Abruptly, he closed the draperies, sealed the ventilators. He turned toward Chani in the darkness, felt her waiting there. Her water rings tinkled like the almsbells of pilgrims. He groped his way to the sound, encountered her outstretched arms.
“Beloved,” she whispered. “Have I troubled you?”
Her arms enclosed his future as they enclosed him.
“Not you,” he said. “Oh … not you.”
The advent of the Field Process shield and the lasgun with their explosive interaction, deadly to attacker and attacked, placed the current determinatives on weapons technology. We need not go into the special role of atomics. The fact that any Family in my Empire could so deploy its atomics as to destroy the planetary bases of fifty or more other Families causes some nervousness, true. But all of us possess precautionary plans for devastating retaliation. Guild and Landsraad contain the keys which hold this force in check. No, my concern goes to the development of humans as special weapons. Here is a virtually unlimited field which a few powers are developing.
—MUAD’DIB: LECTURE TO THE WAR COLLEGE FROM THE STILGAR CHRONICLE
The old man stood in his doorway peering out with blue-in-blue eyes. The eyes were veiled by that native suspicion all desert folk held for strangers. Bitter lines tortured the edges of his mouth where it could be seen through a fringe of white beard. He wore no stillsuit and it said much that he ignored this fact in the full knowledge of the moisture pouring from his house through the open door.
Scytale bowed, gave the greeting signal of the conspiracy.
From somewhere behind the old man came the sound of a rebec wailing through the atonal dissonance of
semuta
music. The old man’s manner carried no drug dullness, an indication that semuta was the weakness of another. It seemed strange to Scytale, though, to find that sophisticated vice in this place.
“Greetings from afar,” Scytale said, smiling through the flat-featured face he had chosen for this encounter. It occurred to him, then, that this old man might recognize the chosen face. Some of the older Fremen here on Dune had known Duncan Idaho.
The choice of features, which he had thought amusing, might have been a mistake, Scytale decided. But he dared not change the face out here. He cast nervous glances up and down the street. Would the old man never invite him inside?
“Did you know my son?” the old man asked.
That, at least, was one of the countersigns. Scytale made the proper response, all the time keeping his eyes alert for any suspicious circumstance in his surroundings. He did not like his position here. The street was a cul-de-sac ending in this house. The houses all around had been built for veterans of the Jihad. They formed a suburb of Arrakeen which stretched into the Imperial Basin past Tiemag. The walls which hemmed in this street presented blank faces of dun plasmeld broken by dark shadows of sealed doorways and, here and there, scrawled obscenities. Beside this very door someone had chalked a pronouncement that one Beris had brought back to Arrakis a loathsome disease which deprived him of his manhood.
“Do you come in partnership?” the old man asked.
“Alone,” Scytale said.
The old man cleared his throat, still hesitating in that maddening way.
Scytale cautioned himself to patience. Contact in this fashion carried its own dangers. Perhaps the old man knew some reason for carrying on this way. It was the proper hour, though. The pale sun stood almost directly overhead. People of this quarter remained sealed in their houses to sleep through the hot part of the day.
Was it the new neighbor who bothered the old man? Scytale wondered. The adjoining house, he knew, had been assigned to Otheym, once a member of Muad’dib’s dreaded Fedaykin death commandos. And Bijaz, the catalyst-dwarf, waited with Otheym.
Scytale returned his gaze to the old man, noted the empty sleeve dangling from the left shoulder and the lack of a stillsuit. An air of command hung about this old man. He’d been no foot slogger in the Jihad.
“May I know the visitor’s name?” the old man asked.
Scytale suppressed a sigh of relief. He was to be accepted, after all. “I am Zaal,” he said, giving the name assigned him for this mission.
“I am Farok,” the old man said, “once Bashar of the Ninth Legion in the Jihad. Does this mean anything to you?”
Scytale read menace in the words, said: “You were born in Sietch Tabr with allegiance to Stilgar.”
Farok relaxed, stepped aside. “You are welcome in my house.”
Scytale slipped past him into a shadowy atrium—blue tile floor, glittering designs worked in crystal on the walls. Beyond the atrium was a covered courtyard. Light admitted by translucent filters spread an opalescence as silvery as the white-night of First Moon. The street door grated into its moisture seals behind him.
“We were a noble people,” Farok said, leading the way toward the courtyard. “We were not of the cast-out. We lived in no
graben
village … such as this! We had a proper sietch in the Shield Wall above Habbanya Ridge. One worm could carry us into Kedem, the inner desert.”
“Not like this,” Scytale agreed, realizing now what had brought Farok into the conspiracy. The Fremen longed for the old days and the old ways.
They entered the courtyard.
Farok struggled with an intense dislike for his visitor, Scytale realized. Fremen distrusted eyes that were not the total blue of the Ibad. Offworlders, Fremen said, had unfocused eyes which saw things they were not supposed to see.
The semuta music had stopped at their entrance. It was replaced now by the strum of a baliset, first a nine-scale chord, then the clear notes of a song which was popular on the Naraj worlds.
As his eyes adjusted to the light, Scytale saw a youth sitting cross-legged on a low divan beneath arches to his right. The youth’s eyes were empty sockets. With that uncanny facility of the blind, he began singing the moment Scytale focused on him. The voice was high and sweet:
A wind has blown the land away
And blown the sky away
And all the men!
Who is this wind?
The trees stand unbent,
Drinking where men drank.
I’ve known too many worlds,
Too many men,
Too many trees,
Too many winds.
Those were not the original words of the song, Scytale noted. Farok led him away from the youth and under the arches on the opposite side, indicated cushions scattered over the tile floor. The tile was worked into designs of sea creatures.
