Dune (12 page)

“It tasted like cinnamon.”

“But never twice the same,” he said. “It's like life—it presents a different face each time you take it. Some hold that the spice produces a learned-flavor reaction. The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable—slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized.”

“I think it would've been wiser for us to go renegade, to take ourselves beyond the Imperial reach,” she said.

He saw that she hadn't been listening to him, focused on her words, wondering:
Yes—why didn't she make him do this? She could make him do virtually anything.

He spoke quickly because here was truth and a change of subject: “Would you think it bold of me . . . Jessica, if I asked a personal question?”

She pressed against the window ledge in an unexplainable pang of disquiet. “Of course not. You're . . . my friend.”

“Why haven't you made the Duke marry you?”

She whirled, head up, glaring. “Made him marry me? But—”

“I should not have asked,” he said.

“No.” She shrugged. “There's good political reason—as long as my Duke remains unmarried some of the Great Houses can still hope for alliance. And. . . .” She sighed. “. . . motivating people, forcing them to your will, gives you a cynical attitude toward humanity. It degrades everything it touches. If I made him do . . . this, then it would not be his doing.”

“It's a thing my Wanna might have said,” he murmured. And this, too, was truth. He put a hand to his mouth, swallowing convulsively. He had never been closer to speaking out, confessing his secret role.

Jessica spoke, shattering the moment. “Besides, Wellington, the Duke is really two men. One of them I love very much. He's charming, witty, considerate . . . tender—everything a woman could desire. But the other man is . . . cold, callous, demanding, selfish—as harsh and cruel as a winter wind. That's the man shaped by the father.” Her face contorted. “If only that old man had died when my Duke was born!”

In the silence that came between them, a breeze from a ventilator could be heard fingering the blinds.

Presently, she took a deep breath, said, “Leto's right—these rooms are nicer than the ones in the other sections of the house.” She turned, sweeping the room with her gaze. “If you'll excuse me, Wellington, I want another look through this wing before I assign quarters.”

He nodded. “Of course.” And he thought:
If only there were some way not to do this thing that I must do.

Jessica dropped her arms, crossed to the hall door and stood there a moment, hesitating, then let herself out.
All the time we talked he was hiding something, holding something back,
she thought.
To save my feelings, no doubt. He's a good man.
Again, she hesitated, almost turned back to confront Yueh and drag the hidden thing from him.
But that would only shame him, frighten him to learn he's so easily read. I should place more trust in my friends.

 

PAUL LAY on the bed feigning sleep. It had been easy to palm Dr. Yueh's sleeping tablet, to pretend to swallow it. Paul suppressed a laugh. Even his mother had believed him asleep. He had wanted to jump up and ask her permission to go exploring the house, but had realized she wouldn't approve. Things were too unsettled yet. No. This way was best.

He heard his mother and Yueh talking in the other room. Their words were indistinct—something about the spice . . . the Harkonnens. The conversation rose and fell.

Paul's attention went to the carved headboard of his bed—a false headboard attached to the wall and concealing the controls for this room's functions. A leaping fish had been shaped on the wood with thick brown waves beneath it. He knew if he pushed the fish's one visible eye that would turn on the room's suspensor lamps. One of the waves, when twisted, controlled ventilation. Another changed the temperature.

Quietly, Paul sat up in bed. A tall bookcase stood against the wall to his left. It could be swung aside to reveal a closet with drawers along one side. The handle on the door into the hall was patterned on an ornithopter thrust bar.

It was as though the room had been designed to entice him.

The room and this planet.

He thought of the filmbook Yueh had shown him—“Arrakis: His Imperial Majesty's Desert Botanical Testing Station.” It was an old filmbook from before discovery of the spice. Names flitted through Paul's mind, each with its picture imprinted by the book's mnemonic pulse:
saguaro, burro bush, date palm, sand verbena, evening primrose, barrel cactus, incense bush, smoke tree, creosote bush . . . kit fox, desert hawk, kangaroo mouse. . . .

Names and pictures, names and pictures from man's terranic past—and many to be found now nowhere else in the universe except here on Arrakis.

So many new things to learn about—the spice.

And the sandworms.

A door closed in the other room. Paul heard his mother's footsteps retreating down the hall. Dr. Yueh, he knew, would find something to read and remain in the other room.

Now was the moment to go exploring.

Paul slipped out of the bed, headed for the bookcase door that opened into the closet. He stopped at a sound behind him, turned. The carved headboard of the bed was folding down onto the spot where he had been sleeping. Paul froze, and immobility saved his life.

From behind the headboard slipped a tiny hunter-seeker no more than five centimeters long. Paul recognized it at once—a common assassination weapon that every child of royal blood learned about at an early age. It was a ravening sliver of metal guided by some near-by hand and eye. It could burrow into moving flesh and chew its way up nerve channels to the nearest vital organ.

The seeker lifted, swung sideways across the room and back.

