Thufir Hawat slipped into the training room of Castle Caladan, closed the door softly. He stood there a moment, feeling old and tired and storm-leathered. His left leg ached where it had been slashed once in the service of the Old Duke.

Three generations of them now , he thought.

He stared across the big room bright with the light of noon pouring through the skylights, saw the boy seated with back to the door, intent on papers and charts spread across an ell table.

How many times must I tell that lad never to settle himself with his back to a door? Hawat cleared his throat.

Paul remained bent over his studies.

A cloud shadow passed over the skylights. Again, Hawat cleared his throat.

Paul straightened, spoke without turning: “I know. I’m sitting with my back to a door.”

Hawat suppressed a smile, strode across the room.

Paul looked up at the grizzled old man who stopped at a corner of the table. Hawat’s eyes were two pools of alertness in a dark and deeply seamed face.

“I heard you coming down the hall,” Paul said. “And I heard you open the door.”

“The sounds I make could be imitated.”

“I’d know the difference.”

He might at that , Hawat thought. That witch mother of his is giving him the deep training, certainly. I wonder what her precious school thinks of that? Maybe that’s why they sent the old Proctor here—to whip our dear Lady Jessica into line.

Hawat pulled up a chair across from Paul, sat down facing the door. He did it pointedly, leaned back and studied the room. It struck him as an odd place suddenly, a stranger-place with most of its hardware already gone off to Arrakis. A training table remained, and a fencing mirror with its crystal prisms quiescent, the target dummy beside it patched and padded, looking like an ancient foot soldier maimed and battered in the wars.

There stand I , Hawat thought.

“Thufir, what’re you thinking?” Paul asked.

Hawat looked at the boy. “I was thinking we’ll all be out of here soon and likely never see the place again.”

“Does that make you sad?”

“Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.” He glanced at the charts on the table. “And Arrakis is just another place.”

“Did my father send you up to test me?”

Hawat scowled—the boy had such observing ways about him. He nodded. “You’re thinking it’d have been nicer if he’d come up himself, but you must know how busy he is. He’ll be along later.”

“I’ve been studying about the storms on Arrakis.”

“The storms. I see.”

“They sound pretty bad.”

“That’s too cautious a word: bad . Those storms build up across six or seven thousand kilometers of flatlands, feed on anything that can give them a push—coriolis force, other storms, anything that has an ounce of energy in it. They can blow up to seven hundred kilometers an hour, loaded with everything loose that’s in their way—sand, dust, everything. They can eat flesh off bones and etch the bones to slivers.”

“Why don’t they have weather control?”

“Arrakis has special problems, costs are higher, and there’d be maintenance and the like. The Guild wants a dreadful high price for satellite control and your father’s House isn’t one of the big rich ones, lad. You know that.”

“Have you ever seen the Fremen?”

The lad’s mind is darting all over today , Hawat thought.

“Like as not I have seen them,” he said. “There’s little to tell them from the folk of the graben and sink. They all wear those great flowing robes. And they stink to heaven in any closed space. It’s from those suits they wear—call them ‘stillsuits’—that reclaim the body’s own water.”

Paul swallowed, suddenly aware of the moisture in his mouth, remembering a dream of thirst. That people could want so for water they had to recycle their body moisture struck him with a feeling of desolation. “Water’s precious there,” he said.

Hawat nodded, thinking: Perhaps I’m doing it, getting across to him the importance of this planet as an enemy. It’s madness to go in there without that caution in our minds.

Paul looked up at the skylight, aware that it had begun to rain. He saw the spreading wetness on the gray meta-glass. “Water,” he said.

“You’ll learn a great concern for water,” Hawat said. “As the Duke’s son you’ll never want for it, but you’ll see the pressures of thirst all around you.”

Paul wet his lips with his tongue, thinking back to the day a week ago and the ordeal with the Reverend Mother. She, too, had said something about water starvation.

“You’ll learn about the Funeral Plains,” she’d said, “about the wilderness that is empty, the wasteland where nothing lives except the spice and the sandworms. You’ll stain your eyepits to reduce the sun glare. Shelter will mean a hollow out of the wind and hidden from view. You’ll ride upon your own two feet without ’thopter or groundcar or mount.”

And Paul had been caught more by her tone—singsong and wavering—than by her words.

“When you live upon Arrakis,” she had said, “khala, the land is empty. The moons will be your friends, the sun your enemy.”

Paul had sensed his mother come up beside him away from her post guarding the door. She had looked at the Reverend Mother and asked: “Do you see no hope, Your Reverence?”

“Not for the father.” And the old woman had waved Jessica to silence, looked down at Paul. “Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things....” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “...the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing....” She closed her fingers into a fist. “...without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!”

