text:
my Sisters at the Chapter House?
"Everyone will know in time," Hwi said. "This is not the time. I tell you because it helps impress upon you the gravity of the Lord Leto's trust."
"His trust in you?"
"In both of us."
This had sent a barely concealed, shuddering thrill through Anteac. The power inherent in such trust!
"Do you know why Ix chose you as Ambassador?" Anteac asked.
"Yes. They intended me to beguile him."
"You appear to have succeeded. Does this mean that the lxians believe those Tleilaxu stories about the Lord Leto's gross habits?"
"Even the Tleilaxu don't believe them."
"I take it that you confirm the falsehood of such stories?"
Hwi had spoken in an odd flatness which even Anteac's truthsense and abilities as a Mentat found hard to decipher.
"You have talked to him and observed him. Answer that question for yourself."
Anteac put down a small surge of irritation. Despite her youth, this Hwi was not an acolyte... and would never make a good Bene Gesserit. Such a pity!
"Have you reported this to your government on Ix?" Anteac asked.
"No." .Why?"
"They will learn soon enough. Premature revelation could harm the Lord Leto."
She is truthful, Anteac reminded herself.
"Isn't your first loyalty to Ix?" Anteac asked.
"Truth is my first loyalty." She smiled then. "Ix contrived better than it thought."
"Does Ix think of you as a threat to the God Emperor?"
"I think their primary concern is knowledge. I discussed this with Ampre before leaving."
"The Director of Ix's Outfederation Affairs? That Ampre?"
"Yes. Ampre is convinced that the Lord Leto permits threats to his person only up to certain limits."
"Ampre said that?"
"Ampre does not believe the future can be hidden from the Lord Leto. "
"But my mission to Ix has about it the suggestion that..." Anteac broke off and shook her head, then: "Why does Ix provide the Lord with machines and weapons?"
"Ampre believes that Ix has no choice. Overwhelming force destroys people who pose too great a threat."
"And if Ix refused, that would pass the Lord Leto's limits. No middle point. Have you thought about the consequences of wedding the Lord Leto?"
"You mean the doubts such an act will raise about his godhead?"
"Some will believe the Tleilaxu stories."
Hwi only smiled.
Damnation! Anteac thought. How did we lose this girl?
"He is changing the design of his religion," Anteac accused. "That's it, of course."
"Do not make the mistake of judging all others by yourselves," Hwi said. And, as Anteac started to bridle, Hwi added: "But I did not come here to argue with you about the Lord."
"No. Of course not."
"The Lord Leto has commanded me," Hwi said, "to tell you every detail in my memory about the place where I was born and raised."
As she reflected on Hwi's words, Anteac stared down at the cryptic square of black in her lap. Hwi had proceeded to recount the details which her Lord (and now bridegroom!) had commanded, details which would have been boring at times were it not for Anteac's Mentat abilities at data absorption.
Anteac shook her head as she considered what must be reported to her Sisters at the Chapter House. They already would be studying the import of her previous message. A machine which could shield itself and contents from the penetrating prescience of even the God Emperor? Was that possible? Or was this a different kind of test, a test of Bene Gesserit candor with their Lord Leto? But now! If he did not already know the genesis of this enigmatic Hwi Noree...
This new development reinforced Anteac's Mentat summation of why she had been chosen for the mission to Ix. The God Emperor did not trust this knowledge to his Fish Speakers. He did not want Fish Speakers suspecting a weakness in their Lord!
Or was that as obvious as it appeared? Wheels within wheels-that was the way of the Lord Leto.
Again, Anteac shook her head. She bent then and resumed her account for the Chapter House, leaving out the revelation that the God Emperor had chosen a bride.
They would learn it soon enough. Meanwhile, Anteac herself would consider the implications. -= If you know all of your ancestors, you were a personal witness to the events which created the myths and religions of our past. Recognizing this, you must think of me as a myth-maker.
- The Stolen Journals THE FIRST explosion came just as darkness enfolded the City of Onn. The blast caught a few venturesome revelers outside the Ixian Embassy, passing on their way to a party where (it was promised) Face Dancers would perform an ancient drama about a king who slew his children. After the violent events of the first four Festival Days, it had taken some courage for the revelers to emerge from the relative safety of their quarters. Stories of death and injury to innocent bystanders circulated all through the City-and here it was again-more fuel for the cautious.
None of the victims and survivors would have appreciated Leto's observation that innocent bystanders were in relatively short supply.
Leto's acute senses detected the explosion and located it. With an instant fury which he was later to regret, he shouted for his Fish Speakers and commanded them to "wipe out the Face Dancers," even the ones he had spared earlier.
On immediate reflection, the sensation of-fury itself fascinated Leto. It had been so long since he had felt even mild anger. Frustration, irritation-these had been his limits. But now, at a threat to Hwi Noree, fury!
Reflection caused him to modify his initial command, but not before some Fish Speakers had raced from the Royal Presence, their most violent desires released by what they had seen in their Lord.
"God is furious!" some of them shouted.
The second blast caught some of the Fish Speakers emerging into the plaza, limiting the spread of Leto's modified command and igniting more violence. The third explosion, located near the first one, sent Leto himself into action. He propelled his cart like a berserk juggernaut out of his resting chamber into the Ixian lift and surged to the surface.
Leto emerged at the edge of the plaza to find a scene of chaos lighted by thousands of free-floating glowglobes released by his Fish Speakers. The central stage of the plaza had been shattered, leaving only the plasteel base intact beneath the paved surface. Broken pieces of masonry lay all around, mixed with dead and wounded.
In the direction of the Ixian Embassy, directly across the plaza from him, there was a wild surging of combat.
"Where is my Duncan?" Leto bellowed.
A guard bashar came racing across the plaza to his side where she reported through panting breaths: "We have taken him to the Citadel, Lord!"
"What is happening over there?" Leto demanded, pointing at the battle outside the Ixian Embassy.
"The rebels and the Tleilaxu are attacking the Ixian Embassy, Lord. They have explosives."
Even as she spoke, another blast erupted in front of the Embassy's shattered facade. He saw bodies twisting in the air, arching outward and falling at the perimeter of a bright flash which left an orange afterimage, studded with black dots.
With no thought of consequences, Leto shifted his cart onto suspensors and sent it bulleting across the plaza-a hurtling behemoth which sucked glowglobes into its wake. At the battle's edge, he arched over his own defenders and plunged into the attackers' flank, aware only then of lasguns which sent livid blue arcs leaping toward him. He felt his cart thudding into flesh, scattering bodies all around.
The cart spilled him directly in front of the Embassy, rolling him off onto a hard surface as it struck the rubble there. He felt lasgun beams tickle his ribbed body, then the inner surge of heat followed by a venting belch of oxygen at his tail. Instinct tucked his face deep into its cowl and folded his arms into the protective depths of his front segment. The worm-body took over, arching and flailing, rolling like an insane wheel, lashing out on all sides.
Blood lubricated the street. Blood was buffered water to his body, but death released the water. His flailing body slipped and slithered in it, the water igniting blue smoke from every flexion place where it slipped through the sandtrout skin. This filled him with water-agony which ignited more violence in the great flailing body.
At Leto's first lashing out, the Fish Speaker perimeter fell back. An alert bashar saw the opportunity now presented. She shouted above the battle noise:
"Pick off the stragglers!"
The ranks of guardian women rushed forward.
It was bloody play among the Fish Speakers for a few minutes, blades thrusting in the merciless light of the glowglobes, the dancing of lasgun arcs, even hands chopping and toes digging into vulnerable flesh. The Fish Speakers left no survivors.
Leto rolled beyond the Bloody mush in front of the Embassy, barely able to think through the waves of water-agony. The air was heavy with oxygen all around him and this helped his human senses. He summoned his cart and it drifted toward him, tipping perilously on damaged suspensors. Slowly, he wriggled onto the tipping cart and gave it the mental command to return to his quarters beneath the plaza.
Long ago, he had prepared himself against water-damage room where blasts of superheated dry air would cleanse and restore him. Sand would serve but there was no place in t e confines of Onn for the necessary expanse of sand in which he might heat and rasp his surface to its normal purity.
In the lift, he thought of Hwi and sent a message to have her brought down to him immediately.
If she survived.
He had no time now to make a prescient search; he could only hope while his body, both pre-worm and human, longed for the cleansing heat.
Once into the cleansing room, he thought to reaffirm his modified command= "Save some of the Face Dancers!" But by then the maddened Fish Speakers were spreading out through the City and he had not the strength to make a prescient sweep which would send his messengers to the proper meeting points.
A Guard captain brought him word as he was emerging from the cleansing room that Hwi Noree, although slightly wounded, was safe and would be brought to him as soon as the local commander thought it prudent.
Leto promoted the Guard captain to sub-bashar on the spot.
She was a heavyset Nayla-type but without Nayla's square face-features more rounded and closer to the older norms. She trembled in the warmth of her Lord's approval and, when he told her to return and "make doubly certain" no more harm came to Hwi, she whirled and dashed from his presence. didn't even ask her name, Leto thought, as he rolled himself onto the new cart in the depression of his small audience room. It took a few moments of reflection to recall the new sub-bashar's name-Kieuemo. The promotion would have to be reaffirmed. He lodged a mental reminder to do this personally. The Fish Speakers, all of them, would have to learn immediately how much he valued Hwi Noree. Not that there could be much doubt after tonight.
He made his prescient scan then and dispatched messengers to his rampaging Fish Speakers. By then the damage had been done-corpses all over Onn, some Face Dancers and some only-suspected Face Dancers.
And many have seen me kill, he thought.
While he waited for Hwi's arrival, he reviewed what had just happened. This had not been a typical Tleilaxu attack, but the previous attack on the road to Onn fitted into a new pattern, all of it pointing at a single mind with lethal purpose.
I could have died out there, he thought.
That began to explain why he had not anticipated this attack, but there was a deeper reason. Leto could see that reason rising into his awareness, a summation of all the clues. What human knew the God Emperor best? What human possessed a secret place from which to conspire?
Malky!
Leto summoned a guard and told her to ask if the Reverend Mother Anteac had yet left Arrakis. The guard returned in a moment to report.
"Anteac is still in her quarters. The Commander of the Fish Speaker Guard there says they have not come under attack."
"Send word to Anteac," Leto said. "Ask if she now understands why I put her delegation in quarters at a distance from me? Then tell her that while she is on Ix she must locate Malky. She is to report that location to our local garrison on Ix."
"Malky, the former Ixian Ambassador?"
"The same. He is not to remain alive and free. You will inform our garrison commander on Ix that she is to make close liaison with Anteac, providing every necessary assistance.
Malky is to be brought here to me or executed, whichever our commander finds necessary."
The guard-messenger nodded, shadows lurching across her features where she stood in the ring of light around Leto's face. She did not ask for a repetition of the orders. Each of his close guards had been trained as a human-recorder. They could repeat Leto's words exactly, even the intonations, and would never forget what they had heard him say.
When the messenger had gone, Leto sent a private signal of inquiry and, within seconds, had a response from Nayla. The Ixian device within his cart reproduced a non-identifiable version of her voice, a flatly metallic recital for his ears alone.
Yes, Siona was at the Citadel. No, Siona had not contacted her rebel companions. "No, she does not yet know that I am here observing her." The attack on the Embassy? That had been by a splinter group called "The Tleilaxu-Contact Element."
Leto allowed himself a mental sigh. Rebels always gave their groups such pretentious labels.
"Any survivors?" he asked.
"No known survivors."
Leto found it amusing that, while the metallic voice provided no emotional tones, his memory supplied them.
"You will make contact with Siona," he said. "Reveal that you are a Fish Speaker. Tell her you did not reveal this earlier because you knew she would not trust you and because you feared exposure since you are quite alone among Fish Speakers in your allegiance to Siona. Reaffirm your oath to her. Tell her that you swear by all that you hold holy to obey Siona in anything. If she commands it, you will do it. All of this is truth, as you well know."
"Yes, Lord."
Memory supplied the fanatic emphasis in Nayla's response. She would obey.
"If possible, provide opportunities for Siona and.Duncan Idaho to be alone together," he said.
"Yes, Lord."
Let propinquity take its usual course, he thought.
He broke contact with Nayla, thought for a moment, then sent for the commander of his plaza forces. The bashar arrived presently, her dark uniform stained and dusty, evidence of gore still on her boots. She was a tall, bone-thin woman with age lines which gave her aquiline features an air of powerful dignity. Leto recalled her troop-name, Iylyo, which meant "Dependable" in Old Fremen. He called her, however, by her matronymic, Nyshae, "Daughter of Shae," which set a tone of subtle intimacy for this meeting.
"Rest yourself on a cushion, Nyshae," he said. "You have been working hard."
"Thank you, Lord."
She sank onto the red cushion which Hwi had used. Leto noted the fatigue lines around Nyshae's mouth, but her eyes remained alert. She stared up at him, eager to hear his words.
"Matters are once more tranquil in my City." He made it not quite a question, leaving the interpretation to Nyshae.
"Tranquil but not good, Lord."
He glanced at the gore on her boots.
"The street in front of the Ixian Embassy?"
"It is being cleansed, Lord. Repairs already are under way."
"The plaza?"
"By morning, it will appear as it has always appeared."
Her gaze remained steady on his face. Both of them knew he had not yet reached the nubbin of this interview. But Leto now identified a thing lurking within Nyshae's expression.
Pride in her Lord!
For the first time, she had seen the God Emperor kill. The seeds of a terrible dependency had been planted. If disaster threatens, my Lord will come. That was how it appeared in her eyes. She would no longer act with complete independence, taking her power from the God Emperor and being personally responsible for the use of that power. There was something possessive in her expression. A terrible death machine waited in the wings, available at her summons.
Leto did not like what he saw, but the damage had been done. Any remedies would require slow and subtle pressures.
"Where did the attackers get lasguns?" he asked.
"From our own stores, Lord. The Arsenal Guard has been replaced."
Replaced. It was a euphemism with a certain nicety. Errant Fish Speakers were isolated and reserved until Leto found a problem which required Death Commandos. They would die gladly, of course, believing that thus they expiated their sin. And even the rumor that such berserkers had been dispatched could quiet a trouble spot.
"The arsenal was breached by explosives?" he asked. g "Stealth and explosives, Lord. The Arsenal Guard was careless."
"The source of the explosives?"
Some of Nyshae's fatigue was visible in her shrug.
Leto could only agree. He knew he could search out and identify those sources, but it would serve little purpose. Resourceful people could always find the ingredients for homemade explosives-common things such as sugar and bleaches, quite ordinary oils and innocent fertilizers, plastics and solvents and extracts from the dirt beneath a manure pile. The list was virtually endless, growing with each addition to human experience and knowledge. Even a society such as the one he had created, one which tried to limit the admixture of technology and new ideas, had no real hope of totally eliminating dangerously violent small weapons. The whole idea of controlling such things was chimera, a dangerous and distracting myth. The key was to limit the desire for violence. In that respect, this night had been a disaster.
So much new injustice, he thought.
As though she read his thought, Nyshae sighed.
Of course. Fish Speakers were trained from childhood to avoid injustice wherever possible.
"We must see to the survivors in the populace," he said. "See to it that their needs are met. They must be brought to the realization that the Tleilaxu were to blame."
Nyshae nodded. She had not reached bashar rank while remaining ignorant of the drill. By now, she believed it. Merely by hearing Leto say it, she believed in the Tleilaxu guilt. And there was a certain practicality in her understanding. She knew why they did not slay all of the Tleilaxu.
You do not eliminate every scapegoat.
"And we must provide a distraction," Leto said. "Luckily, there may be one ready at hand. I will send word to you after conferring with the Lady Hwi Noree."
"The Ixian Ambassador, Lord? Is she not implicated in..."
"She is entirely guiltless," he said.
He saw belief settle into Nyshae's features, a readymade plastic underlayment which could lock her jaw and glaze her eyes. Even Nyshae. He knew the reasons because he had created those reasons, but sometimes he felt a bit awed by his creation.
"I hear the Lady Hwi arriving in my anteroom," he said. "Send her in as you leave. And, Nyshae..."
She already was on her feet, but she stood expectantly silent.
"Tonight, I have elevated Kieuemo to sub-bashar," he said. "See that it is made official. As for yourself, I am pleased. Ask and you shall receive."
He saw the formula send a wave of pleasure through Nyshae, but she tempered it immediately, proving once more her worth to him.
"I shall test Kieuemo, Lord," she said. "If she suits, I may take a holiday. I have not seen my family on Salusa Secundus for many years."
"At a time of your own choosing," he said.
And he thought: Salusa Secundus. Of course!
That one reference to her origins reminded him of who she resembled: Harq at-Ada. She has Corrino blood. We are closer relatives than Ibad thought.
"My Lord is generous," she said.
She left him then, a new spring in her stride. He heard her voice in the anteroom: "Lady Hwi, our Lord will see you now."
Hwi entered, back-lighted and framed in the archway for a moment, hesitancy in her step until her eyes adjusted to the inner chamber. She came like a moth to the brightness around Leto's face, looking away only to seek along his shadowy length for signs of injury. He knew that no such sign was visible, but there were still aches and interior tremblings.
His eyes detected a slight limp, Hwi favoring her right leg, but a long gown of jade green concealed the injury. She stopped at the edge of the declivity which held his cart, looking directly into his eyes.
"They said you were wounded, Hwi. Are you in pain?"
"A cut on my leg below the knee, Lord. A small piece of masonry from the explosion. Your Fish Speakers treated it with a salve which removed the pain. Lord, I feared for you."
"And I feared for you, gentle Hwi."
"Except for that first explosion, I was not in danger, Lord. They rushed me into a room deep beneath the Embassy."
So she did not see my performance, he thought. I can be thankful for that.
"I sent for you to ask your forgiveness," he said.
She sank onto a golden cushion. "What is there to forgive, Lord? You are not the reason for..."
"I am being tested, Hwi."
"You?"
"There are those who wish to know the depths of my concern for the safety of Hwi Noree."
She pointed upward. "That... was because of me?"
"Because of us."
"Oh. But who..."
"You have agreed to wed me, Hwi, and I..." He raised a hand to silence her as she started to speak. "Anteac has told us what you revealed to her, but this did not originate with Anteac."
"Then who is.." - "The who is not important. It is important that you reconsider. I must give you this opportunity to change your mind."
She lowered her gaze.
How sweet her features are, he thought.
It was possible for him to create only in his imagination an entire human lifetime with Hwi. Enough examples lay in the welter of his memories upon which to build a fantasy of wedded life. It gathered nuances in his fancy-small details of mutual experience, a touch, a kiss, all of the sweet sharings upon which arose something of painful beauty. He ached with it, a pain far deeper than the physical reminders of his violence at the Embassy.
Hwi lifted her chin and looked into his eyes. He saw there a compassionate longing to help him.
"But how else may I serve you, Lord?"
He reminded himself that she was a primate, while he no longer was fully primate. The differences grew deeper by the minute.
The ache remained within him.
Hwi was an inescapable reality, something so basic that no word could ever fully express it. The ache within him was almost more than he could bear.
" love you, Hwi. I love you as a man loves a woman... but it cannot be. That will never be."
Tears flowed from her eyes. "Should I leave? Should I return to Ix?"
"They would only hurt you, trying to find out what went wrong with their plan."
She has seen my pain, he thought. She knows the futility and frustration. What will she do? She will not lie. She will not say she returns my love as a woman to a man. She recognizes the futility. And.she knows her own feelings for me compassion, awe, a questioning which ignores fear.
"Then I will stay," she said. "We will take such pleasure as we can from being together. I think it is best that we do this. If it means we should wed, so be it."
"Then I must share knowledge with you which I have shared with no other person," he said. "It will give you a power over me which..."
"Do not do this, Lord! What if someone forced me to...'"
"You will never again leave my household. My quarters here, the Citadel, the safe places of the Sareer-these will be your home."
"As you will."
How gentle and open her quiet acceptance, he thought.
The aching pulse within him had to be calmed. In itself, it was a danger to him and to the Golden Path.
Those clever Ixians!
Malky had seen how the all-powerful were forced to contend with a constant siren song-the will to self-delight.
Constant awareness of the power in your slightest whim.
Hwi took his silence to be uncertainty. "Will we wed, Lord?"
"Yes.'"
"Should anything be done about the Tleilaxu stories which..."
"Nothing."
She stared at him, remembering their earlier conversation.
The seeds of dissolution were being planted.
"It is my fear, Lord, that I will weaken you," she said.
"Then you must find ways to strengthen me."
"Can it strengthen you if we diminish belief in the God' Leto?"
He heard a hint of Malky in her voice, that measured weighing which had made him so revoltingly charming. We never completely escape tine teachers of our childhood.
"Your question begs the answer," he said. "Many will continue to worship according to my design. Others will believe the lies."
"Lord... would you ask me to lie for you?"
"Of course not. But I will ask you to remain silent when you might wish to speak."
"But if they revile..."
"You will not protest."
Once more, tears flowed down her cheeks. Leto longed to touch them, but they were water... painful water.
"It must be done this way," he said.
"Will you explain it to me, Lord?"
"When I am gone, they must call me Shaitan, the Emperor of Gehenna. The wheel must turn and turn and turn along the Golden Path."
"Lord, could the anger not be directed at me alone? I would not..."
"No! The lxians made you much more perfectly than they thought. I truly love you. I cannot help it."
"I do not wish to cause you pain!" The words were wrenched from her.
"What's done is done. Do not mourn it."
"Help me to understand."
"The hate which will blossom after I am gone, that, too, will fade into the inevitable past. A long time will pass. Then, on a far-distant day, my journals will be found."
"Journals?" She was shaken by the seeming shift of subject.
"My chronicle of my time. My arguments, the apologia. Copies exist and scattered fragments will survive, some in distorted form, but the original journals will wait and wait and wait. I have hidden them well."
"And when they are discovered?"
"People will learn that I was something quite different from what they supposed."
Her voice came in a trembling hush. "I already know what they will learn."
"Yes, my darling Hwi, I think you do."
"You are neither devil nor god, but something never seen before and never to be seen again because your presence removes the need."
She brushed tears from her cheeks.
"Hwi, do you realize how dangerous you are?"
Alarm showed in her expression, the tensing of her arms.
"You have the makings of a saint," he said. _"Do you understand how painful it can be to find a saint in the wrong place and the wrong time?"
She shook her head.
"People have to be prepared for saints," he said. "Otherwise, they simply become followers, supplicants, beggars and weakened sycophants forever in the shadow of the saint. People are destroyed by this because it nurtures only weakness."
After a moment of thought, she nodded, then: "Will there be saints when you are gone?"
"That's the purpose of my Golden Path."
"Moneo's daughter, Siona, will she..."
"For now she is only a rebel. As to sainthood, we will let her decide. Perhaps she will only do what she was bred to do."
"What is that, Lord?"
"Stop calling me Lord," he said. "We will be Worm and wife. Call me Leto if you wish. Lord interferes."
"Yes, L... Leto. But what is..."
"Siona was bred to rule. There is danger in such breeding. When you rule, you gain knowledge of power. This can lead into impetuous irresponsibility, into painful excesses and that can lead to the terrible destroyer-wild hedonism."
"Siona would..."
"All we know about Siona is that she can remain dedicated to a particular performance, to the pattern which fills her senses. She is necessarily an aristocrat, but aristocracy looks mostly to the past. That's a failure. You don't see much of any path unless you are Janus, looking simultaneously backward and forward."
"Janus? Oh, yes, the god with the two opposed faces." She wet her lips with her tongue. "Are you Janus, Leto?"
"I am Janus magnified a billion-fold. And I am also something less. I have been, for example, what my administrators admire most-the decision-maker whose every decision can be made to work."
"But if you fail them..."
"They will turn against me, yes."
"Will Siona replace you if..."
"Ahhh, what an enormous if! You observe that Siona threatens my person. However, she does not threaten the Golden Path. There is also the fact that my Fish Speakers have a certain attachment to the Duncan."
"Siona seems... so young."
"And I am her favorite poseur, the sham who holds power under false pretenses, never consulting the needs of his people."
"Could I not talk to her and..."
"No! You must never try to persuade Siona of anything. Promise me, Hwi."
"If you ask it, of course, but I..."
"All gods have this problem, Hwi. In the perception of deeper needs, I must often ignore immediate ones. Not addressing immediate needs is an offense to the young."
"Could you not reason with her and..."
"Never attempt to reason with people who know they are right!"
"But when you know they are wrong..."
"Do you believe in me?"
"Yes."
"And if someone tried to convince you that I am the greatest evil of all time..."
"I would become very angry. I would..." She broke off.
"Reason is valuable," he said, "only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe."
Her brows drew together in thought. It fascinated Leto to sense the arousal of her awareness. "Ahhh." She breathed the word.
"No reasoning creature will ever again be able to deny the Leto experience," he said. "I see your understanding begin. Beginnings! They are what life is all about!"
She nodded.
No arguments, he thought. When she sees the tracks, she follows them to find where they will lead.
"As long as there is life, every ending is a beginning," he said. "And I would save humankind, even from itself."
Again, she nodded. The tracks still led onward.
"This is why no death in the perpetuation of humankind can be a complete failure," he said. "This is why a birth touches us so deeply. This is why the most tragic death is the death of a youth."
"Does Ix still threaten your Golden Path? I've always known they conspired in something evil."
They conspire. Hwi does not hear the inner message of her own words. She has no need to hear it.
He stared at her, full of the marvel that was Hwi. She possessed a form of honesty which some would call naive, but which Leto recognized as merely non-self-conscious. The honesty was not her core, it was Hwi herself.
"Then I will arrange a performance in the plaza tomorrow," Leto said. "It will be a performance of the surviving Face Dancers. Afterward, our betrothal will be announced." -= Let there be no doubt that I am the assemblage of our ancestors, the arena in which they exercise my moments. They are my cells and I am their body. This is the favrashi of which I speak, the soul, the collective unconscious, the source of archetypes, the repository of all trauma and joy. I am the choice of their awakening. My samhadi is their samhadi. Their experiences are mine! Their knowledge distilled is mfr inheritance. Those billions are my one.
- The Stolen Journals THE FACE DANCER performance occupied almost two hours of the morning, and afterward came the announcement which sent shock waves through the Festival City.
"It has been centuries since he took a bride!"
"More than a thousand years, my dear."
The trooping of the Fish Speakers had been brief. They cheered him loudly, but they were disturbed.
"You are my only brides," he had said. Was that not the meaning of Siaynoq?
Leto thought the Face Dancers performed well despite their obvious terror. Garments had been found in the depths of a Fremen museum hooded black robes with white cord belts, spread-winged green hawks appliqued across the shoulders at the back-uniforms of Muad'Dib's itinerant priests. The Face Dancers had put on dark, seamed faces with these robes and performed a dance which told how Muad'Dib's legions had spread their religion through the Empire.
Hwi, wearing a brilliant silver dress with a green jade necklace, sat beside Leto on the Royal Cart throughout the ritual.
Once, she leaned close to his face and asked: "Is that not a parody?"
"To me, perhaps."
"Do the Face Dancers know?"
"They suspect."
"Then they are not as frightened as they appear."
"Oh, yes, they are frightened. It's just that they are braver than most people expect them to be."
"Bravery can be so foolish," she whispered.
"And vice-versa."
She had favored him with a measuring stare before returning her attention to the performance. Almost two hundred Face Dancers had survived unscathed. All of them had been pressed into the dance. The intricate weavings and posturings could fascinate the eye. It was possible to watch them and, for a time, forget the bloody preliminaries to this day.
Leto remembered this as he lay alone in his small reception room shortly before noon when Moneo arrived. Moneo had seen the Reverend Mother Anteac onto a Guild lighter, had conferred with the Fish Speaker Command about the previous night's violence, had made a quick flight to the Citadel and back to make sure Siona was under a secure watch and that she had not been implicated in the Embassy attack. He had returned to Onn just after the betrothal announcement, having had no previous warning.
Moneo was furious. Leto had never seen him this angry. He stormed into the room and stopped only two meters from Leto's face.
"Now the Tleilaxu lies will be believed!" he said.
Leto responded in a reasoned tone. "How persistent it is, this demand that our gods be perfect. The Greeks were much more reasonable about such things."
"Where is she?" Moneo demanded. "Where is this..."
"Hwi is resting. It was a difficult night and a long morning. I want her well rested when we return to the Citadel this evening."
"How did she work this?" Moneo demanded.
"Really, Moneo! Have you lost all sense of caution?"
"I am concerned about you! Have you any idea what they're saying in the City?"
"I'm fully aware of the stories."
"What are you doing?"
"You know, Moneo, I think that only the old pantheists had the right idea about deities: mortal foibles in immortal guise." Moneo raised both arms to the heavens. "I saw the looks on their faces!" He lowered his arms. "It'll be all over the Empire within two weeks."
"Surely it'll take longer than that."
"If your enemies needed one thing to bring them all together..."
"The defiling of the god is an ancient human tradition, Moneo. Why should I be an exception?"
Moneo tried to speak, found he could not utter a word. He stamped down along the edge of the pit which held Leto's cart, stamped back and resumed his former position glaring into Leto's face.
"If I am to help you, I need an explanation," Moneo said. "Why are you doing this?"
"Emotions."
Moneo's mouth formed the word without speaking it.
"They have come over me just when I thought them gone forever," Leto said. "How sweet these last few sips of humanity are."
"With Hwi? But you surely cannot..."
"Memories of emotions are never enough, Moneo."
"Are you telling me that you are indulging yourself in a..."
"Indulgence) Certainly not! But the tripod upon which Eternity swings is composed of flesh and thought and emotion. I felt that I had been reduced to flesh and thought."
"She has worked some kind of witchery," Moneo accused.
"Of course she has. And how grateful I am for it. If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection; we cannot define what our senses report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe. It was emotions which I missed the most."
"I insist, Lord, that you..."
"You are making me angry, Moneo. That is an emotion."
Leto saw Moneo's frustrated fury cool, quenched like a hot iron plunged into icy water. There was still some steam in him, though.
"I care not for myself, Lord. My concern is mostly for you, and you know this."
Leto spoke softly. "It is your emotion, Moneo, and I hold it dear."
Moneo inhaled a deep, trembling breath. He had never be- fore seen the God Emperor in this mood, reflecting this emotion. Leto appeared both elated and resigned, if Moneo were reading it correctly. One could not be certain.
"That which makes life sweet for the living," Leto said, "that which makes life warm and filled with beauty, that is what I would preserve even though it were denied to me."
"Then this Hwi Noree..."
"She makes me recall the Butlerian Jihad in a poignant way. She is the antithesis of all that's mechanical and non-human. How odd it is, Moneo, that the lxians, of all people, should produce this one person who so perfectly embodies those qualities which I hold most dear."
"I do not understand your reference to the Butlerian Jihad, Lord, Machines that think have no place in..."
"The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed."
"Lord, I still resent the fact that you welcome this..."
"Moneo! Hwi reassures me merely by her presence. For the first time in centuries, I am not lonely unless she is away from my side. If I had no other proof of the emotion, this would serve."
Moneo fell silent, obviously touched by Leto's evocation of loneliness. Surely, Moneo could understand the absence of the intimate sharing in love. His expression betrayed as much.
For the first time in a long while, Leto noted how much Moneo had aged.
It happens so suddenly to them. Leto thought.
It made Leto deeply aware of how much he cared for Moneo.
I should not let attachments happen to me, but I cannot help it... especially now that Hwi is here.
"They will laugh at you and make obscene jests," Moneo said.
"That is a good thing."
"How can it be good?"
"This is something new. Our task has always been to bring the new into balance and, with it, modify behavior while not suppressing survival."
"Even so, how can you welcome this?"
"The making of obscenities?" Leto asked. "What is the opposite of obscenity?"
Moneo's eyes went wide with a sudden questioning awareness. He had seen the action of many polarities-the thing made known by its opposite.
The thing stands out against a background which defines it, Leto thought. Surely Moneo will see this.
"It's too dangerous," Moneo said.
The ultimate verdict of conservatism!
Moneo was not convinced. A deep sigh wracked him.
I must remember not to take away their doubts, Leto thought. That's how I failed my Fish Speakers in the plaza. The lxians are holding on to the ragged end of human doubts. Hwi is the evidence of that.
A disturbance sounded in the anteroom. Leto sealed the portal against impetuous intrusions.
"My Duncan has come," he said.
"He's probably heard about your wedding plans-"
"Probably."
Leto watched Moneo wrestle with doubts, his thoughts utterly transparent. In that moment, Moneo fit so precisely into his human niche that Leto wanted to hug him.
He has the full spectrum: doubt-to-trust, love-to-hate... everything! All of those dear qualities which come to fruition in the warmth of emotion, in the willingness to spend yourself on Life.
"Why is Hwi accepting this?" Moneo asked.
Leto smiled. Moneo cannot doubt me; he must doubt others.
"I admit it is not a conventional union. She is a primate and I no longer am fully primate."
Again, Moneo wrestled with things he could only feel and not express.
Watching Moneo, Leto felt the flow of an observational awareness, a thought process which occurred so rarely but with such vivid amplication when it did occur, that Leto did not stir lest he cause a ripple in the flow.
The primate thinks and, by thinking, survives. Beneath his thinking is a thing which came with his cells. It is the current of human concerns for the species. Sometimes, they cover it up, wall it off and hide it behind thick barriers, but I have deliberately sensitized Moneo to these workings of his innermost self. He follows me because he believes I hold the best course for human survival. He knows there is a cellular awareness. It is what I find when I scan the Golden Path. This is humanity and both of us agree: it must endure!
"Where, when and how will the wedding ceremony be conducted?" Moneo asked.
Not why? Leto noted. Moneo no longer sought to understand the why. He had returned to safe ground. He was the majordomo, the director of the God Emperor's household, the First Minister.
He has names and verbs and modifiers with which he can perform. The words will work for him in their usual ways. Moneo may never glimpse the transcendental potential of his words, but he well understands their everyday, mundane uses.
"What of my question?" Moneo pressed.
Leto blinked at him, thinking:, on the other hand, feel that words are mostly useful if they open for me a glimpse of attractive and undiscovered places. But the use of words is so little understood by a civilization which still believes unquestioningly in a mechanical universe of absolute cause and effect-obviously reducible to one single root-cause and one primary seminal-effect.
"How like a limpet the Ixian-Tleilaxu fallacy clings to human affairs," Leto said.
"Lord, it disturbs me deeply when you don't pay attention."
"But I do pay attention, Moneo."
"Not to me."
"Even to you."
"Your attention wanders, Lord. You do not have to conceal that from me. I would betray myself before I would betray you."
"You think I'm woolgathering?"
"What gathering, Lord?" Moneo had never questioned this word earlier, but now...
Leto explained the allusion, thinking: How ancient! The looms and shuttles clicked in Leto's memory. Animal fur to human garments... huntsman to herdsman... the long steps up the ladder of awareness... and now they must make another long step, longer even than the ancient ones.
