| Bin leicht gehyped |  |
Dienstag 20:00 Uhr, Preview. Die ersten Reviews sind anscheinend sehr vielversprechend. Mir fallen so einige Szenen ein, die ich endlich mal verfilmt sehen möchte.
Das Wiedersehen von Gurney und Muad'Dib
Gurney tested his muscles in his stillsuit, stretching. He left the filter mask off his face, losing moisture for the sake of a greater need – the carrying power of his voice if he had to shout commands. He began climbing up into the rocks, checking the terrain – pebbles and pea sand underfoot, the smell of spice.
Good site for an emergency base, he thought. Might be sensible to bury a few supplies here.
He glanced back, watching his men spread out as they followed him. Good men, even the new ones he hadn’t had time to test. Good men. Didn’t have to be told every time what to do. Not a shield glimmer showed on any of them. No cowards in this bunch, carrying shields into the desert where a worm could sense the field and come to rob them of the spice they found.
From this slight elevation in the rocks, Gurney could see the spice patch about half a kilometer away and the crawler just reaching the near edge. He glanced up at the coverflight, noting the altitude – not too high. He nodded to himself, turned to resume his climb up the ridge.
In that instant, the ridge erupted.
Twelve roaring paths of flame streaked upward to the hovering ’thopters and carrier wing. There came a blasting of metal from the factory crawler, and the rocks around Gurney were full of hooded fighting men.
Gurney had time to think: By the horns of the Great Mother! Rockets! They dare to use rockets!
Then he was face to face with a hooded figure who crouched low, crysknife at the ready. Two more men stood waiting on the rocks above to left and right. Only the eyes of the fighting man ahead of him were visible to Gurney between hood and veil of sand-colored burnoose, but the crouch and readiness warned him that here was a trained fighting man. The eyes were the blue-in-blue of the deep-desert Fremen.
Gurney moved one hand toward his own knife, kept his eyes fixed on the other’s knife. If they dared use rockets, they’d have other projectile weapons. This moment argued extreme caution. He could tell by sound alone that at least part of his skycover had been knocked out. There were gruntings, too, the noise of several struggles behind him.
The eyes of the fighting man ahead of Gurney followed the motion of hand toward knife, came back to glare into Gurney’s eyes.
‘Leave the knife in its sheath, Gurney Halleck,’ the man said.
Gurney hesitated. That voice sounded oddly familiar even through a stillsuit filter.
‘You know my name?’ he said.
‘You’ve no need of a knife with me, Gurney,’ the man said. He straightened, slipped his crysknife into its sheath back beneath his robe. ‘Tell your men to stop their useless resistance.’
The man threw his hood back, swung the filter aside.
The shock of what he saw froze Gurney’s muscles. He thought at first he was looking at a ghost image of Duke Leto Atreides. Full recognition came slowly.
‘Paul,’ he whispered. Then louder: ‘Is it truly Paul?’
‘Don’t you trust your own eyes?’ Paul asked.
‘They said you were dead,’ Gurney rasped. He took a half-step forward.
‘Tell your men to submit,’ Paul commanded. He waved toward the lower reaches of the ridge.
Gurney turned, reluctant to take his eyes off Paul. He saw only a few knots of struggle. Hooded desert men seemed to be everywhere around. The factory crawler lay silent with Fremen standing atop it. There were no aircraft overhead.
‘Stop the fighting,’ Gurney bellowed. He took a deep breath, cupped his hands for a megaphone. ‘This is Gurney Halleck! Stop the fight!’
Slowly, warily, the struggling figures separated. Eyes turned toward him, questioning.
‘These are friends,’ Gurney called.
‘Fine friends!’ someone shouted back. ‘Half our people murdered.’
‘It’s a mistake,’ Gurney said. ‘Don’t add to it.’
He turned back to Paul, stared into the youth’s blue-blue Fremen eyes.
A smile touched Paul’s mouth, but there was a hardness in the expression that reminded Gurney of the Old Duke, Paul’s grandfather. Gurney saw then the sinewy harshness in Paul that had never before been seen in an Atreides – a leathery look to the skin, a squint to the eyes and calculation in the glance that seemed to weigh everything in sight.
‘They said you were dead,’ Gurney repeated.
‘And it seemed the best protection to let them think so,’ Paul said.
Gurney realized that was all the apology he’d ever get for having been abandoned to his own resources, left to believe his young Duke … his friend, was dead. He wondered then if there were anything left here of the boy he had known and trained in the ways of fighting men.
Paul took a step closer to Gurney, found that his eyes were smarting. ‘Gurney …’
It seemed to happen of itself, and they were embracing, pounding each other on the back, feeling the reassurance of solid flesh.
‘You young pup! You young pup!’ Gurney kept saying.
And Paul: ‘Gurney, man! Gurney, man!’
