Dune:   House Harkonnen

Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

October 2000

To our mutual friend Ed Kramer, without whom this project would never have come to fruition.  He provided the spark that brought us together.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Jan Herbert, with appreciation for her unflagging devotion and constant creative support.

Penny Merritt, for helping manage the literary legacy of her father, Frank Herbert.

Rebecca Moesta Anderson's tireless support and enthusiasm for this project, her ideas, imagination, and sharp eyes truly enhanced this project.

Robert Gottlieb and Matt Bialer of the WilliamMorrisAgency, Mary Alice Kier and Anna Cottle of Cine/Lit Representation -- all of whom never wavered in their faith and dedication, seeing the potential of the entire project.

Irwyn Applebaum and Nita Taublib at Bantam Books gave their support and attention to such an enormous undertaking.

Pat LoBrutto's excitement and dedication to this project -- from the very start -- helped to keep us on track.  He made us consider possibilities and plot threads that made Dune:  House Harkonnen even stronger and more complex.

Picking up the editorial reins, Anne Lesley Groell and Mike Shohl offered excellent advice and suggestions, even at the eleventh hour.

Our U.K. editor, Carolyn Caughey, for continuing to find things that everyone else missed, and for her suggestions on details, large and small.

Anne Gregory, for editorial work on an export edition of Dune:  House Atreides that occurred too late to list her in the credits.

As always, Catherine Sidor at WordFire, Inc., worked tirelessly to transcribe dozens of microcassettes and type many hundreds of pages to keep up with our manic work pace.  Her assistance in all steps of this project has helped to keep us sane, and she even fools other people into thinking we're organized.

Diane E. Jones and Diane Davis Herdt worked hard as test readers and guinea pigs, giving us honest reactions and suggesting additional scenes that helped make this a stronger book.

The Herbert Limited Partnership, including Ron Merritt, David Merritt, Byron Merritt, Julie Herbert, Robert Merritt, Kimberly Herbert, Margaux Herbert, and Theresa Shackelford, all of whom have provided us with their enthusiastic support, entrusting us with the continuation of Frank Herbert's magnificent vision.

Beverly Herbert, for almost four decades of support and devotion to her husband, Frank Herbert.

And, most of all, thanks to Frank Herbert, whose genius created such a wondrous universe for all of us to explore.

Discovery is dangerous . . . but so is life.  A man unwilling to take risk is doomed never to learn, never to grow, never to live.

-PLANETOLOGIST PARDOT KYNES, An Arrakis Primer, written for his son Liet

WHEN THE SANDSTORM came howling up from the south, Pardot Kynes was more interested in taking meteorological readings than in seeking safety.  His son Liet -- only twelve years old, but raised in the harsh ways of the desert -- ran an appraising eye over the ancient weather pod they had found in the abandoned botanical testing station.  He was not confident the machine would function at all.

Then Liet gazed back across the sea of dunes toward the approaching tempest.  "The wind of the demon in the open desert.  Hulasikali Wala."  Almost instinctively, he checked his stillsuit fittings.

"Coriolis storm," Kynes corrected, using a scientific term instead of the Fremen one his son had selected.  "Winds across the open flatlands are amplified by the planet's revolutionary motion.  Gusts can reach speeds up to seven hundred kilometers per hour."

As his father talked, the young man busied himself sealing the egg-shaped weather pod, checking the vent closures, the heavy doorway hatch, the stored emergency supplies.  He ignored their signal generator and distress beacon; the static from the sandstorm would rip any transmissions to electromagnetic shreds.

In pampered societies Liet would have been considered just a boy, but life among the hard-edged Fremen had given him a tightly coiled adulthood that few others achieved even at twice his age.  He was better equipped to handle an emergency than his father.

The elder Kynes scratched his sandy-gray beard.  "A good storm like this can stretch across four degrees of latitude."  He powered up the dim screens of the pod's analytical devices.  "It lifts particles to an altitude of two thousand meters and suspends them in the atmosphere, so that long after the storm passes, dust continues to fall from the sky."

Liet gave the hatch lock a final tug, satisfied that it would hold against the storm.  "The Fremen call that El-Sayal, the 'rain of sand.' "

"One day when you become Planetologist, you'll need to use more technical language," Pardot Kynes said in a professorial tone.  "I still send the Emperor occasional reports, though not as often as I should.  I doubt he ever reads them."  He tapped one of the instruments.  "Ah, I believe the atmospheric front is almost upon us."

Liet removed a porthole cover to see the oncoming wall of white, tan, and static.  "A Planetologist must use his eyes, as well as scientific language.  Just look out the window, Father."

Kynes grinned at his son.  "It's time to raise the pod."  Operating long-dormant controls, he managed to get the dual bank of suspensor engines functioning.  The pod tugged against gravity, heaving itself off the ground.

The mouth of the storm lunged toward them, and Liet closed the cover plate, hoping the ancient meteorological apparatus would hold together.  He trusted his father's intuition to a certain extent, but not his practicality.

The egg-shaped pod rose smoothly on suspensors, buffeted by precursor breezes.  "Ah, there we are," Kynes said.  "Now our work begins --"

The storm hit them like a blunt club, and vaulted them high into the maelstrom.

DAYS EARLIER, on a trip into the deep desert, Pardot Kynes and his son had discovered the familiar markings of a botanical testing station, abandoned thousands of years before.  Fremen had ransacked most of the research outposts, scavenging valuable items, but this isolated station in an armpit of rock had gone undiscovered until Kynes spotted the signs.

He and Liet had cracked open the dust-encrusted hatch to peer inside like ghouls about to enter a crypt.  They were forced to wait in the hot sun for atmospheric exchange to clear out the deadly stale air.  Pardot Kynes paced in the loose sand, holding his breath and poking his head into the darkness, waiting until they could enter and investigate.

These botanical testing stations had been built in the golden age of the old Empire.  Back then, Kynes knew, this desert planet had been nothing special, with no resources of note, no reason to colonize.  When the Zensunni Wanderers had come here after generations of slavery, they'd hoped to build a world where they could be free.

But that had been before the discovery of the spice melange, the precious substance found nowhere else in the universe.  And then everything had changed.

Kynes no longer referred to this world as Arrakis, the name listed in Imperial records, but instead used the Fremen name:  Dune.  Though he was, by nature, Fremen, he remained a servant of the Padishah Emperors.  Elrood IX had assigned him to unravel the mystery of the spice:  where it came from, how it was formed, where it could be found.  For thirteen years Kynes had lived with the desert dwellers; he had taken a Fremen wife, and he'd raised a half-Fremen son to follow in his footsteps, to become the next Planetologist on Dune.

Kynes's enthusiasm for this planet had never dimmed.  He thrilled at the chance to learn something new, even if he had to thrust himself into the middle of a storm . . . .

THE POD'S ANCIENT SUSPENSORS hummed against the Coriolis howl like a nest of angry wasps.  The meteorological vessel bounced on swirling currents of air, a steel-walled balloon.  Wind-borne dust scoured the hull.

"This reminds me of the aurora storms I saw on Salusa Secundus," Kynes mused.  "Amazing things -- very colorful and very dangerous.  The hammer-wind can come up from out of nowhere and crush you flat.  You wouldn't want to be caught outside."

"I don't want to be outside in this one, either," Liet said.

Stressed inward, one of the side plates buckled; air stole through the breach with a thin shriek.  Liet lurched across the deck toward the leak.  He'd kept the repair kit and foam sealant close at hand, certain the decrepit pod would rupture.  "We are held in the hand of God, and could be crushed at any moment."

"That's what your mother would say," the Planetologist said without looking up from the skeins of information pouring through the recording apparatus into an old datapack.  "Look, a gust clocked at eight hundred kilometers per hour!"  His voice carried no fear, only excitement.  "What a monster storm!"

Liet looked up from the stone-hard sealant he had slathered over the thin crack.  The squealing sound of leaking air faded, replaced by a muffled hurricane din.  "If we were outside, this wind would scour the flesh off our bones."

Kynes pursed his lips.  "Quite likely true, but you must learn to express yourself objectively and quantitatively.  'Scour the flesh off our bones' is not a phrasing one would include in a report to the Emperor."

The battering wind, the scraping sand, and the roar of the storm reached a crescendo; then, with a burst of pressure inside the survey pod, it all broke into a bubble of silence.  Liet blinked, swallowing hard to clear his ears and throat.  Intense quiet throbbed in his skull.  Through the hull of the creaking vessel, he could still hear Coriolis winds like whispered voices in a nightmare.

"We're in the eye."  Glowing with delight, Pardot Kynes stepped away from his instruments.  "A sietch at the center of the storm, a refuge where you would least expect it."

Blue static discharges crackled around them, sand and dust rubbing together to generate electromagnetic fields.  "I would prefer to be back in the sietch right now," Liet admitted.

The meteorological pod drifted along in the eye, safe and silent after the intense battering of the storm wall.  Confined together in the small vessel, the two had a chance to talk, as father and son.

But they didn't . . . .

Ten minutes later they struck the opposite sandstorm wall, thrown back into the insane flow with a glancing blow of the dust-thick winds.  Liet stumbled and held on; his father managed to maintain his footing.  The vessel's hull vibrated and rattled.

Kynes looked at his controls, at the floor, and then at his son.  "I'm not sure what to do about this.  The suspensors are" -- with a lurch, they began to plunge, as if their safety rope had been severed -- "failing."

Liet held himself against an eerie weightlessness as the crippled pod dropped toward the ground, which lay obscured by dusty murk.  As they tumbled in the air, the Planetologist continued to work the controls.

The haphazard suspensors sputtered and caught again just before impact.  The force from the Holtzman field generator cushioned them enough to absorb the worst of the crash.  Then the storm pod slammed into the churned sand, and the Coriolis winds roared overhead like a spice harvester trampling a kangaroo mouse under its treads.  A deluge of dust poured down, released from the sky.

Bruised but otherwise unharmed, Pardot and Liet Kynes picked themselves up and stared at each other in the afterglow of adrenaline.  The storm headed up and over them, leaving the pod behind . . . .

AFTER WORKING A SANDSNORK out through the clogged vent opening, Liet pumped fresh air into the stale confinement.  When he pried open the heavy hatch, a stream of sand fell into the interior, but Liet used a static-foam binder to pack the walls.  Using a scoop from his Fremkit as well as his bare hands, he set to work digging them out.

Pardot Kynes had complete confidence in his son's abilities to rescue them, so he worked in dimness to collate his new weather readings into a single old-style datapack.

Blinking as he pushed himself into the open air like an infant emerging from a womb, Liet stared at the storm-scoured landscape.  The desert was reborn:  Dunes moved along like a marching herd; familiar landmarks changed; footprints, tents, even small villages erased.  The entire basin looked fresh and clean and new.

Covered with pale dust, he scrambled up to more stable sand, where he saw the depression that hid the buried pod.  When they'd crashed, the vessel had slammed a crater into the wind-stirred desert surface, just before the passing storm dumped a blanket of sand on top of them.

With Fremen instincts and an inborn sense of direction, Liet was able to determine their approximate position, not far from the South False Wall.  He recognized the rock forms, the cliff bands, the peaks and rilles.  If the winds had blown them a kilometer farther, the pod would have crashed into the blistering mountains . . . an ignominious end for the great Planetologist, whom the Fremen revered as their Umma, their prophet.

Liet called down into the hole that marked the buried vessel.  "Father, I believe there's a sietch in the nearby cliffs.  If we go there, the Fremen can help us dig out the pod."

"Good idea," Kynes answered, his voice muffled.  "Go check to make sure.  I'll stay here and work.  I've . . . got an idea."

With a sigh, the young man walked across the sand toward the jutting elbows of ocher rock.  His steps were without rhythm, so as not to attract one of the great worms:  step, drag, pause . . . drag, pause, step-step . . . drag, step, pause, step. . . .

Liet's comrades at Red Wall Sietch, especially his blood-brother Warrick, envied him for all the time he spent with the Planetologist.  Umma Kynes had brought a vision of paradise to the desert people -- they believed his dream of reawakening Dune, and followed the man.

Without the knowledge of the Harkonnen overlords -- who were only on Arrakis to mine the spice, and viewed people only as a resource to be squeezed -- Kynes oversaw armies of secret, devoted workers who planted grasses to anchor the mobile dunes; these Fremen established groves of cacti and hardy scrub bushes in sheltered canyons, watered by dew-precipitators.  In the unexplored south polar regions, they had planted palmaries, which had gained a foothold and now flourished.  A lush demonstration project at Plaster Basin produced flowers, fresh fruit, and dwarf trees.

Still, though the Planetologist could orchestrate grandiose, world-spanning plans, Liet did not trust his father's common sense enough to leave him alone for long.

The young man went along the ridge until he found subtle blaze marks on the rocks, a jumbled path no outsider would notice, messages in the placement of off-colored stones that promised food and shelter, under the respected al'amyah Travelers' Benediction rules.

With the aid of strong Fremen in the sietch, they could excavate the weather pod and drag it to a hiding place where it would be salvaged or repaired; within an hour, the Fremen would remove all traces and let the desert fall back into brooding silence.

But when he looked back at the crash site, Liet was alarmed to see the battered vessel moving and lurching, already protruding a third of the way out of the sand.  With a deep-throated hum, the pod heaved and strained, like a beast of burden caught in a Bela Tegeusan quagmire.  But the pulsing suspensors had only enough strength to wrench the vessel upward a few centimeters at a time.

Liet froze when he realized what his father was doing.  Suspensors.  Out in the open desert!

He ran, tripping and stumbling, an avalanche of powder sand following his footsteps.  "Father, stop.  Turn them off!"  He shouted so loudly that his throat grew raw.  With dread in the pit of his stomach, he gazed across the golden ocean of dunes, toward the hellish pit of the faraway Cielago Depression.  He scanned for a telltale ripple, the disturbance indicating deep movement. . . .

"Father, come out of there."  He skidded to a stop in front of the open hatch as the pod continued to shift back and forth, straining.  The suspensor fields thrummed.  Grabbing the edge of the door frame, Liet swung himself through the hatch and dropped inside the weather pod, startling Kynes.

The Planetologist grinned at his son.  "It's some sort of automated system -- I don't know what controls I bumped into, but this pod just might lift itself out in less than an hour."  He turned back to his instruments.  "It gave me time to collate all our new data into a single storage --"

Liet grabbed his father by the shoulder and pulled him from the controls.  He slammed his hands down on the emergency cutoff switch, and the suspensors faded.  Confused, Kynes tried to protest, but his son urged him toward the open hatch.  "Get out, now!  Run as fast as you can toward the rocks."

"But --"

Liet's nostrils flared in angry exasperation.  "Suspensors operate on a Holtzman field, just like shields.  You know what happens when you activate a personal shield out in the open sand?"

"The suspensors are working again?"  Kynes blinked, then his eyes lit up as he understood.  "Ah!  A worm comes."

"A worm always comes.  Now run!"

The elder Kynes staggered out of the hatch and dropped to the sand.  He recovered his balance and oriented himself in the glaring sun.  Seeing the cliff line Liet had indicated, a kilometer away, he trudged off in a jerky, mismatched walk, stepping, sliding, pausing, hopping forward in a complicated dance.  The young Fremen dropped out of the hatch and followed along, as they made their way toward the safety of rocks.

Before long, they heard a hissing, rolling sound from behind.  Liet glanced over his shoulder, then pushed his father over a dune crest.  "Faster.  I don't know how much time we'll have."  They increased their pace.  Pardot stumbled, got back up.

Ripples arrowed across the sands directly toward the half-buried pod.  Toward them.  Dunes lurched, rolled, then flattened with the inexorable tunneling of a deep worm rising to the surface.

"Run with your very soul!"  They sprinted toward the cliffs, crossed a dune crest, slid down, then surged forward again, the soft sand pulling at their feet.  Liet's spirits rose when he saw the safety of rocks less than a hundred meters away.

The hissing grew louder as the giant worm picked up speed.  The ground beneath their boots trembled.

Finally, Kynes reached the first boulders and clutched them like an anchor, panting and wheezing.  Liet pushed him farther, though, onto the slopes, to be sure the monster could not rise from the sand and strike them.

Moments later, sitting on a ledge, wordless as they sucked hot air through their nostrils to catch their breath, Pardot Kynes and his son stared back to watch a churning whirlpool form around the half-buried weather pod.  In the loosening powder, as the viscosity of the stirred sand changed, the pod shifted and began to sink.

The heart of the whirlpool rose up in a cavernous scooped mouth.  The desert monster swallowed the offending vessel along with tons of sand, forcing all the debris down into a gullet lined with crystal teeth.  The worm sank back into the arid depths, and Liet watched the ripples of its passage, slower now, returning into the empty basin. . . .

In the pounding silence that followed, Pardot Kynes did not look exhilarated from his near brush with death.  Instead, he appeared dejected.  "We lost all that data."  The Planetologist heaved a deep breath.  "I could have used our readings to understand those storms better."

Liet reached inside a front pocket of his stillsuit and held up the old-style datapack he had snatched from the pod's instrument panel.  "Even while watching out for our lives -- I can still pay attention to research."

Kynes beamed with fatherly pride.

Under the desert sun, they hiked up the rugged path to the safety of the sietch.

Behold, O Man, you can create life.  You can destroy life.  But, lo, you have no choice but to experience life.  And therein lies both your greatest strength and your greatest weakness.

-Orange Catholic Bible, Book of Kimla Septima, 5:3

ON OIL-SOAKED GIEDI PRIME, the work crew left the fields at the end of a typically interminable day.  Encrusted with perspiration and dirt, the workers slogged from trench-lined plots under a lowering red sun, making their way back home.

In their midst, Gurney Halleck, his blond hair a sweaty tangle, clapped his hands rhythmically.  It was the only way he could keep going, his way of resisting the oppression of Harkonnen overlords, who for the moment were not within earshot.  He made up a work song with nonsense lyrics, trying to get his companions to join in, or at least to mumble along with the chorus.

We toil all day, the Harkonnen way,

Hour after hour, we long for a shower,

Just workin' and workin' and workin' . . .

The people trudged along silently.  Too tired after eleven hours in the rocky fields, they hardly gave the would-be troubadour a notice.  With a resigned sigh, Gurney finally gave up his efforts, though he maintained his wry smile.  "We are indeed miserable, my friends, but we don't have to be dismal about it."

Ahead lay a low village of prefabricated buildings -- a settlement called Dmitri in honor of the previous Harkonnen patriarch, the father of Baron Vladimir.  After the Baron had taken control of House Harkonnen decades ago, he'd scrutinized the maps of Giedi Prime, renaming land features to his own tastes.  In the process he had added a melodramatic flair to the stark formations:  Isle of Sorrows, Perdition Shallows, Cliff of Death. . . .

No doubt a few generations hence, someone else would rename the landmarks all over again.

Such concerns were beyond Gurney Halleck.  Though poorly educated, he did know the Imperium was vast, with a million planets and decillions of people . . . but it wasn't likely he'd travel even as far as Harko City, the densely packed, smoky metropolis that shed a perpetual ruddy glow on the northern horizon.

Gurney studied the crew around him, the people he saw every day.  Eyes downcast, they marched like machines back to their squalid homes, so sullen that he had to laugh aloud.  "Get some soup in your bellies, and I'll expect you to start singing tonight.  Doesn't the O. C. Bible say, 'Make cheer from your own heart, for the sun rises and sets according to your perspective on the universe'?"

A few workers mumbled with faint enthusiasm; it was better than nothing.  At least he had managed to cheer them up some.  With a life so dreary, any spot of color was worth the effort.

Gurney was twenty-one, his skin already rough and leathery from working in the fields since the age of eight.  By habit, his bright blue eyes drank in every detail . . . though the village of Dmitri and the desolate fields gave him little to look at.  With an angular jaw, a too-round nose, and flat features, he already looked like an old farmer and would no doubt marry one of the washed-out, tired-looking girls from the village.

Gurney had spent the day up to his armpits in a trench, wielding a spade to throw out piles of stony earth.  After so many years of tilling the same ground, the villagers had to dig deep in order to find nutrients in the soil.  The Baron certainly didn't waste solaris on fertilizers -- not for these people.

During their centuries of stewardship on Giedi Prime, the Harkonnens had made a habit of wringing the land for all it was worth.  It was their right -- no, their duty -- to exploit this world, and then move the villages to new land and new pickings.  One day when Giedi Prime was a barren shell, the leader of House Harkonnen would undoubtedly request a different fief, a new reward for serving the Padishah Emperors.  There were, after all, many worlds to choose from in the Imperium.

But galactic politics were of no interest to Gurney.  His goals were limited to enjoying the upcoming evening, sharing a bit of entertainment and relaxation down at the meeting place.  Tomorrow would be another day of back-breaking work.

Only stringy, starchy krall tubers grew profitably in these fields; though most of the crop was exported as animal feed, the bland tubers were nutritious enough to keep people working.  Gurney ate them every day, as did everyone else.  Poor soil leads to poor taste.

His parents and coworkers were full of proverbs, many from the Orange Catholic Bible; Gurney memorized them all and often set them to tunes.  Music was the one treasure he was allowed to have, and he shared it freely.

The workers spread out to their separate but identical dwellings, defective prefabricated units House Harkonnen had bought at discount and dumped there.  Gurney gazed ahead to where he lived with his parents and his younger sister, Bheth.

His home had a brighter touch than the others.  Old, rusted cookpots held dirt in which colorful flowers grew:  maroon, blue, and yellow pansies, a shock of daisies, even sophisticated-looking calla lilies.  Most houses had small vegetable gardens where the people grew plants, herbs, vegetables -- though any produce that looked too appetizing might be confiscated and eaten by roving Harkonnen patrols.

The day was warm and the air smoky, but the windows of his home were open.  Gurney could hear Bheth's sweet voice in a lilting melody.  In his mind's eye he saw her long, straw-colored hair; he thought of it as "flaxen" -- a word from Old Terran poems he had memorized -- though he had never seen homespun flax.  Only seventeen, Bheth had fine features and a sweet personality that had not yet been crushed by a lifetime of work.

Gurney used the outside faucet to splash the gray, caked dirt from his face, arms, and hands.  He held his head under the cold water, soaking his snarled blond hair, then used blunt fingers to maul it into some semblance of order.  He shook his head and strode inside, kissing Bheth on the cheek while dripping cold water on her.  She squealed and backed away, then returned to her cooking chores.

Their father had already collapsed in a chair.  Their mother bent over huge wooden bins outside the back door, preparing krall tubers for market; when she noticed Gurney was home, she dried her hands and came inside to help Bheth serve.  Standing at the table, his mother read several verses from a tattered old O. C. Bible in a deeply reverent voice (her goal was to read the entire mammoth tome to her children before she died), and then they sat down to eat.  He and his sister talked while sipping a soup of stringy vegetables, seasoned only with salt and a few sprigs of dried herbs.  During the meal, Gurney's parents spoke little, usually in monosyllables.

Finishing, he carried his dishes to the basin, where he scrubbed them and left them to drip dry for the next day.  With wet hands he clapped his father on the shoulder.  "Are you going to join me at the tavern?  It's fellowship night."

The older man shook his head.  "I'd rather sleep.  Sometimes your songs just make me feel too tired."

Gurney shrugged.  "Get your rest then."  In his small room, he opened the rickety wardrobe and took out his most prized possession:  an old baliset, designed as a nine-stringed instrument, though Gurney had learned to play with only seven, since two strings were broken and he had no replacements.

He had found the discarded instrument, damaged and useless, but after working on it patiently for six months . . . sanding, lacquering, shaping parts . . . the baliset made the sweetest music he'd ever heard, albeit without a full tonal range.  Gurney spent hours in the night strumming the strings, spinning the counterbalance wheel.  He taught himself to play tunes he had heard, or composed new ones.

As darkness enclosed the village, his mother sagged into a chair.  She placed the precious Bible in her lap, comforted more by its weight than its words.  "Don't be late," she said in a dry, empty voice.

"I won't."  Gurney wondered if she would notice if he stayed out all night.  "I'll need my strength to tackle those trenches tomorrow."  He raised a well-muscled arm, feigning enthusiasm for the tasks all of them knew would never end.  He made his way across the packed-dirt streets down to the tavern.

In the wake of a deadly fever several years ago, four of the prefab structures had been left empty.  The villagers had moved the buildings together, knocked down the connecting walls, and fashioned themselves a large community house.  Although this wasn't exactly against the numerous Harkonnen restrictions, the local enforcers had frowned at such a display of initiative.  But the tavern remained.

Gurney joined the small crowd of men who had already gathered for the fellowship down at the tavern.  Some brought their wives.  One man already lay slumped across the table, more exhausted than drunk, his flagon of watery beer only half-consumed.  Gurney crept up behind him, held out his baliset, and strummed a jangling chord that startled the man to full wakefulness.

"Here's a new one, friends.  Not exactly a hymn that your mothers remember, but I'll teach it to you."  He gave them a wry grin.  "Then you'll all sing along with me, and probably ruin the tune."  None of them were very good singers, but the songs were entertaining, and it brought a measure of brightness to their lives.

With full energy, he tacked sardonic words onto a familiar melody:

O Giedi Prime!

Thy shades of black are beyond compare,

From obsidian plains to oily seas,

To the darkest nights in the Emperor's Eye.

Come ye from far and wide

To see what we hide in our hearts and minds,

To share our bounty

And lift a pickax or two . . .

Making it all lovelier than before.

O Giedi Prime!

Thy shades of black are beyond compare,

From obsidian plains to oily seas,

To the darkest nights in the Emperor's Eye.

When Gurney finished the song, he wore a grin on his plain, blocky face and bowed to imagined applause.  One of the men called out hoarsely, "Watch yourself, Gurney Halleck.  If the Harkonnens hear your sweet voice, they'll haul you off to Harko for sure -- so you can sing for the Baron himself."

Gurney made a rude noise.  "The Baron has no ear for music, especially not lovely songs like mine."  This brought a round of laughter.  He picked up a mug of the sour beer and chugged it down.

Then the door burst open and Bheth ran in, her flaxen hair loose, her face flushed.  "Patrol coming!  We saw the suspensor lights.  They've got a prisoner transport and a dozen guards."

The men sat up with a jolt.  Two ran for the doors, but the others remained frozen in place, already looking caught and defeated.

Gurney strummed a soothing note on his baliset.  "Be calm, my friends.  Are we doing anything illegal?  'The guilty both know and show their crimes.'  We are merely enjoying fellowship.  The Harkonnens can't arrest us for that.  In fact, we're demonstrating how much we like our conditions, how happy we are to work for the Baron and his minions.  Right, mates?"

A somber grumbling was all the agreement he managed to elicit.  Gurney set aside his baliset and went to the trapezoidal window of the communal hall just as a prisoner transport pulled up in the center of the village.  Several human forms could be seen in shadow behind the transport's plaz windows, evidence that the Harkonnens had been busy arresting people -- all women, it appeared.  Though he patted his sister's hand and maintained his good humor for the benefit of the others, Gurney knew the troopers needed few excuses to take more captives.

Brilliant spotlights targeted the village.  Dark armored forms rushed up the packed-dirt streets, pounding on houses.  Then the door to the communal building was shouldered open with a loud crash.

Six men strode inside.  Gurney recognized Captain Kryubi of the baronial guard, the man in charge of House Harkonnen security.  "Stand still for inspection," Kryubi ordered.  A shard of mustache bristled on his lip.  His face was narrow and his cheeks looked sunken, as if he clenched his jaw too often.

Gurney remained by the window.  "We've done nothing wrong here, Captain.  We follow Harkonnen rules.  We do our work."

Kryubi looked over at him.  "And who appointed you the leader of this village?"

Gurney did not think fast enough to keep his sarcasm in check.  "And who gave you orders to harass innocent villagers?  You'll make us incapable of doing our tasks tomorrow."

His companions in the tavern were horrified at his impudence.  Bheth clutched Gurney's hand, trying to keep her brother quiet.  The Harkonnen guards made threatening gestures with their weapons.

Gurney jerked his chin to indicate the prisoner escort vehicle outside the window.  "What did those people do?  What crimes worthy of arrest?"

"No crimes are necessary," Kryubi said, coolly unafraid of the truth.

Gurney took a step forward, but three guards grasped his arms and threw him heavily to the floor.  He knew the Baron often recruited guards from the farming villages.  The new thugs -- rescued from bleak lives and given new uniforms, weapons, lodgings, and women -- often became scornful of their previous lives and proved crueler than off-world professionals.  Gurney hoped he would recognize a man from a neighboring village, so he could spit in his eye.  His head struck the hard floor, but he sprang back to his feet.

Bheth moved quickly to her brother's side.  "Don't provoke them anymore."

It was the worst thing she could have done.  Kryubi pointed at her.  "All right, take that one, too."

Bheth's narrow face paled when two of the three guards grabbed her by her thin arms.  She struggled as they hauled her to the still-open door.  Gurney cast his baliset aside and lunged forward, but the remaining guard produced his weapon and brought the butt down hard across the young man's forehead and nose.

Gurney staggered, then threw himself forward again, swinging balled fists like mallets.  "Leave her alone!"  He knocked one of the guards down and tore the second one away from his sister.  She screamed as the three converged upon Gurney, pummeling him, slamming their weapons so brutally into him that his ribs cracked; his nose was already bloodied.

"Help me!"  Gurney shouted to the saucer-eyed villagers.  "We outnumber the bastards."

No one came to his aid.

He flailed and punched, but went down in a flurry of kicking boots and pounding weapons.  Struggling to lift his head, he saw Kryubi watching as his men pulled Bheth toward the door.  Gurney pushed, trying to throw off the heavy men who held him down.

Between the gauntleted arms and padded legs, he saw the villagers frozen in their seats, like sheep.  They watched him with stricken expressions, but remained as motionless as stones in a castle keep.  "Help me, damn you!"

One guard punched him in the solar plexus, making him gasp and retch.  Gurney's voice was gone, his breath fading.  Black spots danced in front of his eyes.  Finally, the guards withdrew.

He propped himself on an elbow just in time to see Bheth's despairing face as the Harkonnen men dragged her into the night.

Enraged and frustrated, he swayed back to his feet, fighting to remain conscious.  He heard the prison transport power up in the square outside.  Haloed by a glow of illumination against the windows of the tavern, it roared off toward another village to pick up more captives.

Gurney blinked at the other men through swollen eyes.  Strangers.  He coughed and spat blood, then wiped it from his lips.  Finally, when he could wheeze, he said, "You bastards just sat there.  You didn't lift a finger to help."  Brushing himself off, he glared at the villagers.  "How can you let them do this to us?  They took my sister!"

But they were no better than sheep, and never had been.  He should have expected nothing different now.

With utter contempt, he spat blood and saliva on the floor, then staggered toward the door and out.

Secrets are an important aspect of power. The effective leader spreads them in order to keep men in line.

-PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, Discourses on Leadership in a Galactic Imperium, Twelfth Edition

THE FERRET-FACED MAN stood like a spying crow on the second level of the Residency at Arrakeen.  He gazed down into the spacious atrium.  "You are certain they know about our little soiree, hmmm-ah?"  His lips were cracked from the dry air; they had been that way for years.  "All the invitations personally delivered?  All the populace notified?"

Count Hasimir Fenring leaned toward the slender, loose-chinned chief of his guard force, Geraldo Willowbrook, who stood beside him.  The scarlet-and-gold-uniformed man nodded, squinted in the bright light that streamed through prismatic, shield-reinforced windows.  "It will be a grand celebration for your anniversary here, sir.  Already beggars are massing at the front gate."

"Hmm-m-ah, good, very good.  My wife will be pleased."

On the main floor below, a chef carried a silver coffee service toward the kitchen.  Cooking odors drifted upward, exotic soups and sauces prepared for the evening's extravagant festivities, broiled brochettes of meat from animals that had never lived on Arrakis.

Fenring gripped a carved ironwood banister.  An arched Gothic ceiling rose two stories overhead, with elacca wood crossbeams and plaz skylights.  Though muscular, he was not a large man, and found himself dwarfed by the immensity of this house.  He'd commissioned the ceiling himself, and another in the Dining Hall.  The new east wing was his concept as well, with its elegant guest rooms and opulent private pools.

In his decade as Imperial Observer on the desert planet, he had generated a constant buzz of construction around him.  Following his exile from Shaddam's court on Kaitain, he'd had to make his mark somehow.