"You indulge in idle thoughts," Moneo accused.
"I have time for idle thoughts. That's one of the most interesting things about my existence as a singular multitude."
"But, Lord, there are matters which demand our..."
"You'd be surprised what comes of idle thinking, Moneo. I've never minded spending an entire day on things a human would not bother with for one minute. Why not? With my life expectancy of some four thousand years, what's one day more or less? How much time does one human life count? A million minutes? I've already experienced almost that many days."
Moneo stood frozen in silence, diminished by this comparison. He felt his own lifetime reduced to a mote in Leto's eye. The source of the allusion did not escape him.
Words... words... words, Moneo thought.
"Words are often almost useless in sentient affairs," Leto said.
Moneo held his breathing to a shallow minimum. The Lord can read thoughts!
"Throughout our history," Leto said, "the most potent use of words has been to round out some transcendental event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles, explaining the event in such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say: "This is what it meant."
Moneo felt beaten down by these words, terrified by unspoken things they might make him think.
"That's how events get lost in history," Leto said.
After a long silence, Moneo ventured: "You have not answered my question, Lord. The wedding?"
How tired he sounds, Leto thought. How utterly defeated.
Leto spoke briskly: "I have never needed your good offices more. The wedding must be managed with utmost care. It must have the precision of which only you are capable."
"Where, Lord?"
A bit more life in his voice.
"At Tabur Village in the Sareer."
"When?"
"I leave the date to you. Announce it when all things are arranged."
"And the ceremony itself?"
"I will conduct it."
"Will you need assistants, Lord? Artifacts of any kind?"
"The trappings of ritual?"
"Any particular thing which I may not..."
"We will not need much for our little charade."
"Lord! I beg of you! Please..."
"You will stand beside the bride and give her in marriage," Leto said. "We will use the Old Fremen ritual."
"We will need water rings then," Moneo said.
"Yes! I will use Ghani's water rings."
"And who will attend, Lord?"
"Only a Fish Speaker guard and the aristocracy."
Moneo stared at Leto's face. "What... what does my Lord mean by `aristocracy'?"
"You, your family, the household entourage, the courtiers of the Citadel."
"My fam..." Moneo swallowed. "Do you include Siona?"
"If she survives the test."
"But...
"Is she not family?"
"Of course, Lord. She is Atreides and..."
"Then by all means include Siona!"
Moneo brought a tiny memocorder from his pocket, a dull black Ixian artifact whose existence crowded the proscriptions of the Butlerian Jihad. A soft smile touched Leto's lips. Moneo knew his duties and would now perform them.
The clamor of Duncan Idaho outside the portal grew more strident, but Moneo ignored the sound.
Moneo knows the price of his privileges, Leto thought. It is another kind of marriage-the marriage of privilege and duty. It is the aristocrat's explanation and his excuse.
Moneo finished his note taking.
"A few details, Lord," Moneo said. "Will there be some special garb for Hwi?"
"The stillsuit and robe of a Fremen bride, real ones."
"Jewelry or other baubles?"
Leto's gaze locked on Moneo's fingers scrabbling over the tiny recorder, seeing there a dissolution.
Leadership, courage, a.sense of knowledge and order Moneo has these in abundance. They surround him like a holy aura, but they conceal from all eyes except mine the rot which eats from within. It is inevitable. Were I gone, it would be visible to everyone.
"Lord?" Moneo pressed. "Are you woolgathering?"
Ahhh! He likes that word!
"That is all," Leto said. "Only the robe, the stillsuit and the water rings."
Moneo bowed and turned away.
He is looking ahead now, Leto thought, but even this new thing will pass. He will turn toward the past once more. And I had such high hopes for him once. Well... perhaps Siona...
- =
"Make no heroes," my father said.
- The voice of Ghanima,
From the Oral History
JUST BY the way Idaho strode across the small chamber, his loud demands for audience now gratified, Leto could see an important transformation in the ghola. It was a thing repeated so many times that it had become deeply familiar to Leto. The Duncan had not even exchanged words of greeting with the departing Moneo. It all fitted into the pattern. How boring that pattern had become!
Leto had a name for this transformation of the Duncans. He called it "The Since Syndrome."
The gholas often nurtured suspicions about the secret things which might have been developed across the centuries of oblivion since they last knew awareness. What had people been doing all that time? Why could they possibly want me, this relic from their past? No ego could overcome such doubts forever-especially in a doubting man.
One of the gholas had accused Leto: "You've put things in my body, things I know nothing about! These things in my body tell you everything I'm doing! You spy on me everywhere!"
Another had charged him with possessing a "manipulative machine which makes us want to do whatever you want."
Once it started, the Since Syndrome could never be entirely eliminated. It could be checked, even diverted, but the dormant seed might sprout at the slightest provocation.
Idaho stopped where Moneo had stood and there was a veiled look of nonspecific suspicions in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders. Leto allowed the situation to simmer, bringing the condition to a head. Idaho locked gazes with him, then
broke away to dart his glances around the room. Leto recognized the manner behind the gaze.
The Duncans never forget!
As he studied the room, using the sightful ways he had been taught centuries before by the Lady Jessica and the Mentat Thufir Hawat, Idaho began to feel a giddy sense of dislocation. He thought the room rejected him, each thing-the soft cushions: big bulbous things in gold, green and a red that was almost purple; the Fremen rugs, each a museum piece, lapping over each other in thick piles around Leto's pit; the false sunlight of Ixian glowglobes, light which enveloped the Emperor's face in dry warmth, making the shadows around it deeper and more mysterious; the smell of spice-tea somewhere nearby; and that rich melange odor which radiated from the worm-body.
Idaho felt that too much had happened to him too fast since the Tleilaxu had abandoned him to the mercies of Luli and Friend in that featureless prison-cell room.
Too much... too much...
Am I really here? he wondered. Is this me? What are these thoughts that I think?
He stared at Leto's quiescent body, the shadowy and enormous mass which lay so silently there on its cart within the pit. The very quietness of that fleshly mass only suggested mysterious energies, terrible energies which might be unleashed in ways nobody could anticipate.
Idaho had heard the stories about the fight at the Ixian Embassy, but the Fish Speaker accounts had an aura of miraculous visitation about them which obscured the physical data.
"He flew down from above them and executed a terrible slaughter among the sinners."
"How did he do that?" Idaho had asked.
"He was an angry God," his informant had said.
Angry, Idaho thought. Was it because of the threat to Hwi? The stories he had heard! None were believable. Hwi wedded to this gross... It was not possible! Not the lovely Hwi, the Hwi of gentle delicacy. He is playing some terrible game, testing us... testing us... There was no honest reality in these times, no peace except in the presence of Hwi. All else was insanity.
As he returned his attention to Leto's face-that silently waiting Atreides face-the sense of dislocation grew stronger in Idaho. He began to wonder if, by a slight increase in mental effort along some strange new pathway, he might break through ghostly barriers to remember all of the experiences of the other Ghola Idahos.
What did they think when they entered this room? Did they feel this dislocation, this rejection?
Just a little extra effort.
He felt dizzy and wondered if he were going to faint.
"Is something wrong, Duncan?" It was Leto's most reasonable and calming tone.
"It's not real," Idaho said. "I don't belong here."
Leto chose to misunderstand. "But my guard tells me you came here of your own accord, that you flew back from the Citadel and demanded an immediate audience."
"I mean here, now! In this time!"
"But I need you."
"For what?"
"Look around you, Duncan. The ways you can help me are so numerous that you could not do them all."
"But your women won't let me fight! Every time I want to go where..."
"Do you question that you're more valuable alive than dead?" Leto made a clucking sound, then: "Use your wits, Duncan! That's what I value."
"And my sperm. You value that."
"Your sperm is your own to put where you wish."
"I will not leave a widow and orphans behind me the way...
"Duncan! I've said the choice is yours."
Idaho swallowed, then: "You've committed a crime against us, Leto, against all of us=the gholas you resurrect without ever asking us if that's what we want."
This was a new turn in Duncan-thinking. Leto peered at Idaho with renewed interest.
"What crime?"
"Oh, I've heard you spouting your deep thoughts," Idaho accused. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing at the room's entrance. "Did you know you can be heard out there in the anteroom?"
"When I wish to be heard, yes." But only my journals hear it all! "I would like to know the nature of my crime, though."
"There's a time, Leto, a time when you're alive. A time when you're supposed to be alive. It can have a magic, that time, while you're living it. You know you're never going to see a time like that again."
Leto blinked, touched by the Duncan's distress. The words were evocative.
Idaho raised both hands, palms up, to chest-height, a beggar Asking for something he knew he could not receive.
"Then... one day you wake up and you remember dying... and you remember the axlotl tank... and the Tleilaxu nastiness which awakened you... and it's supposed to start all over again. But it doesn't. It never does, Leto. That's a crime!"
"I have taken away the magic?"
"Yes!"
Idaho dropped his hands to his sides and clenched them into fists. He felt that he stood alone in the path of a millrace tide which would overwhelm him at his slightest relaxation.
And what of my time? Leto thought. This, too, will never happen again. But the Duncan would not understand the difference.
"What brought you rushing back from the Citadel?" Leto asked.
Idaho took a deep breath, then: "Is it true? You're to be married?"
"That's correct."
"To this Hwi Noree, the Ixian Ambassador?"
"True."
Idaho darted a quick glance along Leto's supine length.
They always look for genitalia, Leto thought. Perhaps I should have something made, a gross protuberance to shock them. He choked back the small burst of amusement which threatened to erupt from his throat. Another emotion amplified. Thank you, Hwi. Thank you, lxians.
Idaho shook his head. "But you..."
"There are strong elements to a marriage other than sex," Leto said. "Will we have children of our flesh? No. But the effects of this union will be profound."
"I listened while you were talking to Moneo," Idaho said. "I thought it must be some kind of joke, a..."
"Careful, Duncan!"
"Do you love her?"
"More deeply than any man ever loved a woman."
"Well, what about her? Does she..."
"She feels... a compelling compassion, a need to share with me, to give whatever she can give. It is her nature."
Idaho suppressed a feeling of revulsion.
"Moneo's right. They'll believe the Tleilaxu stories."
"That is one of the profound effects."
"And you still want me to... to mate with Siona!"
"You know my wishes. I leave the choice to you."
"Who's that Nayla woman?"
"You've met Nayla! Good."
"She and Siona act like sisters. That big hunk! What's going on there, Leto?"
"What would you want to go on? And what does it matter?" "I've never met such a brute! She reminds me of Beast Rabban. You'd never know she was female if she didn't..."
"You have met her before," Leto said. "You knew her as Friend."
Idaho stared at him in quick silence, the silence of a burrowing creature who senses the hawk.
"Then you trust her," Idaho said.
"Trust? What is trust?"
The moment arrives, Leto thought. He could see it shaping in Idaho's thoughts.
"Trust is what goes with a pledge of loyalty," Idaho said. "Such as the trust between you and me?" Leto asked.
A bitter smile touched Idaho's lips. "So that's what you're doing with Hwi Noree? A marriage, a pledge..."
"Hwi and I already have trust for each other."
"Do you trust me, Leto?"
"If I cannot trust Duncan Idaho, I cannot trust anyone."
"And if I can't trust you?"
"Then I pity you."
Idaho took this as almost a physical shock. His eyes were wide with unspoken demands. He wanted to trust. He wanted the magic which would never come again.
Idaho indicated his thoughts were taking off in an odd tangent then.
"Can they hear us out in the anteroom?" he asked.
"No." But my journals hear!
"Moneo was furious. Anyone could see it. But he went away like a docile lamb."
"Moneo is an aristocrat. He is married to duty, to responsibilities. When he is reminded of these things, his anger vanishes."
"So that's how you control him," Idaho said.
"He controls himself," Leto said, remembering how Moneo had glanced up from the note-taking, not for reassurances, but to prompt his sense of duty.
"No," Idaho said. "He doesn't control himself. You do it."
"Moneo has locked himself into his past. I did not do that."
"But he's an aristocrat... an Atreides."
Leto recalled Moneo's aging features, thinking how inevitable it was that the aristocrat would refuse his final duty-which was to step aside and vanish into history. He would have to be driven aside. And he would be. No aristocrat had ever overcome the demands of change.
Idaho was not through. "Are you an aristocrat, Leto?"
Leto smiled. "The ultimate aristocrat dies within me." And he thought: Privilege becomes arrogance. Arrogance promotes injustice. The seeds of ruin blossom.
"Maybe I will not attend your wedding," Idaho said. "I never thought of myself as an aristocrat."
"But you were. You were the aristocrat of the sword."
"Paul was better," Idaho said.
Leto spoke in the voice of Muad'Dib: "Because you taught me!" He resumed his normal tones: "The aristocrat's unspoken duty-to teach, and sometimes by horrible example."
And he thought: Pride of birth trails out into penury and the weaknesses of interbreeding. The way is opened for pride of wealth and accomplishment. Enter the nouveaux riches, riding to power as the Harkonnens did, on the backs of the ancient regime.
The cycle repeated itself with such persistence that Leto felt anyone should have seen how it must be built into long forgotten survival patterns which the species had outgrown, but never lost.
But no, we still carry the detritus which I must weed out.
"Is there some frontier?" Idaho asked. "Is there some frontier where I could go and never again be a part of this?"
"If there is to be any frontier, you must help me create it," Leto said. "There is now no place to go where others of us cannot follow and find you."
"Then you won't let me go."
"Go if you wish. Others of you have tried it. I tell you there is no frontier, no place to hide. Right now, as it has been for a long, long time, humankind is like a single-celled creature, bound together by a dangerous glue."
"No new planets? No strange..."
"Oh, we grow, but we do not separate."
"Because you hold us together!" he accused.
"I do not know if you can understand this, Duncan, but if there is a frontier, any kind of frontier, then what lies behind you cannot be more important than what lies ahead."
"You're the past!"
"No, Moneo is the past. He is quick to raise the traditional aristocratic barriers against all frontiers. You must understand the power of those barriers. They not only enclose planets and land on those planets, they enclose ideas. They repress change."
"You repress change!"
He will not deviate, Leto thought. One more try.
"The surest sign that an aristocracy exists is the discovery of barriers against change, curtains of iron or steel or stone or of any substance which excludes the new, the different."
"I know there must be a frontier somewhere," Idaho said. "You're hiding it."
"I hide nothing of frontiers. I want frontiers! I want surprises!"
They come right up against it, Leto thought. Then they refuse to enter.
True to this prediction, Idaho's thoughts darted off on a new tack. "Did you really have Face Dancers perform at your betrothal?"
Leto felt a surge of anger, followed immediately by a wry enjoyment of the fact that he could experience the emotion in such depth. He wanted to let it shout at Duncan... but that would solve nothing "The Face Dancers performed," he said.
.Why?"
"I want everyone to share in my happiness."
Idaho stared at him as though just discovering a repellent insect in his drink. In a flat voice, Idaho said: "That is the most cynical thing I have ever heard an Atreides say."
"But an Atreides said it."
"You're deliberately trying to put me off! You're avoiding my question."
Once more into the fray, Leto thought. He said: "The Face Dancers of the Bene Tleilax are a colony organism. Individually, they are mules. This is a choice they made for and by themselves."
Leto waited, thinking: I must be patient. They have to discover it for themselves. If I say it, they will not believe. Think, Duncan. Think!
After a long silence, Idaho said: "I have given you my oath. That is important to me. It is still important. I don't know what you're doing or why. I can only say I don't like what's happening. There! I've said it."
"Is that why you returned from the Citadel?"
"Yes!"
"Will you go back to the Citadel now?"
"What other frontier is there?"
"Very good, Duncan! Your anger knows even when your reason does not. Hwi goes to the Citadel tonight. I will join her there tomorrow."
"I want to get to know her better," Idaho said.
"You will avoid her," Leto said. "That is an order. Hwi is not for you."
"I've always known there were witches," Idaho said. "Your grandmother was one."
He turned on his heel and, not asking leave, strode back the way he had come.
How like a little boy he is, Leto thought, watching the stiffness in Idaho's back. The oldest man in our universe and the youngest-both in one flesh. -= The prophet is not diverted by illusions of past, present and future. The fixity of language determines such linear distinctions. Prophets hold a key to the lock in a language. The mechanical image remains only an image to them. This is not a mechanical universe. The linear progression of events is imposed by the observer. Cause and effect? That's not it at all. The prophet utters fateful words. You glimpse a thing "destined to occur." But the prophetic instant releases something of infinite portent and power. The universe undergoes a ghostly shift. Thus, the wise prophet conceals actuality behind shimmering labels. The uninitiated then believe the prophetic language is ambiguous. The listener distrusts the prophetic messenger. Instinct tells you how the utterance blunts the power of such words. The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through for yourself.
- The Stolen Journals LETO ADDRESSED Moneo in the coldest voice he had ever used: "The Duncan disobeys me."
They were in the airy room of golden stone atop the Citadel's south tower, Leto's third full day back from the Decennial Festival in Onn. An open portal beside him looked out over the harsh noonday of the Sareer. The wind made a deep humming sound through the opening. It stirred up dust and sand which made Moneo squint. Leto seemed not to notice the irritation. He stared out across the Sareer, where the air was alive with heat movements. The distant flow of dunes suggested a mobility in the landscape which only his eyes observed.
Moneo stood immersed in the sour odors of his own fear, knowing that the wind conveyed the message of these odors to Leto's senses. The arrangements for the wedding, the upset among the Fish Speakers-everything was paradox. It reminded Moneo of something the God Emperor had said in the first days of their association.
"Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it. If paradoxes bother you, that betrays your deep desire for absolutes. The relativist treats a paradox merely as interesting, perhaps amusing or even, dreadful thought, educational. "
"You do not respond," Leto said. He turned from his examination of the Sareer and focused the weight of his attention on Moneo.
Moneo could only shrug. How near is the Worm? he wondered. Moneo had noticed that the return to the Citadel from Onn sometimes aroused the Worm. No sign of that awful shift in the God Emperor's presence had yet betrayed itself, but Moneo sensed it. Could the Worm come without warning?
"Accelerate arrangements for the wedding," Leto said. "Make it as soon as possible."
"Before you test Siona?"
Leto was silent for a moment, then: "No. What will you do about the Duncan,"
"What would you have me do, Lord?"
"I told him not to see Noree, to avoid her. I told him it was an order."
"She has sympathy for him, Lord. Nothing more."
"Why would she have sympathy for him?"
"He is a ghola. He has no connection to our times, no roots."
"He has roots as deep as mine!"
"But he does not know this, Lord."
"Are you arguing with me, Moneo?"
Moneo backed away a half step, knowing that this did not remove him from danger. "Oh, no, Lord. But I always try to tell you truly what I believe is happening."
"I will tell you what is happening. He is courting her."
"But she initiates their meetings, Lord."
"Then you knew about this!"
"I did not know you had absolutely prohibited it, Lord."
Leto spoke in a musing voice: "He is clever with women,
Moneo, exceedingly clever. He sees into their souls and makes them do what he wants. It has always been that way with the Duncans."
"I did not know you had prohibited all meetings between them, Lord!" Moneo's voice was almost strident.
"He is more dangerous than any of the others," Leto said. "It is the fault of our times."
"Lord, the Tleilaxu do not have a successor for him ready to deliver."
"And we need this one?"
"You said it yourself, Lord. It is a paradox which I do not understand, but you did say it."
"How long until there could be a replacement?"
"At least a year, Lord. Shall I inquire as to a specific date?"
"Do it today."
"He may hear about it, Lord. The previous one did."
"I do not want it to happen this way, Moneo!"
"I know, Lord."
"And I dare not speak of this to Noree," Leto said. "The Duncan is not for her. Yet, I cannot hurt her!" This last was almost a wail.
Moneo stood in awed silence.
"Can't you see this?" Leto demanded. "Moneo, help me."
"I see that it is different with Noree," Moneo said. "But I do not know what to do."
"What is different?" Leto's voice had a penetrating quality which cut right through Moneo.
"I mean your attitude toward her, Lord. It is different from anything I have ever seen in you."
Moneo noted then the first signs-twitching in the God Emperor's hands, the beginning glaze in the eyes. Gods! The Worm is coming! Moneo felt totally exposed. A simple flick of the great body would crush Moneo against a wall. I must appeal to the human in him.
"Lord," Moneo said, "I have read the accounts and heard your own words about your marriage to your sister, Ghanima."
"If only she were with me now," Leto said.
"She was never your mate, Lord."
"What're you suggesting?" Leto demanded.
The twitching of Leto's hands had become a- spasmodic vibration.
"She was... I mean, Lord, that Ghanima was Harq al-Ada's mate."
"Of course she was! All of you Atreides are descended from them!"
"Is there something you have not told me, Lord? Is it possible... that is, with Hwi Noree... could you mate?"
Leto's hands shook so strongly Moneo wondered that their owner did not know it. The glazing of the great blue eyes deepened.
Moneo backed another step toward the door to the stairs leading down from this deadly place.
"Do not question me about possibilities," Leto said, and his voice was hideously distant, gone somewhere into the layers of his past.
"Never again, Lord," Moneo said. He bowed himself back to only a single pace from the door. "I will speak to Noree, Lord... and to the Duncan."
"Do what you can." Leto's voice was far away in those interior chambers which only he could enter.
Softly, Moneo let himself out of the door. He closed it behind him and placed his back against it, trembling. Ahhh, that was the closest ever.
And the paradox remained. Where did it point? What was the meaning of the God Emperor's odd and painful decisions? What had brought The Worm Who Is God?
A thumping sounded from within Leto's aerie, a heavy beating against stone. Moneo dared not open the door to investigate. He pushed himself away from the surface which reflected that dreadful thumping -and went down the stairs, moving cautiously, not drawing an easy breath until he reached ground level and the Fish Speaker guard there.
"Is he disturbed?" she asked, looking up the stairs.
Moneo nodded. They both could hear the thumping quite plainly.
"What disturbs him?" the guard asked.
"He is God and we are mortal," Moneo said. This was an answer which usually satisfied Fish Speakers, but new forces were at work now.
She looked directly at him and Moneo saw the killer training close to the surface of her soft features. She was a relatively young woman with auburn hair and a face usually dominated by a turned-up nose and full lips, but now her eyes were hard and demanding. Only a fool would turn his back on those eyes.
"I did not disturb him," Moneo said.
"Of course not," she agreed. Her look softened slightly.
"But I would like to know who or what did."
"I think he is impatient for his marriage," Moneo said. "I think that's all it is."
"Then hurry the day!" she said.
"That's what I'm about," Moneo said. He turned and hurried away down the long hall to his own area of the Citadel. Gods! The Fish Speakers were becoming as dangerous as the God Emperor.
That stupid Duncan! He puts us all in peril. And Hwi Noree! What's to be done about her?
- = The pattern of monarchies and similar systems has a message of value for all political forms. My memories assure me that governments of any kind could profit from this message. Governments can be useful to the governed only so long as inherent tendencies toward tyranny are restrained. Monarchies have some good features beyond their star qualities. They can reduce the size and parasitic nature of the management bureaucracy. They can make speedy decisions when necessary. They fit an ancient human demand for a parental (tribal/feudal) hierarchy where every person knows his place. It is valuable to know your place, even if that place is temporary. It is galling to be held in place against your will. This is why I teach about tyranny in the best possible way by example. Even though you read these words after a passage of eons, my tyranny will not be forgotten. My Golden Path assures this. Knowing my message, I expect you to be exceedingly careful about the powers you delegate to any government.
- The Stolen Journals Leto PREPARED with patient care for his first private meeting with Siona since her childhood banishment to the Fish Speaker schools in the Festival City. He told Moneo that he would see her at the Little Citadel, a vantage tower he had built in the
$ central Sareer. The site had been chosen to provide views of old and new and places between. There were no roads to the Little Citadel. Visitors arrived by 'thopter. Leto went there as though by magic. '
With his own hands, in the early days of his ascendancy, Leto has used an Ixian machine to dig a secret tunnel under the Sareer to his tower, doing all of the work himself. In those days, a few wild sandworms still roamed the desert. He had lined his tunnel with massive walls of fused silica and had imbedded countless bubbles of worm-repelling water in the outer layers. The tunnel anticipated his maximum growth and the requirements of a Royal Cart which, at that time, had been only a figment of his visions, In the early predawn hours of the day assigned to Siona, Leto descended to the crypt and gave orders to his guard that he was not to be disturbed by anyone. His cart sped him down one of the crypt's dark spokes where he opened a hidden portal, emerging in less than an hour at the Little Citadel.
One of his delights was to go out alone onto the sand. No cart. Only his pre-worm body to carry him. The sand felt luxuriously sensuous against him. The heat of his passage through the dunes in the day's first light sent up a wake of steam which required him to keep moving. He brought himself to a stop only when he found a relatively dry pocket about five kilometers out. He lay there at the center of an uncomfortable dampness from the trace-dew, his body just outside the long shadow of the tower which stretched eastward from him across the dunes.
From a distance, the three thousand meters of the tower could be seen as an impossible needle stabbing the sky. Only the inspired blend of Leto's commands and Ixian imagination made the structure conceivable. One hundred and fifty meters in diameter, the tower sat on a foundation which plunged as deeply under the sand as it climbed above. The magic of plasteel and superlight alloys kept it supple in the wind and resistant to sandblast abrasions.
Leto enjoyed the place so much that he rationed his visits, making up a long list of personal rules which had to be met. The rules added up to "Great Necessity."
For a few moments while he lay there, he could shed the loads of the Golden Path. Moneo, good and reliable Moneo, would see that Siona arrived promptly, just at nightfall. Leto had a full day in which to relax and think, to play and pretend that he possessed no cares, to drink up the raw sustenance of the earth in a feeding frenzy which he could never indulge in at Onn or at the Citadel. In those places, he was required to confine himself to furtive burrowings through narrow passages where only prescient caution kept him from encountering waterpockets. Here, though, he could race through the sand and across it, feed and grow strong.
Sand crunched beneath him as he rolled, flexing his body in pure animal enjoyment. He could feel his worm-self being restored, an electric sensation which sent messages of health all through him.
The sun was well above the horizon now, painting a golden line up the side of the tower. There was the smell of bitter dust in the air and an odor of distant spiny plants which had responded to the morning's trace-dew. Gently at first, then more rapidly, he moved out in a wide circle around the tower, thinking about Siona as he went.
There could be no more delays. She had to be tested. Moneo knew this as well as Leto did.
Just that morning, Moneo had said: "Lord, there is terrible violence in her."
"She has the beginnings of adrenalin addiction," Leto had said. "It's cold-turkey time."
"Cold what, Lord?"
"It's an ancient expression. It means she must be subjected to a complete withdrawal. She must go through a necessity shock."
"Oh... I see."
For once, Leto realized, Moneo did see. Moneo had gone through his own cold-turkey time.
"The young generally are incapable of making hard decisions unless those decisions are associated with immediate violence and the consequent sharp flow of adrenalin," Leto had explained.
Moneo had held himself in reflexive silence, remembering, then: "It is a great peril."
"That's the violence you see in Siona. Even old people can cling to it, but the young wallow in it."
As he circled his tower in the growing light of the day, enjoying the feel of the sand even more as it dried, Leto thought about the conversation. He slowed his passage over the sand. A wind from behind him carried the vented oxygen and a burnt flint smell over his human nostrils. He inhaled deeply, lifting $ his magnified awareness to a new level.
This preliminary day contained a multiple purpose. He thought of the coming encounter much as an ancient bullfighter had thought about the first examination of a horned adversary. Siona possessed her own version of horns, although Moneo would make certain that she brought no physical weapons to this encounter. Leto had to be sure, though, that he knew Siona's every strength and every weakness. And he would have to create special susceptibilities in her wherever possible. She had to be prepared for the test, her psychic muscles blunted by well-planted barbs.
Shortly after noon, his worm-self satiated, Leto returned to the tower, crawled back onto his cart and lifted on suspensors to the very tip of a portal there which opened only at his command. Throughout the rest of the day, he lay there in the aerie, thinking, plotting.
The fluttering wings of an ornithopter whispered on the air just at nightfall to signal Moneo's arrival.
Faithful Moneo.
Leto caused a landing-lip to extrude from his aerie. The 'thopter glided in, its wings cupped. It settled gently onto the lip. Leto stared out through the gathering darkness. Siona emerged and darted in toward him, fearful of the unprotected height. She wore a white robe over a black uniform without insignia. She stole one look backward when she stopped just inside the tower, then she turned her attention to Leto's bulk waiting on the cart almost at the center of the aerie. The 'thopter lifted away and jetted off into the darkness. Leto left the lip extruded, the portal open.
"There is a balcony on the other side of the tower," he said. "We will go there."
"Why?"
Siona's voice carried almost pure suspicion.
"I'm told it's a cool place," Leto said. "And there is indeed a faint sensation of cold on my cheeks when I expose them to the breeze there."
Curiosity brought her closer to him.
Leto closed the portal behind her.
"The night view from the balcony is magnificent," Leto said.
"Why are we here?"
"Because here we will not be overheard."
Leto turned his cart and moved it silently out to the balcony.
The faintest of hidden illumination within the aerie showed her his movement. He heard her follow.
The balcony was a half-ring on the southeast arc of the tower, a lacy railing at chest-height around the perimeter. Siona moved to the rail and swept her gaze around the open land.
Leto sensed the waiting receptivity. Something was to be spoken here for her ears alone. Whatever it was, she would listen and respond from the well of her own motives. Leto looked across her toward the edge of the Sareer where the manmade boundary wall was a low flat line just barely visible in the light of First Moon lifting above the horizon. His amplified vision identified the distant movement of a convoy from Onn, a dull glow of lights from the beast-drawn vehicles pacing along the high road toward Tabur Village.
He could call up a memory-image of the village nestled among the plants which grew in the moist area along the inner base of the wall. His Museum Fremen tended date palms, tall grasses and even truck gardens there. It was not like the old days when any inhabited place, even a tiny basin with a few low plants fed by a single cistern and windtrap, could appear lush by comparison with the open sand. Tabur Village was a water-rich paradise when compared with Sietch Tabr. Everyone in today's village knew that just beyond the Sareer's boundary wall the Idaho River slid southward in a long straight line which would be silver now in the moonlight. Museum Fremen could not climb the wall's sheer inner face, but they knew the water was there. The earth knew, too. If a Tabur inhabitant put an ear against the ground, the earth spoke with the sound of distant rapids.
There would be nightbirds along the bankment now, Leto thought, creatures which would live in sunlight on another world. Dune had worked its evolutionary magic on them and they still lived at the mercies of the Sareer. Leto had seen the birds draw dumb shadows across the water and, when they dipped to drink, there were ripples which the river took away.
Even at this distance, Leto sensed a power in that faraway water, something forceful out of his past which moved away from him like the current slipping southward into the reaches of farm and forest. The water searched through rolling hills, along the margins of an abundant plant life which had replaced all of Dune's desert except for this one last place, this Sareer, this sanctuary of the past.
Leto recalled the growling thrust of Ixian machines which had inflicted that watercourse upon the landscape. It seemed such a short time ago, little more than three thousand years.
Siona stirred and looked back at him, but Leto remained silent, his attention fixed beyond her. A pale amber light shone above the horizon, reflection of a town on faraway clouds. From its direction and distance, Leto knew it to be the town of Wallport transplanted far into a warmer clime of the south from its once-austere location in the cold, low-slanted light of the north. The glow of the town was like a window into his past. He felt the beam of it striking through to his breast, straight through the thick and scaled membrane which had replaced his human skin. am vulnerable, he thought.
Yet, he knew himself to be the master of this place. And the planet was the master of him.
I am part of it.
He devoured the soil directly, rejecting only the water. His human mouth and lungs had been relegated to breathing just enough to sustain a remnant humanity... and talking.
Leto spoke to Siona's back: "I like to talk and I dread the day when I no longer will be able to engage in conversations."
With a certain diffidence, she turned and stared at him in the moonlight, quite obvious distaste in her expression.
"I agree that I am a monster in many human eyes," he said.
"Why am I here?"
Directly to the point! She would not deviate. Most of the Atreides had been that way, he thought. It was a characteristic which he hoped to maintain in the breeding of them. It spoke of a strong inner sense of identity.
"I need to find out what Time has done to you," he said.
"Why do you need that?"
A little fear in her voice there, he thought. She thinks I will probe after her puny rebellion and the names of her surviving associates.
When he remained silent, she said: "Do you intend to kill me the way you killed my friends?"
So she has heard about the fight at the Embassy. And she assumes I know all about her past rebellious activities. Moneo has been lecturing her, damn him! Well...I might have done the same in his circumstances.
"Are you really a god?" she demanded. "I don't understand why my father believes that."
She has some doubts, he thought. I still have room to maneuver.
"Definitions vary," he said. "To Moneo, I am a god... and that is a truth."
"You were human once."
He began to enjoy the leaps of her intellect. She had that sure, hunting curiosity which was the, hallmark of the Atreides.
"You are curious about me," he said. "It is the same with me. I am curious about you."
"What makes you think I'm curious?"
"You used to watch me very carefully when you were a child. I see that same look in your eyes tonight."
"Yes, I have wondered what it's like to be you."
He studied her for a moment. The moonlight drew shadows under her eyes, concealing them. He could let himself imagine that her eyes were the total blue of his own eyes, the blue of spice addiction. With that imaginative addition, Siona bore a curious resemblance to his long-dead Ghani. It was in the outline of her face and the placement of the eyes. He almost told Siona this, then thought better of it.
"Do you eat human food?" Siona asked.
"For a long time after I put on the sandtrout skin, I felt stomach hunger," he said. "Occasionally, I would attempt food. My stomach mostly rejected it. The cilia of the sandtrout spread almost everywhere in my human flesh. Eating became a bothersome thing. These days, I only ingest dry substances which sometimes contain a bit of the spice."
"You... eat melange?"
"Sometimes."
"But you no longer have human hungers?"
"I didn't say that."
She stared at him, waiting.
Leto admired the way she let unspoken questions work for her. She was bright and she had learned much during her short life.
"The stomach hunger was a black feeling, a pain I could not relieve," he said. "I would run then, run like an insane creature across the dunes."
"You... ran?"
"My legs were longer in proportion to my body in those days. I could move myself about quite easily. But the hungry pain has never left me. I think it's hunger for my lost humanity."
B$
He saw the beginnings of reluctant sympathy in her, the questioning.
"You still have this... pain?"
"It's only a soft burning now. That's one of the signs of my final metamorphosis. In a few hundred years, I'll be back under the sand."
He saw her clench her fists at her sides. "Why?" she demanded. "Why did you do this?"
"This change isn't all bad. Today, for example, has been very pleasant. I feel quite mellow."
"There are changes we cannot see," she said. "I know there must be." She relaxed her hands.
