A Fremen's Joy, cont'd

Whatever image one has of God, is wrong, for God is beyond all conception; the finite and temporal consciousness can only conceive of the infinite and eternal consciousness in terms of error.  All human conceptions of God therefore share identity with the subconsciousness, and, therefore, with the mother image each human carries within from  his earliest lucid days.  Understanding God is an exercise in learned ignorance, of climbing metaphorical tier upon tier to become mentally more like Christ, more clear like his mind was clear, toward an ideal balance of consciousness and preconsciousness, and a minimum of subconsciousness.

 

I listen, O Lord.

 

Good.  But, one’s resultant conception of God, as if ever more accurate, is, in fact, ever more like a perfect display of subconsciousness, being a unification of mind beyond all divisions, our only memory of which is our subconsciousness as a blending, an overlap, of conscious and preconscious aspects of mind.  The closer we get to God, the closer we get to KTHLH, the insane Old One(s) lurking within, the absolute negation of goodness, beauty, truth – the absolute opposite of God.  We delve within deeply at our peril, for, in our imperfection we do not rise up into heaven but downwards into the depths of the mind ocean, down to unutterable pressures and unspeakable awfulness.

 

Save me, O Jesus!  I fear the depths!

 

“I am with you,” he might say.  I do not hear voices, but my apprehension of what he might say will suffice.

 

Thank you, Jesus.  I pray to serve you in strength; I pray my very weakness be useful.  I pray – I know not what to pray, my prayers become entangled in each other, full of contradictions and uncertainty, like seaweed lightly floating and plastering to the igneous rocks of the unmentionable city – HUSH!

 

Katrin shakes her head, knocking the almost-voice away out of her mind.  That was nothing good!

 

How do I know goodness is good?!

 

Twisting, beneath the sea!

 

She came out of the fugue with a shock, pulling at the vacuum of her noseplugs, mouth hanging loose.  She had momentarily forgotten to desert-breathe, trying to sietch-breathe instead, nose-in, mouth-out.  She felt like a retarded child with trainer-valves in her nose and mouth.

 

Thinking is like a vampire, she thought.  It sucks resources from everywhere in the mind, leading one astray.  She remembered the old rhyme her sietchmates used to taunt her with as a child:

 

Mentatty Kat-tie!

 

Gonna be a fat-tie!

 

Ate so much she bur-rst!

 

Always thinks the wor-rst!

 

Even though she could put any one of them’s teeth into his tonsils – but there were always more to deal with, and it was too much to bear to consider adopting a strategy of dedicating all her mental resources to calculating how to exact revenge on them all.  She turned to food to assuage the pain that distracted her from her thinking; rather bear shame than pain, and through that unsealed emotional door did she escape into her destiny as one worthy of her distant ancestors, the ones who broke free of their own age’s degeneracy so long ago on long-lost Terra.  For if they did not, whence cometh the drive to conquer Space?

 

Walking and breathing, two elementary pleasures she now reveled in.  It wasn’t orgasmic and it didn’t need to be.  Orgasmic release was exhausting, a trek up a rocky mountain.  Walking was a gentle soughing wind, a rocking rhythm of the hips, knees, heels, steady and assured, always novel yet always similar.  Breathing was a counterpoint, a refreshing and clearing of the lungs, a reassuring lovemaking with the stillsuit through the catchtubes.  She could walk and breathe all day and all night, and she’d not be tired.

 

What is the real me? She thought.  My parents, my sietchmates, they demand I mourn for the death of my grandmother.  They demand water for the living – not for the dead, which I would gladly give, but for the living, for their dirty pleasure of seeing me behave as they do!

 

What is the real me?  Under this mask of pale pinkish skin, there is the mask of Katrin, and under that, Horse, and under that…?

 

It’s masks all the way down, girly.

 

“Be real!  Be the real you!” they say, but I don’t know what that means.  Underneath it all is just a blank space.  The bowl is only useful because of the negative space that defines it, but shatter the bowl and where does the empty space go?

 

A childish conundrum.  The empty space remains, can you not see it?  If not, you could not see it to begin with, you saw only a bowl and what “empty space” it jealously claimed for itself.

 

There is nothing underneath the mask except my self-interest, my will, my talents, my capacity for emotion.