From the botanical conservatory under construction near the private chambers he shared with Lady Margot, he heard the hum of power tools along with the chants of day-labor crews.  They cut keyhole-arched doorways, set dry fountains into alcoves, adorned walls with colorful geometric mosaics.  For luck, one of the hinges supporting a heavy ornamental door had been symbolically shaped as the hand of Fatimah, beloved daughter of an ancient prophet of Old Terra.

Fenring was about to dismiss Willowbrook when a resounding crash made the upper floor shudder.  The two men ran down the curving hallway, past bookcases.  From rooms and lift tubes, curious household servants poked their heads into the corridor.

The oval conservatory door stood open, revealing a mass of tangled metal and plaz.  One of the workers shouted for medics over the din of screaming.  A fully laden suspensor scaffold had collapsed; Fenring vowed to personally administer the appropriate punishment, once an investigation had pointed fingers at the likely scapegoats.

Shouldering his way into the room, Fenring looked up.  Through the open metal framing of the arched roof, he saw a lemon-yellow sky.  Only a few of the filter-glass windows had been installed; others now lay shattered in the tangle of scaffolding.  He spoke in a tone of disgust.  "Unfortunate timing, hmmmm?  I was going to take our guests on a tour tonight."

"Yes, most unfortunate, Count Fenring, Sir."  Willowbrook watched while household workers began digging in the rubble to reach the injured.

House medics in khaki uniforms hurried past him into the ruined area.  One tended a bloody-faced man who had just been pulled from the debris, while two men helped remove a heavy sheet of plaz from additional victims.  The job superintendent had been crushed by the fallen scaffold.  Stupid fellow, Fenring thought.  But lucky, considering what I'd have done to him for this mess.

Fenring glanced at his wristchron.  Two more hours until the guests arrived.  He motioned to Willowbrook.  "Wrap it up here.  I don't want any noise coming from this area during the party.  That would provide entirely the wrong message, hmmm?  Lady Margot and I have laid out the evening's festivities most carefully, down to the last detail."

Willowbrook scowled, but obviously thought better of showing defiance.  "It will be done, sir.  In less than an hour."

Fenring simmered.  In reality he cared nothing for exotic plants, and initially had agreed to this expensive remodeling only as a concession to his Bene Gesserit wife, the Lady Margot.  Although she'd requested only a modest airlocked room with plants inside, Fenring -- ever ambitious -- had expanded it to something far more impressive.  He conceived plans to collect rare flora from all over the Imperium.

If ever the conservatory could be finished . . .

Composing himself, he greeted Margot in the vaulted entry just as she returned from the labyrinthine souk markets in town.  A willowy blonde with gray-green eyes, perfect figure, and impeccable features, she stood nearly a head taller than he.  She wore an aba robe tailored to show off her figure, the black fabric speckled with dust from the streets.

"Did they have Ecazi turnips, my dear?"  The Count stared hungrily at two heavy packages wrapped in thick brown spice paper carried by male servants.  Having heard of a merchant's arrival by Heighliner that afternoon, Margot had hurried into Arrakeen to purchase the scarce vegetables.  He tried to peek under the paper wrappings, but she playfully slapped his hand away.

"Is everything ready here, my dear?"

"Mmm-m-m, it's all going smoothly," he said.  "We can't tour your new conservatory tonight, though.  It's too messy up there for our dinner guests."

WAITING TO GREET the important guests as they arrived at sunset, Lady Margot Fenring stood in the mansion's atrium, adorned on its wood-paneled lower level with portraits of Padishah Emperors extending back to the legendary General Faykan Corrin, who had fought in the Butlerian Jihad, and the enlightened ruler Crown Prince Raphael Corrino, as well as "the Hunter" Fondil III, and his son Elrood IX.

In the center of the atrium, a golden statue showed the current Emperor Shaddam IV in full Sardaukar regalia with a ceremonial sword raised high.  It was one of many expensive works the Emperor had commissioned in the first decade of his reign.  Around the Residency and grounds were numerous additional examples, gifts from her husband's boyhood friend.  Although the two men had quarreled at the time of Shaddam's ascension to the throne, they had gradually grown closer again.

Through the dust-sealed double doors streamed elegantly dressed ladies, accompanied by men in ravenlike post-Butlerian tuxedos and military uniforms of varying colors.  Margot herself wore a floor-length gown of silk taffeta with emerald shimmer-sequins on the bodice.

As a uniformed crier announced her guests, Margot greeted them.  They filed past into the Grand Hall, where she heard much laughter, conversation, and clinking of glasses.  Entertainers from House Jongleur performed tricks and sang witty songs to celebrate the Fenrings' ten years on Arrakis.

Her husband strutted down the grand staircase from the second floor.  Count Fenring wore a dark blue retrotuxedo with a crimson royal sash across the chest, personally tailored for him on Bifkar.  She bent to allow the shorter man to kiss her on the lips.  "Now go in and welcome our guests, dear, before the Baron dominates every conversation."

With a light step, Fenring avoided an intent, frumpy-looking Duchess from one of the Corrino subplanets; the Duchess passed a remote-cast poison snooper over her wineglass before drinking, then slipped the device unobtrusively into a pocket of her ball gown.

Margot watched her husband as he went to the fireplace to talk with Baron Harkonnen, current holder of the siridar-fief of Arrakis and its rich spice monopoly.  The light of a blazing fire enhanced by hearth prisms gave the Baron's puffy features an eerie cast.  He wasn't looking at all well.

In the years she and Fenring had been stationed there, the Baron had invited them to dine at his Keep or attend gladiatorial events featuring slaves from Giedi Prime.  He was a dangerous man who thought too much of himself.  Now, the Baron leaned on a gilded walking stick whose head had been designed to resemble the mouth of a great sandworm of Arrakis.

Margot had seen the Baron's health decline dramatically over the past decade; he suffered from a mysterious muscular and neurological malady that had caused him to gain weight.  From her Bene Gesserit Sisters she knew the reason for his physical discomfiture, how it had been inflicted upon him when he'd raped Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam.  The Baron, however, had never learned the cause of his distress.

Mohiam herself, another carefully selected guest for this event, passed into Margot's line of sight.  The gray-haired Reverend Mother wore a formal aba robe with a diamond-crusted collar.  She smiled a tight-lipped greeting.  With a subtle flicker of fingers, she sent a message and a question.  "What news for Mother Superior Harishka?  Give details.  I must report to her."

Margot's fingers responded:  "Progress on the Missionaria Protectiva matter.  Only rumors, nothing confirmed.  Missing Sisters not yet located.  Long time.  They may all be dead."

Mohiam did not look pleased.  She herself had once worked with the Missionaria Protectiva, an invaluable Bene Gesserit division that sowed infectious superstitions on far-flung worlds.  Mohiam had spent decades here in her younger years, posing as a town woman, disseminating information, enhancing superstitions that might benefit the Sisterhood.  Mohiam herself had never been able to infiltrate the closed Fremen society, but over the centuries, many other Sisters had gone into the deep desert to mingle with the Fremen -- and had disappeared.

Since she was on Arrakis as the Count's consort, Margot had been asked to confirm the Missionaria's subtle work.  Thus far she'd heard unconfirmed reports of Reverend Mothers who had joined the Fremen and gone underground, as well as rumors of Bene Gesserit-like religious rituals among the tribes.  One isolated sietch supposedly had a holy woman; dusty travelers were overheard in a town coffee tent speaking of a messiah legend clearly inspired by the Panoplia Propheticus . . . but none of this information came directly from the Fremen themselves.  The desert people, like their planet, seemed impenetrable.

Maybe the Fremen murdered the Bene Gesserit women outright and stole the water from their bodies.

"Those others have been swallowed up by the sands."  Margot's fingers flickered.

"Nevertheless, find them."  With a nod that ended the silent conversation, Mohiam glided across the room toward a side doorway.

"Rondo Tuek," the crier announced, "the water merchant."

Turning, Margot saw a broad-faced but wiry man stride across the foyer with an odd, rolling gait.  He had tufts of rusty-gray hair at the sides of his head, thinning strands on his pate, and widely separated gray eyes.  She reached out to greet him.  "Ah, yes -- the smuggler."

Tuek's flat cheeks darkened, then a broad smile cracked his squarish face.  He wagged a finger at her, in the manner of a teacher to a student.  "I am a water supplier who works hard to excavate moisture from the dirty ice caps."

"Without the industriousness of your family, I'm sure the Imperium would collapse."

"My Lady is too kind."  Tuek bowed and entered the Grand Hall.

Outside the Residency, poor beggars had gathered, hoping for a rare show of graciousness from the Count.  Other spectators had come to watch the beggars, and gaze longingly up at the ornate facade of the mansion.  Water-sellers in brightly dyed traditional garb jingled their bells and called out an eerie cry of "Soo-Soo Sook!"  Guards -- borrowed from the Harkonnen troops and obliged to wear Imperial uniforms for the event -- stood by the doorways, keeping out undesirables and clearing the way for the invited.  It was a circus.

When the last of the expected guests arrived, Margot glanced at an antique chrono set into the wall, adorned with mechanical figures and delicate chimes.  They were nearly half an hour late.  She hurried to her husband's side and whispered in his ear.  He dispatched a messenger to the Jongleurs, and they fell silent -- a signal familiar to the guests.

"May I have your attention please, hmmm?"  Fenring shouted.  Pompously dressed footmen appeared to escort the attendees.  "We will reconvene in the Dining Hall."  According to tradition, Count and Countess Fenring trailed behind the last of their guests.

On either side of the wide doorway to the Dining Hall stood laving basins of gold-embedded tile, decorated with intricate mosaics containing the crests of House Corrino and House Harkonnen, in accordance with political necessity.  The crest denoting the previous governors of Arrakis, House Richese, had been painstakingly chiseled out to be replaced with a blue Harkonnen griffin.  The guests paused at the basins, dipped their hands into the water, and slopped some onto the floor.  After drying their hands, they flung towels into a growing puddle.

Baron Harkonnen had suggested this custom to show that a planetary governor cared nothing for water shortages.  It was an optimistic flaunting of wealth.  Fenring had liked the sound of that, and the procedure had been instituted -- with a benevolent twist, however:  Lade Margot saw a way to help the beggars, in a largely symbolic way.  With her husband's grudging concurrence, she let it be known that at the conclusion of each banquet, beggars were welcome to gather outside the mansion and receive any water that could be squeezed from the soiled towels.

Her hands tingling and damp, Margot entered the long hall with her husband.  Antique tapestries adorned the walls.  Free-floating glowglobes wandered around the room, all set at the same height above the floor, all tuned to the yellow band.  Over the polished wooden table hung a chandelier of glittering blue-green Hagal quartz, with a sensitive poison snooper concealed in the upper reaches of the chain.

A small army of footmen held chairs for the diners, and draped a napkin over each guest's lap.  Someone stumbled and knocked a crystal centerpiece to the floor, where it shattered.  Servants hurried to clean it up and replace it.  Everyone else pretended not to notice.

Margot, seated at the foot of the long table, nodded graciously to Planetologist Pardot Kynes and his twelve-year-old son, who took their assigned seats on either side of her.  She'd been surprised when the rarely seen desert man accepted her invitation, and she hoped to learn how many of the rumors about him were true.  In her experience, dinner parties were notorious for small talk and insincerity, though certain things did not escape the attention of an astute Bene Gesserit observer.  She watched the lean man carefully, noting a repair patch on the gray collar of his dress tunic, and the strong line of his sandy-bearded jaw.

Two places down from her, Reverend Mother Mohiam slid into a chair.  Hasimir Fenring took his seat at the head of the table, with Baron Harkonnen on his right.  Knowing how the Baron and Mohiam loathed one another, Margot had seated them far apart.

At a snap of Fenring's fingers, servants bearing platters of exotic morsels emerged from side doorways.  They worked their way around the table, identifying the fare and serving sample portions from the plates.

"Thank you for inviting us, Lady Fenring," Kynes's son said, looking at Margot.  The Planetologist had introduced the young man as Weichih, a name that meant "beloved."  She could see a resemblance to the father, but while the older Kynes had a dreaminess in his eyes, this Weichih bore a hardness caused by growing up on Arrakis.

She smiled at him.  "One of our chefs is a city Fremen who has prepared a sietch specialty for the banquet, spice cakes with honey and sesame."

"Fremen cuisine is Imperial class now?"  Pardot Kynes inquired with a wry smile.  He looked as if he'd never thought of food as anything more than sustenance, and considered formal dining to be a distraction from other work.

"Cuisine is a matter of . . . taste."  She selected her words diplomatically.  Her eyes twinkled.

"I take that as a no," he said.

Tall, off-world servingwomen moved from place to place with narrow-necked bottles of blue melange-laced wine.  To the amazement of the locals, plates of whole fish appeared, surrounded by gaping Buzzell mussels.  Even the wealthiest inhabitants of Arrakeen rarely sampled seafood.

"Ah!" Fenring said with delight from the other end of the table, as a servant lifted a cover from a tray.  "I shall relish these Ecazi turnips, hmmmm.  Thank you, my dear."  The servant ladled dark sauce onto the vegetables.

"No expense is too great for our honored guests," Margot said.

"Let me tell you why those vegetables are so expensive," a diplomat from Ecaz groused, commanding everyone's attention.  Bindikk Narvi was a small man with a deep, thundering voice.  "Crop sabotage has drastically reduced our supply for the entire Imperium.  We've named this new scourge the 'Grumman blight.' "

He glared across the table at the Ambassador from Grumman, a huge heavy-drinking man with creased, dark skin.  "We have also discovered biological sabotage in our fogtree forests on the continent of Elacca."  All of the Imperium prized Ecazi fogtree sculptures, which were made by directing growth through the power of human thought.

Despite his bulk, the Moritani man -- Lupino Ord -- spoke in a squeaky voice.  "Once again the Ecazis fake a shortage to drive prices up.  An ancient trick that has been around since your thieving ancestors were driven from Old Terra in disgrace."

"That isn't what happened at all --"

"Gentlemen, please," Fenring said.  The Grummans had always been a very volatile people, ready to fly into a vengeful frenzy at the slightest perceived insult.  Fenring found it all rather thin-skinned and boring.  He looked at his wife.  "Did we make a mistake in the seating arrangement, my dear, hmmm?"

"Or perhaps in the guest list," she quipped.

Polite, embarrassed laughter bubbled around the table.  The quarreling men grew quiet, though they glared at one another.

"So nice to see that our eminent Planetologist has brought along his fine young son," Baron Harkonnen said in an oily tone.  "Quite a handsome lad.  You have the distinction of being the youngest dinner guest."

"I am honored to be here," the boy replied, "among such esteemed company."

"Being groomed to succeed your father, I hear," the Baron continued.  Margot detected carefully hidden sarcasm in the basso voice.  "I don't know what we'd do without a Planetologist."  In truth, Kynes was rarely seen in the city, and almost never submitted the required reports to the Emperor, not that Shaddam noticed or cared.  Margot had gleaned from her husband that the Emperor was occupied with other -- as yet unrevealed -- matters.

The young man's intent eyes brightened.  He raised a water flagon.  "May I propose a toast to our host and hostess?"  Pardot Kynes blinked at his son's boldness, as if surprised that the social nicety had not occurred to him first.

"An excellent suggestion," the Baron gushed.  Margot recognized a slackness in his speech from consuming too much melange wine.

The twelve-year-old spoke in a firm voice, before taking a sip.  "May the wealth you display for us here, with all this food and abundance of water, be merely a pale reflection of the riches in your hearts."

The assembled guests endorsed the blessing, and Margot detected a flicker of greed in their eyes.  The Planetologist fidgeted and finally spoke what was on his mind, as the clinking of glasses diminished.  "Count Fenring, I understand you have an elaborate wet-planet conservatory under construction here.  I would be very interested in seeing it."  Margot suddenly understood why Kynes had accepted the invitation, the reason he had come in from the desert.  Dressed in his plain but serviceable tunic and breeches, covered by a sandy-brown cloak, the man resembled a dirty Fremen more than an Imperial servant.

"You have learned our little secret, hmmm-ah?"  With obvious discomfort, Fenring pursed his lips.  "I had intended to show it to my guests this evening, but sadly certain . . . hmmm-ahh, delays have made that impossible.  Some other time, perhaps."

"By keeping a private conservatory, do you not flaunt things that the people of Arrakis cannot have?"  young Weichih asked.

"Yet," Pardot Kynes said under his breath.

Margot heard it.  Interesting.  She saw that it would be a mistake to underestimate this rugged man, or even his son.  "Surely it is an admirable goal to collect plants from all over the Imperium?" she suggested, patiently.  "I see it as a display of riches the universe has to offer, rather than a reminder of what the people lack."

In a low but firm tone, Pardot Kynes admonished the young man, "We did not come here to force our views on others."

"On the contrary, please be so good as to explain your views," Margot urged, trying to ignore insulting looks still being exchanged across the table by the Ecazi and Grumman ambassadors.  "We won't take offense, I promise you."

"Yes," said a Carthag weapons-importer from halfway down the table.  His fingers were so laden with jeweled rings he could barely lift his hands.  "Explain how Fremen think.  We all want to know that!"

Kynes nodded slowly.  "I have lived with them for many years.  To begin an understanding of the Fremen, realize that survival is their mind-set.  They waste nothing.  Everything is salvaged, reused."

"Down to the last drop of water," Fenring said.  "Even the water in dead bodies, hmmmm?"

Kynes looked at his son, then back at Margot.  "And your private conservatory will require a great deal of that precious water to maintain."

"Ahh, but as Imperial Observer here, I can do anything I please with natural resources," Fenring pointed out.  "I consider my wife's conservatory a worthwhile expenditure."

"Your rights are not in doubt," Kynes said, his tone as steady as the Shield Wall.  "And I am the Planetologist for Emperor Shaddam, as I was for Elrood IX before him.  We are each bound to our duties, Count Fenring.  You will hear no speeches from me about ecological issues.  I merely answered your Lady's question."

"Well, then, Planetologist, tell us something we don't know about Arrakis," the Baron said, gazing down the table.  "You've certainly been here long enough.  More of my men die here than in any other Harkonnen holding.  The Guild can't even put enough functional weather satellites in orbit to provide reliable surveillance and make predictions.  It is most frustrating."

"And, thanks to the spice, Arrakis is also most profitable," Margot said.  "Especially for you, dear Baron."

"This planet defies understanding," Kynes said.  "And it will take more than my brief lifetime to determine what is going on here.  This much I know:  We must learn how to live with the desert, rather than against it."

"Do the Fremen hate us?" Duchess Caula, an Imperial cousin, asked.  She held a forkful of brandy-seasoned sweetbreads halfway to her mouth.

"They are insular, and distrust anyone who is non-Fremen.  But they are honest, direct people with a code of honor that no one at this table -- not even myself -- fully understands."

With an elegant lift of her eyebrows Margot asked the next question, watching carefully for his reaction.  "Is it true what we've heard, that you've become one of them yourself, Planetologist?"

"I remain an Imperial servant, my Lady, though there is much to be learned from the Fremen."

Murmurs rose from different seats, accompanied by louder pockets of discussion while the first dessert course arrived.

"Our Emperor still has no heir," Lupino Ord, the Grumman ambassador, commented.  The big man's voice was a lilting shrill.  He'd been drinking steadily.  "Only two daughters, Irulan and Chalice.  Not that women aren't valuable . . ."  He looked around mischievously with his coal-black eyes, catching the disapproving gazes of several ladies at the table.  "But without a male heir, House Corrino must step aside in favor of another Great House."

"If he lives as long as Elrood, our Emperor might have a century left in him," Margot pointed out.  "Perhaps you haven't heard that Lady Anirul is with child again?"

"My duties sometimes keep me out of the mainstream of news," Ord admitted.  He lifted his wineglass.  "Let us hope the next one is a boy."

"Hear, hear!" several diners called out.

But the Ecazi diplomat, Bindikk Narvi, made an obscene hand gesture.  Margot had heard about the long-standing animosity between the Archduke Armand Ecaz and Viscount Moritani of Grumman, but hadn't realized how serious it had grown.  She wished she hadn't seated the two rivals so close to one another.

Ord grabbed a thin-necked bottle and poured more blue wine for himself before a servant could do it for him.  "Count Fenring, you have many works of art featuring our Emperor -- paintings, statues, plaques bearing his likeness.  Is Shaddam funneling too much money into such self-serving commissions?  They have sprouted up all over the Imperium."

"And someone keeps defacing them or knocking them down," the Carthag weapons-importer said with a snort.

Thinking of the Planetologist and his son next to her, Margot selected a sweet melange cake from the dessert tray.  Perhaps the guests had not heard the other rumors, that those benevolent gifts of artwork contained surveillance devices to monitor activities around the Imperium.  Such as the plaque on the wall right behind Ord.

"Shaddam desires to make his mark as our ruler, hmmm?" Fenring commented.  "I have known him for many years.  He wishes to separate himself from the policies of his father, who served for so interminably long."

"Perhaps, but he's neglecting the training of actual Sardaukar troops, while allowing the ranks of his generals . . . What are they called?"

"Bursegs," someone said.

"Yes, while allowing the ranks of his Bursegs to increase, with exorbitant pensions and other benefits.  Morale among the Sardaukar must be ebbing, as they are called upon to do more with fewer and fewer resources."

Margot noticed her husband had grown dangerously quiet.  Having narrowed his large eyes to slits, he was staring at the foolish drunk.

A woman whispered something to the Grumman ambassador.  He ran a finger over the lip of his wineglass.  "Oh yes, I apologize for stating the obvious to someone who knows our Emperor so well."

"You're an idiot, Ord," Narvi thundered, as if he'd been waiting for any chance to shout an insult.

"And you're a fool and a dead man."  The Grumman ambassador stood up, knocking his chair over behind him.  He moved too swiftly, too accurately.  Had his drunkenness all been an act, an excuse, just to provoke the man?

Lupino Ord drew a gleaming cutterdisk pistol and, with ear-piercing reports, fired it repeatedly at his adversary.  Had he planned this, provoking his Ecazi rival?  Cutterdisks tore Narvi's face and chest apart, killing him long before the poisons on the razor edges could have any effect.

Diners cried out and scattered in all directions.  Footmen grabbed the reeling ambassador and wrestled the expended weapon from him.  Margot sat frozen in place, more astonished than terrified.  What have I missed?  How deep does this animosity between Ecaz and House Moritani go?

"Lock him in one of the underground tunnels," Fenring commanded.  "Station a guard at all times."

"But I have diplomatic immunity!"  Ord protested, his voice squeakier now.  "You don't dare hold me."

"Never assume what I might dare."  The Count glanced at the shocked faces around him.  "I could simply allow my other guests to punish you, thus exercising their own . . . immunity, hmmm?"  Fenring waved an arm, and the sputtering man was taken away until protected passage back to Grumman could be arranged.

Medics hurried in, the same ones Fenring had seen earlier at the conservatory disaster.  Clearly, they could do nothing for the mutilated Ecazi ambassador.

Quite a body count around here today, Fenring mused.  And I didn't kill any of them.

"Hmmm-ah," he said to his wife, who stood by him.  "I fear this will become an . . . incident.  Archduke Ecaz is bound to issue a formal complaint, and there's no telling how Viscount Moritani will respond."

He commanded the footmen to remove Narvi's body from the hall.  Many of the guests had scattered to other rooms of the mansion.  "Shall we call people back?"  He squeezed his wife's hand.  "I hate to see the evening end like this.  Maybe we could bring in the Jongleurs, have them tell amusing stories."

Baron Harkonnen came up beside them, leaning on his wormhead cane.  "This is your jurisdiction, Count Fenring, not mine.  You send a report to the Emperor."

"I'll take care of it," Fenring said, tersely.  "I'm journeying to Kaitain on another matter, and I will provide Shaddam with the necessary details.  And the proper excuses."

In the days of Old Terra there were experts in poisons, deviously clever persons who dealt in what were known as "the powders of inheritance."

-Filmbook excerpt, Royal Library of Kaitain

GRINNING WITH PRIDE, Court Chamberlain Beely Ridondo marched through the doorway.  "Your Imperial Majesty, you have another new daughter.  Your wife has just delivered a fine and healthy girl."

Instead of rejoicing, Emperor Shaddam IV cursed under his breath and sent the man away.  That makes three!  What use is another daughter to me?

He was in a foul mood, worse than any since the struggles to remove his decrepit father from the Golden Lion Throne.  At a brisk pace Shaddam entered his private study, passing beneath an ancient plaque that read, "Law is the ultimate science" -- some nonsense from Crown Prince Raphael Corrino, a man who'd never even bothered to wear the Imperial crown.  He sealed the door behind him and thumped his angular frame into the textured, high-backed suspensor chair at his desk.

A man of middle height, Shaddam had a loosely muscled body and an aquiline nose.  His long nails were carefully manicured, his pomaded red hair combed straight back.  He wore a gray Sardaukar-style uniform with epaulets and silver-and-gold trim, but the military trappings no longer comforted him as they once had.

In addition to the birth of yet another daughter, he had much on his mind.  Recently, at a gala concert in one of the inverted-pyramid stadiums on Harmonthep, someone had released a giant inflated effigy of Shaddam IV.  Obscenely insulting, the gaudy caricature made him look like a buffoon.  The inflatable construction had drifted over the vast laughing crowds until the Harmonthep dragoon guards had shot it down in flaming tatters -- and any fool could see the symbolism in that act!  Despite the most rigorous crackdown and interrogation, even Sardaukar investigators were not able to determine who'd been responsible for creating or releasing the effigy.

In another incident, hundred-meter-high letters had been scrawled across the granite wall of Monument Canyon on Canidar II:  "Shaddam, does your crown rest comfortably on your pointy head?"  In scattered worlds across the Imperium, dozens of his new commemorative statues had been defaced.  Nobody had ever seen the perpetrators.

Someone hated him enough to do this.  Someone.  The question kept gnawing at his Imperial heart, along with other worries . . . including an impending visit from Hasimir Fenring to report on the secret synthetic spice experiments being conducted by the Tleilaxu.

Project Amal.

Initiated during his father's reign, this research was known to only a few.  Perhaps the most closely guarded secret in the Imperium, Project Amal could, if successful, give House Corrino a reliable, artificial source of melange, the most precious substance in the universe.  But the damned Tleilaxu experiments were taking years too long, and the situation upset him more and more with each passing month.

And now . . . a third cursed daughter!  He didn't know when -- or if -- he would bother to gaze upon this useless new girl-child.

Shaddam's gaze moved along the paneled wall, to a bookcase that contained a stand-up holophoto of Anirul in her wedding gown, shelved next to a thick reference volume of great historical disasters.  She had large doe eyes -- hazel in some light, darker at other times -- that concealed something.  He should have noticed before.

It was the third time this Bene Gesserit "of Hidden Rank" had failed to produce the required male heir, and Shaddam had made no contingency plans for such an eventuality.  His face grew hot.  He could always impregnate a few concubines and hope for a son, but while legally married to Anirul, he would face tremendous political difficulties if he attempted to declare a bastard his heir for the Imperial throne.

He could also kill Anirul and take another wife -- his father had done that enough times -- but such a course of action would risk the wrath of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood.  Everything could be solved if Anirul would just give him a son, a healthy male child he could call his heir.

All these months of waiting, and now this . . .

He'd heard that the witches could actually choose the gender of their children, through manipulations in body chemistry; these daughters could be no accident.  He'd been deceived by the Bene Gesserit power brokers who had foisted Anirul on him.  How dare they do that to the Emperor of a Million Worlds?  What was Anirul's true purpose in his royal household?  Was she gathering blackmail information to use against him?  Should he send her away?

He tapped a stylus on his blood-grained elacca wood desk, stared at an image of his paternal grandfather, Fondil III.  Commonly known as "the Hunter" for his propensity to attack every vestige of rebellion, Fondil had been no less feared in his own household.  Though the old man had died long before Shaddam's birth, he knew something of the Hunter's moods and methods.  Had Fondil been faced with an arrogant wife, he would have found a way to rid himself of her. . . .

Shaddam pressed a button on his desk, and his personal Chamberlain reentered the study.  Ridondo bowed, showing the gleaming top of his high forehead.  "Sire?"

"I wish to see Anirul now.  Here."

"The Lady is in bed, Sire."

"Don't make me repeat my order."

Without another word, Ridondo faded into the woodwork, disappearing through the side door with long, spidery movements.

Moments later a pale and overly perfumed lady-in-waiting arrived.  In a shaky voice, she said, "My Emperor, the Lady Anirul wishes me to convey that she is weakened from the birth of your child.  She begs your indulgence in permitting her to remain in bed.  Might it be possible for you to consider coming to visit her and the baby?"

"I see.  She begs my indulgence?  I am not interested in seeing another useless daughter, or in hearing further excuses.  This is a command from your Emperor:  Anirul is to come here now.  She is to do it alone, without the aid of any servant or mechanical device.  Is that understood?"

With any luck, she would drop dead along the way.

Terrified, the lady-in-waiting bowed.  "As you wish, Sire."

Presently, a gray-skinned Anirul stood in the doorway of his private study, holding tight to the fluted support column.  She wore a wrinkled scarlet-and-gold robe that did not entirely conceal the nightclothes underneath.  Though swaying on her feet, she held her head high.

"What do you have to say for yourself?" he demanded.

"I've just had a difficult childbirth, and I'm quite weak."

"Excuses, excuses.  You are intelligent enough to figure out what I mean.  You've been clever enough to fool me all these years."

"Fool you?"  She blinked her doe eyes at him as if he were out of his mind.  "Forgive me, Majesty, but I am tired.  Why must you be so cruel, calling me here like this and refusing to see our daughter?"

His lips were colorless, as if the blood had drained from them.  His eyes were flat pools.  "Because you could give me a male heir, but refuse to do so."

"There is no truth in that, Majesty, only rumors."  It required all of her Bene Gesserit training to remain standing.

"I listen to intelligence reports, not rumors."  The Emperor peered at her through one open eye, as if he could see her in more minute detail that way.  "Do you wish to die, Anirul?"

It occurred to Anirul that he might kill her after all.  There is certainly no love between us, but would he dare risk the Sisterhood's ire by disposing of me?  At the time of his ascension to the throne, Shaddam had agreed to marry her because he'd needed the strength of a Bene Gesserit alliance in the uneasy political climate.  Now, after a dozen years, Shaddam felt too confident in his position.  "Everyone dies," she said.

"But not the way I could arrange for you."

Anirul tried not to show emotion and reminded herself that she was not alone, that within her psyche were the collective memories of the multitudes of Bene Gesserit who had come before her and remained in Other Memory.  Her voice was utterly calm.  "We are not the complex, devious witches we're made out to be."  This was not true, of course, though she knew Shaddam couldn't possibly have more than suspicions to the contrary.

His demeanor didn't soften.  "What's more important to you . . . your Sisters or me?"

She shook her head in dismay.  "You have no right to ask me such a thing.  I've never given you any reason to feel I've been less than faithful to the crown."

Lifting her head proudly, Anirul reminded herself of her position in the long history of the Sisterhood.  She would never admit to him that she had orders from the Bene Gesserit hierarchy never to give birth to a Corrino son.  The wisdom of her Sisters echoed through her mind.  Love weakens.  It is dangerous, for it clouds reason and diverts us from our duties.  It is an aberration, a disgrace, an unforgivable infraction.  We cannot love.

Anirul tried to divert Shaddam's anger.  "Accept your daughter, Sire, for she can be used to cement important political alliances.  We should discuss her name.  What do you think of Wensicia?"

With sudden alarm she became aware of warm moisture on her inner thighs.  Blood?  Had the stitches broken?  Red droplets were falling onto the carpet.

Anirul saw him peering down at her feet.  New rage consumed the Emperor's features.  "That carpet has been in my family for centuries!"

Don't show weakness.  He's an animal . . . will attack weakness and back down from strength.  She turned slowly, allowing several more drops to fall, then staggered away.  "Given the history of House Corrino, I am certain that blood has been spilled on it before."

It is said that there is nothing firm, nothing balanced, nothing durable in all the universe -- that nothing remains in its original state, that each day, each hour, each moment, there is change.

-Panoplia Propheticus of the Bene Gesserit

ON THE RUGGED SHORE beneath Castle Caladan, a lone figure stood at the end of a long dock, profiled against the sea and the newly risen sun.  He had a narrow, olive-skinned face with a high-bridged nose, giving him the look of a hawk.

