“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

He fought down an aching shiver, stared at the lightless void where his hand seemed to remain of its own volition.

“Ever sift sand through a screen?” she asked. The tangential slash of her question shocked his mind into a higher awareness: Sand through a screen. He nodded. “We Bene Gesserit sift people to find the humans.”

reminding herself: “Hope clouds observation.”

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” “ ‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’ ” Paul quoted.

“Why do you test for humans?” he asked. “To set you free.” “Free?” “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” “ ‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,’ ” Paul quoted.

We might, for example, have wanted to breed her to a close relative to set up a dominant in some genetic trait. We have many reasons.”

“They tried and failed, all of them?” “Oh, no.” She shook her head. “They tried and died.”

slender,

renegade.

“Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things....” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “... the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing....” She closed her fingers into a fist. “... without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!”

She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.

the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’

One more day here, he thought. He looked around the room. We’re leaving. The idea of departure was suddenly more real to him than it had ever been before. He recalled another thing the old woman had said about a world being the sum of many things—the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns—the unknown sum called nature, a vague summation without any sense of the now. And he wondered: What is the now?

like a man running to his enemy’s funeral.”

bodkin

How soon this child must assume his manhood, Halleck thought. How soon he must read that form within his mind, that contract of brutal caution, to enter the necessary fact on the necessary line: “Please list your next of kin.

“The book is held closed by the charge, which forces against spring-locked covers. You press the edge—thus, and the pages you’ve selected repel each other and the book opens.” “It’s so small.” “But it has eighteen hundred pages. You press the edge—thus, and so ... and the charge moves ahead one page at a time as you read. Never touch the actual pages with your fingers. The filament tissue is too delicate.” He closed the book, handed it to Paul. “Try it.”

“It’s quite old. Let it be our secret, eh? Your parents might think it too valuable for one so young.” And Yueh thought: His mother would surely wonder at my motives.

“Consider Arrakis,” the Duke said. “When you get outside the towns and garrison villages, it’s every bit as terrible a place as Salusa Secundus.”

bodice.”

Mapes lowered the knife. “My Lady, when one has lived with prophecy for so long, the moment of revelation is a shock.”

“Mapes, you’ve sheathed that blade unblooded.”

coagulation,

Jessica felt the cold sheath of the crysknife beneath her bodice, thought of the long chain of Bene Gesserit scheming that had forged another link here. Because of that scheming, she had survived a deadly crisis. “It cannot be hurried,” Mapes had said. Yet there was a tempo of headlong rushing to this place that filled Jessica with foreboding. And not all the preparations of the Missionaria Protectiva nor Hawat’s suspicious inspection of this castellated pile of rocks could dispel the feeling.

Jessica turned away, thinking: Hawat may have passed this residency as safe, but there’s something wrong about the place. I can feel

Jessica turned away, thinking: Hawat may have passed this residency as safe, but there’s something wrong about the place. I can feel it.

Faster and faster she walked until she was almost running.

“We’ve known each other six years,” she said. “It’s long past time formalities should’ve been dropped between us—in private.”

renegade,

Water everywhere in this room—on a planet where water was the most precious juice of life. Water being wasted so conspicuously that it shocked her to inner stillness.

But the hidden message of the note demanded immediate attention, couched as it was in a way to inform her the writer was another Bene Gesserit. A bitter thought touched Jessica in passing: The Count married his Lady.

The visible note contained the code phrase every Bene Gesserit not bound by a School Injunction was required to give another Bene Gesserit when conditions demanded it: “On that path lies danger.”

The Duke felt in this moment that his own dearest dream was to end all class distinctions and never again think of deadly order.

A wave of self-pity, immediately despised and rejected, swept through him, and for some reason he found himself recalling two lines from a poem Gurney Halleck often repeated— “My lungs taste the air of Time Blown past falling sands....”

They have tried to take the life of my son!

