The God Emperor
By Frank Herbert
Excerpt from the speech by Hadi Benotto announcing the discoveries at Dar-es-
Balat on the planet of Rakis: IT NOT only is my pleasure to announce to you this morning our discovery of this marvelous storehouse containing, among other things, a monumental collection of manuscripts inscribed on ridulian crystal paper, but I also take pride in giving you our arguments for the authenticity of our discoveries, to tell you why we believe we have uncovered the original journals of Leto II, the God Emperor.
First, let me recall to you the historical treasure which we all know by the
name of The Stolen Journals, those volumes of known antiquity which over the
centuries have been so valuable in helping us to understand our ancestors. As
you all know, The Stolen Journals were deciphered by the Spacing Guild, and the
method of the Guild Key was employed to translate these newly discovered
volumes. No one denies the antiquity of the Guild Key and it, and it alone,
translates these volumes.
Second, these volumes were printed by an Ixian dictatel of truly ancient make.
The Stolen Journals leave no doubt that this was in fact the method employed by
Leto II to record his historical observations.
Third and we believe that this is equal in portent to the actual discovery,
there is the storehouse itself. The repository for these journals is an
undoubted Ixian artifact of such primitive and yet marvelous construction that
it is sure to throw new light on the historical epoch known as "The Scattering."
As was to be expected, the storehouse was invisible. It was buried far deeper
than myth and the Oral History had led us to expect and it emitted radiation and
absorbed radiation to simulate the natural character of its surroundings, a
mechanical mimesis which is not surprising of itself. What has surprised our
engineers, however, is the way this was done with the most rudimentary and truly
primitive mechanical skills.
I can see that some of you are as excited by this as we were.
We believe we are looking at the first Ixian Globe, the noroom from which all
such devices evolved. If it is not actually the first, we believe it must be one
of the first and embodying the same principles as the first.
Let me address your obvious curiosity by assuring you that we will take you on a
brief tour of the storehouse presently. We will ask only that you maintain
silence while within the storehouse because our engineers and other specialists
are still at work there unraveling the mysteries.
Which brings me to my fourth point, and this may well be the capstone of our
discoveries. It is with emotions difficult to describe that I reveal to you now
another discovery at this site-namely, actual oral recordings which are labeled
as having been made by Leto II in the voice of his father, Paul Muad'Dib. Since
authenticated recordings of the God Emperor are lodged in the Bene Gesserit
Archives, we have sent a sampling of our recordings, all of which were made on
an ancient microbubble system, to the Sisterhood with a formal request that they
conduct a comparison test. We have little doubt that the recordings will be
authenticated.
Now, please turn your attention to the translated excerpts which were handed to
you as you entered. Let me take this opportunity to apologize for their weight.
I have heard some of you joking about that. We used ordinary paper for a
practical reason-economy. The original volumes are inscribed in symbols so small
that they must be magnified substantially before they can be read. In fact, it
requires more than forty ordinary volumes of the type you now hold just to
reprint the contents of one of the ridulian crystal originals.
If the projector-yes. We are now projecting part of an original page onto the
screen at your left. This is from the first page of the first volume. Our
translation is on the screens to the right. I call your attention to the
internal evidence, the poetic vanity of the words as well as the meaning derived
from the translation. The style conveys a personality which is identifiable and
consistent. We believe that this could only have been written by someone who had
the direct experience of ancestral memories, by someone laboring to share that
extraordinary experience of previous lives in a way that could be understood by
those not so gifted.
Look now at the actual meaning content. All of the references accord with
everything history has told us about the one person whom we believe is the only
person who could have written such an account.
We have another surprise for you now. I have taken the liberty of inviting the
well-known poet, Rebeth Vreeb, to share the platform with us this morning and to
read from this first page a short passage of our translation. It is our
observation that, even in translation, these words take on a different character
when read aloud. We want to share with you a truly extraordinary quality which
we have discovered in these volumes.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rebeth Vreeb.
From the reading by Rebeth Vreeb:
I ASSURE you that I am the book of fate.
Questions are my enemies. For my questions explode! Answers leap up like a
frightened flock, blackening the sky of my inescapable memories. Not one answer,
not one suffices.
What prisms flash when I enter the terrible field of my past. I am a chip of
shattered flint enclosed in a box. The box gyrates and quakes. I am tossed about
in a storm of mysteries. And when the box opens, I return to this presence like
a stranger in a primitive land.
Slowly (slowly, I say) I relearn my name.
But that is not to know myself!
This person of my name, this Leto who is the second of that calling, finds other
voices in his mind, other names and other places. Oh, I promise you (as I have
been promised) that I answer to but a single name. If you say, "Leto," I
respond. Sufferance makes this true, sufferance and one thing more:
I hold the threads!
All of them are mine. Let me but imagine a topicsay . . . men who have died by
the sword-and I have them in all of their gore, every image intact, every moan,
every grimace.
Joys of motherhood, I think, and the birthing beds are mine. Serial baby smiles
and the sweet cooings of new generations. The first walkings of the toddlers and
the first victories of youths brought forth for me to share. They tumble one
upon another until I can see little else but sameness and repetition.
"Keep it all intact," I warn myself. Who can deny the value of such experiences,
the worth of learning through which I view each new instant? Ahhh, but it's the
past. Don't you understand? It's only the past!
This morning I was born in a yurt at the edge of a horse-plain in a land of a
planet which no longer exists. Tomorrow I will be born someone else in another
place. II have not yet chosen. This morning, though-ahhh, this life! When my
eyes had learned to focus, I looked out at sunshine on trampled grass and I saw
vigorous people going about the sweet activities of their lives. Where... oh
where has all of that vigor gone?
-The Stolen Journals
THE THREE people running northward through moon shadows in the Forbidden Forest
were strung out along almost half a kilometer. The last runner in the line ran
less than a hundred meters ahead of the pursuing D-wolves. The animals could be
heard yelping and panting in their eagerness, the way they do when they have the
prey in sight.
