Dune: List 3

His mind focused on the storm as he had seen it begin through the transparent end of their stilltent—cold dribbles of sand crossing the basin, then runnels and tails furrowing the sky.

Tent bows had creaked once as they accepted the pressure, then—silence broken only by the dim bellows wheezing of their sand snorkel pumping air from the surface.

Jessica heard Paul drinking, felt the slickness of her own stillsuit clinging to her body, but she refused to accept her thirst. To accept it would require awakening fully into the terrible necessities of Arrakis where they must guard even fractional traces of moisture, hoarding the few drops in the tent's catchpockets, begrudging a breath wasted on the open air.

These people and their disconcerting directness!

"If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken." It was a Bene Gesserit axiom.

"Not much sand this high." But she could feel them sinking deeper into the maelstrom.

"Get him away from them. Say I wish to question him."
"If they demur?"
"They will not if you handle it correctly."

"Have you any idea, Rabban, how much we spent to bring such military force to bear on the Atreides? Do you have even the first inkling of how much the Guild charges for military transport?"

"The damnable Guild monopoly on space would've ruined us if I hadn't planned for this expense long ago. You should know, Rabban, that we bore the entire brunt of it. We even paid for transport of the Sardaukar."

And not for the first time, the Baron wondered if there ever would come a day when the Guild might be circumvented.

They were insidious—bleeding off just enough to keep the host from objecting until they had you in their fist where they could force you to pay and pay and pay. Always, the exorbitant demands rode upon military ventures.

They were insidious—bleeding off just enough to keep the host from objecting until they had you in their fist where they could force you to pay and pay and pay. Always, the exorbitant demands rode upon military ventures.

"It is said this Fremen force already had captured the Duke's redoubtable Thufir Hawat."

"Ignore them, boy! They're rabble. It's the populous towns, cities, and villages that concern us. A great many people there, eh?"

Think of these clods as what they are—slaves envious of their masters and waiting only the opportunity to rebel. Not the slightest vestige of pity or mercy must you show them.

"A carnivore never stops. Show no mercy. Never stop. Mercy is a chimera. It can be defeated by the stomach rumbling its hunger, by the throat crying its thirst. You must be always hungry and thirsty."

Benign Feyd-Rautha, the compassionate one who saves them from a beast.

The boy will know by that time how to oppress with impunity.

The first rock shingle, like a beach slanting from the sand, lay no more than ten meters ahead when they heard metal crunch and shatter behind them.

She heard Paul pulling at his stillsuit tube, sipped her own reclaimed water. It tasted brackish, and she remembered the waters of Caladan—a tall fountain enclosing a curve of sky, such a richness of moisture that it hadn't been noticed for itself...only for its shape, or its reflection, or its sound as she stopped beside it.

They slid down onto a wide shelf that led around a sheer rock face.

Jessica felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in substances beneath their feet and hands—boulders or pea gravel or flaked rock or pea sand or sand itself or grit or dust or gossamer powder.

Jessica closed her eyes, found herself moved close to tears by the pathos in her son's voice.

"The cliff curves back north over there. You can see by the way it's wind-cut that's the windward face. There'll be crevasses there, deep ones."

They came to a series of shelves dropping down and, beyond them, saw a fissure with its ledge outlined by moonshadow leading along the vestibule.

There was no rhythm to it that might tell a marauding worm something not of the desert moved here.

"You did not hear me say that. I merely say I will protect our contract with the Guild. The Guild requires that we play a circumspect game. There are other ways of destroying a foe."

"But a pogrom—that isn't like the Harkonnens. A pogrom is wasteful."

Halleck nodded, heard the faint susurration and felt the air shift as a lockport swung open beside him.

Here was a new slave-concubine, then, red-haired like my father, willowy and graceful.

You have no idea how much consternation this restraint created in the Royal Creche. Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly threats to us all.

Yes, saguaro in the arroyos and other spiny growth...and a matting of low grasses, yellow-green in the shadows.

It had brought a stillness to the basin so unuttered that the blue-milk moonlight could almost be heard flowing across sentinel saguaro and spiked paintbrush.

He forced himself now to obey her teachings: relax, then fall into the semblance of relaxation, then into the arrested whipsnap of muscles that can slash in any direction.

He was a mote caught in the glare of the noon sun.

The energy sphere of the planet is there to see and understand—a relentless process, but a process nonetheless.

It tipped its head to examine the supine flesh.

I will take the boy-man, your son, and he shall have my countenance, sanctuary in my tribe.

There came a whispered imprecation from above Paul and a low voice: "Call me spawn of a lizard!"

The sudden need of Paul's ascendancy overrode all other consideration, and she barked, "My son's been tested with the gom jabbar!"