And he thought: I’m a seed.
He suddenly saw how fertile was the ground into which he had fallen, and with this realization, the terrible purpose filled him, creeping through the empty place within, threatening to choke him with grief.
He had seen two main branchings along the way ahead – in one he confronted an evil old Baron and said: ‘Hello, Grandfather.’ The thought of that path and what lay along it sickened him.
The other path held long patches of gray obscurity except for peaks of violence. He had seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the universe with the Atreides green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic legions drunk on spice liquor. Gurney Halleck and a few others of his father’s men – a pitiful few – were among them, all marked by the hawk symbol from the shrine of his father’s skull.
‘I can’t go that way,’ he muttered. ‘That’s what the old witches of your schools really want.’
‘I don’t understand you, Paul,’ his mother said.
He remained silent, thinking like the seed he was, thinking with the race consciousness he had first experienced as terrible purpose. He found that he no longer could hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor or even the Harkonnens. They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way for this – the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad.
Surely I cannot choose that way, he thought.
But he saw again in his mind’s eye the shrine of his father’s skull and the violence with the green and black banner waving in its midst.