With First Moon almost directly overhead, it was quite light in the forest and,
although these were the higher latitudes of Arrakis it was still warm from the
heat of a summer day. The nightly drift of air from the Last Desert of the
Sareer carried resin smells and the damp exhalations of the duff underfoot. Now
and again, a breeze from the Kynes Sea beyond the Sareer drifted across the
runners' tracks with hints of salt and fishes.
By a quirk of fate, the last runner was called Ulot, which in the Fremen tongue
means "Beloved Straggler." Ulot was short in stature and with a tendency to fat
which had placed an extra dieting burden on him in training for this venture.
Even when slimmed down for their desperate run, his face remained round, the
large brown eyes vulnerable in that suggestion of too much flesh.
To Ulot it was obvious that he could not run much farther. He panted and
wheezed. Occasionally, he staggered. But he did not call out to his companions.
He knew they could not help him. All of them had taken the same oath, knowing
they had no defenses except the old virtues and Fremen loyalties. This remained
true even though everything that once had been Fremen had now a museum qualityrote
recitals learned from Museum Fremen.
It was Fremen loyalty that kept Ulot silent in the full awareness of his doom. A
fine display of the ancient qualities, and rather pitiful when none of the
runners had any but book knowledge and the legends of the Oral History about the
virtues they aped.The D-wolves ran close behind Ulot, giant gray figures almost
manheight at the shoulders. They leaped and whined in their eagerness, heads
lifted, eyes focused on the moon betrayed figure of their quarry.
A root caught Ulot's left foot and he almost fell. This gave him renewed energy.
He put on a burst of speed, gaining perhaps a wolf length on his pursuers. His
arms pumped. He breathed noisily through his open mouth.
The D-wolves did not change pace. They were silver shadows which went flickflick
through the loud green smells of their forest. They knew they had won. It
was a familiar experience.
Again, Ulot stumbled. He caught his balance against a sapling and continued his
panting flight, gasping, his legs trembling in rebellion against these demands.
No energy remained for another burst of speed.
One of the D-wolves, a large female, moved out on Ulot's left flank. She swerved
inward and leaped across his path. Giant fangs ripped Ulot's shoulder and
staggered him but he did not fall. The pungency of blood was added to the forest
smells. A smaller male caught his right hip and at last Ulot fell, screaming.
The pack pounced and his screams were cut off in abrupt finality.
Not stopping to feed, the D-wolves again took up the chase. Their noses probed
the forest floor and the vagrant eddies in the air, scenting the warm tracery of
two more running humans.
The next runner in the line was named Kwuteg, an old and honorable name on
Arrakis, a name from the Dune times. An ancestor had served Sietch Tabr as
Master of the Deathstills, but that was more than three thousand years lost in a
past which many no longer believed. Kwuteg ran with the long strides of a tall
and slender body which seemed perfectly fitted to such exertion. Long black hair
streamed back from his aquiline features. As with his companions, he wore a
black running suit of tightly knitted cotton. It revealed the workings of his
buttocks and stringy thighs, the deep and steady rhythm of his breathing. Only
his pace, which was markedly slow for Kwuteg, betrayed the fact that he had
injured his right knee coming down from the man-made precipices which girdled
the God Emperor's Citadel fortress in the Sareer.
Kwuteg heard Ulot's screams, the abrupt and potent silence, then the renewed
chase-yelps of the D-wolves. He tried not to let his mind create the image of
another friend being slain by Leto's monster guardians but imagination worked
its sorcery on him. Kwuteg thought a curse against the tyrant but wasted no
breath to voice it. There remained a chance that he could reach the sanctuary of
the Idaho River. Kwuteg knew what his friends thought about him-even Siona. He
had always been known as a conservative. Even as a child he had saved his energy
until it counted most, parceling out his reserves like a miser.
In spite of the injured knee, Kwuteg increased his pace. He knew the river was
near. His injury had gone beyond agony into a steady flame which filled his
entire leg and side with its burning. He knew the limits of his endurance. He
knew also that Siona should be almost at the water. The fastest runner of them
all, she carried the sealed packet and, in it, the things they had stolen from
the fortress in the Sareer. Kwuteg focused his thoughts on that packet as he
ran.
Save it, Siona! Use it to destroy him!
The eager whining of the D-wolves penetrated Kwuteg's consciousness. They were
too close. He knew then that he would not escape.
But Siona must escape!
He risked a backward glance and saw one of the wolves move to flank him. The
pattern of their attack plan imprinted itself on his awareness. As the flanking
wolf leaped Kwuteg also leaped. Placing a tree between himself and the pack, he
ducked beneath the flanking wolf, grasped one of its hind legs in both hands
and, without stopping, whirled the captive wolf as a flail which scattered the
others. Finding the creature not as heavy as he had expected, almost welcoming
the change of action, he flailed his living bludgeon at the attackers in a
dervish whirl which brought two of them down in a crash of skulls. But he could
not guard every side. A lean male caught him in the back, hurling him against a
tree and he lost his bludgeon.
"Go!" he screamed.
The pack bored in and Kwuteg caught the throat of the lean male in his teeth. He
bit down with every gram of his final desperation. Wolf blood spurted over his
face, blinding him. Rolling without any knowledge of where he went, Kwuteg
grappled another wolf. Part of the pack dissolved into a yelping, whirling mob,
some turning against their own injured. Most of the pack remained intent on the
quarry, though. Teeth ripped Kwuteg's throat from both sides.
Siona, too, had heard Ulot scream, then the unmistakable silence followed by the
yelping of the pack as the wolves resumed the chase. Such anger filled her that
she felt she might explode with it. Ulot had been included in this venture
because of his analytical ability, his way of seeing a whole from only a few
parts. It had been Ulot who, taking the inevitable magnifier from his kit, had
examined the two strange volumes they had found in with the Citadel's plans.
"I think it's a cipher," Ulot had said.
And Radi, poor Radi who had been the first of their team to die .... Radi had
said, "We can't afford the extra weight. Throw them away."
Ulot had objected: "Unimportant things aren't concealed this way."