Out on the water, a fleet of fishing coracles was just departing, trailing wakes behind them.  Men in heavy sweaters, coats, and knit hats scrambled about on the cluttered decks, preparing their gear for the day.  In the village downshore, wisps of smoke rose above the chimneys.  Locals called it "old town," the site of the original settlement centuries before the elegant capital city and spaceport were built on the plain behind the Castle.

Duke Leto Atreides, dressed casually in blue fishing dungarees and a white tunic with a red hawk crest, took a deep breath of invigorating salt air.  Though he was master of House Atreides, representing Caladan to the Landsraad and the Emperor, Leto liked to rise early with the fishermen, many of whom he knew on a first-name basis.  Sometimes they invited the Duke to their homes, and despite the objections of his Security Commander, Thufir Hawat, who trusted no one, he occasionally joined them for a fine meal of cioppino.

The salt wind picked up, whipping the sea into dancing whitecaps.  He wished he could accompany the men, but his responsibilities were too great here.  And there were matters of importance beyond his world as well; he owed allegiance to the Imperium as well as the people he ruled, and he found himself thrust into the middle of great things.

The shocking murder of an Ecazi diplomat by a Grumman ambassador was no small matter, even on distant Arrakis, but Viscount Moritani didn't seem to care about public opinion.  Already the Great Houses were calling for Imperial intervention in order to avoid a larger conflict.  The day before, Leto had sent his own message to the Landsraad Council on Kaitain, volunteering his services as a mediator.

He was only twenty-six years old, but a veteran of a decade at the helm of a Great House.  He attributed his success to the fact that he had never lost touch with his roots.  For that, he could thank his late father, Paulus.  Ostensibly, the Old Duke had been an unpretentious man who mixed with his people, just as Duke Leto did now.  But his father must have known -- though he'd never admitted it to Leto -- that this was also a good political tactic, one that endeared the Duke to his people.  The requirements of the office made for a complex mixture; sometimes Leto couldn't tell where his personal and official personas began and left off.

Shortly after being thrust into his responsibilities, Leto Atreides had stunned the Landsraad with his dramatic Trial by Forfeiture, a bold gamble to escape being framed for an attack on two Tleilaxu ships inside a Guild Heighliner.  Leto's gambit had impressed many of the Great Houses, and he'd even received a congratulatory letter from Hundro Moritani, the puckish and unlikeable Viscount of Grumman, who often refused to cooperate -- or even participate -- in matters of the Imperium.  The Viscount said he admired Leto's "brash flouting of the rules," proving that "leadership is made by strong men with strong convictions, not clerks who study commas on lawslates."  Leto wasn't entirely sure that Moritani believed in his innocence; instead, he thought the Viscount simply enjoyed seeing Duke Atreides get away unpunished, against such insurmountable odds.

On the other side of the dispute, Leto had a connection to House Ecaz as well.  The Old Duke, his father, had been one of the great heroes in the Ecazi Revolt, battling beside Dominic Vernius to overthrow violent secessionists and defend the Landsraad-sanctioned rulers of the forested world.  Paulus Atreides himself had stood beside the grateful young Archduke Armand Ecaz during the victory ceremony that restored him to the Mahogany Throne.  Somewhere among the Old Duke's possessions lay the Chain of Bravery that Armand Ecaz had placed around Paulus's thick neck.  And the lawyers who had represented Leto during his Landsraad trial had come from the Ecazi region of Elacca.

Since he was respected by both parties in the feud, Leto thought he might make them see a way to peace.  Politics!  His father had always taught him to be careful to consider the whole picture, from the tiniest to the largest elements.

From his tunic pocket Leto brought out a voicescriber and dictated a letter to his cousin, Shaddam IV, congratulating him on the joyous birth of another child.  The message would be sent by official Courier on the next Guild Heighliner departing for Kaitain.

When Leto could no longer hear the putt-putting of the fishing boats, he hiked up the steep zigzag path that led to the top of the cliff.

HE SHARED A BREAKFAST in the courtyard with twenty-year-old Duncan Idaho.  The round-faced young man wore a green-and-black Atreides trooper uniform.  His wiry dark hair had been cropped short, out of his eyes for vigorous weapons training.  Thufir Hawat had spent a lot of time with him, proclaiming him to be a particularly skilled student.  But Duncan had already reached the limits of what the warrior Mentat could teach him.

As a boy, he had escaped from Harkonnen bondage to Castle Caladan, where he'd thrown himself upon the mercy of the Old Duke.  As he grew up, Duncan remained one of the most loyal members of the Atreides household, and certainly the best weapons trainee.  Longtime military allies of House Atreides, the Swordmasters of Ginaz had recently granted Duncan Idaho admission into their renowned academy.

"I will be sorry to see you go, Duncan," Leto told him.  "Eight years is a long time. . . ."

Duncan sat straight, showing no fear.  "But when I return, my Duke, I will be better able to serve you in all ways.  I'll still be young, and no one will dare threaten you."

"Oh, they'll still threaten me, Duncan.  Make no mistake about that."

The young man paused before giving him a thin, hard smile.  "Then they will be making the mistake.  Not me."  He lifted a slice of paradan melon to his mouth, took a bite of the yellow fruit, and wiped away the salty juice that ran down his chin.  "I am going to miss these melons.  Barracks food can't compare."  He cut his portion into smaller sections.

Bougainvillea vines trailed up the stone walls around them, but it was still winter and the plants were flowerless.  With unseasonable warmth and predictions of an early spring, though, buds had already begun to appear on trees.  Leto gave a contented sigh.  "I've seen no more beautiful place in all the vast reaches of the Imperium than Caladan in the spring."

"Certainly, Giedi Prime can't compare."  Duncan raised his guard, uneasy to see how relaxed and content Leto appeared.  "We must remain constantly on the alert, my Duke, not permitting the slightest weakness.  Never forget the ancient feud between Atreides and Harkonnen."

"Now you sound like Thufir."  Leto scooped up a sweet mouthful of his pundi rice pudding.  "I'm sure there is no finer man than you in the service of the Atreides, Duncan.  But I fear we may be creating a monster in sending you away for eight years of training.  What will you be when you return?"

Pride infused the young man's deeply set blue-green eyes.  "I will be a Swordmaster of the Ginaz."

For a long moment, Leto thought of the extreme dangers at the school.  Nearly a third of all students died during training.  Duncan had laughed off the statistics, saying he had already survived far worse odds against the Harkonnens.  And he was right.

"I know you will succeed," Leto said.  He felt a thickness in his throat, a deep sadness at letting Duncan go.  "But you must never forget compassion.  No matter what you learn, don't come back here with the attitude that you're better than other men."

"I won't, my Duke."

Leto reached under the table and brought out a long, thin parcel and passed it across the table.  "This is why I asked you to join me for breakfast."

Surprised, Duncan opened it and removed an ornately carved ceremonial sword.  He gripped the inlaid rope pattern of the pommel.  "The Old Duke's sword!  You're lending it to me?"

"Giving it to you, my friend.  Remember when I found you in the weapons hall, just after my father died in the bullring?  You had taken this sword from the display rack.  It was nearly as tall as you were then, but now you've grown into it."

Duncan could find no words to thank him.

Leto looked the young man up and down, appraising him. "I believe if my father had lived to see the man you've become, he might have given it to you himself.  You're grown now, Duncan Idaho -- worthy of a Duke's sword."

"Good morning," a cheerful voice said.  Prince Rhombur Vernius sauntered into the courtyard, still bleary-eyed but dressed.  The firejewel ring on his right hand gleamed in stray sunlight.  His sister Kailea walked beside him, her coppery hair held back by a golden clasp.  Rhombur glanced from the sword to the tears brimming in Duncan's eyes.  "What's going on here?"

"Giving Duncan a going-away present."

Rhombur whistled.  "Pretty fancy for a stableboy."

"Perhaps the gift is too much," Duncan said, looking at Duke Leto.  He stared at the sword, then glared at Rhombur.  "I'll never work in the stables again, though, Prince Vernius.  The next time you see me I'll be a Swordmaster."

"The sword is yours, Duncan," Leto said in his firmest tone, one he had copied from his father.  "There will be no further discussion of the matter."

"As you wish, my Duke." Duncan bowed.  "I beg to be excused, to prepare for my trip."  The young man strode across the courtyard.

Rhombur and Kailea sat at the table, where their breakfast plates had been set up.  Kailea smiled at Leto, but not in her customary warm fashion.  For years, the pair had been tiptoeing around romantic involvement, with the Duke unwilling to get any closer because of political concerns, his need to wed the daughter of a powerful Great House.  His reasons were strictly those his father had drilled into him, a Duke's responsibility to the people of Caladan.  Only once had Leto and Kailea held hands; he had never even kissed her.

Lowering her voice, Kailea said, "Your father's sword, Leto?  Was that really necessary?  It's so valuable."

"But only an object, Kailea.  It means more to Duncan than to me.  I don't need a sword to retain fond memories of my father."  Then Leto noted the blond stubble on his friend's face, which made Rhombur look more like a fisherman than a Prince.  "When was the last time you shaved?"

"Vermilion hells!  What difference does it make how I look?"  He took a drink of cidrit juice, puckered his lips at the tartness.  "It's not as if I have anything important to do."

Kailea, eating quickly and quietly, studied her brother.  She had penetrating green eyes; her catlike mouth was turned down in disapproval.

As Leto looked across the table at Rhombur, he noted that his friend's face still retained a childlike roundness, but the brown eyes were no longer bright.  Instead they revealed deep sadness over the loss of his home, the murder of his mother, the disappearance of his father.  Now only he and his sister remained of their once-great family.

"Makes no difference, I suppose," Leto said.  "We have no affairs of state to conduct today, no trips to glorious Kaitain.  In fact, you may as well stop bathing altogether."  Leto stirred his bowl of pundi rice pudding, then his voice became uncharacteristically sharp.  "Nonetheless, you remain a member of my court -- and one of my most trusted advisors.  By now, I'd hoped you might develop a plan to regain your lost holdings and position."

As a constant reminder of the glory days of Ix, when House Vernius had ruled the machine world before the Tleilaxu takeover, Rhombur still wore the purple-and-copper helix on the collar of every shirt.  Leto noted that the shirt Rhombur wore was badly wrinkled and needed to be washed.

"Leto, if I had any idea what to do, I would jump on the next Heighliner and try."  He looked flustered.  "The Tleilaxu have sealed Ix behind impenetrable barricades.  Do you want Thufir Hawat to send in more spies?  The first three never found their way underground to the cavern city, and the last two vanished without a trace."  He tapped his fingers together.  "I just have to hope the loyal Ixians are fighting from within and will soon overthrow the invaders.  I expect everything will turn out all right."

"My friend, the optimist," Leto said.

Kailea scowled at her breakfast and finally spoke up.  "It's been a dozen years, Rhombur.  How long does it take for everything to magically fix itself?"

Uncomfortable, her brother tried to change the subject.  "Have you heard that Shaddam's wife just gave birth to their third daughter?"

Kailea snorted.  "Knowing Shaddam, I'll bet he's none too pleased that it wasn't a male heir."

Leto refused to accept such negative thoughts.  "He's probably ecstatic, Kailea.  Besides, his wife still has many childbearing years left."  He turned to Rhombur.  "Which makes me think, old friend -- you should take a wife."

"To keep me clean and make sure I shave?"

"To begin your House again, perhaps.  To continue the Vernius bloodline with an heir in exile."

Kailea almost said something, seemed to have second thoughts.  She finished a melon, nibbled on a piece of toast.  Presently she rose and excused herself from the table.

During the long silence, tears glistened on the lower lids of the Ixian Prince's eyes, then rolled down his cheeks.  Embarrassed, he wiped them away.  "Yes. I've been thinking about that myself.  How did you know?"

"You've told me so more than once, after we've shared two or three bottles of wine."

"The whole thing is a crazy idea.  My House is dead, and Ix is in the hands of fanatics."

"So, start a new House Minor on Caladan, a new family trade.  We could look over the list of industries and see what's needed.  Kailea has plenty of business sense.  I'll provide the resources you need to get established."

Rhombur allowed himself a bittersweet laugh.  "My fortunes will always remain closely allied with yours, Duke Leto Atreides.  No, I'd better remain here to watch your backside, making sure you don't give the whole Castle away."

Leto nodded without smiling, and they clasped hands in the half handshake of the Imperium.

Nature commits no errors; right and wrong are human categories.

-PARDOT KYNES, Arrakis Lectures

MONOTONOUS DAYS.  The three-man Harkonnen patrol cruised over the golden swells of dunes along a thousand-kilometer flight path.  In the unrelenting desert landscape, even a puff of dust caused excitement.

The troopers flew their armored ornithopter in a long circle, skirting mountains, then curving south over great pans and flatlands.  Glossu Rabban, the Baron's nephew and temporary governor of Arrakis, had ordered them to fly regularly, to be seen -- to show the squalid settlements that Harkonnens were watching.  Always.

Kiel, the sidegunner, considered the assignment a license to hunt any Fremen found wandering near legitimate spice-harvesting operations.  What made those dirty wanderers think they could trespass on Harkonnen lands without permission from the district office in Carthag?  But few Fremen were ever caught abroad in daylight, and the task had grown dull.

Garan flew the 'thopter, rising up and dipping down to catch thermals, as if operating an amusement ride.  He maintained a stoic expression, though occasionally a grin stole across his lips as the craft bucked and jostled in rough air.  As they completed their fifth day on patrol, he continued to mark discrepancies on topographical maps, muttering in disgust each time he found another mistake.  These were the worst charts he had ever used.

In the back passenger compartment sat Josten, recently transferred from Giedi Prime.  Accustomed to industrial facilities, gray skies, and dirty buildings, Josten gazed out over the sandy wastelands, studying hypnotic dune patterns.  He spotted the knot of dust off to the south, deep in the open Funeral Plain.  "What's that?  Spice-harvesting operation?"

"Not a chance," the sidegunner Kiel said.  "Harvesters shoot a plume like a cone into the air, straight and thin."

"Too low for a dust devil.  Too small."  With a shrug, Garan jerked the 'thopter controls and soared toward the low, reddish-brown cloud.  "Let's take a look."  After so many tedious days, they would have gone out of their way to investigate a large rock sticking out of the sand. . . .

When they reached the site, they found no tracks, no machinery, no sign of human presence -- and yet acres of desert looked devastated.  A mottled rust color stained the sands a darker ocher, as if blood from a wound had dried in the hot sun.

"Looks like somebody dropped a bomb here," Kiel said.

"Could be the aftermath of a spice blow," Garan suggested.  "I'll set down for a closer look."

As the 'thopter settled on the churned sands, Kiel popped open the hatch.  The temperature-controlled atmosphere hissed out, replaced by a wave of heat.  He coughed dust.

Garan leaned over from the cockpit and sniffed hard.  "Smell it."  The odor of burned cinnamon struck his nostrils.  "Spice blow for sure."

Josten squeezed past Kiel and dropped onto the soft ground.  Amazed, he bent down, picked up a handful of ocher sand and touched it to his lips.  "Can we scoop up some fresh spice and take it back?  Must be worth a fortune."

Kiel had been thinking the same thing, but now he turned to the newcomer with scorn.  "We don't have the processing equipment.  You need to separate it from the sand, and you can't do that with your fingers."

Garan spoke in a quieter, but firmer voice.  "If you went back to Carthag and tried to sell raw product to a street vendor, you'd be hauled in front of Governor Rabban -- or worse yet, have to explain to Count Fenring how some of the Emperor's spice ended up in a patrolman's pockets."

As the troopers tromped out to the ragged pit at the center of the dissipating dust cloud, Josten glanced around.  "Is it safe for us to be here?  Don't the big worms go to spice?"

"Afraid, kid?" Kiel asked.

"Let's throw him to a worm if we see one," Garan Suggested.  "It'll give us time to get away."

Kiel saw movement in the sandy excavation, shapes squirming, buried things that tunneled and burrowed, like maggots in rotten meat.  Josten opened his mouth to say something, then clamped it shut again.

A whiplike creature emerged from the sand, two meters long with fleshy segmented skin.  It was the size of a large snake, its mouth an open circle glittering with needle-sharp teeth that lined its throat.

"A sandworm!"  Josten said.

"Only a runt," Kiel scoffed.

"Newborn -- do you think?" Garan asked.

The worm waved its eyeless head from side to side.  Other slithering creatures, a nest of them, squirmed about as if they'd been spawned in the explosion.

"Where in the hells did they come from?" Kiel asked.

"Wasn't in my briefing," Garan said.

"Can we . . . catch one?"  Josten asked.

Kiel stopped himself from making a rude rejoinder, realizing that the young recruit did have a good idea.  "Come on!"  He charged forward into the churned sand.

The worm sensed the movement and reared back, uncertain whether to attack or flee.  Then it arced like a sea serpent and plunged into the sand, wriggling and burrowing.

Josten sprinted ahead and dove facefirst to grasp the segmented body three-quarters of the way to its end.  "It's so strong!"  Following him, the sidegunner jumped down and grabbed the thrashing tail.

The worm tried to tug away, but Garan reached the front, where he dug into the sand and grabbed behind its head with a stranglehold.  All three troopers wrestled and pulled.  The small worm thrashed like an eel on an electric plate.

Other sandworms on the far side of the pit rose like a strange forest of periscopes sprouting from the sea of dunes, round mouths like black Os turned toward the men.  For an icy moment, Kiel feared they might attack like a swarm of marrow leeches, but the immature worms darted away and disappeared underground.

Garan and Kiel hauled their captive out of the sand and dragged it toward the ornithopter.  As a Harkonnen patrol, they had all the equipment necessary to arrest criminals, including old-fashioned devices for trussing a captive like a herd animal.  "Josten, go get the binding cords in our apprehension kit," the pilot said.

The new recruit came running back with the cords, fashioning a loop which he slipped over the worm's head and cinched tight.  Garan released his hold on the rubbery skin and grabbed the rope, tugging while Josten slipped a second cord lower on the body.

"What are we going to do with it?" Josten asked.

Once, early in his assignment on Arrakis, Kiel had joined Rabban on an abortive worm hunt.  They had taken a Fremen guide, well-armed troops, even a Planetologist.  Using the Fremen guide as bait, they had lured one of the enormous sandworms and killed it with explosives.  But before Rabban could take his trophy, the beast had dissolved, sloughing into amoeba-creatures that fell to the sand, leaving nothing but a cartilaginous skeleton and loose crystal teeth.  Rabban had been furious.

Kiel's stomach knotted.  The Baron's nephew might consider it an insult that three simple patrolmen could capture a worm, when he'd been unable to do so himself.  "We'd better drown it."

"Drown it?" Josten said.  "What for?  And why would I want to waste my water ration to do that?"

Garan stopped as if struck by a thunderbolt.  "I've heard the Fremen do it.  If you drown a baby worm, they say it spits out some kind of poison.  It's very rare."

Kiel nodded.  "Oh, yeah.  The crazy desert people use it in their religious rituals.  It sends everybody into frenzied, wild orgies, and a lot of them die."

"But . . . we've only got two literjons of water in the compartment," Josten said, still nervous.

"Then we only use one.  I know where we can refill it, anyway."  The pilot and his sidegunner exchanged glances.  They had patrolled together long enough that they'd both thought of the same thing.

As if understanding its fate, the worm bucked and thrashed even more, but it was already growing weaker.

"Once we get the drug," Kiel said, "let's have some fun."

AT NIGHT, with the patrol 'thopter running in stealth mode, they flew over the razor-edged mountains, approaching from behind a ridge and landing on a rough mesa above the squalid village of Bilar Camp.  The villagers lived in hollowed-out caves and aboveground structures that extended out to the flats.  Windmills generated power; supply bins glittered with tiny lights that attracted a few moths and the bats that fed on them.

Unlike the reclusive Fremen, these villagers were slightly more civilized but also more downtrodden:  men who worked as desert guides and joined spice-harvesting crews.  They had forgotten how to survive on their world without becoming parasites upon the planetary governors.

On an earlier patrol, Kiel and Garan had discovered a camouflaged cistern on the mesa, a treasure trove of water.  Kiel didn't know where the villagers had gotten so much moisture; most likely, they had committed fraud, inflating their census numbers so that Harkonnen generosity provided more than they deserved.

The people of Bilar Camp covered the cistern with rock so that it looked like a natural protrusion, but the villagers placed no guards around their illegal stockpile.  For some reason desert culture forbade thievery even more than murder; they trusted the safety of their possessions from bandits or thieves of the night.

Of course, the Harkonnen troopers had no intention of stealing the water -- that is, no more than enough for their own needs.

Dutifully, Josten trotted along with their sloshing container, which held the thick, noxious substance exuded by the drowned worm after it had stopped thrashing and bucking inside the container.  Awed and nervous about what they'd done, they'd dumped the flaccid carcass near the perimeter of the spice blow and then taken off with the drug.  Kiel had been concerned that the toxic exhalation from the worm might eat its way through the literjon.

Garan operated the Bilar cistern's cleverly concealed spigot and refilled one of their empty containers.  No sense in letting all the water go to waste just for a practical joke on the villagers.  Next, Kiel took the container of worm bile and upended it into the cistern.  The villagers would certainly have a surprise next time they all drank from their illegal water hoard.  "Serves them right."

"Do you know what this drug will do to them?"  Josten asked.

Garan shook his head.  "I've heard plenty of crazy stories."

"Maybe we should make the kid try it first," the sidegunner said.

Josten backed away, raising his hands.  Garan looked at the contaminated cistern again.  "I bet they tear off their clothes and dance naked in the streets, squawking like dinfowl."

"Let's stay here and watch the fun for ourselves," Kiel said.

Garan frowned.  "Do you want to be the one to explain to Rabban why we're late returning from patrol?"

"Let's go," Kiel answered quickly.

As the worm-poison infused the cistern, the Harkonnen troopers hurried back to their ornithopter, reluctantly content to let the villagers discover the prank for themselves.

Before us, all methods of learning were tainted by instinct.  Before us, instinct-ridden researchers possessed a limited attention span -- often no longer than a single lifetime.  Projects stretching across fifty or more generations never occurred to them.  The concept of total muscle/nerve training had not entered their awareness.  We learned how to learn.

-Bene Gesserit Azhar Book

IS THIS TRULY A SPECIAL CHILD?  The Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam watched the perfectly proportioned girl perform prana-bindu muscular-nervature exercises on the hardwood floor of the Mother School's training module.

Recently returned from the abortive banquet on Arrakis, Mohiam tried to look at her student with impartiality, suppressing the truth.  Jessica.  My own daughter . . .  The girl must never know her heritage, must never suspect.  Even on the secret Bene Gesserit breeding charts, Mohiam was not identified by her Sisterhood-adopted name, but by her birth name of "Tanidia Nerus."

Twelve-year-old Jessica stood poised, arms at her sides, trying to relax herself, trying to arrest the movement of every muscle in her body.  Gripping an imaginary blade in her right hand, she stared straight ahead at a chimerical opponent.  She summoned untapped depths of inner peace and concentration.

But Mohiam's sharp eye noted the barely discernible twitches in Jessica's calf muscles, around her neck, over one eyebrow.  This one would need more practice in order to perfect the techniques, but the child had made excellent progress and showed great promise.  Jessica was blessed with a supreme patience, an ability to calm herself and listen to what she was told.

So focused, this one . . . so full of potential.  As she was bred to be.

Jessica feinted to the left, floated, whirled -- then stiffened to become a sudden statue again.  Her eyes, while looking at Mohiam, did not see her taskmistress and mentor.

The stern Reverend Mother entered the training module, stared into the girl's clear green eyes, and saw an emptiness there, like the gaze of a corpse.  Jessica was gone, lost among her nerve and muscle fibers.

Mohiam dampened a finger and placed it in front of the girl's nose.  She felt only the faintest stirring of air.  The budding breasts on the slender torso barely moved.  Jessica was close to a complete bindu suspension . . . but not quite.

Much hard work remains.

In the Sisterhood, only total perfection was good enough.  As Jessica's instructor, Mohiam would go over the ancient routines again and again, reviewing the steps that must be followed.

The Reverend Mother pulled back, studying Jessica but not rousing her.  In the girl's oval face, she tried to identify her own features, or those of the father, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen:  The long neck and small nose reflected Mohiam's genetics, but the widow's peak at the hairline, the wide mouth, generous lips, and clear skin derived from the Baron . . . back when he'd been healthy and attractive.  Jessica's widely set green eyes and hair the color of polished bronze came from more distant latencies.

If you only knew.  Mohiam recalled what she'd been told of the Bene Gesserit plan.  Jessica's own daughter, when grown to womanhood, was destined to give birth to the Kwisatz Haderach -- the culmination of millennia of careful breeding.  Mohiam looked into the girl's face, searching for any twitch, any hint of grand historical import.  You are not ready to discover this yet.

Jessica began to speak, mouthing word-shapes as she recited a mantra as ancient as the Bene Gesserit School itself:  "Each attacker is a feather drifting on an infinite path.  As the feather approaches, it is diverted and removed.  My response is a puff of air that blows the feather away."

Mohiam stepped back as her daughter snapped into a blur of motion, attempting to float through reflex moves.  But Jessica still struggled to force her muscles to flow silently and smoothly, when she should have allowed them to do so.

The girl's movements were better than before, more focused and precise.  Jessica's recent progress had been impressive, as if she'd experienced a mind-clarifying epiphany that lifted her to the next level.  However, Mohiam still detected too much youthful energy and unharnessed intensity.

This girl was the product of a vicious rape by Baron Harkonnen, after the Sisterhood had blackmailed him into providing them with a daughter.  Mohiam had exacted her revenge during the sexual attack, controlling her internal body chemistry in the Bene Gesserit way, inflicting him with a painful, debilitating disease.  Such a delightfully slow torture.  As his ailment progressed, the Baron had relied on a cane for the past Standard Year.  At the Fenrings' banquet, she'd been sorely tempted to tell the gross man what she'd done to him.

But if Mohiam had told him, there would have been another act of violence in the Dining Hall of the Residency at Arrakeen, far worse than the squabble between the Ecazi and Grumman ambassadors.  She might even have found it necessary to kill the Baron with her deadly fighting skills.  Jessica herself, despite her limited training, could have dispatched the man -- her own father -- quickly and easily.

Hearing a whir of machinery, Mohiam watched a life-size doll emerge from the floor.  The next phase of the routine.  In a blur the girl whirled and decapitated it with a single slashing kick.

"More finesse.  The killing touch must be delicate, precise."

"Yes, Reverend Mother."

"Still, I am proud of what you have accomplished."  Mohiam spoke in an uncharacteristically gentle tone, one that her superiors would not condone, had they heard it.  Love, in any form, was prohibited.

"The Sisterhood has great plans for you, Jessica."

"Xuttuh" is a word that means many things.  Every Bene Tleilax knows it was the name of the first Master.  But just as that man was more than a mere mortal, so there are depths and complexities in the appellation.  Depending upon tone and vocal inflection, "Xuttuh" can mean "hello" or "blessings be upon you."  Or it can constitute a prayer encompassed in a single word, as a devotee prepares to die for the Great Belief.  For such reasons, we have chosen this as our new name for the conquered planet formerly known as Ix.

-Tleilaxu Training Disk

A CONTINGENCY PLAN is only as good as tile mind that devises it.

Deep in the labyrinthine research pavilion, Hidar Fen Ajidica understood that maxim only too well.  One day, the Emperor's man would attempt to kill him; therefore, careful defensive preparations were necessary.

"This way, please, Count Fenring," Ajidica said in his most pleasant voice while thinking, Unclean powindah.  He glanced peripherally at the man.  I should slay you now!

But the Master Researcher could not accomplish this safely, and might never have the proper opportunity.  Even if he did succeed, the Emperor would send in his investigators and even more Sardaukar troops to interfere with the delicate work.

"It is good to hear that you are finally making progress on Project Amal.  Elrood IX did commission it over a dozen years ago, hmmmm?"  Fenring strolled along a featureless corridor in the underground city.  He wore a scarlet Imperial jacket and tight-fitting gold trousers.  His dark hair was razor-cut, sticking out in patches to emphasize his overlarge head.  "We have been extremely patient."

Ajidica wore a white lab coat with ample pockets.  Chemical odors clung to the fabric, his hair, his corpselike gray skin.  "I warned all of you in the beginning that it could take many years to develop a completed product.  A dozen years is a mere eyeblink to develop a substance the Imperium has wanted for centuries upon centuries."  His nostrils narrowed as he forced a thin smile.

"Nevertheless, I am pleased to report that our modified axlotl tanks have now been grown, that preliminary experiments have been conducted, and the data analyzed.  Based on this, we have discarded unworkable solutions, thus narrowing down the remaining possibilities."

"The Emperor is not interested in 'narrowed possibilities,' Master Researcher, but in results."  Fenring's voice was frozen acid.  "Your expenses have been immense, even after we financed your takeover of Ixian facilities."

"Our records would stand up to any audit, Count Fenring," Ajidica said.  He knew full well that Fenring could never allow a Guild Banker to look at the expenditures; the Spacing Guild, more than any other entity, must not suspect the aim of this project.  "All funds have been properly applied.  All spice stockpiles are accounted for, exactly according to our original agreement."

"Your agreement was with Elrood, little man, not with Shaddam, hmmmm?  The Emperor can stop your experiments at any moment."

Like all Tleilaxu, Ajidica was accustomed to being insulted and provoked by fools; he refused to take offense.  "An interesting threat, Count Fenring, considering that you personally initiated the contact between my people and Elrood.  We have recordings, back on the Tleilaxu homeworlds."

Fenring bristled, and pushed ahead, deeper into the research pavilion.  "Just by observing you, Master Researcher, I have learned something," he said in an oily voice.  "You have developed a phobia of being underground, hmmm?  The fear came upon you recently, a sudden onslaught."

"Nonsense."  Despite his denial, sweat broke out on Ajidica's forehead.

"Ah, but I detect something mendacious in your voice and expression.  You take medication for the condition . . . a bottle of pills in the right pocket of your jacket.  I see the bulge."

Trying to conceal his rage, Ajidica stammered, "I am in perfect health."

"Hm-m-m-ah, I would say that your continued health depends upon how well things are going here.  The sooner you complete Project Amal, the sooner you will be able to breathe fresh air again back on beautiful Tleilax.  When was the last time you were there?"

"A long time ago," Ajidica admitted.  "You cannot know what it looks like.  No powin" -- he caught himself -- "no outsider has ever been permitted beyond the spaceport."

Fenring simply answered with a maddening, too-knowing smile.  "Just show me what you have done here, so that I can report to Shaddam."

At a doorway Ajidica raised his arm to block Fenring's passage.  The Tleilaxu closed his eyes and reverently kissed the door.  The brief ritual deactivated the deadly security systems, and the door melted into narrow cracks in the wall.

"You may enter safely now."  Ajidica stepped aside to let Fenring cross into a white smoothplaz room, where the Master Researcher had set up a number of demonstrations to show the progress of the experiments.  In the center of the enormous oval room sat a high-resolution microscope, a metal rack containing laboratory bottles and vials, and a red table holding a dome-shaped object.  Ajidica saw intense interest in Fenring's overlarge eyes as he approached the demonstration area.  "Don't touch anything, please."Subtle treacheries hung thick in the air, and this Imperial powindah would never see or comprehend them until it was too late.  Ajidica intended to solve the riddle of the artificial spice, then escape with the sacred axlotl tanks to a safe planet in the farthest reaches of the Imperium.  He had made a number of clever arrangements without revealing his identity, using promises and bribes, transferring funds . . . all without the knowledge of his superiors on the Bene Tleilax homeworlds.  He was alone in this.

He had decided that there were heretics among his own people, followers who had adopted their identity as downtrodden scapegoats so well that they had forgotten the heart of the Great Belief.  It was like a Face Dancer who had disguised himself so well, he had forgotten who he truly was.  If Ajidica meekly allowed such people access to his great discovery of amal, they would surrender the one thing that would gain them the supremacy they deserved.

Ajidica planned to continue in his role, until he was ready.  And then he could take the artificial spice, control it himself, and help his people and their mission . . . whether they wanted him to or not.

Count Fenring murmured as he leaned close to the dome-shape on the table.  "Most intriguing.  Something is inside, I presume, hmmm-ah?"

