Chapter 22 Chapter 21

Hayter saw Alia come out of the temple and across the piazza.The guards stood close together, their ferocious expressions belied their usual sense of superiority. The heliostats on the flapping wings glowed in the bright afternoon sun, and the Fist of Muad'di emblem of the Royal Guard was faintly visible on the fuselage. Hayter turned his gaze to Alia.She seemed so out of tune with this city, he thought, she should be in the desert, that vast and free place.As he watched her approach, it occurred to him: Aria was only sad when she smiled.All because of those eyes.He remembered a memory, vivid, of the time she had received the Guild ambassador: high above the background of music, conversation, robes, uniforms.At that time, Alia was wearing a white robe, which was dazzlingly white, representing the elegance and purity of a virgin.He looked down from the window and watched her walk through the inner courtyard garden, with its pools, fountains, lawns of palm fronds, and a white belvedere.

All wrong...everything is wrong.She belongs to the desert. Hayter breathed heavily.Like last time, Alia was out of his sight.He waited, fists clenched and then loosened.He was distraught by the meeting with Bigas. He heard Alia's entourage moving outside the house.She herself has entered the private residential area.He tried to focus, to think about what about her was disturbing his mind.The gesture of walking across the piazza?Yes.Her gait is like that of a stalked prey trying to escape a ferocious predator.He came out of the house, onto the shaded patio, and paused in the shadows.Alia is standing by the parapet overlooking her temple.

He cast his gaze towards the city, toward where she was looking.What he saw were pieces of rectangular buildings, piles of colors, and wriggling crowds.The building swayed and glistened in the thermals, swirling hot air rising from the roof.A boy was playing football against the wall of a cul-de-sac facing a hill just around the corner from a temple.The ball bounced back and forth. Alia looked at the ball too, and felt like the ball, bouncing back and forth...in the alley of time. Before leaving the temple she drank the largest dose of spice she had ever taken before.Greatly overdose.The dose frightened her before the spice's effects could take hold.

Why am I doing this?she asked herself. "You can only make a choice among various dangers." Is that right?That's the only way to pierce the damned dune tarot fog that blinds the future.A barrier stands there.It must be broken.It was necessary, it could only be done, she had to see the future, and her eyeless brother was striding in that direction. The familiar spice trance begins.She took a deep breath and gradually entered a state of peace, stillness, and selflessness. Having a second sight can easily make a fatalist, she thought.Unfortunately, there is no other way of calculating the future. There is no formula that can replace precognition. Finding the future cannot be like mathematical derivation.Entering the future has to pay the price of life and mind.

There was movement in the shadows of the adjacent terrace, a figure.That necromancer!Alia watched him with her greatly enhanced senses, knowing everything.The most eye-catching thing on the vibrant dark complexion is the pair of shining metal eyes.He is an amalgamation of extreme opposites that have been brought together outright.He is a shadow, but also a blazing light, a processed product.The process had animated his dead body...and something warm and simple...an innocence. He is the innocence under pressure, the innocence under siege! "Have you been there long, Duncan?" she asked.

"So you're going to take me for Duncan right now," he said. "Why?" "Don't ask me," she said. She looked at him and thought: The workmanship of the Trealax is unearthly, and there is nothing in him like Duncan that has achieved perfection. "Only God dares to be perfect," she said. "For humans, perfection is dangerous." "Duncan is dead," he said, and he hoped she didn't use that title. "I'm Haight." She studied his artificial eyes.I don't know what those eyes see.A closer look revealed many small dark indentations in the shiny metal surface, like small, dark wells.Compound eyes!The surrounding world suddenly lit up and shook.She grabbed onto the sun-warmed railing with one hand, trying to steady herself.Ah, how fast the spices work.

"Are you unwell?" Hayter asked. He moved closer, his metal eyes wide open, watching her. Who is speaking?She wondered, Duncan Idaho?Mentat Necromancer?True Sunni philosopher?Or a minion of the Trealax, more dangerous than any Guild navigator?Her brother knew who he was. She looked at the undead again.There was something indolent about him, something latent.His whole being was waiting, and there was a power within him that was far beyond their ordinary lives. "Because of my mother, I look a lot like Bee Geist," she said. "You know that?" "I know."

"I have their strength, I think like them. Some part of me understands the urgency of a breeding program ... and the finished product that will come out of it." She blinked, feeling a part of her consciousness begin to flow freely in the long river of time. "It is said that Bee Geist never gave up on that project," he said.He watched her closely, and her fingers, gripping the edge of the terrace, looked strangely pale. "Did I trip?" she asked. He noticed how heavy her breathing was, how nervous her movements were, how her eyes were starting to glaze over.

