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They rounded a corner where the passage widened. Stilgar stood at one side motioning them into a low hole that opened at right angles.
"Quickly!" he hissed. "We're like rabbits in a cage if a patrol catches us here."
Paul bent for the opening, followed Chani into a cave illuminated by thin gray light from somewhere ahead.
"You can stand up," she said.
He straightened, studied the place: a deep and wide area with domed ceiling that curved away just out of a man's handreach. The troop spread out through shadows. Paul saw his mother come up on one side, saw her examine their companions. And he noted how she failed to blend with the Fremen even though her garb was identical. The way she moved --such a sense of power and grace.
"Find a place to rest and stay out of the way, child-man," Chani said. "Here's food." She pressed two leaf-wrapped morsels into his hand. They reeked of spice.
Stilgar came up behind Jessica, called an order to a group on the left. "Get the doorseal in place and see to moisture security." He turned to another Fremen: "Lemil, get glowglobes." He took Jessica's arm. "I wish to show you something, weirding woman." He led her around a curve of rock toward the light source.
Jessica found herself looking out across the wide lip of another opening to the cave, an opening high in a cliff wall--looking out across another basin about ten or twelve kilometers wide. The basin was shielded by high rock walls. Sparse clumps of plant growth were scattered around it.
As she looked at the dawn-gray basin, the sun lifted over the far escarpment illuminating a biscuit-colored landscape of rocks and sand. And she noted how the sun of Arrakis appeared to leap over the horizon.
It's because we want to hold it back, she thought. Night is safer than day. There came over her then a longing for a rainbow in this place that would never see rain. I must suppress such longings, she thought. They're a weakness. I no longer can afford weaknesses.
Stilgar gripped her arm, pointed across the basin. "There! There you see proper Druses."
She looked where he pointed, saw movement: people on the basin floor scattering at the daylight into the shadows of the opposite cliffwall. In spite of the distance, their movements were plain in the clear air. She lifted her binoculars from beneath her robe, focused the oil lenses on the distant people. Kerchiefs fluttered like a flight of multicolored butterflies.
"That is home," Stilgar said. "We will be there this night." He stared across the basin, tugging at his mustache. "My people stayed out overlate working. That means there are no patrols about. I'll signal them later and they'll prepare for us."
"Your people show good discipline," Jessica said. She lowered the binoculars, saw that Stilgar was looking at them.
"They obey the preservation of the tribe," he said. "It is the way we choose among us for a leader. The leader is the one who is strongest, the one who brings water and security." He lifted his attention to her face.
She returned his stare, noted the whiteless eyes, the stained eyepits, the dust-rimmed beard and mustache, the line of the catchtube curving down from his nostrils into his stillsuit.
"Have I compromised your leadership by besting you, Stilgar?" she asked.
"You did not call me out," he said.
"It's important that a leader keep the respect of his troop," she said.
"Isn't a one of those sandlice I cannot handle," Stilgar said. "When you bested me, you bested us all. Now, they hope to learn from you ... the weirding way ... and some are curious to see if you intend to call me out."
She weighed the implications. "By besting you in formal battle?"
He nodded. "I'd advise you against this because they'd not follow you. You're not of the sand. They saw this in our night's passage."
"Practical people," she said.
"True enough." He glanced at the basin. "We know our needs. But not many are thinking deep thoughts now this close to home. We've been out overlong arranging to deliver our spice quota to the free traders for the cursed Guild ... may their faces be forever black."
Jessica stopped in the act of turning away from him, looked back up into his face. "The Guild? What has the Guild to do with your spice?"
"It's Liet's command," Stilgar said. "We know the reason, but the taste of it sours us. We bribe the Guild with a monstrous payment in spice to keep our skies clear of satellites and such that none may spy what we do to the face of Arrakis."
She weighed out her words, remembering that Paul had said this must be the reason Arrakeen skies were clear of satellites. "And what is it you do to the face of Arrakis that must not be seen?"