"Something is inside of everything," Ajidica replied.

He smiled inwardly as he imagined a glut of artificial spice flowing into the interplanetary marketplace, wreaking economic havoc within CHOAM and the Landsraad.  Like a tiny leak in a dam, a bit of inexpensive melange would ultimately become a raging torrent to turn the Imperium upside down.  If played right, Ajidica would be the kingpin of the new economic and political order -- not to serve himself, of course, but to serve God.

The magic of our God is our salvation.

Ajidica smiled at Count Fenring, revealing sharp teeth.  "Rest assured, Count Fenring, our goals in this matter are mutual."

In time, wealthy beyond imagining, Ajidica would develop tests to determine loyalty to his new regime, and he would begin assimilating the Bene Tleilax.  Though it was too dangerous to bring them into his scheme now, he had several candidates in mind.  With proper military support -- perhaps even converts among the Sardaukar stationed here? -- he might even set up headquarters in the lovely capital city of Bandalong. . . .

Fenring continued to snoop at the demonstration equipment.  "Have you ever heard the saying 'Trust but verify'?  It's from Old Terra.  You'd be surprised at the little tidbits I pick up.  My Bene Gesserit wife collects objects, knickknacks and the like.  I collect pieces of information."

The Tleilaxu's narrow face twisted into a frown.  "I see."  He needed to finish this annoying inspection as quickly as possible.  "If you will look over here, please."  Ajidica removed an opaque plaz vial from the rack and lifted the lid, letting out a strong odor reminiscent of raw ginger, bergamot, and clove.  He passed the container to Fenring, who peered at a thick, orangish substance.

"Not quite melange," Ajidica said, "though chemically it has many spice precursors."  He poured the syrup on a scanning plate, inserted it into the microscope reader, then beckoned Fenring to look through the eyepiece.  The Count saw elongated molecules connected to one another like the strands of a cable.

"An unusual protein chain," the Master Researcher said.  "We are close to a breakthrough."

"How close?"

"The Tleilaxu also have sayings, Count Fenring:  'The closer one gets to a goal, the farther off it appears to be.'  In matters of scientific research, time has a way of stretching.  Only God possesses intimate knowledge of the future.  The breakthrough could occur in a matter of days, or years."

"Double-talk," Fenring muttered.  He fell silent when Ajidica pressed a button at the base of the dome.

The foggy surface of the plaz cleared, revealing sand on the bottom of the container.  The Tleilaxu researcher pressed another button, filling the interior with a fine dust.  The sand moved, a tiny mound in motion that surfaced, like a fish emerging from murky water.  A worm-shape the size of a small snake, it was a little over half a meter in length, with tiny crystal teeth.

"Sandworm, immature form," Ajidica said, "nineteen days from Arrakis.  We don't expect it to survive much longer."

From the top of the dome, a box dropped to the sand on a hidden suspensor, then opened to reveal more of the glistening orange gelatin.  "Amal 1522.16," Ajidica said.  "One of our many variations -- the best we've developed so far."

Fenring watched as the mouth of the immature worm quested left and right, revealing glimmering thorns far back in its gullet.  The creature slithered toward the orange substance, then stopped in confusion and didn't touch it.  Presently it turned and burrowed back into the sand.

"What is the relationship between the sandworms and the spice?"  Fenring asked.

"If we knew that, we would have the puzzle solved.  If I were to put real spice in that enclosure, the worm would consume it in a primal frenzy.  Still, though the worm can identify the difference, at least it did approach the sample.  We tempted the beast, but did not satisfy it."

"Nor did your little demonstration satisfy me.  I am told that there continues to be an Ixian underground movement, causing difficulties.  Shaddam is concerned about interference with his most important plan."

"A few rebels, Count Fenring -- inadequately funded, with limited resources.  Nothing to worry about." Ajidica rubbed his hands together.

"But they have sabotaged your communications systems and destroyed a number of facilities, hmmm?"

"The death throes of House Vernius, no more.  It has been well over a decade, and soon it will die down.  They cannot get near this research pavilion."

"Well, your security worries are over, Master Researcher.  The Emperor has agreed to dispatch two additional legions of Sardaukar, as peacekeepers, led by Bashar Cando Garon, one of our best."

A look of alarm and surprise came over the diminutive Tleilaxu.  His pinched face reddened.  "But that isn't necessary, sir.  The half legion already in place is more than sufficient."

"The Emperor does not agree.  These troops will emphasize the importance of your experiments to him.  Shaddam will do anything to protect the amal program, but his patience has run out."  The Count's eyes narrowed.  "You should think of this as good news."

"Why is that?  I do not understand."

"Because the Emperor has not yet ordered your execution."

A center for the coordination of rebellion can be mobile; it does not need to be a permanent place where people meet.

-CAMMAR PILRU, Ixian Ambassador in Exile:  Treatise on the Downfall of Unjust Governments

THE TLEILAXU INVADERS had instituted a brutal curfew for anyone not assigned to the late work shift.  For C'tair Pilru, slipping away to attend the hushed rebellion meetings was just another way to thumb his nose at their restrictions.

At the freedom fighters' irregular, carefully guarded gatherings, C'tair could finally remove his masks and disguises.  He became the person he once had been, the person he remained inside.

Knowing he'd be killed if caught, the short, dark-haired man approached the meeting place.  He clung to oily night shadows between blocky buildings on the cavern floor, making no sound.  The Tleilaxu had restored the projected sky on the cavern ceiling, but they had reconfigured the sparkle of stars to show the constellations over their own homeworlds.  Here on Ix, even the heavens were wrong.

This was not the glorious place it should be, but a hellish prison beneath the surface of the planet.  We will change all that.  Someday.

During more than a decade of repression, black marketeers and revolutionaries had built their secret network.  The scattered resistance groups interacted to exchange supplies, equipment, and information.  But each gathering made C'tair nervous.  If they were caught together, the fledgling rebellion could be snuffed out in a few moments of lasgun fire.

When possible, he preferred to work alone -- as he had always done. Trusting no one, he never divulged details of his surreptitious life, not even to other rebels.  He'd made private contacts with rare off-worlders at the port-of-entry canyon -- openings and landing pads in the sheer cliff wall where carefully guarded ships hauled Tleilaxu products to waiting Heighliners in orbit.

The Imperium required vital items of Ixian technology, which were now manufactured under Tleilaxu control.  The invaders needed the profits to finance their own work, and they could not risk outside scrutiny.  Although they could not seal Ix completely away from the rest of the Imperium, the Tleilaxu used the services of very few outsiders.

Sometimes, under the direst of circumstances and at great risk to himself, C'tair could bribe one of the transport laborers to skim a shipment or snag a vital component.  Other black marketeers had their own contacts, but they refused to share that information with each other.  It was safer that way.

Now, slipping through the claustrophobic night, he passed an abandoned manufactory, turned onto an even darker street, and picked up his pace.  The meeting was about to begin.  Perhaps tonight . . .

Though it seemed hopeless, C'tair continued to find ways to strike against the Tleilaxu slave masters, and other rebels did the same.  Infuriated that they could not capture any saboteurs, the masters made "examples" out of hapless suboids.  After torture and mutilation, the scapegoat would be hurled off the Grand Palais balcony to the distant cavern floor, where great Heighliners had once been built.  Every expression on the victim's face, every dripping wound, was projected on the holo-sky, while recorders transmitted his wails and screams.

But the Tleilaxu understood little of the Ixian psyche.  Their brutality only caused greater unrest and more incidents of violent rebellion.  Over the years, C'tair could see the Tleilaxu being worn down, despite efforts to crush the resistance with shape-shifting Face Dancer infiltrators and surveillance pods.  The freedom fighters continued the struggle.

Those few rebels with access to uncensored outside news reported on the activities in the Imperium.  From them, C'tair learned of impassioned speeches before the Landsraad made by his father, the exiled Ixian Ambassador -- little more than futile gestures. Earl Dominic Vernius, who'd been overthrown and gone renegade, had vanished completely, and his heir, Prince Rhombur, lived in exile on Caladan, without a military force and without Landsraad support.

The rebels could not count on rescue from the outside.  Victory must come from inside. From Ix.

He rounded another corner, and in a narrow alleyway stepped onto a metal grating.  Narrowing his dark eyes, C'tair looked from side to side, always expecting someone to spring out of the shadows.  His demeanor was furtive and quick, drastically different from the cowed and cooperative routine he followed in public.

He gave the password, and the grate lowered, taking him beneath the street.  He hurried down a dark corridor.

During the day shift, C'tair wore a gray work smock.  He had learned how to mimic the simple, lackluster suboids over the years:  He walked with a stooped gait, eyes dull with disinterest.  He had fifteen identity cards, and no one bothered to study faces in the shifting masses of laborers.  It was easy to become invisible.

The rebels had developed their own identity checks.  They posted concealed guards outside the abandoned facility under infrared glowglobes.  Transeyes and sonic detectors provided a further bubble of protection -- none of which would help if the freedom fighters were discovered.

On this level, the guards were visible.  When C'tair mumbled his password response, they waved him inside.  Too easily.  He had to tolerate these people and their inept security games in order to acquire the equipment he needed, but he didn't have to feel comfortable about it.

C'tair scanned the meeting site -- at least that had been carefully selected.  This closed-down facility had once assembled combat meks to train fighters against a spectrum of tactics or weapons.  But the Tleilaxu overlords had unilaterally determined that such "self-aware" machines violated the strictures of the Butlerian Jihad.  Though all thinking machines had been obliterated ten thousand years before, severe prohibitions were still in effect and emotions ran high.  This place and others like it had been abandoned after the revolt on Ix, production lines left to fall into disrepair.  Some equipment had been cannibalized for other uses, the rest turned into scrap.

Other pursuits preoccupied the Tleilaxu.  Secret work, a vast project staffed only by their own people.  No one, not even members of C'tair's resistance group, had been able to determine what the overlords had in mind.

Inside the echoing facility, flinty-eyed resistance fighters spoke in whispers.  There would be no formal agenda, no leader, no speech.  C'tair smelled their nervous sweat, heard odd inflections in the low voices.  No matter how many security precautions they took, how many escape plans they devised, it was still dangerous to have so many gathered in one place.  C'tair always kept his eyes open, aware of the nearest exit.

He had business to conduct.  He'd brought a disguised satchel containing the most vital items he had hoarded.  He needed to trade with other scavengers to find components for his innovative but problematic transmitter, the rogo.  The prototype allowed him to communicate through foldspace with his twin brother D'murr, a Guild Navigator.  But C'tair rarely succeeded in establishing contact, either because his twin had mutated so far from human . . . or because the transmitter itself was falling apart.

On a dusty metal table, he brought out weapons components, power sources, communications devices, and scanning equipment -- items that would have led to his immediate execution if any Tleilaxu had stopped to ask his business.  But C'tair armed himself well, and he had killed the gnomish men before.

C'tair displayed his wares.  He searched the faces of the rebels, the crude disguises and intentional dirt smudges, until he spotted a woman with large eyes, prominent cheekbones, and a narrow chin.  Her hair had been raggedly chopped in an effort to destroy any hint of beauty.  He knew her as Miral Alechem, though that might not have been her real name.

In her face, C'tair saw echoes of Kailea Vernius, the pretty daughter of Earl Vernius.  He and his twin brother had both fancied Kailea, flirted with her . . . back when they'd thought nothing would ever change.  Now Kailea was exiled on Caladan, and D'murr was a Guild Navigator.  The twins' mother, a Guild banker, had been killed during the takeover of Ix.  And C'tair himself lived like a furtive rat, flitting from hideout to hideout. . . .

"I found the crystalpak you requested," he said to Miral.

She withdrew a wrapped item from a sack at her waist.  "I've got the module rods you needed, calibrated precisely . . . I hope.  I had no way of checking."

C'tair took the packet, feeling no need to inspect the merchandise.  "I can do it myself."  He handed Miral the crystalpak, but did not ask what she had in mind for it.  Everyone present searched for ways to strike against the Tleilaxu.  Nothing else mattered.  As he exchanged a nervous glance with her, he wondered if she might be thinking the same thing he was, that under different circumstances they might have had a personal relationship.  But he couldn't allow her that close to him.  Not anyone.  It would weaken him and divert his resolve.  He had to remain focused, for the sake of the Ixian cause.

One of the door guards hissed an alarm, and everyone fell into fearful silence, ducking low.  The muted glowglobes dimmed.  C'tair held his breath.

A humming sound passed overhead as a surveillance pod cruised above the abandoned buildings, trying to pick up unauthorized vibrations or movements.  Shadows smothered the hiding rebels.  C'tair mentally reviewed the location of every possible escape from this facility, in case he needed to duck out into the blinding darkness.

But the humming device cruised onward down the length of the city grotto.  Shortly afterward, the nervous rebels stood again and began muttering to themselves, wiping sweat off their faces, laughing nervously.

Spooked, C'tair decided not to remain any longer.  He memorized the coordinates for the group's next gathering, packed up his remaining equipment, and looked around, scanning the faces once more, marking them in his mind.  If they were caught, he might never see these people again.

He nodded a final time at Miral Alechem, then slipped off into the Ixian night, flitting under artificial stars.  He had already made up his mind where he would spend the remainder of the sleep shift . . . and which identity he would choose for the following day.

It is said that the Fremen has no conscience, having lost it in a burning desire for revenge.  This is foolish.  Only the rawest primitive and the sociopath have no conscience.  The Fremen possesses a highly evolved worldview centered on the welfare of his people.  His sense of belonging to the community is almost stronger than his sense of self.  It is only to outsiders that these desert dwellers seem brutish . . . just as outsiders appear to them.

-PARDOT KYNES, The People of Arrakis

LUXURY IF FOR the noble-born, Liet," Pardot Kynes said as the groundcar trundled across the uneven ground.  Here, in privacy, he could use his son's secret sietch name, rather than Weichih, the name reserved for outsiders.  "On this planet you must instantly become aware of your own surroundings, and remain alert at all times.  If you fail to learn this lesson, you won't live long."

As Kynes operated the simple controls, he gestured toward the buttery morning light that melted across the stark dunes.  "There are rewards here, too.  I grew up on Salusa Secundus, and even that broken and wounded place had its beauty . . . though nothing to match the purity of Dune."  Kynes exhaled a long breath between his hard, chapped lips.

Liet continued to stare out the scratched windowplaz.  Unlike his father, who reeled off whatever random thoughts occurred to him, making pronouncements that the Fremen heeded as if they were weighty spiritual matters, Liet preferred silence.  He narrowed his eyes to study the landscape, searching for any small thing out of its place.  Always alert.

On such a harsh planet, one had to develop stored perceptions, each of them linked to every moment of survival.  Though his father was much older, Liet wasn't certain the Planetologist understood as much as he himself did.  The mind of Pardot Kynes contained powerful concepts, but the older man experienced them only as esoteric data.  He didn't understand the desert in his heart or in his soul. . . .

For years, Kynes had lived among the Fremen.  It was said that Emperor Shaddam IV had little interest in his activities, and since Kynes asked for no funding and few supplies, they left him alone.  With each passing year he slipped farther from attention.  Shaddam and his advisors had stopped expecting any grand revelations from the Planetologist's periodic reports.

This suited Pardot Kynes, and his son as well.

In his wanderings, Kynes often made trips to outlying villages where the people of the pan and graben scratched out squalid lives.  True Fremen rarely mixed with the townspeople, and viewed them with veiled contempt for being too soft, too civilized.  Liet would never have lived in those pathetic settlements for all the solaris in the Imperium.  But still, Pardot visited them.

Eschewing roads and commonly traveled paths, they rode in the groundcar, checking meteorological stations and collecting data, though Pardot's troops of devoted Fremen would gladly have done this menial work for their "Umma."

Liet-Kynes's features echoed many of his father's, though with a leaner face and the closely set eyes of his Fremen mother.  He had pale hair, and his chin was still smooth, though later he would likely grow a beard similar to the great Planetologist's.  Liet's eyes had the deep blue of spice addiction, since every meal and breath of sietch air was laced with melange.

Liet heard a sharp intake of breath from his father as they passed the jagged elbow of a canyon where camouflaged catchtraps directed moisture to plantings of rabbitbush and poverty grasses.  "See?  It's taking on a life of its own.  We'll 'cycle' the planet through prairie phase into forest over several generations.  The sand has a high salt content, indicating old oceans, and the spice itself is alkaline."  He chuckled.  "People in the Imperium would be horrified that we'd use spice by-products for something as menial as fertilizer."  He smiled at his son.  "But we know the value of such things, eh?  If we break down the spice, we can set up protein digestion.  Even now, if we flew high enough, we could spot patches of green where matted plant growth holds the dune faces in place."

The young man sighed.  His father was a great man with magnificent dreams for Dune -- and yet Kynes was so focused on one thing that he failed to see the universe around him.  Liet knew that if any Harkonnen patrols found the plantings, they would destroy them and punish the Fremen.

Though only twelve, Liet went out on razzia raids with his Fremen brothers and had already killed Harkonnens.  For more than a year, he and his friends -- led by the brash Stilgar -- had struck targets that others refused to consider.  Only a week before, Liet's companions had blown up a dozen patrol 'thopters at a supply post.  Unfortunately, the Harkonnen troops had taken their revenge against poor villagers, seeing no difference between settled folk and the will-o'-the-sand Fremen.

He hadn't told his father about his guerrilla activities, since the elder Kynes wouldn't understand the necessity.  Premeditated violence, for whatever reason, was a foreign concept to the Planetologist.  But Liet would do what needed to be done.

Now, the groundcar approached a village tucked into the rocky foothills; it was called Bilar Camp on their terrain maps.  Pardot continued to talk about melange and its peculiar properties.  "They found spice too soon on Arrakis.  It deflected scientific inquiry.  It was so useful right from the outset that no one bothered to probe its mysteries."

Liet turned to look at him.  "I thought that was why you were assigned here in the first place -- to understand the spice."

"Yes . . . but we have more important work to do.  I still report back to the Imperium often enough to convince them I'm working at my job . . . though not very successfully."  Talking about the first time he'd been to this region, he drove toward a cluster of dirty buildings the color of sand and dust.

The groundcar jounced over a rough rock, but Liet ignored it and stared ahead at the village, squinting in the harsh light of the desert morning.  The morning air held the fragility of fine crystal.  "Something's wrong," he said, interrupting his father.

Kynes continued talking for a few seconds and then brought the vehicle to a stop.  "What's that?"

"Something is wrong."  Liet pointed ahead at the village.

Kynes shaded his eyes against the glare.  "I don't see anything."

"Still . . . let us proceed with caution."

IN THE CENTER OF THE VILLAGE, they encountered a festival of horrors.

The surviving victims wandered about as if insane, shrieking and snarling like animals.  The noise was horrific, as was the smell.  They had ripped hair out of their heads in bloody clumps.  Some used long fingernails to claw the eyes out of their faces, then held the scooped eyeballs in their palms; blind, they staggered against the tan walls of dwellings, leaving wet crimson smears.

"By Shai-Hulud!"  Liet whispered under his breath, while his father let out a louder curse in common Imperial Galach.

One man with torn eye sockets like bloody extra mouths above his cheekbones collided with a crawling woman; both victims flew into a rage and ripped at each other's skin with bare hands, biting and spitting and screaming.  There were muddy spots on the street, overturned containers of water.

Many bodies lay sprawled on the ground like squashed insects, arms and legs stiffened at odd angles.  Some buildings were locked and shuttered, barricaded against the crazed wretches outside who pounded on the walls, wailing wordlessly to get in.  On an upper floor Liet saw a woman's terrified face at the dust-streaked windowplaz.  Others hid, somehow unaffected by the murderous insanity.

"We must help these people, Father."  Liet leaped out of the sealed groundcar before his father had brought it to a complete stop.  "Bring your weapons.  We may need to defend ourselves."

They carried old maula pistols as well as knives.  His father, though a scientist at heart, was also a good fighter -- a skill he reserved for defending his vision for Arrakis.  The legend was told of how he had slain several Harkonnen bravos who'd been attempting to kill three young Fremen.  Those rescued Fremen were now his most loyal lieutenants, Stilgar, Turok, and Ommun.  But Pardot Kynes had never fought against anything like this. . . .

The maddened villagers noticed them and moaned.  They began to move forward.

"Don't kill them unless you must," Kynes said, amazed at how quickly his son had armed himself with a crysknife and maula pistol.  "Watch yourself."

Liet ventured into the street.  What struck him first was the terrible stink, as if the foul breath of a dying leper had been captured in a bottle and slowly released.

Staring in disbelief, Pardot stepped farther from the groundcar.  He saw no lasgun burn marks in the village, no chip scars from projectile weapons, nothing that would have indicated an overt Harkonnen attack.  Was it a disease?  If so, it might be contagious.  If a plague or some kind of communicable insanity was at work here, he could not let the Fremen take these bodies for the deathstills.

Liet moved forward.  "Fremen would attribute this to demons."

Two of the bloody-faced victims let out demonic shrieks and rushed toward them, their fingers outstretched like eagle claws, their mouths open like bottomless pits.  Liet pointed the maula pistol, uttered a quick prayer, then fired twice.  The perfect shots hit each of the attackers in the chest, and they fell dead.

Liet bowed.  "Forgive me, Shai-Hulud."

Pardot watched him.  I have tried to teach my son many things, but at least he has learned compassion.  All other information can be learned from filmbooks . . . but not compassion.  This was born into him.

The young man bent over the two bodies, studied them closely, pushing back his superstitious fear.  "I do not think it's a disease."  He looked back at Pardot.  "I've assisted the sietch healers, as you know, and . . ." His voice trailed off.

"What, then?"

"I believe they've been poisoned."

One by one, the tortured villagers wandering the dusty streets fell onto their backs in screaming convulsions, until only three remained alive.  Liet moved quickly with the crysknife and dispatched the last victims painlessly and efficiently.  No tribe or village would ever accept them again, no matter how much they recovered, for fear that they had been corrupted by demons; even their water would be considered tainted.

Liet found it odd how easily he had taken command in front of his father.  He gestured toward two of the sealed buildings.  "Convince the people inside those barred dwellings that we mean them no harm.  We must discover what happened here."  His voice became low and icy.  "And we must learn who is to blame."

Pardot Kynes moved to the dusty building.  Fingernail scratches and bloody handprints marked the mud-brick walls and pitted metal doors where crazed victims had tried to pound their way in.  He swallowed hard and prepared to make his case, to convince the terrified survivors that their ordeal was over.  He turned back to his son.  "Where will you be, Liet?"

The young man looked at an overturned water container.  He knew of only one way the poison could affect so many people at once.  "Checking the water supply."

His face etched in concern, Pardot nodded.

Liet studied the terrain around the village, saw a faint trail leading up the side of the overhanging mesa.  Moving with the speed of a sun-warmed lizard, he scurried up the mountain path and reached the cistern.  The evidence of its location had been cleverly disguised, though the villagers had made many errors.  Even a clumsy Harkonnen patrol could have discovered the illegal reservoir.  He studied the area quickly, noting patterns in the sand.

Smelling a harsh alkaloid bitterness near the upper opening of the cistern, he tried to place the odor.  He'd experienced it rarely, and only during great sietch celebrations.  The Water of Life!  The Fremen consumed such a substance only after a Sayyadina had converted the exhalation of a drowned worm, using her own body chemistry as a catalyst to create a tolerable drug that sent the sietch into an ecstatic frenzy.  Unconverted, the substance was a ferocious toxin.

The villagers in Bilar Camp had drunk pure Water of Life, before it was transformed.  Someone had done this intentionally . . . poisoning them.

Then he saw the marks of ornithopter pads in the soft soil atop the plateau.  It had to be a Harkonnen 'thopter.  One of the regular patrols . . . a practical joke?

Frowning grimly, Liet descended to the devastated village, where his father had succeeded in bringing out the survivors who had barricaded themselves within their dwellings.  Through luck, these people had not drunk the poisoned water.  Now they fell to their knees in the streets, surrounded by the awful carnage.  Their keening cries of grief drifted like the thin wails of ghosts along a sheer cliffside.

Harkonnens did this.

Pardot Kynes moved about doing what he could to comfort them, but from the quizzical expressions on the villagers' faces, Liet knew his father was probably saying the wrong things, expressing his sympathy in abstract concepts that they had no ability to understand.

Liet moved down the slope, and already plans were forming in his mind.  As soon as they returned to the sietch, he would meet with Stilgar and his commando squad.

And they would plan their retaliation against the Harkonnens.

An empire built on power cannot attract the affections and loyalty that men bestow willingly on a regime of ideas and beauty.  Adorn your Grand Empire with beauty, with culture.

-From a speech by CROWN PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO:  L'Institut de Kaitain Archives

THE YEARS HAD BEEN UNKIND to Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.

In a rage, he swiped his wormhead walking stick across the counter in his therapy room.  Jars of ointments, salves, pills, and hypo-injectors crashed to the tile floor.  "Nothing works!"  Each day, he felt worse, looked more revolting.  In the mirror he saw a puffy, red-faced caricature of his Adonis-self, hardly recognizable as the person he had once been.

"I look like a tumor, not a man."

With darting movements, Piter de Vries stepped into the room, ready to offer assistance.  The Baron struck at him with the heavy cane, but the Mentat sidestepped the blow with the grace of a cobra.

"Get out of my sight, Piter."  The Baron reeled, trying to catch his balance.  "Or this time I really will think of a way to kill you."

"Whatever my Baron wishes," de Vries said in a too-silken voice.  He bowed and retreated to the door.

The Baron held affection for few people, but he appreciated the devious workings of the twisted Mentat's mind, his convoluted plans, his long-term thinking . . . regardless of his obnoxious familiarity and lack of respect.

"Wait, Piter.  I need your Mentat brain."  He lumbered forward, leaning on the walking stick.  "It's the same old question.  Find out why my body is degenerating, or I will dispatch you to the deepest slave pit."

The whip-thin man waited for the Baron to catch up with him.  "I shall do my best, Baron.  I know full well what happened to all of your doctors."

"Incompetents," he growled.  "None of them knew anything."

Formerly healthy and full of tremendous energy, the Baron suffered from a debilitating disease whose manifestations disgusted and frightened him.  He had gained an enormous amount of weight.  Exercise did not help, nor did medical scans or even exploratory surgeries.  For years he had tried every healing procedure and bizarre experimental treatment -- all to no avail.

For their failures, a score of House doctors had received torturous deaths at the hands of Piter de Vries, often through imaginative application of their own instruments.  As a result, no high-level medical practitioners remained on Giedi Prime -- or at least none were visible; those who had not been executed had gone into hiding or fled to other worlds.

More annoyingly, servants had begun disappearing, too -- and not always because the Baron had ordered them killed.  They had fled outside the Castle Keep into Harko City, vanishing into the ranks of uncounted and unheeded laborers.  As he ventured out into the streets accompanied by his guard captain Kryubi, the Baron found himself constantly looking for people who even resembled the servants who had abandoned him.  Wherever he went, he left a trail of bodies.  The killings brought him little pleasure, though; he would rather have had an answer.

De Vries accompanied the Baron as he hobbled into the corridor; his walking stick clicked along the floor.  Soon, the big man thought, he would have to wear a suspensor mechanism to remove the burden from his aching joints.

A team of workmen froze as the two approached.  The Baron noted that they were repairing wall damage he had caused in a rage the day before.  Each of them bowed as the Baron clicked past and breathed audible sighs of relief when they saw him disappear around a corner.

When he and de Vries reached a cerulean-curtained drawing room, the Baron lowered himself onto a black sligskin settee.  "Sit beside me, Piter."  The Mentat's inky eyes darted around, like those of a trapped animal, but the Baron snorted with impatience.  "I probably won't kill you today, provided you give me good advice."

The Mentat maintained his casual demeanor, revealing none of his private thoughts.  "Advising you is the sole purpose of my existence, my Baron."  He remained aloof, even arrogant, because he knew it would be far too costly for House Harkonnen to replace him, though the Bene Tleilax could always grow another Mentat from the same genetic stock.  In fact, they probably already had replacements, just waiting.

The Baron drummed his fingers on the arm of the settee.  "True enough, but you don't always give the advice I need."  Looking closely at de Vries, he added, "You are a very ugly man, Piter.  Even with my disease, I'm still prettier than you."

The Mentat's salamander tongue darted over lips stained crimson by sapho juice.  "But my sweet Baron, you always liked to look at me."

The Baron's face hardened, and he leaned close to the tall, thin man.  "Enough relying on amateurs.  I want you to obtain a Suk doctor for me."

Surprised, de Vries drew a quick breath.  "But you have insisted that we maintain complete secrecy about the nature of your condition.  A Suk must report all activities to his Inner Circle -- and send them the bulk of his fee."

Vladimir Harkonnen had led members of the Landsraad to believe he'd grown corpulent through his own excesses -- which was an acceptable reason to him, one that did not imply weakness.  And, given the Baron's tastes, it was a lie easy to believe.  He did not wish to become a pitiable laughingstock among the other nobles.  A great Baron should not suffer from a simple, embarrassing disease.

"Just find a way to do it.  Don't go through regular channels.  If a Suk can cure me, then I'll have nothing to hide."

SEVERAL DAYS LATER, Piter de Vries learned that a talented if somewhat narcissistic Suk doctor had been stationed on Richese, an ally of the Harkonnens.  The wheels in the Mentat's mind began to turn.  In the past, House Richese had aided Harkonnen-inspired plots, including the assassination of Duke Paulus Atreides in the bullring, but the allies often disagreed on priorities.  For this most sensitive of all matters, de Vries invited the Richesian Premier, Ein Calimar, to visit the Baron's Keep on Giedi Prime, to discuss "a mutually profitable enterprise."

An older, meticulously dressed man who retained his youthful athleticism, Calimar had dark skin and a wide nose with wire-rimmed eyeglasses perched on it.  He arrived at the Harko City Spaceport wearing a white suit with gold lapels.  Four guards in blue Harkonnen livery escorted him into the Baron's private quarters.

Once he stepped inside the private chambers, the Premier's nose twitched at an odor, which did not escape his host's bemused notice.  The nude body of a young boy hung in a closet only two meters away; the Baron had intentionally left the door open a crack.  The corpse's putrid odor mixed and interlocked with older ones that had permeated the rooms to such a degree that even strong perfumes did not conceal them.

"Please sit."  The Baron pointed to a couch where faint bloodstains could still be seen.  He had prepared this entire meeting with subliminal threats and unpleasantness, just to set the Richesian leader on edge.

Calimar hesitated -- a moment that delighted the Baron -- then accepted the seat, but declined an offer of kirana brandy, though his host took a snifter for himself.  The Baron slumped into a bobbing suspensor chair.  Behind him stood his fidgety personal Mentat, who stated why House Harkonnen had requested the meeting.

Surprised, Calimar shook his head.  "You wish to rent my Suk doctor?"  His nose continued to twitch, and his gaze searched the room for a source of the odor, settling on the closet door.  He adjusted his golden spectacles.  "I'm sorry, but I am unable to comply.  A personal Suk physician is a responsibility and an obligation . . . not to mention an enormous expense."

The Baron pouted.  "I have tried other doctors, and I would prefer to keep this matter private.  I cannot simply advertise for one of the arrogant professionals.  Your Suk doctor, though, would be bound by his oath of confidentiality, and no one needs to know he left your service for a brief period."  He heard the whining tone in his own voice.  "Come, come, where is your compassion?"

Calimar looked away from the dark closet.  "Compassion?  An interesting comment from you, Baron.  Your House hasn't bothered to help us with our problem, despite our entreaties over the last five years."

The Baron leaned forward.  His wormhead walking stick lay across his lap, its tip filled with serpent-venom darts pointed toward the white-suited man.  Tempting, so tempting.  "Perhaps we could come to an understanding."  He looked questioningly at his Mentat for an explanation.

De Vries said, "In a word, he means money, my Baron.  The Richesian economy is floundering."

"As our ambassador has explained repeatedly to your emissaries," Calimar added.  "Since my House lost control of the spice operations on Arrakis -- you replaced us, don't forget -- we have attempted to rebuild our economic foundation."  The Premier held his chin high, pretending that he still had some pride left.  "Initially, the downfall of Ix was a boon to us, removing competition.  However, our finances remain somewhat . . . strained."

