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Despite every attempt at mundane thoughts, she could not drive away the sharklike circling of all those others within her.
She put her hands to her forehead and pressed.
Her temple guards had brought her a prisoner to judge at sunset the previous day: one Essas Paymon, a dark little man ostensibly in the pay of a house minor, the Nebiros, who traded in holy artifacts and small manufactured items for decoration. Actually Paymon was known to be a CHOAM spy whose task was to assess the yearly spice crop. Alia had been on the point of sending him into the dungeons when he'd protested loudly "the injustice of the Atreides." That could have brought him an immediate sentence of death on the hanging tripod, but Alia had been caught by his boldness. She'd spoken sternly from her Throne of Judgment, trying to frighten him into revealing more than he'd already told her inquisitors.
"Why are our spice crops of such interest to the Combine Honnete?" she demanded. "Tell us and we may spare you."
"I only collect something for which there is a market," Paymon said. "I know nothing of what is done with my harvest."
"And for this petty profit you interfere with our royal plans?" Alia demanded.
"Royalty never considers that we might have plans, too," he countered.
Alia, captivated by his desperate audacity, said: "Essas Paymon, will you work for me?"
At this a grin whitened his dark face, and he said: "You were about to obliterate me without a qualm. What is my new value that you should suddenly make a market for it?"
"You've a simple and practical value," she said. "You're bold and you're for hire to the highest bidder. I can bid higher than any other in the Empire."
At which, he named a remarkable sum which he required for his services, but Alia laughed and countered with a figure she considered more reasonable and undoubtedly far more than he'd ever before received. She added: "And, of course, I throw in the gift of your life upon which, I presume, you place an even more inordinate value."
"A bargain!" Paymon cried and, at a signal from Alia, was led away by her priestly Master of Appointments, Ziarenko Javid.
Less than an hour later, as Alia prepared to leave the Judgment Hall, Javid came hurrying to report that Paymon had been overheard to mutter the fateful lines from the Orange Catholic Bible: "Maleficos non patieris vivere."
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," Alia translated. So that was his gratitude! He was one of those who plotted against her very life! In a flush of rage such as she'd never before experienced, she ordered Paymon's immediate execution, sending his body to the Temple deathstill where his water, at least, would be of some value in the priestly coffers.
And all night long Paymon's dark face haunted her.
She tried all of her tricks against this persistent, accusing image, reciting the Bu Ji from the Fremen Book of Kreos: "Nothing occurs! Nothing occurs! " But Paymon took her through a wearing night into this giddy new day, where she could see that his face had joined those in the jeweled reflections from the dew.
A female guard called her to breakfast from the roof door behind a low hedge of mimosa. Alia sighed. She felt small choice between hells: the outcry within her mind or the outcry from her attendants--all were pointless voices, but persistent in their demands, hourglass noises that she would like to silence with the edge of a knife.
Ignoring the guard, Alia stared across the roof garden toward the Shield Wall. A bahada had left its broad outwash like a detrital fan upon the sheltered floor of her domain. The delta of sand spread out before her gaze, outlined by the morning sun. It came to her that an uninitiated eye might see that broad fan as evidence of a river's flow, but it was no more than the place where her brother had shattered the Shield Wall with the Atreides Family atomics, opening a path from the desert for the sandworms which had carried his Fremen troops to shocking victory over his Imperial predecessor, Shaddam IV. Now a broad qanat flowed with water on the Shield Wall's far side to block off sandworm intrusions. Sandworms would not cross open water; it poisoned them.
Would that I had such a barrier within my mind, she thought.
The thought increased her giddy sensation of being separated from reality.
Sandworms! Sandworms!
Her memory presented a collection of sandworm images: mighty Shai-Hulud, the demiurge of the Fremen, deadly beast of the desert's depths whose outpourings included the priceless spice. How odd it was, this sandworm, to grow from a flat and leathery sandtrout, she thought. They were like the flocking multitude within her awareness. The sandtrout, when linked edge to edge against the planet's bedrock, formed living cisterns; they held back the water that their sandworm vector might live. Alia could feel the analogy: some of those others within her mind held back dangerous forces which could destroy her.
