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“Why did you leave?” Chani asks one night.
Paul is pale beneath her, his dark locks curling away from his skin. The air between them in their tent is parched from the water collector. He’s lost in himself, doesn’t remember what they were talking about before they started.
“Caladan?” He finally asks her.
She nods.
“It was an Imperial order, couched in an honor.”
Chani frowns.
“You had soldiers. You were a Great House with money. Why didn’t you fight?”
Paul sighed.
“That’s not what the Great Houses do.”
“Why have soldiers then?” Chani asks, skeptical.
“To show strength.”
“Strength you never use is pointless,” she observes, half expecting him to bristle, become defensive, but he laughs.
“Probably. That’s not how they think of it. The Great Houses train their children to be deceitful, to try to outmaneuver the opponent. When I was a small child, they would send spies to try to trick me into giving away information, or even to defect. The ambitious ones would have tried to ransom me. The rest would have killed me.”
Chani rises, careful not to waste any water as they separate. She does this out of habit; he still doesn’t have the knack of it.
“They lack courage. When a Fremen kills you he does you the courtesy of doing it himself.”
Paul nods.
“I agree. But it’s not their opponents they fear. It’s the Emperor. He wants the illusion of harmony. And above all else he wants the Spice to keep flowing.”
Chani frowns.
“It doesn’t belong to him.”
Paul strokes her arm.
“No,” he murmurs. “It doesn’t.”
Chani has dreams. They all do. There is not a Fremen alive who can remember a time before the dreaming. It was a surprise when Chani learned that outworlders didn’t share them, like hearing that there were creatures who breathed through slits in their necks. Strange visions are just a part of life, natural as dying. The spice gives them these visions—Chani ignores them most of the time. Outside of the communal ritual of the spice orgy, she doesn’t have the luxury of introspection. Not for something as wispy as dreams. They are confusing and poetic, and she lives in the world of the literal. No time for deciphering the threads of what might or might not be. There is work to be done. Puzzling out a dream feels too much like trying to hold fast to a single grain of sand in a storm. Futile, and pointless besides.
But this dream stills her. Does something strange to the inside of her chest. Because the day she meets Paul she dreams of water.
Just a little at first, trickling over her feet. It is enough for many days in the desert. A treasure. More comes, cold and strange, rising up her skin. More water than she’s seen harvested from a battalion of enemy soldiers. A king’s ransom. Her dream-body can’t imagine what it might feel like for water to be pouring over her, covering her up to her knees, so it supplies a sensation a little like wind, but without the grit of sand.
Chani wants to rejoice—the water keeps rising, and when it reaches her chest she thinks that this must be all the water in the world, because already it is more than she could ever hope to see.
So much water. A shame she never learned a fear of drowning.
“You say the Emperor is just one man. How is it that all the Great Houses allow one man and one man only to dictate their lives?”
This time Paul is alert. There was a close call while he and the other Fedaykin were surveilling their enemies in the desert. One of the younger boys, Sumata, had been too cocky. Chani had seen it, they all had. But he had been allowed to join them anyway, because if he was old enough to be making boasts then he was old enough to learn some things the hard way. Sumata will live, and he will remember the lesson of today. It should be enough, but it has left Paul shaky and unhappy. It is a strange time to be picking a fight, but Chani is not in the habit of letting things rest.
“Because that is how it has always been,” Paul says with a frustrated sigh. “People like stability too much, even though they talk about how things should be different.”
This, Chani can understand. Her people are much the same. The stability of their prophecies, the ones that never come true, has always been comforting. She sees it every day. People cling to the Mahdi, and he is easy to cling to because he is not real. He will never arrive, and therefore he can never disappoint. The idea of him is better than anything a real man can be.
“But how did it come to be that there is just one man? Even when my people came to Arrakis in small numbers, we splintered and became separate in our sietches. We survive better when more voices come together as one. We wither when one voice speaks for many.”
“There’s the Landsraad—the governing body that represents all the Great Houses. It functions much like the gathering in the south that you’ve described,” Paul shakes his head. “It was supposed to be a check on the Emperor’s power. But the Houses have grown petty, vindictive.”
“Self-serving,” she supplies.
