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"They will rally round profit," Scytale said.
"What of the other power groups?"
"One invokes the name of government," Scytale said. "We will annex the less powerful in the name of morality and progress. Our opposition will die of its own entanglements."
"Alia, too?"
"Hayt is a multi-purpose ghola," Scytale said. "The Emperor's sister is of an age when she can be distracted by a charming male designed for that purpose. She will be attracted by his maleness and by his abilities as a mentat."
Mohiam allowed her old eyes to go wide in surprise. "The ghola's a mentat? That's a dangerous move."
"To be accurate," Irulan said, "a mentat must have accurate data. What if Paul asks him to define the purpose behind our gift?"
"Hayt will tell the truth," Scytale said. "It makes no difference."
"So you leave an escape door open for Paul," Irulan said.
"A mentat!" Mohiam muttered.
Scytale glanced at the old Reverend Mother, seeing the ancient hates which colored her responses. From the days of the Butlerian Jihad when "thinking machines" had been wiped from most of the universe, computers had inspired distrust. Old emotions colored the human computer as well.
"I do not like the way you smile," Mohiam said abruptly, speaking in the truth mode as she glared up at Scytale.
In the same mode, Scytale said: "And I think less of what pleases you. But we must work together. We all see that." He glanced at the Guildsman. "Don't we, Edric?"
"You teach painful lessons," Edric said. "I presume you wished to make it plain that I must not assert myself against the combined judgments of my fellow conspirators."
"You see, he can be taught," Scytale said.
"I see other things as well," Edric growled. "The Atreides holds a monopoly on the spice. Without it I cannot probe the future. The Bene Gesserit lose their truthsense. We have stockpiles, but these are finite. Melange is a powerful coin."
"Our civilization has more than one coin," Scytale said. "Thus, the law of supply and demand fails."
"You think to steal the secret of it," Mohiam wheezed. "And him with a planet guarded by his mad Fremen!"
"The Fremen are civil, educated and ignorant," Scytale said. "They're not mad. They're trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous."
"But will I be left with something to father a royal dynasty?" Irulan asked.
They all heard the commitment in her voice, but only Edric smiled at it.
"Something," Scytale said. "Something."
"It means the end of this Atreides as a ruling force," Edric said.
"I should imagine that others less gifted as oracles have made that prediction," Scytale said. "For them, mektub al mellah, as the Fremen say."
"The thing was written with salt," Irulan translated.
As she spoke, Scytale recognized what the Bene Gesserit had arrayed here for him--a beautiful and intelligent female who could never be his. Ah, well, he thought, perhaps I'll copy her for another.
Every civilization must contend with an unconscious force which can block, betray or countermand almost any conscious intention of the collectivity.
--TLEILAXU THEOREM (UNPROVEN)
Paul sat on the edge of his bed and began stripping off his desert boots. They smelled rancid from the lubricant which eased the action of the heel-powered pumps that drove his stillsuit. It was late. He had prolonged his nighttime walk and caused worry for those who loved him. Admittedly, the walks were dangerous, but it was a kind of danger he could recognize and meet immediately. Something compelling and attractive surrounded walking anonymously at night in the streets of Arrakeen.
He tossed the boots into the corner beneath the room's lone glowglobe, attacked the seal strips of his stillsuit. Gods below, how tired he was! The tiredness stopped at his muscles, though, and left his mind seething. Watching the mundane activities of everyday life filled him with profound envy. Most of that nameless flowing life outside the walls of his Keep couldn't be shared by an Emperor--but ... to walk down a public street without attracting attention: what a privilege! To pass by the clamoring of mendicant pilgrims, to hear a Fremen curse a shopkeeper: "You have damp hands!" ...
Paul smiled at the memory, slipped out of his stillsuit.
He stood naked and oddly attuned to his world. Dune was a world of paradox now--a world under siege, yet the center of power. To come under siege, he decided, was the inevitable fate of power. He stared down at the green carpeting, feeling its rough texture against his soles.
The streets had been ankle deep in sand blown over the Shield Wall on the stratus wind. Foot traffic had churned it into choking dust which clogged stillsuit filters. He could smell the dust even now despite a blower cleaning at the portals of his Keep. It was an odor full of desert memories.
Other days ... other dangers.
Compared to those other days, the peril in his lonely walks remained minor. But, putting on a stillsuit, he put on the desert. The suit with all its apparatus for reclaiming his body's moisture guided his thoughts in subtle ways, fixed his movements in a desert pattern. He became wild Fremen. More than a disguise, the suit made of him a stranger to his city self. In the stillsuit, he abandoned security and put on the old skills of violence. Pilgrims and townfolk passed him then with eyes downcast. They left the wild ones strictly alone out of prudence. If the desert had a face for city folk, it was a Fremen face concealed by a stillsuit's mouth-nose filters.
