Dune

    "So I've heard, so I've heard," wheezed the old woman. "Yet he's already fifteen."

    "Yes, Your Reverence."

    "He's awake and listening to us," said the old woman. "Sly little rascal." She chuckled. "But royalty has need of slyness. And if he's really the Kwisatz Haderach ... well...."

    Within the shadows of his bed, Paul held his eyes open to mere slits. Two bird-bright ovals the eyes of the old woman seemed to expand and glow as they stared into his.

    "Sleep well, you sly little rascal," said the old woman. "Tomorrow you'll need all your faculties to meet my gom jabbar."

    And she was gone, pushing his mother out, closing the door with a solid thump.

    Paul lay awake wondering: What's a gom jabbar?

    In all the upset during this time of change, the old woman was the strangest thing he had seen.

    Your Reverence.

    And the way she called his mother Jessica like a common serving wench instead of what she was a Bene Gesserit Lady, a duke's concubine and mother of the ducal heir.

    Is a gom jabbar something of Arrakis I must know before we go there? he wondered.

    He mouthed her strange words: Gom jabbar ... Kwisatz Haderach.

    There had been so many things to learn. Arrakis would be a place so different from Caladan that Paul's mind whirled with the new knowledge. Arrakis Dune Desert Planet.

    Thufir Hawat, his father's Master of Assassins, had explained it: their mortal enemies, the Harkonnens, had been on Arrakis eighty years, holding the planet in quasi-fief under a CHOAM Company contract to mine the geriatric spice, melange. Now the Harkonnens were leaving to be replaced by the House of Atreides in fief-complete an apparent victory for the Duke Leto. Yet, Hawat had said, this appearance conta