Dune

She moved to obey, heard the water literjons gurgle as she shoved the pack across the floor. She peered upward, saw Paul framed against stars.

“Here,” he said and reached down, pulled the pack to the surface.

Now she saw only the circle of stars. They were like the luminous tips of weapons aimed down at her. A shower of meteors crossed her patch of night. The meteors seemed to her like a warning, like tiger stripes, like luminous grave slats clabbering her blood. And she felt the chill of the price on their heads.

“Hurry up,” Paul said. “I want to collapse the tent.”

A shower of sand from the surface brushed her left hand. How much sand will the hand hold? she asked herself.

“Shall I help you?” Paul asked.

“No.”

She swallowed in a dry throat, slipped into the hole, felt static-packed sand rasp under her hands. Paul reached down, took her arm. She stood beside him on a smooth patch of starlit desert, stared around. Sand almost brimmed their basin, leaving only a dim lip of surrounding rock. She probed the farther darkness with her trained senses.

Noise of small animals.

Birds.

A fall of dislodged sand and faint creature sounds within it.

Paul collapsing their tent, recovering it up the hole.

Starlight displaced just enough of the night to charge each shadow with menace. She looked at patches of blackness.

Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.

Presently, Paul stood beside her, said: “Duncan told me that if he was captured, he could hold out…this long. We must leave here now.” He shouldered the pack, crossed to the shallow lip of the basin, climbed to a ledge that looked down on open desert.

Jessica followed automatically, noting how she now lived in her son’s orbit.

For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow’s life. I live now for my young Duke and the daughter yet to be.

She felt the sand drag her feet as she climbed to Paul’s side.

He looked north across a line of rocks, studying a distant escarpment.

The faraway rock profile was like an ancient battleship of the seas outlined by stars. The long swish of it lifted on an invisible wave with syllables of boomerang antennae, funnels arcing back, a pi-shaped upthrusting at the stern.

An orange glare burst above the silhouette and a line of brilliant purple cut downward toward the glare.

Another line of purple!

And another upthrusting orange glare!

It was like an ancient naval battle, remembered shellfire, and the sight held them staring.

“Pillars of fire,” Paul whispered.

A ring of red eyes lifted over the distant rock. Lines of purple laced the sky.

“Jetflares and lasguns,” Jessica said.

The dust-reddened first moon of Arrakis lifted above the horizon to their left and they saw a storm trail there—a ribbon of movement over the desert.

“It must be Harkonnen ’thopters hunting us,” Paul said. “The way they’re cutting up the desert…it’s as though they were making certain they stamped out whatever’s there…the way you’d stamp out a nest of insects.”

“Or a nest of Atreides,” Jessica said.

“We must seek cover,” Paul said. “We’ll head south and keep to the rocks. If they caught us in the open….” He turned, adjusting the pack to his shoulders. “They’re killing anything that moves.”

He took one step along the ledge and, in that instant, heard the low hiss of gliding aircraft, saw the dark shapes of ornithopters above them.

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. “Something cannot emerge from nothing,” he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable “the truth” can be.

—FROM “CONVERSATIONS WITH MUAD’DIB”

BY THE PRINCESS IRULAN

“I’ve always prided myself on seeing things the way they truly are,” Thufir Hawat said. “That’s the curse of being a Mentat. You can’t stop analyzing your data.”

The leathered old face appeared composed in the predawn dimness as he spoke. His sapho-stained lips were drawn into a straight line with radial creases spreading upward.

A robed man squatted silently on sand across from Hawat, apparently unmoved by the words.