Paul Atreides

Paul Atreides:

Paul stroked her hair.

Chani had peeled away the dross.

Terrible purpose brushed him. It was a coriolis wind in his soul. It

whistled through the framework of his being. His body knew things then

never learned in consciousness.

“Chani, beloved,” he whispered, “do you know what I’d spend to end the

Jihad—to separate myself from the damnable godhead the Qizarate forces

onto me?”

She trembled, “You have but to command it,” she said.

“Oh, no. Even if I died now, my name would still lead them. When I

think of the Atreides name tied to this religious butchery …”

“But you’re the Emperor! You’ve—”

“I’m a figurehead. When godhead’s given, that’s the one thing the socalled god no longer controls.” A
bitter laugh shook him. He sensed the

future looking back at him out of dynasties not even dreamed. He felt his

being cast out, crying, unchained from the rings of fate—only his name

continued. “I was chosen,” he said. “Perhaps at birth … certainly before I

had much say in it. I was chosen.”

“Then un-choose,” she said.

His arm tightened around her shoulder. “In time, beloved. Give me yet a

little time.”

Unshed tears burned his eyes.

“We should return to Sietch Tabr,” Chani said. “There’s too much to
contend with in this tent of stone.”

He nodded, his chin moving against the smooth fabric of the scarf which

covered her hair. The soothing spice smell of her filled his nostrils.

Sietch. The ancient Chakobsa word absorbed him: a place of retreat and

safety in a time of peril. Chani’s suggestion made him long for vistas of

open sand, for clean distances where one could see an enemy coming from

a long way off.

“The tribes expect Muad’dib to return to them,” she said. She lifted her

head to look at him. “You belong to us.”

“I belong to a vision,” he whispered.

He thought then of the Jihad, of the gene mingling across parsecs and the

vision which told him how he might end it. Should he pay the price? All the

hatefulness would evaporate, dying as fires die—ember by ember. But …

oh! The terrifying price!

I never wanted to be a god, he thought. I wanted only to disappear like a

jewel of trace dew caught by the morning. I wanted to escape the angels

and the damned—alone … as though by an oversight.

“Will we go back to the Sietch?” Chani pressed.

“Yes,” he whispered. And he thought: I must pay the price.

Chani heaved a deep sigh, settled back against him.

I’ve loitered, he thought. And he saw how he’d been hemmed in by

boundaries of love and the Jihad. And what was one life, no matter how

beloved, against all the lives the Jihad was certain to take? Could single

misery be weighed against the agony of multitudes?

“Love?” Chani said, questioning.

He put a hand against her lips.

I’ll yield up myself, he thought. I’ll rush out while I yet have the strength,

fly through a space a bird might not find. It was a useless thought, and he

knew it. The Jihad would follow his ghost.

What could he answer? he wondered. How explain when people taxed

him with brutal foolishness? Who might understand?

I wanted only to look back and say: “There! There’s an existence which

couldn’t hold me. See! I vanish! No restraint or net of human devising can

trap me ever again. I renounce my religion! This glorious instant is mine!

I’m free!

What empty words!

“A big worm was seen below the Shield Wall yesterday,” Chani said.

“More than a hundred meters long, they say. Such big ones come rarely into

this region any more. The water repels them, I suppose. They say this one

came to summon Muad’dib home to his desert.” She pinched his chest.

“Don’t laugh at me!”

“I’m not laughing.”

Paul, caught by wonder at the persistent Fremen mythos, felt a heart

constriction, a thing inflicted upon his lifeline: adab, the demanding

memory. He recalled his childhood room on Caladan then … dark night in

the stone chamber … a vision! It’d been one of his earliest prescient

moments. He felt his mind dive into the vision, saw through a veiled cloudmemory (vision-within-vision)
a line of Fremen, their robes trimmed with

dust. They paraded past a gap in tall rocks. They carried a long, clothwrapped burden.

And Paul heard himself say in the vision: “It was mostly sweet … but

you were the sweetest of all …”

Adab released him.

“You’re so quiet,” Chani whispered. “What is it?”

Paul shuddered, sat up, face averted.

“You’re angry because I’ve been to the desert’s edge,” Chani said.

He shook his head without speaking.

“I only went because I want a child,” Chani said.

Paul was unable to speak. He felt himself consumed by the raw power of
that early vision. Terrible purpose! In that moment, his whole life was a

limb shaken by the departure of a bird … and the bird was chance. Free

will.

I succumbed to the lure of the oracle, he thought.

And he sensed that succumbing to this lure might be to fix himself upon

a single-track life. Could it be, he wondered, that the oracle didn’t tell the

future? Could it be that the oracle made the future? Had he exposed his life

to some web of underlying threads, trapped himself there in that long-ago

awakening, victim of a spider-future which even now advanced upon him

with terrifying jaws.

A Bene Gesserit axiom slipped into his mind: To use raw power is to

make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.

“I know it angers you,” Chani said, touching his arm. “It’s true that the

tribes have revived the old rites and the blood sacrifices, but I took no part

in those.”

Paul inhaled a deep, trembling breath. The torrent of his vision

dissipated, became a deep, still place whose currents moved with absorbing

power beyond his reach.

“Please,” Chani begged. “I want a child, our child. Is that a terrible

thing?”

Paul caressed her arm where she touched him, pulled away. He climbed

from the bed, extinguished the glowglobes, crossed to the balcony window,

opened the draperies. The deep desert could not intrude here except by its

odors. A windowless wall climbed to the night sky across from him.

Moonlight slanted down into an enclosed garden, sentinel trees and broad

leaves, wet foliage. He could see a fish pond reflecting stars among the

leaves, pockets of white floral brilliance in the shadows. Momentarily, he

saw the garden through Fremen eyes: alien, menacing, dangerous in its

waste of water.
He thought of the Water Sellers, their way destroyed by the lavish

dispensing from his hands. They hated him. He’d slain the past. And there

were others, even those who’d fought for the sols to buy precious water,

who hated him for changing the old ways. As the ecological pattern dictated

by Muad’dib remade the planet’s landscape, human resistance increased.

Was it not presumptuous, he wondered, to think he could make over an

entire planet—everything growing where and how he told it to grow? Even

if he succeeded, what of the universe waiting out there? Did it fear similar

treatment?

Abruptly, he closed the draperies, sealed the ventilators. He turned

toward Chani in the darkness, felt her waiting there. Her water rings tinkled

like the almsbells of pilgrims. He groped his way to the sound, encountered

her outstretched arms.

“Beloved,” she whispered. “Have I troubled you?”

Her arms enclosed his future as they enclosed him.

“Not you,” he said. “Oh … not you.”