Dune

“I wish I had,” Jessica said. And she thought: She knows I will confirm this to the Sisterhood. She knows. She may even suspect I’ll tell the Fremen and force her into a Trial of Possession. She cannot let me leave here alive.

“Our brave Fedaykin waits while we argue,” Alia said.

Jessica forced her attention back to the old Naib. She brought her responses under control, said: “You came to see me, Ghadhean.”

“Yes, My Lady. We of the desert see terrible things happening. The Little Makers come out of the sand as was foretold in the oldest prophecies. Shai-Hulud no longer can be found except in the deeps of the Empty Quarter. We have abandoned our friend, the desert!”

Jessica glanced at Alia, who merely motioned for Jessica to continue. Jessica looked out over the throng in the Chamber, saw the shocked alertness on every face. The import of the fight between mother and daughter had not been lost on this throng, and they must wonder why the audience continued. She returned her attention to al-Fali.

“Ghadhean, what is this talk of Little Makers and the scarcity of sandworms?”

“Mother of Moisture,” he said, using her old Fremen title, “we were warned of this in the Kitab al-Ibar. We beseech thee. Let it not be forgotten that on the day Muad’Dib died, Arrakis turned by itself! We cannot abandon the desert.”

“Hah!” Alia sneered. “The superstitious riffraff of the Inner Desert fear the ecological transformation. They—”

“I hear you, Ghadhean,” Jessica said. “If the worms go, the spice goes. If the spice goes, what coin do we have to buy our way?”

Sounds of surprise: gasps and startled whispers could be heard spreading across the Great Hall. The Chamber echoed to the sound.

Alia shrugged. “Superstitious nonsense!”

Al-Fali lifted his right hand to point at Alia. “I speak to the Mother of Moisture, not to the Coan-Teen!”

Alia’s hands gripped the arms of her throne, but she remained seated.

Al-Fali looked at Jessica. “Once it was the land where nothing grew. Now there are plants. They spread like lice upon a wound. There have been clouds and rain along the belt of Dune! Rain, My Lady! Oh, precious mother of Muad’Dib, as sleep is death’s brother, so is rain on the Belt of Dune. It is the death of us all.”

“We do only what Liet-Kynes and Muad’Dib himself designed for us to do,” Alia protested. “What is all of this superstitious gabble? We revere the words of Liet-Kynes, who told us: ‘I wish to see this entire planet caught up in a net of green plants.’ So it will be.”

“And what of the worms and the spice?” Jessica asked.

“There’ll always be some desert,” Alia said. “The worms will survive.”

She’s lying, Jessica thought. Why does she lie?

“Help us, Mother of Moisture,” al-Fali pleaded.

With an abrupt sensation of double vision, Jessica felt her awareness lurch, propelled by the old Naib’s words. It was the unmistakable adab, the demanding memory which came upon one of itself. It came without qualifications and held her senses immobile while the lesson of the past was impressed upon her awareness. She was caught up in it completely, a fish in the net. Yet she felt the demand of it as a human-most moment, each small part a reminder of creation. Every element of the lesson-memory was real but insubstantial in its constant change, and she knew this was the closest she might ever come to experiencing the prescient dietgrasp which had inflicted itself upon her son.

Alia lied because she was possessed by one who would destroy the Atreides. She was, in herself, the first destruction. Then al-Fali spoke the truth: the sandworms are doomed unless the course of the ecological transformation is modified.

In the pressure of revelation, Jessica saw the people of the audience reduced to slow motion, their roles identified for her. She could pick the ones charged with seeing that she did not leave here alive! And the path through them lay there in her awareness as though outlined in bright light—confusion among them, one of them feinted to stumble into another, whole groups tangled. She saw, also, that she might leave this Great Hall only to fall into other hands. Alia did not care if she created a martyr. No—the thing which possessed her did not care.