Presently, they stepped apart, looked at each other. Gurney took a deep breath. ‘So you’re why the Fremen have grown so wise in battle tactics. I might’ve known. They keep doing things I could’ve planned myself. If I’d only known …’ He shook his head. ‘If you’d only got word to me, lad. Nothing would’ve stopped me. I’d have come arunning and …’
A look in Paul’s eyes stopped him … the hard, weighing stare.
Gurney sighed. ‘Sure, and there’d have been those who wondered why Gurney Halleck went arunning, and some would’ve done more than question. They’d have gone hunting for answers.’
Paul nodded, glanced to the waiting Fremen around them – the looks of curious appraisal on the faces of the Fedaykin. He turned from the death commandos back to Gurney. Finding his former swordmaster filled him with elation. He saw it as a good omen, a sign that he was on the course of the future where all was well.
Die Selbstmordattacke als Illustration der Entschlossenheit der Fremen. Das hat mich damals als 13-Jährigen tief beeindruckt, von islamistischen Selbstmordattacken etc. war damals noch nicht so sehr die Rede (glaube nicht, dass man das noch einbaut):
‘Aiihh! They use their stupid shields,’ the Fremen beside Hawat hissed. He glanced toward the open south wall of the sink.
‘They are Sardaukar,’ Hawat whispered.
‘Good.’
The Sardaukar approached the waiting group of Fremen in an enclosing half-circle. Sun glinted on blades held ready. The Fremen stood in a compact group, apparently indifferent.
Abruptly, the sand around the two groups sprouted Fremen. They were at the ornithopter, then in it. Where the two groups had met at the dune crest, a dust cloud partly obscured violent motion.
Presently, dust settled. Only Fremen remained standing.
‘They left only three men in their ’thopter,’ the Fremen beside Hawat said. ‘That was fortunate. I don’t believe we had to damage the craft in taking it.’
Behind Hawat, one of his men whispered: ‘Those were Sardaukar!’
‘Did you notice how well they fought?’ the Fremen asked.
Hawat took a deep breath. He smelled the burned dust around him, felt the heat, the dryness. In a voice to match that dryness, he said: ‘Yes, they fought well, indeed.’
The captured ’thopter took off with a lurching flap of wings, angled upward to the south in a steep, wing-tucked climb.
So these Fremen can handle ’thopters, too, Hawat thought.
On the distant dune, a Fremen waved a square of green cloth: once … twice.
‘More come!’ the Fremen beside Hawat barked. ‘Be ready. I’d hoped to have us away without more inconvenience.’
Inconvenience! Hawat thought.
He saw two more ’thopters swooping from high in the west onto an area of sand suddenly devoid of visible Fremen. Only eight splotches of blue – the bodies of the Sardaukar in Harkonnen uniforms – remained at the scene of violence.
Another ’thopter glided in over the cliff wall above Hawat. He drew in a sharp breath as he saw it – a big troop carrier. It flew with the slow, spread-wing heaviness of a full load – like a giant bird coming to its nest.
In the distance, the purple finger of a lasgun beam flicked from one of the diving ’thopters. It laced across the sand, raising a sharp trail of dust.
‘The cowards!’ the Fremen beside Hawat rasped.
The troop carrier settled toward the patch of blue-clad bodies. Its wings crept out to full reach, began the cupping action of a quick stop.
Hawat’s attention was caught by a flash of sun on metal to the south, a ’thopter plummeting there in a power dive, wings folded flat against its sides, its jets a golden flare against the dark silvered gray of the sky. It plunged like an arrow toward the troop carrier which was unshielded because of the lasgun activity around it. Straight into the carrier the diving ’thopter plunged.
A flaming roar shook the basin. Rocks tumbled from the cliff walls all around. A geyser of red-orange shot skyward from the sand where the carrier and its companion ’thopters had been – everything there caught in the flame.
It was the Fremen who took off in that captured ’thopter, Hawat thought. He deliberately sacrificed himself to get that carrier. Great Mother! What are these Fremen?
‘A reasonable exchange,’ said the Fremen beside Hawat. ‘There must’ve been three hundred men in that carrier. Now, we must see to their water and make plans to get another aircraft.’ He started to step out of their rock-shadowed concealment.
Count Fenring verweigert den Gehorsam
‘Majesty,’ Paul said, ‘your force is reduced by one more. Shall we now shed sham and pretense? Shall we now discuss what must be? Your daughter wed to me and the way opened for an Atreides to sit on the throne.’
The Emperor turned, looked at Count Fenring. The Count met his stare – gray eyes against green. The thought lay there clearly between them, their association so long that understanding could be achieved with a glance.
Kill this upstart for me, the Emperor was saying. The Atreides is young and resourceful, yes – but he is also tired from long effort and he’d be no match for you anyway. Call him out now …you know the way of it. Kill him.
Slowly, Fenring moved his head, a prolonged turning until he faced Paul.
‘Do it!’ the Emperor hissed.
