Dune by Frank Herbert Page B

But the hair was the Duke’s—coal-colored and tousled. Long lashes concealed the lime-toned eyes. Jessica smiled, feeling her fears retreat. She was suddenly caught by the idea of genetic traces in her son’s features—her lines in eyes and facial outline, but sharp touches of the father peering through that outline like maturity emerging from childhood.
    She thought of the boy’s features as an exquisite distillation out of random patterns—endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus. The thought made her want to kneel beside the bed and take her son in her arms, but she was inhibited by 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.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œWhere 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.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œThe sky’s so dark,” she said.
    â€œThat’s partly the lack of moisture,” he said.
    â€œWater!” she snapped. “Everywhere you turn here, you’re involved with the lack of water!”
    â€œIt’s the precious mystery of Arrakis,” he said.
    â€œWhy 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?”
    â€œFirst a trickle, then nothing,” he said.
    â€œBut, 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?”
    â€œIt is curious,” he said. “You suspect some living agency? Wouldn’t that have shown in core samples?”
    â€œWhat 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.”
    â€œPerhaps the reason’s known,” he said. “The Harkonnens sealed off many sources of information about Arrakis. Perhaps there was reason to suppress this.”
    â€œWhat 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?”
    â€œThe polar caps?”
    â€œCold air takes up little moisture, Wellington. There are things here behind the