The rain was in the air without falling.
The blue of the sea and the gray of the sky met at a horizon he had known as a boy. He was standing on the path above the cliffs that led down to the old fishing village, and the path was grown over at its edges but not too much.
Almost like the way a path goes when it has not been walked for a generation but has not yet been reclaimed.
The village below was intact. The boats were in their slips. The nets were folded on the racks.
No smoke from any chimney.
He walked down the path.
The door of the first house stood half-open.
Inside, a chair pulled back from a table, as though someone had risen and gone outside for a moment and not yet returned.
On the mantel a wedding portrait.
A man and a woman he did not know, and between them a child of perhaps three, and beside the portrait a second one, the same child older, and a third, older still, and no fourth.
He stood in the doorway and looked at the three portraits for some time.
He did not go further into the house.
When he stepped back into the street a gull crossed overhead, calling loudly, and the ordinariness of the sound against the absolute quiet of the village was the first thing that struck him like a physical thing.
He kept walking.
Kaitain, when he arrived there, was clean.
The great avenues were clean. The palace was clean. The plinths of the old statues had been polished by the automated systems within the last cycle and the water still moved in the ornamental channels and the lights along the processional way came on as he walked under them, triggered by his motion, and went off behind him again.
He walked up the processional way toward the palace because it was the way he remembered walking once througha a vision.
The palace doors stood open.
Inside, the throne room.
The throne itself had been maintained. The silk of the canopy was not faded. The golden lions at the arms of the chair were polished. Someone had continued the maintenance schedule for a very long time after there had stopped being anyone to sit in the chair, and then the maintenance schedule had stopped, and now the room sat in the held condition of the moment the last servant had set down the last cloth.
He did not approach the throne.
He stood in the middle of the great floor under the banners of the old houses and he began, for the first time, to understand what he was looking at.
It came to him the way a cold comes into a room.
Not all at once.
He recognized it first in the absence of the thing he had been looking for without knowing he was looking.
No bones.
No ash.
No signs of flight.
No barricades in the streets. No defensive positions. No graves.
'No graves!' Paul thought to himself.
'They did not die,' he thought.
'They simply stopped.'
He thought of Leto II then.
He did not know why the name came to him so cleanly.
Some residue of Jack watching videos.
Some half-memory of a book he had read in the past, and with it the shape of what Leto II had seen and what Leto II had refused to allow, and Paul stood in the throne room of Kaitain and understood that he was standing inside the thing Leto II had given up everything to prevent.
He did not panic.
He kept walking because the walking was the understanding, and he was not finished understanding.
The next world was a frontier colony that had not existed when Jack had died and had not existed when Paul had taken Arrakis and had been built in the decades of the peace.
He could tell because the architecture had the confident generosity of a settlement that had never known a bad year.
Wide streets.
Houses set back from the road with gardens that would have been a luxury on any world that still remembered rationing.
The gardens had gone to seed. The seed had gone to weed.
The weed had grown and died and grown and died, layer on layer, and the houses stood in the middle of the slow green returning with their doors closed and their windows intact.
He walked down a residential street.
Inside one of the gardens a swing set.
Beside the swing set a small bicycle laid on its side, the rubber of its tires perished long ago, the frame still bright under the weather.
He walked past it without stopping.
At the end of the street the school. A low building of the kind built on two hundred colony worlds from the same template. He pushed the door and opened.
The corridor inside was clean in the way that all of them were clean. A classroom. Desks in rows. On the board, written in a child's hand, a mathematics problem half-solved.
The roll-book on the teacher's desk.
He left the school and walked out of the colony and the light changed again.
He was on Arrakis.
He knew it before he knew it. The weight of the gravity. The taste of the air. The particular angle of the light.
But Arrakis was green.
He stood on a terrace above Arrakeen and Arrakeen was a city of gardens. The great basin that had held the city of his memory had been deepened and terraced and planted, and water ran along the courses of what had been sand streets, and the towers he had commissioned stood among trees he had not lived to see mature.
It was beautiful.
It was the most beautiful version of anything he had ever built.
He walked down from the terrace into the city.
The gardens were tended.
Not perfectly there had been some years, evidently, since the last hand had pruned them but the irrigation system still ran and the hardier plants had held their ground against the softer ones and what remained was a slower, wilder version of the thing he had made.