The Count focused on Paul, seeing with eyes his Lady Margot had trained in the Bene Gesserit way, aware of the mystery and hidden grandeur about this Atreides youth.
I could kill him, Fenring thought – and he knew this for a truth.
Something in his own secretive depths stayed the Count then, and he glimpsed briefly, inadequately, the advantage he held over Paul – a way of hiding from the youth, a furtiveness of person and motives that no eye could penetrate.
Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost-Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern – a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he’d ever experienced.
Fenring, reading Paul’s emotion, said, ‘Majesty, I must refuse.’
Rage overcame Shaddam IV. He took two short steps through the entourage, cuffed Fenring viciously across the jaw.
A dark flush spread up and over the Count’s face. He looked directly at the Emperor, spoke with deliberate lack of emphasis: ‘We have been friends, Majesty. What I do now is out of friendship. I shall forget that you struck me.’
Und Dune Messiah MUSS noch draufgelegt werden. Das habe ich grad neulich noch einmal mit Children of Dune gelesen.
Paul durchstreift Alias Tempel:
As Paul emerged onto the ramp at the far side of the building, he heard the bells calling the Evening Rite at Alia’s Fane.
There was an odd feeling of permanence about the bells.
The temple across the thronged square was new, its rituals of recent devising, but there was something about this setting in a desert sink at the edge of Arrakeen—something in the way wind-driven sand had begun to weather stones and plastene, something in the haphazard way buildings had gone up around the Fane. Everything conspired to produce the impression that this was a very old place full of traditions and mystery.
He was down into the press of people now—committed. The only guide his Security force could find had insisted it be done this way. Security hadn’t liked Paul’s ready agreement. Stilgar had liked it even less. And Chani had objected most of all.
The crowd around him, even while its members brushed against him, glanced his way unseeing and passed on, gave him a curious freedom of movement. It was the way they’d been conditioned to treat a Fremen, he knew. He carried himself like a man of the inner desert. Such men were quick to anger.
As he moved into the quickening flow to the temple steps, the crush of people became even greater. Those all around could not help but press against him now, but he found himself the target for ritual apologies: “Your pardon, noble sir. I cannot prevent this discourtesy.” “Pardon, sir; this crush of people is the worst I’ve ever seen.” “I abase myself, holy citizen. A lout shoved me.”
Paul ignored the words after the first few. There was no feeling in them except a kind of ritual fear. He found himself, instead, thinking that he had come a long way from his boyhood days in Caladan Castle. Where had he put his foot on the path that led to this journey across a crowded square on a planet so far from Caladan? Had he really put his foot on a path? He could not say he had acted at any point in his life for one specific reason. The motives and impinging forces had been complex—more complex possibly than any other set of goads in human history. He had the heady feeling here that he might still avoid the fate he could see so clearly along this path. But the crowd pushed him forward and he experienced the dizzy sense that he had lost his way, lost personal direction over his life.
The crowd flowed with him up the steps now into the temple portico. Voices grew hushed. The smell of fear grew stronger—acrid, sweaty.
Acolytes had already begun the service within the temple. Their plain chant dominated the other sounds—whispers, rustle of garments, shuffling feet, coughs—telling the story of the Far Places visited by the Priestess in her holy trance.
“She rides the sandworm of space!
She guides through all storms
Into the land of gentle winds.
Though we sleep by the snake’s den,
She guards our dreaming souls.
Shunning the desert heat,
She hides us in a cool hollow.
The gleaming of her white teeth
Guides us in the night.
By the braids of her hair
We are lifted up to heaven!
Sweet fragrance, flower-scented,
Surrounds us in her presence.”
Balak! Paul thought, thinking in Fremen. Look out! She can be filled with angry passion, too.
The temple portico was lined with tall, slender glowtubes simulating candle flame. They flickered. The flickering stirred ancestral memories in Paul even while he knew that was the intent. This setting was an atavism, subtly contrived, effective. He hated his own hand in it.
The crowd flowed with him through tall metal doors into the gigantic nave, a gloomy place with the flickering lights far away overhead, a brilliantly illuminated altar at the far end. Behind the altar, a deceptively simple affair of black wood encrusted with sand patterns from the Fremen mythology, hidden lights played on the field of a pru-door to create a rainbow borealis. The seven rows of chanting acolytes ranked below that spectral curtain took on an eerie quality: black robes, white faces, mouths moving in unison.
Paul studied the pilgrims around him, suddenly envious of their intentness, their air of listening to truths he could not hear. It seemed to him that they gained something here which was denied to him, something mysteriously healing.
He tried to inch his way closer to the altar, was stopped by a hand on his arm. Paul whipped his gaze around, met the probing stare of an ancient Fremen—blue-blue eyes beneath overhanging brows, recognition in them. A name flashed into Paul’s mind: Rasir, a companion from the sietch days.