The Baron's spider-black eyes flashed, relishing Calimar's embarrassment.  House Richese, manufacturers of exotic weaponry and complex machines, experts in miniaturization and Richesian mirrors, had made initial market-share gains against rival Ixian companies during the upheavals on Ix.

"Five years ago the Tleilaxu began shipping Ixian products again," de Vries said with cold logic.  "You are already losing whatever gains you made in the past ten years.  Sales of Richesian products have fallen off severely with the renewed availability of Ixian technology."

Calimar kept his voice steady.  "So you see, we must have resources to enhance our efforts and invest in new facilities."

"Richese, Tleilax, Ix . . . we try not to interfere in squabbles between other Houses."  The Baron sighed.  "I wish there could just be peace throughout the Landsraad."

Anger seeped into the Premier's features.  "This is more than a squabble, Baron.  This is about survival.  Many of my agents are missing on Ix and presumed dead.  It disgusts me even to consider what the Tleilaxu may use their body parts for."  He adjusted his spectacles; perspiration glistened on his forehead.  "Besides, the Bene Tleilax are not a House of any sort.  The Landsraad would never accept them."

"A mere technicality."

"We arrive at an impasse then," Calimar announced, making as if to rise.  He looked once more at the ominous closet door.  "I did not believe you'd be willing to meet our stiff price, regardless of how excellent our Suk doctor is."

"Wait, wait --" The Baron held up a hand.  "Trade agreements and military pacts are one thing.  Friendship is another.  You and your House have been our loyal ally in the past.  Perhaps I didn't fully understand the scope of your problem before."

Calimar tilted his head back, gazed down the bridge of his nose at the Baron.  "The scope of our problem consists of many zeros and no decimal points."

Set in folds of fat, his black eyes took on a crafty gaze.  "If you send me your Suk doctor, Premier, we shall rethink the situation.  I'm sure you will be most pleased to hear the financial details of our offer.  Consider it a down payment."

Calimar refused to move.  "I would like to hear the offer now, please."

Seeing the stony expression on the Premier's face, the Baron nodded.  "Piter, tell him our proposal."

De Vries quoted a high price for the rental of the Suk, payable in melange.  No matter how much this Suk doctor cost, House Harkonnen could squeeze out the extra income by liquidating some of their hidden, illegal spice stockpiles, or by tightening production on Arrakis.

Calimar pretended to consider the offer, but the Baron knew the man had no choice but to accept.  "The Suk will be sent to you immediately.  This doctor, Wellington Yueh, has been working on cyborg studies, developing a machine-human interface to restore lost limbs through artificial means, an alternative to having the Tleilaxu grow replacements in their axlotl tanks."

" 'Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind,' " de Vries quoted -- the primary commandment arising out of the Butlerian Jihad.

Calimar stiffened.  "Our patent lawyers have gone over this in detail, and there is no violation whatsoever."

"Well, I don't care what his specialty is," the Baron said impatiently.  "All Suk doctors have broad reservoirs of knowledge upon which they can draw.  You understand that this must be kept in strict confidence?"

"That is not a matter of concern.  The Suk Inner Circle has held embarrassing medical information on every family in the Landsraad for generations.  You need not worry."

"I am more worried that your people will talk.  Do I have your promise that you will not divulge any details of our bargain?  It could prove just as embarrassing to you."  The Baron's dark eyes seemed to sink deeper into his puffy face.

A stiff nod from the Premier.  "I am pleased to be of assistance, Baron.  I have had the rare privilege of closely observing this Dr. Yueh.  Allow me to assure you that he is most impressive indeed."

Military victories are meaningless unless they reflect the wishes of the populace.  An Emperor exists only to clarify those wishes.  He executes the popular will, or his time is short.

-Principium, Imperial Leadership Academy

BENEATH A BLACK SECURITY HOOD, the Emperor sat in his elaborate suspensor chair as he received information from the ridulian report crystal.  After delivering the encrypted summary, Hasimir Fenring stood beside him while words streamed through Shaddam's mind.

The Emperor did not like the news.

At the conclusion of the progress summary, Fenring cleared his throat.  "Hidar Fen Ajidica conceals much from us, Sire.  If he were not vitally important to Project Amal, I would terminate him, hmmmm?"

The Emperor swung the security hood from his head, removed the glittering crystal from its receptacle.  Adjusting his eyes to the bright morning sunshine that passed through a skylight in his private tower quarters, he peered at Fenring.  The other man lounged at the Emperor's desk of golden chusuk wood inlaid with milky soostones, as if he owned it.

"I see," Shaddam mused.  "The little gnome isn't pleased to receive two more legions of Sardaukar.  Commander Garon will put pressure on him to perform, and he feels the vise tightening around him."

Fenring got up to pace in front of a window that overlooked a profusion of orange and lavender blossoms in a rooftop garden.  He picked at something lodged beneath one of his fingernails and flicked it away.  "Don't we all, hmmm?"

Shaddam noticed that the Count's gaze had strayed to the holophotos of his three young daughters that Anirul had mounted on the wall -- annoying reminders that he still had no male heir.  Irulan was four years old, Chalice a year and a half, and baby Wensicia barely two months.  Pointedly, he switched off the images and turned to his friend.

"You're my eyes in the desert, Hasimir.  It disturbs me that the Tleilaxu have been smuggling infant sandworms from Arrakis.  I thought it couldn't be done."

Fenring shrugged.  "What could it possibly matter if they took a small worm or two?  The creatures die soon after they leave the desert, despite every effort to care for them."

"Perhaps the ecosystem should not be disturbed."  The Emperor's scarlet-and-gold tunic trailed over the edge of the suspensor chair onto the floor.  He nibbled on a morsel of crimson fruit from a bowl beside him.  "In his last report, our desert Planetologist claims that reductions in particular species could have devastating consequences on food chains.  He says there are prices to be paid by future generations for the mistakes of today."

Fenring made a dismissive gesture.  "You shouldn't bother yourself with his reports.  If you brought me back from exile, Sire, I could remove such worries from your mind.  I'd do your thinking for you, hmmm-ah?"

"Your assignment as Imperial Observer is hardly exile.  You are a Count, and you are my Spice Minister."  Distracted, Shaddam thought about ordering something to drink, perhaps with music, exotic dancers, even a military parade outside.  He had only to command it.  But such things did not interest him at the moment.  "Do you desire an additional title, Hasimir?"

Averting his overlarge eyes, Fenring said, "That would only call more attention to me.  Already it is difficult to conceal from the Guild how often I journey to Xuttuh.  Besides, trivial titles mean nothing to me."

The Emperor tossed the pit of his fruit into the bowl, frowning.  Next time he would order the preparers to cut out the seeds before serving them.  "Is 'Padishah Emperor' a trivial title?"

At the sound of three beeps, the men looked up at the ceiling, from which a clearplaz tube spiraled down to a receptacle on the Emperor's chusuk wood desk.  An urgent message cylinder streaked through the tube and thunked into place.  Fenring retrieved the cylinder, cut off a Courier's seal, and removed two sheets of rolled instroy paper, which he passed to the Emperor, restraining himself from examining them first.  Shaddam unrolled them, scanned the pages with an expression of growing distress.

"Hmmmm?"  Fenring asked, in his impatient manner.

"Another formal letter of complaint from Archduke Ecaz, and a declaration of kanly against House Moritani on Grumman.  Most serious, indeed."  He wiped red juice from his fingertips onto his scarlet robe, then read further.  His face flushed.  "Wait a minute.  Duke Leto Atreides has already offered his services to the Landsraad as a mediator, but the Ecazis are taking the matter into their own hands."

"Interesting," the Count said.

Angrily, Shaddam thrust the letter into Fenring's hands.  "Duke Leto found out before I did?  How is this possible?  I'm the Emperor!"

"Sire, the flare-up is not surprising, considering the disgraceful behavior at my formal banquet."  Seeing the blank look, he continued.  "The Grumman ambassador assassinating his rival right at the dinner table?  You remember my report?  It came to you months ago, hmmmm?"

As Shaddam struggled to put the pieces together in his mind, he waved dismissively at a blackplaz shelf beside his desk.  "Maybe it's over there.  I haven't read them all."

Fenring's dark eyes flashed with annoyance.  "You have time to read esoteric reports from a Planetologist, but not from me?  You would have been prepared for this feud if you'd paid attention to my communique.  I warned you the Grummans are dangerous and bear watching."

"I see.  Just tell me what the report says, Hasimir.  I'm a busy man."

Fenring recounted how he'd had to release the arrogant Lupino Ord, owing to diplomatic immunity.  With a sigh, the Emperor summoned attendants and called an emergency meeting of his advisors.

IN THE CONFERENCE ROOM adjoining Shaddam's Imperial office, a team of Mentat legal advisors, Landsraad spokesmen, and Guild observers reviewed the technicalities of kanly, the careful ballet of warfare designed to harm only actual combatants, with minimal collateral damage to civilians.

The Great Convention prohibited the use of atomic and biological weapons and required that disputing Houses fight a controlled feud through accepted direct and indirect methods.  For millennia, the rigid rules had formed the framework of the Imperium.  Advisors recounted the background of the current conflict, how Ecaz had accused Moritani of biological sabotage in their delicate fogtree forests, how the Grumman ambassador had murdered his Ecazi counterpart at Fenring's banquet, how Archduke Ecaz had formally declared kanly against Viscount Moritani.

"Another item of note," said the Imperial Trade Chief, waving one knobby finger like a rapier in the air, "I have learned that an entire shipment of commemorative coins -- minted, if you recall, Sire, to celebrate your tenth anniversary on the Golden Lion Throne -- has been stolen in an audacious raid on a commercial frigate.  By self-styled space pirates, if reports are to be believed."

Shaddam glowered, impatient.  "How is a petty theft relevant to the situation here?"

"That shipment was bound for Ecaz, Sire."

Fenring perked up.  "Hmmmm, was anything else stolen?  War materiel, weapons of any kind?"

The Trade Chief checked his notes.  "No -- the so-called raiders commandeered only the Imperial commemorative coins, leaving other valuables behind."  He lowered his voice and mumbled, as if to himself, "However, since we used inferior materials in minting those coins, the financial losses are not significant. . . ."

"I recommend that we dispatch Imperial Observers to Ecaz and to Grumman," Court Chamberlain Ridondo said, "in order to enforce the forms.  House Moritani has been known to . . . ah, stretch their interpretation of formal rules."  Ridondo was a skeletally gaunt man with yellowish skin and a slippery way of accomplishing tasks while allowing Shaddam to take the credit; he had fared well in his position as Chamberlain.

Before Ridondo's suggestion could be discussed, though, another message cylinder thumped into the receptacle beside the Emperor's chair.  After scanning the message, Shaddam slammed it onto the conference table.  "Viscount Hundro Moritani has responded to the diplomatic insult by carpet-bombing the Ecazi Palace and its surrounding peninsula!  The Mahogany Throne is physically destroyed.  A hundred thousand noncombatants dead, and several forests are on fire.  Archduke Ecaz barely escaped with his three daughters."  He squinted down at the curling instroy paper again, then looked quickly at Fenring but refused to ask for advice.

"He disregarded the strictures of kanly?" the Trade Chief said in shock.  "How can they do that?"

The sallow skin on Chamberlain Ridondo's towering forehead wrinkled with concern.  "Viscount Moritani does not have the honor of his grandfather, who was a friend of the Hunter.  What is to be done with wild dogs such as these?"

"Grumman has always hated being part of the Imperium, Sire," Fenring pointed out.  "They constantly seek opportunities to spit in our faces."

The discussion around the table took on a more frenetic tone.  As Shaddam listened to the talk, trying to look regal, he reflected on how different it was to be Emperor from how he'd imagined.  Reality was exceedingly complicated, with too many competing forces.

He recalled playing war games with young Hasimir, and realized how much he missed his boyhood friend's companionship and advice.  But an Emperor could not reverse important decisions lightly -- Fenring would remain in his Arrakis assignment and in the allied duty of overseeing the artificial spice program.  It was better if spies believed the stories of friction between them, though perhaps Shaddam could schedule more frequent visits with his childhood companion. . . .

"The forms must be obeyed, Sire," Ridondo said.  "Law and tradition bind the Imperium.  We cannot allow one noble house to ignore the strictures as they choose.  Clearly, Moritani sees you as weak and unwilling to intervene in this squabble.  He's taunting you."

The Imperium will not slip through my fingers, Shaddam vowed.  He decided to set an example.  "Let it be known throughout the Imperium, that a legion of Sardaukar troops is to be stationed on Grumman for a period of two years.  We'll put a leash on this Viscount."  He turned to the Spacing Guild observer at the far end of the table.  "Furthermore, I want the Guild to levy a heavy tariff on all goods delivered to and from Grumman.  Such income to be used for reparations to Ecaz."

The Guild representative sat in silence for a long, cold moment, as if pondering the "decision," which was in reality only a request.  The Guild was beyond the control of the Padishah Emperor.  Finally, he nodded.  "It will be done."

One of the court Mentats sat rigidly in his chair.  "They will appeal, Sire."

Shaddam sniffed.  "If Moritani has a case, let him make it."

Fenring tapped his fingers on the table, considering consequences.  Shaddam had already dispatched two legions of Sardaukar to oversee the Tleilaxu on Ix, and now he was sending more to Grumman.  In other trouble spots around the Imperium he had increased the visible presence of his crack military troops, hoping to smother any thoughts of rebellion.  He had increased the ranks of the Bursegs throughout the military, adding more mid-level commanders to be dispatched with troops, as needed.

Even so, small and annoying instances of sabotage or defacement continued to occur in random places, such as the theft of commemorative coins bound for Ecaz, the balloon effigy of Shaddam floating over the Harmonthep stadium, the insulting words painted on the cliffs of Monument Canyon. . . .

As a result, the loyal Sardaukar were spread too thinly, and because of the costly Project Amal, the Imperial treasury had insufficient funds to train and supply new troops.  Thus, the military reserves were being depleted, and Fenring saw troubled times ahead.  As House Moritani's actions proved, some forces in the Landsraad sensed weakness, smelled blood. . . .

Fenring considered reminding Shaddam of all this, but instead he held his own counsel as the meeting continued.  His old friend seemed to think he could handle things without him -- so let the man prove it.

The Emperor would get himself deeper and deeper into trouble, and finally he would have to call his exiled "Spice Minister" back to Kaitain.  When that occurred, Fenring would make him grovel . . . before finally assenting.

Organizational structure is crucial to the success of a movement.  It is, as well, a prime target for attack.

-CAMMAR PILRU, Ixian Ambassador in Exile:  Treatise on the Downfall of Unjust Governments

BEFORE THE NEXT MEETING of the resistance group, C'tair disguised himself as an introverted suboid worker.  Under the guise, he spent days of reconnaissance in the underground warrens where the rebels planned to gather.

Interspersed with islands of stalactite buildings, the holoprojected sky looked wrong, mimicking light from a sun that did not belong to Ix.  C'tair's arms ached from placing heavy crates on self-motivated pallets that delivered supplies, equipment, and raw materials into the sealed-off research pavilion.

The invaders had commandeered a cluster of industrial facilities and modified the construction, building over rooftops and connecting side passages.  Under House Vernius, the facilities had been masterfully designed to be both beautiful and functional.  Now they resembled rodent nests, all sloping barricades and armored gables that shimmered beneath defensive fields.  Their covered windows looked like blind eyes.

What are the Tleilaxu doing in there?

C'tair wore drab clothes, let his face hang slack and his eyes grow dull.  He focused on the tedious monotony of his tasks.  When dust or dirt smudged his cheeks, when grease smeared his fingers, he did nothing to clean himself, just plodded like clockwork.

Although the Tleilaxu did not consider suboids worthy of attention, the invaders had rallied these workers during their takeover of Ix.  Despite promises of better conditions and better treatment, the Tleilaxu had ground the suboids under their heels, far more than their experiences under Dominic Vernius.

When he was off shift, C'tair lived in a rock-walled chamber within the suboid warrens.  The workers had little social life, did not speak much to each other.  Few noticed the newcomer or asked his name; none of them made overtures of friendship.  He felt more invisible there than when he had hidden in a shielded chamber for months during the initial revolt.

C'tair preferred being invisible.  He could accomplish more that way.

Slipping off by himself, he evaluated the secret meeting place beforehand.  He took bootleg equipment into the empty supply chamber to scan for surveillance instruments.  He did not dare underestimate the Tleilaxu -- especially since two more legions of Imperial Sardaukar had been stationed here to keep even tighter control.

He stood in the center of the chamber and turned in a slow circle, concerned about the five tunnels leading into the chamber.  Too many entrances, too many spots for an ambush.  He pondered for a moment, then smiled as an idea occurred to him.

The following afternoon he stole a small holoprojector, with which he imaged comparable featureless rock.  Moving silently, he set up the projector inside one of the openings and switched it on.  A false barrier of rock now blocked one of the tunnels, a perfect illusion.

C'tair had lived with suspicion and fear for so long that he never expected his plans to go well.  But that didn't mean he stopped hoping. . . .

THE FREEDOM FIGHTERS ARRIVED one by one as the appointed time approached.  No one risked traveling with any other rebel; each wore a disguise, each came prepared with an excuse for his business down in the suboid tunnels.

C'tair arrived late -- safely late.  The furtive resistance fighters exchanged vital equipment and discussed plans in harsh whispers.  No one had an overall strategy.  Some of their schemes were so impossible C'tair had to force himself not to laugh, while others seemed like suggestions he might want to imitate.

He needed more crystalline rods for his rogo transmitter.  After each attempt to communicate with his distant Navigator brother, the crystals splintered and cracked, leaving him with pounding headaches.

The last time he'd tried the rogo, C'tair had been unable to contact D'murr, sensing his twin's presence and a few staticky thoughts but without linking up.  Afterward, lying awake for hours in his darkened chamber, C'tair felt lost and depressed, entirely alone.  He realized just how much he had counted on his brother's well-being, and on hearing that others from Ix had escaped and survived.

At times, C'tair wondered exactly what he had accomplished in all his years of struggle.  He wanted to do more, wanted to strike forcefully against the Tleilaxu -- but what could he do?  He stared at the gathered rebels, people who talked a great deal but accomplished little.  He watched their faces, noting greed in the black marketeers and ferretlike nervousness in others.  C'tair wondered if these were truly the allies he needed.  Somehow he doubted it.

Miral Alechem was also there, bartering furiously for more components to add to her mysterious plan.  She seemed different from the others, willing to take necessary action.

Unobtrusively, he worked his way over to Miral and caught the gaze of her large, wary eyes.  "I've studied the components you buy" -- he nodded toward the few items she held in her hands -- "and I can't fathom your plan.  I might . . . I might be able to help.  I've done a good deal of tinkering myself."

She took a half step back, like a suspicious rabbit, trying to read the meaning behind his words.  Finally, she spoke through pale lips, but her mouth remained drawn.  "I have an . . . idea.  I need to search --"

Before she could continue, C'tair heard a movement in the tunnels, footsteps that were at first faint and then louder.  The lookout guards shouted.  One ducked inside the room as projectile gunfire rang out.

"We're betrayed!" shouted one of the rebels.

In the confusion, C'tair saw Sardaukar soldiers and Tleilaxu warriors converging from the four exits, blocking the tunnels.  They fired into the gathered resistance fighters as if it were a shooting gallery.

Screams, smoke, and blood filled the air.  Sardaukar hurried in with hand weapons drawn; some used only their fists and fingers to kill.  C'tair waited for the smoke to thicken, for the rebels to fly into a greater frenzy -- and then lunged forward.

Seeing no escape, Miral crouched low.  C'tair grabbed her by the shoulders.  She began to fight him, thrashing as if he were her enemy, but C'tair pushed her backward toward the solid rock wall.

She fell directly through.  He plunged after her into the holo-covered opening.  He felt a twinge of guilt for not shouting to the others, but if all the rebels disappeared through the same escape hatch, the Sardaukar would be upon them in moments.

Miral looked around in confusion.  C'tair grabbed her arm and dragged her along.  "I planned for an escape ahead of time.  A hologram."  They began sprinting through the tunnel.

Miral stumbled beside him.  "Our group is dead."

"It was never my group," C'tair said, panting.  "They're amateurs."

She looked at him as they ran, her dark eyes boring into his.  "We must separate."

He nodded, then both took divergent tunnels.

Far behind him, he heard the Sardaukar cry out as they discovered the disguised opening.  C'tair ran faster, taking a left tunnel, then an uphill branch, doubling back to a different grotto.  Finally, he reached a lift tube that would take him out into the immense cavern.

Like a suboid going to work on the late shift, he fumbled for one of his identity cards and swiped it through a reader.  The lift tube whisked him toward the stalactite buildings that had once been inhabited by bureaucrats and nobles who served House Vernius.

Within the ceiling levels, he raced across connecting walkways, slipped between buildings, and looked down at the glittering lights of corrupted manufactories.  Finally, inside the crustal levels of what had once been the Grand Palais, he made his way to the shielded bolt-hole he had abandoned long ago.

He slipped to the chamber and locked it.  He hadn't found it necessary to hide there for a long time -- but tonight he'd come closer to capture than ever before.  In the silent darkness, C'tair rolled onto the musty-smelling cot that had been his bed for so many tense evenings.  Panting, he stared at the low ceiling, black above him.  His heart pounded.  He could not relax.

He imagined seeing stars above his room, a blizzard of tiny lights that showered across the open night sky on Ix's pristine surface.  As his thoughts traveled out into the sprawling expanse of the galaxy, he envisioned D'murr flying his Guild ship . . . safely away from here.

C'tair had to contact him soon.

The universe is our picture.  Only the immature imagine the cosmos to be what they think it is.

-SIGAN VISEE, First Head Instructor, Guild Navigator School

D'MURR, A VOICE SAID in the back of his awareness. D'murr . . .

Within the sealed navigation chamber atop his Heighliner, D'murr swam in spice gas, kicking his webbed feet.  Orange eddies swirled around him.  In his navigation trance, all star systems and planets were a grand tapestry, and he could travel along any thread he chose.  He derived supreme pleasure from entering the womb of the universe and conquering its mysteries.

It was so peaceful in deep, open space.  The brightness of suns came and went . . . a vast, eternal night dotted with tiny points of illumination.

D'murr performed the higher-order mental calculations required to foresee a safe course through any star system.  He guided the immense ship through the limitless void.  He could encompass the reaches of the universe and transport passengers and freight to any place he desired.  He saw the future and conformed to it.

Because of the outstanding abilities he had demonstrated, D'murr was among only a few mutated humans who had risen through the Navigators' ranks so swiftly.  Human.  The word was little more than a lingering memory for him.

His emotions -- strange detritus from his original physical form -- swung him in a way he had not expected.  In the seventeen Standard Years he'd spent growing up on Ix with his twin brother C'tair, he had not possessed the time, wisdom, or desire to understand what it meant to be human.

And for the past dozen years, admittedly by his own choice, he'd been removed from that dubious reality and vaulted into another existence, part dream, part nightmare.  Certainly his new appearance could frighten any man who was unprepared for the sight.

But the advantages, the reasons he had joined the Guild in the first place, more than compensated for that.  He experienced cosmic beauty unknown to other life-forms:  What they could only imagine, he actually knew.

Why had the Spacing Guild accepted him at all?  Very few outsiders were admitted to the elite corps; the Guild favored their own Navigator candidates -- those born in space to Guild employees and loyalists, some of whom had never walked upon solid ground.

Am I only an experiment, a freak among freaks?  Sometimes, with all the contemplative time on a great voyage, D'murr's mind wandered.  Am I being tested at this very moment by some means that can scan my aberrant thoughts?  Whenever the wild awareness of his previous human self came over him, D'murr felt as if he were standing on the edge of a precipice, deciding whether or not to leap into the void.  The Guild is always watching.

While floating in the navigation chamber, he journeyed among the remnants of his emotions.  An unusual sense of melancholy enveloped him.  He had sacrificed so much to become what he was.  He could never land on any planet unless he emerged in a wheeled and enclosed tank of spice gas. . . .

He concentrated hard, drove his thoughts back into line.  If he allowed the human self to become too strong, D'murr might send the Heighliner reeling off course.

"D'murr," the nagging voice said again, like the throbbing pain of a mounting headache.  "D'murr. . ."

He ignored it.  He tried to convince himself that such thoughts and regrets must be common for Navigators, that others experienced them as often as he did.  But why hadn't the instructors warned him?

I am strong.  I can overcome this.

On a routine flight to the Bene Gesserit world of Wallach IX, he piloted one of the last Heighliners constructed by Ixians, before the Tleilaxu took over and reverted to an earlier, less efficient design.  Mentally he reviewed the passenger list, seeing the words imaged on the walls of his navigation tank.

A Duke was aboard -- Leto Atreides.  And his friend Rhombur Vernius, exiled heir to the lost fortunes of Ix.  Familiar faces and memories . . .

A lifetime ago, D'murr had been introduced to young Leto in the Grand Palais.  Navigators overheard snippets of Imperial news and could eavesdrop on business conducted over the communication channels, but they paid little attention to petty matters.  This Duke had won a Trial by Forfeiture, a monumental act that had granted him respect throughout the Imperium.

Why would Duke Leto be going to Wallach IX?  And why did he bring the Ixian refugee?

The distant, crackling voice cut in again:  "D'murr . . . answer me . . ."

With sudden clarity he realized it was a manifestation of his former life.  Loyal, kind C'tair attempting to stay in touch, though for months D'murr had been unable to reply.  Perhaps it was a distortion caused by the continuing evolution of his brain, widening the gulf between himself and his brother.

The atrophied vocal cords of a Navigator could still utter words, but the mouth was primarily used to consume more and more melange.  The mind-expansion of the spice trance pushed away D'murr's former life and contacts.  He could no longer experience love, except as a flickering memory.  He could never again touch a human being. . . .

With one of his stubby webbed hands he withdrew a concentrated melange pill from a container and popped it into his tiny mouth, increasing the flow of spice through his system.  His mind floated a little, but not enough to dull the pain of the past, and of the attempted mental contact.  This time his emotions were too strong to overcome.

His brother finally stopped calling to him, but he would return soon.  He always did.

Now, the only sound D'murr heard was the steady hiss of gas entering the chamber.  Melange, melange.  It continued to pour into him, filling his senses completely.  He had no individuality left, could barely tolerate speaking to his own brother anymore.

He could only listen, and remember. . . .

War is a form of organic behavior.  The army is a means of survival for the all-male group.  The all-female group, on the other hand, is traditionally religion-oriented.  They are the keepers of sacred mysteries.

-Bene Gesserit Teaching

AFTER DESCENDING FROM the orbiting Heighliner and passing through the intricate atmospheric defensive systems, Duke Leto Atreides and Rhombur Vernius were met in the Mother School's spaceport by a contingent of three black-robed women.

Wallach IX's blue-white sun was not visible from the ground.  A bone-chilling breeze whipped into the open-air portico where the group stood.  Leto felt it through his clothing and could see white feathers of breath curl from his exhalations.  At his side, Rhombur pulled the collar of his jacket tight.

The leader of the escort committee introduced herself as Mother Superior Harishka -- an honor Leto had not expected.  What have I ever done to warrant such attention?  When he'd been imprisoned on Kaitain, awaiting his Trial by Forfeiture, the Bene Gesserit had secretly offered him assistance, but had never explained their reasons.  The Bene Gesserit do nothing without a clear purpose.

Old but energetic, Harishka had dark almond eyes and a direct manner of speaking.  "Prince Rhombur Vernius."  She bowed to the round-faced young man, who swept his purple-and-copper cape in a dashing gesture of his own.  "It is a pity what happened to your Great House, a terrible pity. Even the Sisterhood finds the Bene Tleilax . . . incomprehensible."

"Thank you, but uh, I am certain everything will work out.  Just the other day our Ambassador in Exile submitted another petition to the Landsraad Council."  He smiled with forced optimism.  "I seek no sympathy."

"You seek only a concubine, correct?"  The old woman turned to lead the way out of the portico and onto the grounds of the Mother School complex.  "We welcome the opportunity to place one of our Sisters in Castle Caladan.  I am sure she will benefit you, and the Atreides."

They followed a cobblestone pathway between interlinked stucco buildings with terra-cotta roof tiles, arranged like the scales on a reef lizard.  In a flower-filled courtyard, they paused at a stylized black quartz statue of a woman kneeling.  "The founder of our ancient School," Harishka said, "Raquella Berto-Anirul.  By manipulating her own body chemistry, Raquella survived what would have been a lethal poisoning."

Rhombur bent to read the brass plaque.  "It says that all written and pictorial records of this woman were lost long ago when invaders set fire to the library building and destroyed the original statue.  Uh, how do you know what she looked like?"

With a wrinkled smile, Harishka said cryptically,  "Why, because we are witches."  Without another word, the robed old woman led the way down a short stairway and through a humid greenhouse where Acolytes and Sisters tended exotic plants and herbs.  Perhaps medicines, perhaps even poisons.

The Mother School was a place of legend and mythology seen by few men, and Leto had been astonished at the warm acceptance that his brash request had received.  He had asked the Bene Gesserit to select a talented, intelligent mate for Rhombur, and his tousle-haired friend had agreed to go "shopping."

At a brisk pace Harishka crossed a grassy field where women in short, lightweight robes performed impossible stretching exercises to a vocal cadence called out by a wrinkled, stooped old woman who matched them, move for move.  Leto found their bodily control astonishing.

When they finally entered a large stucco building with dark timbered beams and highly polished wooden floors, Leto was glad to be out of the sharp wind.  The building had a dusty chalkboard smell from old plaster walls.  The foyer opened into a practice hall, where a dozen young women in white robes stood motionless in the center, as erect as soldiers waiting for inspection.  Their hoods were thrown back over their shoulders.

Mother Superior stopped in front of the acolytes.  The two Reverend Mothers accompanying her went to stand behind the young women.  "Who here seeks a concubine?" Harishka inquired.  It was a traditional question, part of the ritual.

Rhombur stepped forward.  "I do-uh, Prince Rhombur, firstborn son and heir of House Vernius.  Or perhaps I seek even a wife."  He glanced over at Leto and lowered his voice.  "Since my House is renegade, I don't have to play silly political games.  Unlike some people I know."

Leto flushed, remembering the lessons his father had taught him.

Find love wherever you like, but never marry for love.  Your title belongs to House Atreides -- use it to strike the best possible bargain.

He had recently traveled to forested Ecaz to meet with Archduke Armand in his provisional capital after the Moritani carpet-bombing of his ancestral chateau.  Under the Emperor's crackdown, sending a legion of Sardaukar to Grumman to keep the fuming Viscount at bay, open hostilities between the two Houses had stopped, at least for the moment.

Archduke Armand Ecaz had requested an investigation team to study the alleged sabotage of the famous Ecazi fogtree forests and other crops, but Shaddam had refused.  "Let sleeping dogs lie" had been his official Imperial response.  And he expected the problem to end there.

Recognizing Leto's diligent attempts to calm the still-uneasy tensions, the Archduke had informally mentioned that his eldest daughter, Sanya, might be a marriageable prospect for House Atreides.  Upon hearing the suggestion, Leto had considered the assets of House Ecaz, their commercial, political, and military power, and how they might complement the resources of Caladan.  He had not even looked at the girl in question.  Study the political advantages of a marriage alliance.  His father would have been pleased. . . .

Now, Mother Superior said, "These young women are well trained in the myriad ways of pleasing nobility.  All have been chosen according to your profile, Prince."

Rhombur approached the line of women and looked closely at each of their faces.  Blondes, brunettes, redheads, some with skin as pale as milk, some as sleek and dark as ebony.  All were beautiful, all intelligent . . . and all studied him with poise and anticipation.

Knowing his friend as he did, Leto was not surprised to see Rhombur pause in front of a rather plain-looking girl with wide-set sepia eyes and mousy brown hair cut as short as a man's.  She met Rhombur's appraisal without looking away, without feigning a demure reaction as some of the others had done.  Leto noted the faintest smile curving her lips upward.

"Her name is Tessia," the Mother Superior said.  "A very intelligent, talented young woman.  She can recite the ancient classics perfectly, and plays several musical instruments."

Rhombur tilted her chin up, looked into her dark brown eyes.  "But can you laugh at a joke?  And tell an even better one in return?"

"Clever wordplay, my Lord?" Tessia answered.  "Do you prefer a distressingly bad pun, or a joke so bawdy it'll make your cheeks burn?"