Through Paul's mind flashed the related knowledge, the hunter-seeker limitations: Its compressed suspensor field distorted the room to reflect his target, the operator would be relying on motion—anything that moved. A shield could slow a hunter, give time to destroy it, but Paul had put aside his shield on the bed. Lasguns would knock them down, but lasguns were expensive and notoriously cranky of maintenance—and there was always the peril of explosive pyrotechnics if the laser beam intersected a hot shield. The Atreides relied on their body shields and their wits.

Now, Paul held himself in near catatonic immobility, knowing he had only his wits to meet this threat.

The hunter-seeker lifted another half meter. It rippled through the slatted light from the window blinds, back and forth, quartering the room.

The thing dropped a half meter, quartered to the left, circled back around the bed. A faint humming could be heard from it.

The hall door behind Paul creaked. A rap sounded there. The door opened.

The hunter-seeker arrowed past his head toward the motion.

Paul's right hand shot out and down, gripping the deadly thing. It hummed and twisted in his hand, but his muscles were locked on it in desperation. With a violent turn and thrust, he slammed the thing's nose against the metal doorplate. He felt the crunch of it as the nose eye smashed and the seeker went dead in his hand.

Still, he held it—to be certain.

Paul's eyes came up, met the open stare of total blue from the Shadout Mapes.

“Your father has sent for you,” she said. “There are men in the hall to escort you.”

Paul nodded, his eyes and awareness focusing on this odd woman in a sacklike dress of bondsman brown. She was looking now at the thing clutched in his hand.

“I've heard of suchlike,” she said. “It would've killed me, not so?”

He had to swallow before he could speak. “I . . . was its target.”

“But it was coming for me.”

“Because you were moving.” And he wondered:
Who is this creature?

“Then you saved my life,” she said.

“I saved both our lives.”

“Seems like you could've let it have me and made your own escape,” she said.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“The Shadout Mapes, housekeeper.”

How did you know where to find me?”

“Your mother told me. I met her at the stairs to the weirding room down the hall.” She pointed to her right. “Your father's men are still waiting.”

Those will be Hawat's men,
he thought.
We must find the operator of this thing.

“Go to my father's men,” he said. “Tell them I've caught a hunter-seeker in the house and they're to spread out and find the operator. Tell them to seal off the house and its grounds immediately. They'll know how to go about it. The operator's sure to be a stranger among us.”

And he wondered:
Could it be this creature?
But he knew it wasn't. The seeker had been under control when she entered.

“Before I do your bidding, manling,” Mapes said, “I must cleanse the way between us. You've put a water burden on me that I'm not sure I care to support. But we Fremen pay our debts—be they black debts or white debts. And it's known to us that you've a traitor in your midst. Who it is, we cannot say, but we're certain sure of it. Mayhap there's the hand guided that flesh-cutter.”

Paul absorbed this in silence:
a traitor.
Before he could speak, the odd woman whirled away and ran back toward the entry.

He thought to call her back, but there was an air about her that told him she would resent it. She'd told him what she knew and now she was going to do his
bidding.
The house would be swarming with Hawat's men in a minute.

His mind went to other parts of that strange conversation:
weirding room.
He looked to his left where she had pointed.
We Fremen.
So that was a Fremen. He paused for the mnemonic blink that would store the pattern of her face in his memory—prune-wrinkled features darkly browned, blue-on-blue eyes without any white in them. He attached the label:
The Shadout Mapes.

Still gripping the shattered seeker, Paul turned back into his room, scooped up his shield belt from the bed with his left hand, swung it around his waist and buckled it as he ran back out and down the hall to the left.

She'd said his mother was someplace down here—stairs . . . a
weirding room.

 

AT THE end of the south wing, Jessica found a metal stair spiraling up to an oval door. She glanced back down the hall, again up at the door.

Oval?
she wondered.
What an odd shape for a door in a house.

Through the windows beneath the spiral stair she could see the great white sun of Arrakis moving on toward evening. Long shadows stabbed down the hall. She returned her attention to the stairs. Harsh sidelighting picked out bits of dried earth on the open metalwork of the steps.

Jessica put a hand on the rail, began to climb. The rail felt cold under her sliding palm. She stopped at the door, saw it had no handle, but there was a faint depression on the surface of it where a handle should have been.

Surely not a palm lock,
she told herself.
A palm lock must be keyed to one individual's hand shape and palm lines.
But it looked like a palm lock. And there were ways to open any palm lock—as she had learned at school.

Jessica glanced back to make certain she was unobserved, placed her palm against the depression in the door. The most gentle of pressures to distort the lines—a turn of the wrist, another turn, a sliding twist of the palm across the surface.

She felt the click.

But there were hurrying footsteps in the hall beneath her. Jessica lifted her hand from the door, turned, saw Mapes come to the foot of the stairs.

“There are men in the great hall say they've been sent by the Duke to get young master Paul,” Mapes said. “They've the ducal signet and the guard has identified them.” She glanced at the door, back to Jessica.

A cautious one, this Mapes,
Jessica thought.
That's a good sign.

“He's in the fifth room from this end of the hall, the small bedroom,” Jessica said. “If you have trouble waking him, call on Dr. Yueh in the next room. Paul may require a wakeshot.”