Dune [Frank Herbert's Dune Saga Collection: Books 1 - 6]

“Duncan! That’s a dangerous game. Bait that Fremen Naib and you could awaken a beast to destroy us all.”

“He still believes in Muad’Dib,” Idaho said. “That’s our protection.”

“What was his reply?”

“He said he knew his own mind.”

“I see.”

“No . . . I don’t believe you do. Things that bite have longer teeth than Stilgar’s.”

“I don’t understand you today, Duncan. I ask you to do a very important thing, a thing vital to . . . What is all of this rambling?”

How petulant she sounded. He turned back to the chambered window. “When I was trained as a mentat . . . It is very difficult, Alia, to learn how to work your own mind. You learn first that the mind must be allowed to work itself. That’s very strange. You can work your own muscles, exercise them, strengthen them, but the mind acts of itself. Sometimes, when you have learned this about the mind, it shows you things you do not want to see.”

“And that’s why you tried to insult Stilgar?”

“Stilgar doesn’t know his own mind; he doesn’t let it run free.”

“Except in the spice orgy.”

“Not even there. That’s what makes him a Naib. To be a leader of men, he controls and limits his reactions. He does what is expected of him. Once you know this, you know Stilgar and you can measure the length of his teeth.”

“That’s the Fremen way,” she said. “Well, Duncan, will you do it, or won’t you? She must be taken and it must be made to look like the work of House Corrino.”

He remained silent, weighing her tone and arguments in his mentat way. This abduction plan spoke of a coldness and a cruelty whose dimensions, thus revealed, shocked him. Risk her own mother’s life for the reasons thus far produced? Alia was lying. Perhaps the whisperings about Alia and Javid were true. This thought produced an icy hardness in his stomach.

“You’re the only one I can trust for this,” Alia said.

“I know that,” he said.

She took this as acceptance, smiled at herself in the mirror.

“You know,” Idaho said, “the mentat learns to look at every human as a series of relationships.”

Alia did not respond. She sat, caught in a personal memory which drew a blank expression on her face. Idaho, glancing over his shoulder at her, saw the expression and shuddered. It was as though she communed with voices heard only by herself.

“Relationships,” he whispered.

And he thought: One must cast off old agonies as a snake casts off its skin—only to grow a new set and accept all of their limitations. It was the same with governments—even the Regency. Old governments can be traced like discarded molts. I must carry out this scheme, but not in the way Alia commands.

Presently Alia shook her shoulders, said: “Leto should not be going out like that in these times. I will reprimand him.”

“Not even with Stilgar?”

“Not even with him.”

She arose from her mirror, crossed to where Idaho stood beside the window, put a hand on his arm.

He repressed a shiver, reduced this reaction to a mentat computation. Something in her revolted him.

Something in her.

He could not bring himself to look at her. He smelled the melange of her cosmetics, cleared his throat.

She said: “I will be busy today examining Farad’n’s gifts.”

“The clothing?”

“Yes. Nothing he does is what it seems. And we must remember that his Bashar, Tyekanik, is an adept of chaumurky, chaumas, and all the other subtleties of royal assassination.”

“The price of power,” he said, pulling away from her. “But we’re still mobile and Farad’n is not.”

She studied his chiseled profile. Sometimes the workings of his mind were difficult to fathom. Was he thinking only that freedom of action gave life to a military power? Well, life on Arrakis had been too secure for too long. Senses once whetted by omnipresent dangers could degenerate when not used.

“Yes,” she said, “we still have the Fremen.”

“Mobility,” he repeated. “We cannot degenerate into infantry. That’d be foolish.”

His tone annoyed her, and she said: “Farad’n will use any means to destroy us.”

“Ahhh, that’s it,” he said. “That’s a form of initiative, a mobility which we didn’t have in the old days. We had a code, the code of House Atreides. We always paid our way and let the enemy be the pillagers. That restriction no longer holds, of course. We’re equally mobile, House Atreides and House Corrino.”

“We abduct my mother to save her from harm as much as for any other reason,” Alia said. “We still live by the code!”

He looked down at her. She knew the dangers of inciting a mentat to compute. Didn’t she realize what he had computed? Yet . . . he still loved her. He brushed a hand across his eyes. How youthful she looked. The Lady Jessica was correct: Alia gave the appearance of not having aged a day in their years together. She still possessed the soft features of her Bene Gesserit mother, but her eyes were Atreides—measuring, demanding, hawklike. And now something possessed of cruel calculation lurked behind those eyes.

Idaho had served House Atreides for too many years not to understand the family’s strengths as well as their weaknesses. But this thing in Alia, this was new. The Atreides might play a devious game against enemies, but never against friends and allies, and not at all against Family. It was ground into the Atreides manner: support your own populace to the best of your ability; show them how much better they lived under the Atreides. Demonstrate your love for your friends by the candor of your behavior with them. What Alia asked now, though, was not Atreides. He felt this with all of his body’s flesh and nerve structure. He was a unit, indivisible, feeling this alien attitude in Alia.