"When you're about to stumble," he said, "you jump over what tripped you up and regain your balance." "The Bee Geist Sisterhood has stumbled," she said. "They want to jump over my brother now and regain their balance. They want Chani's baby...or mine." "You have a kid?" She tried to adjust, to adjust herself to the time and space corresponding to this problem.have kids?when?Where? "I saw . . . my child," she whispered. She moved away from the balcony railing and turned to look at the undead.He has a quick-witted face and painful eyes.When he turned around with her, the two pieces of metal flickered.

"What can you see... with eyes like these?" she whispered. "Everything other eyes can see," he said. His voice rang in her ears, but her consciousness couldn't grasp its meaning.She tried her best to extend her consciousness, as if across the entire universe.Such a long stretch...outward...outward.Countless time and space entangled her. "You're taking spices, in very large doses," he said. "Why can't I see him?" she muttered. "Tell me why I can't see him." "Who can't you see?" "I can't see the father of the child, the fog of the tarot is covering my eyes. Help me."

He used Mentat's logical operation function to the extreme, and then said: "Bee Geist wants you to mate with your brother, so that the gene can be locked..." She couldn't help but whine.A chill ran through his body, and then he was scorching hot again.The mating partner she couldn't see, only in her worst dreams, the one who couldn't even manifest the power of precognition!Could that really happen? "Did you risk taking a super-dose of the spice?" he asked, trying to suppress the overwhelming fear that an Atreides woman might die, and that Paul might be forced to face the fact that—a The royal woman... is gone. "You don't know what it means to chase the future," she said. "Sometimes, I get glimpses of my future self... but my own precognition interferes with me. I can't see my future clearly." She bowed her head , shaking his head back and forth. "How much spice did you take?" he asked. "Nature hates foreknowledge." She looked up. "Did you know that, Duncan?" He said softly, as if speaking to a child, "Tell me how much you take." He put his left hand around her shoulders . "Words, this method is too crude, primitive, and unable to express clearly." She broke away from his hand. "You have to tell me," he said. "Look at the shielding wall mountain." She ordered, pointing forward, and looking out in the direction of the hand. A sudden vision, the shield wall mountain collapsed, like a castle made of sand and gravel destroyed by an invisible force.She couldn't help shaking.She turned her gaze to look at the undead, and was stunned by the expression on the undead's face.His features creased together and grew older and then younger...older...younger.He seemed to have become life itself, arbitrary, circular... She turned to escape, but he grabbed her left wrist. "I'll call the doctor," he said. "No! I must take a good look at this vision! I must know!" "You've seen it," he said. She lowered her head and stared at his hands.There was a feeling of electric shock where the skin touched, which made her ecstatic and terrified at the same time.She flung him away, panting heavily: "It's like a whirlwind, and you can't catch the whirlwind!" "You need a doctor!" he snapped. "Why don't you understand?" she snapped. "My visions are incomplete, only pulsating fragments. I must remember this future. Don't you know?" "If you die because of this, where is the future?" he asked, pushing her gently into the bedroom. "Words...words," she murmured, "I can't explain. One thing caused another, but it wasn't the cause of the other... and it had no effect. We can't let the illusion just sit like that. .But no matter how we try, there is still a gap ahead, we can’t get through it, we can’t see it.” "Extend your consciousness across that gap," he ordered. How dull he is!she thinks. A cold shadow enveloped her.She felt her muscles squirm, like the movement of a sandworm.There is a real bed under her body, but she knows that the bed is not actually a real one.Only space is eternal and there is no other entity.The bed was floating, and there were many corpses floating around, all of her own.Time becomes a complex feeling, unbearable for its load.It had so many meanings, all tangled together, that she couldn't tell them apart.This is the time.It's in motion.The whole universe is moving backwards, forwards and sideways. "That gap, it's not like other objects, you can't see and touch it," she explained. "You can't go under it, you can't go around it. There is no place for you to find support." Countless people surrounded her, all of them were the same person, and these same people held her left hand.Her own body is also full of phantoms.She stretched out countless phantom-like left arms, and touched the countless changing mask-like faces: Duncan Idaho!There was something... wrong about his eyes, but it was Duncan's face.Duncan is child-adult-youth-child-adult-youth...every line on his face reveals his concern for her. "Don't be afraid, Duncan," she whispered. He squeezed her hand tightly and nodded, "Lie still," he said. He thought: she will not die!She can't die!An Atreides woman cannot be allowed to die!He shook his head vigorously.Such thinking defies Mentat's logic.Death is a necessity, only in this way can life continue. The ghoul loves me, Alia thought. The idea became a rock on which she could work.It was a familiar face, and behind it was a real room.This is a room in Paul's suite. Finally, there is a fixed figure.The man did something with a tube down her throat.She couldn't help feeling sick. "Fortunately, the rescue was done in time." A voice said, which she