Kwuteg had joined Radi. "We came for the Citadel plans and we have them. Those
things are too heavy."
But Siona had agreed with Ulot. "I will carry them."
That had ended the argument.
Poor Ulot.
They had all known him as the worst runner in the team. Ulot was slow in most
things, but the clarity of his mind could not be denied.
He is trustworthy.
Ulot had been trustworthy.
Siona mastered her anger and used its energy to increase her pace. Trees whipped
past her in the moonlight. She had entered that timeless void of the running
when there was nothing else but her own movements, her own body doing what it
had been conditioned to do.
Men thought her beautiful when she ran. Siona knew this. Her long dark hair was
tied tightly to keep it from whipping in the wind of her passage. She had
accused Kwuteg of foolishness when he had refused to copy her style.
Where is Kwuteg?
Her hair was not like Kwuteg's. It was that deep brown which is sometimes
confused with black, but is not truly black, not like Kwuteg's at all.
In the way genes occasionally do, her features copied those of a long dead
ancestor: gently oval and with a generous mouth, eyes of alert awareness above a
small nose. Her body had grown lanky from years of running, but it sent strong
sexual signals to the males around her.
Where is Kwuteg?
The wolf pack had fallen silent and this filled her with alarm. They had done
that before bringing down Radi. It had been the same when they got Setuse.
She told herself the silence could mean other things. Kwuteg, too, was silent .
. . and strong. The injury had not appeared to bother him too much.
Siona began to feel pain in her chest, the gasping-to-come which she knew well
from the long kilometers of training. Perspiration still poured down her body
under the thin, black running garment. The kit, with its precious contents
sealed against the river passage ahead, rode high on her back. She thought about
the Citadel charts folded there.
Where does Leto hide his hoard of spice?
It had to be somewhere within the Citadel. It had to be. Somewhere in the charts
there would be a clue. The mélange spice for which the Bene Gesserit, the Guild
and all the others hungered . . . that was a prize worth this risk.
And those two cryptic volumes. Kwuteg had been right in one thing. Ridulian
crystal paper was heavy. But she shared Ulot's excitement. Something important
was concealed in those lines of cipher.
Once more the eager chase-yelps of the wolves sounded in the forest behind her.
Run, Kwuteg! Run!
Now, just ahead of her through the trees, she could see the wide cleared strip
which bordered the Idaho River. She glimpsed moon brightness on water beyond the
clearing.
Run, Kwuteg!
She longed for a sound from Kwuteg, any sound. Only the
two of them remained now from the eleven who had started the run. Nine had paid
for this venture with their lives: Radi, Aline, Ulot, Setuse, lnineg, Onemao,
Hutye, Memar and Oala.
Siona thought their names and with each sent a silent prayer to the old gods,
not to the tyrant Leto. Especially, she prayed to Shai-Hulud.
"I pray to Shai-Hulud, who lives in the sand."
Abruptly, she was out of the forest and onto the moon-bright stretch of mowed
ground along the river. Straight ahead beyond a narrow shingle of beach, the
water beckoned to her. The beach was silver against the oily flow.
A loud yell from back in the trees almost made her falter. She recognized
Kwuteg's voice above the wild wolf sounds. Kwuteg called out to her without
name, an unmistakable cry with one word containing countless conversations-a
message of death and life.
"Go!"
The pack sounds took on a terrible commotion of frenzied yelps, but nothing more
from Kwuteg. She knew then how Kwuteg was spending the last energies of his
life.
Delaying them to help me escape.
Obeying Kwuteg's cry, she dashed to the river's edge and plunged headfirst into
the water. The river was a freezing shock after the heat of the run. It stunned
her for a moment and she floundered outward, struggling to swim and regain her
breath. The precious kit floated and bumped against the back of her head.
The Idaho River was not wide here, no more than fifty meters, a gently sweeping
curve with sandy indentations fringed by roots and shelving banks of lush reeds
and grass where the water refused to stay in the straight lines Leto's engineers
had designed. Siona was strengthened by the knowledge that the D-wolves had been
conditioned to stop at the water. Their territorial boundaries had been drawn,
the river on this side and the desert wall on the other side. Still, she swam
the last few meters underwater and surfaced in the shadows of a cutbank before
turning and looking back.
The wolf pack stood ranged along the bank, all except one which had come down to
the river's edge. It leaned forward with its forefeet almost into the flow. She
heard it whine.
Siona knew the wolf saw her. No doubt of that. D-wolves were noted for their
keen eyesight. There were Gaze Hounds
in the ancestry of Leto's forest guardians and he bred the wolves for their
eyesight. She wondered if this once the wolves might break through their
conditioning. They were mostly sight-hunters. If that one wolf at the river's
edge should enter the water, all might follow. Siona held her breath. She felt
the dragging of exhaustion. They had come almost thirty kilometers, the last
half of it with the D-wolves close behind.
The wolf at the river's edge whined once more then leaped back up to its
companions. At some silent signal, they turned and loped back into the forest.
Siona knew where they would go. D-wolves were allowed to eat anything they
brought down in the Forbidden Forest. Everyone knew this. It was why the wolves
roamed the forest the guardians of the Sareer.
"You'll pay for this, Leto," she whispered. It was a low sound, her voice, very
close to the quiet rustling of the water against the reeds just behind her.
"You'll pay for Ulot, for Kwuteg and for all the others. You'll pay."
She pushed outward gently and drifted with the current until her feet met the
first shelving of a narrow beach. Slowly, her body dragged down by fatigue, she
climbed from the water and paused to check that the sealed contents of her kit
had remained dry. The seal was unbroken. She stared at it a moment in the
moonlight, then lifted her gaze to the forest wall across the river.
The price we paid. Ten dear friends.
Tears glimmered in her eyes, but she had the stuff of the ancient Fremen and her
tears were few. The venture across the river, directly through the forest while
the wolves patrolled the northern boundaries, then across the Last Desert of the
Sareer and over the Citadel's ramparts-all of this already was assuming dream
proportions in her mind . . . even the flight from the wolves which she had
anticipated because it was a certainty that the guardian pack would cross the
track of the invaders and be waiting . . . all a dream. It was the past.
