Her voice rising in impudent arrogance, Sheeana said: “I will ask Shaitan to let us ride him!” She scrambled up the slipface of the dune beside the worm.
Immediately, the great mouth lifted to follow her movements. “Stay there!” Sheeana shouted. The worm stopped.
“Mother, come with me,” Sheeana called.
Thrusting Waff ahead of her, Odrade obeyed. They scrambled up the sandy slope behind Sheeana. Dislodged sand spilled down beside the waiting worm, piling up in the defile. Ahead of them, the worm’s tapering tail curved along the dune crest. Sheeana led them at a sand-clotted trot to the very tip of the thing. There, she gripped the leading edge of a ring in the corrugated surface and scrambled up onto her desert beast.
More slowly, Odrade and Waff followed. The worm’s warm surface felt non-organic to Odrade, as though it were some Ixian artifact.
Sheeana skipped forward along the back and squatted just behind its mouth where the rings bulged thick and wide.
“Like this,” Sheeana said. She leaned forward and clutched beneath the leading edge of a ring, lifting it slightly to expose pink softness underneath.
Waff obeyed her immediately but Odrade moved with more caution, storing impressions. The ring surface was as hard as plascrete and covered with tiny encrustations. Odrade’s fingers probed the softness under the leading edge. It pulsed faintly. The surface around them lifted and fell with an almost imperceptible rhythm. Odrade heard a tiny rasping with each movement.
Sheeana kicked the worm surface behind her.
“Shaitan, go!” she said.
The worm did not respond.
“Please, Shaitan,” Sheeana pleaded.
Odrade heard the desperation in Sheeana’s voice. The child was so confident of her Shaitan but Odrade knew that the girl had been allowed to ride only that first time. Odrade had the full story from death-wish to priestly confusion but none of it told her what would happen next.
Abruptly, the worm lurched into motion. It lifted sharply, twisted to the left and made a tight curve out of the rocky defile, then moved directly away from Dar-es-Balat into the open desert.
“We go with God!” Waff shouted.
The sound of his voice shocked Odrade. Such wildness! She sensed the power in his faith. The thwock-thwock of following ornithopters came from overhead. The wind of their passage whipped past Odrade full of ozone and the hot furnace odors stirred up by the friction of the rushing behemoth.
Odrade glanced over her shoulders at the ’thopters, thinking how easy it would be for enemies to rid this planet of a troublesome child, an equally troublesome Reverend Mother and a despised Tleilaxu—all in one violently vulnerable moment on the open desert. The priestly cabal might attempt it, she knew, hoping that Odrade’s own watchers up there would be too late to prevent it.
Would curiosity and fear hold them back?
Odrade admitted to a mighty curiosity herself.
Certainly, it was not headed toward Keen. She lifted her head and peered past Sheeana. On the horizon directly ahead lay that telltale indentation of fallen stones, that place where the Tyrant had been spilled from the surface of his faery bridge.
The place of Other Memory warning.
Abrupt revelation locked Odrade’s mind. She understood the warning. The Tyrant had died at a place of his own choosing. Many deaths had left their imprint on that place but his the greatest. The Tyrant chose his peregrination route with purpose. Sheeana had not told her worm to go there. It moved that way of its own volition. The magnet of the Tyrant’s endless dream drew it back to the place where the dream began.
There was this drylander who was asked which was more important, a literjon of water or a vast pool of water? The drylander thought a moment and then said: “The literjon is more important. No single person could own a great pool of water. But a literjon you could hide under your cloak and run away with it. No one would know.”
—THE JOKES OF ANCIENT DUNE, BENE GESSERIT ARCHIVES
It was a long session in the no-globe’s practice hall, Duncan in a mobile cage driving the exercise, adamant that this particular training series would continue until his new body had adapted to the seven central attitudes of combat response against attack from eight directions. His green singlesuit was dark with perspiration. Twenty days they had been at this one lesson!
Teg knew the ancient lore that Duncan revived here but knew it by different names and sequencing. Before they had been into it five days, Teg doubted the superiority of modern methods. Now, he was convinced that Duncan did something completely new—mixing the old with what he had learned in the Keep.