"My sight and hearing have become extremely acute, but not my sense of touch. Except for my face, I don't feel things the way I could once. I miss that."
Again, he noted the reluctant sympathy, the striving toward an empathic understanding. She wanted to know!
"When you live so long," she said, "how does the passage of Time feel? Does it move more rapidly as the years go by?"
"That's a strange thing, Siona. Sometimes, Time rushes by me; sometimes, it creeps."
Gradually, as they spoke, Leto had been dimming the concealed lights of his aerie, moving his cart closer and closer to Siona. Now, he shut off the lights, leaving only the moon. The front of his cart protruded onto the balcony, his face only about two meters from Siona.
"My father tells me," she said, "that the older you get, the slower your time goes. Is that what you told him?"
Testing my veracity, he thought. She's not a Truthsayer, then.
"All things are relative, but compared to the human timesense, this is true."
"Why?"
"It is involved in what I will become. At the end, Time will stop for me and I will be frozen like a pearl caught in ice. My new bodies will scatter, each with a pearl hidden within it."
She turned and looked away from him, peering out at the desert, speaking without looking at him.
"When I talk to you like this here in the darkness I can almost forget what you are."
"That's why I chose this hour for our meeting."
"But why this place?".
"Because it is the last place where I can feel at home."
Siona turned against the rail, leaning on it and looking at him. "I want to see you."
He turned on all of the aerie's lights, including the harsh white globes along the roof of the balcony's outer edge. As the light came on, an Ixian-made transparent mask slid out of wall recesses and sealed off the balcony behind Siona. She felt it move behind her and was startled, but nodded as though she understood. She thought it was a defense against attack. It was not. The wall merely kept out the damp insects of the night.
Siona stared at Leto, sweeping her gaze along his body, pausing at the stubs which once had been his legs, bringing her attention then to his arms and hands, then to his face.
"Your approved histories tell us that all Atreides are descended from you and your sister, Ghanima," she said. "The Oral History disagrees."
"The Oral History is correct. Your ancestor was Harq al Ada Ghani and I were married only in name, a move to consolidate the power."
"Like your marriage to this Ixian woman?"
"That is different."
"You will have children?"
"I have never been capable of having children. I chose the metamorphosis before that was possible."
"You were a child and then you were-" she pointed "this?"
"Nothing between."
"How does a child know what to choose?"
"I was one of the oldest children this universe has ever seen. Ghani was the other."
"That story about your ancestral memories!"
"A true story. We're all here. Doesn't the Oral History agree?"
She whirled away and held her back stiffly presented to him. Once more, Leto found himself fascinated by this human gesture: rejection coupled to vulnerability. Presently, she turned around and concentrated on his features within the hooded folds.
"You have the Atreides look," she said.
"I come by it just as honestly as you do."
"You're so old... why aren't you wrinkled?"
"Nothing about the human part of me ages in a normal way."
"Is that why you did this to yourself?"
"To enjoy long life? No."
"I don't see how anyone could make such a choice," she muttered. Then louder: "Never to know love..."
"You're playing the fool!" he said. "You don't mean love, you mean sex."
She shrugged.
"You think the most terrible thing I gave up was sex? No, the greatest loss was something far different."
"What?" She asked it reluctantly, betraying how deeply he touched her.
"I cannot walk among my fellows without their special notice. I am no longer one of you. I am alone. Love? Many people love me, but my shape keeps us apart. We are separated, Siona, by a gulf that no other human dares to bridge."
"Not even your Ixian woman?"
"Yes, she would if she could, but she cannot. She's not an Atreides."
"You mean that I... could?" She touched her breast with a finger.
"If there were enough sandtrout around. Unfortunately, all of them enclose my flesh. However, if I were to die..."
She shook her head in dumb horror at the thought.
"The Oral History tells it accurately," he said. "And we must never forget that you believe the Oral History."
She continued to shake her head from side to side.
"There's no secret about it," he said. "The first moments of the transformation are the critical ones. Your awareness must drive inward and outward simultaneously, one with Infinity. I could provide you with enough melange to accomplish this. Given enough spice, you can live through those first awful moments... and all the other moments."
She shuddered uncontrollably, her gaze fixed on his eyes.
"You know I'm telling you the truth, don't you?"
She nodded, inhaled a deep trembling breath, then: "Why did you do it?"
"The alternative was far more horrible."
"What alternative?"
"In time, you may understand it. Moneo did."
"Your damned Golden Path!"
"Not damned at all. Quite holy."
"You think I'm a fool who can't..."
"I think you're inexperienced, but possessed of great capability whose potential you do not even suspect."
She took three deep breaths and regained some of her composure, then: "If you can't mate with the Ixian, what..."
"Child, why do you persist in misunderstanding? It's not sex. Before Hwi, I could not pair. I had no other like me. In all of the cosmic void, I was the only one."
"She's like... you?"
"Deliberately so. The lxians made her that way."
"Made her..."
"Don't be a complete fool!" he snapped. "She is the essential god-trap. Even the victim cannot reject her."
"Why do you tell me these things?" she whispered.
"You stole two copies of my journals," he said. "You've read the Guild translations and you already know what could catch me."
"You knew?"
He saw boldness return to her stance, a sense of her own power. "Of course you knew," she said, answering her own question.
"It was my secret," he said. "You cannot imagine how many times I have loved a companion and seen that companion slip away... as your father is slipping away now."
"You love... him?"
"And I loved your mother. Sometimes they go quickly; sometimes with agonizing slowness. Each time I am wracked. I can play callous and I can make the necessary decisions, even decisions which kill, but I cannot escape the suffering. For a long, long time-those journals you stole tell it truly-that was the only emotion I knew."
He saw the moistness in her eyes, but the line of her jaw still spoke of angry resolution.
"None of this gives you the right to govern," she said.
Leto suppressed a smile. At last they were down to the root of Siona's rebellion.
By what right? Where is justice in my rule? By imposing my rules upon them with the weight of Fish Speaker arms, am I being fair to the evolutionary thrust of humankind? I know all of the revolutionary cant, the catch-prattle and the resounding phrases.
"Nowhere do you see your own rebellious hand in the power I wield," he said.
Her youth still demanded its moment.
"I never chose you to govern," she said.
"But you strengthen me."
"How?"
"By opposing me. I sharpen my claws on the likes of you."
She shot a sudden glance at his hands.
"A figure of speech," he said.
"So I've offended you at last," she said, hearing only the cutting anger in his words and tone.
"You've not offended me. We're related and can speak bluntly to each other within the family. The fact is, I have much more to fear from you than you from me."
This took her aback, but only momentarily. He saw belief stiffen her shoulders, then doubt. Her chin lowered and she peered upward at him.
"What could the great God Leto fear from me?"
"Your ignorant violence."
"Are you saying that you're physically vulnerable?"
"I will not warn you again, Siona. There are limits to the word games I will play. You and the lxians both know that it's the ones I love who are physically vulnerable. Soon, most of the Empire will know it. This is the kind of information which travels fast."
"And they'll all ask what right you have to rule!"
There was glee in her voice. It aroused an abrupt anger in Leto. He found it difficult to suppress. This was a side of human emotions he detested. Gloating! It was some time before he dared answer, then he chose to slash through her defenses at the vulnerability he already had seen.
"I rule by the right of loneliness, Siona. My loneliness is part-freedom and part-slavery. It says I cannot be bought by any human group. My slavery to you says that I will serve all of you to the best of my lordly abilities."
"But the lxians have caught you!" she said.
"No. They have given me a gift which strengthens me."
"It weakens you!"
"That, too," he admitted. "But very powerful forces still obey me."
"Ohhh, yes." she nodded. "I understand that."
"You don't understand it."
"Then I'm sure you'll explain it to me," she taunted.
He spoke so softly that she had to lean toward him to hear: "There are no others of any kind anywhere who can call upon me for anything-not for sharing, not for compromise, not even for the slightest beginning of another government. I am the only one."
"Not even this Ixian woman can..."
"She is so much like me that she would not weaken me in that way."
"But when the Ixian Embassy was attacked..."
"I can still be irritated by stupidity," he said.
She scowled at him.
Leto thought it a pretty gesture in that light, quite unconscious. He knew he had made her think. He was sure she had never before considered that any rights might adhere to uniqueness.
He addressed her silent scowl: "There has never before been a government exactly like mine. Not in all of our history. I am responsible only to myself, exacting payment in full for what I have sacrificed."
"Sacrificed!" she sneered, but he heard the doubts. "Every despot says something like that. You're responsible only to yourself!"
"Which makes every living thing my responsibility. I watch over you through these times."
"Through what times?"
"The times that might have been and then no more."
He saw the indecision in her. She did not trust her instincts, her untrained abilities at prediction. She might leap occasionally as she had done when she took his journals, but the motivation for the leap was lost in the revelation which followed.
"My father says you can be very tricky with words," she said.
"And he ought to know. But there is knowledge you can only gain by participating in it. There's no way to learn it by standing off and looking and talking."
"That's the kind of thing he means," she said.
"You're quite right," he agreed. "It's not logical. But it is a light, an eye which can see, but does not see itself."
"I'm tired of talking," she said.
"As am L" And he thought: l have seen enough, done enough. She is wide open to her doubts. How vulnerable they are in their ignorance!
"You haven't convinced me of anything," she said.
"That was not the purpose of this meeting."
"What was the purpose?"
"To see if you are ready to be tested."
"Test..." She tipped her head a bit to the right and stared at him.
"Don't play the innocent with me," he said. "Moneo has told you. And I tell you that you are ready!"
She tried to swallow, then: "What are..."
"I have sent for Moneo to return you to the Citadel," he said. "When we meet again, we will really learn what you are made of." -= You know the myth of the Great Spice Hoard? Yes, I know about that story, too. A majordomo brought it to me one day to amuse me. The story says there is a hoard of melange, a gigantic hoard, big as a great mountain. The hoard is concealed in the depths of a distant planet. It is not Arrakis, that planet. It is not Dune. The spice was hidden there long ago, even before the First Empire and the Spacing Guild. The story says Paul Muad'Dib went there and lives yet beside the hoard, kept alive by it, waiting. The majordomo did not understand why the story disturbed me.
- The Stolen Journals IDAHO TREMBLED with anger as he strode along the gray plastone halls toward his quarters in the Citadel. At each guard post he passed, the woman there snapped to attention. He did not respond. Idaho knew he was causing disturbance among them. Nobody could mistake the Commander's mood. But he did not abate his purposeful stride. The heavy thumping of his boots echoed along the walls.
He could still taste the noon meal-oddly familiar Atreides chopstick-fare of mixed grains herb-seasoned and baked around a pungent morsel of pseudomeat, all of it washed down with a drink of clear cidrit juice. Moneo had found him at table in the Guard Mess, alone in a corner with a regional operations schedule propped up beside his plate.
Without invitation, Moneo had seated himself opposite
Idaho and had pushed aside the operations schedule.
"I bring a message from the God Emperor," Moneo said.
The tightly controlled tone warned Idaho that this was no casual encounter. Others sensed it. Listening silence settled over the women at nearby tables, spreading out through the room.
Idaho put down his chopsticks. "Yes?"
"These were the words of the God Emperor," Moneo said. "`It is my bad luck that Duncan Idaho should become enamored of Hwi Noree. This mischance must not continue."'
Anger thinned Idaho's lips, but he remained silent.
"Such foolishness endangers us all," Moneo said. "Noree is the God Emperor's intended."
Idaho tried to control his anger, but the words were a betrayal: "He can't marry her!"
"Why not?"
"What game is he playing, Moneo?"
"I am a messenger with a single message, no more," Moneo said.
Idaho's voice was low and threatening. "But he confides in you."
"The God Emperor sympathizes with you," Moneo lied.
"Sympathizes!" Idaho shouted the word, creating a new depth to the room's silence.
"Noree is a woman of obvious attractions," Moneo said. "But she is not for you."
"The God Emperor has spoken," Idaho sneered, "and there is no appeal."
"I see that you understand the message," Moneo said.
Idaho started to push himself away from the table.
"Where are you going?" Moneo demanded.
"I'm going to have this out with him right now!"
"That is certain suicide," Moneo said.
Idaho glared at him, aware suddenly of the listening intensity in the women at the tables around them. An expression which Muad'Dib would have recognized immediately came over Idaho's face: "Playing to the Devil's Gallery," Muad'Dib had called it.
"D'you know what the original Atreides Dukes always said?" Idaho asked. There was a mocking tone in his voice.
"Is it pertinent?"
"They said your liberties all vanish when you look up to any absolute ruler."
Rigid with fear, Moneo leaned toward Idaho. Moneo's lips barely moved. His voice was little more than a whisper. "Don't say such things."
"Because one of these women will report it?"
Moneo shook his head in disbelief. "You are more reckless than any of the others."
"Really?"
"Please! It is perilous in the extreme to take this attitude."
Idaho heard the nervous stirring that swept through the room.
"He can only kill us," Idaho said.
Moneo spoke in a tight whisper: "You fool! The Worm can dominate him at the slightest provocation!"
"The Worm, you say?" Idaho's voice was unnecessarily loud.
"You must trust him," Moneo said.
Idaho glanced left and right. "Yes, I think they heard that."
"He is billions upon billions of people united in that one body," Moneo said.
"So I've been told."
"He is God and we are mortal," Moneo said.
"How is it a god can do evil things?" Idaho asked.
Moneo thrust his chair backward and leaped to his feet. "I wash my hands of you!" Whirling away, he dashed from the room.
Idaho looked out into the room, finding himself the center of attention for all of the guards' faces.
"Moneo doesn't judge, but I do," Idaho said.
It surprised him then to glimpse a few wry smiles among the women. They all returned to their eating.
As he strode down the hall of the Citadel, Idaho replayed the conversation, seeking out the oddities in Moneo's behavior. The terror could be recognized and even understood, but it had seemed far more than fear of death... far, far more.
The Worm can dominate him.
Idaho felt that this had slipped out of Moneo, an inadvertent betrayal. What could it mean?
More reckless than any of the others.
It galled Idaho that he should have to bear comparisons to himself-as-an-unknown. How careful had the others been?
Idaho came to his own door, put a hand on the palm-lock and hesitated. He felt like a hunted animal retreating to his den. The guards in the mess surely would have reported that
conversation to Leto by now. What would the God Emperor do? Idaho's hand moved across the lock. The door swung inward. He entered the anteroom of his apartment and sealed the door, looking at it.
Will he send his Fish Speakers for me?
Idaho glanced around the entry area. It was a conventional space-racks for clothing and shoes, a full-length mirror, a weapons cupboard. He looked at the closed door of the cupboard. Not one of the weapons behind that door offered any real threat to the God Emperor. There wasn't even a lasgun... although even lasguns were ineffectual against the Worm, according to all the accounts.
He knows I will defy him.
Idaho sighed and looked toward the arched portal which led into the sitting area. Moneo had replaced the soft furniture with heavier, stiffer pieces, some of them recognizably Fremen culled from the coffers of the Museum Fremen.
Museum Fremen!
Idaho spat and strode through the portal. Two steps into the room he stopped, shocked. The soft light from the north windows revealed Hwi Noree seated on the low sling-divan. She wore a shimmering blue gown which draped itself revealingly around her figure. Hwi looked up at his entrance.
"Thank the gods you've not been harmed," she said.
Idaho glanced back at his entry, at the palm-locked door. He returned a speculative look at Hwi. No one but a few selected guards should be able to open that door.
She smiled at his confusion. "We lxians manufactured those locks," she said.
He found himself filled with fear for her. "What are you doing here?"
"We must talk."
"About what?"
"Duncan..." She shook her head. "About us."
"They warned you," he said.
"I've been told to reject you."
"Moneo sent you!"
"Two guardswomen who overheard you in the mess-they brought me. They think you are in terrible danger."
"Is that why you're here?"
She stood, one graceful motion which reminded him of the way Leto's grandmother, Jessica, had moved-the same fluid control of muscles, every movement beautiful.
Realization came as a shock. "You're Bene Gesserit..."
"No! They were among my teachers, but I am not Bene Gesserit."
Suspicions clouded his mind. What allegiances were really at work in Leto's Empire? What does a ghola know about such things?
The changes since last I lived...
"I suppose you're still just a simple Ixian," he said.
"Please don't sneer at me, Duncan."
"What are you?"
"I am the intended bride of the God Emperor."
"And you'll serve him faithfully!"
"I will."
"Then there's nothing for us to talk about."
"Except this thing between us."
He cleared his throat. "What thing?"
"This attraction." She raised a hand as he started to speak. "I want to hurl myself into your arms, to find the love and shelter I know is there. You want it, too."
He held himself rigid. "The God Emperor forbids!"
"But I am here." She took two steps toward him, the gown rippling across her body.
"Hwi..." He tried to swallow in a dry throat. "It's best you leave."
"Prudent, but not best," she said.
"If he finds that you've been here..."
"It is not my way to leave you like this." Again, she stopped his response with a lifted hand. "I was bred and trained for just one purpose."
Her words filled him with icy caution. "What purpose?"
"To woo the God Emperor. Oh, he knows this. He would not change a thing about me."
"Nor would L"
She moved a step closer. He smelled the milky warmth of her breath.
"They made me too well," she said. "I was designed to please an Atreides. Leto says his Duncan is more an Atreides than many born to the name."
"Leto?"
"How else should I address the one I'll wed?"
Even as she spoke, Hwi leaned toward Idaho. As though a magnet had found its point of critical attraction, they moved together. Hwi pressed her cheek against his tunic, her arms around him feeling the hard muscles. Idaho rested his chin in her hair, the musk filling his senses.
"This is insane," he whispered.
"Yes."
He lifted her chin and kissed her.
She pressed herself against him.
Neither of them doubted where this must lead. She did not resist when he lifted her off her feet and carried her into the bedroom.
Only once did Idaho speak. "You're not a virgin."
"Nor are you, love."
"Love," he whispered. "Love, love, love..."
"Yes... yes!"
In the post-coital peace, Hwi put both hands behind her head and stretched, twisting on the rumpled bed. Idaho sat with his back to her looking out the window.
"Who were your other lovers?" he asked.
She lifted herself on one elbow. "I've had no other lovers." "But..." He turned and looked down at her.
"In my teens," she said, "there was a young man who needed me very much." She smiled. "Afterward, I was very ashamed. How trusting I was! I thought I had failed the people who depended on me. But they found out and they were elated. You know, I think I was being tested."
Idaho scowled. "Is that how it was with me? I needed you?" "No, Duncan." Her features were grave. "We gave joy to each other because that's how it is with love."
"Love!" he said, and it was a bitter sound.
She said: "My Uncle Malky used to say that love was a bad bargain because you get no guarantees."
"Your Uncle Malky was a wise man."
"He was stupid! Love needs no guarantees."
A smile twitched at the corners of Idaho's mouth.
She grinned up at him. "You know it's love when you want to give joy and damn the consequences."
He nodded. "I think only of the danger to you."
"We are what we are," she said.
"What will we do?"
"We'll cherish this for as long as we live."
"You sound... so final."
"I am."
"But we'll see each other every...
"Never again like this."
"Hwi!" He hurled himself across the bed and buried his face in her breast.
She stroked his hair.
His voice muffled against her, he said: "What if I've impreg...
"Shush! If there's to be a child, there will be a child."
Idaho lifted his head and looked at her. "But he'll know for sure!"
"He'll know anyway."
"You think he really knows everything?"
"Not everything, but he'll know this."
"How?"
"I will tell him."
Idaho pushed himself away from her and sat up on the bed. Anger warred with confusion in his expression.
"I must," she said.
"If he turns against you... Hwi, there are stories. You could be in terrible danger!"
"No. I have needs, too. He knows this. He will not harm either of us."
"But he..."
"He will not destroy me. He will know that if he harms you that would destroy me."
"How can you marry him?"
"Dear Duncan, have you not seen that he needs me more than you do?"
"But he cannot... I mean, you can't possibly...
"The joy that you and I have in each other, I'll not have that with Leo. It's impossible for him. He has confessed this to me."
"Then why can't... If he loves you..."
"He has larger plans and larger needs." She reached out and took Idaho's right hand in both of hers. "I've known that since I first began to study about him. Needs larger than either of us have."
"What plans? What needs?"
"Ask him."
"Do you know?" "Yes.., "You mean you believe those stories about..." "There is honesty and goodness in him. I know it by my own responses to him. What my Ixian masters made in me was, I think, a reagent which reveals more than they wanted me to know."
"Then you believe him!" Idaho accused. He tried to pull his hand away from her.
"If you go to him, Duncan, and..."
"He'll never see me again!"
"He will."
She pulled his hand to her mouth and kissed his fingers.
"I'm a hostage," he said. "You've made me fearful... the two of you together..."
"I never thought it would be easy to serve God," she said. "I just didn't think it would be this hard."
- = Memory has a curious meaning to me, a meaning I have hoped others might share. It continually astonished me how people hide from their ancestral memories, shielding themselves behind a thick barrier of mythos. Ohhh, I do not expect them to seek the terrible immediacy of every living moment which I must experience. I can understand that they might not want to be submerged in a mush of petty ancestral details. You have reason to fear that your living moments might be taken over by others. Yet, the meaning is there within those memories. We carry all of our ancestry forward like a living wave, all of the hopes and joys and griefs, the agonies and the exultations of our past. Nothing within those memories remains completely without meaning or influence, not as long as there is a humankind somewhere. We have that bright Infinity all around us, that Golden Path of forever to which we can continually pledge our puny but inspired allegiance.
- The Stolen Journals "I HAVE summoned yon, Moneo, because of what my guards tell me," Leto said.
They stood in the darkness of the crypt where, Moneo reminded himself, some of the God Emperor's most painful decisions originated. Moneo, too, had heard reports. He had been expecting the summons all afternoon and, when it came shortly after the evening meal, a moment of terror had engulfed him.
"Is it about... about the Duncan, Lord?"
"Of course it's about the Duncan!"
"I'm told, Lord... his behavior..."
"Terminal behavior, Moneo?"
Moneo bowed his head. "If you say it, Lord."
"How long until the Tleilaxu could supply us with another one?"
"They say they have had problems, Lord. It might be as much as two years."
"Do you know what my guards tell me, Moneo?"
Moneo held his breath. If the God Emperor had learned about this latest... No! Even the Fish Speakers were terrified by the affront. Had it been anyone but a Duncan, the women would have taken it upon themselves to eliminate him.
"Well, Moneo?"
"I am told, Lord, that he called out a levy of guards and questioned them about their origins. On what worlds were they born? What of their parentage, their childhood?"
"And the answers did not please him."
"He frightened them, Lord. He kept insisting."
"As though repetition could elicit the truth, yes."
Moneo allowed himself to hope that this might be the whole of his Lord's concern. "Why do the Duncans always do this, Lord?"
"It was their early training, the Atreides training."
"But how did that differ from..."
"The Atreides lived in the service of the people they governed. The measure of their government was found in the lives of the governed. Thus, the Duncans always want to know how the people live."
"He has spent a night in one village, Lord. He has been to some of the towns. He has seen..."
"It's all in how you interpret the results, Moneo. Evidence is nothing without judgments."
"I have observed that he judges, Lord."
"We all do, but the Duncans tend to believe that this universe is hostage to my will. And they know that you cannot do wrong in the name of right."
"Is that what he says you..."
"It is what I say, what all of the Atreides in me say. This universe will not permit it. The things you attempt will not endure if you..."
"But, Lord! You do no wrong!" -"Poor Moneo. You cannot see that I have created a vehicle of injustice."
Moneo could not speak. He realized that he had been diverted by a seeming return to mildness in the God Emperor. But now, Moneo sensed changes moving in that great body, and at this proximity...Moneo glanced around the crypt's central chamber, reminding himself of the many deaths which had occurred here and which were enshrined here.
Is it my time?
Leto spoke in a musing tone. "You cannot succeed by taking hostages. That is a form of enslavement. One kind of human cannot own another kind of human. This universe will not permit it."
The words lay there, simmering in Moneo's awareness, a terrifying contrast to the rumblings of transformation which he sensed in his Lord.
The Worm comes!
Again, Moneo glanced around the crypt chamber. This place was far worse than the aerie! Sanctuary was too remote.
"Well, Moneo, do you have any response?" Leto asked.
Moneo ventured a whisper: "The Lord's words enlighten me."
"Enlighten? You are not enlightened!"
Moneo spoke out of desperation. "But I serve my Lord!"
"You claim service to God?"
"Yes, Lord."
"Who created your religion, Moneo?"
"You did, Lord."
"That's a sensible answer."
"Thank you, Lord."
"Don't thank me! Tell me what religious institutions perpetuate!"
Moneo backed away four steps.
"Stand where you are!" Leto ordered.
Trembling all through his body, Moneo shook his head dumbly. At last, he had encountered the question without answer. Failure to answer would precipitate his death. He waited for it, head bowed.
"Then I will tell you, poor servant," Leto said.
Moneo dared to hope. He lifted his gaze to the God Emperor's face, noting that the eyes were not glazed... and the hands were not trembling. Perhaps the Worm did not come.
"Religious institutions perpetuate a mortal master-servant relationship," Leto said. "They create an arena which attracts prideful human power-seekers with all of their nearsighted prejudices!"
Moneo could only nod. Was that a trembling in the God Emperor's hands? Was the terrible face withdrawing slightly into its cowl?
"The secret revelations of infamy, that is what the Duncans ask after," Leto said. "The Duncans have too much compassion for their fellows and too sharp a limit on fellowship."
Moneo had studied holos of Dune's ancient sandworms, the gigantic mouths full of crysknife teeth around consuming fire. He noted the tumescence of the latent rings on Leto's tubular surface. Were they more prominent? Would a new mouth open below that cowled face?
"The Duncans know in their hearts," Leto said, "that I have deliberately ignored the admonition of Mohammed and Moses. Even you know it, Moneo!"
It was an accusation. Moneo started to nod, then shook his head from side to side. He wondered if he dared renew his retreat. Moneo knew from experience that lectures in this tenor did not long continue without the coming of the Worm.
"What might that admonition be?" Leto asked. There was a mocking lightness in his voice.
Moneo allowed himself a faint shrug.
Abruptly, Leto's voice filled the chamber with a rumbling baritone, an ancient voice which spoke across the centuries: "You are servants unto God, not servants unto servants!"
Moneo wrung his hands and cried out: "I serve you, Lord!"
"Moneo, Moneo," Leto said, his voice low and resonant, "a million wrongs cannot give rise to one right. The right is known because it endures."
Moneo could only stand in trembling silence.
"I had intended Hwi to mate with you, Moneo," Leto said. "Now, it is too late."
The words took a moment penetrating Moneo's consciousness. He felt that their meaning was out of any known context. Hwi? Who was Hwi? Oh, yes-the God Emperor's Ixian bride-to-be. Mate... with me?
Moneo shook his head.
Leto spoke with infinite sadness: "You, too, shall pass away.
Will all your works be as dust forgotten?"
Without any warning, even as he spoke, Leto's body convulsed in a thrashing roll which heaved him from the cart. The speed of it, the monstrous violence, threw him within centimeters of Moneo, who screamed and fled across the crypt.
"Moneo!"
Leto's call stopped the majordomo at the entrance to the lift "The test, Moneo! I will test Siona tomorrow!" -= The realization of what I am occurs in the timeless awareness which does not stimulate nor delude. I create a field without self or center, a field where even death becomes only analogy. I desire no results. I merely permit this field which has no goals nor desires, no perfections nor even visions of achievements. In that field, omnipresent primal awareness is all. It is the light which pours through the windows of my universe.
- The Stolen Journals THE SUN came up, sending its harsh glare across the dunes. Leto felt the sand beneath him as a soft caress. Only his human ears, hearing the abrasive rasp of his heavy body, reported otherwise. It was a sensory conflict which he had learned to accept.
He heard Siona walking behind him, a lightness in her tread, a gentle spilling of sand as she climbed to his level atop a dune.
The longer I endure, the more vulnerable I become, he thought.
This thought often occurred to him these days when he went into his desert. He peered upward. The sky was cloudless with a blue density which the old days of Dune had never seen.
What was a desert without a cloudless sky? Too bad it could not have Dune's silvery hue.
Ixian satellites controlled this sky, not always to the perfection he might desire. Such perfection was a machine-fantasy which faltered under human management. Still, the satellites held a sufficiently steady grip to give him this morning of desert stillness. He gave his human lungs a deep breath of it and listened for Siona's approach. She had stopped. He knew she was admiring the view.
Leto felt his imagination like a conjurer calling up everything which had produced the physical setting for this moment. He felt the satellites. Fine instruments which played the music for the dance of warming and cooling air masses, perpetually monitoring and adjusting the powerful vertical and horizontal currents. It amused him to recall that the lxians had thought he would use this exquisite machinery in a new kind of hydraulic despotism-withholding moisture from those who defied their ruler, punishing others with terrible storms. How surprised they had been to f-and themselves mistaken!
My controls are more subtle.
Slowly, gently, he began to move, swimming on the sand surface, gliding down off the dune, never once looking back at the thin spire of his tower, knowing that it would vanish presently into the haze of daytime heat.
Siona followed him with an uncharacteristic docility. Doubt had done its work. She had read the stolen journals. She had listened to the admonitions of her father. Now, she did not know what to think.
"What is this test?" she had asked Moneo. "What will he do?"
"It is never the same."
"How did he test you?"
"It will be different with you. I would only confuse you if I told you my experience."
Leto had listened secretly while Moneo prepared his daughter, dressing her in an authentic Fremen stillsuit with a dark robe over it, fitting the boot-pumps correctly. Moneo had not forgotten.
Moneo had looked up from where he bent to adjust her boots. "The Worm will come. That is all I can tell you. You must find a way to live in the presence of the Worm."
He had stood then, explaining about the stillsuit, how it recycled her body's own waters. He made her pull the tube from a catchpocket and suck on it, then reseal the tube.
"You will be alone with him on the desert," Moneo had said. "Shai-Hulud is never far away when you're on the desert."
"What if I refuse to go?" she asked.
"You will go... but you may not return."
This conversation had occurred in the ground-level chamber of the Little Citadel while Leto waited in the aerie. He had come down when he knew Siona was ready, drifting down in the predawn darkness on his cart's suspensors. The cart had gone into the ground level room after Moneo and Siona emerged. While Moneo marched across-the flat ground to his 'thopter and left in a whispering of wings, Leto had required Siona to test the sealed portal of the ground-level chamber, then look upward at the tower's impossible heights.
"The only way out is across the Sareer," he said.
He led her away from the tower then, not even commanding her to follow, depending on her good sense, her curiosity and her doubts.
Leto's swimming progress took him down the dune's slipface and onto an exposed section of the rocky basement complex, then up another sandy face at a shallow angle, creating a path for Siona to follow. Fremen had called such compression tracks "God's gift to the weary." He moved slowly, giving Siona plenty of time in which to recognize that this was his domain, his natural habitat.
He came out atop another dune and turned to watch her progress. She held to the track he had provided and stopped only when she reached the top. Her glance went once to his face then she turned a full circle to examine the horizon. He heard the sharp intake of her breath. Heat haze hid the spire's top. The base might have been a distant outcropping.
"This is how it was," he said.
There was something about the desert which spoke to the eternal soul of people who possessed Fremen blood, he knew. He had chosen this place for its desert impact-a dune slightly higher than the others.
"Take a good look at it," he said, and he slipped down the dune's other side to remove his bulk from her view.
Siona took one more slow turn, looking outward.
Leto knew the innermost sensation of what she saw. Except for that insignificant, blurred blip of his tower's base, there was not the slightest lift of horizon-flat, everywhere flat. No plants, no living movement. From her vantage, there was a limit of approximately eight kilometers to the line where the planet's curvature hid everything beyond.
Leto spoke from where he had stopped, just below the dune's crest. "This is the real Sareer. You only know it when you're down here afoot. This is all that's left of the bahr bela ma."
"The ocean without water," she whispered.
Again, she turned and examined the entire horizon.
There was no wind and, Leto knew, without wind, the silence ate at the human soul. Siona was feeling the loss of all familiar reference points. She was abandoned in dangerous space.
Leto glanced at the next dune. In that direction, they would come presently to a low line of hills which originally had been mountains but now were broken into remnant slag and rubble. He continued to rest quietly, letting the silence do his work for him. It was even pleasant to imagine that these dunes went on, as they once had, without end completely around the planet. But even these few dunes were degenerating. Without the original Coriolis storms of Dune, the Sareer saw nothing stronger than a stiff breeze and occasional heat vortices which had no more than local effect.
One of these tiny "wind devils" danced across the middle distance to the south. Siona's gaze followed its track. She spoke abruptly: "Do you have a personal religion?"
Leto took a moment composing his reply. It always astonished him how a desert provoked thoughts of religion.
"You dare ask me if I have a personal religion?" he demanded.
Betraying no surface sign of the fears he knew she felt, Siona turned and stared down at him. Audacity was always an Atreides hallmark, he reminded himself.
When she didn't answer, he said: "You are an Atreides for sure."
"Is that your answer?" she asked.
"What is it you really want to know, Siona?"
"What you believe!"
"Ho! You ask after my faith. Well, now-I believe that something cannot emerge from nothing without divine intervention."
His answer puzzled her. "How is that an..."
"Natura non facit saltus," he said.
She shook her head, not understanding the ancient allusion which had sprung to his lips. Leto translated:
"Nature makes no leaps."
"What language was that?" she asked.
"A language no longer spoken anywhere else in my universe."
"Why did you use it then?"
"To prod your ancient memories."
"I don't have any! I just need to know why you brought me here."
"To give you a taste of your past. Come down here and climb onto my back."
She hesitated at first, then seeing the futility of defiance, slid down the dune and clambered onto his back.
Leto waited until she was kneeling atop him. It was not the same as the old times he knew. She had no Maker hooks and could not stand on his back. He lifted his front segments slightly off the surface.
"Why am I doing this?" she asked. Her tone said she felt silly up there.
"I want you to taste the way our people once moved proudly across this land, high atop the back of a giant sandworm."
He began to glide along the dune just below the crest. Siona had seen holos. She knew this experience intellectually, but the pulse of reality had a different beat and he knew she would resonate to it.
Ahhh, Siona, he thought, you do not even begin to suspect how I will test you.
Leto steeled himself then. I must have no pity. If she dies, she dies. If any of them dies, that is a required event, no more.
And he had to remind himself that this applied even to Hwi Noree. It was just that all of them could not die.
He sensed it when Siona began to enjoy the sensation of riding on his back. He felt a faint shift in her weight as she eased back onto her legs to lift her head.
He drove outward then along a curving barracan, joining Siona in enjoyment of the old sensations. Leto could just glimpse the remnant hills at the horizon ahead of him. They were like a seed from the past waiting there, a reminder of the self-sustaining and expanding force which operated in a desert. He could forget for a moment that on this planet where only a small fraction of the surface remained desert, the Sareer's dynamism existed in a precarious environment.