In truth, there existed now only the small danger that someone from the old sietch days might mark him by his walk, by his odor or by his eyes. Even then, the chances of meeting an enemy remained small.
A swish of door hangings and a wash of light broke his reverie. Chani entered bearing his coffee service on a platinum tray. Two slaved glowglobes followed her, darting to their positions: one at the head of their bed, one hovering beside her to light her work.
Chani moved with an ageless air of fragile power--so self-contained, so vulnerable. Something about the way she bent over the coffee service reminded him then of their first days. Her features remained darkly elfin, seemingly unmarked by their years--unless one examined the outer corners of her whiteless eyes, noting the lines there: "sandtracks," the Fremen of the desert called them.
Steam wafted from the pot as she lifted the lid by its Hagar emerald knob. He could tell the coffee wasn't yet ready by the way she replaced the lid. The pot--fluting silver female shape, pregnant--had come to him as a ghanima, a spoil of battle won when he'd slain the former owner in single combat. Jamis, that'd been the man's name ... Jamis. What an odd immortality death had earned for Jamis. Knowing death to be inevitable, had Jamis carried that particular one in his hand?
Chani put out cups: blue pottery squatting like attendants beneath the immense pot. There were three cups: one for each drinker and one for all the former owners.
"It'll only be a moment," she said.
She looked at him then, and Paul wondered how he appeared in her eyes. Was he yet the exotic offworlder, slim and wiry but water-fat when compared to Fremen? Had he remained the Usul of his tribal name who'd taken her in "Fremen tau" while they'd been fugitives in the desert?
Paul stared down at his own body: hard muscles, slender ... a few more scars, but essentially the same despite twelve years as Emperor. Looking up, he glimpsed his face in a shelf mirror--blue-blue Fremen eyes, mark of spice addiction; a sharp Atreides nose. He looked the proper grandson for an Atreides who'd died in the bull ring creating a spectacle for his people.
Something the old man had said slipped then into Paul's mind: "One who rules assumes irr
evocable responsibility for the ruled. You are a husbandman. This demands, at times, a selfless act of love which may only be amusing to those you rule."
People still remembered that old man with affection.
And what have I done for the Atreides name? Paul asked himself. I've loosed the wolf among the sheep.
For a moment, he contemplated all the death and violence going on in his name.
"Into bed now!" Chani said in a sharp tone of command that Paul knew would've shocked his Imperial subjects.
He obeyed, lay back with his hands behind his head, letting himself be lulled by the pleasant familiarity of Chani's movements.
The room around them struck him suddenly with amusement. It was not at all what the populace must imagine as the Emperor's bedchamber. The yellow light of restless glowglobes moved the shadows in an array of colored glass jars on a shelf behind Chani. Paul named their contents silently--the dry ingredients of the desert pharmacopoeia, unguents, incense, mementos ... a pinch of sand from Sietch Tabr, a lock of hair from their firstborn ... long dead ... twelve years dead ... an innocent bystander killed in the battle that had made Paul Emperor.
The rich odor of spice-coffee filled the room. Paul inhaled, his glance falling on a yellow bowl beside the tray where Chani was preparing the coffee. The bowl held ground nuts. The inevitable poison-snooper mounted beneath the table waved its insect arms over the food. The snooper angered him. They'd never needed snoopers in the desert days!
"Coffee's ready," Chani said. "Are you hungry?"
His angry denial was drowned in the whistling scream of a spice lighter hurling itself spaceward from the field outside Arrakeen.
Chani saw his anger, though, poured their coffee, put a cup near his hand. She sat down on the foot of the bed, exposed his legs, began rubbing them where the muscles were knotted from walking in the stillsuit. Softly, with a casual air which did not deceive him, she said: "Let us discuss Irulan's desire for a child."
Paul's eyes snapped wide open. He studied Chani carefully. "Irulan's been back from Wallach less than two days," he said. "Has she been at you already?"
"We've not discussed her frustrations," Chani said.
Paul forced his mind to mental alertness, examined Chani in the harsh light of observational minutiae, the Bene Gesserit Way his mother had taught him in violation of her vows. It was a thing he didn't like doing with Chani. Part of her hold on him lay in the fact he so seldom needed his tension-building powers with her. Chani mostly avoided indiscreet questions. She maintained a Fremen sense of good manners. Hers were more often practical questions. What interested Chani were facts which bore on the position of her man--his strength in Council, the loyalty of his legions, the abilities and talents of his allies. Her memory held catalogs of names and cross-indexed details. She could rattle off the major weakness of every known enemy, the potential dispositions of opposing forces, battle plans of their military leaders, the tooling and production capacities of basic industries.