A week had passed since that day with the Reverend Mother. Her words were only now beginning to come into full register. Now, sitting in the training room with Thufir Hawat, Paul felt a sharp pang of fear. He looked across at the Mentat’s puzzled frown.

“Where were you woolgathering that time?” Hawat asked.

“Did you meet the Reverend Mother?”

“That Truthsayer witch from the Imperium?” Hawat’s eyes quickened with interest. “I met her.”

“She....” Paul hesitated, found that he couldn’t tell Hawat about the ordeal. The inhibitions went deep.

“Yes? What did she?”

Paul took two deep breaths. “She said a thing.” He closed his eyes, calling up the words, and when he spoke his voice unconsciously took on some of the old woman’s tone: “‘You, Paul Atreides, descendant of kings, son of a Duke, you must learn to rule. It’s something none of your ancestors learned.’” Paul opened his eyes, said: “That made me angry and I said my father rules an entire planet. And she said, ‘He’s losing it.’ And I said my father was getting a richer planet. And she said, ‘He’ll lose that one, too.’ And I wanted to run and warn my father, but she said he’d already been warned—by you, by Mother, by many people.”

“True enough,” Hawat muttered.

“Then why’re we going?” Paul demanded.

“Because the Emperor ordered it. And because there’s hope in spite of what that witch-spy said. What else spouted from this ancient fountain of wisdom?”

Paul looked down at his right hand clenched into a fist beneath the table. Slowly, he willed the muscles to relax. She put some kind of hold on me , he thought. How?

“She asked me to tell her what it is to rule,” Paul said. “And I said that one commands. And she said I had some unlearning to do.”

She hit a mark there right enough , Hawat thought. He nodded for Paul to continue.

“She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.”

“How’d she figure your father attracted men like Duncan and Gurney?” Hawat asked.

Paul shrugged. “Then she said a good ruler has to learn his world’s language, that it’s different for every world. And I thought she meant they didn’t speak Galach on Arrakis, but she said that wasn’t it at all. She said she meant the language of the rocks and growing things, the language you don’t hear just with your ears. And I said that’s what Dr. Yueh calls the Mystery of Life.”

Hawat chuckled. “How’d that sit with her?”

“I think she got mad. She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. So I quoted the First Law of Mentat at her: ‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’ That seemed to satisfy her.”

He seems to be getting over it , Hawat thought, but that old witch frightened him. Why did she do it?

“Thufir,” Paul said, “will Arrakis be as bad as she said?”

“Nothing could be that bad,” Hawat said and forced a smile. “Take those Fremen, for example, the renegade people of the desert. By first-approximation analysis, I can tell you there’re many, many more of them than the Imperium suspects. People live there, lad: a great many people, and....” Hawat put a sinewy finger beside his eye. “...they hate Harkonnens with a bloody passion. You must not breathe a word of this, lad. I tell you only as your father’s helper.”

“My father has told me of Salusa Secundus,” Paul said. “Do you know, Thufir, it sounds much like Arrakis...perhaps not quite as bad, but much like it.”

“We do not really know of Salusa Secundus today,” Hawat said. “Only what it was like long ago...mostly. But what is known—you’re right on that score.”

“Will the Fremen help us?”

“It’s a possibility.” Hawat stood up. “I leave today for Arrakis. Meanwhile, you take care of yourself for an old man who’s fond of you, heh? Come around here like the good lad and sit facing the door. It’s not that I think there’s any danger in the castle; it’s just a habit I want you to form.”

Paul got to his feet, moved around the table. “You’re going today?”

“Today it is, and you’ll be following tomorrow. Next time we meet it’ll be on the soil of your new world.” He gripped Paul’s right arm at the bicep. “Keep your knife arm free, heh? And your shield at full charge.” He released the arm, patted Paul’s shoulder, whirled and strode quickly to the door.

“Thufir!” Paul called.

Hawat turned, standing in the open doorway.

“Don’t sit with your back to any doors,” Paul said.

A grin spread across the seamed old face. “That I won’t, lad. Depend on it.” And he was gone, shutting the door softly behind.

Paul sat down where Hawat had been, straightened the papers. One more day here , he thought. He looked around the room. We’re leaving. The idea of departure was suddenly more real to him than it had ever been before. He recalled another thing the old woman had said about a world being the sum of many things—the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns—the unknown sum called nature , a vague summation without any sense of the now . And he wondered: What is the now?

The door across from Paul banged open and an ugly lump of a man lurched through it preceded by a handful of weapons.

“Well, Gurney Halleck,” Paul called, “are you the new weapons master?”

Halleck kicked the door shut with one heel. “You’d rather I came to play games, I know,” he said. He glanced around the room, noting that Hawat’s men already had been over it, checking, making it safe for a duke’s heir. The subtle code signs were all around.

