The dream becomes more real each time I experience it. In my waking moments, I long to return there, though I sense great danger.
—PAUL ATREIDES, private journals
In his dim bedchamber, Paul lay awake on an unusually warm evening, his covers thrown aside. He felt very alone in Castle Caladan and adrift, uneasy that Duke Leto and Lady Jessica were far away and separated from each other. Gurney Halleck was gone, too.
But he was the heir to noble House Atreides, and he had to think like a Duke. He was about to turn fifteen, and Caladan was his responsibility, at least temporarily while his father was gone.
He knew that the Duke’s mission was of utmost importance, and he recalled the recorded message his father had left for him. “Watch this only if I don’t come back,” Leto had said, placing the shigawire spool in the young man’s palm. “I hope you never need to view it. You know why I’m doing this, why I’m taking such a risk.” And in the Duke’s expression, Paul saw a genuine realization of the danger to which he was exposing himself—willingly, for the sake of the Imperium.
Now, Paul tried to sleep in the uncomfortable heat, feeling sticky sweat on his skin. The day had been unseasonably hot without the sea breezes that customarily skimmed over the water and moderated temperatures along the coast. As bad luck would have it, the castle’s mechanical air-cooling system had failed at just such a time. Caladan engineers had inspected the mechanism, consulted manuals provided by the Ixian manufacturer, and apologized to the young man that repairs could not be completed without securing parts from off-planet.
Paul was not a delicate noble child, so he could deal with such discomfort, preferring to adapt to the weather and ignore it as much as possible, a human surviving the elements. Open windows and sea breezes were welcome to him. With the wilderness excursions he’d made with his father, the young man felt relaxed without being enclosed within a structure.
For security reasons, as well as the expected decorum of a ducal heir, he couldn’t be footloose and aloof. He had to play the part of a young nobleman residing in the ancient castle, ready on a moment’s notice to rule in Leto’s place. It was what his father expected of him, the same as old Duke Paulus Atreides had demanded of his own son a generation before.
To make his father proud, Paul would meet those expectations, but he rather liked the idea of doing things people did not anticipate.
The boy tossed and turned in the darkness, wiped perspiration from his brow. Finally, he swung out of bed and carried a sheet and pillow out onto the small balcony of his bedroom, where he lay down in his thin nightclothes. The tile balcony was hard and warm, still radiating heat from the day. With a sigh, he gazed up at the gently twinkling stars in the crystal-clear night.
Across his field of vision danced stars whose names he knew, the ones his father and Dr. Yueh had taught him—Seille, Ikam, Jylar, and many others, all part of the vast galactic Imperium. But none of the brightest stars overhead at this time of year belonged to powerful noble families. Caladan did not have a particularly favorable location—not physically close to the capital, Kaitain, and not on any major Heighliner shipping or passenger routes. Other Landsraad Houses had equally unfavorable locations, but some managed to excel even so. Paul wondered about the future of House Atreides, and what his part might be in that unfolding story.
As he lay there, he heard a fluttering of wings. One of his father’s trained hawks landed on the stone railing of the balcony. In the low light, the magnificent creature looked sidelong at him, then took up a sentry position, turning its head first one way and then the other.
Paul realized that the bird had not come here by coincidence. The head of Atreides security, Thufir Hawat, somehow knew that the young man had gone out onto the balcony, and he’d sent the hawk. The old warrior Mentat and his staff had been working with these birds in recent weeks, part of the falconry group maintained by the Duke. These specialized birds had surveillance equipment secured to their bodies.
Thufir worried constantly about young Paul’s welfare, complaining about the “unnecessary risks” the fourteen-year-old had been taking, such as climbing steep cliffs and flying aircraft into dangerous storms over the sea. Duncan Idaho had accompanied him on such risky endeavors, calling them maneuvers to stretch the young man’s abilities. He had sworn never to let Paul come to harm, but even Duncan had been concerned. “Perhaps we’re going a bit too far,” the Swordmaster admitted to the boy. “Thufir wants you to train, but within limits.”
The Mentat watched the Atreides heir like a hawk, figuratively and now literally.
Paul extended his hand to the bird on the rail. It watched him, then looked away, continuing its sentry duty. Paul could see the small lenses on its feathers, a transponder at its throat. No doubt, the old Mentat was reviewing images right now.
“Thufir, I am perfectly capable of taking care of myself on my own castle balcony.”
The transponder emitted a small, but discernible voice. “It is not possible to concern myself ‘too much’ with your welfare, young Master. If harm were to befall you under my watch, my abilities would be worth nothing. Now, I want you to have a restful sleep.”
Paul lay back on his pillow. “Thufir … thank you for your concern.”
He used a Bene Gesserit mental exercise his mother had taught him to remove troubling thoughts, so he could open the doorway to sleep. His body was exhausted after another long day of training with Duncan.
With warm sea breezes around him and the hawk standing sentinel above him, Paul drifted into a slumber of darkness and solitude … which shifted gradually into a desert landscape, bright sun on hot dunes. He stood on an expanse of sand, squinting at a rock escarpment baked in the sun. In the dream, it was morning in that distant place, but already warm, portending another hot day.
A figure made its way down a trail on the great rock, moving athletically in a desert costume. At the bottom of the rock, opened a burnoose to reveal the elfin features of a young woman with skin darker than his own and hair matted with dust.
He’d seen her before in dream after dream, and the voice was familiar as well, drifting over him like a breeze from the desert. “Tell me about the waters of your homeworld, Usul.”
Having experienced this in many haunting variations, he felt it was more than a dream, and he always awakened in the middle of it. This time, he managed to remain in the other reality a little longer, but as his dream-self struggled to speak a response, to ask questions, the landscape and the intriguing young woman faded from view.
Much later at night, when the breezes turned damp and chill, he lay awake on the open balcony, again resorting to thought exercises. He counted the nobles in the Atreides line who had preceded him. The castle had stood for twenty-six generations on this commanding spot overlooking the sea, originally constructed by Earl Kanius Atreides. Not the first Atreides to rule Caladan, he had envisioned a great fortress on this rocky promontory, commissioning the grand blueprints when he was only nineteen years old, not much older than Paul was now.
Earl Kanius had seen the mighty castle completed in little more than a decade, along with the gardens and a thriving coastal village. Paul recalled a filmbook image of his ancestor’s face, and then thought of the successors of Kanius, counting each one all the way up to Paulus Atreides, his own grandfather, whose painting hung in the castle’s dining hall.
But when Paul tried to summon the next image in the line, his father, he could only summon a fuzzy, undefined outline. He missed the man so much and hoped he would come home soon.
He felt the weight of all the work done by Kanius and the other Atreides, all the planning they’d had to do and the decisions they’d made to empower their Great House. He finally drifted into a deep, troubled sleep.
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