I escaped.
She restored the kit with its sealed packet and fastened it once more against
her back.
I have broken through your defenses, Leto.
Siona thought then about the cryptic volumes. She felt certain that something
hidden in those lines of cipher would open the way for her revenge.
l will destroy you, Leto!
Not We will destroy you! That was not Siona's way. She would do it herself.
She turned and strode toward the orchards beyond the river's mowed border. As
she walked she repeated her oath, adding to it aloud the old Fremen formula
which terminated in her full name:
"Siona Ibn Fuad al-Seyefa Atreides it is who curses you, Leto. You will pay in
full!"
The following is from the Hadi Benotto translation of the volumes discovered at
Dar-es-Balat:
I WAS born Leto Atreides II more than three thousand standard years ago,
measuring from the moment when I cause these words to be printed. My father was
Paul Muad'Dib. My mother was his Fremen consort, Chani. My maternal grandmother
was Faroula, a noted herbalist among the Fremen. My paternal grandmother was
Jessica, a product of the Bene Gesserit breeding scheme in their search for a
male who could share the powers of the Sisterhood's Reverend Mothers. My
maternal grandfather was Liet-Kynes, the planetologist who organized the
ecological transformation of Arrakis. My paternal grandfather was Leto Atreides,
descendant of the House of Atreus and tracing his ancestry directly back to the
Greek original.
Enough of these begats!
My paternal grandfather died as many good Greeks did, attempting to kill his
mortal enemy, the old Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Both of them rest uncomfortably
now in my ancestral memories. Even my father is not content. I have done what he
feared to do and now his shade must share in the consequences.
The Golden Path demands it. And what is the Golden Path? you ask. It is the
survival of humankind, nothing more nor less. We who have prescience, we who
know the pitfalls in our human futures, this has always been our responsibility.
Survival.
How you feel about this-your petty woes and joys, even your agonies and
raptures-seldom concerns us. My father had this power. I have it stronger. We
can peer now and again through the veils of Time.
This planet of Arrakis from which I direct my multigalactic Empire is no longer
what it was in the days when it was known as Dune. In those days, the entire
planet was a desert. Now, there is just this little remnant, my Sareer. No
longer does the giant sandworm roam free, producing the spice mélange. The
spice! Dune was noteworthy only as the source of melange, the only .source. What
an extraordinary substance. No laboratory has ever been able to duplicate it.
And it is the most valuable substance humankind has ever found.
Without melange to ignite the linear prescience of Guild Navigators, people
cross the parsecs of space only at a snail's crawl. Without melange, the Bene
Gesserit cannot endow Truthsayers or Reverend Mothers. Without the geriatric
properties of melange, people live and die according to the ancient measure-no
more than a hundred years or so. Now, the only spice is held in Guild and Bene
Gesserit storehouses, a few small hoards among the remnants of the Great Houses,
and my gigantic hoard which they all covet. How they would like to raid me! But
they don't dare. They know I would destroy it all before surrendering it.
No They come hat in hand and petition me for melange. I dole it out as a reward
and hold it back as punishment. How they hate that.
It is my power, I tell them. It is my gift.
With it, I create Peace. They have had more than three thousand years of Leto's
Peace. It is an enforced tranquility which humankind knew only for the briefest
periods before my ascendancy. Lest you have forgotten, study Leto's Peace once
more in these, my journals.
I began this account in the first year of my stewardship, in the first throes of
my metamorphosis when I was still mostly human, even visibly so. The sandtrout
skin which I accepted (and my father refused) and which gave me greatly
amplified strength plus virtual immunity from conventional attack and aging-that
skin still covered a form recognizably human: two legs, two arms, a human face
framed in the scrolled folds of the sandtrout.
Ahhh, that face! I still have it-the only human skin I expose to the universe.
All the rest of my flesh has remained covered by the linked bodies of those tiny
deep sand vectors which one day can become giant sandworms.
As they will . . . someday.
I often think about my final metamorphosis, that likeness of death. I know the
way it must come but I do not know the moment or the other players. This is the
one thing I cannot know. I only know whether the Golden Path continues or ends.
As I cause these words to be recorded, the Golden Path continues and for that,
at least, I am content.
I no longer feel the sandtrout cilia probing my flesh, encapsulating the water
of my body within their placental barriers. We are virtually one body now, they
my skin and I the force which moves the whole . . . most of the time.
At this writing, the whole could be considered rather gross. I am what could be
called a pre-worm. My body is about seven meters long and somewhat more than two
meters in diameter, ribbed for most of its length, with my Atreides face
positioned man-height at one end, the arms and hands (still quite recognizable
as human) just below. My legs and feet? Well, they are mostly atrophied. Just
flippers, really, and they have wandered back along my body. The whole of me
weighs approximately five old tons. These items I append because I know they
will have historical interest.
How do I carry this weight around? Mostly on my Royal Cart, which is of Ixian
manufacture. You are shocked? People invariably hated and feared the Ixians even
more than they hated and feared me. Better the devil you know. And who knows
what the Ixians might manufacture or invent? Who knows?
I certainly don't. Not all of it.
But I have a certain sympathy for the Ixians. They believe so strongly in their
technology, their science, their machines. Because we believe (no matter the
content) we understand each other, the Ixians and I. They make many devices for
me and think they earn my gratitude thus. These very words you are reading were
printed by an Ixian device, a dictatel it is called. If I cast my thoughts in a
particular mode, the dictatel is activated. I merely think in this mode and the
words are printed for me on ridulian crystal sheets only one molecule thick.
Sometimes I order copies printed on material of lesser permanence. It was two of
these latter types that were stolen from me by Siona.
Isn't she fascinating, my Siona? As you come to understand her importance to me,
you may even question whether I really would have let her die there in the
forest. Have no doubt about it. Death is a very personal thing. I will seldom
interfere with it. Never in the case of someone who must be tested as Siona
requires. I could let her die at any stage. After all, I could bring up a new
candidate in very little time as I measure time.