Rhombur guffawed with delight.  "This one!"  As he touched Tessia's arm, she stepped out of line and walked with him for the first time.  Leto was pleased to see his friend so happy, but his heart was heavy as well, considering his own lack of a relationship.  Rhombur often did things on impulse, but had the fortitude to make them turn out right.

"Come here, children," Harishka said in a solemn tone.  "Stand before me and bow your heads."  They did so, holding hands.

With a paternal frown, Leto stepped forward to straighten Rhombur's collar and brushed an offending wrinkle from his shoulder pad.  The Ixian Prince flushed, then mumbled his thanks.

Harishka continued, "May you both lead long, productive lives and enjoy each other's honorable company.  You are now bound.  If, in years to come, you should choose to marry and seal the bond beyond concubinage, you have the blessings of the Bene Gesserit.  If you are not satisfied with Tessia, she may return here to the Mother School."

Leto was surprised to witness so many ceremonial trappings in what was, fundamentally, a business agreement.  By Courier from Caladan, he had already agreed upon a range of prices.  Still, Mother Superior's words imbued the relationship with some structure and established a foundation for good things to come.

"Prince Rhombur, this is a special woman, trained in ways that may surprise you.  Heed her advice, for Tessia is wise beyond her years."  Mother Superior stepped back.

Tessia leaned forward to whisper in Rhombur's ear, and the exiled Prince laughed.  Looking at his friend, he said, "Tessia has an interesting idea.  Leto, why don't you select a concubine for yourself?  There's plenty to choose from."  He gestured toward the other Acolytes.  "That way you won't have to keep making eyes at my sister!"

Leto blushed furiously.  His long-standing attraction to Kailea must be obvious, though he had taken steps over the years to conceal it.  He had refused to take her to his bed, torn as he was by the demands of ducal duty and the admonitions of his father.

"I've had other lovers, Rhombur.  You know that.  City and village girls find their Duke attractive enough.  There's no shame in it -- and I can maintain my honor with your sister."

Rhombur rolled his eyes.  "So, some fisherman's daughter from the docks is good enough for you, but my sister isn't?"

"That's not it at all.  I do this out of respect for House Vernius, and for you."

Harishka broke in, "I am afraid the women we have brought here are not suitable for Duke Atreides.  These have been selected for compatibility with Prince Rhombur."  Her prunish lips smiled.  "Nonetheless, other arrangements might be made. . . ."  She glanced up at an interior balcony, as if someone were watching them in concealment from above.

"I am not here for a concubine," Leto said gruffly.

"Uh, he's the independent sort," Rhombur said to Mother Superior, then raised his eyebrows at Tessia.  "What are we to do with him?"

"He knows what he wants, but does not know to admit it to himself," Tessia said with a clever smile.  "A bad habit for a Duke."

Rhombur patted Leto on the back.  "See, she's already giving good advice.  Why don't you just take Kailea as your concubine and be done with it, Leto?  I'm growing tired of your schoolboy angst.  It's certainly within your rights and, uh, we, both know it's the best she can aspire to be."

With an uneasy laugh, Leto dismissed the idea, though he had considered it many times.  He had been hesitant to approach Kailea with such a suggestion.  What might her reaction be?  Would she demand to be more than a concubine?  That was impossible.

Still, Rhombur's sister understood political realities.  Before the Ixian tragedy, the daughter of Earl Vernius would have been an acceptable match for a Duke (perhaps that's what old Paulus had had in mind).  But now, as head of House Atreides, Leto could never marry into a family that no longer held any Imperial title or fief.

What is this Love that so many speak of with such apparent familiarity?  Do they truly comprehend how unattainable it is?  Are there not as many definitions of Love as there are stars in the universe?

-The Bene Gesserit Question Book

FROM AN INTERIOR BALCONY overlooking the waiting Acolytes, twelve-year-old Jessica watched the concubine-selection process with intent eyes and sharp curiosity.  Standing beside the girl, Reverend Mother Mohiam had instructed her to observe, so Jessica drank in every detail with practiced Bene Gesserit scrutiny.

What does the teacher want me to see?

On the polished hardwood floor, Mother Superior stood talking with the young nobleman and his newly selected concubine, Tessia al-Reill.  Jessica had not predicted that choice; several of the other Acolytes were more beautiful, more shapely, more glamorous . . . but Jessica did not know the Prince or his personality, was not familiar with his tastes.

Did beauty intimidate him, an indication of low self-esteem?  Perchance the Acolyte Tessia reminded him of someone else he had known?  Or maybe he was simply attracted to her for some difficult-to-define reason . . . her smile, her eyes, her laugh.

"Never try to understand love," Mohiam cautioned in a directed-whisper, sensing the girl's thoughts.  "Simply work to understand its effects in lesser people."

Below, one of the other Reverend Mothers brought a document on a writing board and handed it to the Prince for his signature.  His companion, a black-haired, hawk-featured nobleman, peered over his shoulder to review the fine print.  Jessica could not make out their spoken words, but she was familiar with the ancient Ritual of Duty.

The dark-haired Duke reached forward to fix his companion's collar.  She found the gesture oddly endearing, and she smiled.

"Will I be presented to a nobleman one day, Reverend Mother?" she whispered.  No one had ever explained what Jessica's purpose in the Bene Gesserit might be, and it was a constant source of curiosity to her -- one that often irritated Mohiam.

The Reverend Mother formed a scowl on her plain, aging face, as Jessica had suspected she would.  "When the time is right, you will know, child.  Wisdom is understanding when to ask questions."

Jessica had heard this admonition before.  "Yes, Reverend Mother.  Impatience is a weakness."

The Bene Gesserit had many such sayings, all of which Jessica had committed to memory.  She sighed in exasperation, then controlled the reaction, hoping her teacher had not seen.  The Sisterhood obviously had some plan for her -- why wouldn't they reveal her future?  Most other Acolytes had some idea of their predetermined paths, but Jessica saw only a blank wall ahead of her, with no writing on it.

I am being groomed for something.  Prepared for an important assignment.

Why had her teacher brought her to this balcony, at this precise moment?  There was no accident in this, no coincidence; the Bene Gesserit planned everything, thought everything through with utmost care.

"There is hope for you yet, child," Mohiam murmured.  "I instructed you to observe -- but you are intent on the wrong person.  Not the man with Tessia.  Watch the other one, watch them both, watch how they interact with each other.  Tell me what you see."

From her high vantage, Jessica studied the men.  She breathed deeply, let her muscles relax.  Her thoughts, like minerals suspended in a glass of water, clarified.

"Both men are nobles, but not blood kin, judging from differences in their dress, mannerisms, and expressions."  She did not take her eyes from them.  "They have been close friends for many years.  They depend on one another.  The black-haired one is concerned for his friend's welfare."

"And?"  Jessica heard excitement and anticipation in her teacher's voice, though she could not imagine why.  The Reverend Mother's eyes were riveted on the second nobleman.

"I can tell by his bearing and interaction that the dark-haired one is a leader and takes his responsibilities seriously.  He has power, but does not wallow in it.  He is probably a better ruler than he gives himself credit for."  She watched his movement, the flush of his skin, the way he looked at the other Acolytes and then forced himself to turn away.  "He is also lonely."

"Excellent."  Mohiam beamed down at her pupil, but her eyes narrowed.  "That man is Duke Leto Atreides -- and you are destined for him, Jessica.  One day you will be the mother of his children."

Though Jessica knew she should take this news impassively, as a duty she must perform for the Sisterhood, she suddenly found a need to calm her hammering heart.

At that moment Duke Leto glanced up at Jessica, as if sensing her presence in the balcony shadows -- and their gazes met.  She saw a fire in his gray eyes, a strength and wisdom beyond his years, the result of bearing difficult burdens.  She felt herself drawn to him.

But she resisted.  Instincts . . . automatic reactions, responses . . . I am not an animal.  She rejected other emotions, as Mohiam had taught her for years.

Jessica's previous questions vanished, and for the moment she formed no new ones.  A deep, calming breath brought her to a state of serenity.  For whatever reasons, she liked the look of this Duke . . . but her duty was to the Sisterhood.  She would wait to learn what lay in store for her, and she would do whatever was necessary.

Impatience is a weakness.

Inwardly, Mohiam smiled.  Knowing the genetic threads she'd been ordered to weave, the Reverend Mother had staged this brief but distant encounter between Jessica and Duke Atreides.  Jessica was the culmination of many generations of careful breeding to create the Kwisatz Haderach.

The mistress of the program, Kwisatz Mother Anirul, wife of Emperor Shaddam, claimed that the highest likelihood of success would occur if a Harkonnen daughter of the current generation produced an Atreides daughter.  Jessica's secret father was Baron Harkonnen . . . and when she was ready she would be joined with Duke Leto Atreides.

Mohiam found it supremely ironic that these mortal enemies -- House Harkonnen and House Atreides -- were destined to form such an incredibly important union, one that neither House would ever suspect . . . or condone.

She could hardly restrain her excitement at the prospect:  Thanks to Jessica, the Sisterhood was only two generations away from its ultimate goal.

When you ask a question, do you truly want to know the answer, or are you merely flaunting your power?

-DMITRI HARKONNEN, Notes to My Sons

BARON HARKONNEN HAD TO PAY for the Suk doctor twice.

He'd thought his massive payment to Richesian Premier Calimar would be sufficient to obtain the services of Dr. Wellington Yueh for as long as would be required to diagnose and treat his debilitating illness.  Yueh, though, refused to cooperate.

The sallow Suk doctor was totally absorbed in himself and his technical research on the orbiting laboratory moon of Korona.  He showed not the slightest respect or fear when the Baron's name was mentioned.  "I may work for the Richesians," he said in a firm, humorless voice, "but I do not belong to them."

Piter de Vries, sent to Richese to work out the confidential details for the Baron, studied the doctor's aged, wooden features, the oblivious stubbornness.  They stood together in a small laboratory office on the artificial research station, a grand satellite that shone in the Richesian sky.  Despite the emphatic request of Premier Calimar, narrow-faced Yueh, with long drooping mustaches and a rope of black hair gathered into a silver Suk ring, declined to go to Giedi Prime.  Self-confident arrogance, de Vries thought.  That can be used against him.

"You, sir, are a Mentat, accustomed to selling your thoughts and intelligence to any patron."  Yueh drew his lips together and studied de Vries as if he were performing an autopsy . . . or wanted to.  "I, on the other hand, am a member of the Suk Inner Circle, graduate of full Imperial Conditioning."  He tapped the diamond tattoo on his wrinkled forehead.  "I cannot be bought, sold, or rented out.  You have no hold over me.  Now, please allow me to return to my important work."  He gave a minimal bow before taking his leave to continue research in the Richesian laboratories.

That man has never been put in his place, never been hurt . . . never been broken.  Piter de Vries considered it a challenge.

IN THE GOVERNMENTAL BUILDINGS of Triad Center, Richesian Premier Calimar's apologies and posturing meant nothing to de Vries.  However, he could easily make use of the man's authorization to pass through the security gates and guards, to return to the Korona satellite research station.  With no choice in the matter, the Mentat went to Dr. Yueh's sterile medical laboratory.  Alone, this time.

Time to renegotiate for the Baron.  He did not dare return to Giedi Prime without a fully cooperative Suk doctor.

He moved with mincing steps into a metal-walled room filled with machinery, cables, and preserved body parts in tanks -- a mixture of the best Richesian electromechanical technology, Suk surgical equipment, and biological specimens from other animals.  The smells of lubricants, rot, chemicals, burned flesh, and burning circuits hung heavy in the cold room, even as the station's air-recyclers attempted to scrub the contaminants.  Several tables contained sinks, metal and plaz piping, snaking cables, dispensing machines.  Rising above the dissection areas, shimmering holo blueprints portrayed human limbs as organic machines.

As the Mentat gazed across the laboratory, Yueh's head suddenly appeared on the other side of one of the counters -- lean and grease-smeared, with facial bones so prominent they seemed to be made of metal.

"Please don't disturb me further, Mentat," he said in an abrupt voice, preempting conversation.  He didn't even ask how de Vries had found his way back to the restricted Korona moon.  The diamond tattoo of Imperial Conditioning glistened on his forehead, buried under a smear of dark lubricant from a careless wipe of his hand.  "I am very busy."

"Still, Doctor, I must speak with you.  My Baron commands it."

Yueh narrowed his eyes, as if imagining how some of his prototype cyborg parts might fit on the Mentat.  "I am not interested in your Baron's medical condition.  It is not my area of expertise."  He looked at the laboratory racks and tables filled with experimental prosthetics, as if the answer should be obvious.  Yueh remained maddeningly aloof, as if he couldn't be touched or corrupted by anything.

De Vries approached to within garroting distance of the shorter man, talking all the while.  No doubt he would face serious punishment if he was forced to kill this annoying doctor.  "My Baron used to be healthy, trim, proud of his physique.  Through no change in diet or exercise, he has nearly doubled his body weight in ten years.  He suffers from a gradual deterioration of muscular functions and bloating."

Yueh frowned, but his gaze turned back to the Mentat's.  De Vries caught the flicker of expression and lowered his voice, ready to pounce.  "Do those symptoms sound familiar to you, Doctor?  Something you've seen elsewhere?"

Now Yueh became calculating.  He shifted so that racks of test apparatus separated him from the twisted Mentat.  A long glass tube continued to bubble and stink on the far side of the chamber.  "No Suk doctor gives free advice, Mentat.  My expenses here are exorbitant, my research vital."

De Vries chuckled as his enhanced mind spun through possibilities.  "And are you so engrossed in your tinkering, Doctor, that you've failed to notice that your patron, House Richese, is nearly bankrupt?  Baron Harkonnen's payment could guarantee your funding for many years."

The twisted Mentat reached abruptly into his jacket pocket, causing Yueh to flinch, fearing a silent weapon.  Instead de Vries brought out a flat black panel with touch pads.  The holoprojection of an old-style sea chest appeared, made entirely of gold with precious-gem studs inlaid on its top and sides in the patterns of blue Harkonnen griffins.  "After you diagnose my Baron, you could continue your research however you see fit."

Intrigued, Yueh reached out, so that his hand and forearm passed through the image.  With a synthetic squeal, the lid of the bolo-image opened to reveal an empty interior.  "We will fill this with whatever you please.  Melange, soostones, blue obsidian, opafire jewels, Hagal quartz . . . blackmail images.  Everyone knows that a Suk doctor can be bought."

"Then go buy yourself one.  Make it a matter of public record."

"We prefer a more, ah, confidential arrangement, as Premier Calimar promised."

The sallow old doctor pursed his dark lips again, deep in thought.  Yueh's entire world seemed focused on a small bubble around him, as if no one else existed, no one else mattered.  "I cannot provide long-term care, but I could perhaps diagnose the disease."

De Vries shrugged his bony shoulders.  "The Baron doesn't want you any longer than necessary."

Staring at the sheer amount of wealth the Mentat was promising him, Yueh imagined how much more productive his work would be here on Korona, given adequate funding.  Still, he hesitated.  "I have other responsibilities.  I have been assigned here by the Suk College for this specific purpose.  Cyborg prostheses will be a valuable market for Richese, and us, once proven."

With a sigh of resignation, de Vries pressed a key on the pad, and the treasure chest became noticeably larger.

Yueh stroked his mustaches.  "It might be possible for me to travel between Richese and Giedi Prime -- under an assumed identity, of course.  I could study your Baron, then return here to continue my work."

"An interesting idea," the Mentat said.  "So you accept our terms?"

"I agree to examine the patient.  And I shall consider what to put in the treasure chest you offer."  Yueh pointed toward a nearby counter.  "Now hand me that measuring scope.  Since you interrupted, you can help me with constructing a prototype body core."

TWO DAYS LATER ON GIEDI PRIME, adjusting to the industrial air and the heavier gravity, Yueh examined the Baron in the infirmary of Harkonnen Keep.  All doors closed, all windows covered, all servants sent away.  Piter de Vries watched through his peephole, grinning.

Yueh discarded the medical files the Baron's doctors had compiled over the years, documenting the progress of the disease.  "Foolish amateurs.  I am not interested in them, or their test results."  Opening his diagnostic kit, the doctor withdrew his own set of scanners, complex mechanisms that only a highly trained Suk could decipher.  "Remove your clothing, please."

"Do you want to play?"  The Baron tried to retain his dignity, his command of the situation.

"No."

The Baron distracted himself from the uncomfortable probings and proddings as he considered ways to kill this pompous Suk if he, too, failed to discover the cause of the disease.  He drummed his fingertips on the examining table.  "None of my physicians could suggest any effective course of treatment.  Given the choice of a clean mind or a clean body, I had to take my pick."

Ignoring the basso voice, Yueh donned a pair of goggles with green lenses.  "Suggesting that you strive for both is too much to ask?"  He initialized the power pack and scanning routines, then peered at the gross, naked form of his patient.  The Baron lay on his belly on the examination couch.  He muttered constantly, complaining about pains and discomforts.

Yueh spent several minutes examining the Baron's skin, his internal organs, his orifices, until a string of subtle clues began to fit together in his mind.  Finally, the delicate Suk scanner detected a vector path.

"Your condition appears to be sexually generated.  Are you able to use this penis?"  Yueh said without the slightest trace of humor.  He might have been giving a stock quote.

"Use it?"  The Baron gave a rude snort.  "Hells and damnations, it's still the best part of me."

"Ironic."  Yueh used a scalpel to scrape a sample from the foreskin, and the Baron yelped in surprise.  "I need to run an analysis."  The doctor didn't give the slightest hint of an apology.

With the slender blade Yueh smeared the fragment of skin onto a thin slide and inserted it into a slot in the front underside of his goggles.  Using finger controls, he rotated the specimen in front of his eyes, under varying illuminations.  The goggle plaz changed color from green to scarlet to lavender.  Then he sent the sample through a multistage chemical analysis.

"Was that necessary?" the Baron growled.

"It is only the beginning."  Yueh then removed more instruments -- many of them sharp -- from his kit.  The Baron would have been intrigued, if he'd been able to use the tools on someone else.  "I must perform many tests."

AFTER SLIPPING INTO A ROBE, Baron Harkonnen sat back, gray-skinned and sweaty, sore in a thousand places that had not hurt before.  Several times he'd wanted to kill this arrogant Suk doctor -- but he didn't dare interfere with the protracted diagnosis.  The other physicians had been helpless and stupid; now he would endure whatever was necessary in order to obtain his answer.  The Baron hoped the treatment and eventual cure would be less aggressive, less painful than Yueh's original analysis.  He poured from a decanter of kirana brandy and gulped down a mouthful.

"I have reduced the spectrum of possibilities, Baron," Yueh said, pursing his lips.  "Your ailment belongs to a category of rare diseases, narrowly defined, specifically targeted.  I can collect another full set of samples, if you would like me to triple-verify the diagnosis?"

"That will not be necessary."  The Baron sat up, gripping his walking stick in case he needed to hit someone with it.  "What have you found?"

Yueh droned on, "The transmission vector is obvious, via heterosexual intercourse.  You were infected by one of your female lovers."

The Baron's momentary elation at finally finding an answer washed away in confusion.  "I have no female lovers.  Women disgust me."

"Yes, I see."  Yueh had heard many patients deny the obvious.  "The symptoms are so subtly general that I am not surprised less-competent doctors missed it.  Even Suk teaching did not initially include a mention of it, and I learned of such intriguing diseases through my wife Wanna.  She is a Bene Gesserit, and the Sisterhood occasionally makes use of these disease organisms --"

The Baron lunged into a sitting position on the edge of the examination couch.  A firestorm crossed his jowly face.  "Those damnable witches!"

"Ah, so now you remember," Yueh said with smug satisfaction.  "When did the contacts occur?"

Hesitation, then:  "More than a dozen years ago."

Yueh stroked his long mustaches.  "My Wanna tells me that a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother is capable of altering her internal chemistry to hold diseases latent in her own body."

"The bitch!" the Baron roared.  "She infected me."

The doctor did not seem interested in the injustice or the indignity.  "More than just passively infected -- such a pathogen is released by force of will.  This was not an accident, Baron."

In his mind's eye the Baron envisioned horse-faced Mohiam, the sneering, disrespectful manner with which she had looked at him during the Fenrings' banquet.  She had known, known all along -- had been watching his body transform itself into this loathsome, corpulent lump.

And she had been the cause of it all.

Yueh closed up his goggles and slipped them back into his diagnostic kit.  "Our bargain is concluded, and I will take my leave now.  I have much research to complete on Richese."

"You agreed to treat me."  The Baron lost his balance as he tried to surge to his feet.  He collapsed back onto the groaning examination couch.

"I agreed to examine you, and no more, Baron.  No Suk can do anything for your condition.  There is no known treatment, no cure, though I am sure we'll eventually study it at the Suk College."

The Baron clenched his walking stick, finally standing.  Seething, he thought about the venom-drenched darts hidden in its tip.

But he also understood the political consequences of killing a Suk doctor, if word ever got out.  The Suk School had powerful contacts in the Imperium; it might not be worth the pleasure.  Besides, he had murdered enough doctors already . . . at least he finally had an answer.

And a legitimate target for his revenge.  He knew who had done this to him.

"I'm afraid you must ask the Bene Gesserit, Baron."

Without another word, Dr. Wellington Yueh hurried out of Harkonnen Keep and fled from Giedi Prime aboard the next Heighliner, glad that he would never have to deal with the Baron again.

Some lies are easier to believe than the truth.

-Orange Catholic Bible

EVEN SURROUNDED BY other villagers, Gurney Halleck felt completely alone.  He stared into the watery beer.  The brew was weak and sour, though if he drank enough of it, the pain in his body and in his heart grew numb.  But in the end he was left with only a throbbing hangover and no hope of finding his sister.

In the five months since Captain Kryubi and the Harkonnen patrol had taken her, Gurney's cracked ribs, bruises, and cuts had healed.  "Flexible bones," he told himself, a bitter joke.

The day after Bheth's abduction, he'd been back in the fields, slowly and painfully digging trenches and planting the despised krall tubers.  The other villagers, looking sidelong at him, had continued to work, pretending nothing had happened.  They knew that if productivity declined, the Harkonnens would come back and punish them even more.  Gurney learned that other daughters had been taken as well, but the parents involved never spoke of it outside their families.

Back at the tavern, Gurney rarely sang anymore.  Though he carried his old baliset with him, the strings remained silent, and music refused to issue from his lips.  He drank his bitter ale and sat sullenly, listening to the tired conversations of his mates.  The men repeated complaints about work, about the weather, about uninteresting spouses.  Gurney turned a deaf ear on all of it.

Though sickened to imagine what Bheth might be enduring, he hoped she was still alive. . . .  She was probably locked inside a Harkonnen pleasure house, trained to perform unspeakable acts.  And if she resisted or failed to meet expectations, she would be killed.  As the patrol sweep had proved, Harkonnens could always find other candidates for their stinking brothels.

At home, his parents had blocked their own daughter from memory; without Gurney's painstaking attention, they would have let Bheth's garden die.  His parents had even performed a mock funeral and recited verses from the battered Orange Catholic Bible.  For a while, Gurney's mother lit a candle and stared at the flickering flame, her lips moving in a silent prayer.  They cut calla lilies and daisies -- Bheth's favorite flowers -- and laid out a bouquet to honor her memory.

Then all of it ceased, and they moved on with their dreary lives without mention of her, as if she had never existed.

But Gurney never gave up.

"Don't you care?" he bellowed one night into his father's seamed face.  "How can you let them do this to Bheth?"

"I didn't let them do anything."  The older man seemed to stare right through his son, as if he were made of dirty glass.  "There's nothing any of us can do -- and if you keep trying to fight against the Harkonnens, they will pay you back in blood."

Gurney stormed out to sulk in the tavern, but the villagers there offered no more help.  Night after night, he grew disgusted with them.  The months passed in a blur.

Sloshing his ale, Gurney suddenly sat up at his table and realized what he was becoming.  He saw his blunt face in the mirror each morning with a gradual awareness that he had stopped being himself.  He, Gurney Halleck -- good-natured, full of music and bluster -- had tried to reawaken the life in these people.  But instead he'd been transformed into one of them.  Though barely in his twenties, he already looked like his aging father.

The drone of humorless conversation continued, and Gurney looked at the smooth prefab walls, the streaked window plates.  This monotonous routine had not varied for generations.  His hand clenched around the flagon, and he took stock of his own talents and abilities.  He couldn't fight the Harkonnens with brute strength or weapons, but he had another idea.  He could strike back at the Baron and his followers in a more insidious way.

Feeling renewed energy, he grinned.  "I've got a tune for you, mates -- the likes of which you've never heard before."

The men smiled uneasily.  Gurney held the baliset, strummed its strings as brusquely as if he were peeling coarse vegetables, and sang out in a loud, blustery voice:

We work in the fields, we work in the towns,

and this is our lot in life.

For the rivers are wide, and the valleys are low,

and the Baron -- he is fat.

We live with no joy, we die without grief,

and this is our lot in life.

For the mountains are high, and the oceans are deep,

and the Baron -- he is fat.

Our sisters are stolen, our sons are crushed,

our parents forget, and our neighbors pretend --

and this is our lot in life!

For our labor is hard, and our rest is short,

while the Baron grows fat from us.

As the stanzas continued the listeners' eyes widened in horror.  "Stop this, Halleck!" one man said, rising from his seat.

"Why, Perd?" Gurney said with a sneer.  "Do you love the Baron so much?  I hear he enjoys bringing strong young men like you into his pleasure chambers."

Bravely, Gurney sang another insulting song, and another, until finally he felt liberated.  These tunes gave him a freedom he'd never before imagined.  The onlookers were disturbed and uneasy.  Many got up to leave as he continued to sing, but Gurney would not be swayed.  He stayed until long after midnight.

When finally he walked home that night, Gurney Halleck had a spring in his step.  He had struck back at his tormentors, though they would never know it.

He wouldn't get enough sleep going to bed at this hour, and work would begin early in the morning.  But that didn't bother him -- he felt recharged.  Gurney returned to the darkened house where his parents had long since retired.  He set the baliset in his personal wardrobe, lay back on his pallet, and dozed off with a smile on his lips.

LESS THAN TWO WEEKS LATER, a silent Harkonnen patrol entered the village of Dmitri.  It was three hours before dawn.

Armed guards battered in the door of the prefab dwelling, though the Hallecks never kept it locked.  The uniformed men lit blazing glowglobes as they marched in, knocking furniture aside, smashing crockery.  They uprooted all the flowers Bheth had planted in old pots outside the front door.  They tore down the curtains that covered the small windows.

Gurney's mother screamed and huddled far back on the bed.  His father lurched up, went to the door of their chamber, and saw the troopers.  Instead of defending his home, he backed away and slammed the bedroom door, as if that could protect him.

But the guards were only interested in Gurney.  They dragged the young man from his bed, and he came out flailing wildly with his fists.  The men found his resistance amusing, and flung him facedown on the fireplace hearth; Gurney chipped a tooth and scraped his chin.  He tried to get back to his hands and knees, but two Harkonnens kicked him in the ribs.

After ransacking a small closet, one blond soldier came out with the nicked and patched baliset.  He tossed it on the floor, and Kryubi made sure Gurney's face was turned toward the instrument.  As the Harkonnens pressed their victim's cheek against the hearth bricks, the guard captain stomped on the baliset with a booted foot, breaking its spine.  The strings twanged in a discordant jangle.

Gurney moaned, feeling a greater pain from that than from the blows he had received.  All the work he had put into restoring the instrument, all the pleasure it had given him.  "Bastards!" he spat, which earned him another pummeling.

He made a concentrated effort to see their faces, recognized a square-featured, brown-haired ditch-digger he'd known from a nearby village, now resplendent in his new uniform with the low-rank insignia of an Immenbrech.  He saw another guard with a bulbous nose and a harelip, a man he was sure had been "recruited" from Dmitri five years before.  But their faces showed no recognition, no sympathy.  They were the Baron's men now, and would never do anything to risk being sent back to their former lives.

Seeing that Gurney recognized them, the guards dragged him outside and beat him with redoubled enthusiasm.

During the attack, Kryubi stood tall, sad, and appraising.  He ran a finger along his shred of mustache.  The guard captain watched in grim silence as his men punched and kicked and beat Gurney, drawing energy from their victim's refusal to cry out as often as they would have liked.  They finally stepped back to catch their breath.

And brought out the sticks . . .

At last, when Gurney could no longer move because his bones were broken, his muscles battered, and his flesh covered with clotting blood, the Harkonnens withdrew.  Under the harsh glare of clustered glowglobes, he lay bleeding and moaning.

Kryubi held up his hand and signaled the men to return to their craft.  They took all the glowglobes but one, which shed a single flickering light upon the mangled man.

Kryubi stared at him with apparent concern, then knelt close by.  He spoke quiet words meant only for Gurney.  Even through the pain-fogged clamor in his skull, Gurney found it strange.  He had expected the Harkonnen guard captain to crow his triumph so that all the villagers could hear.  Instead, Kryubi seemed more disappointed than smug.  "Any other man would have given up long ago.  Most men would have been more intelligent.  You brought this on yourself, Gurney Halleck."

The captain shook his head.  "Why did you force me to do this?  Why did you insist on bringing wrath down upon yourself?  I've saved your life this time.  Barely.  But if you defy the Harkonnens again, we may have to kill you."  He shrugged.  "Or perhaps just kill your family and maim you instead.  One of my men has a certain talent for gouging out eyes with his fingers."

Gurney tried to speak several times around broken, blood-thick lips.  "Bastards," he finally managed.  "Where's my sister?"

"Your sister is not of concern right now.  She is gone.  Stay here and forget about her.  Do your work.  We each have our job to do for the Baron, and if you fail in yours" -- Kryubi's nostrils flared --" then I must do mine.  If you speak out against the Baron, if you insult him, if you ridicule him to incite discontent, I will have to act.  You're smart enough to know that."

With an angry grunt, Gurney shook his head.  Only his anger sustained him.  Every drop of his blood that spattered the ground he swore to repay with Harkonnen blood.  With his dying breath he would discover what had happened to his sister -- and if by some miracle Bheth remained alive, he would rescue her.

Kryubi turned toward the troop transport, where the guards had already seated themselves.  "Don't make me come back."  He looked over his shoulder at Gurney and added a very odd word.  "Please."

Gurney lay still, wondering how long it would take for his parents to venture out and see whether he lived or not.  He watched through blurred vision and pain-smeared eyes as the transport lifted off and left the village.  He wondered if any other lights would come on, if any villagers would come out and help him, now that the Harkonnens were gone.

But the dwellings in Dmitri remained dark.  Everyone pretended not to have seen or heard.

The strictest limits are self-imposed.

-FRIEDRE GINAZ, Philosophy of the Swordmaster

WHEN DUNCAN IDAHO ARRIVED at Ginaz, he believed he needed nothing more than the Old Duke's prized sword to become a great warrior.  His head full of romantic expectations, he envisioned the swashbuckling life he would lead, the marvelous fighting techniques he would learn.  He was only twenty, and looked forward to a golden future.

Reality was quite different.

The Ginaz School was an archipelago of habitable islands scattered like bread crumbs across turquoise water.  On each island, different Masters taught students their particular techniques that ranged from shield-fighting, military tactics, and combat skills to politics and philosophy.  Over the course of his eight-year training ordeal, Duncan would move from one environment to the next and learn from the best fighters in the Imperium.

If he survived.

The school's main island served as the spaceport and administration center, surrounded by reefs that blocked waves from the choppy water.  Tall clustered buildings reminded Duncan of the bristles on a spiny rat, like the one he'd kept as a pet inside the Harkonnen prison fortress.

Revered throughout the Imperium, the Swordmasters of Ginaz had built many of their primary structures as museums and memorials, rather than classrooms.  This reflected the supreme confidence they felt in their personal fighting abilities, a self-assurance that bordered on hubris.  Politically neutral, they served their art and allowed its practitioners to make their own choices regarding the Imperium.  Contributing to the mythology, the academy's graduates had included the leaders of many Great Houses in the Landsraad.  Master jongleurs were commissioned to compose songs and commentary about the great deeds of the legendary heroes of Ginaz.

The central skyscraper, where Duncan would endure his final testing years hence, held the tomb of Jool-Noret, founder of the Ginaz School.  Noret's sarcophagus lay in open view -- surrounded by clear armor-plaz and a Holtzman-generated shield -- yet only the "worthy" were allowed to see it.