“They have always been that,” Paul says. “But for a long time it was understood that it served them to collaborate, to stand as one body so that the Emperor could not pick them off one by one if he chose. They’ve forgotten that,” this last he says with the bitterness of a boy who has been betrayed, not the clear-eyed understanding of a man whose world was built on sand instead of stone.
It is the kind of childishness that should have been stamped out early, as it had been done for Sumata. It makes Chani feel sour inside.
“Sounds like they prioritize the wrong things.”
Paul gently lays down the sand compactor he’s been struggling to repair.
“Like what?”
“Their wealth. Their status. Their sanctimony.”
Paul’s lips twist into a smile.
“For someone who’s never attended a council of the Landsraad, you have a keen understanding of it.”
“We know our enemies,” Chani scoffs. “Not their titles or their pretentious names for the things that they do. But we know them. Just as well as we know which storms are killers and which creatures will leave behind nothing, not even your dry bones.”
Paul reaches for her, but Chani is in a foul mood, and it’s all her own fault. She doesn’t want to be touched. Yet she doesn’t regret starting this argument. Or perhaps re-starting it. Because despite what she’s just said, she doesn’t understand at all. How could there be people in the universe with so much power and wealth, with enough water that they didn’t need to measure every drop, who were so useless in the face of a single man? Just because he called himself an Emperor! Why was it that her people bore the brunt of their whims, their needs, when they already had more than they could ever use? So much, and yet not enough. Would everything in the known world even be enough for people like that? She is amazed they did not choke on their own greed, and furious that they exist at all.
“I wish my father had lived to meet you,” Paul says. “He would have admired you.”
Chani looks away. She didn’t want the flattery of some Duke, especially not a dead one.
“You should be careful saying things like that. Fremen know better than to wish for things that cannot be. We don’t waste time on regret.”
Paul picks up the sand compactor again.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” he murmurs.
Chani watches him struggle for a full minute before she decides to help him, and it is only because if he broke the compactor it would be a pointless waste.
Once she’d had the dream, it is inevitable that she had it again.
Paul dreams often—she can feel him beside her recoiling in his sleep. They speak of what he saw sometimes, because when his dreams are literal enough he can warn them of things to come. Chani’s aren’t like that most of the time. The dream of water, the trickle that grows into a flood, that dream she never speaks of. It doesn’t belong to anyone else, and she is afraid of what it could mean.
There are times when Paul sits with Stilgar all night, well into the morning, discussing strategies and long-term plans. Discussions that Chani does not feel welcomed into. She tries to explain this to Paul, but he refuses to understand. Fedaykin follow their leaders. Unless their leaders prove weak or cowardly, and then they are challenged. This keeps their ranks strong, and ensures that the one they are following is worthy. A soldier makes reports, shares what they have, but they do not sit beside their leaders and give counsel. The Naib has earned the position, to sit beside one and behave like a fellow Naib without being one—it is not the order of things. It is like a challenge. And Paul should not challenge Stilgar.
Chani thinks the men are evenly matched in might, but Stilgar knows the desert. For all that he believes in Paul’s potential, belief does not confer ability. Only ability does. Paul is a capable warrior, but he should not lead. He is too filled with regret. The desert has no time for that.
His mother Jessica seems to understand, but not for the correct reasons. Paul has explained the woman to Chani: she was born in a community of sisters, trained from an early age to obey them and give herself to their goals. This makes sense to Chani. Growing up isolated and estranged from the greater world, raised not by a small family unit but by a community of others, all set to a single purpose (survival and the dream of utopia) all feel familiar and right. The training even made Jessica capable of converting the worm’s poison, and while Chani has no use for her religious conspiracies, she can see the value in creating a Sayyadina from birth. It is not how the Fremen do it—they let the desert choose the most capable among them. But there are no deserts where Paul and Jessica come from, so Chani can understand why they have substituted a breeding program instead.
But none of this makes Jessica understand the Fremen. She wasn’t born to Arrakis and it shows. She defers in public, though her words are always manipulative, with layers and double meanings. She does not use the truth, she spends time telling stories that sound like the truth.
“You’re harsh with her,” Paul says, though it is not a recrimination. “Do you think that will make her stronger?”
Chani doesn’t. Fremen are hard on their children because children need to be hard. Adults who can’t survive give their water to the tribe so that someone more worthy can make use of it.
