“Why would you do that?”
“Because my ancestors loved you. Because my father loved you.”
“Love? You witches can’t feel love!”
She stared down at him for almost a minute. The bleached hair was growing out dark at the roots and curling once more into ringlets, especially at his neck, she saw.
“I feel what I feel,” she said. “And your water is ours, Duncan Idaho.”
She saw the Fremen admonition have its effect on him and then turned away and was passed out of the room by the guards.
Before leaving the ship, she went back to the hold and stared down at the quiescent worm on its bed of Rakian sand. Her viewport looked down from some two hundred meters onto the captive. As she looked, she shared a silent laugh with the increasingly integrated Taraza.
We were right and Schwangyu and her people were wrong. We knew he wanted out. He had to want that after what he did.
She spoke aloud in a soft whisper, as much for herself as for the nearby observers stationed there to watch for the moment when metamorphosis began in that worm.
“We have your language now,” she said.
There were no words in the language, only a moving, dancing adaptation to a moving, dancing universe. You could only speak the language, not translate it. To know the meaning you had to go through the experience and even then the meaning changed before your eyes. “Noble purpose” was, after all, an untranslatable experience. But when she looked down at the rough, heat-immune hide of that worm from the Rakian desert, Odrade knew what she saw: the visible evidence of noble purpose.
Softly, she called down to him: “Hey! Old worm! Was this your design?”
There was no answer but then she had not really expected an answer.
Frank Herbert was born in Tacoma, Washington, and educated at the University of Washington, Seattle. He worked a wide variety of jobs — including TV cameraman, radio commentator, oyster diver, jungle survival instructor, lay analyst, creative writing teacher, reporter and editor of several West Coast newspapers — before becoming a full-time writer.
In 1952, Herbert began publishing science fiction with “Looking for Something?” in Startling Stories. But his true emergence as a writer of major stature did not occur until 1965, with the publication of Dune. Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and Chapterhouse: Dune followed, completing the saga that the Chicago Tribune would call “one of the monuments of modern science fiction.” Herbert is also the author of some twenty other books, including The Jesus Incident, The Dosadi Experiment, and Destination: Void. He died in 1986.