Again the guard called her to breakfast, a note of impatience apparent.
Angrily Alia turned, waved a dismissal signal.
The guard obeyed, but the roof door slammed.
At the sound of the slamming door, Alia felt herself caught by everything she had attempted to deny. The other lives welled up within her like a hideous tide. Each demanding life pressed its face against her vision centers--a cloud of faces. Some presented mange-spotted skin, other were callous and full of sooty shadows; there were mouths like moist lozenges. The pressure of the swarm washed over her in a current which demanded that she float free and plunge into them.
"No," she whispered. "No ... no ... no ..."
She would have collapsed onto the path but for a bench beside her which accepted her sagging body. She tried to sit, could not, stretched out on the cold plasteel, still whispering denial.
The tide continued to rise within her.
She felt attuned to the slightest show of attention, aware of the risk, but alert for every exclamation from those guarded mouths which clamored within her. They were a cacophony of demand for her attention: "Me! Me!" "No, me!" And she knew that if she once gave her attention, gave it completely, she would be lost. To behold one face out of the multitude and follow the voice of that face would be to be held by the egocentrism which shared her existence.
"Prescience does this to you," a voice whispered.
She covered her ears with her hands, thinking: I'm not prescient! The trance doesn't work for me!
But the voice persisted: "It might work, if you had help."
"No ... no," she whispered.
Other voices wove around her mind: "I, Agamemnon, your ancestor, demand audience!"
"No ... no." She pressed her hands against her ears until the flesh answered her with pain.
An insane cackle within her head asked: "What has become of Ovid? Simple. He's John Bartlett's ibid!"
The names were meaningless in her extremity. She wanted to scream against them and against all the other voices but could not find her own voice.
Her guard, sent back to the roof by senior attendants, peered once more from the doorway behind the mimosa, saw Alia on the bench, spoke to a companion: "Ahhh, she is resting. You noted that she didn't sleep well last night. It is good for her to take the zaha, the morning siesta."
Alia did not hear her guard. Her awareness was caught by shrieks of singing: "Merry old birds are we, hurrah!" the voices echoed against the inside of her skull and she thought: I'm going insane, I'm losing my mind.
Her feet made feeble fleeing motions against the bench. She felt that if she could only command her body to run, she might escape. She had to escape lest any part of that inner tide sweep her into silence, forever contaminating her soul. But her body would not obey. The mightiest forces in the Imperial universe would obey her slightest whim, but her body would not.
An inner voice chuckled. Then: "From one viewpoint, child, each incident of creation represents a catastrophe." It was a basso voice which rumbled against her eyes, and again that chuckle as though deriding its own pontification. "My dear child, I will help you, but you must help me in return."
Against the swelling background clamor behind t
hat basso voice, Alia spoke through chattering teeth: "Who ... who ..."
A face formed itself upon her awareness. It was a smiling face of such fatness that it could have been a baby's except for the glittering eagerness of the eyes. She tried to pull back, but achieved only a longer view which included the body attached to that face. The body was grossly, immensely fat, clothed in a robe which revealed by subtle bulges beneath it that this fat had required the support of portable suspensors.
"You see," the basso voice rumbled, "it is only your maternal grandfather. You know me. I was the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen."
"You're ... you're dead!" she gasped.
"But, of course, my dear! Most of us within you are dead. But none of the others are really willing to help you. They don't understand you."
"Go away," she pleaded. "Oh, please go away."
"But you need help, granddaughter," the Baron's voice argued.
How remarkable he looks, she thought, watching the projection of the Baron against her closed eyelids.
"I'm willing to help you," the Baron wheedled. "The others in here would only fight to take over your entire consciousness. Any one of them would try to drive you out. But me ... I want only a little corner of my own."
Again the other lives within her lifted their clamor. The tide once more threatened to engulf her and she heard her mother's voice screeching. And Alia thought: She's not dead.
"Shut up!" the Baron commanded.
Alia felt her own desires reinforcing that command, making it felt throughout her awareness.
Inner silence washed through her like a cool bath and she felt her hammering heart begin slowing to its normal pace. Soothingly the Baron's voice intruded: "You see? Together, we're invincible. You help me and I help you."