 

About a year ago, at menarche, she started practising her “real face” and “real voice,” by trying to drop all pretense, all emotionalism, all masks and simply “be” the “real her.”  Her face grew ashen dead and lines of concentration eased away from the plasticity of youthful skin.  Her voice deepened two notes, then raised one as she adjusted to not putting on a role, and her sietchmates – never friends, not even as a child, save adults – teased her as sounding like a Guild recording.  She pursued and listened to them as they arrived with the food shipments.  That insectile buzzing talk aroused her imagination.

 

“Good:  Frozen Fruit; Origin:  Giedi Prime”

 

She knew – pardon, she’d heard - of the nature of Giedi Prime.  They were slavers, torturers, murderers, they ruled Arrakis and hunted Fremen for sport from their grav-skiffs.  She refused the food, pretending it might be poisoned.  Her friends knew better, even in their apathy.  No Guild-marked shipment could be poisoned!  The Guild would destroy anyone, anyone at all, who interfered with their quality seals.  In the end, she came back to the table and sucked on the fruit and chewed the ice crystals imbedded in the yellow, green, and pale orange flesh.

 

Now she came into true Fremen country:  the open desert of endless humping dunes, arranged in their rows upon rows diagonal against the soft, sere wind.  She paused and pulled back her hood, ears perking with muscles few offworlders ever developed.

 

There was an ambient humming in the air.  She was long familiar with this but rarely was allowed out this far to hear it.  The music of the dunes, their sand-surfaces in synchrony to produce a hum.  Each dune had its own voice, its own hum.  She pulled open her fremkit and attempted to take out her spice sandwitch, only to find there was nothing but the wrapper.  She looked at her wine-stained fingers, pulled down her veil and picked her teeth with her tongue, finding a grain of spice there.  She picked it out with a fingernail and ground it between her fingertips.

 

I ate the entire thing already…I’ve been walking with enough spice in me to kill my entire sietch twice over.

 

A sturdy female voice moved from within:  The spice’s precise effects on the human metabolism remain undefined.

 

I fear!

 

A male voice, that of a kind teacher she had when six years old, moved then:  So are its precise effects on the mind.  Speak the Mentat’s Prayer if you want to live.

 

I fear!

 

Another male voice, a more comfortable one, like her own voice but deeper by one register, spoke then:

 

Speak it, you little fool!  And be true!

 

It is by Agape alone I set my self in motion, by the spice mélange the mind acquires truth, the eyes acquire blue, the blue becomes a warning:  it is by Agape alone I set my self in motion.

 

Now drink!, said Horse

 

Katrin drunk deeply, emptying her catchpockets.

 

Lights were opening within her, each with its own hum.  She staggered through the dunes, up one face to smush her elbow into the sand, cloak hanging half off of her.  She shrugged out of it in an artless motion a martial arts master might’ve took pleasure in seeing but which in a Fremen teacher would always find something to criticise, lest he disappoint his student.  She came to the top and stood looking without seeing as the humming upon humming upon humming filled her mind’s ear, the humming sounding more like a babbling now, liquid, alive.

 

This is the sea of voices within!  They all want to become me!

 

Every dune, every face, every wash, every rill, every grain – said Horse

 

There is too much!

 

You took too much, said Horse

 

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

 

Ahead I see another wretch

 

Crouched back against an ugly store’s wall

 

I see the eyes, the skin – racial kin…

 

He wears a long-sleeved pullover, hooded

 

He cradles one of their white bags

 

Ugly plastic fruit of this Pro-Future industrial hole

 

Within, is an – alcoholic beverage?

 

No…fruit juice, and a plastic pack of nuts

 

I pause, right hand on hip, left hand free, looking down

 

He looks up

 

“How are you?” I say

 

“I’m good.  Someone gave me some stuff,” he replies

 

“You look rough,” I say

 

“You know, no one ever told me that before?  Everyone tells me I look like shit.  You’re the first person to ever tell me that.”

 

I crouch, and lightly clap a hand to his shoulder

 

“Count your pennies.  Take care of yourself,” I say

 

“I will” he agrees

 

I walk on

 

Asphalt walking’s an easy rhythm, but seductive

 

I move my hips, postured at alert

 

I prefer the shift of the sands

 

But, I’ll get the hang of it, in time

 

The Harkonnen patrol picked her up at midday.  She was sandblind for lack of undereye lampblack.  There were under orders to bring some Fremen “alive and unspoiled” back to Piter De Vries for his examination.  He had made the journey to Arrakis especially to survey how “the native issue” was being handled.  The guards took their vicarious pleasure in imagining what that twisted Mentat had in mind, knowing full well he was far more imaginative than they were.

 

SINE DIE