“There is a cushion once occupied in sietch by Muad’dib,” Farok said, indicating a round, black mound: “It is yours now.”
“I am in your debt,” Scytale said, sinking to the black mound. He smiled. Farok displayed wisdom. A sage spoke of loyalty even while listening to songs of hidden meaning and words with secret messages. Who could deny the terrifying powers of the tyrant Emperor?
Inserting his words across the song without breaking the meter, Farok said: “Does my son’s music disturb you?”
Scytale gestured to a cushion facing him, put his back against a cool pillar. “I enjoy music.”
“My son lost his eyes in the conquest of Naraj,” Farok said. “He was nursed there and should have stayed. No woman of the People will have him thus. I find it curious, though, to know I have grandchildren on Naraj that I may never see. Do you know the Naraj worlds, Zaal?”
“In my youth, I toured there with a troupe of my fellow Face Dancers,” Scytale said.
“You are a Face Dancer, then,” Farok said. “I had wondered at your features. They reminded me of a man I knew here once.”
“Duncan Idaho?”
“That one, yes. A swordmaster in the Emperor’s pay.”
“He was killed, so it is said.”
“So it is said,” Farok agreed. “Are you truly a man, then? I’ve heard stories about Face Dancers that …” He shrugged.
“We are Jadacha hermaphrodites,” Scytale said, “either sex at will. For the present, I am a man.”
Farok pursed his lips in thought, then: “May I call for refreshments? Do you desire water? Iced fruit?”
“Talk will suffice,” Scytale said.
“The guest’s wish is a command,” Farok said, settling to the cushion which faced Scytale.
“Blessed is Abu d’ Dhur, Father of the Indefinite Roads of Time,” Scytale said. And he thought:
There! I’ve told him straight out that I come from a Guild Steersman and wear the Steersman’s concealment.
“Thrice blessed,” Farok said, folding his hands into his lap in the ritual clasp. They were old, heavily veined hands.
“An object seen from a distance betrays only its principle,” Scytale said, revealing that he wished to discuss the Emperor’s fortress Keep.
“That which is dark and evil may be seen for evil at any distance,” Farok said, advising delay.
Why?
Scytale wondered. But he said: “How did your son lose his eyes?”
“The Naraj defenders used a stone burner,” Farok said. “My son was too close. Cursed atomics! Even the stone burner should be outlawed.”
“It skirts the intent of the law,” Scytale agreed. And he thought:
A stone burner on Naraj! We weren’t told of that. Why does this old man speak of stone burners here?
“I offered to buy Tleilaxu eyes for him from your masters,” Farok said. “But there’s a story in the legions that Tleilaxu eyes enslave their users. My son told me that such eyes are metal and he is flesh, that such a union must be sinful.”
“The principle of an object must fit its original intent,” Scytale said, trying to turn the conversation back to the information he sought.
Farok’s lips went thin, but he nodded. “Speak openly of what you wish,” he said. “We must put our trust in your Steersman.”
“Have you ever entered the Imperial Keep?” Scytale asked.
“I was there for the feast celebrating the Molitor victory. It was cold in all that stone despite the best Ixian space heaters. We slept on the terrace of Alia’s Fane the night before. He has trees in there, you know—trees from many worlds. We Bashars were dressed in our finest green robes and had our tables set apart. We ate and drank too much. I was disgusted with some of the things I saw. The walking wounded came, dragging themselves along on their crutches. I do not think our Muad’dib knows how many men he has maimed.”
“You objected to the feast?” Scytale asked, speaking from a knowledge of the Fremen orgies which were ignited by spice-beer.
“It was not like the mingling of our souls in the sietch,” Farok said. “There was no tau. For entertainment, the troups had slave girls, and the men shared the stories of their battles and their wounds.”
“So you were inside that great pile of stone,” Scytale said.
“Muad’dib came out to us on the terrace,” Farok said. “ ‘Good fortune to us all,’ he said. The greeting drill of the desert in that place!”
“Do you know the location of his private apartments?” Scytale asked.
“Deep inside,” Farok said. “Somewhere deep inside. I am told he and Chani live a nomadic life and that all within the walls of their Keep. Out to the Great Hall he comes for the public audiences. He has reception halls and formal meeting places, a whole wing for his personal guard, places for the ceremonies and an inner section for communications. There is a room far beneath his fortress, I am told, where he keeps a stunted worm surrounded by a water moat with which to poison it. Here is where he reads the future.”
Myth all tangled up with facts,
Scytale thought.
“The apparatus of government accompanies him everywhere,” Farok grumbled. “Clerks and attendants and attendants for the attendants. He trusts only the ones such as Stilgar who were very close to him in the old days.”
“Not you,” Scytale said.
“I think he has forgotten my existence,” Farok said.
“How does he come and go when he leaves that building?” Scytale asked.
“He has a tiny ’thopter landing which juts from an inner wall,” Farok said. “I am told Muad’dib will not permit another to handle the controls for a landing there. It requires an approach, so it is said, where the slightest miscalculation would plunge him down a sheer cliff of wall into one of his accursed gardens.”
Scytale nodded. This, most likely, was true. Such an aerial entry to the Emperor’s quarters would carry a certain measure of security. The Atreides were superb pilots all.
“He uses men to carry his
distrans
messages,” Farok said. “It demeans men to implant wave translators in them. A man’s voice should be his own to command. It should not carry another man’s message hidden within its sounds.”
Scytale shrugged. All great powers used the distrans in this age. One could never tell what obstacle might be placed between sender and addressee. The distrans defied political cryptology because it relied on subtle distortions of natural sound patterns which could be scrambled with enormous intricacy.