"We change it ... slowly but with certainty ... to make it fit for human life. Our generation will not see it, nor our children nor our children's children nor the grandchildren of their children ... but it will come." He stared with veiled eyes out over the basin. "Open water and tall green plants and people walking freely without stillsuits."
So that's the dream of this Liet-Kynes, she thought. And she said: "Bribes are dangerous; they have a way of growing larger and larger."
"They grow," he said, "but the slow way is the safe way."
Jessica turned, looked out over the basin, trying to see it the way Stilgar was seeing it in his imagination. She saw only the grayed mustard stain of distant rocks and a sudden hazy motion in the sky above the cliffs.
"Ah-h-h-h," Stilgar said.
She thought at first it must be a patrol vehicle, then realized it was a mirage--another landscape hovering over the desert-sand and a distant wavering of greenery and in the middle distance a long worm traveling the surface with what looked like Fremen robes fluttering on its back.
The mirage faded.
"It would be better to ride," Stilgar said, "but we cannot permit a maker into this basin. Thus, we must walk again tonight."
Maker--theirword for worm, she thought.
She measured the import of his words, the statement that they could not permit a worm into this basin. She knew what she had seen in the mirage--Fremen riding on the back of a giant worm. It took heavy control not to betray her shock at the implications.
"We must be getting back to the others," Stilgar said. "Else my people may suspect I dally with you. Some already are jealous that my hands tasted your loveliness when we struggled last night in Tuono Basin."
"That will be enough of that!" Jessica snapped.
"No offense," Stilgar said, and his voice was mild. "Women among us are not taken against their will ... and with you...." He shrugged. "... even that convention isn't required."
"You will keep in mind that I was a duke's lady," she said, but her voice was calmer.
"As you wish," he said. "It's time to seal off this opening, to permit relaxation of stillsuit discipline. My people need to rest in comfort this day. Their families will give them little rest on the morrow."
Silence fell between them.
Jessica stared out into the sunlight. She had heard what she had heard in Stilgar's voice--the unspoken offer of more than his countenance. Did he need a wife? She realized she could step into that place with him. It would be one way to end conflict over tribal leadership--female properly aligned with male.
But what of Paul then? Who could tell yet what rules of parenthood prevailed here? And what of the unborn daughter she had carried these few weeks? What of a dead Duke's daughter? And she permitted herself to face fully the significance of this other child growing within her, to se
e her own motives in permitting the conception. She knew what it was--she had succumbed to that profound drive shared by all creatures who are faced with death--the drive to seek immortality through progeny. The fertility drive of the species had overpowered them.
Jessica glanced at Stilgar, saw that he was studying her, waiting. A daughter born here to a woman wed to such a one as this man--what would be the fate of such a daughter? she asked herself. Would he try to limit the necessities that a Bene Gesserit must follow?
Stilgar cleared his throat and revealed then that he understood some of the questions in her mind. "What is important for a leader is that which makes him a leader. It is the needs of his people. If you teach me your powers, there may come a day when one of us must challenge the other. I would prefer some alternative."
"There are several alternatives?" she asked.
"The Sayyadina," he said. "Our Reverend Mother is old."
Their Reverend Mother!
Before she could probe this, he said: "I do not necessarily offer myself as mate. This is nothing personal, for you are beautiful and desirable. But should you become one of my women, that might lead some of my young men to believe that I'm too much concerned with pleasures of the flesh and not enough concerned with the tribe's needs. Even now they listen to us and watch us."
A man who weighs his decisions, who thinks of consequences, she thought.
"There are those among my young men who have reached the age of wild spirits," he said. "They must be eased through this period. I must leave no great reasons around for them to challenge me. Because I would have to maim and kill among them. This is not the proper course for a leader if it can be avoided with honor. A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob."
His words, the depth of their awareness, the fact that he spoke as much to her as to those who secretly listened, forced her to reevaluate him.
He has stature, she thought. Where did he learn such inner balance?
"The law that demands our form of choosing a leader is a just law," Stilgar said. "But it does not follow that justice is always the thing a people needs. What we truly need now is time to grow and prosper, to spread our force over more land."