In the press of the crowd, Paul knew he was completely vulnerable if Rasir planned violence.
The old man pressed close, one hand beneath a sand-grimed robe—grasping the hilt of a crysknife, no doubt. Paul set himself as best he could to resist attack. The old man moved his head toward Paul’s ear, whispered: “We will go with the others.”
It was the signal to identify his guide. Paul nodded.
Rasir drew back, faced the altar.
“She comes from the east,” the acolytes chanted. “The sun stands at her back. All things are exposed. In the full glare of light—her eyes miss no thing, neither light nor dark.”
A wailing rebaba jarred across the voices, stilled them, receded into silence. With an electric abruptness, the crowd surged forward several meters. They were packed into a tight mass of flesh now, the air heavy with their breathing and the scent of spice.
“Shai-hulud writes on clean sand!” the acolytes shouted.
Paul felt his own breath catch in unison with those around him. A feminine chorus began singing faintly from the shadows behind the shimmering pru-door: “Alia … Alia … Alia …” It grew louder and louder, fell to a sudden silence.
Again—voices beginning vesper-soft:
“She stills all storms—
Her eyes kill our enemies,
And torment the unbelievers.
From the spires of Tuono
Where dawnlight strikes
And clear water runs,
You see her shadow.
In the shining summer heat
She serves us bread and milk—
Cool, fragrant with spices,
Her eyes melt our enemies,
Torment our oppressors
And pierce all mysteries.
She is Alia … Alia … Alia … Alia ….”
Slowly, the voices trailed off.
Paul felt sickened. What are we doing? he asked himself. Alia was a child witch, but she was growing older. And he thought: Growing older is to grow more wicked.
The collective mental atmosphere of the temple ate at his psyche. He could sense that element of himself which was one with those all around him, but the differences formed a deadly contradiction. He stood immersed, isolated in a personal sin which he could never expiate. The immensity of the universe outside the temple flooded his awareness. How could one man, one ritual, hope to knit such immensity into a garment fitted to all men?
Paul shuddered.
The universe opposed him at every step. It eluded his grasp, conceived countless disguises to delude him. That universe would never agree with any shape he gave it.
A profound hush spread through the temple.
Alia emerged from the darkness behind the shimmering rainbows. She wore a yellow robe trimmed in Atreides green—yellow for sunlight, green for the death which produced life. Paul experienced the sudden surprising thought that Alia had emerged here just for him, for him alone. He stared across the mob in the temple at his sister. She was his sister. He knew her ritual and its roots, but he had never before stood out here with the pilgrims, watched her through their eyes. Here, performing the mystery of this place, he saw that she partook of the universe which opposed him.
Acolytes brought her a golden chalice.
Alia raised the chalice.
With part of his awareness, Paul knew that the chalice contained the unaltered melange, the subtle poison, her sacrament of the oracle.
Her gaze on the chalice, Alia spoke. Her voice caressed the ears, flower sound, flowing and musical:
“In the beginning, we were empty,” she said.
“Ignorant of all things,” the chorus sang.
“We did not know the Power that abides in every place,” Alia said.
“And in every Time,” the chorus sang.
“Here is the Power,” Alia said, raising the chalice slightly.
“It brings us joy,” sang the chorus.
And it brings us distress, Paul thought.
“It awakens the soul,” Alia said.
“It dispels all doubts,” the chorus sang.
“In worlds, we perish,” Alia said.
“In the Power, we survive,” sang the chorus.
Alia put the chalice to her lips, drank.
To his astonishment, Paul found he was holding his breath like the meanest pilgrim of this mob. Despite every shred of personal knowledge about the experience Alia was undergoing, he had been caught in the tao-web. He felt himself remembering how that fiery poison coursed into the body. Memory unfolded the time-stopping when awareness became a mote which changed the poison. He reexperienced the awakening into timelessness where all things were possible. He knew Alia’s present experience, yet he saw now that he did not know it. Mystery blinded the eyes.
Alia trembled, sank to her knees.
Paul exhaled with the enraptured pilgrims. He nodded. Part of the veil began to lift from him. Absorbed in the bliss of a vision, he had forgotten that each vision belonged to all those who were still on-the-way, still to become. In the vision, one passed through a darkness, unable to distinguish reality from insubstantial accident. One hungered for absolutes which could never be.
Hungering, one lost the present.
Alia swayed with the rapture of spice change.
Paul felt that some transcendental presence spoke to him, saying: “Look! See there! See what you’ve ignored?” In that instant, he thought he looked through other eyes, that he saw-an imagery and rhythm in this place which no artist or poet could reproduce. It was vital and beautiful, a glaring light that exposed all power-gluttony … even his own.
Alia spoke. Her amplified voice boomed across the nave.
“Luminous night,” she cried.
A moan swept like a wave through the crush of pilgrims.