The illusion of the past was here, though. He felt it as he moved. Fantasy, of course, he told himself, a vanishing fantasy as long as his enforced tranquility continued. Even the sweeping barracan which he traversed now was not as great as the ones of the past. None of the dunes were that great.
This whole maintained desert struck him suddenly as ridiculous. He almost stopped on a pebbled surface between the dunes, continuing but more slowly as he tried to conjure up the necessities which kept the whole system working. He imagined the planet's rotation setting up great air currents which shifted cold and heated air to new regions in enormous volume-everything monitored and ruled by those tiny satellites with their Ixian instruments and heat-focusing dishes. If the high monitors saw anything, they saw the Sareer partly as a "relief desert" with both physical and cold-air walls girdling it. This tended to create ice at the edges and required even more climatic adjustments.
It was not easy and Leto forgave the occasional mistakes for that reason.
As he moved once more out onto dunes, he lost that sense of delicate balance, put aside memories of the pebbly wastelands outside the central sands, and gave himself up to enjoyment of his "petrified ocean" with its frozen and apparently immovable waves. He turned southward, parallel to the remnant hills.
He knew that most people were offended by his infatuation with desert. They were uneasy and turned away. Siona, however, could not turn away. Everywhere she looked, the desert demanded recognition. She rode silently on his back, but he knew her eyes were full. And the old-old memories were beginning to churn.
He came within three hours to a region of cylindrical whaleback dunes, some of them more than one hundred and fifty kilometers long at an angle to the prevailing wind. Beyond them lay a rocky corridor between dunes and into a region of star dunes almost four hundred meters high. Finally, they entered the braided dunes of the central erg where the general high pressure and electrically charged air gave his spirits a lift. He knew the same magic would be working on Siona.
"Here is where the songs of the Long Trek originated," he said. "They are perfectly preserved in the Oral History."
She did not answer, but he knew she heard.
Leto slowed his pace and began to speak to Siona, telling her about their Fremen past. He sensed the quickening of her interest. She even asked questions occasionally, but he could also feel her fears building. Even the base of his Little Citadel was no longer visible here. She could recognize nothing manmade. And she would think he engaged now in small talk, unimportant things to put off something portentous.
"Equality between our men and women originated here," he said.
"Your Fish Speakers deny that men and women are equal," she said.
Her voice, full of questioning disbelief, was a better locator than the sensation of her crouched on his back. Leto stopped at the intersection of two braided dunes and let the venting of his heat-generated oxygen subside.
"Things are not the same today," he said. "But men and women do have different evolutionary demands upon them. With the Fremen, though, there was an interdependence. That fostered equality out here where questions of survival can become immediate."
"Why did you bring me here?" she demanded.
"Look behind us," he said.
He felt her turn. Presently, she said: "What am I supposed to see?"
"Have we left any tracks? Can you tell where we've been?"
"There's a little wind now."
"It has covered our tracks?"
"I guess so... yes."
"This desert made us what we were and are," he said. "It's the real museum of all our traditions. Not one of those traditions has really been lost."
Leto saw a small sandstorm, a ghibli, moving across the southern horizon. He noted the narrow ribbons of dust and sand moving out ahead of it. Surely, Siona had seen it.
"Why won't you tell me why you brought me here?" she asked. Fear was obvious in her voice.
"But I have told you."
"You have not!"
"How far have we come, Siona?"
She thought about this. "Thirty kilometers? Twenty?"
"Farther," he said. "I can move very fast in my own land. Didn't you feel the wind on your face?"
"Yes." Sullen. "So why ask me how far?"
"Come down and stand where I can see you." ..Why?"
Good, he thought. She believes I will abandon her here and speed off faster than she can follow.
"Come down and I'll explain," he said.
She slid off his back and came around to where she could look into his face.
"Time passes swiftly when your senses are full," he said.
"We have been out almost four hours. We have come about sixty kilometers."
"Why is that important?"
"Moneo put dried food in the pouch of your robe," he said. "Eat a little and I will tell you."
She found a dried cube of protomor in the pouch and chewed on it while she watched him. It was the authentic old Fremen food even to the slight addition of melange.
"You have felt your past," he said. "Now, you must be sensitized to your future, to the Golden Path."
She swallowed. "I don't believe in your Golden Path."
"If you are to live, you will believe in it."
"Is that your test? Have faith in the Great God Leto or die?"
"You need no faith in me whatsoever. I want you to have faith in yourself."
"Then why is it important how far we've come?"
"So you'll understand how far you still have to go."
She put a hand to her cheek. "I don't..."
"Right where you stand," he said, "you are in the unmistakable midst of Infinity. Look around you at the meaning of Infinity."
She glanced left and right at the unbroken desert.
"We are going to walk out of my desert together," he said. "Just the two of us."
"You don't walk," she sneered.
"A figure of speech. But you will walk. I assure you of that."
She looked in the direction they had come. "So that's why you asked me about tracks."
"Even if there were tracks, you could not go back. There is nothing at my Little Citadel that you could get to and use for survival."
"No water?"
"Nothing."
She found the catchpocket tube at her shoulder, sucked at it and restored it. He noted the care with which she sealed the end, but she did not pull the face flap across her mouth, although Leto had heard her father warning her about this. She wanted her mouth free for talking!
"You're telling me I can't run away from you," she said.
"Run away if you want."
She turned a full circle, examining the wasteland.
"There is a saying about the open land," he said, "that one direction is as good as another. In some ways, that's still true, but I would not depend on it."
"But I'm really free to leave you if I want?"
"Freedom can be a very lonely estate," he said.
She pointed to the steep side of the dune on which they had stopped. "But I could just go down there and..."
"Were I you, Siona, I would not go down where you are pointing."
She glared at him. "Why?"
"On the dune's steep side, unless you follow the natural curves, the sand may slide down upon you and bury you."
She looked down the slope, absorbing this.
"See how beautiful words can be?" he asked.
She returned her attention to his face. "Should we be going?"
"You learn to value leisure out here. And courtesy. There's no hurry."
"But we have no water except the..
."
"Used wisely, that stillsuit will keep you alive."
"But how long will it take us to..."
"Your impatience alarms me."
"But we have only this dried food in my pouch. What will we eat when..."
"Siona! Have you noticed that you are expressing our situation as mutual. What will we eat? We have no water. Should we be going? How long will it take us?"
He sensed the dryness of her mouth as she tried to swallow.
"Could it be that we're interdependent?" he asked.
She spoke reluctantly. "I don't know how to survive out here."
"But I do?"
She nodded.
"Why should I share such precious knowledge with you?" he asked.
She shrugged, a pitiful gesture which touched him. How quickly the desert cut away previous attitudes.
"I will share my knowledge with you," he-said. "And you must find something valuable that you can share with me."
Her gaze traversed his length, paused a moment at the flippers which once were his legs and feet, then came back to his face.
"Agreement bought with threats is no agreement," she said.
"I offer you no violence."
"There are many kinds of violence," she said.
"And I brought you out here where you may die?"
"Did I have a choice in it?"
"It is difficult to be born an Atreides," he said. "Believe me, I know."
"You don't have to do it this way," she said.
"And there you are wrong."
He turned away from her and set off in a sinusoidal track down the dune. He heard her slipping and stumbling as she followed. Leto stopped well into the dune shadow.
"We'll wait out the day here," he said. "It uses less water to travel by night."
- = One of the most terrible words in any language is Soldier. The synonyms parade through our history: yogahnee, trooper, hussar, kareebo, cossack, deranzeef, legionnaire, sardaukar, fish speaker... I know them all. They stand there in the ranks of my memory to remind me: Always make sure you have the army with you.
- The Stolen Journals IDAHO FOUND Moneo at last in the long underground corridor which connected the Citadel's eastern and western complexes. Since daybreak two hours before, Idaho had been prowling the Citadel seeking the majordomo and there he was, far off down the corridor, talking to someone concealed in a doorway, but Moneo was recognizable even at this distance by his stance and that inevitable white uniform.
The corridor's plastone walls were amber here fifty meters below the surface and lighted by glowstrips keyed to the daylight hours. Cool breezes were drawn into these depths by a simple arrangement of free swinging wings which stood like gigantic robed figures on perimeter towers at the surface. Now that the sun had warmed the sands, all of the wings pointed northward for the cool air pouring into the Sareer. Idaho smelled the flinty breeze as he walked.
He knew what this corridor was supposed to represent. It did have some characteristics of an ancient Fremen sietch. The corridor was wide, big enough to take Leto on his cart. The arched ceiling looked like rock. But the twin glowstrips were discord. Idaho had never seen glowstrips before coming to the Citadel; they had been considered impractical in his day, requiring too much energy, too costly to maintain. Glowglobes were simpler and easily replaced. He had come to realize, however, that Leto considered few things impractical.
What Leto wants, someone provides.
The thought had an ominous feeling as Idaho marched down the corridor toward Moneo.
Small rooms lined the corridor sietch-fashion, no doors, only thin hangings of russet fabric which swayed in the breeze. Idaho knew that this area was mostly quarters for the younger Fish Speakers. He had recognized an assembly chamber with attendant rooms for weapons storage, kitchen, a dining hall, maintenance shops. He had also seen other things behind the inadequate privacy of the hangings, things which fed his rage.
Moneo turned at Idaho's approach. The woman to whom Moneo had been talking retreated and let the hanging drop, but not before Idaho glimpsed an older face with an air of command about it. Idaho did not recognize that particular commander.
Moneo nodded as Idaho stopped two paces away.
"The guards say you've been looking for me," Moneo said.
"Where is he, Moneo?"
"Where is who?"
Moneo swept his gaze up and down Idaho's figure, noting the old-fashioned Atreides uniform, black with a red hawk at the breast, the high boots glistening with polish. There was a ritual look about the man.
Idaho took a shallow breath and spoke through clenched teeth: "Don't you start that game with me!"
Moneo took his attention away from the sheathed knife at Idaho's waist. It looked like a museum piece with its jeweled handle. Where had Idaho found it?"
"If you mean the God Emperor..." Moneo said.
"Where?"
Moneo kept his voice mild. "Why are you so anxious to die?"
"They said you were with him."
"That was earlier."
"I'll find him, Moneo!"
"Not right now."
Idaho put a hand on his knife. "Do I have to use force to make you talk?"
"I would not advise that."
"Where... is... he?"
"Since you insist, he is out in the desert with Siona."
"With your daughter?" "Is there another Siona?" "What're they doing?" "She is being tested." "When will they return?" Moneo shrugged, then: "Why this unseemly anger, Duncan?" "What's this test of your..
."
"I don't know. Now, why are you so upset?"
"I'm sick of this place! Fish Speakers!" He turned his head and spat.
Moneo glanced down the corridor behind Idaho, recalling the man's approach. Knowing the Duncans, it was easy to recognize what had fed his current rage.
"Duncan," Moneo said, "it's perfectly normal for adolescent females as well as males to have feelings of physical attraction toward members of their own sex. Most of them will grow out of it."
"It should be stamped out!"
"But it's part of our heritage."
"Stamped out! And that's not..
."
"Oh, be still. If you try to suppress it, you only increase its power."
Idaho glared at him. "And you say you don't know what's going on up there with your own daughter!"
"Siona is being tested, I told you."
"And what's that supposed to mean?"
Moneo put a hand over his eyes and sighed. He lowered the hand, wondering why he put up with this foolish, dangerous, antique human.
"It means that she may die out there."
Idaho was taken aback, some of his anger cooling. "How can you allow..."
"Allow? You think I have a choice?"
"Every man has a choice!"
A bitter smile flitted across Moneo's lips. "How is it that you are so much more foolish than the other Duncans?"
"Other Duncans!" Idaho said. "How did those others die, Moneo?"
"The way we all die. They ran out of time."
"You lie." Idaho spoke past gritted teeth, his knuckles white on the knife handle.
Still speaking mildly, Moneo said: "Have a care. There are limits even to what I will take, especially just now."
"This place is rotten!" Idaho said. He gestured with his free hand at the corridor behind him. "There are some things I'll never accept!"
Moneo stared down the empty corridor without seeing. "You must mature, Duncan. You must."
Idaho's hand tensed on the knife. "What does that mean?"
"These are sensitive times. Anything unsettling to him, anything... must be prevented."
Idaho held himself on the edge of violence, his anger restrained only by something puzzling in Moneo's manner. Words had been spoken, though, which could not be ignored.
"I'm not some damned immature child you can..."
"Duncan!" It was the loudest sound Idaho had ever heard from the mild-mannered Moneo. Surprise stayed Idaho's hand while Moneo continued: "If the demands of your flesh are for maturity, but something holds you in adolescence, quite nasty behavior develops. Let go."
"Are... you... accusing... me... of.,
"No!" Moneo gestured at the corridor. "Oh, I know. what you must've seen back there, but it..."
"Two women in a passionate kiss! You think that's not..."
"It's not important. Youth explores its potential in many ways."
Idaho balanced himself on the edge of an explosion, rocking forward on his toes. "I'm glad to learn about you, Moneo."
"Yes, well, I've learned about you, several times."
Moneo watched the effect of these words as they twisted through Idaho, tangling him. The gholas could never avoid a fascination with the others who had preceded them.
Idaho spoke in a hoarse whisper: "What have you learned?"
"You have taught me valuable things," Moneo said. "All of us try to evolve, but if something blocks us, we can transfer our potential into pain-seeking it or giving it. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable."
Idaho leaned close to Moneo. "I'm talking about sex!"
"Of course you are."
"Are you accusing me of adolescent..."
"That's right."
"I should cut your..
."
"Oh, shut up!"
Moneo's response did not have the training nuances of Bene Gesserit Voice control, but it had a lifetime of command behind it. Something in Idaho could only obey.
"I'm sorry," Moneo said. "But I'm distracted by the fact that my only daughter..." He broke off and shrugged.
Idaho inhaled two deep breaths. "You're crazy, all of you! You say your daughter may be dying and yet you..."
"You fool!" Moneo snapped. "Have you any idea how your petty concerns appear to me! Your stupid questions and your selfish..." He broke off, shaking his head.
"I make allowances because you have personal problems," Idaho said. "But if you..."
"Allowances? You make allowances?" Moneo took a trembling breath. It was too much!
Idaho spoke stiffly: "I can forgive you for..."
"You! You prattle about sex and forgiving and pain and... you think you and Hwi Noree..."
"Leave her out of this!"
"Oh, yes. Leave her out. Leave out that pain! You share sex with her and you never think about parting. Tell me, fool, how do you give of yourself in the face of that?"
Abashed, Idaho inhaled deeply. He had not suspected such passion smoldering in the quiet Moneo, but this attack, this could not be...
"You think I'm cruel?" Moneo demanded. "I make you think about things you'd rather avoid. Hah! Crueler things have been done to the Lord Leto for no better reason than the cruelty!"
"You defend him? You..."
"I know him best!"
"He uses you!"
"To what ends?"
"You tell me!"
"He's our best hope to perpetuate..."
"Perverts don't perpetuate!"
Moneo spoke in a soothing tone, but his words shook Idaho. "I will tell you this only once. Homosexuals have been among the best warriors in our history, the berserkers of last resort. They were among our best priests and priestesses. Celibacy was no accident in religions. It is also no accident that adolescents make the best soldiers."
"That's perversion!"
"Quite right. Military commanders have known about the perverted displacement of sex into pain for thousands upon thousands of centuries."
"Is that what the Great Lord Leto's doing?"
Still mild, Moneo said: "Violence requires that you inflict pain and suffer it. How much more manageable a military force driven to this by its deepest urgings."
"He's made a monster out of you, too!"
"You suggested that he uses me," Moneo said. "I permit this because I know that the price he pays is much greater than what he demands of me."
"Even your daughter?"
"He holds back nothing. Why should I? Ohhh, I think you understand this about the Atreides. The Duncans are always good at that."
"The Duncans! Damn you, I won't be..."
"You just haven't the guts to pay the price he's asking," Moneo said.
In one blurred motion, Idaho whipped his knife from its sheath and lunged at Moneo. As fast as he moved, Moneo moved faster-sidestepping, tripping Idaho and propelling him face-down onto the floor. Idaho scrambled forward, rolled and started to leap to his feet, then hesitated, realizing that he had actually tried to attack an Atreides. Moneo was Atreides. Shock held Idaho immobile.
Moneo stood unmoving, looking down at him. There was an odd look of sadness on the majordomo's face.
"If you're going to kill me, Duncan, you'd best do it in the back by stealth," Moneo said. "You might succeed that way."
Idaho levered himself to one knee, put a foot flat on the floor, but remained there still clutching his knife. Moneo had moved so quickly and with such grace-so... so casually! Idaho cleared his throat. "How did you..."
"He has been breeding us for a long time, Duncan, strengthening many things in us. He has bred us for speed, for intelligence, for self-restraint, for sensitivity. You're... you're just an older model." -= Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to assess the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies-in any system which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.
- The Stolen Journals LETO AND Siona lay all day in the dune-shadows, moving only as the sun moved. He taught her how to protect herself under a blanket of sand in the noontime heat; it never grew too warm at the rock-level between the dunes.
In the afternoon, Siona crept close to Leto for warmth, a warmth he knew he had in excess these days.
They talked sporadically. He told her about the Fremen graces which once had dominated this landscape. She probed for secret knowledge of him.
Once, he said: "You may find it odd, but out here is where I can be most human."
His words failed to make her fully conscious of her human vulnerability and the fact that she might die out here. Even when she was not talking, she did not restore the face flap of her stillsuit.
Leto recognized the unconscious motivation behind this failure, but knew the futility of addressing that directly.
In the late afternoon, night's chill already starting to creep over the land, he began regaling her with songs of the Long Trek which had not been saved in the Oral History. He enjoyed the fact that she liked one of his favorites, "Liet's March."
"The tune is really ancient," he said, "a pre-space thing of Old Terra."
"Would you sing it again?"
He chose one of his best baritones, a long-dead artist who had filled many a concert hall.
"The wall of past-beyond-recall Hides me from an ancient fall Where all the waters tumble! And plays of sprays Carve caves in clays Beneath a torrent's rumble."
When he had finished, she was silent for a moment, then: "That's an odd song for marching."
"They liked it because they could dissect it," he said.
"Dissect?"
"Before our Fremen ancestors came to this planet, night was the time for storytelling, songs and poetry. In the Dune days, though, that was reserved for the false dark, the daytime gloom of the sietch. The night was when they could emerge and move about... just as we do now."
"But you said dissect."
"What does that song mean?" he asked.
"Oh. It's... it's just a song."
"Siona!"
She heard anger in his voice and remained silent.
"This planet is the child of the worm," he warned her, "and I am that worm."
She responded with a surprising insouciance: "Then tell me what it means."
"The insect has no more freedom from its hive than we have freedom from our past," he said. "The caves are there and all of the messages written in the sprays of the torrents."
"I prefer dancing songs," she said.
It was a flippant answer, but Leto chose to take it as a change of subject. He told her about the marriage dance of
Fremen women, tracing the steps back to the whirling of dust devils. Leto prided himself on telling a good story. It was clear from her rapt attention that she could see the women whirling before her inner eye, long black hair thrown in the ancient movements, straggling across long-dead faces.
Darkness was almost upon them when he finished.
"Come," he said. "Morning and evening are still the times of silhouettes. Let us see if anyone shares our desert."
Siona followed him up to a dune-crest and they stared all around at the darkening desert. There was only one bird high overhead, attracted by their movements. From the splayed-gap tips on its wings and the shape, he knew it was a vulture. He pointed this out to Siona.
"But what do they eat?" she asked.
"Anything that's dead or nearly so."
This hit her and she stared up at the last of the sunlight gilding the lone bird's flight feathers.
Leto pressed it: "A few people still venture into my Sareer. Sometimes, a Museum Fremen wanders off and gets lost. They're really only good at the rituals. And then there are the desert's edges and the remains of whatever my wolves leave."
At this, she whirled away from him, but not before he saw the passion still consuming her. Siona was being sorely tested.
"There's little daytime graciousness about a desert," he said. "That's another reason we travel by night. To a Fremen, the image of the day was that of windblown sand filling your tracks."
Her eyes glistened with unshed tears when she turned back to him, but her features were composed..
"What lives here now?" she asked.
"The vultures, a few night creatures, an occasional remnant of plant life out of the old days, burrowing things."
"Is that all?"
"Yes." .,Why?"
"Because this is where they were born and I permit them to know nothing better."
It was almost dark with that sudden glowing light his desert acquired in these moments. He studied her in that luminous moment, recognizing that she had not yet understood his other message. He knew that message would sit there, though, and fester in her."Silhouettes," she said, reminding him. "What did you expect to find when we came up here?"
"Perhaps people at a distance. You're never certain."
"What people?"
"I've already told you."
"What would you've done if you'd seen anyone?"
"It was the Fremen custom to treat distant people as hostile until they threw sand into the air."
As he spoke, darkness fell over them like a curtain.
Siona became ghostly movement in the sudden starlight. "Sand?" she asked.
"Thrown sand is a profound gesture. It says: `We share the same burden. Sand is our only enemy. This is what we drink. The hand that holds sand holds no weapon.' Do you understand this?"
"No!" She taunted him with a defiant falsehood.
"You will," he said.
Without a word, she set out along the arc of their dune, striding away from him with an angry excess of energy. Leto allowed himself to fall far behind her, interested that she had instinctively chosen the right direction. Fremen memories could be felt churning in her.
Where the dune dipped to cross another, she waited for him. He saw that the face flap of her stillsuit remained open, hanging loose. It was not yet time to chide her about this. Some unconscious things had to run their natural course.
As he came up to her, she said: "Is this as good a direction as any other?"
"If you keep to it," he said.
She glanced up at the stars and he saw her identify the Pointers, those Fremen Arrows which had led her ancestors across this land. He could see, though, that her recognition was mostly intellectual. She had not yet come to accept the other things working within her.
Leto lifted his front segments to peer ahead in the starlight. They were moving a little west of north on a track that once had led across Habbanya Ridge and Cave of Birds into the erg below False Wall West and the way to Wind Pass. None of those landmarks remained. He sniffed a cool breeze with flint smells in it and more moisture than he found pleasant.
Once more, Siona set off-slower this time, holding her course by occasional glances at the stars. She had trusted Leto to confirm the way, but now she guided herself. He sensed the turmoil beneath her wary thoughts, and he knew the things which were emerging. She had the beginnings of that intense loyalty to traveling companions which desert folk always trusted.
We know, he thought. If you are separated from your companions, you are lost among dunes and rocks. The lone traveler in the desert is dead. Only the worm lives alone out here.
He let her get well ahead of him where the grating sand of his passage would not be too prominent. She had to think of his human-self. He counted on loyalty to work for him. Siona was brittle, though, filled with suppressed rage-more of a rebel than any other he had ever tested.
Leto glided along behind her, reviewing the breeding program, shaping the necessary decisions for a replacement should she fail.
As the night progressed, Siona moved slower and slower. First Moon was high overhead and Second Moon well above the horizon before she stopped to rest and eat.
Leto was glad of the pause. Friction had set up a worm dominance, the air around him full of the chemical exhalations from his temperature adjustments. The thing he thought of as his oxygen supercharger vented steadily, making him intensely aware of the protein factories and amino acid resources his worm-self had acquired to accommodate the placental relationship with his human cells. Desert quickened the movement toward his final metamorphosis.
Siona had stopped near the crest of a star dune. "Is it true that you eat the sand?" she asked as he came up to her.
"It's true."
She stared all around the moon-frosted horizon. "Why didn't we bring a signal device?"
"I wanted you to learn about possessions."
She turned toward him. He sensed her breath close to his face. She was losing too much moisture into the dry air. Still, she did not remember Moneo's admonition. It would be a bitter lesson, no doubt of that.
"I don't understand you at all," she said.
"Yet, you are committed to doing just that."
"Am I?"
"How else can you give me something of value in exchange for what I give you?"
"What do you give me?" All of the bitterness was there and a hint of the spice from her dried food.
"I give you this opportunity to be alone with me, to share with me, and you spend this time without concern. You waste it."
"What about possessions?" she demanded.
He heard fatigue in her voice, the water message beginning to scream within her.
"They were magnificently alive in the old days, those Fremen," he said. "And their eye for beauty was limited to that which was useful. I never met a greedy Fremen."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"In the old days, everything you took into the desert was a necessity and that was all you took. Your life is no longer free of possessions, Siona, or you would not have asked about a signal device."
"Why isn't a signal device necessary?"
"It would teach you nothing."
He moved out around her along the track indicated by the Pointers. "Come. Let us use this night to our profit."
She came hurrying up to walk beside his cowled face. "What happens if I don't learn your damned lesson?"
"You'll probably die," he said.
That silenced her for a time. She trudged along beside him with only an occasional sideward glance, ignoring the worm-body, concentrating on the visible remnants of his humanity. After a time, she said: "The Fish Speakers told me that you ordered the mating from which I was born."
"That's true."
"They say you keep records and that you order these Atreides matings for your own purposes."
"That also is true."
"Then the Oral History is correct."
"I thought you believed the Oral History without question?"
She was on a single track, though: "What if one of us objects when you order a mating?"
"I allow a wide latitude just as long as there are the children I have ordered."
"Ordered?" She was outraged.
"That's what I do."
"You can't creep into every bedroom or follow every one of us every minute of our lives! How do you know your orders are obeyed?"
"I know."
"Then you know I'm not going to obey you!"
"Are you thirsty, Siona?"
She was startled. "What?"
"Thirsty people speak of water, not of sex."
Still, she did not seal her mouth flap, and he thought: Atreides passions always did run strong, even at the expense of reason.
Within two hours, they came down out of the dunes onto a wind-scoured flat of pebbles. Leto moved onto it, Siona close to his side. She looked frequently at the Pointers. Both moons were low on the horizon now and their light cast long shadows behind every boulder.
In some ways, Leto found such places more comfortable to traverse than the sand. Solid rock was a better heat conductor than sand. He could flatten himself against the rock and ease the working of his chemical factories. Pebbles and even sizable rocks did not impede him.
Siona had more trouble here, though, and almost turned an ankle several times.
The flatland could be a very trying place for humans unaccustomed to it, he thought. If they stayed close to the ground, they saw only the great emptiness, an eerie place especially in moonlight-dunes at a distance, a distance which seemed not to change as the traveler moved-nothing anywhere except the seemingly eternal wind, a few rocks and, when they looked upward, stars without mercy. This was the desert of the desert.
"Here's where Fremen music acquired its eternal loneliness," he said, "not up on the dunes. Here's where you really learn to think that heaven must be the sound of running water and relief-any relief-from that endless wind."
Even this did not remind her of that face flap. Leto began to despair.
Morning found them far out on the flat.
Leto stopped beside three large boulders, all piled against each other, one of them taller even than his back. Siona leaned against him for a moment, a gesture which restored Leto's hopes somewhat. She pushed herself away presently and clambered up onto the highest boulder. He watched her turn up there, examining the landscape.
Without even looking at it Leto knew what she saw: blowing sand like fog on the horizon obscured the rising sun. For the rest, there was only the flat and the wind.
The rock was cold beneath him with the chill of a desert morning. The cold made the air much drier and he found it more pleasant. Without Siona, he would have moved on, but she was visibly exhausted. She leaned against him once more when she came down from the rock and it was almost a minute before he realized that she was listening.
"What do you hear?" he asked.
She spoke sleepily. "You rumble inside."
"The fire never goes completely out."
This interested her. She pushed herself away from his side and came around to look into his face. "Fire?"
"Every living thing has a fire within it, some slow, some very fast. Mine is hotter than most."
She hugged herself against the chill. "Then you're not cold here?"
"No, but I can see that you are." He pulled his face partly into its cowl and created a depression at the bottom arc of his first segment. "It's almost like a hammock," he said, looking down. "If you curl up there, you will be warm."
Without hesitating, she accepted his invitation.
Even though he had prepared her for it, he found the trusting response touching. He had to fight against a feeling of pity far stronger than any he had experienced before knowing Hwi. There could be no room for pity out here, though, he told himself. Siona was betraying clear signs that she would more than likely die here. He had to prepare himself for disappointment.
Siona shielded her face with an arm, closed her eyes and went to sleep.
Nobody has ever had as many yesterdays as I have had, he reminded himself.
From the popular human viewpoint, he knew that the things he did here could only appear cruel and callous. He was forced now to strengthen himself by retreating into his memories, deliberately selecting mistakes of our common past. First-hand access to human mistakes was his greatest strength now. Knowledge of mistakes taught him long-term corrections. He had to be constantly aware of consequences. If consequences were lost or concealed, lessons were lost.
But the closer he came to being a sandworm, the harder he found it to make decisions which others would call inhuman. Once, he had done it with ease. As his humanity slipped away, though, he found himself filled with more and more human concerns.
- = In the cradle of our past, I lay upon my back in a cave so shallow I could penetrate it only by squirming, not by crawling. There, by the dancing light of a resin torch, I drew upon walls and ceiling the creatures of the hunt and the souls of my people. How illuminating it is to peer backward through a perfect circle at that ancient struggle for the visible moment of the soul. All time vibrates to that call: "Here I am!" With a mind informed by artist-giants who came afterward, I peer at handprints and flowing muscles drawn upon the rock with charcoal and vegetable dyes. How much more we are than mere mechanical events! And my anti-civil self demands: "Why is it that they do not want to leave the cave?" -The Stolen Journals THE INVITATION to attend Moneo in his workroom came to Idaho late in the afternoon. All day, Idaho had sat upon the sling couch of his quarters, thinking. Every thought radiated outward from the ease with which Moneo had spilled him onto the corridor floor that morning.
"You're just an older model."
With every thought, Idaho felt himself diminished. He sensed the will to live as it faded, leaving ashes where his anger had burned itself out.
I am the conveyance of some useful sperm and nothing more, he thought.
It was a thought which invited either death or hedonism. He felt himself impaled on a thorn of chance with irritating forces pecking at him from all sides.
The young messenger in her neat blue uniform was merely another irritation. She entered at his low-voiced response to her knock and she stopped under the arched portal from his anteroom, hesitating until she had assessed his mood.
How quickly the word travels, he thought.
He saw her there, framed in the portal, a projection of Fish Speaker essence-more voluptuous than some, but no more blatantly sexual. The blue uniform did not conceal graceful hips, firm breasts. He looked up at her puckish face under a brush of blonde hair-acolyte cut.
"Moneo sends me to inquire after you," she said. "He asks that you attend him in his workroom."
Idaho had seen that workroom several times, but still remembered it best from his first view of it. He had known on entering the room that it was where Moneo spent most of his time. There was a table of dark brown wood streaked by fine golden graining, a table about two meters by one meter and set low on stubby legs in the midst of gray cushions. The table had struck Idaho as something rare and expensive, chosen for a single accent. It and the cushions-which were the same gray as floor, walls and ceiling-were the only furnishings.
Considering the power of its occupant, the room was small, no more than five meters by four, but with a high ceiling. Light came from two slender glazed windows opposite each other on the narrower walls. The windows looked out from a considerable height, one onto the northwest fringes of the Sareer and the bordering green of the Forbidden Forest, the other providing a southwest view over rolling dunes.
Contrast.
The table had put an interesting accent on this initial thought. The surface had appeared as an arrangement demonstrating the idea of clutter. Thin sheets of crystal paper lay scattered across the surface, leaving only glimpses of the wood grain underneath. Fine printing covered some of the paper. Idaho recognized words in Galach and four other languages, including the rare transite tongue of Perth. Several sheets of the paper revealed plan drawings and some were scrawled with black strokes of brush-script in the bold style of the Bene Gesserit. Most interesting of all had been four rolled white tubes about a meter long-tri-D printouts from an illegal computer. He had suspected the terminal lay concealed behind a panel in one of the walls.
The young messenger from Moneo cleared her throat to awaken Idaho from his reverie. "What response shall I return to Moneo?" she asked.
Idaho focused on her face. "Would you like me to impregnate you?" he asked.
"Commander!" She was obviously shocked not so much by his suggestion as by its non sequitur intrusion.
"Ahhh, yes," Idaho said. "Moneo. What shall we tell Moneo?"
"He awaits your reply, Commander."
"Is there really any point in my responding?" Idaho asked.
"Moneo told me to inform you that he wishes to confer with both you and the Lady Hwi together."
Idaho sensed a vague arousal of interest. "Hwi is with him?"
"She has been summoned, Commander." The messenger cleared her throat once more. "Would the Commander wish me to visit him here later tonight?"
"No. Thank you, anyway. I've changed my mind."
He thought she concealed her disappointment well, but her voice came out stiffly formal: "Shall I say that you will attend Moneo?"
"Do that." He waved her away.
After she had gone, he considered just ignoring the summons. Curiosity grew in him, though. Moneo wanted to talk to him with Hwi present? Why? Did he think this would bring Idaho running? Idaho swallowed. When he thought of Hwi, the emptiness in his breast became full. The message of that could not be ignored. Something of terrible power bound him to Hwi.
He stood up, his muscles stiff after their long inaction. Curiosity and this binding force impelled him. He went out into the corridor, ignored the curious glances of guards he passed, and followed that compelling inner force up to Moneo's workroom.
Hwi was already there when Idaho entered the room. She was across the cluttered table from Moneo, her feet in red slippers tucked back beside the gray cushion on which she sat. Idaho saw only that she wore a long brown gown with a braided green belt, then she turned and he could look at nothing except her face. Her mouth formed his name without speaking it.
Even she has heard, he thought.
Oddly, this thought strengthened him. The thoughts of this day began to form new shapes in his mind.
"Please sit down, Duncan," Moneo said. He gestured to a cushion beside Hwi. His voice conveyed a curious, halting tone, a manner that few people other than Leto had ever observed in him. He kept his gaze directed downward at the cluttered surface of his table. The late afternoon sunlight cast a spidery shadow across the jumble from a golden paperweight in the shape of a fanciful tree with jeweled fruit, all mounted on a flame-crystal mountain.
Idaho took the indicated cushion, watching Hwi's gaze follow him until he was seated. She looked at Moneo then and he thought he saw anger in her expression. Moneo's usual plain-white uniform was open at the throat, revealing a wrinkled neck and a bit of dewlap. Idaho stared into the man's eyes, prepared to wait, forcing Moneo to open the conversation.
Moneo returned the stare, noting that Idaho still wore the black uniform of their morning encounter. There was even a small trace of grime down the front, memento of the corridor floor where Moneo had spilled him. But Idaho no longer wore the antique Atreides knife. That bothered Moneo.
"What I did this morning was unforgivable," Moneo said. "Therefore, I do not ask you to forgive me. I merely ask that you try to understand."
Hwi did not appear surprised by this opening, Idaho noted. It revealed much about what the two of them had been discussing before Idaho's arrival.
When Idaho did not respond, Moneo said: "I had no right to make you feel inadequate."
