His mother was beside him, holding his hands, her face a gray blob peering at him. "Paul, what's wrong?"
"You!" he said.
"I'm here, Paul," she said. "It's all right."
"What have you done to me?" he demanded.
In a burst of clarity, she sensed some of the roots in the question, said:
"I gave birth to you."
It was, from instinct as much as her own subtle knowledge, the precisely correct answer to calm him. He felt her hands holding him, focused on the dim outline of her face. (Certain gene traces in her facial structure were noted in the new way by his onflowing mind, the clues added to other data, and a final-summation answer put forward.)
"Let go of me," he said.
She heard the iron in his voice, obeyed. "Do you want to tell me what's wrong, Paul?"
"Did you know what you were doing when you trained me?" he asked.
There's no more childhood in his voice, she thought. And she said: "I hoped the thing any parent hopes--that you'd be . . . superior, different."
"Different?"
She heard the bitterness in his tone, said: "Paul, I--"
"You didn't want a son!" he said. "You wanted a Kwisatz Haderach! You wanted a male Bene Gesserit!"
She recoiled from his bitterness. "But Paul . . ."
"Did you ever consult my father in this?"
She spoke gently out of the freshness of her grief: "Whatever you are, Paul, the heredity is as much your father as me."
"But not the training," he said. "Not the things that . . . awakened . . .
the sleeper."
"Sleeper?"
"It's here." He put a hand to his head and then to his breast. "In me. It goes on and on and on and on and--"
"Paul!"
She had heard the hysteria edging his voice.
"Listen to me," he said. "You wanted the Reverend Mother to hear about my dreams: You listen in her place now. I've just had a waking dream. Do you know why?"
"You must calm yourself," she said. "If there's--"
"The spice," he said, "It's in everything here--the air, the soil, the food.
The geriatric spice. It's like the Truthsayer drug. It's a poison!"
She stiffened.
His voice lowered and he repeated: "A poison--so subtle, so insidious . . .
so irreversible. It won't even kill you unless you stop taking it. We can't leave Arrakis unless we take part of Arrakis with us."
The terrifying presence of his voice brooked no dispute.
"You and the spice," Paul said. "The spice changes anyone who gets this much of it, but thanks to you, I could bring the change to consciousness. I don't get to leave it in the unconscious where its disturbance can be blanked out. I can see it."
"Paul, you--"
"I see it!" he repeated.
She heard madness in his voice, didn't know what to do.
But he spoke again, and she heard the iron control return to him: "We're trapped here."
We're trapped here, she agreed.
And she accepted the truth of his words. No pressure of the Bene Gesserit, no trickery or artifice could pry them completely free from Arrakis: the spice was addictive. Her body had known the fact long before her mind awakened to it.
So here we live out our lives, she thought, on this hell-planet. The place is prepared for us, if we can evade the Harkonnens. And there's no doubt of my course: a broodmare preserving an important bloodline for the Bene Gesserit Plan.
"I must tell you about my waking dream," Paul said. (Now there was fury in his voice.) "To be sure you accept what I say, I'll tell you first I know you'll bear a daughter, my sister, here on Arrakis."
