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thought. That was the message of the desert. Contrast stunned him with
realization. He wanted to turn to the aides massed in the sietch entrance, shout
at them: If you need something to worship, then worship life -- all life, every
last crawling bit of it! We're all in this beauty together!
 They wouldn't understand. In the desert, they were endlessly desert. Growing
things performed no green ballet for them.
He clenched his fists at his sides, trying to halt the vision. He wanted to
flee from his own mind. It was a beast come to devour him! Awareness lay in him,
sodden, heavy with all the living it had sponged up, saturated with too many
experiences.
Desperately, Paul squeezed his thoughts outward.
Stars!
Awareness turned over at the thought of all those stars above him -- an
infinite volume. A man must be half mad to imagine he could rule even a teardrop
of that volume. He couldn't begin to imagine the number of subjects his Imperium
claimed.
Subjects? Worshippers and enemies, more likely. Did any among them see
beyond rigid beliefs? Where was one man who'd escaped the narrow destiny of his
prejudices? Not even an Emperor escaped. He'd lived a 'take everything' life,
tried to create a universe in his own image. But the exultant universe was
breaking across him at last with its silent waves.
I spit on Dune! he thought. I give it my moisture!
This myth he'd made out of intricate movements and imagination, out of
moonlight and love, out of prayers older than Adam, and gray cliffs and crimson
shadows, laments and rivers of martyrs -- what had it come to at last? When the
waves receded, the shores of Time would spread out there clean, empty, shining
with infinite grains of memory and little else. Was this the golden genesis of
man?
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 time? 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 . . ."
"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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]