Idaho found himself undergoing a curious response to Moneo's words and manner. There was still the feeling of being outmaneuvered and outclassed, too far from his time, but he no longer suspected that Moneo might be toying with him. Something had reduced the majordomo to a gritty substratum of honesty. The realization put Leto's universe, the deadly eroticism of the Fish Speakers, Hwi's undeniable candor everything-into a new relationship, a form which Idaho felt that he understood. It was as though the three of them in this room were the last true humans in the entire universe. He spoke from a sense of wry self-deprecation:
"You had every right to protect yourself when I attacked you. It pleases me that you were so capable."
Idaho turned toward Hwi, but before he could speak, Moneo said: "You needn't plead for me. I think her displeasure toward me is quite adamant."
Idaho shook his head. "Does everyone here know what I'm going to say before I say it, what I'm going to feel before I feel it?"
"One of your admirable qualities," Moneo said. "You do not conceal your feelings. We=" he shrugged= "are necessarily more circumspect."
Idaho looked at Hwi. "Does he speak for you?"
She put her hand in Idaho's. "I speak for myself."
Moneo craned to peer at the clasped hands, sank back on his cushion. He sighed. "You must not."
Idaho clasped her hand more tightly, felt her equal response.
"Before either of you asks," Moneo said, "my daughter and the God Emperor have not yet returned from the testing."
Idaho sensed the effort Moneo had required to speak calmly. Hwi heard it, too.
"Is it true what the Fish Speakers say?" she asked. "Siona dies if she fails?"
Moneo remained silent, but his face was a rock.
"Is it like the Bene Gesserit test?" Idaho asked. "Muad'Dib said the Sisterhood tests to try to find out if you are human."
Hwi's hand began to tremble. Idaho felt it and looked at her. "Did they test you?"
"No," Hwi said, "but I heard the young ones talking about it. They said you must pass through agony without losing your sense of self."
Idaho returned his attention to Moneo, noting the start of a tic beside the majordomo's left eye.
"Moneo," Idaho breathed, overcome by sudden realization. "He tested you!"
"I do not wish to discuss tests," Moneo said. "We are here to decide what must be done about you two."
"Isn't that up to us?" Idaho asked. He felt Hwi's hand in his grow slippery with perspiration.
"It is up to the God Emperor," Moneo said.
"Even if Siona fails?" Idaho asked.
"Especially then!"
"How did he test you?" Idaho asked.
"He showed me a small glimpse of what it's like to be the God Emperor."
"And?"
"I saw as much as I'm capable of seeing."
Hwi's hand tightened convulsively in Idaho's.
"Then it's true that you were a rebel once," Idaho said.
"I began with love and prayer," Moneo said. "I changed to anger and rebellion. I was transformed into what you see before you. I recognize my duty and I do it."
"What did he do to you?" Idaho demanded.
"He quoted to me the prayer of my childhood: `I give my life in dedication to the greater glory of God."' Moneo spoke in a musing voice.
Idaho noted Hwi's stillness, her stare fixed on Moneo's face. What was she thinking?
"I admitted that this had been my prayer," Moneo said. "And the God Emperor asked me what I would give up if my life were not enough. He shouted at me: `What is your life when you hold back the greater gift?"'
Hwi nodded, but Idaho felt only confusion.
"I could hear the truth in his voice," Moneo said.
"Are you a Truthsayer?" Hwi asked.
"In the power of desperation, yes," Moneo said. "But only then. I swear to you he spoke truth to me."
"Some of the Atreides had the power of Voice," Idaho muttered.
Moneo shook his head. "No, it was truth. He said to me: `I look at you now and if I could shed tears, I would. Consider the wish to be the act!"'
Hwi rocked forward, almost touching the table. "He cannot cry?"
"Sandworms," Idaho whispered.
"What?" Hwi turned toward him.
"Fremen killed sandworms with water," Idaho said. "From the drowning they produced the spice-essence for their religious orgies."
"But the Lord Leto is not yet a sandworm entire," Moneo said.
Hwi rocked back onto her cushion and looked at Moneo.
Idaho pursed his lips in thought. Did Leto have the Fremen prohibition against tears, then? How awed the Fremen had always been about such a waste of moisture! Giving water to the dead.
Moneo addressed himself to Idaho: "I had hoped you could be brought to an understanding. The Lord Leto has spoken. You and Hwi must separate and never see each other again."
Hwi removed her hand from Idaho's. "We know."
Idaho spoke with resigned bitterness: "We know his power." "But you do not understand him," Moneo said.
"I want nothing more than that," Hwi said. She put a hand on Idaho's arm to silence him. "No, Duncan. Our private desires have no place here."
"Maybe you should pray to him," Idaho said.
She whirled and looked at him, staring and staring until Idaho lowered his gaze. When she spoke, her voice carried a lilting quality that Idaho had never heard there before. "My Uncle Malky always said the Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won't believe in you!"
"Prayer as hubris," Moneo said. "Intercession on demand."
"How can he be a god?" Idaho demanded. "By his own admission, he's not immortal."
"I will quote the Lord Leto on that," Moneo said. "`I am all of God that need be seen. I am the word become a miracle. I am all of my ancestors. Is that not miracle enough? What more could you possibly want? Ask yourself: Where is there a greater miracle?"' "Empty words," Idaho sneered.
"I sneered at him, too," Moneo said. "I threw his own words from the Oral History back at him: `Give to the greater glory of God!"'
Hwi gasped.
"He laughed at me," Moneo said. "He laughed and asked how I could give what already belonged to God?"
"You were angry?" Hwi asked.
"Oh, yes. He saw this and said he would tell me how to give to that glory. He said: `You may observe that you are every bit as great a miracle as I am. "' Moneo turned and looked out the window on his left. "I'm afraid my anger made me deaf and I was totally unprepared."
"Ohhh, he is clever," Idaho said.
"Clever?" Moneo looked at him. "I don't think so, not in the way you mean. I think the Lord Leto may be no more clever than I am in that way."
"Unprepared for what?" Hwi asked.
"The risk," Moneo said.
"But you risked much in your anger," she said.
"Not as much as he. I see in your eyes, Hwi, that you understand this. Does his body revolt you?"
"No more," she said.
Idaho ground his teeth in frustration. "He disgusts me!"
"Love, you must not say such things," Hwi said.
"And you must not call him love," Moneo said.
"You'd rather she learned to love someone more gross and evil than any Baron Harkonnen ever dreamed of being," Idaho said.
Moneo worked his lips in and out, then: "The Lord Leto has told me about that evil old man of your time, Duncan. I don't think you understood your enemy."
"He was a fat, monstrous..."
"He was a seeker after sensations," Moneo said. "The fat was a side-effect, then perhaps something to experience for itself because it offended people and he enjoyed offending."
"The Baron only consumed a few planets," Idaho said. "Leto consumes the universe."
"Love, please!" Hwi protested.
"Let him rant," Moneo said. "When I was young and ignorant, even as my Siona and this poor fool, I said similar things." ` Is that why you let your daughter go out to die?" Idaho demanded.
"Love, that's cruel," Hwi said.
"Duncan, it has always been one of your flaws to seek hysteria," Moneo said. "I warn you that ignorance thrives on hysteria. Your genes provide vigor and you may inspire some among the Fish Speakers, but you are a poor leader."
"Don't try to anger me," Idaho said. "I know better than to attack you, but don't push me too far."
Hwi tried to take Idaho's hand, but he pulled away.
"I know my place," Idaho said. "I'm a useful follower. I can carry the Atreides banner. The green and black is on my back!"
"The undeserving maintain power by promoting hysteria," Moneo said. "The Atreides art is the art of ruling without hysteria, the art of being responsible for the uses of power."
Idaho pushed back and heaved himself to his feet. "When has your damned God Emperor ever been responsible for anything?"
Moneo looked down at his cluttered table and spoke without looking up. "He is responsible for what he has done to himself." Moneo looked up then, his eyes frosty. "You haven't the guts,
Duncan, to learn why he did that to himself!"
"And you have?" Idaho asked.
"When I was most angry," Moneo said, "and he saw himself through my eyes, he said: 'How dare you be offended by me?' It was then=' Moneo swallowed= `that he made me look into the horror... that he had seen." Tears welled from Moneo's eyes and ran down his cheeks. "And I was only glad that I did not have to make his decision... that I could content myself with being a follower."
"I have touched him," Hwi whispered.
"Then you know?" Moneo asked her.
"Without seeing it, I know," she said.
In a low voice, Moneo said: "I almost died of it. I..." He shuddered, then looked up at Idaho. "You must not..."
"Damn you all!" Idaho snarled. He turned and dashed from the room.
Hwi stared after him, her face a mask of anguish. "Ohhh, Duncan," she whispered.
"You see?" Moneo asked. "You were wrong. Neither you nor the Fish Speakers have gentled him. But you, Hwi, you have only contributed to his destruction."
Hwi turned her anguish toward Moneo. "I will not see him again," she said.
For Idaho, the passage down to his quarters became one of the most difficult times in his memory. He tried to imagine that his face was a plasteel mask held immobile to hide the turmoil within. None of the guards he passed could be permitted to see his pain. He did not know that most of them made accurate guesses about his emotion and shared a compassion for him. All of them had sat through briefings on the Duncans and had learned to read them well.
In the corridor near his quarters, Idaho encountered Nayla walking slowly toward him. Something in her face, a look of indecision and loss, stopped him briefly and almost brought him out of his internal concentration.
"Friend?" he said, speaking when he was only a few paces from her.
She looked at him, abrupt recognition obvious on her square face.
What an odd-looking woman, he thought.
"I am no longer Friend," she said and passed by him down the corridor.
Idaho turned on one heel and stared at her retreating back- those heavy shoulders, that plodding sense of terrible muscles.
What was she bred for? he wondered.
It was only a passing thought. His own concerns returned more strongly than before. He strode the few paces to his door and into his quarters.
Once inside, Idaho stood a moment with clenched fists at his sides. have no more ties to any time, he thought. And how odd that this was not a liberating thought. He knew, though, that he had done the thing which would begin freeing Hwi from her love for him. He was diminished. She would think of him soon as a small, petulant fool, a subject only of his own emotions. He could feel himself fading from her immediate concerns.
And that poor Moneo!
Idaho sensed the shape of the things which had formed the pliant majordomo. Duty and responsibility. What a safe haven those were in a time of difficult decisions.
I was like that once, Idaho thought. But that was in another life, another time. -= The Duncans sometimes ask if I understand the exotic ideas of our past? And if I understand them, why can't I explain them? Knowledge, the Duncans believe, resides only in particulars. I try to tell them that all words are plastic. Word images begin to distort in the instant of utterance. Ideas imbedded in a language require that particular language for expression. This is the very essence of the meaning within the word exotic. See how it begins to distort? Translation squirms in the presence of the exotic. The Galach which I speak here imposes itself. It is an outside frame of reference, a particular system. Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change. Does it serve any purpose for me to tell the Duncans that there are no languages for some things? Ahhh! But the Duncans believe that all languages are mine.
- The Stolen Journals Fort Two full turns of days and nights, Siona failed to seal her face mask, losing precious water with every breath. It had taken the Fremen admonition to children before Siona remembered her father's words. Leto had spoken to her finally on the cold third morning of their traverse when they stopped within a rock shadow on the windswept flat of the erg.
"Guard every breath for it carries the warmth and moisture of your life," he said.
He had known they would be three more days on the erg and three more nights beyond that before they reached water. Now, it was the fifth morning from the Little Citadel's tower. They had entered shallow drifts of sand during the night-not dunes, but dunes could be glimpsed ahead of them and even the remnants of Habbanya Ridge were a thin, broken line in the distance if you knew where to look. Now, Siona took down the mouth flap of her stillsuit only to speak clearly. And she spoke through black and bleeding lips.
She has the thirst of desperation, he thought, as he let his senses probe their surroundings. She will reach the moments of crisis soon. His senses told him that they were still alone here at the edge of the flat. Dawn lay only minutes behind them. The low light created barriers of dust reflection which twisted and lifted and dipped in the unceasing wind. His senses filtered out the wind that he might hear other things Siona's heaving breaths, the tumble of a small sandspill from the rocks beside them, his own gross body grating in the thin sand cover.
Siona peeled her face mask aside but held it in her hand for quick restoration.
"How much longer until we find water?" she asked.
"Three nights."
"Is there a better direction to go?"
"No."
She had come to appreciate the Fremen economy with important information. She sipped greedily at a few drops in her catchpocket.
Leto recognized the message of her movements-familiar gestures for Fremen in extremis. Siona was now fully aware of a common experience among her ancestors patiyeh, the thirst at the edge of death.
The few drops in her catchpocket were gone. He heard her sucking air. She restored the mask and spoke in a muffed voice.
"I won't make it, will I?"
Leto looked into her eyes, seeing there the clarity of thought brought on by the nearness of death, a penetrating awareness seldom otherwise achieved. It amplified only that which was required for survival. Yes, she was well into the tedah riagrimi, the agony which opens the mind. Soon, she would have to make that ultimate decision which she yet believed she had already made. Leto knew by the signs that he was required to treat Siona now with extreme courtesy. He would have to answer every question with candor for in every question lurked a judgment.
"Will I?" she insisted.
There was still a trace of hope in her desperation.
"Nothing is certain," he said.
This dropped her into despair.
That had not been Leto's intention, but he knew that it often happened-an accurate, though ambiguous, answer was taken as confirmation of one's deepest fears.
She sighed.
Her mask-muffled voice probed at him once more. "You had some special intention for me in your breeding program."
It was not a question.
"All people have intentions," he told her.
"But you wanted my full agreement."
"That is true."
"How could you expect agreement when you know I hate everything about you? Be honest with me!"
"The three legs of the agreement-tripod are desire, data and doubt. Accuracy and honesty have little to do with it."
"Please don't argue with me. You know I'm dying."
"I respect you too much to argue with you."
He lifted his front segments slightly then, probing the wind. It already was beginning to bring the day's heat but there was too much moisture in it for his comfort. He was reminded that the more he ordered the weather controlled, the more there was that required control. Absolutes only brought him closer to vagueries.
"You say you're not arguing, but..
."
"Argument closes off the doors of the senses," he said, lowering himself back to the surface. "It always masks violence. Continued too long, argument always leads to violence. I have no violent intentions toward you."
"What do you mean-desire, data and doubt?"
"Desire brings the participants together. Data set the limits of their dialogue. Doubt frames the questions."
She moved closer to stare directly into his face from less than a meter away.
How odd, he thought, that hatred could be mingled so completely with hope and fear and awe.
"Could you save me?"
"There is a way."
She nodded and he knew she had leaped to the wrong conclusion.
"You want to trade that for my agreement!" she accused.
"No."
"If I pass your test..."
"It is not my test."
"Whose?"
"It derives from our common ancestors."
Siona sank to a sitting position on the cold rock and remained silent, not yet ready to ask for a resting place within the lip of his warm front segment. Leto thought he could hear the soft scream waiting in her throat. Now, her doubts were at work. She was beginning to wonder if he really could be fitted into her image of Ultimate Tyrant. She looked up at him with that terrible clarity he had identified in her.
"What makes you do what you do?"
The question was well framed. He said: "My need to save the people."
"What people?"
"My definition is much broader than that of anyone else even of the Bene Gesserit, who think they have defined what it is to be human. I refer to the eternal thread of all humankind by whatever definition."
"You're trying to tell me..." Her mouth became too dry for speaking. She tried to accumulate saliva. He saw the movements within her face mask. Her question was obvious, though, and he did not wait.
"Without me there would have been by now no people anywhere, none whatsoever. And the path to that extinction was more hideous than your wildest imaginings."
"Your supposed prescience," she sneered.
"The Golden Path still stands open," he said.
"I don't trust you!"
"Because we are not equals?"
"Yes!"
"But we're interdependent."
"What need have you for me?"
Ahhh, the cry of youth unsure of its niche. He felt the strength within the secret bonds of dependency and forced himself to be hard. Dependency fosters weakness!
"You are the Golden Path," he said.
"Me?" It was barely a whisper.
"You've read those journals you stole from me," he said. "I am in them, but where are you? Look at what I have created, Siona. And you, you can create nothing except yourself."
"Words, more tricky words!"
"I do not suffer from being worshipped, Siona. I suffer from never being appreciated. Perhaps...No, I dare not hope for you."
"What's the purpose of those journals?"
"An Ixian machine records them. They are. to be found on a faraway day. They will make people think."
"An Ixian machine? You defy the Jihad!"
"There's a lesson in that, too. What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking-there's the real danger. Look at how long you walked across this desert without thinking about your face mask."
"You could have warned me!"
"And increased your dependency."
She stared at him a moment, then: "Why would you want me to command your Fish Speakers?"
"You are an Atreides woman, resourceful and capable of independent thought. You can be truthful just for the sake of truth as you see it. You were bred and trained for command which means freedom from dependence."
The wind whirled dust and sand around them while she weighed his words. "And if I agree, you'll save me?"
"No."
She had been so sure of the opposite answer that it was several heartbeats before she translated that single word. In that time, the wind fell slightly, exposing a vista across the dunescape to the remnants of Habbanya Ridge. The air was suddenly chilled with that cold which did as much to rob the flesh of moisture as did the hottest sunlight. Part of Leto's awareness detected an oscillation in weather control.
"No?" She was both puzzled and outraged.
"I do not make bloody bargains with people I must trust."
She shook her head slowly from side to side, but her gaze remained fixed on his face. "What will make you save me?"
"Nothing will make me do it. Why do you think you could do to me what I will not do to you? That is not the way of interdependence."
Her shoulders slumped. "If I cannot bargain with you or force you..."
"Then you must choose another path."
What a marvelous thing to observe the explosive growth of awareness, he thought. Siona's expressive features hid nothing of it from him. She focused on his eyes and glared at him as though seeking to move completely into his thoughts. New strength entered her muffled voice.
"You would have me know everything about you-even every weakness?"
"Would you steal what I would give openly?"
The morning light was harsh on her face. "I promise you nothing!"
"Nor do I require that."
"But you will give me... water if I ask?"
"It is not just water."
She nodded. "And I am Atreides."
The Fish Speakers had not withheld the lesson of that special susceptibility in the Atreides genes. She knew where the spice originated and what it might do to her. The teachers in the Fish Speaker schools never failed him. And the gentle additions of melange in Siona's dried food had done their work, too.
"These little curled flaps beside my face," he said. "Tease one of them gently with a finger and it will give up drops of moisture heavily laced with spice-essence."
He saw the recognition in her eyes. Memories which she did not know as memories were speaking to her. And she was the result of many generations in which the Atreides sensitivity had been increased.
Even the urgency of her thirst would not yet move her.
To ease her through the crisis, he told her about Fremen children poling for sandtrout at an oasis edge, teasing the moisture out of them for quick vitalization.
"But I am Atreides," she said.
"The Oral History tells it truthfully," he said.
"Then I could die of it."
"That's the test."
"You would make a real Fremen out of me!"
"How else can you teach your descendants to survive here after I am gone?"
She pulled away her mask and moved her face to within a handsbreadth of his. A finger came up and touched one of the curled flaps of his cowl.
"Stroke it gently," he said.
Her hand obeyed not his voice but something from within her. The finger movements were precise, eliciting his own memories, a thing passed from child to child to child... the way so much information and misinformation survived. He turned his face to its limit and looked sideways at her face so close to his. Pale blue drops began to form at the flap's edge. Rich cinnamon smells enveloped them. She leaned toward the drops. He saw the pores beside her nose, the way her tongue moved as she drank.
Presently, she retreated-not completely satisfied, but driven by caution and suspicion much the way Moneo had been. Like father, like daughter.
"How long before it begins to work?" she asked.
"It is already working."
"I mean..."
"A minute or so."
"I owe you nothing for this!"
"I will demand no payment."
She sealed her face mask.
He saw the milky distances enter her eyes. Without asking permission, she tapped his front segment, demanding that he prepare the warm hammock of his flesh. He obeyed. She fitted herself to the gentle curve. By peering sharply downward, he could see her. Siona's eyes remained opened, but they no longer saw this place. She jerked abruptly and began to tremble like a small creature dying. He knew this experience, but could not change the smallest part of it. No ancestral presences would remain in her consciousness, but she would carry with her forever afterward the clear sights and sounds and smells. The seeking machines would be there, the smell of blood and entrails, the cowering humans in their burrows aware only that they could not escape... while all the time the mechanical movement approached, nearer and nearer and nearer...louder...louder!
Everywhere she searched, it would be the same. No escape anywhere.
He felt her life ebbing. Fight the darkness, Siona! That was one thing the Atreides did. They fought for life. And now she was fighting for lives other than her own. He felt the dimming, though... the terrible outflow of vitality. She went deeper and deeper into the darkness, far deeper than any other had ever gone. He began to rock her gently, a cradle movement of his front segment. That or the thin hot thread of determination, perhaps both together, prevailed. By early afternoon, her flesh
had trembled its way into something approaching real sleep. Only an occasional gasp betrayed the vision's echoes. He rocked her gently, rolling from side to side.
Could she possibly come back from those depths? He felt the vital responses reassuring him. The strength in her!
She awakened in the late afternoon, a stillness coming over her abruptly, the breathing rhythm changed. Her eyes snapped open. She peered up at him, then rolled out of the hammock to stand with her back to him for almost an hour of silent thinking.
Moneo had done that same thing. It was a new pattern in these Atreides. Some of the preceding ones had ranted at him. Others had backed away from him, stumbling and staring, forcing him to follow, squirming and grating over the pebbles. Some of them had squatted and stared at the ground. None of them had turned their backs on him. Leto took this new development as a hopeful sign.
"You are beginning to have some concept of how far my family extends," he said.
She turned, her mouth a prim line, but did not meet his gaze. He could see her accepting it, though, the realization which few humans could share as she had shared it: His singular multitude made all of humankind his family.
"You could have saved my friends in the forest," she accused.
"You, too, could have saved them."
She clenched her fists and pressed them against her temples while she glared at him. "But you know everything!"
"Siona!"
"Did I have to learn it that way?" she whispered.
He remained silent, forcing her to answer the question for herself. She had to be made to recognize that his primary consciousness worked in a Fremen way and that, like the terrible machines of that apocalyptic vision, the predator could follow any creature who left tracks.
"The Golden Path," she whispered. "I can feel it." Then, glaring at him. "It's so cruel!"
"Survival has always been cruel."
"They couldn't hide," she whispered. Then loud: "What have you done to me?"
"You tried to be a Fremen rebel," he said. "Fremen had an almost incredible ability to read signs on the desert. They could even read the faint tracery of windblown tracks in sand."
He saw the beginnings of remorse in her, memories of her dead companions floating in her awareness. He spoke quickly, knowing that guilt would follow quickly and then anger against him. "Would you have believed me if I had merely brought you in and told you?"
Remorse threatened to overwhelm her. She opened her mouth behind the mask and gasped with it.
"You have not yet survived the desert," he told her.
Slowly, her trembling subsided. The Fremen instincts he had set to work in her did their usual tempering.
"I will survive," she said. She met his gaze. "You read us by our emotions, don't you?"
"The igniters of thought," he said. "I can recognize the slightest behavioral nuance for its emotional origins."
He saw her accept her own nakedness the way Moneo had accepted it, with fear and hate. It was of little matter. He probed the time ahead of them. Yes, she would survive his desert because her tracks were in the sand beside him... but he saw no sign of her flesh in those tracks. Just beyond her tracks, though, he saw a sudden opening where things had been concealed. Anteac's death-shout echoed through his prescient awareness... and the swarming of Fish Speakers attacking!
Malky is coming, he thought. We will meet again, Malky and.
Leto opened his outer eyes and saw Siona still there glaring at him.
"I still hate you!" she said.
"You hate the predator's necessary cruelty."
She spoke with venomous elation: "But I saw another thing! You can't follow my tracks!"
"Which is why you must breed and preserve this."
Even as he spoke, it began to rain. The sudden cloud darkness and the downpour came upon them simultaneously. In spite of the fact that he had sensed weather control's oscillations, Leto was shocked by the onslaught. He knew it rained sometimes in the Sareer, a rain quickly dispersed as the water ran off and vanished. The few pools would evaporate as the sun returned. Most times, the downpour never touched the ground; it was ghost rain, vaporized when it hit the superheated air layer just above the desert's surface, then dispersing on the wind. But this rainfall drenched him.
Siona pulled back her face flap and lifted her face greedily to the falling water, not even noticing the effect on Leto.
As the first drenching swept in from behind the sandtrout overlappings, he stiffened and curled into a ball of agony. Separate drives of sandtrout and sandworm produced a new meaning for the word pain. He felt that he was being ripped apart. Sandtrout wanted to rush to the water and encapsulate it. Sandworm felt the drenching wash of death. Curls of blue smoke 'spurted from every place the rain touched him. The inner workings of his body began to manufacture the true spice-essence. Blue smoke lifted around him from where he lay in puddles of water. He writhed and groaned.
The clouds passed and it was a few moments before Siona sensed his disturbance.
"What's wrong with you?"
He was unable to answer. The rain was gone but water remained on the rocks and in puddles all around and beneath him. There was no escape.
Siona saw the blue smoke rising from every place the water touched him.
"It's the water!"
There was a slightly higher bulge of land off to the right where the water did not stay. Painfully, he made his way toward it, groaning at each new puddle. The bulge was almost dry when he reached it. The agony subsided slowly and he grew aware that Siona stood directly in front of him. She probed at him with words of false concern.
"Why does water hurt you?"
Hurt? What an inadequate word! There was no evading her questions, though. She knew enough now to go searching for the answer. That answer could be found. Haltingly, he explained the relationship of sandtrout and sandworm to water. She heard him out in silence.
"But the moisture you gave me..."
"Is buffered and masked by the spice."
"Then why do you risk it out here without your cart?"
"You can't be a Fremen in the Citadel or on a cart."
She nodded.
He saw the flame of rebellion return to her eyes. She did not have to feel guilty or dependent. She no longer could avoid belief in his Golden Path, but what difference did that make? His cruelties could not be forgiven! She could reject him, deny him a place in her family. He was not a human, not like her at all. And she possessed the secret of his undoing! Ring him with water, destroy his desert, immobilize him within a moat of agony! Did she think she hid her thoughts from him by turning away?
And what can I do about it? he wondered. She must live now while I must demonstrate nonviolence.
Now that he knew something of. Siona's nature, how easy it would be to surrender, to sink blindly into his own thoughts. It was seductive, this talon to live only within his memories, but his children still required another lesson-by-example if they were to escape the last threat to the Golden Path.
What a painful decision! He experienced a new sympathy for the Bene Gesserit. His quandary was akin to the one they had experienced when they had confronted the fact of Muad'Dib. The ultimate goal of their breeding program-my father-they could not contain him, either.
Once more into the breach, dear friends, he thought. and he suppressed a wry smile at his own histrionics. -= Given enough time for the generations to evolve, the predator produces particular survival adaptations in its prey which, through the circular operation of feedback, produce changes in the predator which again change the prey etcetera, etcetera, etcetera... Many powerful forces do the same thing. You can count religions among such forces.
- The Stolen Journals "THE LORD has commanded me to tell you that your daughter lives."
Nayla delivered the message to Moneo in a singsong voice, looking down across the workroom table at his figure seated there amidst a chaos of notes and papers and communications instruments.
Moneo pressed his palms together firmly and looked down at the elongated shadow drawn on his table by late afternoon sunlight across the jeweled tree of his paperweight.
Without looking up at Nayla's stocky figure standing at proper attention in front of him, he asked: "Both of them have returned to the Citadel?"
"Yes."
Moneo looked out the window to his left, not really seeing the flinty borderline of darkness hanging on the Sareer's horizon nor the greedy wind collecting sand grains from every dunetop.
"That matter which we discussed earlier?" he asked.
"It has been arranged."
"Very well." He waved to dismiss her, but Nayla remained standing in front of him. Surprised, Moneo actually focused on her for the first time since she had entered.
"Is it required that I personally attend this-" she swallowed-"wedding?"
"The Lord Leto has commanded it. You will be the only one there armed with a lasgun. It is an honor."
She remained in position, her gaze fixed somewhere over Moneo's head.
"Yes?" he prompted.
Nayla's great lantern jaw worked convulsively, then: "He is God and I am mortal." She turned on one heel and left the workroom.
Moneo wondered vaguely what was bothering that hulking Fish Speaker, but his thoughts turned like a compass arrow to Siona.
She has survived as I did. Siona now had an inner sense which told her that the Golden Path remained unbroken. As I have. He found no sense of sharing in this, nothing to make him feel closer to his daughter. It was a burden and it would inevitably curb her rebellious nature. No Atreides could go against the Golden Path. Leto had seen to that!
Moneo remembered his own rebel days. Every night a new bed and the constant urge to run. The cobwebs of his past clung to his mind, sticking there no matter how hard he tried to shake away troublesome memories.
Siona has been caged. As I was caged. As poor Leto was caged.
The tolling of the nightfall bell intruded on his thoughts and activated his workroom's lights. He looked down at the work still undone in preparation for the God Emperor's wedding to Hwi Noree. So much work! Presently, he pressed a call-button and asked the Fish Speaker acolyte who appeared at the summons to bring him a tumbler of water and then call Duncan Idaho to the workroom.
She returned quickly with the water and placed the tumbler near his left hand on the table. He noted the long fingers, a lute-player's fingers, but did not look up at her face.
"I have sent someone for Idaho," she said.
He nodded and went on with his work. He heard her leave and only then did he look up to drink the water.
Some live lives like summer moths, he thought. But I have burdens without end.
The water tasted flat. It weighed down his senses, making his body feel torpid. He looked out at the sunset colors on the
Sareer as they shaded away into darkness, thinking that he should recognize beauty in that familiar sense, but all he could think was that the light changed in its own patterns. It is not moved by me at all.
With the full darkness, the light level of his workroom increased automatically, bringing a clarity of thought with it. He felt himself quite prepared for Idaho. This one had to be taught the necessities, and quickly.
Moneo's door opened, the acolyte again. "Will you eat now?"
"Later." He raised a hand as she started to leave. "I would like the door left open."
She frowned.
"You may practice your music," he said. "I want to listen."
She had a smooth, round, almost childlike face which became radiant when she smiled. The smile still on her lips, she turned away.
Presently, he heard the sounds of a biwa lute in the outer office. Yes, that young acolyte had a talent. The bass strings were like rain drumming on a rooftop, a whisper of middle strings underneath. Perhaps she could move up to the baliset someday. He recognized the song: a deeply humming memory of autumn wind from some faraway planet where they had never known a desert. Sad music, pitiful music, yet marvelous.
It is the cry of the caged, he thought. The memory of free- dom. This thought struck him as odd. Was it always the case that freedom required rebellion?
The lute fell silent. There came the sound of low voices. Idaho entered the workroom. Moneo watched him enter. A trick of light gave Idaho a face like a grimacing mask with pitted eyes. Without invitation, he sat down across from Moneo and the trickery was gone. Just another Duncan. He had changed into a plain black uniform without insignia.
"I have been asking myself a peculiar question," Idaho said. "I'm glad you summoned me. I want to ask this question of you. What is it, Moneo, that my predecessor did not learn?"
Stiff with surprise, Moneo sat up straight. What an unDuncan question! Could there be a peculiar Tleilaxu difference in this one after all?
"What prompts this question?" Moneo asked.
"I've been thinking like a Fremen."
"You weren't a Fremen."
"Closer to it than you think. Stilgar the Naib once said I was probably born Fremen without knowing it until I came to Dune."
"What happens when you think like a Fremen?"
"You remember that you should never be in company that you wouldn't want to die with."
Moneo put his hands palms down on the surface of his table. A wolfish smile came over Idaho's face.
"Then what are you doing here?" Moneo asked.
"I suspect that you may be good company, Moneo. And I ask myself why Leto would choose you as his closest companion?"
"I passed the test."
"The same one your daughter passed?"
So he has heard they are back. It meant some of the Fish Speakers were reporting things to him... unless the God Emperor had summoned the Duncan... No, I would have heard.
"The tests are never identical," Moneo said. "I was made to go alone into a cavern maze with nothing but a bag of food and a vial of spice-essence."
"Which did you choose?"
"What? Oh... if you are tested, you will learn."
"There's a Leto I don't know," Idaho said.
"Have I not told you this?"
"And there's a Leto you don't know," Idaho said.
"Because he's the loneliest person this universe has ever seen," Moneo said.
"Don't play mood games trying to arouse my sympathy," Idaho said.
"Mood games, yes. That's very good," Moneo nodded. "The God Emperor's moods are like a river-smooth where nothing obstructs him, foaming and violent at the least suggestion of a barrier. He is not be be obstructed."
Idaho looked around at the brightly lighted workroom, turned his gaze to the outside darkness and thought about the tamed course of the Idaho River somewhere out there. Bringing his attention back to Moneo, he asked: "What do you know of rivers?"
"In my youth, I traveled for him. I have even trusted my life to a floating shell of a vessel on a river and then on a sea whose shores were lost in the crossing."
As he spoke, Moneo felt that he had brushed against a clue to some deep truth in the Lord Leto. The sensation dropped Moneo into reverie, thinking of that far planet where he had crossed a sea from one shore to another. There had been a storm on the first evening of that passage and, somewhere deep within the ship, an irritating non-directional "sug-sug-sug-sugsug" of laboring engines. He had stood on deck with the captain. His mind had kept focusing on the engine sound, retreating and coming back to it like the oversurging of the watery green-black mountains which passed and came, repeating and repeating. Each down crash of the keel opened the sea's flesh like a fist smashing. It was insane motion, a sodden shaking, up... up, down! His lungs had ached with repressed fear. The lunging of the ship and the sea trying to put them down-wild explosions of solid water, hour after hour, white blisters of water spilling off the decks, then another sea and another...
All of this was a clue to the God Emperor.
He is both the storm and the ship.
Moneo focused on Idaho seated across the table from him in the workroom's cold light. Not a tremor in the man, but a hungering was there.
"So you will not help me learn what the other Duncan Idahos did not learn," Idaho said.
"But I will help you."
"Then what have I always failed to learn?"
"How to trust."
Idaho pushed himself back from the table and glared at Moneo. When Idaho's voice came, it was harsh and rasping: "I'd say I trusted too much."
Moneo was implacable. "But how do you trust?"
"What do you mean?"
Moneo put his hands in his lap. "You choose male companions for their ability to fight and die on the side of right as you see it. You choose females who can complement this masculine view of yourself. You allow for no differences which can come from good will."
Something moved in the doorway to Moneo's workroom. He looked up in time to see Siona enter. She stopped, one hand on her hip.
"Well, father, up to your old tricks, I see."
Idaho jerked around to stare at the speaker.