“Nothing hides in such a night!” Alia said. “What rare light is this darkness? You cannot fix your gaze upon it! Senses cannot record it. No words describe it.” Her voice lowered. “The abyss remains. It is pregnant with all the things yet to be. Ahhhhh, what gentle violence!”
Paul felt that he waited for some private signal from his sister. It could be any action or word, something of wizardry and mystical processes, an outward streaming that would fit him like an arrow into a cosmic bow. This instant lay like quivering mercury in his awareness.
“There will be sadness,” Alia intoned. “I remind you that all things are but a beginning, forever beginning. Worlds wait to be conquered. Some within the sound of my voice will attain exalted destinies. You will sneer at the past, forgetting what I tell you now: within all differences there is unity.”
Paul suppressed a cry of disappointment as Alia lowered her head. She had not said the thing he waited to hear. His body felt like a dry shell, a husk abandoned by some desert insect.
Others must feel something similar, he thought. He sensed the restlessness about him. Abruptly, a woman in the mob, someone far down in the nave to Paul’s left, cried out, a wordless noise of anguish.
Alia lifted her head and Paul had the giddy sensation that the distance between them collapsed, that he stared directly into her glazed eyes only inches away from her.
“Who summons me?” Alia asked.
“I do,” the woman cried. “I do, Alia. Oh, Alia, help me. They say my son was killed on Muritan. Is he gone? Will I never see my son again … never?”
“You try to walk backward in the sand,” Alia intoned. “Nothing is lost. Everything returns later, but you may not recognize the changed form that returns.”
“Alia, I don’t understand!” the woman wailed.
“You live in the air but you do not see it,” Alia said, sharpness in her voice. “Are you a lizard? Your voice has the Fremen accent. Does a Fremen try to bring back the dead? What do we need from our dead except their water?”
Down in the center of the nave, a man in a rich red cloak lifted both hands, the sleeves falling to expose white-clad arms. “Alia,” he shouted, “I have had a business proposal. Should I accept?”
“You come here like a beggar,” Alia said. “You look for the golden bowl but you will find only a dagger.”
“I have been asked to kill a man!” a voice shouted from off to the right—a deep voice with sietch tones. “Should I accept? Accepting, would I succeed?”
“Beginning and end are a single thing,” Alia snapped. “Have I not told you this before? You didn’t come here to ask that question. What is it you cannot believe that you must come here and cry out against it?”
“She’s in a fierce mood tonight,” a woman near Paul muttered. “Have you ever seen her this angry?”
She knows I’m out here, Paul thought. Did she see something in the vision that angered her? Is she raging at me?
“Alia,” a man directly in front of Paul called. “Tell these businessmen and faint-hearts how long your brother will rule!”
“I permit you to look around that corner by yourself,” Alia snarled. “You carry your prejudice in your mouth! It is because my brother rides the worm of chaos that you have roof and water!”
With a fierce gesture, clutching her robe, Alia whirled away, strode through the shimmering ribbons of light, was lost in the darkness behind.
Immediately, the acolytes took up the closing chant, but their rhythm was off. Obviously, they’d been caught by the unexpected ending of the rite. An incoherent mumbling arose on all sides of the crowd. Paul felt the stirring around him—restless, dissatisfied.
“It was that fool with his stupid question about business,” a woman near Paul muttered. “The hypocrite!”
What had Alia seen? What track through the future?
Something had happened here tonight, souring the rite of the oracle. Usually, the crowd clamored for Alia to answer their pitiful questions. They came as beggars to the oracle, yes. He had heard them thus many times as he’d watched, hidden in the darkness behind the altar. What had been different about this night?
The old Fremen tugged Paul’s sleeve, nodded toward the exit. The crowd already was beginning to push in that direction. Paul allowed himself to be pressed along with them, the guide’s hand upon his sleeve. There was the feeling in him then that his body had become the manifestation of some power he could no longer control. He had become a non-being, a stillness which moved itself. At the core of the non-being, there he existed, allowing himself to be led through the streets of his city, following a track so familiar to his visions that it froze his heart with grief.
I should know what Alia saw, he thought. I have seen it enough times myself. And she didn’t cry out against it … she saw the alternatives, too.
Der atomare Anschlag auf Muad'Dib:
First Moon stood high over the city as Paul, his shield activated and shimmering around him, emerged from the cul-de-sac. A wind off the massif whirled sand and dust down the narrow street, causing Bijaz to blink and shield his eyes.
“We must hurry,” the dwarf muttered. “Hurry! Hurry!”
“You sense danger?” Paul asked, probing.
“I know danger!”
An abrupt sense of peril very near was followed almost immediately by a figure joining them out of a doorway.
Bijaz crouched and whimpered.
It was only Stilgar moving like a war machine, head thrust forward, feet striking the street solidly.
Swiftly, Paul explained the value of the dwarf, handed Bijaz over to Stilgar. The pace of the vision moved here with great rapidity. Stilgar sped away with Bijaz. Security Guards enveloped Paul. Orders were given to send men down the street toward the house beyond Otheym’s. The men hurried to obey, shadows among shadows.
