Children of Dune
Frank Herbert, 1976
Farad'n complied, but he felt foolish. These were his own hands. He knew them.
"Imagine your hands aging," Jessica said. "They must grow very old in your eyes. Very, very old. Notice how dry the skin . . ."
"My hands don't change," he said. He already could feel the muscles of his upper arms trembling.
"Continue to stare at your hands. Make them old, as old as you can imagine. It may take time. But when you see them age, reverse the process. Make your hands young again -- as young as you can make them. Strive to take them from infancy to great age at will, back and forth, back and forth."
"They don't change!" he protested. His shoulders ached.
"If you demand it of your senses, your hands will change," she said. "Concentrate upon visualizing the flow of time which you desire: infancy to age, age to infancy. It may take you hours, days, months. But it can be achieved. Reversing that change-flow will teach you to see every system as something spinning in relative stability . . . only relative."
Puberty came like a flash flood, springing upon her body without warning and sweeping away the innocence of her childhood, of pink ponies and doll houses and dress-up.
She grew a foot in a week, it seemed, and suddenly her clothes no longer fit, her jeans straining to stretch over alien hips.
She sprouted breasts, small and perky, while her classmates grew and grew into their full curves, their necklines plunging to tease boys whose testicles had not yet dropped and who had only just begun to realize that maybe they did want girls' cooties. The boys didn't look at her. ...
Her growth had been lopsided, giving her hips like an ancient fertility goddess and breasts like rolling hills.
Their penises woke, stirred for the first time, for the deep crevice of cleavage. She pushed her way through the world with a book clenched to her chest and hips that would...
Stace and Teeart
The beautiful lady answered with a single word.
Watch.
And Simone did as she was told. She saw the woman's belly swell. Like a balloon it grew bigger and bigger until, in the blink of Simone's eyes-she suddenly disappeared. In her place, on the wide, wooden seat, lay a baby, red-faced and bald and covered with the waxy-white coating of a newborn. It opened its mouth and its cry seemed to shake the very ground Simone was standing on.
Before she could think what to do to help the pitiful thing, it began to grow. Soon it was a dark-haired toddler and then a little girl and finally, a young woman, smiling down at her. This woman looked much like the first, but with subtle changes. Her eyes were not as vivid a green, her hair was no longer curly but straight. Soon, her belly began to swell too and Simone saw how, this time, in flash of light, she was replaced with another caterwauling babe.
This one, Simone soon realized, was a male child. His eyes were green like his mother's but his hair was a bright red.
Freckles appeared across his nose and then faded as he too grew older and was again replaced with another child. On and on it went. Each transformation happening in a split second, but in that second, Simone saw all that she was supposed to see and she remembered, from one generation to the next, the small nuances that each child had inherited from its mother, father, grandparent.
She was wearing a very tight black dress which barely covered the tops of her thighs.
The dress, obviously several sizes too small for her, bulged ominously across her bust and hips, the material so stretched the tanned skin underneath was visible. It was also obvious by the way the stretch material clung to her that she had nothing on underneath. On her feet were pink rubber flip-flops which were also much too small for her.
"It's all she had that would fit me."
She had been hiding from Paige's family the entire time, darting naked from room to room, hiding under beds and in closets, anywhere in the large house to keep from being found in such humiliating circumstances. The dress, small as it was, was the only item in the young teen's closet which she could squeeze into.
A voice makes him turn his head around, and it's the little girl dressed in red from his childhood years. He recognises her instantly, and much to her surprise, he picks her up and hugs her tightly.
To his surprise, when he opens his eyes, he finds out he's holding a girl in her teenaged years...
The girl smiles, and reveals that she can change her body's age into whatever age she wants. He is amazed, and watches as the girl reverts back to being a 5-year-old, 10-year-old, then 16.
She was a little girl again. They enjoyed the perfect summer afternoon.
Her child's legs were thin and as wobbly as a newborn colt, as she made her way up the ladder.
A sudden, chilly breeze washed over her tiny frame, causing the leaves to rustle above her, flowing underneath her yellow dress, so that she felt the shocking realization of her own nudity. She wore nothing underneath!
A hand tentatively touched her thigh, just above the knee, and she shuddered, her body suddenly limp and immobile. His touch was so gentle and calm.
"Are you alright, Michelle?"
It was Dustin's voice from below, concerned but nothing more.
She looked down. Her legs had grown longer and fuller, from beneath the ruffled, sunflower pleated dress. She was as in the present, in a developing woman's body, and her brother was beneath her, a full grown man, only they were still beneath the old apple tree, as they had been as children.
"Yes, I'm fine." she said, though her voice was small and shaky.
previous - next - home