Moneo studied her, looking for signs of the change. She had bathed and put on a fresh uniform, the black and gold of Fish Speaker command, but her face and hands still betrayed the evidence of her desert ordeal. She had lost weight and her cheekbones stood out. Unguent did little to conceal cracks in her lips. Veins stood out on her hands. Her eyes looked ancient and her expression was that of someone who had tasted bitter dregs.
"I've been listening to you two," she said. She dropped her hand from her hip and moved farther into the room. "How dare you speak of good will, father?"
Idaho had noted the uniform. He pursed his lips in thought. Fish Speaker Command? Siona?
"I understand your bitterness," Moneo said. "I -had similar feelings once."
"Did you really?" She came closer, stopping just beside Idaho, who continued to regard her with a look of speculation.
"I am filled with joy to see you alive," Moneo said.
"How gratifying. for you to see me safely into the God Emperor's Service," she said. "You waited so long to have a child and look! See how successful I am." She turned slowly to display her uniform. "Commander of the Fish Speakers. A commander with a troop of one, but nonetheless a commander."
Moneo forced his voice to be cold and professional. "Sit down."
"I prefer to stand." She looked down at Idaho's upturned face. "Ahhh, Duncan Idaho, my intended mate. Don't you find this interesting, Duncan? The Lord Leto tells me I will befitted into the command structure of the Fish Speakers in time. Meanwhile, I have one attendant. Do you know the one called Nayla, Duncan?"
Idaho nodded.
"Really? I think perhaps I don't know her." Siona looked at Moneo. "Do I know her, father?"
Moneo shrugged.
"But you speak of trust, father," Siona said. "Who does the powerful minister, Moneo, trust?"
Idaho turned to see the effect of these words on the majordomo. The man's face appeared brittle with repressed emotion. Anger? No... something else.
I trust the God Emperor," Moneo said. "And, in the hope that it will teach both of you something, I am here to convey his wishes to you."
"His wishes!" Siona taunted. "Hear that, Duncan? The God Emperor's commands are now wishes."
"Speak your piece," Idaho said. "I know we have little choice in whatever it is."
"You always have a choice," Moneo said.
"Don't listen to him," Siona said. "He's full of tricks. They expect us to fall into each other's arms and breed more like my father. Your descendant, my father!"
Moneo's face went pale. He gripped the edge of his worktable with both hands and leaned forward. "You are both fools! But I will try to save you. In spite of yourselves, I will try to save you."
Idaho saw Moneo's cheeks tremble, the intensity of the man's stare, and felt oddly moved by this. "I'm not his stud, but I'll listen to you."
"Always a mistake," Siona said.
"Be still, woman," Idaho said.
She glared at the top of Idaho's head. "Don't address me that way or I'll wrap your neck around your ankles!"
Idaho stiffened and started to turn.
Moneo grimaced and waved a hand for Idaho to remain seated. "I caution you, Duncan, that she could probably do it. I am no match for her and you do recall your attempt at violence against me?"
Idaho inhaled a deep, quick breath, let it out slowly, then: "Say what you have to say."
Siona moved to perch at the end of Moneo's table and looked down at both of them. "Much better," she said. "Let him have his say, but don't listen."
Idaho pressed his lips tightly together.
Moneo released his grip on the edge of his desk. He sat back and looked from Idaho to Siona. "I have almost completed the arrangements for the God Emperor's wedding to Hwi Noree. During those festivities, I want you both out of the way."
Siona turned a questioning look on Moneo. "Your idea or his?"
"Mine!" Moneo returned his daughter's glare. "Have you no sense of honor and duty? Have you learned nothing from being with him?"
"Oh, I learned what you learned, father. And I gave my word, which I will keep."
"Then you'll command the Fish Speakers?"
"Whenever he trusts me with command. You know, father, he's ever so much more devious than you are."
"Where are you sending us?" Idaho asked.
"Provided we agree to go," Siona said.
"There is a small village of Museum Fremen at the edge of the Sareer," Moneo said. "It is called Tuono. The village is relatively pleasant. It's in the shadow of the Wall with the river just beyond the Wall. There is a well and the food is good."
Tuono? Idaho wondered. The name sounded familiar. "There was a Tuono Basin on the way to Sietch Tabr," he said.
"And the nights are long and there's no entertainment," Siona said.
Idaho shot a sharp glance at her. She returned it. "He wants us breeding and the Worm satisfied," she said. "He wants babies in my belly, new lives to warp and twist. I'll see him dead before I'll give him that!"
Idaho looked back at Moneo with a bemused expression. "And if we refuse to go?"
"I think you'll go," Moneo said.
Siona's lips twitched. "Duncan, have you even seen one of these little desert villages? No comforts, no..."
"I have seen Tabur Village," Idaho said.
"I'm sure that is a metropolis beside Tuono. Our God Emperor would not celebrate his nuptials in any cluster of mud hovels! Oh, no. Tuono will be mud hovels and no amenities, as close to the original Fremen as possible."
Idaho kept his attention on Moneo while speaking: "Fremen did not live in mud huts."
"Who cares where they conducted their cultish games?" she sneered.
Still looking at Moneo, Idaho said: "Real Fremen had only one cult, the cult of personal honesty. I worry more about honesty than about comfort."
"Don't expect comfort from me!" Siona snapped.
"I don't expect anything from you," Idaho said. "When would we leave for this Tuono, Moneo?"
"You're going?" she asked.
"I am considering an acceptance of your father's kindness," Idaho said.
"Kindness!" She looked from Idaho to Moneo.
"You would leave immediately," Moneo said. "I have detailed a detachment of Fish Speakers under Nayla to escort you and provide for you at Tuono."
"Nayla?" Siona asked. "Really? Will she stay with us there?"
"Until the day of the wedding."
Siona nodded slowly. "Then we accept."
"Accept for yourself!" Idaho snapped.
Siona smiled. "Sorry. May I formally request that the great
Duncan Idaho join me at this primitive garrison where he will keep his hands off my person?"
Idaho peered up at her from under his brows. "Have no fears about where I will put my hands." He looked at Moneo. "Are you being kind, Moneo? Is that why you're sending me away?"
"It's a question of trust," Siona said. "Who does he trust?"
"Will I be forced to go with your daughter?" Idaho insisted.
Siona stood. "We either accept or the troopers will bind us and carry us out in a most uncomfortable fashion. You can see it in his face."
"So I really have no choice," Idaho said.
"You have the choice anyone has," Siona said. "Die now or later."
Still, Idaho stared at Moneo. "Your real intentions, Moneo? Won't you satisfy my curiosity?"
"Curiosity has kept many people alive when all else failed," Moneo said. "I am trying to keep you alive, Duncan. I have never done that before."
- = It required almost a thousand years before the dust of Dune's old planet-wide desert left the atmosphere to be bound up in soil and water. The wind called sandblaster has not been seen on Arrakis for some twenty-five hundred years. Twenty billion tons of dust could be carried suspended in the wind of just one of those storms. The sky often had a silvery look to it then. Fremen said: "The desert is a surgeon cutting away the skin to expose what's underneath." The planet and the people had layers. You could see them. My Sareer is but a weak echo of what was. I must be the sandblaster today.
- The Stolen Journals "You sent them to Tuono without consulting me? How surprising of you, Moneo! You've not done such an independent thing in a long while."
Moneo stood about ten paces from Leto in the gloomy center of the crypt, head bowed, using every artifice he knew to keep from trembling, aware that even this could be seen and interpreted by the God Emperor. It was almost midnight. Leto had kept his majordomo waiting and waiting.
"I pray I have not offended my Lord," Moneo said.
"You have amused me, but take no heart from that. Lately, I cannot separate the comic from the sad."
"Forgive me, Lord," Moneo whispered.
"What is this forgiveness you ask? Must you always require judgment? Can't your universe merely be?"
Moneo lifted his gaze to that awful cowled face. He is both ship and storm. The sunset exists in itself. Moneo felt that he stood on the brink of terrifying revelations. The God Emperor's eyes bored into him, burning, probing. "Lord, what would you have of me?"
"That you have faith in yourself."
Feeling that something might explode in him, Moneo said: "Then the fact that I did not consult you before..."
"How enlightened of you, Moneo! Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves."
The words were shattering to Moneo. He sensed accusation in them, confession. He felt his hold on a fearsome but infinitely desirable thing weakening. He tried to find words to call it back, but his mind remained blank. Perhaps if he asked the God Emperor...
"Lord, if you would but tell me your thoughts on..
."
"My thoughts vanish on contact!"
Leto stared down at Moneo. How strange were the majordomo's eyes perched there above that hawkish Atreides nose-free-verse eyes in a metronome face. Did Moneo hear that rhythmic pulse-beat: Malky is coming! Malky is coming! Malky is coming!?
Moneo wanted to cry out in anguish. The thing he had felt- all gone! He put both his hands over his mouth.
"Your universe is a two-dimensional hourglass," Leto accused. "Why do you try to hold back the sand?"
Moneo lowered his hands and sighed. "Do you wish to hear about the wedding arrangements, Lord?"
"Don't be tiresome! Where is Hwi?"
"The Fish Speakers are preparing her for..."
"Have you consulted her about the arrangements?"
"Yes, Lord."
"She approved?"
"Yes, Lord, but she accused me of living for the quantity of activity and not for the quality."
"Isn't she marvelous, Moneo? Does she see the unrest among the Fish Speakers?"
"I think so, Lord."
"The idea of my marriage disturbs them."
"It's why I sent the Duncan away, Lord."
"Of course it is, and Siona with him to..."
"Lord, I know you have tested her and she..."
"She senses the Golden Path as deeply as you do, Moneo." "Then why do I fear her, Lord?"
"Because you raise reason above all else."
"But I do not know the reason for my fear!"
Leto smiled. This was like playing bubble dice in an infinite bowl. Moneo's emotions were a marvelous play performed only on this stage. How near the edge he walked without ever seeing it!
"Moneo, why do you insist on taking pieces out of the continuum?" Leto asked. "When you see a spectrum, do you desire one color there above all the others?"
"Lord, I don't understand you!"
Leto closed his eyes, remembering the countless times he had heard this cry. The faces were an unseparated blend. He opened his eyes to erase them.
"As long as one human remains alive to see them, the colors will not suffer a linear mortis even if you die, Moneo."
"What is this thing of colors, Lord?"
"The continuum, the never-ending, the Golden Path."
"But you see things which we do not, Lord!"
"Because you refuse!"
Moneo sank his chin to his chest. "Lord, I know you have evolved beyond the rest of us. That is why we worship you and..."
"Damn you, Moneo!"
Moneo jerked his head up and stared at Leto in terror.
"Civilizations collapse when their powers outrun their religions!" Leto said. "Why can't you see this? Hwi does."
"She is Ixian, Lord. Perhaps she..."
"She's a Fish Speaker! She has been from birth, born to serve me. No!" Leto raised one of his tiny hands as Moneo tried to speak. "The Fish Speakers are disturbed because I called them my brides, and now they see a stranger not trained in Siaynoq who knows it better than they."
"How can that be, Lord, when your Fish..
."
"What are you saying? Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do."
Moneo opened his mouth but closed it without speaking.
"Small children know," Leto said. "It's only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves. Moneo! Uncover yourself!"
"Lord, I cannot!" The words were torn from Moneo. He trembled with anguish. "I do not have your powers, your knowledge of..."
"Enough!"
Moneo fell silent. His body shook.
Leto spoke soothingly to him. "It's all right, Moneo. I asked too much of you and I can see your fatigue."
Slowly, Moneo's trembling subsided. He drew in deep, gulping breaths.
Leto said: "There will be some change in my Fremen wedding. We will not use the water rings of my sister, Ghanima. We will use, instead, the rings of my mother."
"The Lady Chani, Lord? But where are her rings?"
Leto twisted his bulk on the cart and pointed to the intersection of two cavernous spokes on his left where the dim light revealed the earliest burial niches of the Atreides on Arrakis. "In her tomb, the first niche. You will remove those rings, Moneo, and bring them to the ceremony."
Moneo stared across the gloomy distance of the crypt. "Lord... is it not a desecration to..."
"You forget, Moneo, who lives in me." He spoke then in Chani's voice: "I can do what I want with my water rings!"
Moneo cowered. "Yes, Lord. I will bring them with me to Tabur Village when..."
"Tabur Village?" Leto asked in his usual voice. "But I have changed my mind. We will be wed at Tuono Village!"
Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.
The Stolen Journals IDAHO STOOD aghast at his first close glimpse of Tuono Village. That was the home of Fremen?
The Fish Speaker troop had taken them from the Citadel at daybreak, Idaho and Siona bundled into a large ornithopter, accompanied by two smaller guard ships. And the flight had been slow, almost three hours. They had landed at a flat, round plastone hangar almost a kilometer from the village, separated from it by old dunes locked in shape with plantings of poverty grasses and a few scrubby bushes. As they came down, the wall directly behind the village had seemed to grow taller and taller, the village shrinking beneath such immensity.
"The Museum Fremen are kept generally uncontaminated by off-planet technology," Nayla had explained as the escort sealed the 'thopters into the low hangar. One of the troop already had been sent trotting off toward Tuono with the announcement of their arrival.
Siona had remained mostly silent all during the flight, but she had studied Nayla with covert intensity.
For a time during the march across the morning-lighted dunes, Idaho had tried to imagine that he was back in the old days. Sand was visible in the plantings and, in the valleys between dunes, there was parched ground, yellow grass, the sticklike shrubs. Three vultures, their gap-tipped wings spread wide, circled in the vault of sky-"the soaring search," Fremen had called it. Idaho had tried to explain this to Siona walking beside him. You worried about the carrion-eaters only when they began to descend.
"I have been told about vultures," she said, her voice cold.
Idaho had noted the perspiration on her upper lip. There was a spicy smell of sweat in the troop pressed close around them.
His imagination was not equal to the task of defocusing the differences between the past and this time. The issue stillsuits they wore were more for show than for efficient collection of the body's water. No true Fremen would have trusted his life to one of them, not even here, where the air smelled of nearby water. And the Fish Speakers of Nayla's troop did not walk in Fremen silence. They chattered among themselves like children.
Siona trudged beside him in sullen withdrawal, her attention frequently on the broad muscular back of Nayla, who strode along a few paces ahead of the troop.
What was between those two women? Idaho wondered. Nayla appeared devoted to Siona, hanging on Siona's every word, obeying every whim Siona uttered... except that Nayla would not deviate from the orders which brought them to Tuono Village. Still, Nayla deferred to Siona and called her "Commander." There was something deep between those two, something which aroused awe and fear in Nayla.
They came at last to a slope which dropped down to the village and the wall behind it. From the air, Tuono had been a cluster of glittering rectangles just outside the shadow of the wall. From this close vantage, though, it had been reduced to a cluster of decaying huts made even more pitiful by attempts to decorate the place. Bits of shiny minerals and scraps of metal picked out scroll designs on the building walls. A tattered green banner fluttered from a metal pole atop the largest structure. A fitful breeze brought the smell of garbage and uncovered cesspools to Idaho's nostrils. The central street of the village extended out across the sparsely planted sand toward the troop, ending in a ragged edge of broken paving.
A robed delegation waited near the building of the green flag, standing there expectantly with the Fish Speaker messenger Nayla had sent on ahead. Idaho counted eight in the delegation, all men in what appeared to be authentic Fremen robes of dark brown. A green headband could be glimpsed beneath the hood on one of the delegation-the Naib, no doubt. Children waited to one side with flowers. Black-hooded women could be seen peering from side-streets in the background. Idaho found the whole scene distressing.
"Let's get it over with," Siona said.
Nayla nodded and led the way down the slope onto the street. Siona and Idaho stayed a few paces behind her. The rest of the troop straggled along after them, silent now and peering around with undisguised curiosity.
As Nayla neared the delegation, the one with the green headband stepped forward and bowed. He moved like an old man but Idaho saw that he was not old, barely into his middle years, the cheeks smooth and unwrinkled, a stubby nose with no scars from breath-filter tubes, and the eyes! The eyes revealed definite pupils, not the all-blue of spice addiction. They were brown eyes. Brown eyes in a Fremen!
"I am Garun," the man said as Nayla stopped in front of him. "I am Naib of this place. I give you a Fremen welcome to Tuono."
Nayla gestured over her shoulder at Siona and Idaho, who had stopped just behind her. "Are quarters prepared for your guests?"
"We Fremen are noted for our hospitality," Garun said. "All is ready."
Idaho sniffed at the sour smells and sounds of this place. He glanced through open windows of the flag-topped building on his right. The Atreides banner flying over that? The window opened into an auditorium with low ceiling, a band-shell at the far end enclosing a small platform. He saw rows of seats, maroon carpeting on the floor. It had all the look of a stage setting, a place to entertain tourists.
The sound of shuffling feet brought Idaho's attention back to Garun. Children were pressing forward around the delegation, extending clumps of garish red flowers in their grimy hands. The flowers were wilted.
Garun addressed himself to Siona, correctly identifying the gold piping of Fish Speaker Command in her uniform.
"Will you wish a performance of our Fremen rituals?" he asked. "The music, perhaps? The dance?"
Nayla accepted a bunch of flowers from one of the children, sniffed them and sneezed.
Another urchin extended flowers toward Siona, lifting a wide-eyed stare toward her. She accepted the flowers without looking at the child. Idaho merely waved the children aside as they approached him. They hesitated, staring up at him, then scurried around him toward the rest of the troop.
Garun spoke to Idaho. "If you give them a few coins, they will not bother you."
Idaho shuddered. Was this the training for Fremen children?
Garun returned his attention to Siona. With Nayla listening, Garun began explaining the layout of his village.
Idaho moved away from them down the street, noting how glances flicked toward him and then avoided his gaze. He felt deeply offended by the surface decorations on the buildings, none of it disguising the evidence of decay. He stared in an open doorway at the auditorium. There was a harshness in Tuono, a struggling something behind the wilting flowers and the servile tone of Garun's voice. In another time and on another planet, this would have been a donkey-in-the-street village rope-belted peasants pressing forward with petitions. He could hear the whine of supplication in Garun's voice. These were not Fremen! These poor creatures lived on the margins, trying to retain parts of an ancient wholeness. And all the while, that lost reality slipped farther and farther from their grasp. What had Leto created here? These Museum Fremen were lost to everything except a bare existence and the rote mouthing of old words which they did not understand and which they did not even pronounce correctly!
Returning to Siona, Idaho bent to study the cut of Garun's brown robe, seeing a tightness in it dictated by a need to conserve fabric. The gray slick of a stillsuit could be seen underneath, exposed to sunlight which no real Fremen would ever have let touch his stillsuit that way. Idaho looked at the rest of the delegation, noting an identical parsimonious treatment of fabric. It betrayed their emotional bent. Such garments allowed no expansive gestures, no freedom of movement. The robes were tight and confining in the way of these entire people!
Disgust propelling him, Idaho strode forward abruptly and parted Garun's robe to look at the stillsuit. Just as he suspected! The suit was another sham-no arms to it, no boot-pumps!
Garun pulled back, putting a hand to the knife hilt Idaho had exposed at the man's belt. "Here! What're you doing?" Garun demanded, his voice querulous. "You don't touch a Fremen thus!"
"You, a Fremen?" Idaho demanded. "I lived with Fremen! I fought by their sides against Harkonnens! I died with Fremen! You? You're a sham!"
Garun's knuckles went white on the knife haft. He addressed himself to Siona. "Who is this man?"
Nayla spoke up: "This is Duncan Idaho."
"The ghola?" Garun turned to look at Idaho's face. "We have never seen your like here before."
Idaho felt himself almost overcome with desire to cleanse this place even if it cost him his life, this diminished life which could be repeated endlessly by people who had no real concerns for him. An older model, yes! But this was no Fremen.
"Draw that knife or take your hand off it," Idaho said.
Garun jerked his hand away from the knife. "It is not a real knife," he said. "Only for decoration." His voice became eager. "But we have real knives, even crysknives! They are kept locked in the display cases to preserve them."
Idaho could not help himself. He threw his head back in laughter. Siona smiled, but Nayla looked thoughtful and the rest of the Fish Speaker troop drew into a close, watchful circle around them.
The laughter had an odd effect on Garun. He lowered his head and clasped his hands tightly together, but not before Idaho saw them trembling. When Garun peered upward once more, it was to look at Idaho from beneath heavy brows. Idaho felt abruptly sobered. It was as though some terrible boot had crushed Garun's ego into fearful subservience. There was watchful waiting in the man's eyes. And for no reason he could explain, Idaho remembered a passage from the Orange Catholic Bible. He asked himself: Are these the meek who will outwait us all and inherit the universe?
Garun cleared his throat, then: "Perhaps the ghola Duncan Idaho will witness our ways and our ritual and judge them?"
Idaho felt shamed by the plaintive request. He spoke without thinking: "I will teach you anything Fremen that I know." He looked up to see Nayla scowling at him. "It will help to pass the time," he said. "And who knows? It may return something of the true Fremen to this land."
Siona said: "We've no need to play old cultish games! Take us to our quarters."
Nayla lowered her head in embarrassment and spoke without looking at Siona. "Commander, there is a thing I have not ventured to tell you."
"That you must make sure we stay in this filthy place," Siona said.
"Oh, no!" Nayla looked up at Siona's face. "Where could you go? The Wall cannot be climbed and there is only the river beyond it, anyway. And in the other direction, it is the Sareer. Oh, no... it is something else." Nayla shook her head.
"Out with it!" Siona snapped.
"I am under the strictest orders, Commander, which I dare not disobey." Nayla glanced at the other members of the troop then back to Siona. "You and the... Duncan Idaho are to be quartered together."
"My father's orders?"
"Lady Commander, they are said to be the orders of the God Emperor himself and we dare not disobey."
Siona looked full at Idaho. "You will remember my warning, Duncan, when last we spoke at the Citadel?"
"My hands are mine to do with as I wish," Idaho snarled. "I don't think you have any doubts about my wishes!"
She turned away from him after a curt nod and looked at Garun. "What does it matter where we bed in this disgusting place? Take us to our quarters."
Idaho found Garun's response fascinating-a turning of the head toward the ghola, shielding the face behind the Fremen hood, then a secret conspiratorial wink. Only then did Garun lead them away down the ditty street. -= What is the most immediate danger to my stewardship? I will tell you. It is a true visionary, a person who has stood in the presence of God with the full knowledge of where he stands. Visionary ecstasy releases energies which are like the energies of sex-uncaring for anything except creation. One act of creation can be much like another. Everything depends upon the vision.
- The Stolen Journals LETO LAY without his cart on the high, sheltered balcony of his Little Citadel tower, subduing a fretfulness which he knew came from the necessary delays putting off the date of his wedding to Hwi Noree. He stared toward the southwest. Somewhere off there beyond the darkening horizon, the Duncan, Siona and their companions had been six days in Tuono Village.
The delays are my own fault, Leto thought. I am the one who changed the place for the wedding, making it necessary for poor Moneo to revise all of his preparations.
And now, of course, there was the matter of Malky.
None of these necessities could be explained to Moneo, who could be heard stirring about within the central chamber of the aerie, worrying about his absence from the command post where he directed the festive preparations. Moneo was such a worrier!
Leto looked toward the setting sun. It floated low to the horizon, faded a dim orange by a recent storm. Rain crouched low in the clouds to the south beyond the Sareer now. In a prolonged silence, Leto had watched the rain there for a time which had stretched out with no beginning or end. The clouds had grown out of a hard gray sky, rain walking in visible lines. He had felt himself clothed in memories that came unbidden. The mood was hard to shake off and, without even thinking, he muttered the remembered lines of an ancient verse.
"Did you speak, Lord?" Moneo's voice came from close beside Leto. By merely turning his eyes, Leto could see the faithful majordomo standing attentively waiting.
Leto translated into Galach as he quoted: "The nightingale nests in the plum tree, but what will she do with the wind?"
"Is that a question, Lord?"
"An old question. The answer is simple. Let the nightingale keep to her flowers."
"I don't understand, Lord."
"Stop mouthing the obvious, Moneo. It disturbs me when you do that."
"Forgive me, Lord."
"What else can I do?" Leto studied Moneo's downcast features. "You and I, Moneo, whatever else we do, we provide good theater."
Moneo peered at Leto's face. "Lord?"
"The rites of the religious festival of Bacchus were the seeds of Greek theater, Moneo. Religion often leads to theater. They will have fine theater out of us." Once more, Leto turned and looked at the southwest horizon.
There was a wind there now piling up the clouds. Leto thought he could hear driven sand blustering along the dunes, but there was only resonant quiet in the tower aerie, a quiet with the faintest of wind hiss behind it.
"The clouds," he whispered. "I would take a cup of moonlight once more, an ancient sea barge at my feet, thin clouds clinging to my darkling sky, the blue-gray cloak around my shoulders and horses neighing nearby."
"My Lord is troubled," Moneo said. The compassion in his voice wrenched at Leto.
"The bright shadows of my pasts," Leto said. "They never leave me in peace. I listened for a soothing sound, the bell of a country town at nightfall, and it told me only that I am the sound and soul of this place."
As he spoke, darkness enclosed the tower. Automatic lights came on around them. Leto kept his attention directed outward where a thin melon slice of First Moon drifted above the clouds with orange planet-light revealing the satellite's full circle.
"Lord, why have we come out here?" Moneo asked. "Why won't you tell me?"
"I wanted the benefit of your surprise," Leto said. "A Guild lighter will land beside us out here soon. My Fish Speakers bring Malky to me."
Moneo inhaled a quick breath and held it a moment before exhaling. "Hwi's... uncle? That Malky?"
"You are surprised that you had no warning of this," Leto said.
Moneo felt a chill all through his body. "Lord, when you wish to keep things secret from..."
"Moneo?" Leto spoke in a softly persuasive tone. "I know that Malky offered you greater temptations than any other..."
"Lord! I never..."
"I know that, Moneo." Still in that soft tone. "But surprise has shocked your memories alive. You are armed for anything I may require of you."
"What... what does my Lord..."
"Perhaps we will have to dispose of Malky. He is a problem."
"Me? You want me to..."
"Perhaps."
Moneo swallowed, then, "The Reverend Mother..."
"Anteac is dead. She served me well, but she is dead. There was extreme violence when my Fish Speakers attacked the... place where Malky lay hidden."
"We are better off without Anteac," Moneo said.
"I appreciate your distrust of the Bene Gesserit, but I would that Anteac had left us in another way. She was faithful to us, Moneo."
"A Reverend Mother was..."
"Both the Bene Tleilax and the Guild wanted Malky's secret," Leto said. "When they saw us move against the lxians, they struck ahead of my Fish Speakers. Anteac... well, she could only delay them a bit, but it was enough. My Fish Speakers invested the place..."
"Malky's secret, Lord?"
"When a thing vanishes," Leto said, "that is as much of a message as when a thing suddenly appears. The empty spaces are always worthy of our study."
"What does my Lord mean, empty..."
"Malky did not die! Certainly I would have known that. Where did he go when he vanished?"
"Vanished... from you, Lord? Do you mean that the lxians..."
"They have improved upon a device they gave me long ago. They improved it slowly and subtly, hidden shells within hidden shells, but I noted the shadows. I was surprised. I was pleased."
Moneo thought about this. A device which concealed... Ahhh! The God Emperor had mentioned a thing on several occasions, a way of concealing the thoughts he recorded. Moneo spoke:
"And Malky brings the secret of..."
"Oh, yes! But that is not Malky's real secret. He holds another thing in his bosom which he does not think that I suspect."
"Another... but, Lord, if they can hide even from you..."
"Many can do that now, Moneo. They scattered when my Fish Speakers attacked. The secret of the lxian device is spread far and wide."
Moneo's eyes went wide with alarm. "Lord, if anyone..."
"If they learn to be clever, they will leave no tracks," Leto said. "Tell me, Moneo, what does Nayla say about the Duncan? Does she resent reporting directly to you?"
"Whatever my Lord commands..." Moneo cleared his throat. He could not fathom why his God Emperor spoke of hidden tracks, the Duncan and Nayla in the same breath.
"Yes, of course," Leto said. "Whatever I command, Nayla obeys. And what does she say of the Duncan?"
"He has not tried to breed with Siona, if that is my Lord's...
"But what does he do with my puppet Naib, Garun, and the other Museum Fremen?"
"He speaks to them of the old ways, of the wars against the Harkonnens, of the first Atreides here on Arrakis."
"On Dune!"
"Dune, yes."
"It's because there's no more Dune that there are no more Fremen," Leto said. "Have you conveyed my message to Nayla?"
"Lord, why do you add to your peril?"
"Did you convey my message?"
"The messenger has been sent to Tuono, but I could still call her back."
"You will not call her back!"
"But, Lord..."
"What will she say to Nayla?"
"That... that is your command for Nayla to continue in absolute and unquestioning obedience of my daughter except insofar... Lord! This is dangerous!"
"Dangerous? Nayla is a Fish Speaker. She will obey me."
"But Siona... Lord, I fear that my daughter does not serve you with all of her heart. And Nayla is..."
"Nayla must not deviate."
"Lord, let us hold your wedding in some other place."
"No!"
"Lord, I know that your vision has revealed..."
"The Golden Path endures, Moneo. You know that as well as L"
Moneo sighed. "Infinity is yours, Lord. I do not question the..." He broke off as a monstrous shuddering roar shook the tower, louder and louder.
Both of them turned toward the sound- a descending plume of blue-orange light filled with swirling shockwaves came down to the desert less than a kilometer away to the south.
"Ahhh, my guest arrives," Leto said. "I will send you down on my cart, Moneo. Bring only Malky back with you. Tell the Guildsmen this has earned my forgiveness, then send them away."
"Your for... yes, Lord. But if they have the secret of..."
"They serve my purpose, Moneo. You must do the same. Bring Malky to me."
Obediently, Moneo went to the cart which lay in shadows at the far side of the aerie chamber. He clambered on it, watched a mouth of night appear in the Wall. A landing-lip extruded into that night. The cart drifted outward, feather-light, and floated at an angle to the sand beside a Guild lighter which stood upright like a distorted miniature of the Little Citadel's tower.
Leto watched from the balcony, his front segments lifted slightly to provide him a better viewing angle. His acute eyesight identified the white movement of Moneo standing on the cart in the moonlight. Long-legged Guild servitors came out with a litter which they slid onto the cart, standing there a moment in conversation with Moneo. When they left, Leto closed the cart's bubble cover and saw moonlight reflected from it. At his beckoning thought, the cart and its burden returned to the landing-lip. The Guild lighter lifted in its noisy rumbling while Leto was bringing the cart into the chamber's lights, closing the entrance behind it. Leto opened the bubble cover. Sand grated beneath him as he rolled to the litter and lifted his front segments to peer in at Malky who lay as though sleeping, lashed into the litter by broad gray elastic bindings. The man's face was ashen under dark gray hair.
Haw he has aged, Leto thought.
Moneo stepped down off the cart and looked back at the litter's occupant. "He is injured, Lord. They want to send a medical..."
"They wanted to send a spy."
Leto studied Malky the dark wrinkled skin, the sunken cheeks, that sharp nose at such contrast with the rounded oval of his face. The heavy eyebrows had turned almost white. There but for a lifetime of testosterone... yes.
Malky's eyes opened. Such a shock to find evil in those doe-like brown eyes! A smile twitched Malky's mouth.
"Lord Leto." Malky's voice was little more than a husky whisper. His eyes turned right, focusing on the majordomo. "And Moneo. Forgive me for not rising to the occasion."
"Are you in pain?" Leto asked.
"Sometimes." Malky's eyes moved to study his surroundings. "Where are the houris?"
"I'm afraid I must deny you that pleasure, Malky."
"Just as well," Malky husked. "I don't really feel up to their demands. Those were not houris you sent after me, Leto."
"They were professional in their obedience to me," Leto said.
"They were bloody hunters!"
"Anteac was the hunter. My Fish Speakers were merely the clean-up crew."
Moneo shifted his attention from one speaker to the other, back and forth. There were disturbing undertones in this conversation. Despite the huskiness, Malky sounded almost flippant... but then he had always been that way. A dangerous man!
Leto said: "Just before your arrival, Moneo and I were discussing Infinity."
"Poor Moneo," Malky said.
Leto smiled. "Do you remember, Malky? You once asked me to demonstrate Infinity."
"You said no Infinity exists to be demonstrated." Malky swept his gaze toward Moneo. "Leto likes to play with paradox. He knows all the tricks of language that have ever been discovered."
Moneo put down a surge of anger. He felt excluded from this conversation, an object of amusement by two superior beings. Malky and the God Emperor were almost like two old friends reliving the pleasures of a mutual past.
"Moneo accuses me of being the sole possessor of Infinity," Leto said. "He refuses to believe that he has just as much of Infinity as I have."
Malky stared up at Leto. "You see, Moneo? You see how tricky he is with words?"
"Tell me about your niece, Hwi Noree," Leto said.
"Is it true, Leto, what they say? That you are going to wed the gentle Hwi?"
"It is true."
Malky chuckled, then grimaced with pain. "They did terrible damage to me, Leto," he whispered, then: "Tell me, old worm..."
Moneo gasped.
Malky took a moment to recover from pain, then: "Tell me, old worm, is there a monster penis hidden in that monster body of yours? What a shock for the gentle Hwi!"
"I told you the truth about that long ago," Leto said.
"Nobody tells the truth," Malky husked.
"You often told me the truth," Leto said. "Even when you didn't know it."
"That's because you're cleverer than the rest of us."
"Will you tell me about Hwi?"
"I think you already know it."
"I want to hear it from you," Leto said. "Did you get help from the Tleilaxu?"
"They gave us knowledge, nothing more. Everything else we did for ourselves."
"I thought it was not the Tleilaxus' doing."
Moneo could no longer contain his curiosity. "Lord, what is this of Hwi and Tleilaxu? Why do you..."
"Here there, old friend Moneo," Malky said, rolling his gaze toward the majordomo. "Don't you know what he..."
"I was never your friend!" Moneo snapped.
"Companion among the houris then," Malky said.
"Lord," Moneo said, turning toward Leto, "why do you speak of..."
"Shhh, Moneo," Leto said. "We are tiring your old companion and I have things to learn from him yet."
"Did you ever wonder, Leto," Malky asked, "why Moneo never tried to take the whole shebang away from you?"
"The what?" Moneo demanded.
"Another of Leto's old words," Malky said. "She and bang-shebang. It's perfect. Why don't you rename your Empire, Leto? The Grand Shebang!"
Leto raised a hand to silence Moneo. "Will you tell me, Malky? About Hwi?"
"Just a few tiny cells from my body," Malky said. "Then the carefully nurtured growth and education-everything an exact opposite to your old friend, Malky. We did it all in the no-room where you cannot see!"
"But I notice when something vanishes," Leto said.
"No-room?" Moneo asked, then as the import of Malky's words sank home. "You? You and Hwi..."
"That is the shape I saw in the shadows," Leto said.
