Children?
Once more, he stumbled.
I permitted this, he thought. I should feel guilty.
The sound of noisy confusion filled the cavern ahead of them. It grew louder precisely as he remembered it growing louder. Yes, this was the pattern, the inexorable pattern, even with two children.
Chani is dead, he told himself.
At some faraway instant in a past which he had shared with others, this future had reached down to him. It had chivvied him and herded him into a chasm whose walls grew narrower and narrower. He could feel them closing in on him. This was the way the vision went.
Chani is dead. I should abandon myself to grief.
But that was not the way the vision went.
"Has Alia been summoned?" he asked.
"She is with Chani's friends," Tandis said.
Paul sensed the mob pressing back to give him passage. Their silence moved ahead of him like a wave. The noisy confusion began dying down. A sense of congested emotion filled the sietch. He wanted to remove the people from his vision, found it impossible. Every face turning to follow him carried its special imprint. They were pitiless with curiosity, those faces. They felt grief, yes, but he understood the cruelty which drenched them. They were watching the articulate become dumb, the wise become a fool. Didn't the clown always appeal to cruelty?
This was more than a deathwatch, less than a wake.
Paul felt his soul begging for respite, but still the vision moved him. Just a little farther now, he told himself. Black, visionless dark awaited him just ahead. There lay the place ripped out of the vision by grief and guilt, the place where the moon fell.
He stumbled into it, would've fallen had Idaho not taken his arm in a fierce grip, a solid presence knowing how to share his grief in silence.
"Here is the place," Tandis said.
"Watch your step, Sire," Idaho said, helping him over an entrance lip. Hangings brushed Paul's face. Idaho pulled him to a halt. Paul felt the room then, a reflection against his cheeks and ears. It was a rock-walled space with the rock hidden behind tapestries.
"Where is Chani?" Paul whispered.
Harah's voice answered him: "She is right here, Usul."
Paul heaved a trembling sigh. He had feared her body already had been removed to the stills where Fremen reclaimed the water of the tribe. Was that the way the vision went? He felt abandoned in his blindness.
"The children?" Paul asked.
"They are here, too, m'Lord," Idaho said.
"You have beautiful twins, Usul," Harah said, "a boy and a girl. See? We have them here in a creche."
Two children, Paul thought wonderingly. The vision had contained only a daughter. He cast himself adrift from Idaho's arm, moved toward the place where Harah had spoken, stumbled into a hard surface. His hands explored it: the metaglass outlines of a creche.
Someone took his left arm. "Usul?" It was Harah. She guided his hand into the creche. He felt soft-soft flesh. It was so warm! He felt ribs, breathing.
"That is your son," Harah whispered. She moved his hand. "And this is your daughter." Her hand tightened on his. "Usul, are you truly blind now?"
He knew what she was thinking. The blind must be abandoned in the desert. Fremen tribes carried no dead weight.
"Take me to Chani," Paul said, ignoring her question.
Harah turned him, guided him to the left.
Paul felt himself accepting now the fact that Chani was dead. He had taken his place in a universe he did not want, wearing flesh that did not fit. Every breath he drew bruised his emotions. Two children! He wondered if he had committed himself to a passage where his vision would never return. It seemed unimportant.
"Where is my brother?"
It was Alia's voice behind him. He heard the rush of her, the overwhelming presence as she took his arm from Harah.
"I must speak to you!" Alia hissed.
"In a moment," Paul said.
"Now! It's about Lichna."
"I know," Paul said. "In a moment."
"You don't have a moment!"
"I have many moments."
"But Chani doesn't!"
Chapter Twenty-Four
"Be still!" he ordered. "Chani is dead." He put a hand across her mouth as she started to protest. "I order you to be still!" He felt her subside and removed his hand. "Describe what you see," he said.
"Paul!" Frustration and tears battled in her voice.
"Never mind," he said. And he forced himself to inner stillness, opened the eyes of his vision to this moment. Yes - it was still here. Chani's body lay on a pallet within a ring of light. Someone had straightened her white robe, smoothed it trying to hide the blood from the birth. No matter; he could not turn his awareness from the vision of her face: such a mirror of eternity in the still features!
He turned away, but the vision moved with him. She was gone... never to return. The air, the universe, all vacant - everywhere vacant. Was this the essence of his penance? he wondered. He wanted tears, but they would not come. Had he lived too long a Fremen? This death demanded its moisture!
Nearby, a baby cried and was hushed. The sound pulled a curtain on his vision. Paul welcomed the darkness. This is another world, he thought. Two children.
The thought came out of some lost oracular trance. He tried to recapture the timeless mind-dilation of the melange, but awareness fell short. No burst of the future came into this new consciousness. He felt himself rejecting the future - any future.
"Goodbye, my Sihaya," he whispered.
Alia's voice, harsh and demanding, came from somewhere behind him. "I've brought Lichna!"