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"I'm afraid I was woolgathering," he said. "Whenever I ... feel especially sorry for you, I'm afraid I think of you as ... well, Jessica."
"Sorry for me? Whatever for?"
Yueh shrugged. Long ago, he had realized Jessica was not gifted with the full Truthsay as his Wanna had been. Still, he always used the truth with Jessica whenever possible. It was safest.
"You've seen this place, my ... Jessica." He stumbled over the name, plunged ahead: "So barren after Caladan. And the people! Those townswomen we passed on the way here wailing beneath their veils. The way they looked at us."
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.
Jessica stopped beside him, said: "What delicious abandon in the sleep of a child."
He spoke mechanically: "If only adults could relax like that."
"Yes."
"Where do we lose it?" he murmured.
She glanced at him, catching the odd tone, but her mind was still on Paul, thinking of the new rigors in his training here, thinking of the differences in his life now--so very different from the life they once had planned for him.
"We do, indeed, lose something," she said.
She glanced out to the right at a slope humped with a wind-troubled gray-green of bushes--dusty leaves and dry claw branches. The too-dark sky hung over the slope like a blot, and the milky light of the Arrakeen sun gave the scene a silver cast--light like the crysknife concealed in her bodice.
"The sky's so dark," she said.
"That's partly the lack of moisture," he said.
"Water!" she snapped. "Everywhere you turn here, you're involved with the lack of water!"
"It's the precious mystery of Arrakis," he said.
"Why is there so little of it? There's volcanic rock here. There're a dozen power sources I could name. There's polar ice. They say you can't drill in the desert--storms and sandtides destroy equipment faster than it can be installed, if the worms don't get you first. They've never found water traces there, anyway. But the mystery, Wellington, the real mystery is the wells that've been drilled up here in the sinks and basins. Have you read about those?"
"First a trickle, then nothing," he said.
"But, Wellington, that's the mystery. The water was there. It dries up. And never again is there water. Yet another hole nearby produces the same result: a trickle that stops. Has no one ever been curious about this?"
"It is curious," he said. "You suspect some living agency? Wouldn't that have shown in core samples?"
"What would have shown? Alien plant matter ... or animal? Who could recognize it?" She turned back to the slope. "The water is stopped. Something plugs it. That's my suspicion."
"Perhaps the reason's known," he said. "The Harkonnens sealed off many sources of information about Arrakis. Perhaps there was reason to suppress this."
"What reason?" she asked. "And then there's the atmospheric moisture. Little enough of it, certainly, but there's some. It's the major source of water here, caught in windtraps and precipitators. Where does that come from?"
"The polar caps?"
"Cold air takes up little moisture, Wellington. There are things here behind the Harkonnen veil that bear close investigation, and not all of those things are directly involved with the spice."
"We are indeed behind the Harkonnen veil," he said. "Perhaps we'll...." He broke off, noting the sudden intense way she was looking at him. "Is something wrong?"
"The way you say 'Harkonnen,' " she said. "Even my Duke's voice doesn't carry that weight of venom when he uses the hated name. I didn't know you had personal reasons to hate them, Wellington."
Great Mother! he thought. I've aroused
her suspicions! Now I must use every trick my Wanna taught me. There's only one solution: tell the truth as far as I can.
He said: "You didn't know that my wife, my Wanna...." He shrugged, unable to speak past a sudden constriction in his throat. Then: "They...." The words would not come out. He felt panic, closed his eyes tightly, experiencing the agony in his chest and little else until a hand touched his arm gently. "Forgive me," Jessica said. "I did not mean to open an old wound." And she thought: Those animals! His wife was Bene Gesserit --the signs are all over him. And it's obvious the Harkonnens killed her. Here's another poor victim bound to the Atreides by a cherem of hate.
"I am sorry," he said. "I'm unable to talk about it." He opened his eyes, giving himself up to the internal awareness of grief. That, at least, was truth.
Jessica studied him, seeing the up-angled cheeks, the dark sequins of almond eyes, the butter complexion, and stringy mustache hanging like a curved frame around purpled lips and narrow chin. The creases of his cheeks and forehead, she saw, were as much lines of sorrow as of age. A deep affection for him came over her.
"Wellington, I'm sorry we brought you into this dangerous place," she said.