She fascinates even me, though. I watched her there in the forest. Through my
Wan devices I watched her, wondering why I had not anticipated this venture. But
Siona is . . . Siona. That is why I made no move to stop the wolves. It would
have been wrong to do that. The D-wolves are but an extension of my purpose and
my purpose is to be the greatest predator ever known.
-The Journals of Leto
The following brief dialogue is credited to a manuscript source called "The
Welbeck Fragment." The reputed author is Siona Atreides. The participants are
Siona herself and her father, Moneo, who was (as all the histories tell us) a
majordomo and chief aide to Leto II. It is dated at a time when Siona was still
in her teens and was being visited by her father at her quarters in the Fish
Speakers' School at the Festival City of Onn, a major population center on the
planet now known as Rakis. According to the manuscript identification papers,
Moneo had visited his daughter secretly to warn her that she risked destruction.
SIONA: How have you survived with him for so long a time, father? He kills those
who are close to him. Everyone knows that.
MONEO: No! You are wrong. He kills no one.
SIONA: You needn't lie about him.
MONEO: I mean it. He kills no one.
SIONA: Then how do you account for the known deaths?
MONEO: It is the Worm that kills. The Worm is God. Leto lives in the bosom of
God, but he kills no one.
SIONA: Then how do you survive?
MONEO: I can recognize the Worm. I can see it in his face and in his movements.
I know when Shai-Hulud approaches.
SIONA: He is not Shai-Hulud!
MONEO: Well, that's what they called the Worm in the Fremen days.
SIONA: I've read about that. But he is not the God of the desert.
MONEO: Be quiet, you foolish girl! You know nothing of such things.
SIONA: I know that you are a coward.
MONEO: How little you know, You have-never stood where I have stood and seen it
in his eyes, in the movements of his hands.
SIONA: What do you do when the Worm approaches?
MONEO: I leave.
SIONA: That's prudent. He has killed nine Duncan Idahos that we know about for
sure.
MONEO: I tell you he kills no one!
SIONA: What's the difference? Leto or Worm, they are one body now.
MONEO: But they are two separate beings-Leto the Emperor and The Worm Who Is
God.
SIONA: You're mad!
MONEO: Perhaps. But I do serve God.
===
I am the most ardent people-watcher who ever lived. I watch them inside me and
outside. Past and present can mingle with odd impositions in me. And as the
metamorphosis continues in my flesh wonderful things happen to my senses. It's
as though I sensed everything in close-up. I have extremely acute hearing and
vision, plus a sense of smell extraordinarily discriminating. I can detect and
identify pheromones at three parts per million. I know. I have tested it. You
cannot hide very much from my senses. I think it would horrify you what I can
detect by smell alone. Your pheromones tell me what you are doing or are
prepared to do. And gesture and posture! I stared for half a day once at an old
man sitting on a bench in Arrakeen. He was a fifth-generation descendant of
Stilgar the Naib and did not even know it. I studied the angle of his neck, the
skin flaps below his chin, the cracked lips and moistness about his nostrils,
the pores behind his ears, the wisps of gray hair which crept from beneath the
hood of his antique stillsuit. Not once did he detect that he was being watched.
Hah! Stilgar would have known it in a second or two. But this old man was just
waiting for someone who never came. He got up finally and tottered off. He was
very stiff after all of that sitting. I knew I would never see him in the flesh
again. He was that near death and his water was sure to be wasted. Well, that no
longer mattered.
-The Stolen Journals
LETO THOUGHT it the most interesting place in the universe, this place where he
awaited the arrival of his current Duncan Idaho. By most human standards, it was
a gigantic space, the core of an elaborate series of catacombs beneath his
Citadel. Radiating chambers thirty meters high and twenty meters wide ran like
spokes from the hub where he waited. His cart had been positioned at the center
of the hub in a domed and circular chamber four hundred meters in diameter and
one hundred meters high at its tallest point above him.
He found these dimensions reassuring.
It was early afternoon at the Citadel, but the only light in his chamber came
from the random drifting of a few suspensorborne glowglobes tuned into low
orange. The light did not penetrate far into the spokes, but Leto's memories
told him the exact position of everything there the water, the bones, the dust
of his ancestors and of the Atreides who had lived and died since the Dune
times. All of them were here, plus a few containers of melange to create the
illusion that this was all of his hoard should it ever come to such an extreme.
Leto knew why the Duncan was coming. Idaho had learned that the Tleilaxu were
making another Duncan, another ghola created to the specifications demanded by
the God Emperor. This Duncan feared that he was being replaced after almost
sixty years of service. It was always something of that nature which began the
subversion of the Duncans. A Guild envoy had waited upon Leto earlier to warn
that the Ixians had delivered a lasgun to this Duncan.
Leto chuckled. The Guild remained extremely sensitive to anything which might
threaten their slender supply of spice. They were terrified at the thought that
Leto was the last link with the sandworms which had produced the original
stockpiles of melange.
If II die away from water, there will be no more spice-not ever.
That was the Guild's fear. And their historian-accountants assured them Leto sat
on the largest store of melange in the universe. This knowledge made the Guild
almost reliable as allies.
While he waited, Leto did the hand and finger exercises of his Bene Gesserit
inheritance. The hands were his pride. Beneath a gray membrane of sandtrout
skin, their long digits and opposable thumbs could be used much as any human
hands. The almost useless flippers which once had been his feet and legs were
more inconvenience than shame. He could crawl, roll and toss his body with
astonishing speed, but he sometimes fell on the flippers and there was pain.
What was delaying the Duncan?
Leto imagined the man vacillating, staring out a window across the fluid horizon
of the Sareer. The air was alive with heat today. Before descending to the
crypt, Leto had seen a mirage in the southwest. The heat-mirror tipped and
flashed an image across the sand, showing him a band of Museum Fremen trudging
past a Display Sietch for the edification of tourists.
