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her ambitions and you could advance another of them."
Her voice mild, Chani said: "Haven't I always said as much?"
"Yes, of course you have." He stared at her. "Then what are you really
trying to say to me?"
She lay down beside him, placed her hand against his neck. "They have come
to a decision on how to fight you," she said. "Irulan reeks of secret
decisions."
Paul stroked her hair.
Chani had peeled away the dross.
Terrible purpose brushed him. It was a coriolis wind in his soul. It
whistled through the framework of his being. His body knew things then never
learned in consciousness.
"Chani, beloved," he whispered, "do you know what I'd spend to end the Jihad
-- to separate myself from the damnable godhead the Qizarate forces onto me?"
She trembled. "You have but to command it," she said.
"Oh, no. Even if I died now, my name would still lead them. When I think of
the Atreides name tied to this religious butchery . . . "
"But you're the Emperor! You've --"
"I'm a figurehead. When godhead's given, that's the one thing the so-called
god no longer controls." A bitter laugh shook him. He sensed the future looking
back at him out of dynasties not even dreamed. He felt his being cast out,
crying, unchained from the rings of fate -- only his name continued. "I was
chosen," he said. "Perhaps at birth . . . certainly before I had much say in it.
I was chosen."
"Then un-choose," she said.
His arm tightened around her shoulder. "In time, beloved. Give me yet a
little time."
Unshed tears burned his eyes.
"We should return to Sietch Tabr," Chani said. "There's too much to contend
with in this tent of stone."
He nodded, his chin moving against the smooth fabric of the scarf which
covered her hair. The soothing spice smell of her filled his nostrils.
Sietch. The ancient Chakobsa word absorbed him: a place of retreat and
safety in a time of peril. Chani's suggestion made him long for vistas of open
sand, for clean distances where one could see an enemy coming from a long way
off.
"The tribes expect Muad'dib to return to them," she said. She lifted her
head to look at him. "You belong to us."
"I belong to a vision," he whispered.
He thought then of the Jihad, of the gene mingling across parsecs and the
vision which told him how he might end it. Should he pay the price? All the
hatefulness would evaporate, dying as fires die -- ember by ember. But . . . oh!
The terrifying price!
I never wanted to be a god, he thought. I wanted only to disappear like a
jewel of trace dew caught by the morning. I wanted to escape the angels and the
damned -- alone . . . as though by an oversight.
"Will we go back to the Sietch?" Chani pressed.
"Yes," he whispered. And he thought: I must pay the price.
Chani heaved a deep sigh, settled back against him.
I've loitered, he thought. And he saw how he'd been hemmed in by boundaries
of love and the Jihad. And what was one life, no matter how beloved, against all
the lives the Jihad was certain to take? Could single misery be weighed against
the agony of multitudes?
"Love?" Chani said, questioning.
He put a hand against her lips.
I'll yield up myself, he thought. I'll rush out while I yet have the
strength, fly through a space a bird might not find. It was a useless thought,
and he knew it. The Jihad would follow his ghost.
What could he answer? he wondered. How explain when people taxed him with
brutal foolishness? Who might understand?
I wanted only to look back and say: "There! There's an existence which
couldn't hold me. See! I vanish! No restraint or net of human devising can trap
me ever again. I renounce my religion! This glorious instant is mine! I'm free!"
What empty words!
"A big worm was seen below the Shield Wall yesterday," Chani said. "More
than a hundred meters long, they say. Such big ones come rarely into this region
any more. The water repels them, I suppose. They say this one came to summon
Muad'dib home to his desert." She pinched his chest. "Don't laugh at me!"
"I'm not laughing."
Paul, caught by wonder at the persistent Fremen mythos, felt a heart
constriction, a thing inflicted upon his lifeline: adab, the demanding memory.
He recalled his childhood room on Caladan then . . . dark night in the stone
chamber . . . a vision! It'd been one of his earliest prescient moments. He felt
his mind dive into the vision, saw through a veiled cloud-memory (vision-within-
vision) a line of Fremen, their robes trimmed with dust. They paraded past a gap
in tall rocks. They carried a long, cloth-wrapped burden.
And Paul heard himself say in the vision: "It was mostly sweet . . . but you
were the sweetest of all . . . "
Adab released him.
"You're so quiet," Chani whispered. "What is it?"
Paul shuddered, sat up, face averted. "You're angry because I've been to the
desert's edge," Chani said.
He shook his head without speaking.
"I only went because I want a child," Chani said.
Paul was unable to speak. He felt himself consumed by the raw power of that
early vision. Terrible purpose! In that moment, his whole life was a limb shaken
by the departure of a bird . . . and the bird was chance. Free will.
I succumbed to the lure of the oracle, he thought.
And he sensed that succumbing to this lure might be to fix himself upon a
single-track life. Could it be, he wondered, that the oracle didn't tell the
future? Could it be that the oracle made the future? Had he exposed his life to
some web of underlying threads, trapped himself there in that long-ago
awakening, victim of a spider-future which even now advanced upon him with
terrifying jaws. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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