Duncan vowed that he would prove himself worthy. . . .

He was met at the spaceport by a slender, bald woman wearing a black martial-arts gi.  Brisk and businesslike, she introduced herself as Karsty Toper.  "I have been assigned to take your possessions."  She extended her hand for his rucksack and the long bundle containing the Old Duke's sword.

He clutched the blade protectively.  "If you give me your personal guarantee that these items will be safe."

Her forehead furrowed, wrinkling her shaved head.  "We value honor more than any other House in the Landsraad."  Her hand remained extended, unwavering.

"Not more than the Atreides," Duncan said, still refusing to relinquish the blade.

Karsty Toper frowned as she considered.  "Not more, perhaps.  But we are comparable."

Duncan handed her the packages, and she directed him to a long distance shuttle 'thopter.  "Go there.  You will be taken to your first island.  Do what you are told without complaining, and learn from everything."  She tucked the sword bundle and his rucksack under her arms.  "We will hold these for you until it is time."

Without seeing the Ginaz city or the school administration tower, Duncan was flown far across the deep sea to a low, lush island like a lily pad that barely lifted itself out of the water. Jungles were dense and huts were few.  The three uniformed crewmen dropped him on the beach and departed without answering any of his questions.  Duncan stood all alone, listening to the rush of ocean against the island shore, reminded of Caladan.

He had to believe this was some sort of test.

A deeply tanned man with frizzy white hair and thin, sinewy limbs strode out to meet him, parting palm fronds.  He wore a sleeveless black tunic belted at the waist.  The man's expression appeared stony as he squinted into the light glaring off the beach.

"I am Duncan Idaho.  Are you my first instructor, sir?"

"Instructor?"  The man scowled.  "Yes, rat, and my name is Jamo Reed -- but prisoners don't use names here, because everyone knows his place.  Do your work, and don't cause any trouble.  If the others can't keep you in line, then I will."

Prisoners?  "I'm sorry, Master Reed, but I'm here for Swordmaster training --"

Reed laughed.  "Swordmaster?  That's rich!"

Without giving him any time to settle, the man assigned Duncan to a rugged work crew with dark-skinned Ginaz natives.  Duncan communicated by rough hand signals, since none of the natives spoke Imperial Galach.

For several hot and sweaty days, the men dug channels and wells to improve the water system for an inland village.  The air was so thick with humidity and biting gnats that Duncan could barely breathe.  As evening approached and the gnats dissipated, the jungle swarmed with mosquitoes and black flies, and Duncan's skin was covered with swollen bites.  He had to drink copious amounts of water just to replace what he sweated out.

As Duncan labored to move heavy stones by hand, the sun warmed the rippling muscles of his bare back.  Workmaster Reed watched from the shade of a mango tree, arms folded across his chest, a studded whip gripped in one hand.  He never said a word about Swordmaster training.  Duncan voiced no complaints, demanded no answers.  He had expected Ginaz to be . . . unexpected.

This has to be some kind of test.

Before attaining his ninth birthday, he'd suffered cruel tortures at the hands of the Harkonnens.  He had watched Glossu Rabban murder his parents.  Even as a boy, he had killed hunters in Forest Guard Preserve, and he'd finally escaped to Caladan only to see his mentor, Duke Paulus Atreides, slain in the bullring.  Now, after a decade of service to House Atreides, he chose to view each day's effort as a training exercise, toughening himself for future battles.  He would become a Swordmaster of Ginaz. . . .

A month later, another 'thopter unceremoniously dropped off a red-haired, pale-skinned young man.  The newcomer looked out of place on the beach, upset and confused -- just as Duncan must have appeared at his own arrival.  Before anyone could speak to the redhead, though, Master Reed sent the work crews to hack at the dense undergrowth with dull machetes; the jungle seemed to grow back as fast as they could cut it down.  Perhaps that was the point of sending convicts here, a perpetual but pointless errand, like the myth of Sisyphus he'd heard during his studies with the Atreides.

Duncan didn't see the redhead again until two nights later, when he tried to fall asleep in his own primitive palm-frond hut.  In a shelter on the other side of the shoreline encampment, the newcomer lay moaning with a horrible sunburn.  Duncan crept out to help him under the starlight of Ginaz, rubbing a creamy salve on the worst blisters, as he had seen the natives do.

The redhead hissed at the pain, bit back an outcry.  He finally spoke in Galach, startling Duncan.  "Thank you, whoever you are."  Then he lay back and closed his eyes.  "Damned poor way to run a school, wouldn't you say?  What am I doing here?"

The young man, Hiih Resser, came from one of the Houses Minor on Grumman.  As part of a family tradition, every other generation selected a candidate to be trained on Ginaz, but during his generation he was the only one available.  "I was considered a poor choice, a cruel joke to send here, and my father is convinced I'm going to fail."  Resser winced as he sat up, feeling his raw, blistered skin.  "Everyone tends to underestimate me."

Neither of them knew how to explain his situation, stuck on an island populated by convicts.  "It'll toughen us up at least," Duncan said.

The next day, when Jamo Reed saw them talking with each other, he scratched his frizzy white hair, scowled, then assigned them to different work details on opposite sides of the island.

Duncan did not see Resser again for quite a while. . . .

As months passed with no further information, no structured exercises, Duncan began to grow angry, resenting the wasted time when he could have been serving House Atreides.  How was he ever going to become a Swordmaster at this rate?

One dawn as he lay in his hut, instead of the expected call from Workmaster Reed, Duncan heard a rhythmic beating of 'thopter wings, and his heart leaped.  Racing outside, he saw a craft landing on the wide, wet beach just within the line of breakers.  Wind from the articulated wings blew the leaf fronds like fans.

A slender, bald form in a black gi climbed out and spoke with Jamo Reed.  The sinewy workmaster grinned and extended a warm handshake; Duncan had never noticed that Reed's teeth were so white.  Karsty Toper stepped aside, letting her eyes rove across the curious prisoners who had emerged from their huts.

Workmaster Reed turned back to the convicts standing beside their ramshackle huts.  "Duncan Idaho!  Come over here, rat."  Duncan ran across the rocky beach toward the 'thopter.  When he got closer to the flying machine, he could see redheaded Hiih Resser already sitting inside the cockpit.  He pressed a freckled, smiling face against the curved windowplaz.

The woman bowed her shaved head to him, then ran her eyes up and down his body like a scanner.  She turned to Reed and spoke in Galach.  "Success, Master Reed?"

The workmaster shrugged his whipcord shoulders, and his moist eyes suddenly filled with expression.  "The other prisoners didn't try to kill him.  He didn't get himself in trouble.  And we worked some of the fat and weakness out of him."

"Is this part of my training?" Duncan asked.  "A labor crew to toughen me up?"

The bald woman placed her hands on her narrow hips.  "This was a genuine prison crew, Idaho.  These men are murderers and thieves, assigned here for the rest of their lives."

"And you sent me here?  With them?"

Jamo Reed came forward and gave him a surprising hug.  "Yes, rat, and you survived.  As did Hiih Resser."  He gave Duncan a paternal pounding on the back.  "I'm proud of you."

Embarrassed and confused, Duncan mustered a disbelieving snort.  "I lived through worse prisons when I was an eight-year-old boy."

"And you will face worse from this day forward."  In a no-nonsense tone, Karsty Toper explained, "This was a test of character and obedience -- and patience.  A Swordmaster must have the patience to study an opponent, to implement a plan, to ambush the enemy.""But a real Swordmaster usually has more information about his situation," Duncan said.

"Now we have seen what you can do with yourself, rat." Reed wiped a tear from his own cheek.  "Don't let me down -- I expect to see you on your final day of testing."

"Eight years from now," Duncan said.

Toper directed him toward the still-fluttering 'thopter; he was delighted to see that she had brought the Old Duke's sword back to him.  The bald woman had to raise her voice to be heard over the loud hum of the aircraft's engines as she applied thrust.  "Now it is time to begin your real training."

Special knowledge can be a terrible disadvantage if it leads you too far along a path that you cannot explain anymore.

-Mentat Admonition

IN A MEDITATION ALCOVE in the darkest basement of Harkonnen Keep, Piter de Vries could not hear the screech of amputation saws or the screams of torture victims from an open doorway just down the hall.  His Mentat concentration was focused too intensely on other, more important matters.

Numerous harsh drugs enhanced his thinking process.

Sitting with his eyes closed, he pondered the clockwork of the Imperium, how the cogs meshed and slipped and ground together.  The Great and Minor Houses of the Landsraad, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and the commercial trading conglomerate CHOAM were the key cogs.  And all depended upon one thing.

Melange, the spice.

House Harkonnen reaped huge profits from its spice monopoly.  When they'd learned of the secret "Project Amal" years ago, the Baron had needed little coaxing to realize how he would suffer financial ruin if a cheap melange substitute were ever developed -- one that made Arrakis worthless.

The Emperor (or, more likely, Fenring) had hidden the artificial spice scheme well.  He'd buried the vastly expensive project in the vagaries of the Imperial budget - imposed higher taxes here, trumped-up fines there, called in long-standing debts, sold valuable properties.  But Piter de Vries knew where to look.  Consequences, plans, preparations, third- and fourth-order ripples that could not remain invisible.  Only a Mentat could follow them all, and the indications pointed to a long-term project that would bring about the economic ruin of House Harkonnen.

The Baron, however, would not go quietly. He had even attempted to start a war between the Bene Tleilax and House Atreides in order to destroy the "Amal" work . . . but that plan had failed, thanks to the damnable Duke Leto.

Since then, infiltrating spies onto the planet formerly known as Ix had proved predictably difficult, and his Mentat projections gave him no reason to believe the Tleilaxu had ceased their experiments.  Indeed, since the Emperor was sending two more legions of "peacekeeper" Sardaukar to Ix, the research might finally be reaching a head.

Or Shaddam might be reaching the limits of his patience.

Now, in his Mentat trance, de Vries did not move a muscle, other than his eyes.  A tray of mind-enhancing drugs hung around his neck, a slowly spinning platform like a table centerpiece.  A yellow carrion fly landed on his nose, but he didn't see it, didn't feel it.  The insect crawled onto his lower lip and kissed the spilled, bitter sapho juice there.

De Vries studied the rotating smorgasbord of drugs, and with a flick of his eyes stopped the turntable.  The tray tilted, pouring a vial of tikopia syrup into his mouth . . . and with it the hapless fly, followed by a capsule of melange concentrate.  The Mentat bit down on the spice capsule and swallowed, tasting an explosion of sweet-burning cassia essence.  Then he summoned a second capsule, more melange than he had ever consumed in one sitting.  But he needed the clarity now.

A torture victim in a distant cell howled, babbling a confession.  But de Vries noticed nothing.  Impervious to distractions, he plunged deeper into his own mind.  Deeper.  He felt his awareness opening, an unfolding of time like the spreading petals of a flower.  He flowed along a continuum, each part accessible to his brain.  He saw his exact place in it.

In his mind's eye, one of several possible futures became clear, an extraordinary Mentat projection based upon an avalanche of information and intuition, enhanced by massive melange consumption.  The vision was a series of painful filmbook images, visual spikes driven into his eyes.  He saw the Tleilaxu Master Researcher proudly holding a vial of synthetic spice, and laughing as he consumed it for himself.  Success!

A blur.  He saw the Harkonnens on Arrakis, packing up, leaving all their spice production behind.  Troops of armed Sardaukar guards marched blurred figures to an Imperial transport, taking them away from holdings on the desert world.  He saw the Harkonnen blue-griffin banner taken down from the fortress in Carthag and the Residency at Arrakeen.

And replaced with the green-and-black of House Atreides!

A strangled noise came from his throat, and his Mentat mind sifted through the prescient images, forced them into a pattern, and tried to translate what he had seen.

The Harkonnens will lose their spice monopoly.  But not necessarily because of the amal being developed by the Tleilaxu in collusion with the Emperor.

How, then?

As the drugs' multitentacled hold tightened, smothering him, his mind streaked down one avenue of synapses after another.  Each time, he found nothing, only dead ends.  He circled around and tried again, but reached the same conclusion.

How will it happen?

Heavy consumption of mixed drugs was not an approved method of stimulating mind powers; but he wasn't a normal Mentat, a gifted person accepted into the School and trained in the arcane methods of data-sorting and analysis.  Piter de Vries was a "twisted" Mentat -- grown in a Tleilaxu axlotl tank from the cells of a dead Mentat and trained by others who had broken from the Mentat School.  After dispensing their warped training, the Tleilaxu retained no control over their Mentats, though de Vries had no doubt that they had another fully grown ghola, genetically identical to him, just waiting in case Baron Harkonnen happened to lose patience with him one too many times.

The Tleilaxu "twisting" produced an enrichment that could be obtained in no other way.  It gave de Vries greater capabilities, far beyond what normal Mentats could attain.  But it also made him unpredictable and dangerous, potentially beyond control.

For decades the Bene Tleilax had experimented with drug combinations on their Mentats; in his formative years, de Vries had been one of their subjects.  The effects had been unpredictable and inconclusive, resulting in alterations -- improvements, he hoped -- to his brain.

Ever since he'd been sold to House Harkonnen, de Vries had performed his own tests, refining his body, tuning it to the condition he wanted.  With just the right mixture of chemicals he had achieved a high degree of mental clarity for faster processing of data.

Why will House Harkonnen lose the spice monopoly?  And when?

It seemed wise to suggest to the Baron that he reinforce his operations, double-check the secret melange stockpiles hidden on Lankiveil and elsewhere.  We must protect ourselves from this disaster.

His heavy eyelids flickered, lifted.  Bright particles of light swam into his eyes; with difficulty, he focused his vision.  He heard squealing.  Past the half-closed door, two uniformed men wheeled a squeaky gurney, on top of which lay a misshapen lump that had once been a human form.

Why will House Harkonnen lose its spice monopoly?  Sadly, he realized the drugs he had administered were wearing off, dissipated in the effort to unravel the troubled prescient vision.  Why?  He needed to take this to an even deeper level.  I must learn the answer!

In a frenzy he detached the drug tray from his neck, dumping juice and capsules on the floor.  Falling to his knees, he gathered all the pills he could find and swallowed them.  Like an animal, he lapped up spilled sapho juice, before he huddled in a jittering heap on the cold floor.  Why?

When a pleasurable feeling came over him, he lay back on the sticky, wet surface, staring at the ceiling.  His involuntary body functions slowed, giving him the outward appearance of death.  But his mind was racing, its electrochemical activity increasing, neurons sorting signals, processing, searching . . . electrical impulses leaping synaptic gaps, faster and faster.

Why?  Why?

His cognitive pathways fired in all directions, crossed, sizzled; potassium and sodium ions collided with other radicals in his brain cells.  The internal mechanisms broke down, no longer able to handle the fire-hose flow of data.  He was on the brink of vaulting into mental chaos and slipping into a coma.

Instead, his marvelous Mentat mind went into survival mode, shutting down functions, limiting the damage. . . .

PITER DE VRIES AWOKE in a pool of spilled drug residue.  His nostrils, mouth, and throat burned.

At the Mentat's side, the Baron paced back and forth, scolding him like a child.  "Look at the mess you've made, Piter.  All that wasted melange, and I almost had to purchase a new Mentat from the Tleilaxu.  Don't ever be so thoughtless and wasteful again!"

De Vries struggled to sit up, wanting to tell the Baron about his vision, the destruction of House Harkonnen.  "I . . . I have seen . . ."  But he could not get the words out.  It would take a long time before he was able to string sentences together coherently.

Worse yet -- even with his desperate overdose, he still did not have an answer for the Baron.

Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.

-CROWN PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO, Discourses on Leadership

WITHIN THE ICE-CHOKED arctic circle of Lankiveil, commercial whale fur boats were like cities on the water, enormous processing plants that lumbered across the steel-gray waters for months before returning to spaceport docks to disgorge their cargo.

Abulurd Harkonnen, the Baron's younger half-brother, preferred smaller vessels with native crews.  To them, whale hunting was a challenge and an art, rather than an industry.

Biting wind blew his ash-blond hair around his ears and shoulders as he squinted pale-eyed into the distance.  The sky was a soup of dirty clouds, but he'd grown accustomed to the climate.  Despite the glamorous and expensive Harkonnen palaces on other planetary holdings, Abulurd had chosen this frigid, mountainous world to call home.

He had been out on the sea for a week now, cheerfully attempting to assist the swarthy crew, though his appearance was far different from that of the Lankiveil natives.  His hands were sore and covered with blisters that sooner or later would turn to calluses.  The Buddislamic whalers seemed bemused that their planetary governor wanted to come out and work, but they knew his eccentricities.  Abulurd had never been one for pomp and ceremony, for abusing his power, or showing off his riches.

In the deep northern seas, Bjondax fur whales swam in herds like aquatic bison.  Golden-furred beasts were common; those with exotic leopard spots were much rarer.  Standing next to rattling prayer wheels and streamers, lookouts on observation platforms scanned the ice-thick sea with binoculars, searching for lone whales.  Off-shift whalers took turns praying.  These native hunters were selective of the beasts they killed, choosing only those with the best coats that would bring in the highest prices.

Abulurd smelled the salt air and the omnipresent tang of impending sleet.  He waited for the action to begin, for a fast hunt when the captain and his first mate would bellow orders, treating Abulurd as just another crewman.  For now, he had nothing to do but wait and think about home. . . .

At night, when the whaling boat rocked and swayed, accompanied by the patter and thump of ice chunks bumping against the reinforced hull, Abulurd would sing or play a local betting game that involved stacked beads.  He would recite required sutras with the gruff, deeply religious crew.

Glowing heaters inside the boat cabins could not match the roaring fireplaces in his bustling main lodge on Tula Fjord or his romantic private dacha at the mouth of the fjord.  Although he enjoyed the whale hunt, Abulurd already missed his quiet and strong wife.  He and Emmi Rabban-Harkonnen had been married for decades, and the separation of days would only make their reunion sweeter.

Emmi had noble blood, but from a diminished Minor House.  Four generations ago, before the alliance with House Harkonnen, Lankiveil had been the fief of an unimportant family, House Rabban, which had devoted itself to religious pursuits.  They built monasteries and seminary retreats in the rugged mountains, instead of exploiting the resources of their world.

Long ago, after the death of his father, Dmitri, Abulurd had taken Emmi with him to spend seven unpleasant years on Arrakis.  His elder half-brother Vladimir had consolidated all the power of House Harkonnen in his iron fist, but their father's will had given control of spice operations to Abulurd, the kind and bookish son.  Abulurd understood the importance of the position, how much wealth melange brought to his family, though he never grasped the nuances and political complexities of the desert world.

Abulurd had been forced to leave Arrakis in supposed disgrace.  But no matter what they said, he preferred to live on Lankiveil with manageable responsibilities, among people he understood.  He felt sorry for those being trampled by the Baron's overzealous efforts on the desert planet, but Abulurd vowed to do his best here, though he had not yet bothered to reclaim his rightful title of subdistrict governor.  The tedious politics seemed like such a waste of human effort.

He and Emmi had only one son, thirty-four-year-old Glossu Rabban, who, according to Lankiveil tradition, was given the distaff name from his mother's bloodline.  Unfortunately, their son had a coarse personality and took after his uncle more than his own parents.  Although Abulurd and Emmi had always wanted more children, the Harkonnen bloodline had never been particularly fecund. . . .

"Albino!" shouted the lookout, a sharp-eyed boy whose dark hair hung in a thick braid kinked over his warm parka.  "White fur swimming alone -- twenty degrees to port."

The vessel became a hive of activity.  Neuro-harpooners grabbed their weapons while the captain increased the engine speed.  Men scrambled up deck ladders, shading their eyes and staring into water laden with icebergs that looked like buoyant white molars.  It had been a full day since the last chase, so the decks were clean, the processing bins open and prepped, the men anxious.

Abulurd waited his turn to peer through a set of binoculars, staring across the whitecaps.  He saw flashes that might have been an albino whale, but were instead just chunks of drifting ice.  Finally, he spotted the creature as it breached, a creamy arc of white fur.  It was young.  Albinos, the rarest of the breed, were ostracized from the pod, cut loose and left without the support of the swimming herd.  Rarely did they survive to full adulthood.

The men bent to their weapons as the vessel bore down upon its prey.  Prayer wheels continued to spin and clack in the breeze.  The captain leaned out from the bridge deck and shouted in a voice resonant enough to break solid ice.  "If we get this one undamaged, we'll have enough shares to go home."

Abulurd loved to see the sheer joy and exhilaration on their faces.  He felt the thrill himself, his heart pounding to keep the blood moving in this intense cold.  He never took a share of the whaling profits, since he had no use for additional money, but allowed the men to divide it among themselves.

The albino beast, sensing pursuit, swam faster, heading toward an archipelago of icebergs.  The captain increased the throbbing engines, churning a wake behind them.  If the Bjondax whale dove, they would lose it.

Fur whales spent months at a time beneath the heavy ice sheets.  There, in dark waters fed by volcanic vents full of nutrients and warmth, the whales devoured swarms of krill, spores, and Lankiveil's rich plankton that did not require direct sunlight for photosynthesis.

With a loud pop, one of the long-range rifles planted a pulse-tag on the white whale's back.  In response to the prick, the albino dove.  The crewman working the controls sent a jolt of electricity through the pulse-tag, which made the whale breach again.

The boat came about, grinding the starboard side against an iceberg, but the reinforced hull held as the captain closed the gap.  Two master harpooners, moving with forced calm and precision, got into separate pursuit boats, sleek craft with narrow prows and ice-cutting keels.  The men strapped themselves in, sealed the clear protective canopy over them, and dropped the craft into the icy water.

The pursuit boats bounced across the choppy water, striking chunks of ice but closing on the target.  The main boat circled, approaching from the opposite direction.  Each of the master harpooners crossed in front of the albino whale, popping the canopy enclosures and standing up in their compartments.  With perfect balance, they hurled long stun-staves into the whale, delivering a blast of numbing energy.

The whale rolled and came toward the whaling boat.  The master harpooners pursued, but by now the main boat was close enough and four other harpooners leaned over the deck.  Like a well-practiced Roman legion hurling javelins, they pitched stun-staves with enough force to render the whale unconscious.  The two pursuit craft approached the furred hulk and, working as a team, the master harpooners delivered the coup de grace.

Later, as the pursuit craft were winched up to the boat, furriers and skinners strapped on spiked footwear and rappelled down the vessel sides to the floating carcass.

Abulurd had seen whales taken many times before, but he had an aversion to the actual butchering process, so he crossed to the starboard deck and stared northward at the mountain ranges of icebergs.  Their rugged shapes reminded him of the steep rocks that formed the fjord walls near where he lived.

The whaling vessel had reached the far northern limit of even the native hunting waters.  CHOAM whaling crews never ventured into these high latitudes, since their enormous vessels could not navigate the treacherous waters.

Alone at the bow, Abulurd enjoyed the prismatic purity of arctic ice, a crystal glow that enhanced the shrouded sunlight.  He heard the grind of colliding icebergs and stared, not realizing what his peripheral vision registered.  Something gnawed at his subconscious until finally his gaze centered on one of the monoliths of ice, a squarish mountain that appeared fractionally grayer than the others.  It reflected less light.

He squinted, then retrieved a pair of binoculars left lying on the deck.  Abulurd listened to the wet sounds behind him, the men shouting as they cut their prize into pieces ready to take home.  He focused the oil lenses and stared at the floating iceberg.

Glad to have a distraction from the bloody work, Abulurd spent long minutes scrutinizing fragments that had been hacked out of the ice.  The shards were too precise, too exact to have broken free from the glacial shelf and drifted about, battering and scraping other icebergs.

Then, at water level, he saw something that looked suspiciously like a door.

He marched up to the bridge deck.  "You'll be at work here for another hour, won't you, Captain?"

The big-shouldered man nodded.  "Aye.  Then we go home tonight.  Do you want to get down into the wet work?"

Abulurd drew himself up, queasy at the prospect of being smothered in whale blood.  "No . . . actually, I'd like to borrow one of the small boats to go explore . . . something I found on an iceberg."  Normally, he would have asked for an escort, but the whalers were all occupied with the butchery.  Even in these cold, uncharted seas, Abulurd would be glad to be away from the smell of death.

The captain raised his bushy eyebrows.  Abulurd could tell the gruff man wanted to express his skepticism, but he maintained his silence.  His broad, flat face carried only respect for the planetary governor.

Abulurd Harkonnen knew how to handle a boat himself -- often taking one into the fjords and exploring the coastline -- so he declined the offer of other whalers to accompany him.  Alone, he cruised away at a slow speed, watching out for dangerous ice.  Behind him, the butchering continued, filling the iron-scented air with a richer smell of blood and entrails.

Twice as he piloted his boat through the maze of floating mountains, Abulurd lost sight of his target, but eventually he found it again.  Hidden among the drifting icebergs, this one chunk seemed not to have moved.  He wondered if it was anchored in place.

He brought the small boat up against the rugged side, then momentum-locked it to the ice.  A feeling of unreality and displacement shrouded this strange monolith.  As he gingerly stepped out of the boat and onto the nearest flat white surface, he realized just how exotic this object was.

The ice was not cold.

Abulurd bent to touch what appeared to be milky shards of ice.  He rapped with his knuckles:  The substance was some kind of polymer crystal, a translucent solid that had the appearance of ice -- almost.  He stomped hard, and the iceberg echoed beneath him.  Very odd indeed.

He rounded a jagged corner to the place where he'd seen a geometrically even line of cracks, a parallelogram that might have been an access hatch.  He stared at it until he found an indentation, an access panel that appeared to have been damaged, perhaps in a collision with a real iceberg.  He found an activation button, and the trapezoidal covering slid aside.

He gasped as a strong cinnamon scent wafted out, a pungent odor that he recognized instantly.  He had smelled enough of it during his time on Arrakis.  Melange.

He breathed deeply just to make sure, then ventured into the eerie corridors.  The floors were smooth, as if worn down by many feet.  A secret base?  A command post?  A hidden archive?

He discovered room upon room filled with nullentropy containers, sealed bins that bore the pale blue griffin of House Harkonnen.  A stockpile of spice put here by his own family -- and no one had told him of it.  A grid map showed how far the storehouse extended beneath the water.  Here on Lankiveil, under Abulurd's own nose, the Baron had secreted a huge illegal hoard!

Such an amount of spice could have purchased this entire planetary system many times over.  Abulurd's mind reeled, unable to comprehend the treasure he had stumbled upon.  He needed to think.  He needed to talk to Emmi.  With her quiet wisdom, she would give him the advice he needed.  Together they would decide what to do.

Though he considered the whaling crew to be honest, wholesome men, such a stockpile would tempt even the best of them.  Abulurd left in a hurry, sealed the door behind him, and scrambled aboard his boat.

Upon returning to the whaling ship, he made sure to mark the coordinates carefully in his mind.  When the captain asked if he had found anything, Abulurd shook his head and retreated into his private cabin.  He didn't trust himself to control his expressions around the other men.  It would be a long voyage home until he could get back to his wife.  Oh, how he missed her, how he needed her wisdom.

BEFORE LEAVING THE DOCK AT TULA FJORD, the captain presented the fur whale's liver to Abulurd as his reward, though it was worth little compared to the share of the albino's fur he had given to each of the crewmen.

When he and Emmi dined together at the main lodge for the first time in a week, Abulurd was distracted and fidgeting, waiting for the chef to finish her grand workings.

The steaming, savory whale liver came out on two gilded silver platters, surrounded by mounds of salted stringreens with a side dish of smoked oyster nuts.  The long formal dining table could accommodate up to thirty guests, but Abulurd and Emmi sat next to each other near one end, serving themselves from the platters.

Emmi had a pleasant, wide Lankiveil face and a squarish chin that was not glamorous or beautiful -- but Abulurd adored it anyway.  Her hair was the truest color of black and hung straight, cut horizontally just below her shoulders.  Her round eyes were the rich brown of polished jasper.

Often, Abulurd and his wife would eat with the others in the communal dining hall, joining in the conversations.  But since Abulurd had just returned from a long whaling journey, everyone in the household knew the two wanted to talk quietly.  Abulurd had no qualms about telling his wife the great secret he had discovered in the icy sea.

Emmi was silent, but deep.  She thought before she spoke, and didn't talk unless she had something to say.  Now she listened to her husband and did not interrupt him.  When Abulurd finished his tale, Emmi sat in silence, thinking about what he had said.  He waited long enough for her to consider a few possibilities, then said to her, "What shall we do, Emmi?"

"All that wealth must have been stolen from the Emperor's share.  It's probably been there for years."  She nodded to reinforce her own convictions.  "You don't want to dirty your hands with it."

"But my own half-brother has deceived me."

"He must have plans for it.  He didn't tell you because he knew you'd feel honor-bound to report it."

Abulurd chewed a mouthful of the tart stringreens and swallowed, washing it down with a Caladan blanc.  With the smallest hints, Emmi could always tell exactly what he was thinking.  "But I do feel honor-bound to report it."

She considered for a moment, then said, "If you call attention to this stockpile, I can think of many ways it could harm us, harm the people of Lankiveil, or harm your own family.  I wish you had never found it."

He looked into her jasper-brown eyes to see if any glimmer of temptation had crossed them, but he saw only concern and caution there.  "Perhaps Vladimir is avoiding taxes or just embezzling to fill the coffers of House Harkonnen," she ventured, her expression turning hard.  "But he is still your brother.  If you report him to the Emperor, you could bring disaster upon your House."

Abulurd realized another consequence and groaned.  "If the Baron is imprisoned, then I would have to control all of the Harkonnen holdings.  Assuming we keep the Arrakis fief, I'd have to go back there, or else live on Giedi Prime."  Miserably, he took another drink of the wine.  "I couldn't stomach either option, Emmi.  I like it here."

Emmi reached over to touch his hand.  She stroked it, and he raised her hand to his lips, kissing her fingers.  "Then we've come to our decision," she said.  "We know the spice is there . . . but we'll just leave it be."

The desert is a surgeon cutting away the skin to expose what is underneath.

-Fremen Saying

AS THE MOON ROSE COPPER-RED over the desert horizon, Liet-Kynes and seven Fremen departed the rocks and made their way out to the soft curving dunes where they could be easily seen.  One by one the men made the sign of the fist, in accordance with Fremen tradition at the sign of First Moon.

"Prepare yourselves," Stilgar said moments later, his narrow face like a desert hawk's in the moonlight.  His pupils had dilated, making his solid blue eyes look black. He wrapped his desert camouflage around him, as did the other, older guerrillas.  "It is said that when one waits for vengeance, time passes slowly but sweetly."

Liet-Kynes nodded.  He was dressed to look like a weak, water-fat village boy, but his eyes were as hard as Velan steel.  Beside him, his sietch-mate and blood-brother Warrick, a slightly taller lad, nodded as well.  This night, the two would pretend to be helpless children caught out in the open . . . irresistible targets for the anticipated Harkonnen patrol.

"We do what must be done, Stil."  Liet clapped a hand on Warrick's padded shoulder.  These twelve-year-olds had already blooded more than a hundred Harkonnens apiece, and would have stopped keeping count, except for their friendly rivalry with each other.  "I trust my brother with my life."

Warrick covered Liet's hand with his own.  "Liet would be afraid to die without me at his side."

"With or without you, Warrick, I don't plan to die this night," Liet said, which elicited a deep laugh from his companion.  "I plan to exact revenge."

After the orgy of poisoned death had fallen upon Bilar Camp, Fremen rage had spread from sietch to sietch like water soaking into sand.  From the 'thopter markings found near the hidden cistern, they knew who was responsible.  All Harkonnens must pay.

Around Carthag and Arsunt, word was passed to timid-looking workers and dusty servants who had been placed inside Harkonnen strongholds.  Some of the infiltrators scrubbed the floors of troop barracks using dry rags and abrasives.  Others posed as water-sellers supplying the occupation force.

As the tale of the poisoned village passed from one Harkonnen soldier to another in progressively exaggerated anecdotes, the Fremen informants noted who derived the greatest pleasure from the news.  They studied the crew assignments and route logs of Harkonnen patrols.  Before long, they had learned exactly which Harkonnen troopers were responsible.  And where they could be found. . . .

