Sandworms of Dune - Brian Herbert [172]
—The Bene Gesserit Acolytes’ Handbook
Death.
Paul skirted the edge of the interior blackness, dipped briefly into infinity, and danced back out. He wavered on the balance point of his own mortality. The knife wound was deep.
Without any awareness of what was going on around him, he felt an intense coldness spreading from the tips of his fingers to the back of his head. Like a distant whisper, he could still hear the lava fountain blazing nearby. Despite the hard stone floor beneath him, Paul felt as if he were floating, his spirit drifting in and out of the universe.
His skin detected a warm, syrupy wetness. Not water. Blood . . . his own . . . spreading in a great pool across the floor. It filled his chest, mouth, and lungs. He could hardly breathe. With each feeble heartbeat, more of it spilled out, never to be retrieved. . . .
It seemed as if he could still feel the long blade of the Emperor’s knife inside him. Now he remembered. . . . In the last desperate days of Muad’Dib’s jihad, the conniving Count Fenring had stabbed him. Or had that occurred at a different time? Yes, he had tasted a knife blade before.
Or maybe he was the old blind Preacher in the dusty streets of Arrakeen, stabbed by yet another knife. So many deaths for one person . . .
He couldn’t see. Someone squeezed his hand, though he could barely feel it, and he heard a young woman’s voice. “Usul, I am here.” Chani. He remembered her most of all, and was glad she was here with him. “I am here,” she said. “All of me, with all my memories, beloved. Please come back.”
Now a firmer voice yanked his attention, as if strings were attached to his mind. “Paul, you must listen to me. Remember what I taught you.” His mother’s voice. Jessica . . . “Remember what the real Lady Jessica taught the real Paul Muad’Dib. I know what you are. You have the power within you. That is why you aren’t dead yet.”
He found words within his throat, and they bubbled up through the blood. He was amazed at the sound of his own voice. “Not possible . . . I’m not . . . the Kwisatz Haderach—the ultimate . . .” He was not the superbeing that would change the universe.
Paul’s eyes flickered open, and he saw himself lying in the great machine cathedral. That part of the prescient dream had been true. He had seen Paolo laughing with victory and consuming the spice—but now Paolo himself rested on the floor like a fallen statue, frozen and mindless, gazing into infinity. The Baron lay dead, murdered with a look of disbelief and annoyance on his pasty face. So the vision was true, but all the details had not been available to him.
Some kind of commotion came from beside Omnius and Erasmus, and Paul looked there, his gaze bleary. Watcheyes flitted in, displaying images. The old man stood with an impatient expression on his face. The Face Dancer Khrone seemed unsettled. Paul could hear voices shouting. The whole cacophony wove itself in oddly incomprehensible strands through the buzzing tapestry in his head.
“Sandworms attacking like demons . . . destroying buildings.”
“. . . a rampage . . . armies emerging from the no-ship. A poisonous gas that kills—”
The old man said drily, “I have dispatched combat robots and Face Dancers to fight them, but it may not be sufficient. The sandworms and the humans are causing considerable damage.”
Erasmus picked up the conversation. “Rally more Face Dancers, Khrone. You didn’t send all of them out.”
“That is a waste of my people. If we fight the humans, their poison kills us. If we go out to battle sandworms, we will be crushed.”
“Then you will be poisoned, or crushed,” Erasmus said lightly. “No need to fret. We can always create more of you.”
The Face Dancer’s features shifted and blurred, a storm crossing his putty face. He turned and marched out of the vaulted chamber.
Meanwhile Yueh raised Paul’s head, ministering to him with Suk medical techniques. But Paul folded his eyes shut again and dropped