Dune

“Yes. Well, tomorrow we leave. It’ll be good to get settled in our new home, put all this upset behind.”

Paul nodded, suddenly overcome by memory of the Reverend Mother’s words: “…for the father, nothing.”

“Father,” Paul said, “will Arrakis be as dangerous as everyone says?”

The Duke forced himself to the casual gesture, sat down on a corner of the table, smiled. A whole pattern of conversation welled up in his mind—the kind of thing he might use to dispel the vapors in his men before a battle. The pattern froze before it could be vocalized, confronted by the single thought:

This is my son.

“It’ll be dangerous,” he admitted.

“Hawat tells me we have a plan for the Fremen,” Paul said. And he wondered: Why don’t I tell him what that old woman said? How did she seal my tongue?

The Duke noted his son’s distress, said: “As always, Hawat sees the main chance. But there’s much more. I see also the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles—the CHOAM Company. By giving me Arrakis, His Majesty is forced to give us a CHOAM directorship…a subtle gain.”

“CHOAM controls the spice,” Paul said.

“And Arrakis with its spice is our avenue into CHOAM,” the Duke said. “There’s more to CHOAM than melange.”

“Did the Reverend Mother warn you?” Paul blurted. He clenched his fists, feeling his palms slippery with perspiration. The effort it had taken to ask that question.

“Hawat tells me she frightened you with warnings about Arrakis,” the Duke said. “Don’t let a woman’s fears cloud your mind. No woman wants her loved ones endangered. The hand behind those warnings was your mother’s. Take this as a sign of her love for us.”

“Does she know about the Fremen?”

“Yes, and about much more.”

“What?”

And the Duke thought: The truth could be worse than he imagines, but even dangerous facts are valuable if you’ve been trained to deal with them. And there’s one place where nothing has been spared for my son—dealing with dangerous facts. This must be leavened, though; he is young.

“Few products escape the CHOAM touch,” the Duke said. “Logs, donkeys, horses, cows, lumber, dung, sharks, whale fur—the most prosaic and the most exotic…even our poor pundi rice from Caladan. Anything the Guild will transport, the art forms of Ecaz, the machines of Richesse and Ix. But all fades before melange. A handful of spice will buy a home on Tupile. It cannot be manufactured, it must be mined on Arrakis. It is unique and it has true geriatric properties.”

“And now we control it?”

“To a certain degree. But the important thing is to consider all the Houses that depend on CHOAM profits. And think of the enormous proportion of those profits dependent upon a single product—the spice. Imagine what would happen if something should reduce spice production.”

“Whoever had stockpiled melange could make a killing,” Paul said. “Others would be out in the cold.”

The Duke permitted himself a moment of grim satisfaction, looking at his son and thinking how penetrating, how truly educated that observation had been. He nodded. “The Harkonnens have been stockpiling for more than twenty years.”

“They mean spice production to fail and you to be blamed.”

“They wish the Atreides name to become unpopular,” the Duke said. “Think of the Landsraad Houses that look to me for a certain amount of leadership—their unofficial spokesman. Think how they’d react if I were responsible for a serious reduction in their income. After all, one’s own profits come first. The Great Convention be damned! You can’t let someone pauperize you!” A harsh smile twisted the Duke’s mouth. “They’d look the other way no matter what was done to me.”

“Even if we were attacked with atomics?”

“Nothing that flagrant. No open defiance of the Convention. But almost anything else short of that…perhaps even dusting and a bit of soil poisoning.”

“Then why are we walking into this?”

“Paul!” The Duke frowned at his son. “Knowing where the trap is—that’s the first step in evading it. This is like single combat, Son, only on a larger scale—a feint within a feint within a feint…seemingly without end. The task is to unravel it. Knowing that the Harkonnens stockpile melange, we ask another question: Who else is stockpiling? That’s the list of our enemies.”

“Who?”

“Certain Houses we knew were unfriendly and some we’d thought friendly. We need not consider them for the moment because there is one other much more important: our beloved Padishah Emperor.”

Paul tried to swallow in a throat suddenly dry. “Couldn’t you convene the Landsraad, expose—”