“Why does she not just say what she really thinks and be done with it?” Chani glares at their cot even though there is nothing objectively wrong with it. “It would save me a lot of time guessing.”
“She was not raised for candor. It doesn’t come easily to her now.” Paul sighs. “She was taught that women like her could only get what they wanted through tricks and cunning.”
Chani scowls.
“She’s good enough with a blade to get what she wants the easy way.”
“I have never found killing to be easy,” he says in that infuriating neutral way he says all kinds of things. Like you’ve been fighting for a long time and prophecies are just words, they won’t dictate who I become and there are places called oceans filled with water as far as you can see. Chani is used to hearing that tone from people like him, in their grand speeches and proclamations, and there has always been something unsaid underneath it.
He is Jessica’s son. What did she teach him not to say?
“You make too much of it,” Chani says. “Life is only precious to those who live it. The purpose of a life is what it means for one’s people. Some are meant to be cut short. It’s their water that has value.”
He smiles at her, so strange and sad.
“You see, I still have much to learn about the ways of the desert.”
Every child knows the prophecy. There are a million prophecies, but there is one that really matters. The Mahdi will come and he will lead his people to paradise. He will bring water to Arrakis, and his people will rejoice and live lives of plenty.
Chani has known these stories since she was small, since before the days she can remember. She has also known what it takes to terraform a planet, having watched her mother working tirelessly as the Imperial Ecologist, studying and growing and nurturing the plants in her carefully constructed environments. Liet Kynes wanted to see Arrakis filled with life. Chani has seen the life that thrives already on Arrakis—the desert mice and the birds and sacred Shai-Hulud. Her people cover the planet, stubbornly enduring even in the places that the rest of the Empire foolishly believes no man can live.
She dreams of water, and wonders how her planet can hold it all. Will all the sand be washed away? Paul has told her about the sand on his planet, that not much lives inside it. Isopods and microscopic worms, so small the human eye can’t see them. The water begins as a trickle, and at first it feels nice. Cool—then it becomes cool like steel and she starts to wonder. Will her people be washed away like the sand? Scraped clean until all that remains is the water, rising up to her neck.
Chani wakes up before it covers her eyes.
She is injured. It happens. Inevitable, in the life of a Fedaykin. Chani knows her people will care for her, because it is not a fatal injury and she is strong enough to be worth saving. But she does not expect Paul to take so much care with her. At first she thinks it’s because he doesn’t trust the methods and wisdom of the others, as if her people have survived this long on superstition and prayer alone. But she realizes it is because he fears losing her, and she is not sure how she feels about that.
“Tell me about the fields of crop-water,” she says as he is checking her bandages, because she doesn’t like the worried look on his face. Her arm will heal, and frowning at it won’t make it happen any faster. It will make Paul tired, and tired warriors are no good in a fight.
“Do you mean the rice fields?” He pauses for a moment, sniffing the injury. “No infection at least.”
“I could have told you that. Tell me,” she says, lifting his chin so he has to look at her.
He smiles, radiant, and Chani isn’t used to it, even after the weeks they have spent together.
“We build them in neat rows, a little like the way the Fremen store the water carafes. Everything accounted for.” He runs his middle finger down her bare thigh, four lines down and one across. “And inside the squares we plant rice, the crops grow tall, with green grass stalks up to your hip. But through the channels—” the runs his finger across her skin again, so soft with her even though his skin has grown callused from his Stillsuit. “Water runs. It’s not contained, because even though the soil drinks it up, enough falls from the sky every season to replenish it. So the air is always saturated with water.”
“It must feel like the inside of a water harvester,” Chani muses.
“It must,” Paul agrees.
“And what about the fishes? You told me there were fishes.”
Paul nods.
“Silver-bodied and smooth, they sway through the water. Like sand in the wind coursing around a stone. The fish deter pests and fertilize the crops, and the rice fields thrive. When it’s time to harvest there’s plenty of both to eat.”
Chani closes her eyes, trying to imagine such a system. The principles make sense to her, they sound like the kind of thing her mother might have concocted in her laboratory. But the idea of so much water, enough for creatures to live in, that is always where her mind falters. She has seen the wells underneath the sietch, the darkness of it. Nothing lives there, because the Fremen guard the water with all that they are, and life takes water. For the sky to give water freely…
“What do fish taste like?” She usually doesn’t ask such things, because there’s no real purpose, but Chani is tired and hurt and curiosity is a nice distraction.