Moneo looked full at Leto's face. "Lord, I will call off the wedding. I will say..."
"You will do nothing of the kind!"
"But Lord, if she and Malky are..."
"Moneo," Malky husked. "Your Lord commands and you must obey!"
That mocking tone! Moneo glared at Malky.
"The exact opposite of Malky," Leto said. "Didn't you hear him?"
"What could be better?" Malky asked.
"But surely, Lord, if you now know..."
"Moneo," Leto said, "you are beginning to disturb me."
Moneo fell into abashed silence.
Leto said: "That's better. You know, Moneo, once tens of thousands of years ago when I was another person, I made a mistake."
"You, a mistake?" Malky mocked.
Leto merely smiled. "My mistake was compounded by the beautiful way in which I expressed it."
"Tricks with words," Malky taunted.
"Indeed! This is what I said: `The present is distraction; the future a dream; only memory can unlock the meaning of life.' Aren't those beautiful words, Malky?"
"Exquisite, old worm."
Moneo put a hand over his mouth.
"But my words were a foolish lie," Leto said. "I knew it at the time, but I was infatuated with the beautiful words. No memory unlocks no meanings. Without anguish of the spirit, which is a wordless experience, there are no meanings anywhere."
"I fail to see the meaning of the anguish caused me by your bloody Fish Speakers," Malky said.
"You're suffering no anguish," Leto said.
"If you were in this body, you'd..."
"That's just physical pain," Leto said. "It will end soon."
"Then when will I know the anguish?" Malky asked.
"Perhaps later."
Leto flexed his front segments away from Malky to face Moneo. "Do you really serve the Golden Path, Moneo?"
"Ahhh, the Golden Path," Malky taunted.
"You know I do, Lord," Moneo said.
"Then you must promise me," Leto said, "that what you have learned here must never pass your lips. Not by word or sign can you reveal it."
"I promise, Lord."
"He promises, Lord," Malky sneered.
One of Leto's tiny hands gestured at Malky, who lay staring up at the blunt profile of a face within its gray cowl. "For reasons of old admiration and... many other reasons, I cannot kill Malky. I cannot even ask it of you... yet he must be eliminated."
"Ohhh, how clever you are!" Malky said.
"Lord, if you will wait at the other end of the chamber," Moneo said. "Perhaps when you return Malky no longer will be a problem."
"He's going to do it," Malky husked. "Gods below! He's going to do it."
Leto squirmed away and went to the shadowed limit of the chamber, keeping his attention on the faint arc of a line which would become an opening into the night if he merely converted the wish into a thought-of-command. What a long drop that would be out there-just roll off the landing-lip. He doubted that even his body would survive it. But there was no water in the sand beneath his tower and he could feel the Golden Path winking in and out of existence merely because he allowed himself to think of such an end.
"Leto!" Malky called from behind him.
Leto heard the litter grating on the wind-scattered sand which peppered the floor of his aerie.
Once more, Malky called: "Leto, you are the best! There's no evil in this universe which can surpass..."
A sodden thump shut off Malky's voice. A blow to the throat, Leto thought. Yes, Moneo knows that one. There came the sound of the balcony's transparent shield sliding open, the rasping of the litter on the rail, then silence.
Moneo will have to bury the body in the sand, Leto thought. There is as yet no worm to come and devour the evidence. Leto turned then and looked across the chamber. Moneo stood leaning over the railing, peering down... down... down...
I cannot pray for you, Malky, nor for you, Moneo, Leto thought. l may be the only religious consciousness in the Empire because I am truly alone... so I cannot pray.
- = You cannot understand history unless you understand its flowings, its currents and the ways leaders move within such forces. A leader tries to perpetuate the conditions which demand his leadership. Thus, the leader requires the outsider. I caution you to examine my career with care. I am both leader and outsider. Do not make the mistake of assuming that I only created the Church which was the State. That was my function as leader and I had many historical models to use as pattern. For a clue to my role as outsider, look at the arts of my time. The arts are barbaric. The favorite poetry? The Epic. The popular dramatic ideal? Heroism. Dances? Wildly abandoned. From Moneo's viewpoint, he is correct in describing this as dangerous. It stimulates the imagination. It makes people feel the lack of that which I have taken from them. What did I take from them? The right to participate in history.
- The Stolen Journals IDAHO, STRETCHED out on his cot with his eyes closed, heard a weight drop onto the other cot. He sat up into the midafternoon light which slanted through the room's single window at a sharp angle, reflecting off the white-tiled floor onto the light yellow walls. Siona, he saw, had come in and stretched herself on her cot. She already was reading one of the books she carried around with her in a green fabric pack.
Why books? he wondered.
He swung his feet to the floor and glanced around the room. How could this high-ceilinged, spacious box be considered even remotely Fremen? A wide table/desk of some dark brown local plastic separated the two cots. There were two doors. One led directly outside across a garden. The other admitted them to a luxurious bath whose pale blue tiles glistened under a broad skylight. The bath contained, among its many functional services, a sunken tub and a shower, each at least two meters square. The door to this sybaritic space remained open and Idaho could hear water running out of the tub. Siona appeared oddly fond of bathing in an excess of water.
Stilgar, Idaho's Naib of the ancient days on Dune, would have looked on that room with scorn. "Shameful!" he would have said. "Decadent! Weak!" Stilgar would have used many scornful words about this entire village which dared to compare itself with a true Fremen sietch.
Paper rustled as Siona turned a page. She lay with her head propped on two pillows, a thin white robe covering her body. The robe still revealed clinging wetness from her bath.
Idaho shook his head. What was it on those pages which held her interest this way? She had been reading and re-reading since their arrival at Tuono. The volumes were thin but numerous, bearing only numbers on their black bindings. Idaho had seen a number nine.
Swinging his feet to the floor, he stood and went to the window. There was an old man out there at a distance, digging in flowers. The garden was protected by buildings on three sides. The flowers bore large blossoms-red on the outside but, when they unfolded, white in the center. The old Man's uncovered gray hair was a kind of blossom waving among the floral white and jeweled buds. Idaho smelled moldering leaves and freshly turned dirt against a background of pungent floral perfume.
A Fremen tending flowers in the open!
Siona volunteered nothing about her strange reading matter. She's taunting me, Idaho thought. She wants me to ask.
He tried not to think about Hwi. Rage threatened to engulf him when he did. He remembered the Fremen word for that intense emotion: kanawa, the iron ring of jealousy. Where is Hwi? What is she doing at this moment?
The door from the garden opened without a knock and Teishar, an aide to Garun, entered. Teishar had a dead colored
face full of dark wrinkles. His eyes were sunken with pale yellow around the pupils. Teishar wore a brown robe. He had hair like old grass that had been left out to rot. He seemed unnecessarily ugly, like a dark and elemental spirit. Teishar closed the door and stood there looking at them.
Siona's voice came from behind Idaho. "Well, what is it?"
Idaho noticed then that Teishar seemed strangely excited, vibrating with it.
"The God Emperor..." Teishar cleared his throat and began again. "The God Emperor will come to Tuono!"
Siona sat upright on the bed, folding her white robe over her knees. Idaho glanced back at her, then once more to Teishar.
"He will be wed here, here in Tuono!" Teishar said. "It will be done in the ancient Fremen way! The God Emperor and his bride will be guests of Tuono!"
Full in the grip of kanawa, Idaho glared at him, fists clenched. Teishar bobbed his head briefly, turned and let himself out, shutting the door hard.
"Let me read you something, Duncan," Siona said.
Idaho was a moment understanding her words. Fists still clenched at his sides, he turned and looked at her. Siona sat on the edge of her cot, a book in her lap. She took his attention as agreement.
"Some believe," she read, "that you must compromise integrity with a certain amount of dirty work before you can put genius to work. They say the compromise begins when you come out of the sanctus intending to realize your ideals. Moneo says my solution is to stay within the sanctus, sending others to do my dirty work."
She looked up at Idaho. "The God Emperor-his own words."
Slowly, Idaho relaxed his fists. He knew he needed this distraction. And it interested him that Siona had emerged from her silence.
"What is that book?" he asked.
Briefly, she told him how she and her companions had stolen the Citadel charts and the copies of Leto's journals.
"Of course you knew about that," she said. "My father has made it plain that spies betrayed our raid."
He saw the tears latent in her eyes. "Nine of you killed by the wolves?"
She nodded.
"You're a lousy Commander!" he said.
She bristled but before she could speak, he asked: "Who translated them for you?"
"This is from Ix. They say the Guild found the Key."
"We already knew our God Emperor indulged in expedience," Idaho said. "Is that all he has to say?"
"Read it for yourself." She rummaged in her pack beside the cot and came up with the first volume of the translation, which she tossed across to his cot. As Idaho returned to the cot, she demanded: "What do you mean I'm a lousy Commander'?"
"Wasting nine of your friends that way."
"You fool!" She shook her head. "You obviously never saw those wolves!"
He picked up the book and found it heavy, realizing then that it had been printed on crystal paper. "You should have armed yourselves against the wolves," he said, opening the volume.
"What arms?" Any arms we could get would've been useless!"
"Lasguns?" he asked, turning a page.
"Touch a lasgun on Arrakis and the Worm knows it!"
He turned another page. "Your friends got lasguns eventually."
"And look what it got them!"
Idaho read a line, then: "Poisons were available."
She swallowed convulsively.
Idaho looked at her. "You did poison the wolves after all, didn't you?"
Her voice was almost a whisper: "Yes."
"Then why didn't you do that in advance?" he asked.
"We... didn't... know... we... could."
"But you didn't test it," Idaho said. He turned back to the open volume. "A lousy Commander."
"He's so devious!" Siona said.
Idaho read a passage in the volume before returning his attention to Siona. "That hardly describes him. Have you read all of this?"
"Every word! Some of them several times."
Idaho looked at the open page and read aloud: "I have created what I intended-a powerful spiritual tension throughout my Empire. Few sense the strength of it. With what energies did I create this condition? I am not that strong. The only power
I possess is the control of individual prosperity. That is the sum of all the things I do. Then why do people seek my presence for other reasons? What could lead them to certain death in the futile attempt to reach my presence? Do they want to be saints? Do they think that thus they gain the vision of God?"
"He's the ultimate cynic," Siona said, tears apparent in her voice.
"How did he test you?" Idaho asked.
"He showed me a... he showed me his Golden Path."
"That's convenient..."
"It's real enough, Duncan." She looked up at him, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. "But if it was ever a reason for our God Emperor, it is not reason for what he has become!"
Idaho inhaled deeply, then: "The Atreides come to this!"
"The Worm must go!" Siona said.
"I wonder when he's arriving?" Idaho said.
"Garun's little rat friend didn't say."
"We must ask," Idaho said.
"We have no weapons," Siona said.
"Nayla has a lasgun," he said. "We have knives... rope. I saw rope in one of Garun's storage rooms."
"Against the Worm?" she asked. "Even if we could get Nyala's lasgun, you know it won't touch him."
"But is his cart proof against it?" Idaho asked.
"I don't trust Nayla," Siona said.
"Doesn't she obey you?"
"Yes, but...
"We will proceed one step at a time," Idaho said. "Ask Nayla if she would use her lasgun against the Worm's cart."
"And if she refuses?"
"Kill her."
Siona stood, tossing her book aside.
"How will the Worm come to Tuono?" Idaho asked. "He's too big and heavy for an ordinary 'thopter."
"Garun will tell us," she said. "But I think he will come as he usually travels." She looked up at the ceiling which concealed the Sareer's perimeter Wall. "I think he will come on peregrination with his entire crew. He will come along the Royal Road and drop down to here on suspensors." She looked at Idaho. "What of Garun?"
"A strange man," Idaho said. "He wants most desperately to be a real Fremen. He knows he is not anything like what they were in my day."
"What were they like in your day, Duncan?" "They had a saying which describes it," Idaho said. "You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die." "Did you say this to Garun?" she asked. "Yes." "And his response?" "He said I was the only such person he had ever met." "Garun may be wiser than any of us," she said. -= You think power may be the most unstable of all human achievements? Then what of the apparent exceptions to this inherent instability? Some families endure. Very powerful religious bureaucracies have been known to endure. Consider the relationship between faith and power. Are they mutually exclusive when each depends upon the other? The Bene Gesserit have been reasonably secure within the loyal walls of faith for thousands of years. But where has their power gone?
- The Stolen Journals MONEO SPOKE in a petulant tone: "Lord, I wish you had given me more time."
He stood outside the Citadel in the short shadows of noon. Leto lay directly in front of him on the Imperial Cart, its bubble hood retracted. He had been touring the environs with Hwi Noree, who occupied a newly installed seat within the bubble cover's perimeter and just beside Leto's face. Hwi appeared merely curious about all the bustle which was beginning to increase around them.
How calm she is, Moneo thought. He repressed an involuntary shudder at what he had learned of her from Malky. The God Emperor was right. Hwi was exactly what she appeared to be-an ultimately sweet and sensible human being. Would she really have mated with me? Moneo wondered.
Distractions drew his attention away from her. While Leto had toured Hwi around the Citadel on the suspensor-borne cart, a great troop of courtiers and Fish Speakers had been assembled here, all the courtiers in celebration finery, brilliant reds and golds dominant. The Fish Speakers wore their best dark blues, distinguished only by the different colors in the piping and hawks. A baggage caravan on suspensor sleds had been drawn up at the rear with Fish Speakers to pull it. The air was full of dust and the sounds and smells of excitement. Most of the courtiers had reacted with dismay when told their destination. Some had immediately purchased their own tents and pavilions. These had been sent on ahead with the other impediments piled now on the sand just outside Tuono's view. The Fish Speakers in the entourage were not taking this in a festive mood. They had complained loudly when told they could not carry lasguns.
"Just a little more time, Lord," Moneo was saying. "I still don't know how we will..."
"There's no substitute for time in solving many problems," Leto said. "However, you can place too much reliance on it. I can accept no more delays."
"We will be three days just getting there," Moneo complained.
Leto thought about that time-the swift walk-trot-walk of a peregrination... one hundred and eighty kilometers. Yes, three days.
"I'm sure you've made good arrangements for the waystops," Leto said. "Plenty of hot water for the muscle cramps?"
"We'll be comfortable enough," Moneo said, "but I don't like leaving the Citadel in these times! And you know why!"
"We have communications devices, loyal assistants. The Guild is suitably chastened. Calm yourself, Moneo."
"We could hold the ceremony in the Citadel!"
For answer, Leto closed the bubble cover around him, isolating Hwi with him.
"Is there danger, Leto?" she asked.
"There's always danger."
Moneo sighed, turned and trotted toward where the Royal Road began its long climb eastward before turning south around the Sareer. Leto set his cart in motion behind the majordomo, heard his motley troop fall into step behind them.
"Are we all moving?" Leto asked.
Hwi glanced backward around him. "Yes." She turned toward his face. "Why was Moneo being so difficult?"
"Moneo has discovered that the instant which has just left him is forever beyond his reach."
"He has been very moody and distracted since you returned from the Little Citadel. He's not the same at all."
"He is an Atreides, my love, and you were designed to please an Atreides."
"It's not that. I would know if it were that."
"Yes... well, I think Moneo has also discovered the reality of death."
"What's it like at the Little Citadel when you're there with Moneo?" she asked.
"It's the loneliest place in my Empire."
"I think you avoid my questions," she said.
"No, love. I share your concern for Moneo, but no explanation of mine will help him now. Moneo is trapped. He has learned that it is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past."
"I think it's you who have trapped him, Leto."
"But he must free himself."
"Why can't you free him?"
"Because he thinks my memories are his key to freedom. He thinks I am building our future out of our past."
"Isn't that always the way of it, Leto?"
"No, dear Hwi."
"Then how is it?"
"Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed."
"And you with all of your memories know otherwise."
Leto turned his face within its cowl to stare at her, probing... remembering. Out of the multitudes within him, he could form a composite, a genetic suggestion of Hwi, but the suggestion fell far short of the living flesh. That was it, of course. The past became row-on-row of eyes staring outward like the eyes of gasping fish, but Hwi was vibrant life. Her mouth was set in Grecian curves designed for a Delphic chant, but she hummed no prophetic syllables. She was content to live, an opening person like a flower perpetually unfolding into fragrant blossom.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" she asked.
"I was basking in the love of you."
"Love, yes." She smiled. "I think that since we cannot share the love of the flesh, we must share the love of the soul. Would you share that with me, Leto?"
He was taken aback. "You ask about my soul?"
"Surely others have asked."
He spoke shortly: "My soul digests its experiences, nothing more."
"Have I asked too much of you?" she asked.
"I think that you cannot ask too much of me."
"Then I presume upon our love to disagree with you. My Uncle Malky talked about your soul."
He found that he could not respond. She took his silence as an invitation to continue. "He said that you were the ultimate artist at probing the soul, your own soul first."
"But your Uncle Malky denied that he had a soul of his own!"
She heard the harshness in his voice, but was not deterred. "Still, I think he was right. You are the genius of the soul, the brilliant one."
"You need only the plodding perseverance of duration," he said. "No brilliance."
They were well onto the long climb to the top of the Sareer's perimeter Wall now. He lowered his cart's wheels and deactivated the suspensors.
Hwi spoke softly, her voice barely audible above the grating sound of the cart's wheels and the running feet all around them. "May I call you Love, anyway?"
He spoke around a remembered tightness in a throat which was no longer completely human. "Yes."
"I was born an Ixian, Love," she said. "Why don't I share their mechanical view of our universe? Do you know my view, Leto my love?"
He could only stare at her.
"I sense the supernatural at every turning," she said.
Leto's voice rasped, sounding angry even to him: "Each person creates his own supernatural."
"Don't be angry with me, Love."
Again, that awful rasping: "It is impossible for me to be angry with you."
"But something happened between you and Malky once," she said. "He would never tell me what it was, but he said he often wondered why you spared him."
"Because of what he taught me."
"What happened between you two, Love?"
"I would rather not talk about Malky."
"Please, Love. I feel that it's important for me to know."
"I suggested to Malky that there might be some things men should not invent."
"And that's all?"
"No." He spoke reluctantly. "My words angered him. He said: `You think that in a world without birds, men would not invent aircraft! What a fool you are! Men can invent anything!"' "He called you a fool?" There was shock in Hwi's voice.
"He was right. And although he denied it, he spoke the truth. He taught me that there was a reason for running away from inventions."
"Then you fear the lxians?"
"Of course I do! They can invent catastrophe."
"Then what could you do?"
"Run faster. History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps but it's never enough. You also must run."
"You are sharing your soul with me, Love. Do you know that?"
Leto looked away from her and focused on Moneo's back, the motions of the majordomo, the tucked-in pretenses of secrecy so apparent there. The procession had come off the first gentle incline. It turned now to begin the climb onto Ringwall West. Moneo moved as he had always moved, one foot ahead of another, aware of the ground where he would place each step, but there was something new in the majordomo. Leto could feel the man drawing away, no longer content to march beside his Lord's cowled face, no longer trying to match himself to his master's destiny. Off to the east, the Sareer waited. Off to the west, there was the river, the plantations. Moneo looked neither left nor right. He had seen another destination.
"You do not answer me," Hwi said.
"You already know the answer."
"Yes. I am beginning to understand something of you," she said. "I can sense some of your fears. And I think I already know where it is that you live."
He turned a startled glance on her and found himself locked in her gaze. It was astonishing. He could not move his eyes away from her. A profound fear coursed through and he felt his hands begin to twitch.
"You live where the fear of being and the love of being are combined, all in one person," she said.
He could not blink.
"You area mystic," she said, "gentle to yourself only because you are in the middle of that universe looking outward, looking in ways that others cannot. You fear to share this, yet you want to share it more than anything else."
"What have you seen?" he whispered.
"I have no inner eye, no inner voices," she said. "But I have seen my Lord Leto, whose soul I love, and I know the only thing that you truly understand."
He broke from her gaze, fearful of what she might say. The trembling of his hands could be felt all through his front segment.
"Love, that is what you understand," she said. "Love, and that is all of it."
His hands stopped trembling. A tear rolled down each of his cheeks. When the tears touched his cowl, wisps of blue smoke erupted. He sensed the burning and was thankful for the pain.
"You have faith in life," Hwi said. "I know that the courage of love can reside only in this faith."
She reached out with her left hand and brushed the tears from his cheeks. It surprised him that the cowl did not react with its ordinary reflex to prevent the touch.
"Do you know," he asked, "that since I have become thus, you are the first person to touch my cheeks?"
"But I know what you are and what you were," she said.
"What I was... ahhh, Hwi. What I was has become only this face, and all the rest is lost in the shadows of memory... hidden... gone."
"Not hidden from me, Love."
He looked directly at her, no longer afraid to lock gazes. "Is it possible that the lxians know what they have created in you "I assure you, Leto, love of my soul, that they do not know. You are the first person, the only person to whom I have ever completely revealed myself."
"Then I will not mourn for what might have been," he said. "Yes, my love, I will share my soul with you." -= Think of it as plastic memory, this force within you which trends you and your fellows toward tribal forms. This plastic memory seeks to return to its ancient shape, the tribal society. It is all around you-the feudatory, the diocese, the corporation, the platoon, the sports club, the dance troupes, the rebel cell, the planning council, the prayer group... each with its master and servants, its host and parasites. And the swarms of alienating devices (including these very words!) tend eventually to be enlisted in the argument for a return to "those better rimes." I despair of teaching you other ways. You have square thoughts which resist circles.
- The Stolen Journals IDAHO FOUND he could manage the climb without thinking about it. This body grown by the Tleilaxu remembered things the Tleilaxu did not even suspect. His original youth might be lost in the eons, but his muscles were Tleilaxu-young and he could bury his childhood in forgetfulness while he climbed. In that childhood, he had learned survival by flight into the high rocks of his home planet. It did not matter that these rocks in front of him now had been brought here by men, they also had been shaped by ages of weather.
The morning sun was hot on Idaho's back. He could hear Siona's efforts to reach the relatively simple support position of a narrow ledge far below him. The position was virtually useless to Idaho, but it had been the argument which had brought Siona finally into agreement that they should attempt this climb.
They.
She had objected that he might try it alone.
Nayla, three of her Fish Speaker aides, Garun and three chosen from his Museum Fremen waited on the sand at the foot of the barrier Wall which enclosed the Sareer.
Idaho did not think about the Wall's height. He thought only about where he would next put a hand or a foot. He thought about the coil of light rope around his shoulders. That rope was the tallness of this Wall. He had measured it out on the ground, triangulating across the sand, not counting his steps. When the rope was long enough it was long enough. The Wall was as high as the rope was long. Any other way of thinking could only dull his mind.
Feeling for handholds which he could not see, Idaho groped his way up the sheer face... well, not quite sheer. Wind and sand and even some rain, the forces of cold and heat, had been at their erosive work here for more than three thousand years. For one full day, Idaho had sat on the sand below the Wall and he had studied what had been accomplished by Time. He had fixed certain patterns in his mind-a slanting shadow, a thin line, a crumbling bulge, a tiny lip of rock here and another over there.
His fingers wriggled upward into a sharp crack. He tested his weight gently on the support. Yes. Briefly, he rested, pressing his face against warm rock, not looking up or down. He was simply here. Everything was a matter of the pacing. His shoulders must not be allowed to tire too soon. Weight must be adjusted between feet and arms. Fingers took inevitable damage, but while bone and tendons held, the skin could be ignored.
Once more, he crept upward. A bit of rock broke away from his hand; dust and shards fell across his right cheek, but he did not even feel it. Every bit of his awareness concentrated on the groping hand, the balance of his feet on the tiniest of protrusions. He was a mote, a particle which defied gravity... a finger-hold here, a toehold there, clinging to the rock surface at times by the sheer power of his will.
Nine makeshift pitons bulged one of his pockets, but he resisted using them. The equally makeshift hammer dangled from his belt on a short cord whose knot his fingers had memorized.
Nayla had been difficult. She would not give up her lasgun. She had, however, obeyed Siona's direct order to accompany them. A strange woman... strangely obedient.
"Have you not sworn to obey me?" Siona had demanded.
Nayla's reluctance had vanished.
Later, Siona had said: "She always obeys my direct orders."
"Then we may not have to kill her," Idaho had said.
"I would rather not attempt it. I don't think you have even the faintest idea of her strength and quickness."
Garun, the Museum Fremen who dreamed of becoming a "true Naib in the old fashion," had set the stage for this climb by answering Idaho's question: "How will the God Emperor come to Tuono?"
"In the same way he chose for a visit during my great-grandfather's time."
"And that was?" Siona had prompted him.
They had been sitting in the dusty shadows outside the guest house, sheltering from the afternoon sun on the day of the announcement that the Lord Leto would be wed in Tuono. A semicircle of Garun's aides squatted around the doorstep where Siona and Idaho sat with Garun. Two Fish Speakers lounged nearby, listening. Nayla was due to arrive momentarily.
Garun pointed to the high Wall behind the village, its rim glistening distant gold in the sunlight. "The Royal Road runs there and the God Emperor has a device which lowers him gently from the heights."
"It's built into his cart," Idaho said.
"Suspensors," Siona agreed. "I've seen them."
"My great-grandfather said they came along the Royal Road, a great troop of them. The God Emperor glided down to our village square on his device. The others came down on ropes."
Idaho spoke thoughtfully: "Ropes."
"Why did they come?" Siona asked.
"To affirm that the God Emperor had not forgotten his Fremen, so my great-grandfather said. It was a great honor, but not as great as this wedding."
Idaho arose while Garun was still talking. There was a clear view of the high Wall from nearby-straight down the central street, a view from the base in the sand to the top in the sunlight. Idaho strode to the corner of the guest house out into the central street. He stopped there, turned and looked at the Wall. The first look told why everyone said it was not possible to climb that face. Even then, he resisted thinking about a measurement of the height. It could be five hundred meters or five thousand. The important thing lay in what a more careful study revealed tiny transverse cracks, broken places, even a narrow ledge about twenty meters above the drifting sand at the bottom... and another ledge about two-thirds of the way up the face.
He knew that an unconscious part of him, an ancient and dependable part, was making the necessary measurements, scaling them to his own body-so many Duncan-lengths to that place, a handgrip here, another there. His own hands. He could already feel himself climbing.
Siona's voice came from near his right shoulder as he stood in that first examination. "What're you doing?" She had come up soundlessly, looking now where he looked.
"I can climb that Wall," Idaho said. "If I carried a light rope, I could pull up a heavier rope. The rest of you could climb it easily then."
Garun joined them in time to hear this. "Why would you climb the Wall, Duncan Idaho?"
Siona answered for him, smiling at Garun. "To provide a suitable greeting for the God Emperor."
This had been before her doubts, before her own eyes and the ignorance of such a climb, had begun to erode that first confidence.
With that first elation, Idaho asked: "How wide is the Royal Road up there?"
"I have never seen it," Garun said. "But I am told it is very wide. A great troop can march abreast along it, so they say. And there are bridges, places to view the river and... and... oh, it is a marvel."
"Why have you never gone up there to see it yourself?" Idaho asked.
Garun merely shrugged and pointed at the Wall.
Nayla arrived then and the argument about the climb had begun. Idaho thought about that argument as he climbed. How strange, the relationship between Nayla and Siona! They were like two conspirators... yet not conspirators. Siona commanded and Nayla obeyed. But Nayla was a Fish Speaker, the Friend who was trusted by Leto to make a first examination of the new ghola. She admitted that she had been in the Royal Constabulary since childhood. Such strength in her! Given that strength, there was something awesome about the way she bowed to Siona's will. It was as though Nayla listened for secret voices which told her what to do. Then she obeyed.
Idaho groped upward for another handhold. His fingers wriggled along the rock, up and outward to the right, finding at last an unseen crack where they might enter. His memory provided the natural line of ascent, but only his body could learn the way by following that line. His left foot found a toehold... up... up... slowly, testing. Left hand up now... no crack but a ledge. His eyes, then his chin lifted over the high ledge he had seen from below. He elbowed his way onto it, rolled over and rested, looking only outward, not up or down. It was a sand horizon out there, a breeze with dust in it limiting the view. He had seen many such horizons in the Dune days.
Presently, he turned to face the Wall, lifted himself onto his knees, hands groping upward, and he resumed the climb. The picture of the Wall remained in his mind as he had seen it from below. He had only to close his eyes and the pattern lay there, fixed the way he had learned to do it as a child hiding from Harkonnen slave raiders. Fingertips found a crack where they could be wedged. He clawed his way upward.
Watching from below, Nayla experienced a growing affinity for the climber. Idaho had been reduced by distance to such a small and lonely shape upon the Wall. He must know what it was like to be alone with momentous decisions. l would like to have his child, she thought. A child from both of us would be strong and resourceful. What is it that God wants from a child of Siona and this man?
Nayla had awakened before dawn and had walked out to the top of a low dune at the village edge to think about this thing that Idaho proposed. It had been a lime dawn with a familiar winding cloth of dust in the distance, then steel day and the baleful immensity of the Sareer. She knew then that these matters certainly had been anticipated by God. What could be hidden from God? Nothing could be hidden, not even the remote figure of Duncan Idaho groping for a pathway up to the edge of heaven.
As she watched Idaho climb, Nayla's mind played a trick on her, tipping the wall to the horizontal. Idaho became a child crawling across a broken surface. How small he looked... and growing smaller.
An aide offered Nayla water which she drank. The water brought the Wall back into its true perspective.
Siona crouched on the first ledge, leaning out to peer up- ward. "If you fall, I will try it," Siona had promised Idaho. Nayla had thought it a strange promise. Why would both of them want to try the impossible?
Idaho had failed to dissuade Siona from the impossible promise.
It is fate, Nayla thought. It is God's will.
They were the same thing.
A bit of rock fell from where Idaho clutched at it. That had happened several times. Nayla watched the falling rock. It took a long time coming down, bounding and rebounding from the Wall's face, demonstrating that the eye did not report truthfully when it said the Wall was sheer.
He will succeed or he will not,- Nayla thought. Whatever happens, it is God's will.
She could feel her heart hammering, though. Idaho's venture was like sex, she thought. It was not passively erotic, but akin to rare magic in the way it seized her. She had to keep reminding herself that Idaho was not for her.
He is for Siona. If he survives.
And if he failed, then Siona would try. Siona would succeed or she would not. Nayla wondered, though, if she might experience an orgasm should Idaho reach the top. He was so close to it now.
Idaho took several deep breaths after dislodging the rock. It was a bad moment and he took the time to recover, clinging to a three-point hold on the Wall. Almost of its own accord, his free hand groped upward once more, wriggling past the rotten place into another slender crack. Slowly, he shifted his weight onto that hand. Slowly... slowly. His left knee felt the place where a toehold could be achieved. He lifted his foot to that place, tested it. Memory told him the top was near, but he pushed the memory aside. There was only the climb and the knowledge that Leto would arrive tomorrow.
Leto and Hwi.
He could not think about that, either. But it would not go away. The top... Hwi... Leto... tomorrow...
Every thought fed his desperation, forced him into the immediate remembrance of the climbs of his childhood. The more he remembered consciously, the more his abilities were blocked. He was forced to pause, breathing deeply in the attempt to center himself, to go back to the natural ways of his past.
But were those ways natural?
There was a blockage in his mind. He could sense intrusions, a finality... the fatality of what might have been and now would never be.
Leto would arrive up there tomorrow.
Idaho felt perspiration run down his face around the place where he pressed a cheek against the rock.
Leto. will defeat you, Leto. I will defeat you for myself, not for Hwi, but only for myself.
A sensation of cleansing began to spread through him. It was like the thing which had happened in the night while he prepared himself mentally for this climb. Siona had sensed his sleeplessness. She had begun to talk to him, telling him the smallest details of her desperate run through the Forbidden Forest and her oath at the edge of the river.
"Now I have given an oath to command his Fish Speakers," she said. "I will honor that oath, but I hope it will not happen in the way he wants."
"What does he want?" Idaho asked.
"He has many motives and I cannot see them all. Who could possibly understand him? I only know that I will never forgive him."
This memory brought Idaho back to the sensation of the Wall's rock against his cheek. His perspiration had dried in the light breeze and he felt chilled. But he had found his center.
Never forgive.
Idaho felt the ghosts of all his other selves, the gholas who had died in Leto's service. Could he believe Siona's suspicions? Yes. Leto was capable of killing with his own body, his own hands. The rumor which Siona recounted had a feeling of truth in it. And Siona, too, was Atreides. Leto had become something else... no longer Atreides, not even human. He had become not so much a living creature as a brute fact of nature, opaque and impenetrable, all of his experiences sealed off within him. And Siona opposed him. The real Atreides turned away from him.
As I do.
A brute fact of nature, nothing more. Just like this Wall.
Idaho's right hand groped upward and found a sharp ledge. He could feel nothing above the ledge and tried to remember a wide crack at this place in the pattern. He could not dare to allow himself into the belief that he had reached the top... not
yet. The sharp edge cut into his fingers as he put his weight on it. He brought his left hand up to that level, found a purchase and pulled himself slowly upward. His eyes reached the level of his hands. He stared across a flat space which reached outward... outward into blue sky. The surface where his hands clutched showed ancient weather cracks. He crawled his fingers across that surface, one hand at a time, seeking out the cracks, dragging his chest up... his waist... his hips. He rolled then, twisting and crawling until the Wall was far behind him. Only then did he stand and tell himself what his senses reported.
The top. And he had not required pitons or hammer.
A faint sound reached him. Cheering?
He walked back to the edge and looked down, waving to them. Yes, they were cheering. Turning back, he strode to the center of the roadway, letting elation still the trembling of his muscles, soothe the aching of his shoulders. Slowly, he turned full circle, examining the top while he let his memories at last estimate the height of that climb.
Nine hundred meters... at least that.
The Royal Roadway interested him. It was not like what he had seen on the way to Onn. It was wide, wide... at least five hundred meters. The roadbed was a smooth, unbroken gray with its edge some one hundred meters from each lip of the Wall. Rock pillars at man height marked the road's edge, stretching away like sentinels along the path Leto would use.
Idaho walked to the far side of the Wall opposite the Sareer and peered down. Far away in the depths, a hurtling green flow of river battered itself into foam against buttress rocks. He looked to the right. Leto would come from there. Road and Wall curved gently to the right, the curve beginning about three hundred meters from the place where Idaho stood. Idaho returned to the road and walked along its edge, following the curve until it made a returning "S" and narrowed, sloping gently downward. He stopped and looked at what was revealed for him, seeing the new pattern take shape.
About three kilometers away down the gentle slope, the roadway narrowed and crossed the river gorge on a bridge whose faery trusses appeared insubstantial and toy like at this distance. Idaho remembered a similar bridge on the road to Onn, the substantial feel of it beneath his feet. He trusted his memory, thinking about bridges as a military leader was forced to think about them-passages or traps.