More sacrifices Paul thought.
“We want live prisoners,” one of the guard officers hissed.
The sound was a vision-echo in Paul’s ears. It went with solid precision here—vision/reality, tick for tick. Ornithopters drifted down across the moon.
The night was full of Imperial troopers attacking.
A soft hiss grew out of the other sounds, climbed to a roar while they still heard the sibilance. It picked up a terra-cotta glow that hid the stars, engulfed the moon.
Paul, knowing that sound and glow from the earliest nightmare glimpses of his vision, felt an odd sense of fulfillment. It went the way it must.
“Stone burner!” someone screamed.
“Stone burner!” The cry was all around him. “Stone burner … stone burner …”
Because it was required of him, Paul threw a protective arm across his face, dove for the low lip of a curb. It already was too late, of course.
Where Otheym’s house had been there stood now a pillar of fire, a blinding jet roaring at the heavens. It gave off a dirty brilliance which threw into sharp relief every ballet movement of the fighting and fleeing men, the tipping retreat of ornithopters.
For every member of this frantic throng it was too late.
The ground grew hot beneath Paul. He heard the sound of running stop. Men threw themselves down all around him, every one of them aware that there was no point in running. The first damage had been done: and now they must wait out the extent of the stone burner’s potency. The things’s radiation, which no man could outrun, already had penetrated their flesh. The peculiar result of stone-burner radiation already was at work in them. What else this weapon might do now lay in the planning of the men who had used it, the men who had defied the Great Convention to use it.
“Gods … a stone burner,” someone whimpered. “I … don’t … want … to … be … blind.”
“Who does?” The harsh voice of a trooper far down the street.
“The Tleilaxu will sell many eyes here,” someone near Paul growled. “Now shut up and wait!”
They waited.
Paul remained silent, thinking what this weapon implied. Too much fuel in it and it’d cut its way into the planet’s core. Dune’s molten level lay deep, but the more dangerous for that. Such pressures released and out of control might split a planet, scattering lifeless bits and pieces through space.
“I think it’s dying down a bit,” someone said.
“It’s just digging deeper,” Paul cautioned. “Stay put, all of you. Stilgar will be sending help.”
“Stilgar got away?”
“Stilgar got away.”
“The ground’s hot,” someone complained.
“They dared use atomics!” a trooper near Paul protested.
“The sound’s diminishing,” someone down the street said.
Paul ignored the words, concentrated on his fingertips against the street. He could feel the rolling-rumbling of the thing—deep … deep …
“My eyes!” someone cried. “I can’t see!”
Someone closer to it than I was, Paul thought. He still could see to the end of the cul-de-sac when he lifted his head, althought there was a mistiness across the scene. A red-yellow glow filled the area where Otheym’s house and its neighbor had been. Pieces of adjoining buildings made dark patterns as they crumbled into the glowing pit.
Paul climbed to his feet. He felt the stone burner die, silence beneath him. His body was wet with perspiration against the stillsuit’s slickness—too much for the suit to accommodate. The air he drew into his lungs carried the heat and sulfur stench of the burner.
As he looked at the troopers beginning to stand up around him, the mist on Paul’s eyes faded into darkness. He summoned up his oracular vision of these moments, then turned and strode along the track that Time had carved for him, fitting himself into the vision so tightly that it could not escape. He felt himself grow aware of this place as a multitudinous possession, reality welded to prediction.
Moans and groans of his troopers arose all around him as the men realized their blindness.
“Hold fast!” Paul shouted. “Help is coming!” And, as the complaints persisted, he said: “This is Muad’Dib! I command you to hold fast! Help comes!”
Silence.
Then, true to his vision, a nearby guardsman said: “Is it truly the Emperor? Which of you can see? Tell me.”
“None of us has eyes,” Paul said. “They have taken my eyes, as well, but not my vision. I can see you standing there, a dirty wall within touching distance on your left. Now wait bravely. Stilgar comes with our friends.”
The thwock-thwock of many ’thopters grew louder all around. There was the sound of hurrying feet. Paul watched his friends come, matching their sounds to his oracular vision.
“Stilgar!” Paul shouted, waving an arm. “Over here!”
“Thanks to Shai-hulud,” Stilgar cried, running up to Paul. “You’re not …” In the sudden silence, Paul’s vision showed him Stilgar staring with an expression of agony at the ruined eyes of his friend and Emperor. “Oh, m’Lord,” Stilgar groaned. “Usul… Usul… Usul…”
“What of the stone burner?” one of the newcomers shouted.
“It’s ended,” Paul said, raising his voice. He gestured. “Get up there now and rescue the ones who were closest to it. Put up barriers. Lively now!” He turned back to Stilgar.
