"It's more than I'll do . . . can do."
"Don't you mourn him?"
"In the time of mourning, I'll mourn him."
They passed an arched opening. Paul looked through it at men and women working with stand-mounted machinery in a large, bright chamber. There seemed an extra tempo of urgency to them.
"What're they doing in there?" Paul asked.
She glanced back as they passed beyond the arch, said: "They hurry to finish the quota in the plastics shop before we flee. We need many dew collectors for the planting."
"Flee?"
"Until the butchers stop hunting us or are driven from our land."
Paul caught himself in a stumble, sensing an arrested instant of time, remembering a fragment, a visual projection of prescience--but it was displaced, like a montage in motion. The bits of his prescient memory were not quite as he remembered them.
"The Sardaukar hunt us," he said.
"They'll not find much excepting an empty sietch or two," she said. "And they'll find their share of death in the sand."
"They'll find this place?" he asked.
"Likely."
"Yet we take the time to . . . " He motioned with his head toward the arch now far behind them. " . . . make . . . dew collectors?"
"The planting goes on."
"What're dew collectors?" he asked.
The glance she turned on him was full of surprise. "Don't they teach you anything in the . . . wherever it is you come from?"
"Not about dew collectors."
"Hai!" she said, and there was a whole conversation in the one word.
"Well, what are they?"
"Each bush, each weed you see out there in the erg," she said, "how do you suppose it lives when we leave it? Each is planted most tenderly in its own little pit. The pits are filled with smooth ovals of chromoplastic. Light turns them white. You can see them glistening in the dawn if you look down from a high place. White reflects. But when Old Father Sun departs, the chromoplastic reverts to transparency in the dark. It cools with extreme rapidity. The surface condenses moisture out of the air. That moisture trickles down to keep our plants alive."
"Dew collectors," he muttered, enchanted by the simple beauty of such a scheme.
"I'll mourn Jamis in the proper time for it," she said, as though her mind had not left his other question. "He was a good man, Jamis, but quick to anger.
A good provider, Jamis, and a wonder with the children. He made no separation between Geoff's boy, my firstborn, and his own true son. They were equal in his eyes." She turned a questing stare on Paul. "Would it be that way with you, Usul?"
"We don't have that problem."
"But if--"
"Harah!"
She recoiled at the harsh edge in his voice.
They passed another brightly lighted room visible through an arch on their left. "What's made there?" he asked.
"They repair the weaving machinery," she said. "But it must be dismantled by tonight." She gestured at a tunnel branching to their left. "Through there and beyond, that's food processing and stillsuit maintenance." She looked at Paul.
"Your suit looks new. But if it needs work, I'm good with suits. I work in the factory in season."
They began coming on knots of people now and thicker clusterings of openings in the tunnel's sides. A file of men and women passed them carrying packs that gurgled heavily, the smell of spice strong about them.
"They'll not get our water," Harah said. "Or our spice. You can be sure of that."
Paul glanced at the openings in the tunnel walls, seeing the heavy carpets on the raised ledge, glimpses of rooms with bright fabrics on the walls, piled cushions. People in the openings fell silent at their approach, followed Paul with untamed stares.
"The people find it strange you bested Jamis," Harah said. "Likely you'll have some proving to do when we're settled in a new sietch."
"I don't like killing," he said.
"Thus Stilgar tells it," she said, but her voice betrayed her disbelief.
A shrill chanting grew louder ahead of them. They came to another side opening wider than any of the others Paul had seen. He slowed his pace, staring in at a room crowded with children sitting cross-legged on a maroon-carpeted floor.
At a chalkboard against the far wall stood a woman in a yellow wraparound, a projecto-stylus in one hand. The board was filled with designs--circles, wedges and curves, snake tracks and squares, flowing arcs split by parallel lines. The woman pointed to the designs one after the other as fast as she could move the stylus, and the children chanted in rhythm with her moving hand.
Paul listened, hearing the voices grow dimmer behind as he moved deeper into the sietch with Harah.