“Justice?” The Duke looked at the man. “Who asks for justice? We make our own justice. We make it here on Arrakis—win or die. Do you regret casting your lot with us, sir?”

provocateurs.”

For the first time, Paul allowed himself to think about the real possibility of defeat—not thinking about it out of fear or because of warnings such as that of the old Reverend Mother, but facing up to it because of his own assessment of the situation.

My father is desperate, he thought. Things aren’t going well for us at all.

Kynes stared at him, seeing the water-fat flesh. He spoke coldly: “You never talk of likelihoods on Arrakis. You speak only of possibilities.”

“Your desert boots are fitted slip-fashion at the ankles. Who told you to do that?” “It... seemed the right way.” “That it most certainly is.” And Kynes rubbed his cheek, thinking of the legend: “He shall know your ways as though born to them. ” “We waste time,” the Duke

“Your desert boots are fitted slip-fashion at the ankles. Who told you to do that?” “It... seemed the right way.” “That it most certainly is.” And Kynes rubbed his cheek, thinking of the legend: “He shall know your ways as though born to them.

bespeaks

Kynes sat back, thinking about the water-fat flesh he had felt beneath the stillsuits. They wore shield belts over their robes, slow pellet stunners at the waist, coin-sized emergency transmitters on cords around their necks. Both the Duke and his son carried knives in wrist sheathes and the sheathes appeared well worn. The people struck Kynes as a strange combination of softness and armed strength. There was a poise to them totally unlike the Harkonnens.

talismans,

Her leathery face displayed a twisting of emotions: dismay, anger.... With sudden insight, Leto realized that she must have planned to sell the water squeezings from the foot-trampled towels, wringing a few coppers from the wretches who came to the door. Perhaps that also was a custom. His face clouded, and he growled: “I’m posting a guard to see that my orders are carried out to the letter.”

He’ll wear the title well, the Duke thought, and realized with a sudden chill that this was another death thought.

Chevalier

Kynes shook his head, spoke in a lecturing tone: “Not the blood, sir. But all of a man’s water, ultimately, belongs to his people—to his tribe. It’s a necessity when you live near the Great Flat. All water’s precious there, and the human body is composed of some seventy per cent water by weight. A dead man, surely, no longer requires that water.”

Kynes would have killed him without hesitating, she thought. And she realized that there was an offhand attitude toward killing in Kynes’ manner. He was a casual killer, and she guessed that this was a Fremen quality.

“There... may be,” Kynes said. He’s faking uncertainty! Jessica thought. With his deeper truthsense, Paul caught the underlying motive, had to use every ounce of his training to mask his excitement. There is enough water! But Kynes doesn’t wish it to be known.

Silence flooded in upon them.

Even when they’ve profited by me they despise me.

There is a legend that the instant the Duke Leto Atreides died a meteor streaked across the skies above his ancestral palace on Caladan.

THE BARON Vladimir Harkonnen

The mustache drooped beside his purple lips. Only the old eyes seemed alive.

“I never could bring myself to trust a traitor,” the Baron said. “Not even a traitor I created.”

There was a man with a boot-toe chin, a toy man falling. The toy man had a broken nose slanted to the left: an offbeat metronome caught forever at the start of an upward stroke. Leto heard the crash of crockery—so distant—a roaring in his ears. His mind was a bin without end, catching everything. Everything that had ever been: every shout, every whisper, every ... silence. One thought remained to him. Leto saw it in formless light on rays of black: The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. The thought struck him with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain. Silence.

Paul heard his mother’s grief and felt the emptiness within himself. I have no grief, he thought. Why? Why? He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.

The thing was a spectrum of possibilities from the most remote past to the most remote future—from the most probable to the most improbable. He saw his own death in countless ways. He saw new planets, new cultures. People.

“I must tell you about my waking dream,” Paul said. (Now there was fury in his voice.) “To be sure you accept what I say, I’ll tell you first I know you’ll bear a daughter, my sister, here on Arrakis.”

