Frank Herbert - Dune Messiah

“Words are such gross machinery, so primitive and ambiguous,” she said. She pulled away from his hand.

“You must tell me,” he said.

“Look at the Shield Wall,” she commanded, pointing. She sent her gaze along her own outstretched hand, trembled as the landscape crumbled in an overwhelming vision—a sandcastle destroyed by invisible waves. She averted her eyes, was transfixed by the appearance of the ghola’s face. His features crawled, became aged, then young … aged … young. He was life itself, assertive, endless … She turned to flee, but he grabbed her left wrist.

“I am going to summon a doctor,” he said.

“No! You must let me have the vision! I have to know!”

“You are going inside now,” he said.

She stared down at his hand. Where their flesh touched, she felt an electric presence that both lured and frightened her. She jerked free, gasped: “You can’t hold the whirlwind!”

“You must have medical help!” he snapped.

“Don’t you understand?” she demanded. “My vision’s incomplete, just fragments. It flickers and jumps. I have to remember the future. Can’t you see that?”

“What is the future if you die?” he asked, forcing her gently into the Family chambers.

“Words … words,” she muttered. “I can’t explain it. One thing is the occasion of another thing, but there’s no cause … no effect. We can’t leave the universe as it was. Try as we may, there’s a gap.”

“Stretch out here,” he commanded.

He is so dense! she thought.

Cool shadows enveloped her. She felt her own muscles crawling like worms—a firm bed that she knew to be insubstantial. Only space was permanent. Nothing else had substance. The bed flowed with many bodies, all of them her own. Time became a multiple sensation, overloaded. It presented no single reaction for her to abstract. It was Time. It moved. The whole universe slipped backward, forward, sideways.

“It has no thing-aspect,” she explained. “You can’t get under it or around it. There’s no place to get leverage.”

There came a fluttering of people all around her. Many someones held her left hand. She looked at her own moving flesh, followed a twining arm out to a fluid mask of face: Duncan Idaho! His eyes were … wrong, but it was Duncan—child-man-adolescent-child-man-adolescent … Every line of his features betrayed concern for her.

“Duncan, don’t be afraid,” she whispered.

He squeezed her hand, nodded. “Be still,” he said.

And he thought: She must not die! She must not! No Atreides woman can die! He shook his head sharply. Such thoughts defied mentat logic. Death was a necessity that life might continue.

The ghola loves me, Alia thought.

The thought became bedrock to which she might cling. He was a familiar face with a solid room behind him. She recognized one of the bedrooms in Paul’s suite.

A fixed, immutable person did something with a tube in her throat. She fought against retching.

“We got her in time,” a voice said, and she recognized the tones of a Family medic. “You should’ve called me sooner.” There was suspicion in the medic’s voice. She felt the tube slide out of her throat—a snake, a shimmering cord.

“The slapshot will make her sleep,” the medic said. “I’ll send one of her attendants to—”

“I will stay with her,” the ghola said.

“That is not seemly!” the medic snapped.

“Stay … Duncan,” Alia whispered.

He stroked her hand to tell her he’d heard.

“M’Lady,” the medic said, “it’d be better if …”

“You do not tell me what is best,” she rasped. Her throat ached with each syllable.

“M’Lady,” the medic said, voice accusing, “ you know the dangers of consuming too much melange. I can only assume someone gave it to you without—”

“You are a fool,” she rasped. “Would you deny me my visions? I knew what I took and why.” She put a hand to her throat. “Leave us. At once!”

The medic pulled out of her field of vision, said: “I will send word to your brother.”

She felt him leave, turned her attention to the ghola. The vision lay clearly in her awareness now, a culture medium in which the present grew outward. She sensed the ghola move in that play of Time, no longer cryptic, fixed now against a recognizable background.

He is the crucible, she thought. He is danger and salvation.

And she shuddered, knowing she saw the vision her brother had seen. Unwanted tears burned her eyes. She shook her head sharply. No tears! They wasted moisture and, worse, distracted the harsh flow of vision. Paul must be stopped! Once, just once, she had bridged Time to place her voice where he would pass. But stress and mutability would not permit that here. The web of Time passed through her brother now like rays of light through a lens. He stood at the focus and he knew it. He had gathered all the lines to himself and would not permit them to escape or change.

“Why?” she muttered. “Is it hate? Does he strike out at Time itself because it hurt him? Is that it … hate?”

Thinking he heard her speak his name, the ghola said: “M’Lady?”

“If I could only burn this thing out of me!” she cried. “I didn’t want to be different.”

“Please, Alia,” he murmured. “Let yourself sleep.”

“I wanted to be able to laugh,” she whispered. Tears slid down her cheeks. “But I’m sister to an Emperor who’s worshipped as a god. People fear me. I never wanted to be feared.”

He wiped the tears from her face.

“I don’t want to be part of history,” she whispered. “I just want to be loved … and to love.”

“You are loved,” he said.

“Ahhh, loyal, loyal Duncan,” she said.

“Please, don’t call me that,” he pleaded.

“But you are,” she said. “And loyalty is a valued commodity. It can be sold … not bought, but sold.”

“I don’t like your cynicism,” he said.

“Damn your logic! It’s true!”

“Sleep,” he said.

“Do you love me, Duncan?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Is that one of those lies,” she asked, “one of the lies that are easier to believe than the truth? Why am I afraid to believe you?”

“You fear my differences as you fear your own.”

“Be a man, not a mentat!” she snarled.

“I am a mentat and a man.”

“Will you make me your woman, then?”

“I will do what love demands.”

“And loyalty?”

“And loyalty.”

“That’s where you’re dangerous,” she said.

Her words disturbed him. No sign of the disturbance arose to his face, no muscle trembled—but she knew it. Vision-memory exposed the disturbance. She felt she had missed part of the vision, though, that she should remember something else from the future. There existed another perception which did not go precisely by the senses, a thing which fell into her head from nowhere the way prescience did. It lay in the Time shadows—infinitely painful.

Emotion! That was it—emotion! It had appeared in the vision, not directly, but as a product from which she could infer what lay behind. She had been possessed by emotion—a single constriction made up of fear, grief and love. They lay there in the vision, all collected into a single epidemic body, overpowering and primordial.

“Duncan, don’t let me go,” she whispered.

“Sleep,” he said. “Don’t fight it.”

“I must … I must. He’s the bait in his own trap. He’s the servant of power and terror. Violence … deification is a prison enclosing him. He’ll lose … everything. It’ll tear him apart.”

“You speak of Paul?”

“They drive him to destroy himself,” she gasped, arching her back. “Too much weight, too much grief. They seduce him away from love.” She sank back to the bed. “They’re creating a universe where he won’t permit himself to live.”