Paul watched the rolling, ugly man set himself back in motion, veer toward the training table with the load of weapons, saw the nine-string baliset slung over Gurney’s shoulder with the multipick woven through the strings near the head of the fingerboard.

Halleck dropped the weapons on the exercise table, lined them up—the rapiers, the bodkins, the kindjals, the slow-pellet stunners, the shield belts. The inkvine scar along his jawline writhed as he turned, casting a smile across the room.

“So you don’t even have a good morning for me, you young imp,” Halleck said. “And what barb did you sink in old Hawat? He passed me in the hall like a man running to his enemy’s funeral.”

Paul grinned. Of all his father’s men, he liked Gurney Halleck best, knew the man’s moods and deviltry, his humors , and thought of him more as a friend than as a hired sword.

Halleck swung the baliset off his shoulder, began tuning it. “If y’ won’t talk, y’ won’t,” he said.

Paul stood, advanced across the room, calling out: “Well, Gurney, do we come prepared for music when it’s fighting time?”

“So it’s sass for our elders today,” Halleck said. He tried a chord on the instrument, nodded.

“Where’s Duncan Idaho?” Paul asked. “Isn’t he supposed to be teaching me weaponry?”

“Duncan’s gone to lead the second wave onto Arrakis,” Halleck said. “All you have left is poor Gurney who’s fresh out of fight and spoiling for music.” He struck another chord, listened to it, smiled. “And it was decided in council that you being such a poor fighter we’d best teach you the music trade so’s you won’t waste your life entire.”

“Maybe you’d better sing me a lay then,” Paul said. “I want to be sure how not to do it.”

“Ah-h-h, hah!” Gurney laughed, and he swung into “Galacian Girls,” his multipick a blur over the strings as he sang:

“Not bad for such a poor hand with the pick,” Paul said, “but if my mother heard you singing a bawdy like that in the castle, she’d have your ears on the outer wall for decoration.”

Gurney pulled at his left ear. “Poor decoration, too, they having been bruised so much listening at keyholes while a young lad I know practiced some strange ditties on his baliset.”

“So you’ve forgotten what it’s like to find sand in your bed,” Paul said. He pulled a shield belt from the table, buckled it fast around his waist. “Then, let’s fight!”

Halleck’s eyes went wide in mock surprise. “So! It was your wicked hand did that deed! Guard yourself today, young master—guard yourself.” He grabbed up a rapier, laced the air with it. “I’m a hellfiend out for revenge!”

Paul lifted the companion rapier, bent it in his hands, stood in the aguile , one foot forward. He let his manner go solemn in a comic imitation of Dr. Yueh.

“What a dolt my father sends me for weaponry,” Paul intoned. “This doltish Gurney Halleck has forgotten the first lesson for a fighting man armed and shielded.” Paul snapped the force button at his waist, felt the crinkled-skin tingling of the defensive field at his forehead and down his back, heard external sounds take on characteristic shield-filtered flatness. “In shield fighting, one moves fast on defense, slow on attack,” Paul said. “Attack has the sole purpose of tricking the opponent into a misstep, setting him up for the attack sinister. The shield turns the fast blow, admits the slow kindjal!” Paul snapped up the rapier, feinted fast and whipped it back for a slow thrust timed to enter a shield’s mindless defenses.

Halleck watched the action, turned at the last minute to let the blunted blade pass his chest. “Speed, excellent,” he said. “But you were wide open for an underhanded counter with a slip-tip.”

Paul stepped back, chagrined.

“I should whap your backside for such carelessness,” Halleck said. He lifted a naked kindjal from the table and held it up. “This in the hand of an enemy can let out your life’s blood! You’re an apt pupil, none better, but I’ve warned you that not even in play do you let a man inside your guard with death in his hand.”

“I guess I’m not in the mood for it today,” Paul said.

“Mood?” Halleck’s voice betrayed his outrage even through the shield’s filtering. “What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for fighting.”

“I’m sorry, Gurney.”

“You’re not sorry enough!”

Halleck activated his own shield, crouched with kindjal outthrust in left hand, the rapier poised high in his right. “Now I say guard yourself for true!” He leaped high to one side, then forward, pressing a furious attack.

Paul fell back, parrying. He felt the field crackling as shield edges touched and repelled each other, sensed the electric tingling of the contact along his skin. What’s gotten into Gurney? he asked himself. He’s not faking this! Paul moved his left hand, dropped his bodkin into his palm from its wrist sheath.

“You see a need for an extra blade, eh?” Halleck grunted.

Is this betrayal? Paul wondered. Surely not Gurney!

Around the room they fought—thrust and parry, feint and counter-feint. The air within their shield bubbles grew stale from the demands on it that the slow interchange along barrier edges could not replenish. With each new shield contact, the smell of ozone grew stronger.

