Dreamer of Dune by Brian Herbert

Author:Brian Herbert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2002-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 25

Old Dreams, New Dreams

ON THE first Saturday in 1980 in the icy month of January, Jan and I delivered a case of Beaujolais Nouveau wine to Dad, having picked it up for him at a wine shop in Seattle.

At dinner that evening, Dad said that he and Mom had decided to buy a vacation cottage in Hawaii to winter there, on one of the small outer islands along the sixteen-hundred-mile chain. “Something simple on the water,” he said. “Bev can’t stand the cold here in the winter.”

My mother’s preference for warm weather had been mentioned before, especially since losing weight and the insulation of her fatty tissue. She kept saying she felt much better when the weather was warm. I was worried about the availability of medical services for her in remote regions, but said nothing of this since the subject of her health was so uncomfortable to me. And inside I felt a gnawing terror of a different nature, a feeling I’d experienced on occasion that forces were at work trying to make me fly, against my will. I hadn’t flown in more than ten years. Now it was a deep-seated fear ingrained in my psyche, and my parents were talking about living at least part of each year on a remote Pacific island. What if they decided to live there year-round?

I asked if all the islands had electricity so that Dad could operate his electric typewriter and the custom computer he was having built, or if he intended to go back to using a small manual typewriter. He wasn’t certain about the availability of electricity, but went on to talk about setting up solar panels and windmills to generate power, and maybe even a simple system of extracting hydrogen from sea water.

It didn’t sound very simple to me.

On Monday, January 14, 1980, Jan and I met my parents at Hugo’s Rotisserie, a fine Seattle restaurant in the Hyatt House Hotel near SeaTac Airport. Both of them looked elegant and manicured—Mom in a beautiful new green blouse (one of her best colors, according to a color consultant) and Dad with his salt-and-pepper beard freshly trimmed.

They were scheduled to fly to Hawaii the next morning to spend two weeks looking for property. Terrible storms had been ravaging the islands the past week, and Dad quipped, “This is always the best time to look at a piece of property—when it’s at its worst.”

He had selected a rather unusual title for the computer book he was writing with Max Barnard, an idea that was indicative of my father’s sense of humor: Without Me You’re Nothing. This was Frank Herbert’s philosophical comment about the secondary importance of the computer in relation to the human, and brought to mind the Butlerian Jihad of Dune that opposed computers and certain other thinking machines, under the commandment, “Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind.”

The Hawaii-bound travelers seemed a little nervous. At the salad bar, Dad was passing out plates to all of us in line, and I guess he lost count, because he tried to hand one to a stranger.

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