Dune полностью

Still the tigers remained visible to the running twins. The animals flowed with power, a rippling sense of golden sureness in every movement.

Leto felt that he had stumbled into this place to free himself from his soul. He ran with the sure knowledge that he and Ghanima could reach their narrow notch in time, but his gaze kept returning with fascination to the oncoming beasts.

One stumble and we’re lost, he thought.

That thought reduced the sureness of his knowledge, and he ran faster.

You Bene Gesserit call your activity of the Panoplia Prophetica a “Science of Religion.” Very well. I, a seeker after another kind of scientist, find this an appropriate definition. You do, indeed, build your own myths, but so do all societies. You I must warn, however. You are behaving as so many other misguided scientists have behaved. Your actions reveal that you wish to take something out of [away from] life. It is time you were reminded of that which you so often profess: One cannot have a single thing without its opposite.

—THE PREACHER AT ARRAKEEN:

A MESSAGE TO THE SISTERHOOD

In the hour before dawn, Jessica sat immobile on a worn rug of spice-cloth. Around her were the bare rocks of an old and poor sietch, one of the original settlements. It lay below the rim of Red Chasm, sheltered from the westerlies of the desert. Al-Fali and his brothers had brought her here; now they awaited word from Stilgar. The Fedaykin had moved cautiously in the matter of communication, however. Stilgar was not to know their location.

The Fedaykin already knew they were under a procès-verbal, an official report of crimes against the Imperium. Alia was taking the tack that her mother had been suborned by enemies of the realm, although the Sisterhood had not yet been named. The high-handed, tyrannical nature of Alia’s power was out in the open, however, and her belief that because she controlled the Priesthood she controlled the Fremen was about to be tested.

Jessica’s message to Stilgar had been direct and simple: “My daughter is possessed and must be put to the trial.”

Fears destroyed values, though, and it already was known that some Fremen would prefer not to believe this accusation. Their attempts to use the accusation as a passport had brought on two battles during the night, but the ornithopters al-Fali’s people had stolen had brought the fugitives to this precarious safety: Red Chasm Sietch. Word was going out to the Fedaykin from here, but fewer than two hundred of them remained on Arrakis. The others held posts throughout the Empire.

Reflecting upon these facts, Jessica wondered if she had come to the place of her death. Some of the Fedaykin believed it, but the death commandos accepted this easily enough. Al-Fali had merely grinned at her when some of his young men voiced their fears.

“When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature’s wants to direct him to that place,” the old Naib had said.

The patched curtains at her doorway rustled; al-Fali entered. The old man’s narrow, windburned face appeared drawn, his eyes feverish. Obviously he had not rested.

“Someone comes,” he said.

“From Stilgar?”

“Perhaps.” He lowered his eyes, glanced leftward in the manner of the old Fremen who brought bad news.

“What is it?” Jessica demanded.

“We have word from Tabr that your grandchildren are not there.” He spoke without looking at her.

“Alia . . .”

“She has ordered that the twins be given over to her custody, but Sietch Tabr reports that the children are not there. That is all we know.”

“Stilgar’s sent them into the desert,” Jessica said.

“Possibly, but it is known that he was searching for them all through the night. Perhaps it was a trick on his part. . . .”

“That’s not Stilgar’s way,” she said, and thought: Unless the twins put him up to it. But that didn’t feel right either. She wondered at herself: no sensations of panic to suppress, and her fears for the twins were tempered by what Ghanima had revealed. She peered up at al-Fali, found him studying her with pity in his eyes. She said: “They’ve gone into the desert by themselves.”

“Alone? Those two children!”

She did not bother to explain that “those two children” probably knew more about desert survival than most living Fremen. Her thoughts were fixed, instead, on Leto’s odd behavior when he’d insisted that she allow herself to be abducted. She’d put the memory aside, but this moment demanded it. He’d said she would know the moment to obey him.

“The messenger should be in the sietch by now,” al-Fali said. “I will bring him to you.” He let himself out through the patched curtain.