recognized as the royal doctor, "You should have called me earlier." The doctor sounded suspicious.She felt the tube slip out of her throat—a snake, a gleaming cord. "This shot will put her to sleep," said the doctor. "I'll send her entourage to—" "I guard her," said the Necromancer. "Impossible!" The doctor flatly refused. "Stay... Duncan," Alia whispered. He stroked her hand to let her know that he heard her. "Ma'am," said the doctor, "it's better..." "You don't need to tell me what is the best." She panted heavily, her throat hurting every time she uttered a syllable. "Ma'am," said the doctor, in a reproachful voice, "you know the dangers of taking too much spice. I can only assume that someone slipped it on you without..." "You're such a fool," she said in a hoarse voice. "You don't want me to have visions, do you? I know what I'm taking and why." She put a hand to her throat. "Back off. immediately!" The doctor withdrew from her sight and said, "I will report this to your brother." She sensed his departure, and turned her attention to the necromancer.Now, the illusion in her consciousness is clearer, containing the reality, and the reality extends outward in the illusion.In this flow of time, she felt that the undead were moving, but they had become clear, not phantoms like before. He is a severe test for us, she thought.He is both danger and salvation. She shivered, knowing that she was seeing visions that her brother had seen.Disappointing tears welled up in her eyes.She shook her head violently.don't cry!Tears not only waste water, but worse disrupt the already rough phantom flow.Be sure to stop Paul!Even if only once, just this time. She traveled through time, trying to place her voice on the path he must travel in the future.But the pressure was too great and the changes were too great for her to manage.Time flows through her brother like light through a lens.He stands in focus.He knows that very well.He has concentrated every path of future development in himself, not allowing them to escape his grasp and change in the slightest. "Why?" she murmured, "Is it because of hatred? Time hurt him, so he wants to strike time itself? Is this... hatred?" The Necromancer thought she was calling him, and said, "Ma'am?" "I'm going to get this goddamn precognition out of me!" she cried. "I don't want to be different." "Please, Alia," he whispered, "Go to sleep." "I wish I could laugh out loud," she whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks, "but I'm the emperor's sister, an emperor revered as a god. People fear me. But I never want to be feared object." He wiped the tears from her face. "I don't want to be part of history," she whispers. "I just want to be loved...loved." "Everyone loves you," he said. "Aha, loyal, loyal Duncan," she said. "Please, don't say that," he begged. "But you are loyal," she said. "Loyalty is a precious commodity. It can be sold . . . but it cannot be bought. It cannot be bought, it must be sold." "I don't like your cynicism," he said. "To hell with your logic! It's the truth!" "Go to sleep," he said. "Do you love me, Duncan?" she asked. "I love you." "Another lie?" she asked. "A lie that is easier to believe than the truth? I'm afraid to believe you. Why?" "You are as afraid of my being different as you are of your own being different." "Be a man, stop being Mentat, always calculating!" she shouted. "I am Mentat, and a man." "Will you let me be your woman?" "I'll do everything love asks for." "Love, and loyalty?" "And loyalty." "And that's where your danger lies," she said. Her words disturbed him.The unease was not reflected in his face, his muscles did not twitch.But she knew his uneasiness, and the visions she recorded made it clear.Still, she felt like she had forgotten some of the vision, and there were other things she should have remembered.There should be another kind of feeling, not entirely from the senses, but it appeared in her mind for no reason like the illusion brought by the prophecy ability.But this feeling is blocked by the shadow cast by time - pain. emotion!That's it - emotion!There was emotion in the vision, and she wasn't looking for it directly, she was looking for something else, something beneath it.In the vision, she was haunted by emotion—an emotion made of fear, sadness, and love.It was there, in her vision, fear and sorrow and love all in one, an irresistible primal force. "Duncan, don't leave me," she whispered. "Sleep," he said, "don't resist sleepiness." "I must...I must resist. He is the bait in his own trap, he is the instrument of power and brutality. Violence...has become a deification, a cage in which he is imprisoned. He will lose...everything." "You mean Paul?" "They drove him, forced him to destroy himself." Panting, she bowed her back, "The burden was too heavy, the sorrow too deep. They seduced him and kept him away from love." She lay down on the bed, "They He would never allow himself to live in the universe he created." "Who is doing these things?" "It's him! Aha, you're so stupid. He's part of the big plan. It's too late...too late...too late..." As she spoke, she felt that her consciousness was descending layer by layer, layer by layer.Gradually lower and finally settle behind the navel.Body and consciousness have been separated, merged into countless phantom fragments - move, move... She heard the heartbeat of a fetus, a future child.That is to say, the medicinal power of the spice has not passed away, and the medicinal power keeps her drifting in time.She knew that she had felt the life of a child, a child not yet conceived. One thing is for sure about this baby, it will go through the same pain she went through, awakened in the womb as she was.Before birth, it will be a conscious, thinking, independent entity.