As though he saw inside her mind, Paul said: “They thought they were reaching for me. But I’m not what they expected, and I’ve arrived before my time. And they don’t know it.” Jessica pressed her hands to her mouth. Great Mother! He’s the Kwisatz Haderach!

callus

And he thought: I’m a seed.

He had seen two main branchings along the way ahead—in one he confronted an evil old Baron and said: “Hello, Grandfather.” The thought of that path and what lay along it sickened him.

All his life he has been trained to hate Harkonnens, she thought. Now, he finds he is Harkonnen ... because of me. How little he knows me! I was my Duke’s only woman. I accepted his life and his values even to defying my Bene Gesserit orders.

“You were caught in-sietch, without your suits. You must make a water decision, friend.”

Customs differ, but the meaning’s the same.”

“Is it that your men wish to attend the ceremony?” the Fremen asked. He doesn’t even see the problem, Hawat thought. The naïveté of the Fremen was frightening.

“We will fight in the time of fighting,”

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.

“Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Look at the chicken, the Baron thought. I am surrounded by such useless clods. If I scattered sand before this creature and told him it was grain, he’d peck at it:

Rabban advanced another step, thinking that the damnable old man had deliberately removed all chairs, forcing a visitor to stand.

Fear showed in the squinting of Rabban’s eyes. He knew within certain limits how far the old Baron would go against family. Seldom to the point of death unless there were outrageous profit or provocation in it. But family punishments could be painful.

“What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around

“What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”

She heard Paul pulling at his stillsuit tube, sipped her own reclaimed water.

“The historical system of mutual pillage and extortion stops here on Arrakis,” his father said. “You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after. The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record.

countenance.”

“My son’s been tested with the gom jabbar!” He found that his hand tingled with remembered pain.

All of them, she thought, an entire culture trained to military order. What a priceless thing is hereforan outcast Duke!

“We change it ... slowly but with certainty ... to make it fit for human life. Our generation will not see it, nor our children nor our children’s children nor the grandchildren of their children ... but it will come.” He stared with veiled eyes out over the basin. “Open water and tall green plants and people walking freely without stillsuits.”

A man who weighs his decisions, who thinks of consequences,

And what he saw was a time nexus within this cave, a boiling of possibilities focused here, wherein the most minute action—the wink of an eye, a careless word, a misplaced grain of sand—moved a gigantic lever across the known universe.

countenance!”

“When your opponent fears you, then’s the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.”

Jessica gasped. It was the name Paul had told her, saying that the Fremen would accept them and call him thus. She felt a sudden fear of her son and for him.

Paul swallowed. He felt that he played a part already played over countless times in his mind ... yet ... there were differences. He could see himself perched on a dizzying summit, having experienced much and possessed of a profound store of knowledge, but all around him was abyss.

the open without stillsuits. The winner has to get his water back that he loses while fighting.” “I don’t want his water,” Paul muttered. He felt

Chani said. “It’s because you have to fight in the open without stillsuits. The winner has to get his water back that he loses while fighting.” “I don’t want his water,” Paul muttered. He felt

Paul remained silent, knowing then that he would do as she ordered—not because she ordered it, but because her tone of voice had forced him to re-evaluate. To refuse the water would be to break with accepted Fremen practice.

“I was a friend of Jamis,” Paul whispered. He felt tears burning his eyes, forced more volume into his voice. “Jamis taught me ... that ... when you kill ... you pay for it. I wish I’d known Jamis better.”

Blindly, he groped his way back to his place in the circle, sank to the rock floor. A voice hissed: “He sheds tears!” It was taken up around the ring: “Usul gives moisture to the dead!”

I missed something there, Paul thought. He sensed the feeling of humor around him, something bantering in it, and his mind linked up a prescient memory: watercounters offered to a woman—courtship ritual.

He sensed a need for decision, but felt powerless to move.

