Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [204]
He had to become the real Paul Atreides again.
The melange storage chamber was not heavily guarded. Since axlotl tanks now produced more than enough spice, the substance was no longer so rare as to warrant drastic protective measures. The spice was kept in metal cabinets protected only by simple locking mechanisms.
Always wary, like a true Fremen, Chani checked the doorway behind them to make sure no one had been alerted to their presence. Her gaze was intense and concerned, but she harbored no doubts about Paul.
The seals delayed him only for a few seconds. When he swung aside the metal door of the locker, a rich smell swept across him, redolent with the lure of potential memories. In preparation for their later obligations, all the ghola children received melange in carefully measured doses in their food. They were familiar with the flavor, but never consumed enough to experience any of the effects. Paul was well aware of how dangerous it could be. And how powerful.
Touching the neatly stacked spice, Paul knew it was all chemically identical, regardless of the manufacturing processes. Still, he searched among the wafers and selected several specific ones. He didn’t know why, but in his heart he could feel it was right.
“Why those, Usul? Are the others poisoned?”
Then he understood. “Most of this spice came from axlotl tanks. But not these—” He showed her his chosen wafers, though they all looked the same. “This spice was made by worms. Sheeana harvested it from the sands in the hold. The closest thing to spice from Rakis itself.” He took out several wafers of the compressed spice, much more than he had ever before consumed.
Chani’s eyes grew wide. “Usul, that is too much!”
“It is what I need.” He touched her cheeks. “Chani, spice is the key. I am Paul Atreides. Melange opened me to my potential before. Melange made me into what I became. I’m going to explode inside unless I find a way to unlock myself.” He closed the storage cabinet again. “I am the oldest of the ghola children. This could be the answer for all of us.”
When Chani set her jaw, the muscles in her lean, elfin face stood out. “As you say, Usul. Let us hurry.”
They ran through the no-ship corridors, using private passages where few surveillance imagers would be, and opened one of the thousands of empty, unused cabins. They slipped inside together. What would the Sisterhood’s watchers think of that?
“I should lie down before I start.” He sat on the narrow bed. She brought him water from the wall dispenser, and he drank gratefully. “Watch over me, Chani.”
“I will, Usul.”
He sniffed the wafers of spice, merely guessing but pretending that he knew how much he had to consume. The smell was maddening, mouthwatering, terrifying.
“Be careful, my beloved.” Chani kissed him on the cheek, then hesitantly on the lips, and stood back.
He ate the entire wafer, swallowing the burning melange before he could lose his nerve, then grabbed some more and ate it as well. Finally, feeling as if he had stepped off a cliff, he lay back and closed his eyes. A tingling numbness was already creeping in from his extremities. His body began breaking down the chemicals inside him, and he could feel the liberated energy surging through once-familiar pathways in this Atreides body.
And he fell into a pit of Time.
As everything grew dark and he dropped deeper into a trance, lost and searching for the road within him, Paul beheld flashes, familiar faces: his father Duke Leto, Gurney Halleck, and the icily beautiful Princess Irulan. At this level, his thoughts were unfocused. He couldn’t tell if these were real flickers of memory or just stored data points boiling to the surface from accounts he had read in the Archives. He heard his mother, Jessica, reading words to him, the verse of a ribald song Gurney sang as he played his baliset, Irulan’s unsuccessful attempts at seduction. But that was