Dune

Paul stared into the tent’s darkness at the dimly discerned movements of his mother revealed by the manual’s glowtab. Now is the time to carry out my father’s wish, he thought. I must give her his message now while she has time for grief. Grief would inconvenience us later. And he found himself shocked by precise logic.

“Mother,” he said.

“Yes?”

She heard the change in his voice, felt coldness in her entrails at the sound. Never had she heard such harsh control.

“My father is dead,” he said.

She searched within herself for the coupling of fact and fact and fact—the Bene Gesserit way of assessing data—and it came to her: the sensation of terrifying loss.

Jessica nodded, unable to speak.

“My father charged me once,” Paul said, “to give you a message if anything happened to him. He feared you might believe he distrusted you.”

That useless suspicion, she thought.

“He wanted you to know he never suspected you,” Paul said, and explained the deception, adding: “He wanted you to know he always trusted you completely, always loved you and cherished you. He said he would sooner have mistrusted himself and he had but one regret—that he never made you his Duchess.”

She brushed the tears coursing down her cheeks, thought: What a stupid waste of the body’s water! But she knew this thought for what it was—the attempt to retreat from grief into anger. Leto, my Leto, she thought. What terrible things we do to those we love! With a violent motion, she extinguished the little manual’s glowtab.

Sobs shook her.

Paul heard his mother’s grief and felt the emptiness within himself. I have no grief, he thought. Why? Why? He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.

“A time to get and time to lose,” Jessica thought, quoting to herself from the O.C. Bible. “A time to keep and a time to cast away; a time for love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace.”

Paul’s mind had gone on in its chilling precision. He saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet. Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery—as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.

Abruptly, as though he had found a necessary key, Paul’s mind climbed another notch in awareness. He felt himself clinging to this new level, clutching at a precarious hold and peering about. It was as though he existed within a globe with avenues radiating away in all directions…yet this only approximated the sensation.

He remembered once seeing a gauze kerchief blowing in the wind and now he sensed the future as though it twisted across some surface as undulant and impermanent as that of the windblown kerchief.

He saw people.

He felt the heat and cold of uncounted probabilities.

He knew names and places, experienced emotions without number, reviewed data of innumerable unexplored crannies. There was time to probe and test and taste, but no time to shape.

The thing was a spectrum of possibilities from the most remote past to the most remote future—from the most probable to the most improbable. He saw his own death in countless ways. He saw new planets, new cultures.

People.

People.

He saw them in such swarms they could not be listed, yet his mind catalogued them.

Even the Guildsmen.

And he thought: The Guild—there’d be a way for us, my strangeness accepted as a familiar thing of high value, always with an assured supply of the now-necessary spice.

But the idea of living out his life in the mind-groping-ahead-through-possible-futures that guided hurtling spaceships appalled him. It was a way, though. And in meeting the possible future that contained Guildsmen he recognized his own strangeness.

I have another kind of sight. I see another kind of terrain: the available paths.

The awareness conveyed both reassurance and alarm—so many places on that other kind of terrain dipped or turned out of his sight.

As swiftly as it had come, the sensation slipped away from him, and he realized the entire experience had taken the space of a heartbeat.

Yet, his own personal awareness had been turned over, illuminated in a terrifying way. He stared around him.

Night still covered the stilltent within its rock-enclosed hideaway. His mother’s grief could still be heard.