It was cool in the crypt, always cool, the illumination always low. Tunnel
spokes were dark holes sloping upward and downward in gentle gradients to
accommodate the Royal Cart. Some tunnels extended beyond false walls for many
kilometers, passages Leto had created for himself with lxian tools-feeding
tunnels and secret ways.
As he contemplated the coming interview, a sense of nervousness began to grow in
Leto. He found this an interesting emotion, one he had been known to enjoy. Leto
knew that he had grown reasonably fond of the current Duncan. There was a
reservoir of hope in Leto that the man would survive the coming interview.
Sometimes they did. There was little likelihood the Duncan posed a mortal
threat, although this had to be left to such chance as existed. Leto had tried
to explain this to one of the earlier Duncans . . . right here in this room.
"You will think it strange that , with my powers, can speak of luck and chance,"
Leto had said.
The Duncan had been angry. "You leave nothing to chance! I know you!"
"How naive. Chance is the nature of our universe."
"Not chance! Mischief. And you're the author of mischief!"
"Excellent, Duncan! Mischief is a most profound pleasure. It's in the ways we
deal with mischief that we sharpen creativity."
"You're not even human anymore!" Oh, how angry the Duncan had been.
Leto had found his accusation irritating, like a grain of sand in an eye. He
held onto the remnants of his once-human self with a grimness which could not be
denied, although irritation was the closest he could come to anger.
"Your life is becoming a cliche," Leto had accused.
Whereupon the Duncan had produced a small explosive
from the folds of his uniform robe. What a surprise!
Leto loved surprises, even nasty ones.
It is something I did not predict! And he said as much to Duncan, who had stood
there oddly undecided now that decision was absolutely demanded of him.
"This could kill you," the Duncan said.
"I'm sorry, Duncan. It will do a small amount of injury, no more."
"But you said you didn't predict this!" The Duncan's voice had grown shrill.
"Duncan, Duncan, it is absolute prediction which equals death to me. How
unutterably boring death is."
At the last instant, the Duncan had tried to throw the explosive to one side,
but the material in it had been unstable and it had gone off too soon. The
Duncan had died. Ahh, well-the Tleilaxu always had another in their axlotl
tanks.
One of the drifting glowglobes above Leto began to blink. Excitement gripped
him. Moneo's signal! Faithful Moneo had alerted his God Emperor that the Duncan
was descending to the crypt.
The door to the human lift between two spoked passages in the northwest arc of
the hub swung open. The Duncan strode forth, a small figure at that distance,
but Leto's eyes discerned even tiny details, a wrinkle on the uniform elbow
which said the man had been leaning somewhere, chin in hand. Yes, there were
still the marks of his hand on the chin. The Duncan's odor preceded him: the man
was high on his own adrenalin.
Leto remained silent while the Duncan approached, observing details. The Duncan
still walked with the spring of youth despite all of his long service. He could
thank a minimal ingestion of melange for that. The man wore the old Atreides
uniform, black with a golden hawk at the left breast. An interesting statement,
that: "I serve the honor of the old Atreides!" His hair was still the black cap
of karakul, the features fixed in stony sharpness with high cheekbones.
The Tleilaxu make their gholas well, Leto thought.
The Duncan carried a thin briefcase woven of dark brown fibers, one he had
carried for many years. It usually contained the material upon which he based
his reports, but today it bulged with some heavier weight.
The Ixian lasgun.
Idaho kept his attention on Leto's face as he walked. The face remained
disconcertingly Atreides, lean features with eyes
of total blue which the nervous felt as a physical intrusion. It lurked deep
within a gray cowl of sandtrout skin which, Idaho knew, could roll forward
protectively in a flickering reflex, a face blink rather than an eye blink. The
skin was pink within its gray frame. It was difficult avoiding the thought that
Leto's face was an obscenity, a lost bit of humanity trapped in something alien.
Stopping only six paces from the Royal Cart, Idaho did not attempt to conceal
his angry determination. He did not even think about whether Leto knew of the
lasgun. This Imperium had wandered too far from the old Atreides morality, had
become an impersonal juggernaut which crushed the innocent in its path. It had
to be ended.
"I have come to talk to you about Siona and other matters," Idaho said. He
brought the case into position where he could withdraw the lasgun easily.
"Very well." Leto's voice was full of boredom.
"Siona was the only one who escaped, but she still has a base of rebel
companions."
"You think I don't know this!"
"I know your dangerous tolerance for rebels! What I don't know is the contents
of that package she stole."
"Oh, that. She has the complete plans for the Citadel."
For just a moment, Idaho was Leto's Guard Commander, deeply shocked at such a
breach of security.
"You let her escape with that?"
"No, you did."
Idaho recoiled from this accusation. Slowly. the newly resolved assassin in him
regained ascendancy.
"Is that all she got?" Idaho asked.
"I had two volumes, copies of my journal, in with the charts. She stole the
copies."
Idaho studied Leto's immobile face. "What is in these journals? Sometimes you
say it's a diary, sometimes a history."
"A bit of both. You might even call it a textbook."
"Does it bother you that she took these volumes?"
Leto allowed himself a soft smile which Idaho accepted as a negative answer. A
momentary tension rippled through Leto's body then as Idaho reached into the
slim case. Would it be the weapon or the reports! Although the core of his body
possessed a powerful resistance to heat, Leto knew that some of his flesh was
vulnerable to lasguns, especially the face.
Idaho brought a report from his case and, even before he
began reading from it, the signals were obvious to Leto. Idaho was seeking
answers, not providing information. Idaho wanted justification for a course of
action already chosen.
"We have discovered a Cult of Alia on Giedi Prime," Idaho said.
Leto remained silent while Idaho recounted the details. How boring. Leto let his
thoughts wander. The worshippers of his father's long-dead sister served these
days only to provide occasional amusement. The Duncans predictably saw such
activity as a kind of underground threat.
Idaho finished reading. His agents were thorough, no denying it. Boringly
thorough.
"This is nothing more than a revival of Isis," Leto said. "My priests and
priestesses will have some sport suppressing this cult and its followers."
Idaho shook his head as though responding to a voice within it.