Moving out to his left, he looked down and outward to
another high Wall at the far anchor of the faery bridge. The road continued there, turning gently until it was a line running straight northward. There were two Walls along there and the river between them. The river glided in a man-made chasm, its moisture confined and channeled into a northward wind drift while the water itself flowed southward.
Idaho ignored the river then. It was there and it would be there tomorrow. He fixed his attention on the bridge, letting his military training examine it. He nodded once to himself before turning back the way he had come, lifting the light rope from his shoulders as he walked.
It was only when she saw the rope come snaking down that Nayla had her orgasm.
- = What am I eliminating? The bourgeois infatuation with peaceful conservation of the past. This is a binding force, a thing which holds humankind into one vulnerable unit in spite of illusionary separations across parsecs of space. If I can find the scattered bits, others can find them. When you are together, you can share a common catastrophe. You can be exterminated together. Thus, I demonstrate the terrible danger of a gliding, passionless mediocrity, a movement without ambitions or aims. I show you that entire civilizations can do this thing. I give you eons of life which slips gently toward death without fuss or stirring, without even asking 'Why?' I show you the false happiness and the shadow-catastrophe called Leto, the God Emperor. Now, will you learn the real happiness?
- The Stolen Journals HAVING SPENT the night with only one brief catnap, Leto was awake when Moneo emerged from the guest house at dawn. The Royal Cart had been parked almost in the center of a three-sided courtyard. The cart's cover had been set on one-way opaque, concealing its occupant, and was tightly sealed against moisture. Leto could hear the faint stirring of the fans which pulsed his air through a drying cycle.
Moneo's feet scratched on the courtyard's cobbles as he approached the cart. Dawn light edged the guest house roof with orange above the majordomo.
Leto opened the cart's cover as Moneo stopped in front of him. There was a yeasting dirt smell to the air and the accumulation of moisture in the breeze was painful.
"We should arrive at Tuono about noon," Moneo said. "I wish you'd let me bring in 'thopters to guard the sky."
"I do not want 'thopters," Leto said. "We can go down to Tuono on suspensors and ropes."
Leto marveled at the plastic images in this brief exchange. Moneo had never liked peregrinations. His youth as a rebel had left him with suspicions of everything he could not see or label. He remained a mass of latent judgments.
"You know I don't want 'thopters for transport," Moneo said. "I want them to guard..."
"Yes, Moneo."
Moneo looked past Leto at the open end of the courtyard which overlooked the river canyon. Dawn light was frosting the mist which arose from the depths. He thought of how far down that canyon dropped... a body twisting, twisting as it fell. Moneo had found himself unable to go to the canyon's lip last night and peer down into it. The drop was such a... such a temptation.
With that insightful power which filled Moneo with such awe, Leto said: "There's a lesson in every temptation, Moneo."
Speechless, Moneo turned to stare directly into Leto's eyes.
"See the lesson in my life, Moneo."
"Lord?" It was only a whisper.
"They tempt me first with evil, then with good. Each temptation is fashioned with exquisite attention to my susceptibilities. Tell me, Moneo, if I choose the good, does that make me good?"
"Of course it does, Lord."
"Perhaps you will never lose the habit of judgment," Leto said.
Moneo looked away from him once more and stared at the chasm's edge. Leto rolled his body to look where Moneo looked. Dwarf pines had been cultured along the lip of the canyon. There were hanging dewdrops on the damp needles, each of them sending a promise of pain to Leto. He longed to close the cart's cover, but there was an immediacy in those jewels which attracted his memories even while they repelled his body. The opposed synchrony threatened to fill him with turmoil.
"I just don't like going around on foot," Moneo said.
"It was the Fremen war," Leto said.
Moneo sighed. "The others will be ready in a few minutes. Hwi was breakfasting when I came out."
Leto did not respond. His thoughts were lost in memories of night-the one just past and the millennial others which crowded his pasts-clouds and stars, the rains and the open blackness pocked with glittering flakes from a shredded cosmos, a universe of nights, extravagant with them as he had been with his heartbeats.
Moneo suddenly demanded: "Where are your guards?"
"I sent them to eat."
"I don't like them leaving you unguarded!"
The crystal sound of Moneo's voice rang in Leto's memories, speaking things not cast in words. Moneo feared a universe where there was no God Emperor. He would rather die than see such a universe.
"What will happen today?" Moneo demanded.
It was a question directed not to the God Emperor but to the prophet. ` A seed blown on the wind could be tomorrow's willow tree," Leto said.
"You know our future! Why won't you share it?" Moneo was close to hysteria... refusing anything his immediate senses did not report.
Leto turned to glare at the majordomo, a gaze so obviously filled with pent-up emotions that Moneo recoiled from it.
"Take charge of your own existence, Moneo!"
Moneo took a deep, trembling breath. "Lord, I meant no offense. I sought only...
"Look upward, Moneo!"
Involuntarily, Moneo obeyed, peering into the cloudless sky where morning light was increasing. "What is it, Lord?"
"There's no reassuring ceiling over you, Moneo. Only an open sky full of changes. Welcome it. Every sense you possess is an instrument for reacting to change. Does that tell you nothing?"
"Lord, I only came out to enquire when you would be ready to proceed."
"Moneo, I beg you to be truthful with me."
"I am truthful, Lord!"
"But if you live in bad faith, lies will appear to you like the truth."
"Lord, if I lie... then I do not know it."
"That has the ring of truth. But I know what you dread and will not speak."
Moneo began to tremble. The God Emperor was in the most terrible of moods, a deep threat in every word.
"You dread the imperialism of consciousness," Leto said, "and you are right to fear it. Send Hwi out here immediately!"
Moneo whirled and fled back into the guest house. It was as though his entrance stirred up an insect colony. Within seconds, Fish Speakers emerged and spread around the Royal Cart. Courtiers peered from the guest house windows or came out and stood under deep eaves, afraid to approach him. In contrast to this excitement, Hwi emerged presently from the wide central doorway and strode out of the shadows, moving slowly toward Leto, her chin up, her gaze seeking his face.
Leto felt himself becoming calm as he looked at her. She wore a golden gown he had not seen before. It had been piped with silver and jade at the neck and the cuffs of its long sleeves. The hem, almost dragging on the ground, had heavy green braid to outline deep red crenellations.
Hwi smiled as she stopped in front of him.
"Good morning, love." She spoke softly. "What have you done to get poor Moneo so upset?"
Soothed by her presence and her voice, he smiled. "I did what I always hope to do. I produced an effect."
"You certainly did. He told the Fish Speakers you were in an angry and terrifying mood. Are you terrifying, Love?"
"Only to those who refuse to live by their own strengths."
"Ahhh, yes." She pirouetted for him then, displaying her new gown. "Do you like it? Your Fish Speakers gave it to me. They decorated it themselves."
"My love," he said, a warning note in his voice, "decoration! That is how you prepare the sacrifice."
She came up to the edge of the cart and leaned on it just below his face, a mock solemn expression on her lips. "Will they sacrifice me, then?"
"Some of them would like to."
"But you will not permit it."
"Our fates are joined," he said.
"Then I shall not fear." She reached up and touched one of his silver-skinned hands, but jerked away as his fingers began to tremble.
"Forgive me, Love. I forget that we are joined in soul and not in flesh," she said.
The sandtrout skin still shuddered from Hwi's touch. "Moisture in the air makes me overly sensitive," he said. Slowly, the shuddering subsided.
"I refuse to regret what cannot be," she whispered.
"Be strong, Hwi, for your soul is mine."
She turned at a sound from the guest house. "Moneo returns," she said. "Please, Love, do not frighten him."
"Is Moneo your friend, too?"
"We are friends of the stomach. We both like yogurt."
Leto was still chuckling when Moneo stopped beside Hwi. Moneo ventured a smile, casting a puzzled glance at Hwi. There was gratitude in the majordomo's manner and some of the subservience he was accustomed to show to Leto he now directed at Hwi. "Is it well with you, Lady Hwi?"
"It is well with me."
Leto said: "In the time of the stomach, friendships of the stomach are to be nurtured and cultivated. Let us be on our way, Moneo. Tuono awaits."
Moneo turned and shouted orders to the Fish Speakers and courtiers.
Leto grinned at Hwi. "Do I not play the impatient bridegroom with a certain style?"
She leaped lightly up to the bed of his cart, her skirt gathered in one hand. He unfolded her seat. Only when she was seated, her eyes level with Leto's, did she respond, and then it was in a voice pitched for his ears alone.
"Love of my soul, I have captured another of your secrets."
"Release it from your lips," he said, joking in this new intimacy between them.
"You seldom need words," she said. "You speak directly to the senses with your own life."
A shudder flexed its way through the length of his body. It was a moment before he could speak and then it was in a voice she had to strain to hear above the hubbub of the assembling cortege.
"Between the superhuman and the inhuman," he said, "I have had little space in which to be human. I thank you, gentle and lovely Hwi, for this little space."
- = In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshly sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use it's proper name: Temporary.
- The Stolen Journals NAYLA WAS the first to glimpse the approaching cortege. Perspiring heavily in the midday heat, she stood near one of the rock pillars which marked the edges of the Royal Road. A sudden flash of distant reflection caught her attention. She peered in that direction, squinting, realizing with a thrill of awareness that she saw sun-dazzle on the cover of the God Emperor's cart.
"They come!" she called.
She felt hunger then. In their excitement and singleness of purpose, none of them had brought food. Only the Fremen had brought water and that because "Fremen always carry water when they leave sietch." They did it by rote.
Nayla touched one finger to the butt of the lasgun holstered at her hip. The bridge lay no more than twenty meters ahead of her, its faery structure arching across the chasm like an alien fantasy joining one barren surface to another.
This is madness, she thought.
But the God Emperor had reinforced his command. He required his Nayla to obey Siona in all things.
Siona's orders were explicit, leaving no way for evasions. And Nayla had no way here to query her God Emperor. Siona had said: "When his cart is in the middle of the bridge-then!"
"But why?"
They had been standing well away from the others in the chill dawn atop the Barrier Wall, Nayla feeling precariously isolated here, remote and vulnerable.
Siona's grim features, her low, intense voice, could not be denied. "Do you think you can harm God?"
"I..." Nayla could only shrug.
"You must obey me!"
"I must," Nayla agreed.
Nayla studied the approach of the distant cortege, noting the colors of the courtiers, the thick masses of blue marking her sisters of the Fish Speakers... the shiny surface of her Lord's cart.
It was another test, she decided. The God Emperor would know. He would know the devotion in His Nayla's heart. It was a test. The God Emperor's commands must be obeyed in all things. That was the earliest lesson of her Fish Speaker childhood. The God Emperor had said that Nayla must obey Siona. It was a test. What else could it be?
She looked toward the four Fremen. They had been positioned by Duncan Idaho directly in the roadway and blocking part of the exit from this end of the bridge. They sat with their backs to her and looked out across the bridge, four brown-robed mounds. Nayla had heard Idaho's words to them.
"Do not leave this place. You must greet him from here. Stand when he nears you and bow low."
Greet, yes.
Nayla nodded to herself.
The three other Fish Speakers who had climbed the Barrier Wall with her had been sent to the center of the bridge. All they knew was what Siona had told them in Nayla's presence. They were to wait until the Royal Cart was only a few paces from them, then they were to turn and dance away from the cart, leading it and the procession toward the vantage point above Tuono.
If I cut the bridge with my lasgun, those three will die, Nayla thought. And all the others who come with our Lord.
Nayla craned her neck to peer down into the gorge. She could not see the river from here, but she could hear its distant rumblings, a movement of rocks.
They would all die!
Unless He performs a Miracle.
That had to be it. Siona had set the stage for a Holy Miracle. What else could Siona intend now that she had been tested, now that she wore the uniform of Fish Speaker Command? Siona had given her oath to the God Emperor. She had been tested by God, the two of them alone in the Sareer.
Nayla turned only her eyes to the right, peering at the architects of this greeting. Siona and Idaho stood shoulder-to-shoulder in the roadway about twenty meters to Nayla's right. They were deep in conversation, looking at each other occasionally, nodding.
Presently, Idaho touched Siona's arm-an oddly possessive
gesture. He nodded once and strode off toward the bridge, stopping at the buttress corner directly in front of Nayla. He peered down, then crossed to the other near corner of the bridge.
Again, he peered downward, standing there for several minutes before returning to Siona.
What a strange creature, that ghola, Nayla thought. After that awesome climb, she no longer thought of him as quite human. He was something else, a demiurge who stood next to God. But he could breed.
A distant shout caught Nayla's attention. She turned and looked across the bridge. The cortege had been in the familiar trot of a royal peregrination. Now, they were slowing to a sedate walk only a few minutes away from the bridge. Nayla recognized Moneo marching in the van, his uniform brilliant white, the even, undeviating stride with his gaze straight ahead. The cover of the Emperor's cart had been sealed. It glittered in mirror-opacity as it rolled behind Moneo on its wheels.
The mystery of it all filled Nayla.
A miracle was about to happen!
Nayla glanced to the right at Siona. Siona returned her gaze and nodded once. Nayla drew the lasgun from its holster and rested it against the rock pillar as she sighted along it. The cable on the left first, then the cable on the right, then the faery trellis of plasteel on the left. The lasgun felt cold and alien against Nayla's hand. She took a trembling breath to restore calm. must obey. It is a test.
She saw Moneo lift his gaze from the roadway and, not changing stride, turn to shout something at the cart or the ones behind it. Nayla could not make out the words. Moneo faced front once more. Nayla steadied herself, a part of the rock pillar which concealed most of her body.
A test.
Moneo had seen the people on the bridge and at the far end. He identified Fish Speaker uniforms and his first thought was to wonder who had ordered these greeters. He turned and shouted a question at Leto, but the God Emperor's cart cover remained opaque, hiding Hwi and Leto within it.
Moneo was onto the bridge, the cart rasping in blown sand behind him, before he recognized Siona and Idaho standing well back from the far end. He identified four Museum Fremen seated on the roadway. Doubts began squirming through Moneo's mind, but he could not change the pattern. He ventured a glance down at the river-a platinum world there caught in the noonday light. The sound of the cart was loud behind him. The flow of the river, the flow of the cortege, the sweeping importance of these things in which he played a role-all of it caught up his mind in a dizzying sensation of the inevitable.
We are not people passing this way, he thought. We are primal elements linking one piece of Time to another. And when we have passed, everything behind us will drop off into no-sound, a place like the no-room of the lxians, yet never again the same as it was before we came.
A bit from one of the lute-player's songs wafted through Moneo's memory and his eyes went out of focus in the remembrance. He knew that song for its wishfulness, a wish that all of this were ended, all past, all doubts banished, tranquility returned. The plaintive song drifted through his awareness like smoke, twisting and compelling:
"Insect cries in roots of pampas grass." "
Moneo hummed the song to himself:
"Insect cries mark the end. Autumn and my song are the color Of the last leaves In roots of pampas grass."
Moneo nodded his head to the refrain:
"Day is ended, Visitors gone. Day is ended. In our Sietch, Day is ended. Storm wind sounds. Day is ended. Visitors gone."
Moneo decided that the lute-player's song had to be a really old one, an Old Fremen song, no doubt of it. And it told him something about himself. He wished the visitors truly gone, the excitements ended, peace once more. Peace was so near... yet he could not leave his duties. He thought of all that impedimenta piled out there on the sand just beyond visibility range from Tuono. They would see it all soon-tents, food, tables, golden plates and jeweled knives, glowglobes fashioned in the arabesque shapes of ancient lamps... everything rich and full of expectations from completely different lives.
They will never be the same in Tuono.
Moneo had spent two nights in Tuono once on an inspection tour. He remembered the smells of their cooking fires-aromatic bushes kindled and flaming in the dark. They would not use sunstoves because "that is not the most ancient way."
Most ancient!
There was little smell of melange in Tuono. A sweet acridity and the musky oils of oasis shrubs, these dominated the odors. Yes... and the cesspools and the stink of rotting garbage. He recalled the God Emperor's comment when Moneo had finished reporting on that tour.
"These Fremen do not know what is lost from their lives. They think they keep the essence of the old ways. This is a failure of all museums. Something fades; it dries out of the exhibits and is gone. The people who administer the museum and the people who come to bend over the cases and stare few of them sense this missing thing. It drove the engine of life in earlier times. When the life is gone, it is gone."
Moneo focused on the three Fish Speakers who stood just ahead of him on the bridge. They lifted their arms high and began to dance, whirling and skipping away from him only a few paces distant.
How odd, he thought. I've seen the other people dance in the open, but never Fish Speakers. They only dance in the privacy of their quarters, in the intimacy of their own company.
This thought was still in his mind when he heard the first awful humming of the lasgun and felt the bridge lurch beneath him.
This is not happening, his mind told him.
He heard the Royal Cart scrape sideways across the roadbed, then the snap-slap of the cart's cover slamming open. A bedlam of screams and cries arose from behind him, but he could not turn. The bridge's roadbed had tipped steeply to Moneo's right, spilling him onto his face while he went sliding toward the abyss. He clutched a severed strand of cable to stop himself. The cable went with him, everything grating in the spilling film of sand which had covered the roadbed. He clutched the cable with both hands, turning with it. He saw the Royal Cart then. It skewed sideways toward the edge of the bridge, its cover open. Hwi stood there, one hand steadying her on the folding seat while she stared past Moneo.
A horrible screaming of metal filled the air as the roadbed tipped even farther. He saw people from the cortege falling, their mouths open, arms waving. Something had caught Moneo's cable. His arms were stretched out over his head as he turned once more, twisting. He felt his hands, greased by the perspiration of fear, slipping along the cable.
Once more, his gaze came around to the Royal Cart. It lay jammed against the stubs of broken girders. Even as Moneo looked, the God Emperor's futile hands groped for Hwi Noree, but failed to reach her. She fell from the cart's open end, silently, the golden gown whipping upward to reveal her body stretched out as straight as an arrow.
A deep, rumbling groan came from the God Emperor.
Why doesn't he activate the suspensors? Moneo wondered. The suspensors will support him.
But the lasgun was still humming and, as Moneo's hands slipped from the cable's severed end, he saw lancing flame strike the cart's suspensor bubbles, piercing one after another in eruptions of golden smoke. Moneo stretched his hands over his head as he fell.
The smoke! The golden smoke!
His robe whipped upward, turning him until his face was directed downward into the abyss. With his gaze on the depths, he recognized a maelstrom of boiling rapids there, the mirror of his life-precipitous currents and plunges, all movement gathering up all substance. Leto's words wound through his mind on a path of golden smoke: "Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve." Moneo fell freely then in the ecstasy of awareness. The universe opened for him like clear glass, everything flowing in a no Time.
The golden smoke!
"Leto!" he screamed. "Siaynoq! I believe!"
The robe tore away from his shoulders then. He turned in the wind of the canyon-one last glimpse of the Royal Cart tipping... tipping from the shattered roadbed. The God Emperor slid out of the open end.
Something solid smashed into Moneo's back-his last sensation.
Leto felt himself sliding from the cart. His awareness held only the image of Hwi striking the river-the distant pearly fountain which marked her plunge into the myths and dreams of termination. Her last words, calm and steady, rolled through all of his memories: "I shall go on ahead, Love."
As- he slipped from the cart, he saw the scimitar arc of the river, a sliver-edged thing which shimmered in its mottled shadows, a vicious blade of a river honed through Eternity and ready now to receive him into its agony.
I cannot cry, nor even shout, he thought. Tears are no longer possible. They're water. I'll have water enough in a moment. I can only moan in my grief. I am alone, more alone than ever before.
His great ridged body flexed as it fell, twisting him about until his amplified vision revealed Siona standing at the broken brink of the bridge.
Now, you will learn! he thought.
The body continued to turn. He watched the river approach. The water was a dream inhabited by glimpses of fish which ignited an ancient memory of a banquet beside a granite pool- pink flesh dazzling his hungers.
I join you, Hwi, in the banquet of the gods!
A bursting flash of bubbles enclosed him in agony. Water, vicious currents of it, buffeted him all around. He felt the gnashing of rocks as he struggled upward to broach in a torrential cascade, his body flexing in a paroxysm of involuntary, writhing splashes. The canyon Wall, wet and black, sped past his frantic gaze. Shattered spangles of what had been his skin exploded away from him, a rain of silver all around him darting away into the river, a ring of dazzling movement, brittle sequins-the scale-glitter of sandtrout leaving him to begin their own colony lives.
The agony continued. Leto marveled that he could remain conscious, that he had a body to feel.
Instinct drove him. He clutched at a rock around which the torrent spilled him, felt a clutching finger torn from his hand before he could release his grip. The sensation of it was only a minor accent in the symphony of pain.
The river's course swept to the left around a chasm buttress and, as though saying it had enough of him, it sent him rolling onto the sloping edge of a sandbar. He lay there a moment, the blue dye of spice-essence drifting away from him in the current. The agony moved him, the worm body moving of itself, retreating from the water. All the covering sandtrout were gone and he felt every touch more immediate, a lost sense restored when all it could bring him was pain. He could not see his body, but he felt the thing that would have been a worm as it made its writhing, crawling progress out of the water. He peered upward through eyes that saw everything in sheets of flame from which shapes coalesced of their own accord. At last, he recognized this place. The river had swept him to the turn where it left the Sareer forever. Behind him lay Tuono and, just a ways down the barrier Wall, was all that remained of Sietch Tabr-Stilgar's realm, the place where all of Leto's spice had been concealed.
Exhuding blue fumes, his agonized body writhed its way noisily along a shingle of beach, dragged its blue-dyed way across broken boulders and into a damp hole which might have been part of the original sietch. It was only a shallow cave now, blocked at its inner end by a rock fall. His nostrils reported the wet dirt smell and clean spice essence.
Sounds intruded on his agony. He turned in the confinement of the cave and saw a rope dangling at the entrance. A figure slid down the rope. He recognized Nayla. She dropped to the rocks and crouched there, staring into the shadows at him. The flame which was Leto's vision parted to reveal another figure dropping from the rope: Siona. She and Nayla scrambled toward him in a rattle of rocks and stopped, peering in at him. A third figure dropped off the rope: Idaho. He moved with frantic rage, hurling himself at Nayla, screaming:
"Why did you kill her! You weren't supposed to kill Hwi!"
Nayla sent him sprawling with a casual, almost indifferent sweep of her left arm. She scrambled closer up the rocks and stopped on all fours to peer in at Leto.
"Lord? You live?"
Idaho was right behind her, snatching the lasgun from her holster. Nayla turned, astonished, as he leveled the weapon and pulled its trigger. The burning started at the top of Nayla's head. It split her, the pieces slumping apart. A shining crysknife spilled from her burning uniform and shattered on the rocks. Idaho did not see it. A grimace of rage on his face, he kept burning and burning the pieces of Nayla until the weapon's charge was gone. The blazing arc vanished. Only wet and smoking bits of meat and cloth lay scattered among the glowing rocks.
It was the moment for which Siona had waited. She scrambled up to him and pulled the useless lasgun from Idaho's hands. He whirled toward her and she poised herself-to subdue him, but all the rage was gone.
"Why?" he whispered.
"It's done," she said.
They turned and looked into the cave shadows at Leto.
Leto could not even imagine what they saw. The sandtrout skin was gone, he knew. There would be some kind of surface pocked with cilia holes from the departed skin. As for the rest, he could only look back at the two figures from a universe furrowed by sorrow. Through the vision flames he saw Siona as a female demon. The demon name came unbidden to his minds and he spoke it aloud, amplified by the cave and much louder than he had expected:
"Hanmya!"
"What?" She moved a step closer to him.
Idaho put both harass over his face.
"Look at what you've done to poor Duncan," Leto said.
"He'll find other loves." How callous she sounded, an echo of his own angry youth.
"You don't know what it is to love," he said. "What have you ever given?" He could only wring his hands then those travesties which once had been his hands. "Gods below! What I've given!"
She sled closer and reached toward him, then drew back.
"I am reality, Siona. Look upon me. I exist. You can touch me if you dare. Reach out your hand. Do it!"
Slowly, she reached toward what had been his front segment, the place where she had slept in the Sareer. Her hand was touched with blue when she withdrew it.
"You have touched me and felt my body," he said. "Is that not strange beyond any other thing in this universe?"
She started to turn away.
"No! Don't turn away from me! Look at what you have wrought, Siona. How is it that you can touch me but you cannot touch yourself?"
She whirled away from him.
"There is the difference between us," he said. "You are God embodied. You walk around within the greatest miracle of this universe, yet you refuse to touch or see or feel or believe in it."
Leto's awareness went wandering then into a night-encircled place, a place where he thought he could hear the metal insect song of his hidden printers clacking away in their lightless room. There was a complete absence of radiation in this place, an Ixian no-thing which made it a place of anxiety and spiritual alienation because it had no connection with the rest of the universe.
But it will have a connection.
He sensed then that his Ixian printers had been set in motion, that they were recording his thoughts without any special command.
Remember what I did! Remember me! I will be innocent again!
The flame of his vision parted to reveal Idaho standing where Siona had stood. There was gesturing motion somewhere out of focus behind Idaho... ah, yes: Siona waving instructions to someone atop the barrier Wall.
"Are you still alive?" Idaho asked.
Leto's voice came in wheezing gasps: "Let them scatter, Duncan. Let them run and hide anywhere they want in any universe they choose."
"Damn you! What're you saying? I'd have sooner let her live with you!"
"Let? I did not let anything."
"Why did you let Hwi die?" Idaho moaned. "We didn't know she was in there with you."
Idaho's head sagged forward.
"You will be recompensed," Leto husked. "My Fish Speakers will choose you over Siona. Be kind to her, Duncan. She is more than Atreides and she carries the seed of your survival."
Leto sank back into his memories. They were delicate myths now, held fleetingly in his awareness. He sensed that he might have fallen into a time which, by its very being, had changed the past. There were sounds, though, and he struggled to interpret them. Someone scrambling on rocks? The flames parted to reveal Siona standing beside Idaho. They stood hand-in-hand like two children reassuring each other before venturing into an unknown place.
"How can he live like that?" Siona whispered.
Leto waited for the strength to respond. "Hwi helps me," he said. "We had something few experience. We were joined in our strengths rather than in our weaknesses."
"And look what it got you!" Siona sneered.
"Yes, and pray that you get the same," he husked. "Perhaps the spice will give you time."
"Where is your spice?" she demanded.
"Deep in Sietch Tabr," he said. "Duncan will find it. You know the place, Duncan. They call it Tabur now. The outlines are still there."
"Why did you do it?" Idaho whispered.
"My gift," Leto said. "Nobody will find the descendants of Siona. The Oracle cannot see her."
"What?" They spoke in unison, leaning close to hear his fading voice.
"I give you a new kind of time without parallels," he said. "It will always diverge. There will be no concurrent points on its curves. I give you the Golden Path. That is my gift. Never again will you have the kinds of concurrence that once you had."
Flames covered his vision. The agony was fading, but he could still sense odors and hear sounds with a terrible acuity. Both Idaho and Siona were breathing in quick, shallow gasps. Odd kinesthetic sensations began to weave their way through Leto-echoes of bones and joints which he knew he no longer possessed.
"Look!" Siona said.
"He's disintegrating." That was Idaho.
"No." Siona. "The outside is falling away. Look! The Worm!"
Leto felt parts of himself settling into warm softness. The agony removed itself.
"What're those holes in him?" Siona.
"I think they were the sandtrout. See the shapes?"
"I am here to prove one of my ancestors wrong," Leto said
(or thought he said, which was the same thing as far as his journals were concerned). "I was born a man but I do not die a man."
"I can't look!" Siona said.
Leto heard her turn away, a rattle of rocks.
"Are you still there, Duncan?"
"Yes."
So I still have a voice.
"Look at me," Leto said. "I was a bloody bit of pulp in a human womb, a bit no larger than a cherry. Look at me, I say!"
"I'm looking." Idaho's voice was faint.
"You expected a giant and you found a gnome," Leto said. "Now, you're beginning to know the responsibilities which come as a result of actions. What will you do with your new power, Duncan?"
There was a long silence, then Siona's voice: "Don't listen to him! He was mad!"
"Of course," Leto said. "Madness in method, that is genius."
"Siona, do you understand this?" Idaho asked. How plaintive, the ghola voice.
"She understands," Leto said. "It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate. That's the way it always is with humans. Moneo understood at last."
"I wish he'd hurry up and die!" Siona said.
"I am the divided god and you would make me whole," Leto said. "Duncan? I think of all my Duncans I approve of you the most."
"Approve?" Some of the rage returned to Idaho's voice.
"There's magic in my approval," Leto said. "Anything's possible in a magic universe. Your life has been dominated by the Oracle's fatality, not mine. Now, you see the mysterious caprices and you would ask me to dispel this? I wished only to increase it." The others within Leto began to reassert themselves. Without the solidarity of the colonial group to support his identity, he began to lose his place among them. They started speaking the language of the constant "IF." "If you had only... If we had but..." He wanted to shout them into silence.
"Only fools prefer the past!"
Leto did not know if he truly shouted or only thought it. The response was a momentary inner silence matched to an outer silence and he felt some of the threads of his old identity still intact. He tried to speak and knew the reality of it because Idaho said, "Listen, he's trying to say something."
"Do not fear the lxians," he said, and he heard his own voice as a fading whisper. "They can make the machines, but they no longer can make arafel. I know. I was there."
He fell silent, gathering his strength, but he felt the energy flowing from him even as he tried to hold it. Once more, the clamor arose within him-voices pleading and shouting.
"Stop that foolishness!" he cried, or thought he cried.
Idaho and Siona heard only a gasping hiss.
Presently, Siona said: "I think he's dead."
"And everyone thought he was immortal," Idaho said.
"Do you know what the Oral History says?" Siona asked. "If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal."
"That sounds like him," Idaho accused.
"I think it was," she said.
"What did he mean about your descendants... hiding, not finding them?" Idaho asked.
"He created a new kind of mimesis," she said, "a new biological imitation. He knew he had succeeded. He could not see me in his futures."
"What are you?" Idaho demanded.
"I'm the new Atreides."
"Atreides!" It was a curse in Idaho's voice.
Siona stared down at the disintegrating hulk which once had been Leto Atreides II... and something else. The something else was sloughing away in faint wisps of blue smoke where the smell of melange was strongest. Puddles of blue liquid formed in the rocks beneath his melting bulk. Only faint vague shapes which might once have been human remained-a collapsed foaming pinkness, a bit of red-streaked bone which could have held the forms of cheeks and brow...
Siona said: "I am different, but still I am what he was."
Idaho spoke in a hushed whisper: "The ancestors, all of..."
"The multitude is there but I walk silently among them and no one sees me. The old images are gone and only the essence remains to light his Golden Path."
She turned and took Idaho's cold hand in hers. Carefully, she led him out of the cave into the light where the rope dangled invitingly from the barrier Wall's top, from the place where the frightened Museum Fremen waited.
Poor material with which to shape a new universe, she thought, but they would have to serve. Idaho would require gentle seduction, a care within which love might appear.
When she looked down the river to where the flow emerged from its man-made chasm to spread across the green lands, she saw a wind from the south driving dark clouds toward her.
Idaho withdrew his hand from hers, but he appeared calmer. "Weather control is increasingly unstable," he said. "Moneo thought it was the Guild's doing."
"My father was seldom mistaken about such things," she said. "You will have to look into that."
Idaho experienced a sudden memory of the silvery shapes of sandtrout darting away from Leto's body in the river.
"I heard the Worm," Siona said. "The Fish Speakers will follow you, not me."
Again, Idaho sensed the temptation from the ritual of Siaynoq. "We will see," he said. He turned and looked at Siona. "What did he mean when he said the lxians cannot create arafel?"
"You haven't read all the journals," she said. "I'll show you when we return to Tuono."
"But what does it mean-arafel?"
"That's the cloud-darkness of holy judgment. It's from an old story. You'll find it all in my journals."
- = Excerpt from the Hadi Benotto secret summation on the discoveries at Dar-es-Balat:
Herewith THE minority report. We will, of course, comply with the majority decision to apply a careful screening, editing and censorship to the journals from Dar-es-Balat, but our arguments must be heard. We recognize the interest of Holy Church in these matters and the political dangers have not escaped our notice. We share a desire with the Church that Rakis and the Holy Reservation of the Divided God not become "an attraction for gawking tourists."
However, now that all of the journals are in our hands, authenticated and translated, the clear shape of the Atreides Design emerges. As a woman trained by the Bene Gesserit to understand the ways of our ancestors, I have a natural desire to share the pattern we have exposed which is so much more than Dune to Arrakis to Dune, thence to Rakis.
The interests of history and science must be served. The journals throw a valuable new light onto that accumulation of personal recollections and biographies from the Duncan Days, the Guard Bible. We cannot be unmindful of those familiar oaths: "By the Thousand Sons of Idaho!" and "By the Nine Daughters of Siona!" The persistent Cult of Sister Chenoeh assumes new significance because of the journals' disclosures. Certainly, the Church's characterization of Judas/Nayla deserves careful reevaluation.
We of the Minority must remind the political censors that the poor sandworms in their Rakian Reservation cannot provide us with an alternative to Ixian Navigation Machines, nor are the tiny amounts of Church-controlled melange any real commercial threat to the products of the Tleilaxu vats. No! We argue that the myths, the Oral History, the Guard Bible, and even the Holy Books of the Divided God must be compared with the journals from Dar-es-Balat. Every historical reference to the Scattering and the Famine Times has to be taken out and reexamined! What have we to fear? No Ixian machine can do what we, the descendants of Duncan Idaho and Siona, have done. How many universes have we populated? None can guess. No one person will ever know. Does the Church fear the occasional prophet? We know that the visionaries cannot see us nor predict our decisions. No death can find all of humankind. Must we of the Minority join our fellows of the Scattering before we can be heard? Must we leave the original core of humankind ignorant and uninformed? If the Majority drives us out, you know we never again can be found!
We do not want to leave. We are held here by those pearls in the sand. We are fascinated by the Church's use of the pearl as "the sun of understanding." Surely, no reasoning human can escape the journals' revelations in this regard. The admittedly fugitive but vital uses of archeology must have their day! Just as the primitive machine with which Leto I concealed his journals can only teach us about the evolution of our machines, just so, that ancient awareness must be allowed to speak to us. It would be a crime against both historical accuracy and science for us to abandon our attempts at communication with those "pearls of awareness" which the journals have located. Is Leto II lost in his endless dream or could he be reawakened to our times, brought to full consciousness as a storehouse of historical accuracy? How can Holy Church fear this truth?
For the Minority, we have no doubt that historians must listen to that voice from our beginnings. If it is only the journals, we must listen. We must listen across at least as many years into our future as those journals lay hidden in our past. We will not try to predict the discoveries yet to be made within those pages. We say only that they must be made. How can we turn our backs on our most important inheritance? As the poet, Lon Bramlis, has said: "We are the fountain of surprises!" skytell.da.ru