Paul sat silently in the darkness, a single stark thought dominating his awareness: My mother is my enemy. She does not know it, but she is. She is bringing the jihad. She bore me; she trained me. She is my enemy.

Here was only the form of danger without its substance—yet....

“There’s a Bene Gesserit saying,” she said. “You have sayings for everything!” he protested. “You’ll like this one,” she said. “It goes: ‘Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.’ ” MuadDib tells us in “A Time of Reflection” that his first collisions with Arrakeen necessities were the true beginnings of his education. He learned then how to pole the sand for its weather, learned the language of the wind‘s needles stinging his skin, learned how the nose can buzz with sand-itch and how to gather his body’s precious moisture around him to guard it and preserve it. As his eyes assumed the blue of the Ibad, he teamed the Chakobsa way. —Stilgar’s preface to “Muad’Dib, the Man” by the Princess Irulan STILGAR’S TROOP returning to the sietch with its two strays from the desert climbed out of the basin in the waning light of the first moon. The robed figures hurried with the smell of home in their nostrils. Dawn’s gray line behind them was brightest at the notch in their horizon-calendar that marked the middle of autumn, the month of Caprock. Wind-raked dead leaves strewed the cliffbase where the sietch children had been gathering them, but the sounds of the troop’s passage (except for occasional blunderings by Paul and his mother) could not be distinguished from the natural sounds of the night. Paul wiped sweat-caked dust from his forehead, felt a tug at his arm, heard Chani’s voice hissing. “Do as I told you: bring the fold of your hood down over your forehead! Leave only the eyes exposed. You waste moisture.” A whispered command behind them demanded silence: “The desert hears you!” A bird chirruped from the rocks high above them. The troop stopped, and Paul sensed abrupt tension. There came a faint thumping from the rocks, a sound no louder than mice jumping in the sand. Again, the bird chirruped. A stir passed through the troop’s ranks. And again, the mouse-thumping pecked its way across the sand. Once

“There’s a Bene Gesserit saying,” she said. “You have sayings for everything!” he protested. “You’ll like this one,” she said. “It goes: ‘Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.’ ”

“Perhaps,” Stilgar said. “It hasn’t been tested, though.” He returned his attention to Paul. “Usul, it’s our way that you’ve now the responsibility for Jamis’ woman here and for his two sons. His yali ... his quarters, are yours. His coffee service is yours ... and this, his woman.” Paul studied the woman, wondering: Why isn’t she mourning her man? Why does she show no hate for me? Abruptly, he saw that the Fremen were staring at him, waiting.

Harah lifted her arms, turning slowly on one heel. “I am still young, Usul. It’s said I still look as young as when I was with Geoff ... before Jamis bested him.” Jamis killed another to win her, Paul thought.

“You’ll not cast me out when the year’s gone?” she said. “I know for true I’m not as young as once I was.” “As long as I live you’ll have a place with me,”

“Each bush, each weed you see out there in the erg,” she said, “how do you suppose it lives when we leave it? Each is planted most tenderly in its own little pit. The pits are filled with smooth ovals of chromoplastic. Light turns them white. You can see them glistening in the dawn if you look down from a high place. White reflects. But when Old Father Sun departs, the chromoplastic reverts to transparency in the dark. It cools with extreme rapidity. The surface condenses moisture out of the air. That moisture trickles down to keep our plants alive.”

postulating

snare

And Paul recalled the stories of the Fremen—that their children fought as ferociously as the adults.

Has he seen this moment in time? Jessica wondered. She rested a hand on her abdomen, thinking of the unborn daughter there, asking herself: Do I have the right to risk us both?

Why is time suspended? she asked herself. She stared at the frozen expressions around her, seeing a dust mote above Chani’s head, stopped there. Waiting. The answer to this instant came like an explosion in her consciousness : her personal time was suspended to save her life.

“You should’ve told us you were pregnant!” Jessica found the voice that talked within the mutual awareness. “Why?” “This changes both of you! Holy Mother, what have we done?”

