"The past is never dead. It's not even past." – William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
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This she has known since the womb: humans have always defined madness as the hearing of voices that others cannot, the seeing of things that are not there—and possession as the inability to ignore them.
By definition, she has always been mad, always been possessed: abomination is multitude.
My name is Legion: for we are many.
It's the inheritance of her mother's Bene Gesserit training which enables her to keep the voices at bay (the irony isn't lost on her: all the Atreides have a great sense of irony: ask Paul, ask Leto, ask Gurney, ask Duncan. Ask Duncan.), but the spice reveals the natural state of things (sandblasting away the flimsy walls human reason tries in vain to erect).
She wonders what it's like to be alone.
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She has a recurring dream (fantasy) of taking up her brother's crysknife and slicing open her temples: spilling bloodwater on the sand. She wonders if the memories will gush out, too, if the sand will suck them up and turn them into spice (the most precious thing in the universe).
They will call her St. Alia-of-the-Knife.
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All she knows is the past.
There was never a time before, no shadowy pre-anything-place where she can hide, shaded from the unrelenting backwards-perpetuity of lives stretching forever in one direction, like mirrors reflecting each other for eternity.
She wonders if there will ever be a time when it's possible to forget.
She wishes for petty human monotonies: for food and sex and sleep and jokes and silence (she's never known silence, wonders what the lack is like—she is lacking in nothing, and it is the lack of lack which makes her Alia). She wishes for sandstorms, the hoarding of water and the passage of the worm (unlike her brother, Arrakis is her homeworld. But this is the task left to her by her brother's legacy: ridding his adopted-home of its desert, one drop of water after another).
She wishes for—
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Fear is the mind-killer.
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A game she played as a child, become deadly serious with each new voice that swarms up out of the abyss: sorting memories.
This belongs to Jessica, this to Gaius Helen, this to a girl called Ana on humanity's true homeworld who only lived to be fifteen and died in childbirth, and oh, look, there is the Baron Harkonnen, laughinglaughinglaughing.
(shut up shut up SHUT UP)
The game will never end (she, of all people, understands the value of an open-ended system), and for this she is glad.
(if she ever came to the end, would there be anything left that belongs to Alia alone?)
(There is no victor in this game.)
She wonders what color her eyes are under the spice-veil.
--
You are what you are, the othersselves say. There are compensations.
Compensations!
--
She sees him in the future. The glimpses she catches, flashes here and there (like the blaze of a scarlet bird behind emerald leaves in the wet-planet conservatory her motherself discovered upon their arrival on Arrakis, like a glimpse of the safe haven of the sietch through the whipping winds of sand), are vivid but brief, and they slip away too quickly (like sand, like water, and what's the difference, really? She has known both and sees no difference. One or the other will drownsmother her in the end), leaving her bereft, as though he's abandoned her (racing away from her on the back of a great worm towards a future she will never see), though every night he holds her close (if she presses near enough, skin against skin, perhaps she can leave behind her fleshmemory, sink into his—abandonescape the multitude: two alone in one bodyvessel would not be too many).
He will live forever forwards, as she does backwards, and she's not certain if there's every truly been a present in which they can touch.
When he returns (a face her own eyes have never seen, but that is as familiar as her own in the mirror) his past is blank, tabula rasa, and she burns with envy even as she coaxes forth one persistent memory and then another (her memories have taught her well the art of torture).
Then his memories come screaming forward, like the onslaught of the worm or inexorable ocean tide, and pity and malicious glee battle within her as she watches him try to assimilate them (he is weaker than she is: he receives memories that have only ever belonged to him alone, and he is almost crushed by them). He is evidence, as solid and logical as any mentat could wish, that flesh (always) remembers, that the memories can never be scrubbed away, that they march on, pitiless as the sea, as the desert, as logic itself (that the past is never gone).
(If the past disappears, does she disappear, too?).
One day, she wants to be alone with him. Just Alia, just Duncan. But she can't help but wonder: take away her past, his future, and is there anything left?
--
Spice flows in her veins instead of blood, and her water will be an overdue gift to the desert.
--
Spice smells like cinnamon and tastes like the slash of a knife. Sometimes, in the heartbeatthumper-drum between placing it on her tongue and its dissolution, she wishes someone would stop her.
Who would do so? Alia doesn't have friends. She doesn't have companions or confidants. She has enemies and advisors. She has family, and Duncan. She has memories.
Duncan tries. But he loves her too much. He could never be harsh with her (never be as harsh as she is—Harkonnen blood runs in her veins, and sometimes she believes it counts for more than the Atreides name ever could), Swordmaster of the Ginaz or no.
(It is in those moments that she most misses her brother).
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Alia, the books read: Huntress of a Billion Worlds.
How little they know.
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Some days, she yearns to follow her brother into the desert, into the oblivion of sand and the mighty danger of the worm. She would walk in the wormtrack, in the path of shai-hulud, Old Father Eternity, and leave no footprints behind. She tells herself that Paul(Muad'DibUsulKwitsatzHaderach) is the only one who ever understood her.
The greatest man in history.
Other days she hates him with an intensity that sets the voices quivering, the memories undulating, serpentine like heat waves creating a mirage (water is poison to the worm, and blood is mostly water). His own legend was too much for him, so he left it to her (to Leto, to Ghanima), and now it will destroy her, squeezing the life (bloodwater) out her (distilling her into nothingness).
Destiny is cruel, freewill nonexistent. Only the worms are free.
--
She clings to Duncan with a jealousy, a possessiveness she loathes herself for, but when he tries to hold onto her, she grows bitter and vindictive (like she's watching herself from the abyss along with all the othersselves and can do nothing to stop herself).
She thinks she should send him away, for his own (sanity's) sake, but she needs him too much (to be her husband, to be her whipping-boy, to be her lover, her slave, her martyr, her warrior, her self when she has no idea who that is).
And there are moments when she brushes close to human tenderness, when she can almost be what he deserves.
Masochism is too pale a word to describe what he endures.
They will no have children (she could never doom them to the press of memories, the babble of ancestors, which she is certain must whisper still in the consciousness of even the most unaware. This is humanity), and she loveshateswillneverforgive her own mother (the histories will say that Alia was all cruelty, but even she has never been cruel enough to do create innocence only to destroy it).
It is only mortals who need children (to live in their place, to carry on and go forward where they cannot), and they have passed that limitation that long ago (her legend, his rebirths: infinity).
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History is written on the sands of—
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Alia is
memorybloodsandwaterknifememoryspice.
(She is the product of Arrakis as much as her brother ever was.)
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One day she will walk where men leave no footprints.
(desert:legend).
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For now, she is(they are).