Dune by Frank Herbert

Yueh’s presence. She stepped back, closed the door softly.
    Yueh had returned to the window, unable to bear watching the way Jessica
stared at her son. Why did Wanna never give me children? he asked himself. I
know as a doctor there was no physical reason against it. Was there some Bene
Gesserit reason? Was she, perhaps, instructed to serve a different purpose? What
could it have been? She loved me, certainly.
    For the first time, he was caught up in the thought that he might be part of
a pattern more involuted and complicated than his mind could grasp.
    Jessica stopped beside him, said: “What delicious abandon in the sleep of a
child.”
    He spoke mechanically: “If only adults could relax like that.”
    “Yes.”
    “Where do we lose it?” he murmured.
    She glanced at him, catching the odd tone, but her mind was still on Paul,
thinking of the new rigors in his training here, thinking of the differences in
his life now–so very different from the life they once had planned for him.
    “We do, indeed, lose something,” she said.
    She glanced out to the right at a slope humped with a wind-?troubled gray-
green of bushes–dusty leaves and dry claw branches. The too-?dark sky hung over
the slope like a blot, and the milky light of the Arrakeen sun gave the scene a
silver cast–light like the crysknife concealed in her bodice.
    “The sky’s so dark,” she said.
    “That’s partly the lack of moisture,” he said.
    “Water!” she snapped. “Everywhere you turn here, you’re involved with the
lack of water!”
    “It’s the precious mystery of Arrakis,” he said.
    “Why is there so little of it? There’s volcanic rock here. There’re a dozen
power sources I could name. There’s polar ice. They say you can’t drill in the
desert–storms and sandtides destroy equipment faster than it can be installed,
if the worms don’t get you first. They’ve never found water traces there,
anyway. But the mystery, Wellington, the real mystery is the wells that’ve been
drilled up here in the sinks and basins. Have you read about those?”
    “First a trickle, then nothing,” he said.
    “But, Wellington, that’s the mystery. The water was there. It dries up. And
never again is there water. Yet another hole nearby produces the same result: a
trickle that stops. Has no one ever been curious about this?”
    “It is curious,” he said. “You suspect some living agency? Wouldn’t that
have shown in core samples?”
    “What would have shown? Alien plant matter . . . or animal? Who could
recognize it?” She turned back to the slope. “The water is stopped. Something
plugs it. That’s my suspicion.”
“Perhaps the reason’s known,” he said. “The Harkonnens sealed off many
sources of information about Arrakis. Perhaps there was reason to suppress
this.”
    “What reason?” she asked. “And then there’s the atmospheric moisture. Little
enough of it, certainly, but there’s some. It’s the major source of water here,
caught in windtraps and precipitators. Where does that come from?”
    “The polar caps?”
    “Cold air takes up little moisture, Wellington. There are things here behind
the Harkonnen veil that bear close investigation, and not all of those things
are directly involved with the spice.”
    “We are indeed behind the Harkonnen veil,” he said. “Perhaps we’ll . . . ”
He broke off, noting the sudden intense way she was looking at him. “Is
something wrong?”
    “The way you say ‘Harkonnen,’ ” she said. “Even my Duke’s voice doesn’t
carry that weight of venom when he uses the hated name. I didn’t know you had
personal reasons to hate them, Wellington.”
    Great Mother! he thought. I’ve aroused her suspicions! Now I must use every
trick my Wanna taught me. There’s only one solution: tell the truth as far as I
can.
    He said: “You didn’t know that my wife, my Wanna . . . ” He shrugged, unable
to speak past a sudden constriction in