Paul continued to back, but now he directed his retreat toward the exercise table. If I can turn him beside the table, I’ll show him a trick , Paul thought. One more step, Gurney.

Halleck took the step.

Paul directed a parry downward, turned, saw Halleck’s rapier catch against the table’s edge. Paul flung himself aside, thrust high with rapier and came in across Halleck’s neckline with the bodkin. He stopped the blade an inch from the jugular.

“Is this what you seek?” Paul whispered.

“Look down, lad,” Gurney panted.

Paul obeyed, saw Halleck’s kindjal thrust under the table’s edge, the tip almost touching Paul’s groin.

“We’d have joined each other in death,” Halleck said. “But I’ll admit you fought some better when pressed to it. You seemed to get the mood. ” And he grinned wolfishly, the inkvine scar rippling along his jaw.

“The way you came at me,” Paul said. “Would you really have drawn my blood?”

Halleck withdrew the kindjal, straightened. “If you’d fought one whit beneath your abilities, I’d have scratched you a good one, a scar you’d remember. I’ll not have my favorite pupil fall to the first Harkonnen tramp who happens along.”

Paul deactivated his shield, leaned on the table to catch his breath. “I deserved that, Gurney. But it would’ve angered my father if you’d hurt me. I’ll not have you punished for my failing.”

“As to that,” Halleck said, “it was my failing, too. And you needn’t worry about a training scar or two. You’re lucky you have so few. As to your father—the Duke’d punish me only if I failed to make a first-class fighting man out of you. And I’d have been failing there if I hadn’t explained the fallacy in this mood thing you’ve suddenly developed.”

Paul straightened, slipped his bodkin back into its wrist sheath.

“It’s not exactly play we do here,” Halleck said.

Paul nodded. He felt a sense of wonder at the uncharacteristic seriousness in Halleck’s manner, the sobering intensity. He looked at the beet-colored inkvine scar on the man’s jaw, remembering the story of how it had been put there by Beast Rabban in a Harkonnen slave pit on Giedi Prime. And Paul felt a sudden shame that he had doubted Halleck even for an instant. It occurred to Paul, then, that the making of Halleck’s scar had been accompanied by pain—a pain as intense, perhaps, as that inflicted by a Reverend Mother. He thrust this thought aside; it chilled their world.

“I guess I did hope for some play today,” Paul said. “Things are so serious around here lately.”

Halleck turned away to hide his emotions. Something burned in his eyes. There was pain in him—like a blister, all that was left of some lost yesterday that Time had pruned off him.

How soon this child must assume his manhood , Halleck thought. How soon he must read that form within his mind, that contract of brutal caution, to enter the necessary fact on the necessary line: “Please list your next of kin.”

Halleck spoke without turning: “I sensed the play in you, lad, and I’d like nothing better than to join in it. But this no longer can be play. Tomorrow we go to Arrakis. Arrakis is real. The Harkonnens are real.”

Paul touched his forehead with his rapier blade held vertical.

Halleck turned, saw the salute and acknowledged it with a nod. He gestured to the practice dummy. “Now, we’ll work on your timing. Let me see you catch that thing sinister. I’ll control it from over here where I can have a full view of the action. And I warn you I’ll be trying new counters today. There’s a warning you’d not get from a real enemy.”

Paul stretched up on his toes to relieve his muscles. He felt solemn with the sudden realization that his life had become filled with swift changes. He crossed to the dummy, slapped the switch on its chest with his rapier tip and felt the defensive field forcing his blade away.

“En garde!” Halleck called, and the dummy pressed the attack.

Paul activated his shield, parried and countered.

Halleck watched as he manipulated the controls. His mind seemed to be in two parts: one alert to the needs of the training fight, and the other wandering in fly-buzz.

I’m the well-trained fruit tree , he thought. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me—all bearing for someone else to pick.

For some reason, he recalled his younger sister, her elfin face so clear in his mind. But she was dead now—in a pleasure house for Harkonnen troops. She had loved pansies...or was it daisies? He couldn’t remember. It bothered him that he couldn’t remember.

Paul countered a slow swing of the dummy, brought up his left hand entretisser .

The clever little devil! Halleck thought, intent now on Paul’s interweaving hand motions. He’s been practicing and studying on his own. That’s not Duncan style, and it’s certainly nothing I’ve taught him.

This thought only added to Halleck’s sadness. I’m infected by mood , he thought. And he began to wonder about Paul, if the boy ever listened fearfully to his pillow throbbing in the night.

“If wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets,” he murmured.

It was his mother’s expression and he always used it when he felt the blackness of tomorrow on him. Then he thought what an odd expression that was to be taking to a planet that had never known seas or fishes. bqZ3bvyRZG+w2TaSAhMIuFmxrwV0Xo8DEz8J3lUAUMg4uvt7yd47tUNOYna6puvQ