"Frank Herbert - Dune 1 - Dune (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

of a planet called Usul."
"Is there more to this dream?" Jessica prompted.
"Yes. But maybe she was calling me Usul," Paul said. "I just thought of that." Again, he
closed his eyes. "She asks me to tell her about the waters. And I take her hand. And I say I'll
tell her a poem. And I tell her the poem, but I have to explain some of the words -- like beach
and surf and seaweed and seagulls."
"What poem?" the Reverend Mother asked.
Paul opened his eyes. "It's just one of Gurney Halleck's tone poems for sad times."
Behind Paul Jessica began to recite:

"I remember salt smoke from a beach fire
And shadows under the pines --
Solid, clean . . . fixed --
Seagulls perched at the tip of land,
White upon green . . .
And a wind comes through the pines
To sway the shadows;
The seagulls spread their wings,
Lift
And fill the sky with screeches.
And I hear the wind
Blowing across our beach,
And the surf,
And I see that our fire
Has scorched the seaweed."

"That's the one," Paul said.
The old woman stared at Paul, then: "Young man, as a Proctor of the Bene Gesserit, I seek the
Kwisatz Haderach, the male who truly can become one of us. Your mother sees this possibility in
you, but she sees with the eyes of a mother. Possibility I see, too, but no more."
She fell silent and Paul saw that she wanted him to speak. He waited her out.
Presently, she said: "As you will, then. You've depths in you; that I'll grant."
"May I go now?" he asked.
"Don't you want to hear what the Reverend Mother can tell you about the Kwisatz Haderach?"
Jessica asked.
"She said those who tried for it died."
"But I can help you with a few hints at why they failed," the Reverend Mother said.
She talks of hints, Paul thought. She doesn't really know anything. And he said: "Hint then."
"And be damned to me?" She smiled wryly, a crisscross of wrinkles in the old face. "Very well:
'That which submits rules.' "
He felt astonishment: she was talking about such elementary things as tension within meaning.
Did she think his mother had taught him nothing at all?
"That's a hint?" he asked.
"We're not here to bandy words or quibble over their meaning," the old woman said. "The willow
submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows -- a wall against the wind. This
is the willow's purpose."
Paul stared at her. She said purpose and he felt the word buffet him, reinfecting him with
terrible purpose. He experienced a sudden anger at her: fatuous old witch with her mouth full of
platitudes.
"You think I could be this Kwisatz Haderach," he said. "You talk about me, but you haven't