Jessica placed her hands against the tent floor, pressed back against the curving fabric wall to still a pang of fear. She knew her pregnancy could not show yet. Only her own Bene Gesserit training had allowed her to read the first faint signals of her body, to know of the embryo only a few weeks old.
"Only to serve," Jessica whispered, clinging to the Bene Gesserit motto. "We exist only to serve."
"We'll find a home among the Fremen," Paul said, "where your Missionaria Protectiva has bought us a bolt hole."
They've prepared a way for us in the desert, Jessica told herself. But how can he know of the Missionaria Protectiva? She found it increasingly difficult to subdue her terror at the overpowering strangeness in Paul.
He studied the dark shadow of her, seeing her fear and every reaction with his new awareness as though she were outlined in blinding light. A beginning of compassion for her crept over him.
"The things that can happen here, I cannot begin to tell you," he said. "I cannot even begin to tell myself, although I've seen them. This sense of the future--I seem to have no control over it. The thing just happens. The immediate future--say, a year--I can see some of that . . . a road as broad as our Central Avenue on Caladan. Some places I don't see . . . shadowed places . . . as though it went behind a hill" (and again he thought of the surface of a blowing kerchief) " . . . and there are branchings . . . "
He fell silent as memory of that seeing filled him. No prescient dream, no experience of his life had quite prepared him for the totality with which the veils had been ripped away to reveal naked time.
Recalling the experience, he recognized his own terrible purpose--the pressure of his life spreading outward like an expanding bubble . . . time retreating before it . . .
Jessica found the tent's glowtab control, activated it.
Dim green light drove back the shadows, easing her fear. She looked at Paul's face, his eyes--the inward stare. And she knew where she had seen such a look before: pictured in records of disasters--on the faces of children who
experienced starvation or terrible injury. The eyes were like pits, mouth a straight line, cheeks indrawn.
It's the look of terrible awareness, she thought, of someone forced to the knowledge of his own mortality.
He was, indeed, no longer a child.
The underlying import of his words began to take over in her mind, pushing all else aside. Paul could see ahead, a way of escape for them.
"There's a way to evade the Harkonnens," she said.
"The Harkonnens!" he sneered. "Put those twisted humans out of your mind."
He stared at his mother, studying the lines of her face in the light of the glowtab. The lines betrayed her.
She said: "You shouldn't refer to people as humans without--"
"Don't be so sure you know where to draw the line," he said. "We carry our past with us. And, mother mine, there's a thing you don't know and should--we are Harkonnens."
Her mind did a terrifying thing: it blanked out as though it needed to shut off all sensation. But Paul's voice went on at that implacable pace, dragging her with it.
"When next you find a mirror, study your face--study mine now. The traces are there if you don't blind yourself. Look at my hands, the set of my bones.
And if none of this convinces you, then take my word for it. I've walked the future, I've looked at a record, I've seen a place, I have all the data. We're Harkonnens."
"A . . . renegade branch of the family," she said. "That's it, isn't it?
Some Harkonnen cousin who--"
"You're the Baron's own daughter," he said, and watched the way she pressed her hands to her mouth. "The Baron sampled many pleasures in his youth, and once permitted himself to be seduced. But it was for the genetic purposes of the Bene Gesserit, by one of you."
The way he said 'you' struck her like a slap. But it set her mind to working and she could not deny his words. So many blank ends of meaning in her past reached out now and linked. The daughter the Bene Gesserit wanted--it wasn't to end the old Atreides-Harkonnen feud, but to fix some genetic factor in their lines. What? She groped for an answer.
As though he saw inside her mind, Paul said: "They thought they were reaching for me. But I'm not what they expected, and I've arrived before my time. And they don't know it."
Jessica pressed her hands to her mouth.
Great Mother! He's the Kwisatz Haderach!
She felt exposed and naked before him, realizing then that he saw her with eyes from which little could be hidden. And that, she knew, was the basis of her fear.
"You're thinking I'm the Kwisatz Haderach," he said. "Put that out of your mind. I'm something unexpected."
I must get word out to one of the schools, she thought. The mating index may show what has happened.
"They won't learn about me until it's too late," he said.
She sought to divert him, lowered her hands and said: "We'll find a place among the Fremen?"
"The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-hulud, Old Father Eternity,"
he said. "They say: 'Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.' "
And he thought: Yes, mother mine--among the Fremen. You'll acquire the blue eyes and a callus beside your lovely nose from the filter tube to your stillsuit
. . . and you'll bear my sister: St. Alia of the Knife.
"If you're not the Kwisatz Haderach," Jessica said, "what--"
"You couldn't possibly know," he said. "You won't believe it until you see it."