“Do you see, m’Lord?” Stilgar asked, wonder in his tone. “How can you see?”
For answer, Paul put a finger out to touch Stilgar’s cheek above the stillsuit mouthcap, felt tears. “You need give no moisture to me, old friend,” Paul said. “I am not dead.”
“But your eyes!”
“They’ve blinded my body, but not my vision,” Paul said. “Ah, Stil, I live in an apocalyptic dream. My steps fit into it so precisely that I fear most of all I will grow bored reliving the thing so exactly.”
“Usul, I don’t, I don’t …”
“Don’t try to understand it. Accept it. I am in the world beyond this world here. For me, they are the same. I need no hand to guide me. I see every movement all around me. I see every expression of your face. I have no eyes, yet I see.”
Stilgar shook his head sharply. “Sire, we must conceal your affliction from—”
“We hide it from no man,” Paul said.
“But the law …”
“We live by the Atreides Law now, Stil. The Fremen Law that the blind should be abandoned in the desert applies only to the blind. I am not blind. I live in the cycle of being where the war of good and evil has its arena. We are at a turning point in the succession of ages and we have our parts to play.”
In a sudden stillness, Paul heard one of the wounded being led past him. “It was terrible,” the man groaned, “a great fury of fire.”
“None of these men shah be taken into the desert,” Paul said. “You hear me, Stil?”
“I hear you, m’Lord.”
“They are to be fitted with new eyes at my expense.”
“It will be done, m’Lord.”
Paul, hearing the awe grow in Stilgar’s voice, said: “I will be at the Command ’thopter. Take charge here.”
“Yes, m’Lord.”
Paul stepped around Stilgar, strode down the street. His vision told him every movement, every irregularity beneath his feet, every face he encountered. He gave orders as he moved, pointing to men of his personal entourage, calling out names, summoning to himself the ones who represented the intimate apparatus of government. He could feel the terror grow behind him, the fearful whispers.
“His eyes!”
“But he looked right at you, called you by name!”
At the Command ’thopter, he deactivated his personal shield, reached into the machine and took the microphone from the hand of a startled communications officer, issued a swift string of orders, thrust the microphone back into the officer’s hand. Turning, Paul summoned a weapons specialist, one of the eager and brilliant new breed who remembered sietch life only dimly.
“They used a stone burner,” Paul said.
After the briefest pause, the man said: “So I was told, Sire.”
“You know what that means, of course.”
“The fuel could only have been atomic.”
Paul nodded, thinking of how this man’s mind must be racing. Atomics. The Great Convention prohibited such weapons. Discovery of the perpetrator would bring down the combined retributive assault of the Great Houses. Old feuds would be forgotten, discarded in the face of this threat and the ancient fears it aroused.
“It cannot have been manufactured without leaving some traces,” Paul said. “You will assemble the proper equipment and search out the place where the stone burner was made.”
“At once, Sire.” With one last fearful glance, the man sped away.
“M’Lord,” the communications officer ventured from behind him. “Your eyes …”
Paul turned, reached into the ’thopter, returned the command set to his personal band. “Call Chani,” he ordered. “Tell her … tell her I am alive and will be with her soon.”
Now the forces gather, Paul thought. And he noted how strong was the smell of fear in the perspiration all around.
Duncans Satori:
Sand scuffed against rocks told him that the ghola had joined him.
“You’ve been avoiding me today, Duncan,” Paul said.
“It’s dangerous for you to call me that,” the ghola said.
“I know.”
“I … came to warn you, m’Lord.”
“I know.”
The story of the compulsion Bijaz had put on him poured from the ghola then.
“Do you know the nature of the compulsion?” Paul asked.
“Violence.”
Paul felt himself arriving at a place which had claimed him from the beginning. He stood suspended. The Jihad had seized him, fixed him onto a glidepath from which the terrible gravity of the Future would never release him.
“There’ll be no violence from Duncan,” Paul whispered.
“But, Sire …”
“Tell me what you see around us,” Paul said.
“M’Lord?”
“The desert—how is it tonight?”
“Don’t you see it?”
“I have no eyes, Duncan.”
“But …”
“I’ve only my vision,” Paul said, “and wish I didn’t have it. I’m dying of prescience, did you know that, Duncan?”
“Perhaps … what you fear won’t happen,” the ghola said.
“What? Deny my own oracle? How can I when I’ve seen it fulfilled thousands of times? People call it a power, a gift. It’s an affliction! It won’t let me leave my life where I found it!”
“M’Lord,” the ghola muttered, “I… it isn’t … young master, you don’t … I …” He fell silent.
Paul sensed the ghola’s confusion, said: “What’d you call me, Duncan?”
“What? What? I … for a moment, I …”
“You called me ‘young master.’”
“I did, yes.”
“That’s what Duncan always called me.” Paul reached out, touched the ghola’s face. “Was that part of your Tleilaxu training?”
“No.”
