On Wallach IX in the library under the School.
Harishka sat at a corner table with a single volume open before her and had not turned a page in some minutes. Mohiam sat across from her.
Neither had spoken for longer than either would ordinarily have allowed.
"He has held Arrakis for two years without incident," Mohiam said.
"I am aware."
"Spice is flowing. The Fremen are actively being integrated. The Landsraad has settled around him in a way I have not seen the Landsraad settle in my lifetime."
Harishka turned a page she had not read. "Go on."
"Shaddam struck his own chamberlain last week. Over a schedule irregularity. The chamberlain did not report it but we have the report regardless." Mohiam's voice did not change. "He has begun dismissing advisors he has trusted for twenty years. He is drinking before council. He is not sleeping."
"And."
"And I am asking the question that has been in this room for some time and has not been spoken."
Harishka closed the book. The sound was very small.
"Say it."
"The throne is the stabilizing position. It has always been the stabilizing position. We have spent ninety generations breeding for the person fit to sit in it. Our projections for that person do not match the boy on Arrakis. Our projections for the man on the throne, increasingly, also do not match the man on the throne."
"You are suggesting we help him."
"I am suggesting we stop helping the other one."
Harishka looked at her for a long moment across the lamp.
"That is not a small sentence, Gaius."
"I am aware."
"We will speak of this again. Not tonight."
She did not open the book again. Neither of them moved for some time.
Meanwhile on Arrakis.
Paul was standing by his bed side.
His body that was once very skinny had put on some genuine muscle.
He held a cup for a few moments as he just stared at in silence,
The tea inside the cup was dark and thick and Paul drank it standing.
He had brewed it himself from the concentrate in the locked cabinet, the way he had done perhaps a dozen times in two years, always for a specific question he wanted to look at cleanly.
Tonight he had no specific question. He had been restless through the afternoon and the restlessness had the shape of something wanting to be seen.
He had begun to understand his own feelings in a much deeper way then he orignally thought possible and had begun to trust these instincts.
He set the cup down and sat on the edge of the bed and lay back.
The biting began almost at once. Under the skin, through the bone of his arms, into the plates of his skull.
The thing in him, the thing he had carried since Kaitain and had stopped trying to name was moving.
He could feel the shape of its movement without being able to describe it. Like a tide under the floor.
'Nanoparticles' he thought, and the word surfaced from somewhere Jack had left behind, from a film or a book he could no longer picture. 'Thinking about it, it genuinely is Something like that or atleast some version of that.' Jack thought to himself.
The ceiling above him softened at its edges.
He closed his eyes.
All of a sudden he was standing in a plaza.
The stone under his feet was cut in hexagons and polished to a mild shine and the shine was unbroken by any footprint.
Overhead a sky he did not recognize. Two suns, one larger, one very small. The air was warm and smelled faintly of cut grass from somewhere he could not see.
The plaza was held up by buildings of a kind he did not know.
Tall, curved, white, with the easy proportions of architecture that had been given time to become gentle. Fountains ran. Water moved through channels cut along the edges of the walks. The sound of the water was the loudest sound in the city.
He walked.
At first he thought this was for a festival day, the kind of civic quiet that precedes a gathering.
The doors of the buildings stood open.
Tables were set along one of the restaurants with cloths laid out and Jugs full.
A child's toy, a small carved animal of a species he did not recognize, sat on the edge of a fountain where a hand had left it some time ago.
Looking at it clsoer, Paul noticed large accumulations of dust.
He walked further.
A market street. Stalls under awnings. Goods in their places, rotting fruit he did not recognize, arranged in baskets, all of it rotten or the rest beggining to rot.
It sat in the long, held stillness of fruit that has stopped progressing.
At the end of the market the street opened onto a park and the park was full of trees, and under one of the trees a bench, and on the bench nothing. Beside the bench a book lay face down on the grass, its pages stirred faintly by the breeze.
He stood in the park for some time.
He did not know this world.
He knew the shape of it. He had signed orders for worlds like this.
Frontier agricultural grants, terraformed within the last century, settled by the overflow of Imperial population during the decades of peace. He had read reports on three hundred such worlds he had seen in his visions but he could not tell which of the three hundred he was standing on.
He walked until he found a residential quarter and went inside one of the houses and the door opened at his touch.
A kitchen. A table set for two. The food on the plates had started to rot and were left uneaten. There was no smell of decay however. The food had dried in place slowly, over a long time, and had simply ceased.
He stood in the kitchen.
Then the light changed.
He was on Caladan.