BOOK ONE - CHAPTER ONE
 

A stare that is not met turns inward on itself. An expanding circular wave will rush back towards its point of origin if it happens to meet the sudden end of the water, and will interfere with the subsequent waves, either amplifying them or inhibiting their natural movement, but always causing changes.
-Bene Gesserit Coda-
 

Every time he would almost reach his goal, only to have the waters rise and swallow him, after which he would again find himself back where he had started. It almost seemed as if the water was sentient and was actively trying to keep him from leaving.

He awoke once more in the center of the darkness, as he had done countless times before. Nothing had changed. Beneath him he could feel fine-grained, red sand, while above black clouds raged, mixing in an eerie dark red flickering, swirling violently and flowing to his current left.

He let out a scream of frustration, a high-pitched sound that lasted several seconds. There was no echo. There never was an echo. There never were any sounds, except the ones he produced himself. The darkness around him absorbed everything - except for the ceiling of clouds appearing to stretch into infinity in all directions, the information his sensory organs processed never originated more than a few meters away. Still, he knew the water was always there, just beyond the reach of his senses. It usually kept its distance, but it was out there - waiting, watching him, ready to encircle him once more without warning.

His hope of once finding a way out of wherever he had spent longer than he could fathom was the only thing that still remained to supply him with a semblance of sanity. He was utterly alone, but once there had been others. Other beings - resembling him ... He could not recall - whom he could talk to, and who would talk to him. If he could just get beyond the walls of water, he would find them again, and he wouldn't be alone anymore.

Whatever hardship he might have had to face before, he knew loneliness must be one of the most cruel. Every intelligent being needed to continually balance between autonomy, which meant finding origin, cause and goal within oneself, and an unimpeded exchange of ideas and feelings with one's environment. The way these two tendencies even each other out forms the basis of one's interaction with the environment.

He had dim memories of the fact that a person is supposed to be entangled in a wide variety of social roles, to such an extent that he might display quite different personalities in different situations. However, each of these personalities would be defined from the Identity, a single constellation of thoughts, feelings, convictions and experiences, which might not agree with the social role played. He felt the Identity as a point mass just beyond his field of vision, in a way similar to the back of his head: eternally present but impossibly seen from the outside - he could only feel it was there.

He theorised that Identity and an idiosyncratic catalog of interlinked but distinctive personalities had to form the Self. In a normal interchange of information the personalities would usually change the fastest, being dependent on and in intense interaction with the outer world, forming somewhat of a buffer to the more stable Identity, which in turn would be modified by the changing personalities, but much more slowly. A sense of Self would be derived from both introspection - which could only take place by creating a virtual copy of oneself, simulating regarding the Self from the outside but in the process distorting the truth - and reflection in the attitudes of others towards one's actions.

He understood that this was where his current problem originated. However self-sufficient a mind could believe itself to be, it needed to have its own output reflected back to it, as well as a constant stream of new, outwardly generated ideas - this is how a person grows and learns. Apart from a severely limited environment of red sand and dark skies - unchanging, therefore trivial to his current needs -, he had lacked such input for longer than his recollection allowed him to measure. Nothing around him spoke to him, in whatever language one would care to define. Total silence, lack of significant change - loneliness.

No echoes. Nothing to keep the understanding of his Self coherent. Who am I?, he often silently asked himself, and every time the question became of a greater significance while the answer seemed farther away.

Sometimes brief flashes of new impressions entered his mind, but they would never last. Or were they memories, resurfacing after being submerged but quickly sinking again?

A bridge.

Something covering his mouth, making it impossible for him to breathe.

A face. Who was that? So beautiful...

A smile of understanding.

A dull thumping in the distance.

Running for hours on end.

Water engulfing him, invading his body.

Falling through the air.

A man, reflected again and again.

Death, his own as well as of others.

A cascade of such impressions besieged him now, the images and sensations flashing through his narrow consciousness, stimulating it to once again expand and soak up the newness like a sponge. He thought he saw the shadows around him retreating a bit, and this infused him with new hope. He rose, and started running.

As always happened whenever he walked a sufficient distance, he reached the water. He could see the intensely dark stream was still motionless at first, but small waves formed almost immediately, quickly increasing in size and aggressively moving in his direction as if guided by a predator's mind. The total lack of sound while this happened increased the sinister atmosphere.

He came to a halt and watched the wall formed by the water rise higher and bend over him, preparing to once again submerge him and send him back to where had spent the past eternity, when suddenly he heard a scream. The mass of water froze, still liquid but unmovingly hanging over him.

It was a shriek coming from far away, and it took a while to subside. He recognised the voice. It was his own.

Then the barrage of voices came.

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