"The Bene Gesserit knew about the cult," he said.
Now that interested Leto.
"The Sisterhood has never forgiven me for taking their breeding program away
from them," he said.
"This has nothing to do with breeding."
Leto concealed mild amusement. The Duncans were always so sensitive on the
subject of breeding, although some of them occasionally stood at stud.
"I see," Leto said. "Well, the Bene Gesserit are all more than a little insane,
but madness represents a chaotic reservoir of surprises. Some surprises can be
valuable."
"I fail to see any value in this."
"Do you think the Sisterhood was behind this cult?" Leto asked.
"I do."
"Explain."
"They had a shrine. They called it `The Shrine of the Crysknife. "'
"Did they now?"
"And their chief priestess was called `The Keeper of Jessica's Light.' Does that
suggest anything?"
"It's lovely!" Leto did not try to conceal his amusement.
"What is lovely about it?"
"They unite my grandmother and my aunt into a single goddess."
Idaho shook his head slowly from side to side, not understanding.
Leto permitted himself a small internal pause, less than a blink. The
grandmother-within did not particularly care for this Giedi Prime cult. He was
required to wall off her memories and her identity.
"What do you suppose was the purpose of this cult?" Leto asked.
"Obvious. A competing religion to undermine your authority."
"That's too simple. Whatever else they may be, the Bene Gesserit are not
simpletons."
Idaho waited for an explanation.
"They want more spice!" Leto said. "More Reverend Mothers."
"So they annoy you until you buy them off?"
"I am disappointed in you, Duncan."
Idaho merely stared up at Leto, who contrived a sigh, a complicated gesture no
longer intrinsic to his new form. The Duncans usually were brighter, but Leto
supposed that this one's plot had clouded his alertness.
"They chose Giedi Prime as their home," Leto said. "What does that suggest?"
"It was a Harkonnen stronghold, but that's ancient history."
"Your sister died there, a victim of the Harkonnens. It is right that the
Harkonnens and Giedi Prime be united in your thoughts. Why did you not mention
this earlier?"
"I didn't think it was important."
Leto drew his mouth into a tight line. The reference to his sister had troubled
the Duncan. The man knew intellectually that he was only the latest in a long
line of fleshly revivals, all products of the Tleilaxu axlotl tanks and taken
from the original cells at that. The Duncan could not escape his revived
memories. He knew that the Atreides had rescued him from Harkonnen bondage.
And whatever else I may be, Leto thought, I am still Atreides.
"What're you trying to say?" Idaho demanded.
Leto decided that a shout was required. He let it be a loud one: "The Harkonnens
were spice hoarders!"
Idaho recoiled a full step.
Leto continued in a lower voice: "There's an undiscovered
melange hoard on Giedi Prime. The Sisterhood was trying to winkle it out with
their religious tricks as a cover."
Idaho was abashed. Once it was spoken, the answer appeared obvious.
And I missed it, he thought.
Leto's shout had shaken him back into his role as Commander of the Royal Guard.
Idaho knew about the economics of the Empire, simplified in the extreme: no
interest charges permitted; cash on the barrel head. The only coinage bore a
likeness of Leto's cowled face: the God Emperor. But it was all based on the
spice, a substance whose value, though enormous, kept increasing. A man could
carry the price of an entire planet in his hand luggage.
"Control the coinage and the courts. Get the rabble have the rest," Leto
thought. Old Jacob Broom said it and Leto could hear the old man chortling
within. "Things haven't changed all that much, Jacob."
Idaho took a deep breath. "The Bureau of the Faith should be notified
immediately."
Leto remained silent.
Taking this as a cue to continue, Idaho went on with his reports, but Leto
listened with only a fraction of his awareness. It was like a monitoring circuit
which only recorded Idaho's words and actions with but an occasional
intensification for an internal comment:
And now he wants to talk about the Tleilaxu.
That is dangerous ground for you, Duncan.
But this opened up a new avenue for Leto's reflection.
The wily Tleilaxu still produce my Duncans from the original cells. They do a
religiously forbidden thing and we both know it. I do not permit the artificial
manipulation of human genetics. But the Tleilaxu have learned how I treasure the
Duncans as the Commanders of my Guard. II do not think they suspect the
amusement value in this. It amuses me that a river now bears the Idaho name
where once it was a mountain. That mountain no longer exists. We brought it down
to get material for the high walls which girdle my Sareer.
Of course, the Tleilaxu know that I occasionally breed the Duncans back into my
own program. The Duncans represent mongrel strength . . . and much more. Every
fire must have its damper.
It was my intent to breed this one with Siona, but that may not be possible now.
Hah! He says he wants me to "crack down" on the Tleilaxu. Why will he not ask it
straight out? "Are you preparing to replace me?"
I am tempted to tell him.
Once more, Idaho's hand went into the slender pouch. Leto's introspective
monitoring did not miss a beat.
The lasgun or more reports? It is more reports.
The Duncan remains wary. He wants not only the assurance that I am ignorant of
his intent but more "proofs" that I am unworthy of his loyalty. He hesitates in
a prolonged fashion. He always has. I have told him enough times that I will not
use my prescience to predict the moment of my exit from this ancient form. But
he doubts. He always was a doubter.
This cavernous chamber drinks up his voice and, were it not for my sensitivity,
the dankness here would mask the chemical evidence of his fears. l fade his
voice out of immediate awareness. What a bore this Duncan has become. He is
recounting the history, the history of Siona's rebellion, no doubt leading up to
personal admonitions about her latest escapade.
"It's not an ordinary rebellion," he says.
That brings me back! Fool. All rebellions are ordinary and an ultimate bore.
They are copied out of the same pattern, one much like another. The driving
force is adrenalin addiction and the desire to gain personal power. All rebels
are closet aristocrats. That's why I can convert them so easily.
Why do the Duncans never really hear me when I tell them about this? I have had
the argument with this very Duncan. It was one of our earliest confrontations
and right here in the crypt.
"The art of government requires that you never give up the initiative to radical
elements," he said.
