Dune

She folded her arms across her breast, hugging herself, feeling the crysknife there, a blade ground from a sandworm’s tooth, if the reports were right. “It’s just that we’re strange to them—different people, different customs. They’ve known only the Harkonnens.” She looked past him out the windows. “What were you staring at out there?”

He turned back to the window. “The people.”

Jessica crossed to his side, looked to the left toward the front of the house where Yueh’s attention was focused. A line of twenty palm trees grew there, the ground beneath them swept clean, barren. A screen fence separated them from the road upon which robed people were passing. Jessica detected a faint shimmering in the air between her and the people—a house shield—and went on to study the passing throng, wondering why Yueh found them so absorbing.

The pattern emerged and she put a hand to her cheek. The way the passing people looked at the palm trees! She saw envy, some hate…even a sense of hope. Each person raked those trees with a fixity of expression.

“Do you know what they’re thinking?” Yueh asked.

“You profess to read minds?” she asked.

“Those minds,” he said. “They look at those trees and they think: ‘There are one hundred of us.’ That’s what they think.”

She turned a puzzled frown on him. “Why?”

“Those are date palms,” he said. “One date palm requires forty liters of water a day. A man requires but eight liters. A palm, then, equals five men. There are twenty palms out there—one hundred men.”

“But some of those people look at the trees hopefully.”

“They but hope some dates will fall, except it’s the wrong season.”

“We look at this place with too critical an eye,” she said. “There’s hope as well as danger here. The spice could make us rich. With a fat treasury, we can make this world into whatever we wish.”

And she laughed silently at herself: Who am I trying to convince? The laugh broke through her restraints, emerging brittle, without humor. “But you can’t buy security,” she said.

Yueh turned away to hide his face from her. If only it were possible to hate these people instead of love them! In her manner, in many ways, Jessica was like his Wanna. Yet that thought carried its own rigors, hardening him to his purpose. The ways of the Harkonnen cruelty were devious. Wanna might not be dead. He had to be certain.

“Do not worry for us, Wellington,” Jessica said. “The problem’s ours, not yours.”

She thinks I worry for her! He blinked back tears. And I do, of course. But I must stand before that black Baron with his deed accomplished, and take my one chance to strike him where he is weakest—in his gloating moment!

He sighed.

“Would it disturb Paul if I looked in on him?” she asked.

“Not at all. I gave him a sedative.”

“He’s taking the change well?” she asked.

“Except for getting a bit overtired. He’s excited, but what fifteen-year-old wouldn’t be under these circumstances?” He crossed to the door, opened it. “He’s in here.”

Jessica followed, peered into a shadowy room.

Paul lay on a narrow cot, one arm beneath a light cover, the other thrown back over his head. Slatted blinds at a window beside the bed wove a loom of shadows across face and blanket.

Jessica stared at her son, seeing the oval shape of face so like her own. But the hair was the Duke’s—coal-colored and tousled. Long lashes concealed the lime-toned eyes. Jessica smiled, feeling her fears retreat. She was suddenly caught by the idea of genetic traces in her son’s features—her lines in eyes and facial outline, but sharp touches of the father peering through that outline like maturity emerging from childhood.

She thought of the boy’s features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns—endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus. The thought made her want to kneel beside the bed and take her son in her arms, but she was inhibited by Yueh’s presence. She stepped back, closed the door softly.

Yueh had returned to the window, unable to bear watching the way Jessica stared at her son. Why did Wanna never give me children? he asked himself. I know as a doctor there was no physical reason against it. Was there some Bene Gesserit reason? Was she, perhaps, instructed to serve a different purpose? What could it have been? She loved me, certainly.

For the first time, he was caught up in the thought that he might be part of a pattern more involuted and complicated than his mind could grasp.