Dune: List 4

She knew what it was—she had succumbed to that profound drive shared by all creatures who are faced with death—the drive to seek immortality through progeny.

Her mind was filled suddenly with feline prudence.

She knew the cant of the Missionaria Protectiva, knew how to adapt the techniques of legend and fear and hope to her emergency needs, but she sensed wild changes here...as though someone had been in among these Fremen and capitalized on the Missionaria Protectiva's imprint.

It gave him a new understanding of his prescience, and he saw the source of blind time, the source of error in it, with an immediate sensation of fear.

She saw people moving there, Paul among them already dressed and with his hood thrown back to reveal the aquiline Atreides profile.

He's full-fleshed and with a surfeit of water.

He cautioned himself that Jamis also was without shield, but the man wasn't trained to its use, had no shield-fighter inhibitions.

They think Paul's being needlessly cruel. But she sensed also the undercurrent of crowd excitement, their enjoyment of the spectacle.

Jamis leaped high, feinting and striking down with his right hand, but the hand was empty.

But he could feel the demanding race consciousness within him, his own terrible purpose, and he knew that no small thing could deflect the juggernaut. It was gathering weight and momentum.

Such people would be easy to imbue with fervor and fanaticism.

It was like a promontory above the surf.

"Night's pearl-censered requiem...'Tis for us! What joys run, then—Bright in your eyes—What flower-spangled amores Pull at our hearts...What flower-spangled amores Fill our desires."

But off the main way, Count Fenring and his lady noted the rubbish heaps, the scabrous brown walls reflected in the dark puddles of the streets, and the furtive scurrying of the people.

Let us see now how the Emperor's errand boy gets across whatever message he carries without ever being so crass as to speak it right out.

Feyd-Rautha found the man's actions and words almost insulting. They stopped just short of something overt that would require notice.

"My dear Baron," the Count said, leaning close to his ear, "you know, don't you, that the Emperor has not given official sanction to your choice of heir?"

The slow march began, sonorous with its ancient pomp, and Feyd-Rautha led his troupe across the arena for obeisance at the foot of his uncle's box.

The slow march began, sonorous with its ancient pomp, and Feyd-Rautha led his troupe across the arena for obeisance at the foot of his uncle's box.

The aficionados would be whispering among themselves now: "See how he stands. He should be agitated—attacking or retreating. See how he conserves his strength, how he waits. He should not wait."

The slave shifted knife hands, turned inside both parry and feint to grapple the na-Baron's short blade—the one in the white gloved hand that tradition said should carry the poison.

The short blade was being forced inward inexorably, and Feyd-Rautha focused on the fact that a man could also die on an unpoisoned blade.

There was an orthographic thing on his face now for every watcher to recognize. The death was written there.

A sad little moue contorted his mouth.

Languidly, controlling his rage with difficulty, the Baron waved his hand toward the young man standing in the arena beside the sprawled body of the slave.

"I shall have to order a fete. You cannot send people home like this, their energies unspent. They must see that I share their elation."

Wind-raked dead leaves strewed the cliffbase where the sietch children had been gathering them, but the sounds of the troop's passage (except for occasional blunderings by Paul and his mother) could not be distinguished from the natural sounds of the night.

The odor of the place assailed him: unwashed bodies, distillate esters of reclaimed wastes, everywhere the sour effluvia of humanity with, over it all, a turbulence of spice and spicelike harmonics.

The man who had befriended them, helped save them from the Harkonnen hunters, the man who had sent his Fremen cohorts searching for two strays in the desert...another victim of the Harkonnens.

It came to him that he was surrounded by a way of life that could only be understood by postulating an ecology of ideas and values.

"I am your servant," she said, and whirled away in one lithe motion, ducking behind a heavy wall hanging that revealed another passage before falling back into place.

His voice boomed out across the uplifted faces, reverberating with the force given it by the acoustical horn behind the ledge.

"I consecrate the daughter of Liet in the Sayyadina," husked the old woman.

"I give her the silver skies, the golden desert and its shining rocks, the green fields that will be. I give these to Sayyadina Chani. And lest she forget that she's servant of us all, to her fall the menial tasks in this Ceremony of the Seed. Let it be as Shai-hulud will have it."

"Let the watermasters come forward," Chani said with only the slightest quaver of uncertainty in her girl-child voice.

A furry redolence of cinnamon arose from the sack, wafted across Jessica.

For Paul, she knew, she should take that spout and drink of the sack's contents, but as she bent to the proffered spout, her senses told her its peril.

It was like a lecture strip in a subliminal training projector at the Bene Gesserit school...but faster...blindingly faster.

She knew each experience as it happened: there was a lover—virile, bearded, with the Fremen eyes, and Jessica saw his strength and tenderness, all of him in one blink-moment, through the Reverend Mother's memory.

On one side he could see the Imperium, a Harkonnen called Feyd-Rautha who flashed toward him like a deadly blade, the Sardaukar raging off their planet to spread pogrom on Arrakis, the Guild conniving and plotting, the Bene Gesserit with their scheme of selective breeding.