Again, the presence of the old Reverend Mother asserted itself, but now there was a tripling of mutual awareness—two active and one that lay quietly absorbing. “Time compels me,” the Reverend Mother said within the awareness. “I have much to give you. And I do not know if your daughter can accept all this while remaining sane. But it must be: the needs of the tribe are paramount.”

Experiences began to unroll before Jessica. It was like a lecture strip in a subliminal training projector at the Bene Gesserit school... but faster... blindingly faster. Yet... distinct.

“I’ve been a long time waiting for you,” she said. “Here is my life.”

And she knew with a generalized awareness that she had become, in truth, precisely what was meant by a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother. The poison drug had transformed her.

“Let them have their orgy, ” the other-memory said within her. “They’ve little enough pleasure out of living. Yes, and you and I need this little time to become acquainted before I recede and pour out through your memories. Already, I feel myself being tied to bits of you. Ah-h-h, you’ve a mind filled with interesting things. So many things I’d never imagined.”

And she saw the thread of the past carried by Sayyadina after Sayyadina—first by word of mouth, hidden in the sand chanteys, then refined through their own Reverend Mothers with the discovery of the poison drug on Rossak ... and now developed to subtle strength on Arrakis in the discovery of the Water of Life.

He realized suddenly that it was one thing to see the past occupying the present, but the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future.

Let him experience this moment of terror, the Baron thought as he walked along behind his nephew. He will succeed me, but at a time of my choosing. I’ll not have him throwing away what I’ve built!

“I know you, Feyd,” the Baron said. “You will not refuse.” All right, Feyd-Rautha thought. I need you now. I see that. The bargain’s made. But I’ll not always need you. And... someday ...

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

He babbles too much, Hawat thought. He’s not like Leto who could tell me a thing with the lift of an eyebrow or the wave of a hand. Nor like the Old Duke who could express an entire sentence in the way he accented a single word. This is a clod! Destroying him will be a service to mankind.

“It’s powerfully lonely,”

“Give as few orders as possible,” his father had told him ... once ... long ago. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.”

“So,” the Emperor said. He snapped his fingers and a door opened at his left behind the throne. Through the door came two Sardaukar herding a girl-child who appeared to be about four years old. She wore a black aba, the hood thrown back to reveal the attachments of a stillsuit hanging free at her throat. Her eyes were Fremen blue, staring out of a soft, round face. She appeared completely unafraid and there was a look to her stare that made the Baron feel uneasy for no reason he could explain.

The Baron stumbled forward to stand beside Alia. “Majesty,” he pleaded, “I knew nothing of—” “Interrupt me once more, Baron,” the Emperor said, “and you will lose the powers of interruption... forever.”

“I have her, Majesty!” the Baron shouted. “Shall I dispatch her now-eeeeeeeeeeeh!” He hurled her to the floor, clutched his left arm. “I’m sorry, Grandfather,” Alia said. “You’ve met the Atreides gom jabbar.” She got to her feet, dropped a dark needle from her hand. The Baron fell back. His eyes bulged as he stared at a red slash on his left palm. “You... you....” He rolled sideways in his suspensors, a sagging mass of flesh supported inches off the floor with head lolling and mouth hanging open.

“Nothing money won’t repair, I presume,”

It occurred to Paul then that he had seen his own dead body along countless reaches of the time web, but never once had he seen his moment of death. Have I been denied a glimpse of this man because he is the one who kills me? Paul wondered.

“Be silent,” Jessica whispered. “And pray.”

“Do you know so little of my son?” Jessica whispered. “See that princess standing there, so haughty and confident. They say she has pretensions of a literary nature. Let us hope she finds solace in such things; she’ll have little else.” A bitter laugh escaped Jessica. “Think on it, Chani: that princess will have the name, yet she’ll live as less than a concubine—never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she’s bound. While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.”