With a high-pitched squeak and a dancing blur of gossamer wings, a tiny distrans bat swooped from observation outcroppings in the mountains behind them.  When Stilgar held up a hand, the bat landed on his forearm, primly folding its wings and waiting for a reward.

Stilgar drew a tiny drop of water from the sipping tube at his throat and let the moisture fall into the bat's open mouth.  Then he brought forth a thin cylinder and placed it to his ear, listening as the bat emitted complex, wavering squeaks.  Stilgar tapped the bat on its head, then flung it into the night air again, like a falconer releasing his bird.

He turned back to his expectant troop, a predatory smile on his moon-shadowed face.  "Their ornithopter has been seen over the ridge.  The Harkonnens fly a predictable path as they scan the desert.  But they have been on patrol for so long, they are complacent.  They do not see their own patterns."

"Tonight, they fly into a web of death," Warrick said from the dune top, lifting his fist in a very unboylike gesture.

The Fremen checked their weapons, loosed crysknives in sheaths at their sides, tested the strength of garroting cords.  With swishing robes, they erased all marks of their passage, leaving the two young men alone.

Stilgar looked up at the night sky, and a muscle on his jaw flickered.  "This I learned from Umma Kynes.  When we were cataloging lichens, we saw a rock lizard that seemed to vanish before our eyes.  Kynes said to me, 'I give you the chameleon, whose ability to match itself with its background tells you all you need to know about the roots of ecology and the foundations of personal identity.' "  Stilgar looked gravely at his men, and his expression faltered.  "I don't know exactly what he meant . . . but now we must all become chameleons of the desert."

Wearing light-colored clothes, Liet stepped up the slipface of the dune, leaving deliberate, painfully apparent footprints.  Warrick followed just as clumsily, while the other Fremen spread out on the flat sand.  After pulling out breathing tubes and covering their faces with loose hoods, they flailed their arms in a blur of motion.  Powdery sand engulfed them, and then they lay still.

Liet and Warrick ran about, smoothing wrinkles on the surface and leaving nothing but their own footprints.  They finished just as the patrol 'thopter whirred over the line of rocks, flashing red lights.

The two white-clad Fremen froze out in the open, their bright clothes unmistakable against the pale, moonlit sand.  No true Fremen would ever be caught in such a show of clumsiness . . . but the Harkonnens didn't know that.  They would not suspect.

As soon as the 'thopter came into view, Liet made an exaggerated gesture of alarm.  "Come on, Warrick. Let's make a good show of it."  The two ran away pell-mell, as if in a panic.

Predictably, the 'thopter circled to intercept them.  A powerful spotlight flooded down, then a laughing sidegunner leaned out of the 'thopter.  He fired his lasgun twice, sketching a line of melted glass upon the sand surface.

Liet and Warrick tumbled down the steep side of a dune.  The gunner fired three more blasts, missing them each time.

The 'thopter landed on the broad surface of a nearby dune . . . close to where Stilgar and his men had buried themselves.  Liet and Warrick flashed each other a smile, and prepared for the second part of the game.

SIDEGUNNER KIEL SHOULDERED his still-hot lasgun rifle and popped open the door.  "Let's go hunt some Fremen."  He jumped onto the sand as soon as Garan had landed the patrol craft.

Behind them, the fresh-faced recruit Josten fumbled for his own weapon.  "It would be easier just to shoot them from above."

"What kind of sport would that be?" Garan asked in his gruff voice.

"Or is it just that you don't want blood on your new uniform, kid?"  Kiel called over his shoulder.  They stood beside the armored craft looking across the moonlit dunes, where the two scrawny nomads stumbled away -- as if they had any hope of escape once a Harkonnen trooper decided to target them.

Garan grabbed his weapon, and the three of them strode across the sands.  The two Fremen youths scuttled like beetles, but the threat of the troops might cause them to turn around and surrender . . . or better yet, fight like cornered rats.

"I've heard stories about these Fremen."  Josten panted as he kept up with the two older men.  "Their children are said to be killers, and their women will torture you in ways that even Piter de Vries couldn't imagine."

Kiel gave a rude snort of laughter.  "We've got lasguns, Josten.  What are they going to do -- throw rocks at us?"

"Some of them carry maula pistols."

Garan looked back at the young recruit, then gave a shrug.  "Why don't you go back to the 'thopter and get our stunner, then?  We can use a wide field if things get bad."

"Yeah," Kiel said, "that way we can make this last longer."  The two white-clad Fremen continued to flounder across the sand, and the Harkonnen troopers closed the distance with purposeful strides.

Glad for the opportunity to be away from the fight, Josten sprinted over the dune toward the waiting 'thopter.  From the dune top, he looked back at his companions, then rushed to the darkened craft.  As he ducked inside, he encountered a man clad in desert tans, hands flicking across the controls with the speed of a snake on a hot plate.

"Hey, what are you --" Josten cried.

In the cabin light he saw that the figure had a narrow leathery face.  The eyes captivated him, blue-within-blue with the sharp intensity of a man accustomed to killing.  Before Josten could react, his arm was grabbed with a grip as strong as an eagle's talon, and he was dragged deeper into the cockpit.  The Fremen's other hand flashed, and he saw a curved, milky-blue knife strike up.  A bright icicle of pain slashed into his throat, all the way back to his spine -- then the knife was gone before even a droplet of blood could cling to its surface.

Like a scorpion that had just unleashed its sting, the Fremen backed up.  Josten fell forward, already feeling red death spreading from his throat.  He tried to say something, to ask a question that seemed all-important to him, but his words only came out as a gurgle.  The Fremen snatched something from his stillsuit and pressed it against the young man's throat, an absorbent cloth that drank his blood as it spilled.

Was the desert man saving him?  A bandage?  A flash of hope rose in Josten's mind.  Had it all been a mistake?  Was this gaunt native trying to make amends?

But Josten's blood pumped out too quickly and forcefully for any medical help.  As his life faded, he realized that the absorbent pack had never been meant as a wound dressing, but simply to capture every droplet of blood for its moisture. . . .

WHEN KIEL CAME within firing distance of the two Fremen youths, Garan looked back into the moonlight.  "I thought I heard something from the 'thopter."

"Probably Josten tripping on his own feet," the sidegunner said, not lowering his weapon.

The trapped Fremen staggered to a halt across a shallow pan of soft sand.  They crouched and pulled out small, clumsy-looking knives.

Kiel laughed out loud.  "What do you mean to do with those?  Pick your teeth?"

"I'll pick the teeth from your dead body," one of the boys shouted.  "Got any old-fashioned gold molars we can sell in Arrakeen?"

Garan chortled and looked at his companion.  "This is going to be fun."  Moving in lockstep, the troopers marched into the flat sandy area.

As they closed to within five meters, the sand around them erupted.  Human forms popped out of the dust, covered with grit-tan human silhouettes, like animated corpses boiling up from a graveyard.

Garan let out a useless warning cry, and Kiel fired once with his lasgun, injuring one of the men in the shoulder.  Then the dusty forms surged forward.  Clustering around the pilot, they pressed in so close that he couldn't bring his lasgun to bear.  They attacked him like blood-lice on an open wound.

As they drove Garan to his knees, he cried out like an old woman.  The Fremen restrained him so that he could do little more than breathe and blink his eyes.  And scream.

One of the white-clad "victims" hurried forward.  The young man -- Liet-Kynes -- held out the small knife that Garan and Kiel had snickered at just moments ago.  The youth darted downward, jabbing with the tip of the blade -- but with precise control, as gentle as a kiss -- to gouge out both of Garan's eyes, transforming his sockets into red Oedipal stains.

Stilgar barked out a command, "Bind him and keep him.  We shall bring this one back to Red Wall Sietch alive, and let the women take care of him in their own way."

Garan screamed again. . . .

When the Fremen rushed forward to attack Kiel, the sidegunner responded by swinging his weapon like a club.  As clawing hands grabbed for it, he surprised them by releasing the lasrifle. The Fremen who clutched the gun fell backward, caught off-balance by the unexpected action.

Then Kiel began to run.  Fighting would do him no good.  They had already taken Garan, and he assumed Josten was dead back at the 'thopter.  So he left the Fremen, running as he had never run before.  He sprinted across the night sands away from the rocks, away from the 'thopter . . . and out into the open desert.  The Fremen might be able to catch him, but he would give them a run for it.

Panting, leaving his companions behind, Kiel raced across the dunes with no plan and no thought other than to flee farther and farther away. . . .

"WE'VE CAPTURED the 'thopter intact, Stil," Warrick said, flushed with adrenaline and quite proud of himself.  The commando leader nodded grimly.  Umma Kynes would be exceedingly pleased at the news.  He could always use a 'thopter for his agricultural inspections, and he didn't need to know where it came from.

Liet looked down at the blinded captive, whose gouged eye sockets had been covered by a cloth.  "I saw what the Harkonnens did to Bilar Camp with my own eyes . . . the poisoned cistern, the tainted water."  The other body had already been packed in the rear of the patrol 'thopter to be taken to the deathstills.  "This doesn't pay back a tenth part of the suffering."

Going to his blood-brother's side, Warrick made a face of disgust.  "Such is my scorn that I don't even want to take their water for our tribe."

Stilgar glowered at him as if he had spoken sacrilege.  "You would prefer to let them mummify in the sands, to let their water go wasted into the air?  It would be an insult to Shai-Hulud."

Warrick bowed his head.  "It was only my anger speaking, Stil.  I did not mean it."

Stilgar looked up at the ruddy rising moon.  The entire ambush had lasted less than an hour.  "We shall perform the ritual of tal hai so that their souls will never rest.  They will be damned to walk the desert for all eternity."  Then his voice became harsh and fearful.  "But we must take extra care to cover our tracks, so that we do not lead their ghosts back to our sietch."

The Fremen muttered as fear dampened their vengeful pleasure.  Stilgar intoned the ancient chant, while others drew designs in the sand, labyrinthine power-shapes that would bind the spirits of the cursed men to the dunes forever.

Out across the moonlit sands they could still see the clumsily running figure of the remaining trooper.  "That one is our offering to Shai-Hulud," Stilgar said, finishing his chant.  The tal hai curse was complete.  "The world will be at balance, and the desert will be pleased."

"He's chugging like a broken crawler."  Liet stood next to Stilgar, drawing himself up though he was still small compared to the commando leader.  "It won't be long now."

They gathered their supplies.  As many as possible piled into the patrol 'thopter, while the remaining Fremen slipped back across the sands.  They used a well-practiced random gait so that their footsteps made no sound that was not natural to the desert.

The Harkonnen sidegunner continued to flee in a blind panic.  By now, he might be entertaining a hope of escape, though the direction of his flight across the ocean of dunes would take him nowhere.

Within minutes, a worm came for him.

The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth.

-Bene Gesserit Precept

IN ALL HIS DEVIOUS DEALINGS, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen had never before felt such loathing for anyone.

How could the Bene Gesserit bitch do this to me?

One smoky morning on Giedi Prime, he entered the exercise room of his Keep, locked the doors, and left orders not to be disturbed.  Unable to use the weights or pulley equipment because of his increasing bulk, he sat on a floor mat and tried to perform simple leg lifts.  Once, he had been perfection in human form -- now he could barely raise each leg.  Disgust enveloped him.

For two months, ever since hearing Dr. Yueh's diagnosis, he'd wanted to rip out Mohiam's internal organs one by one.  Then, keeping her awake, jolted with life-support systems, he would do interesting things while she watched . . . burn her liver, make the witch-bitch eat her spleen, strangle her with her own entrails.

Now he understood Mohiam's smug expression at the Fenring banquet.

She did this to me!

He looked at himself in a floor-length mirror and recoiled.  His face was puffy and swollen, slig-ugly.  Reaching up with his heavy arms, he yanked the plaz mirror off the wall and slammed it to the floor, twisting the unbreakable material out of shape so that his reflection became even more distorted.

It was understandable that Mohiam might resent the rape, he supposed.  But the witch had blackmailed him into the sexual act in the first place, demanding that he provide the damnable Sisterhood with a Harkonnen daughter -- twice!  It wasn't fair.  He was the victim here.

The Baron simmered and stewed and raged.  He didn't dare let any of his rivals in the Landsraad learn of the cause; it was the difference between strength and weakness.  If they continued to believe he had grown bloated and corpulent because of excess, through his own overindulgences to flaunt his success, he could retain his power.  If, however, they learned he had been inflicted with a disgusting disease by a woman who had forced him to have sex with her . . . The Baron could not abide that.

Yes, hearing Mohiam's screams would be a tasty revenge, but no more than a morsel, not sufficient for a man of his stature.  She was only a repulsive appendage of the Bene Gesserit order itself.  The witches considered themselves so superior, able to crush anyone -- even the head of House Harkonnen.  They must be punished, as a matter of family pride, a matter of asserting power and status in the name of the entire Landsraad.

Besides, he would enjoy it.

But if he acted precipitously, he would never wring a cure from them.  The Suk doctor had claimed there was no known treatment for the disease, that it was in the hands of the Bene Gesserit.  The Sisterhood had done this to the Baron, and only they could restore his once-beautiful body.

Damn them!

He needed to turn the tables, get into their diabolical minds and discover what lurked there.  He would find a way to blackmail them.  He would strip away their funereal black robes (figuratively) and leave them to stand naked, awaiting his judgment.

He threw the bent mirror across the tile floor, where it skidded and slammed into an exercise machine.  Without his walking stick, he lost his balance, slipped, and tumbled back to the mat.

It was all too much to bear. . . .

After composing himself, the Baron hobbled into his cluttered workroom and summoned Piter de Vries.  His voice boomed through the corridors, and servants dashed about, looking for the Mentat.

For a full month de Vries had been recovering from his foolish spice overdose.  The idiot claimed to have seen a vision of House Harkonnen's downfall, but he'd been unable to offer any useful information as to how the Baron could combat such a dismal future.

Now the Mentat could make up for his failure by devising a strike against the Bene Gesserit.  Every time de Vries pushed the Baron too far, annoying him to the point of impending execution, he managed to prove himself indispensable again.

How do I hurt the witches?  How do I cripple them, make them squirm?

Still waiting, the Baron looked out of the Keep, studying Harko City, with its oil-streaked buildings and hardly a tree in sight.  Usually he liked this view, but now it added to his despondency.  He chewed the inside of his mouth, felt the tears of self-pity recede.

I will crush the Sisterhood!

These women were not stupid.  Far from it.  With their breeding programs and their political machinations, they had bred intelligence into their own ranks.  To improve on this even more, they had wanted his superior Harkonnen genes as part of their order.  Oh, how he hated them!

A careful plan would be required . . . tricks within tricks . . .

"My Lord Baron," Piter de Vries said, arriving silently.  His voice rose from his throat like a viper slithering out of a pit.

In the corridor outside, the Baron heard loud voices and a clattering of metal.  Something thudded against a wall, and furniture crashed.  He turned from the window to see his burly nephew stride through the doorway, right behind the Mentat.  Even with normal footsteps, Glossu Rabban seemed to stomp across the floor.  "I'm here, Uncle."

"Obviously.  Now leave us.  I called Piter, not you."  Normally Rabban spent his time on Arrakis carrying out the Baron's wishes, but whenever he returned to Giedi Prime he wanted to participate in every meeting, every discussion.

The Baron took a deep breath, reconsidered.  "On second thought, you may as well stay, Rabban.  I need to tell you about this anyway."  After all, this brute was his heir-presumptive, the best hope for the future of House Harkonnen.  Better than soft-headed Abulurd, Rabban's father.  How different they were, though each man had serious shortcomings.

Like a pathetic puppy, his nephew smiled, happy to be included.  "Tell me what, Uncle?"

"That I'm going to have you put to death."

Rabban's pale blue eyes dulled for a moment, then he brightened.  "No you aren't."

"How can you be so sure?"  The Baron glowered, while the Mentat's darting eyes watched the interplay.

Rabban responded promptly.  "Because if you were really going to put me to death, you wouldn't warn me first."

A smile stole across the Baron's plump face.  "Perhaps you aren't a total fool after all."

Accepting the compliment, Rabban slumped into a chairdog, squirming until the creature molded to his form.  De Vries remained standing, observing, waiting.

The Baron reiterated the details of the disease Mohiam had inflicted upon him -- and his need for revenge against the Bene Gesserit.  "We must come up with a way to get even with them.  I want a plan, a delicious plan that will return the . . . favor . . . for us."

De Vries stood with his effeminate features slack, his eyes unfocused.  In Mentat mode, he rolled pattern-searches through his mind at hyperspeed.  His tongue darted over his red-stained lips.

Rabban kicked the chairdog with his heel, adjusting to a different position.  "Why not a full-scale military assault on Wallach IX?  We can destroy every building on the planet."

De Vries twitched, and for a fraction of a second he seemed to glance at Rabban, but it was so quick that the Baron wasn't certain if it had occurred at all.  He couldn't stand the notion of his nephew's primitive thoughts contaminating the finely tuned thinking processes of his valuable Mentat.

"Like a Salusan bull at a dinner party, you mean?" the Baron said.  "No, we require something with more finesse.  Look up the definition in a dictionary slate if the concept is unfamiliar to you."

Rather than being offended, Rabban leaned forward on the chairdog, narrowing his eyes.  "We . . . have the no-ship."

Startled, the Baron turned to look at him.  Just when he thought the clod was too dull-witted even to join the House Guard, Rabban surprised him with an unexpected insight.

They had dared use the experimental invisible ship only once, to destroy Tleilaxu vessels and frame the hapless young Duke Atreides.  Because Rabban had murdered the eccentric Richesian inventor, they had no way of duplicating the technology.  Even so, it was a weapon whose existence no one suspected, not even the witches.

"Perhaps . . . unless Piter has a different idea."

"I do, my Baron."  De Vries's eyelids flickered, and the eyes came into focus.  "Mentat summation," he said, in a voice that was more stilted than his normally smooth tone.  "I have found a useful loophole in the Law of the Imperium.  Something most intriguing, my Baron."  Like a lawtech he quoted it word for word, then recommended a plan.

For a moment all of the Baron's bodily aches and pains vanished in euphoria.  He turned to his nephew.  "Now do you see the potential, Rabban?  I would rather be known for finesse than brute force."

Grudgingly, Rabban nodded.  "I still think we should take the noship.  Just in case."  He himself had piloted the invisible warcraft and launched the attack that should have triggered a full-scale Atreides-Tleilaxu war.

Not wanting to let the Mentat grow too smug, the Baron agreed.  "It never hurts to have a backup plan."

THE PREPARATIONS WERE swift and complete.  Captain Kryubi insisted that his men follow Piter de Vries's instructions to the letter.  Rabban marched through the hangars and barracks like a warlord, maintaining an appropriate level of tension among the troops.

Guild transport had already been summoned, while a Harkonnen frigate was stripped and loaded with more than its normal complement of men and weapons, along with the ultrasecret ship that had been used only once, a full decade earlier.

From a military standpoint the invisibility technology was a potential boon unlike any other in recorded history.  Theoretically, it would let the Harkonnens deliver crushing blows to their enemies without being detected in any way.  Imagine what Viscount Moritani of Grumman would pay for such an advantage.

The unseen warcraft had functioned effectively on its maiden voyage, but further plans had been delayed while technicians repaired mechanical bugs that cropped up afterward.  While most of the problems were minor, some -- involving the no-field generator itself -- proved more stubborn.  And the Richesian inventor was no longer alive to offer assistance.  Nevertheless, the ship had performed well enough in recent tests, though the quavery-voiced mechanics warned that it might not be entirely battleworthy. . . .

One of the slowest-moving cargo workers had had to be crushed gradually in a steam-press to give sufficient incentive to his peers so that they would not miss the scheduled departure time.  The Baron was in a hurry.

THE FULLY LOADED FRIGATE went into geostationary orbit over Wallach IX, directly above the Mother School complex.  Standing on the bridge of the frigate with Piter de Vries and Glossu Rabban, the Baron transmitted no signal to the Bene Gesserit headquarters.  He didn't have to.

"State your business," a female voice demanded over the comsystem, stiff and unwelcoming.  Did he detect an undertone of surprise?

De Vries replied formally, "His Excellency the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen of Giedi Prime wishes to speak with your Mother Superior on a private channel."

"Not possible.  No prior arrangements have been made."

The Baron leaned forward and boomed into the comsystem, "You have five minutes to establish a confidential connection with your Mother Superior, or I will communicate on an open line.  That could prove, ah . . . embarrassing."

The pause was longer this time. Moments before the deadline, a different, rasping voice came over the speaker.  "I am Mother Superior Harishka.  We are on my personal comlink."

"Good, then listen carefully."  The Baron smiled.

De Vries recited the case.  "The articles of the Great Convention are most explicit regarding certain serious crimes, Mother Superior.  These laws were established in the wake of the horrors committed by thinking machines on humanity.  One of the ultimate crimes is the use of atomics against human beings.  Another is aggression by biological warfare."

"Yes, yes.  I am not a military historian, but I can get someone to quote the exact phrasing, if you wish.  Does your Mentat not take care of such bureaucratic details, Baron?  I don't see what this has to do with us.  Would you like me to tell you a bedtime story as well?"

Her sarcasm could only mean she had begun to grow nervous.  " 'The forms must be obeyed,' " the Baron quoted.  "The punishment for a violation of these laws is immediate annihilation of the perpetrators at the hands of the Landsraad.  Every Great House has sworn to deliver an overwhelming combined force against the offending party."  He paused, and his words became more menacing.  "The forms have not been obeyed, have they, Mother Superior?"

Piter de Vries and Rabban looked at each other, both grinning.

The Baron continued.  "House Harkonnen is prepared to bring a formal complaint before the Emperor and the Landsraad, charging the Bene Gesserit with the illegal use of biological weapons against a Great House."

"You speak nonsense.  The Bene Gesserit have no aspirations of military power."  She sounded entirely baffled.  Was it possible she did not know?

"Know this, Mother Superior -- We have incontrovertible evidence that your Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam intentionally inflicted a biological scourge upon my person while I was providing a service demanded by the Sisterhood.  Ask the bitch yourself, if your underlings keep such information from you."

The Baron did not mention that the Sisterhood had blackmailed him with information about illegal spice-stockpiling activities.  He was ready for that subject if it surfaced again, since all of his melange hoards had been moved to remote regions of distant Harkonnen worlds, where they would never be discovered.

Contented, the Baron sat back, listening to the deep silence.  He imagined the appalled horror on the old Mother Superior's face.  He twisted the knife deeper.  "If you doubt our interpretation, read the wording of the Great Convention again and see if you care to risk it in open Landsraad court.  Bear in mind, too, that the instrument of your attack -- Reverend Mother Mohiam -- was delivered to me on a Guild ship.  When the Guild discovers that, they will not be pleased."  He tapped his fingertips on a console.  "Even if your Sisterhood is not demolished, you will receive severe sanctions from the Imperium, heavy fines, even banishment."

Finally, in a voice that almost managed to cover how the threat had shaken her, Harishka said, "You exaggerate your case, Baron, but I wish to be open-minded.  What is it you want from us?"

He could feel her squirm.  "I will take a shuttle down to the surface and meet with you privately.  Send up a pilot to shepherd us through your planetary defense systems."  He did not bother to point out his arrangements to transmit the evidence and accusations directly to Kaitain, should anything happen to them on this journey.  The Mother Superior would already know.

"Certainly, Baron, but you will realize soon, this is all a terrible misunderstanding."

"Just produce Mohiam at the meeting.  And be prepared to provide me with an effective treatment and cure -- or else you and your Sisterhood have no hope of surviving this debacle."

The ancient Mother Superior remained unimpressed.  "How large is your entourage?"

"Tell her we have a whole army," Rabban whispered to his uncle.

The Baron shoved him away.  "Myself and six men."

"Your request for a meeting is granted."

When the link was shut down, Rabban asked, "Can I go, Uncle?"

"Do you remember what I said to you about finesse?"

"I looked up the word and all of its definitions, as you commanded."

"Stay here and think about it while I confer with the witch mother."

Angrily, Rabban stomped away.

An hour later a Bene Gesserit lighter docked with the Harkonnen frigate.  A narrow-faced young woman with wavy chestnut hair stepped onto the entry dock.  She wore a slick black uniform.  "I am Sister Cristane.  I will guide you to the surface."  Her eyes glittered.  "Mother Superior awaits."

The Baron marched forward with six hand-picked, armed soldiers.  Piter de Vries spoke in a low voice that the witch could not hear.  "Never underestimate the Bene Gesserit, my Baron."

With a grunt the Baron strode past his Mentat and boarded the lighter.  "Not to worry, Piter.  They're under our thumb now."

Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child.  Religion is the encystment of past beliefs:  mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power . . . all mingled with shreds of enlightenment.  And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is "Thou shalt not question!"  But we do anyway.  We break that commandment as a matter of course.  The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind's deepest sense of creativity.

-Credo of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood

A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN confined to a desolate world, Lady Margot Fenring did not complain about the starkness, miserable heat, or lack of amenities in the dusty garrison town.  Arrakeen was situated on a hard salt pan, with the inhospitable desert stretching off to the south and higher elevations, including the rugged Shield Wall, rising to the northwest.  Since it was a few kilometers beyond the uncertain wormline, the settlement had never been attacked by one of the great sandworms, but this was still a subject of occasional concern.  What if something changed?  Life on the desert planet was never entirely secure.

Margot thought of the Sisters who had been lost there while working for the Missionaria Protectiva.  Long ago, they had gone off into the desert, following the orders of Mother Superior -- never to be seen again.

Arrakeen was immersed in the rhythms of the desert . . . the dryness and the premium put on water, the ferocious storms that blew in like great winds across a vast sea, the legends of danger and survival.  Margot felt great serenity and spirituality here.  It was a haven where she could contemplate nature, philosophy, and religion far from the inane bustle of the Imperial Court.  She had time to do things in this place, time to discover herself.

What had those lost women found?

In the lemon glow of dawn, she stood on a second-floor balcony of the Residency.  Fine dust and grit filtered the rising sun and gave the landscape a new look, leaving deep shadows where creatures concealed themselves.  She watched a desert hawk fly toward the sun-drenched horizon, flapping its wings with slow power.  The sunrise was like an oil painting by one of the great masters, a wash of pastels that sharply defined the rooftops of the town and the Shield Wall.

Somewhere out there, in countless sietches nestled in the rocky wasteland, dwelled the elusive Fremen.  They had the answers she needed, the essential information Mother Superior Harishka had pressed her to obtain.  Had the desert nomads listened to the teachings of the Missionaria Protectiva, or had they simply killed the messengers and stolen their water?

Behind her, the recently completed conservatory had been sealed with an airlock that opened only for her.  Count Fenring, still asleep in their bedroom, had helped her to obtain some of the most exotic plants in the Imperium.  But they were for her eyes alone.

Lately, she'd heard rumors of a Fremen dream for a green Arrakis -- typical Edenic myths of the type often spread by the Missionaria Protectiva.  That could have been an indication of the missing Sisters.  It was not unusual, however, for a struggling people in a harsh environment to develop their own dreams of paradise, even without Bene Gesserit prompting.  It would have been interesting to discuss the stories with Planetologist Kynes, perhaps ask him who the Fremen's mysterious "Umma" might be.  She could not imagine how all this might be connected.

The desert hawk rose on thermals and soared.

Still standing at the balcony window, Margot took a sip of melange tea from a small cup; the soothing glow of its spicy essence filled her mouth.  Though she had lived on Arrakis for a dozen years, she consumed spice only in moderation, careful not to become addicted enough that her eye color altered.  In the mornings, though, melange enhanced her ability to perceive the natural beauty of Arrakis.  She'd heard it said that melange never tasted the same twice, that it was like life, changing each time one partook of it. . . .

Change was an essential concept here, a key to understanding the Fremen.  Superficially, Arrakis appeared always the same, a wasteland stretching into the unending distance, and into infinite time.  But the desert was so much more than that.  Margot's Fremen housekeeper, the Shadout Mapes, had suggested as much one day.  "Arrakis is not what it seems, my Lady."  Tantalizing words.

Some said the Fremen were strange, suspicious, and smelly.  Outsiders spoke with a critical eye and sharp tongue, with no compassion or any attempt to understand the indigenous population.  Margot, though, viewed the Fremen oddness as intriguing.  She wanted to learn about their fiercely independent ways, to understand how they thought, and how they survived here.  If she got to know them better, she could perform her job more effectively.

She could learn the answers she needed.

Studying the Fremen who worked in the mansion, Margot recognized barely discernible identifiers in body language, vocal inflection, odor.  If the Fremen had anything to say, and if they thought you deserved to hear it, they would tell you.  Otherwise, they went about their chores diligently, with heads bowed, disappearing into the tapestry of their society afterward like grains of sand in the desert.

In her search for answers, Margot had considered stating her questions outright, demanding any information about the missing Sisters, hoping the household servants would take her request out into the desert.  But she knew the Fremen would simply vanish, refusing to be coerced.

Perhaps she should expose her own vulnerabilities to gain their trust.  The Fremen would be shocked at first, then confused . . . and possibly even willing to cooperate with her.

My only duty is to the Sisterhood.  I am a loyal Bene Gesserit.

But how to communicate without being obvious, without raising suspicions?  She considered writing a note and leaving it in a place where it was sure to be found.  The Fremen were always listening, always gathering information in their furtive ways.

No, Margot would have to be subtle, and also treat them with respect.  She would have to tantalize them.

Then she remembered an odd practice that came to her through centuries of Other Memory . . . or was it just a bit of trivia she had read while studying on Wallach IX?  No matter.  On Old Terra, in an honor-based society known as Japan, there had been a tradition of hiring ninja assassins, quiet yet effective, in order to dodge legal entanglements.  When a person wished to engage the services of the shadowy killers, he would go to a designated wall, face it, and whisper the name of the target and the fee offered.  Though never seen, the ninja were always listening, and a contract was made.

Here in the Residency, the Fremen, too, were always listening.

Margot tossed her blonde hair over her shoulder, loosened her cool slikweave garment, and stepped into the hall outside of her offices.  In the immense mansion, even in the cool early morning, people moved about, cleaning, dusting, polishing.

Margot stood in the central atrium and looked up toward the high-arched ceiling.  She spoke in a soft, directed voice, knowing that the architecture of the old Residency created a whisper gallery.  Some would hear her, in random places.  She didn't know who, nor did she look to identify them.

"The Bene Gesserit Sisters, whom I represent here, hold the utmost respect and admiration for Fremen ways.  And I, personally, am interested in your affairs."  She waited for the faint echoes to die away.  "If anyone could hear me, perhaps I have information to share about the Lisan al-Gaib -- information you do not know at this time."

The Lisan al-Gaib, or "Voice from the Outer World," was a Fremen myth concerning a messianic figure, a prophet who bore striking parallels with the Sisterhood's own plans.  Obviously, some prior representative of the Missionaria Protectiva had planted the legend as a precursor to the arrival of the Bene Gesserit's Kwisatz Haderach.  Such preparation had been done on countless worlds in the Imperium; her comments were sure to spark Fremen interest.

She saw a flitting shadow, a drab robe, leathery skin.

Later that day, upon observing the Fremen employees moving about their household tasks, Margot thought they stared at her with a different kind of intensity, assessing her rather than just averting their blue-within-blue eyes.

Now, she began to wait, with the supreme patience of a Bene Gesserit.

Humiliation is a thing never forgotten.

-REBEC of Ginaz

THE NEXT ISLAND of the Ginaz School was the remnant of an ancient volcano, a bleak scab raised out of the water and left to dry in the tropical sun.  The settlement inside the bowl of the dry crater looked like another penal colony.

Duncan stood in formation on the stony exercise field with a hundred and ten other young men, including the redheaded Grumman trainee Hiih Resser.  Of the original hundred and fifty, thirty-nine had not completed their initial testing.

The curly black hair on Duncan's head had been shaved, and he wore the loose black gi of the school.  Each student carried whatever weapon he'd brought to Ginaz, and Duncan had the Old Duke's sword -- but he would learn to rely above all on his own abilities and reactions, not a talisman that reminded him of home.  The young man felt comfortable now, and strong, and ready.  He was eager to begin his training, at long last.

Inside the crater compound, the junior training master identified himself as Jeh-Wu.  He was a muscular man with a rounded nose, and a weak chin that gave him the appearance of an iguana.  His long dark hair was kinked into snakelike dreadlocks.  "The Pledge," he said.  "In unison, please!"

"To the memory of the Swo