Paul lowered his hand. “What, then?”
“It came from … me.”
“Do you serve two masters?”
“Perhaps.”
“Free yourself from the ghola, Duncan.”
“How?”
“You’re human. Do a human thing.”
“I’m a ghola!”
“But your flesh is human. Duncan’s in there.”
“Something’s in there.”
“I care not how you do it,” Paul said, “but you’ll do it.”
“You’ve foreknowledge?”
“Foreknowledge be damned!” Paul turned away. His vision hurtled forward now, gaps in it, but it wasn’t a thing to be stopped.
“M’Lord, if you’ve—”
“Quiet!” Paul held up a hand. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what, m’Lord?”
Paul shook his head. Duncan hadn’t heard it. Had he only imagined the sound? It’d been his tribal name called from the desert—far away and low: “Usul … Uuuussssuuuullll …”
“What is it, m’Lord?”
Paul shook his head. He felt watched. Something out there in the night shadows knew he was here. Something? No—someone.
“It was mostly sweet,” he whispered, “and you were the sweetest of all.”
“What’d you say, m’Lord?”
“It’s the future,” Paul said.
That amorphous human universe out there had undergone a spurt of motion, dancing to the tune of his vision. It had struck a powerful note then. The ghost-echoes might endure.
“I don’t understand, m’Lord,” the ghola said.
“A Fremen dies when he’s too long from the desert,” Paul said. “They call it the ‘water sickness.’ Isn’t that odd?”
“That’s very odd.”
Paul strained at memories, tried to recall the sound of Chani breathing beside him in the night. Where is there comfort? he wondered. All he could remember was Chani at breakfast the day they’d left for the desert. She’d been restless, irritable.
“Why do you wear that old jacket?” she’d demanded, eyeing the black uniform coat with its red hawk crest beneath his Fremen robes. “You’re an Emperor!”
“Even an Emperor has his favorite clothing,” he’d said.
For no reason he could explain, this had brought real tears to Chani’s eyes—the second time in her life when Fremen inhibitions had been shattered.
Now, in the darkness, Paul rubbed his own cheeks, felt moisture there. Who gives moisture to the dead? he wondered. It was his own face, yet not his. The wind chilled the wet skin. A frail dream formed, broke. What was this swelling in his breast? Was it something he’d eaten? How bitter and plaintive was this other self, giving moisture to the dead. The wind bristled with sand. The skin, dry now, was his own. But whose was the quivering which remained?
They heard the wailing then, far away in the sietch depths. It grew louder … louder …
The ghola whirled at a sudden glare of light, someone flinging wide the entrance seals. In the light, he saw a man with a raffish grin—no! Not a grin, but a grimace of grief! It was a Fedaykin lieutenant named Tandis. Behind him came a press of many people, all fallen silent now that they saw Muad’Dib.
“Chani …” Tandis said.
“Is dead,” Paul whispered. “I heard her call.”
He turned toward the sietch. He knew this place. It was a place where he could not hide. His onrushing vision illuminated the entire Fremen mob. He saw Tandis, felt the Fedaykin’s grief, the fear and anger.
“She is gone,” Paul said.
The ghola heard the words out of a blazing corona. They burned his chest, his backbone, the sockets of his metal eyes. He felt his right hand move toward the knife at his belt. His own thinking became strange, disjointed. He was a puppet held fast by strings reaching down from that awful corona. He moved to another’s commands, to another’s desires. The strings jerked his arms, his legs, his jaw. Sounds came squeezing out of his mouth, a terrifying repetitive noise—
“Hraak! Hraak! Hraak!”
The knife came up to strike. In that instant, he grabbed his own voice, shaped rasping words: “Run! Young master, run!”
“We will not run,” Paul said. “We’ll move with dignity. We’ll do what must be done.”
The ghola’s muscles locked. He shuddered, swayed.
“… what must be done!” The words rolled in his mind like a great fish surfacing. “… what must be done!” Ahhh, that had sounded like the old Duke, Paul’s grandfather. The young master had some of the old man in him. “… what must be done!”
The words began to unfold in the ghola’s consciousness. A sensation of living two lives simultaneously spread out through his awareness: Hayt/Idaho/Hayt/Idaho … He became a motionless chain of relative existence, singular, alone. Old memories flooded his mind. He marked them, adjusted them to new understandings, made a beginning at the integration of a new awareness. A new persona achieved a temporary form of internal tyranny. The masculating synthesis remained charged with potential disorder, but events pressed him to the temporary adjustment. The young master needed him.
It was done then. He knew himself as Duncan Idaho, remembering everything of Hayt as though it had been stored secretly in him and ignited by a flaming catalyst. The corona dissolved. He shed the Tleilaxu compusions.
“Stay close to me, Duncan,” Paul said. “I’ll need to depend on you for many things.” And, as Idaho continued to stand entranced: “Duncan!”
“Yes, I am Duncan.”