Paul thinks for a long time.
“Like nothing I’ve had on Arrakis,” he finally says.
Her people are winning, and Chani keeps dreaming.
Every night she lays beside Paul, and as soon as she closes her eyes she can feel the water on the other side of her consciousness. She almost starts to expect it. Chani knows better—nothing can be taken for granted in the desert.
Her people are winning the war, but they are losing something too. Chani sees the fervor in their eyes when they look at Paul, the way they whisper when he passes. They think he cannot be killed. They think he is the creature from their stories. They ignore her when she points out that their stories came from somewhere. There are histories in which Sayyadinas see a future with a man who can drink the worm’s poison. Chani thinks those women saw what they wanted to see. She knows what it’s like in the throes of a spice orgy. Everyone is suggestible. It’s good for cohesion, it builds trust, but it also makes fictions feel true.
Something she liked about Paul, from the very beginning, was his doubt. He didn’t dismiss her people’s faith like other outworlders, calling them uncivilized vermin. He always saw the power in their beliefs, knew that part of why the Fremen had persevered for so long was because they believed there was a purpose for their suffering. Chani learned from her mother that the Fremen had the means to take charge of their own destiny. The water they gathered could be used to terraform the surface of the planet. Done mindfully and with generations of planning, they could build their own paradise.
Chani knows that Paul is not a true believer. She should have known that would not stop him from harnessing her people’s beliefs anyway.
She watches it happen. Tries to shout, but is pulled away. She watches her people churning all around him, around Paul, as if he is something more than a man.
Chani doesn’t speak to him for days, even though they continue to share a tent. There is distance between them vaster than the trek from the north to the south. It’s difficult for her to sleep so she doesn’t. The time is well-spent mending Stillsuits and sharpening blades and doing all the other work needed to prepare for a battle. Chani does this, watching her hands work, refusing to think about the voice in her head that commanded her to give water to a living, breathing, traitorous man. Even though he looked dead.
When she finally does sleep, Chani is not expecting the dream again. The water-dream. But she feels the trickle. Her toes recoil this time, she tries to step away, but the water is everywhere.
Chani knows this is a dream. She knows it might even be a true dream. Shouldn’t it be a good thing? To know that her mother’s work will finally be realized, that all the studying and testing she did will be put to some use. That their people will be saved from suffering.
But the water is relentless. Chani can feel it now—water takes just as easily as the desert does, with the same remorse (none). Cold as steel, this water isn’t the water of her people, the water they have stewarded for generations, carefully saving every spare drop. This water is something else. Vast, further than human eyes can see, and full of creatures she cannot begin to comprehend. Hungry things. The water rises, reaching her knees. Chani steps backward, the water follows. She steps forward, and the water rises again. Her thighs are wet. It feels like the time her Stillsuit malfunctioned, the water storage leaking. It had been lucky that any of it was salvaged. No, not luck; Chani had been careful, as she had been taught all her life it was her obligation to be. Had she been careful when she’d looked at Paul?
This dream had been a warning, and now it was warning her that everything was too late. The water would rise, it had already reached her neck, her collarbone. Why is she bare? She’d never asked herself before, always accepted the dream as it was. But she would never stand outside uncovered, not when it meant giving away her water to the atmosphere. What had driven her dream-self to stand and be consumed by the water she was meant to save?
Chani doesn’t have an answer. The dream holds her for a long time, until she is choking on water the same way she choked on sand when a compactor exploded. She has no idea if that is what happens to human beings in water. She has never needed to know. But when she wakes up, she sits and stares at the lining of their tent for a long time. Chani does not know if she will survive the coming battle. She had decided she would join it, because the liberation of her people is more important than her fury at Paul. Whether or not she lives had not been a consideration. But now she wonders. If she survives, what will be waiting for her on the other side?
Will it be Councils and pointless arguments, fancy nobility jostling for power? Will it be Paul sitting on a distant throne somewhere, commanding an Empire filled with people who have more than they will ever need, while the rest of the known universe struggles and suffers and dies?
Maybe water will come to Arrakis. Maybe there will be oceans further than she can imagine. Maybe she will live to see the prophecies of her youth come to pass. Even if they do, Chani wonders, will anything actually change at all?