How pedantic. Radicals crop up in every generation and you must not try to
prevent this. That's what he means by "give up the initiative." He wants to
crush them, suppress them, control them, prevent them. He is living proof that
there is little difference between the police mind and the military mind.
I told him, "Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You
must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer."
"They are dangerous. They are dangerous!" He thinks that by repeating he creates
some kind of truth.
Slowly, step by step, I lead him through my method and he even gives the
appearance of listening.
"This is their weakness, Duncan. Radicals always .see matters in terms which are
too simple-black and white, good and evil, them and us. By addressing complex
matters in that way, they rip open a passage for chaos. The art of government as
you call it, is the mastery of chaos."
"No one can deal with every surprise."
"Surprise? Who's talking about surprise? Chaos is no surprise. It has
predictable characteristics. For one thing, it carries away order and
strengthens the forces at the extremes."
"Isn't that what radicals are trying to do? Aren't they trying to shake things
up so they can grab control?"
"That's what they think they're doing. Actually, they're creating new
extremists, new radicals and they are continuing the old process."
"What about a radical who sees the complexities and comes at you that way?"
"That's no radical. That's a rival for leadership."
"But what do you do?"
"You co-opt them or kill them. That's how the struggle for leadership
originated, at the grunt level."
"Yes, but what about messiahs?"
"Like my father?"
The Duncan does not like this question. He knows that in a very special way I am
my father. He knows I can speak with my father's voice and persona, that the
memories are precise, never edited and inescapable.
Reluctantly, he says: "Well. . . if you want."
"Duncan, I am all of them and I know. There has never been a truly selfless
rebel, just hypocrites-conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it's all
the .same."
That stirs up a small hornet's nest among my ancestral memories. Some of them
have never given up the belief that they and they alone held the key to all of
humankind's problems. Well, in that, they are like me. I can sympathize even
while I tell them that failure is its own demonstration.
I am forced to block them off, though. There's no sense dwelling on them. They
now are little more than poignant reminders . . . as is this Duncan who stands
in front of me with his lasgun . . . .
Great Gods below! He has caught me napping. He has the lasgun in his hand and it
is pointed at my face.
"You, Duncan'? Have you betrayed me, too?"
Et tu, Brute?
Every fiber of Leto's awareness came to full alert. He could feel his body
twitching. The worm-flesh had a will of its own.
Idaho spoke with derision: "Tell me, Leto: How many times must I pay the debt of
loyalty?"
Leto recognized the inner question: "How many of me have there been?" The
Duncans always wanted to know this. Every Duncan asked it and no answer
satisfied. They doubted.
In his saddest Muad'Dib voice, Leto asked: "Do you take no pride in my
admiration, Duncan? Haven't you ever wondered what it is about you that makes me
desire you as my constant companion through the centuries?"
"You know me to be the ultimate fool!"
"Duncan!"
The voice of an angry Muad'Dib could always be counted on to shatter Idaho.
Despite the fact that Idaho knew no Bene Gesserit had ever mastered the powers
of Voice as Leto had mastered them, it was predictable that he would dance to
this one voice. The lasgun wavered in his hand.
That was enough. Leto was off the cart in a hurtling roil. Idaho had never seen
him leave the cart this way, had not even suspected it could happen. For Leto,
there were only two requirements-a real threat which the worm-body could sense
and the release of that body. The rest was automatic and the speed of it always
astonished even Leto.
The lasgun was his major concern. It could scratch him badly, but few understood
the abilities of the pre-worm body to deal with heat.
Leto struck Idaho while rolling and the lasgun was deflected as it was fired.
One of the useless flippers which had been Leto's legs and feet sent a shocking
burst of sensations crashing into his awareness. For an instant, there was only
pain. But the worm-body was free to act and reflexes ignited a violent paroxysm
of flopping. Leto heard bones cracking. The lasgun was thrown far across the
floor of the crypt by a spasmodic jerk of Idaho's hand.
Rolling off of Idaho, Leto poised himself for a renewed attack but there was no
need. The injured flipper still sent pain signals and he sensed that the tip of
the flipper had been burned away. The sandtrout skin already had sealed the
wound. The pain had eased to an ugly throbbing.
Idaho stirred. There could be little doubt that he had been
mortally injured. His chest was visibly crushed. There was obvious agony when he
tried to breathe, but he opened his eyes and stared up at Leto.
The persistence of these mortal possessions! Leto thought.
"Siona," Idaho gasped.
Leto saw the life leave him then.
Interesting, Leto thought. Is it possible that this Duncan and Siona . . . No!
This Duncan always displayed a true sneering disdain for Siona's foolishness.
Leto climbed back onto the Royal Cart. That had been a close one. There could be
little doubt that the Duncan had been aiming for the brain. Leto was always
aware that his hands and feet were vulnerable, but he had allowed no one to
learn that what had once been his brain was no longer directly associated with
his face. It was not even a brain of human dimensions anymore, but had spread in
nodal congeries throughout his body. He had told this to no one but his
journals.
===
Oh, the landscapes I have seen! And the people! The far wanderings of the Fremen
and all the rest of it. Even back through the myths to Terra. Oh, the lessons in
astronomy and intrigue, the migrations, the disheveled flights, the leg aching
and lung-aching runs through so many nights on all of those cosmic specks where
we have defended our transient possession. I tell you we are a marvel and my
memories leave no doubt of this.
-The Stolen Journals
THE WOMAN working at the small wall desk was too big for the narrow chair on
which she perched. Outside, it was midmorning, but in this windowless room deep
beneath the city of Onn there was but a single glowglobe high in a corner. It
had been tuned to warm yellow but the light failed to dispel the gray utility of
the small room. Walls and ceiling were covered by identical rectangular panels
of dull gray metal.
There was only one other piece of furniture, a narrow cot with a thin pallet
covered by a featureless gray blanket. It was obvious that neither piece of
furniture had been designed for the occupant.
She wore a one-piece pajama suit of dark blue which stretched tightly across her
wide shoulders as she hunched over the desk. The glowglobe illuminated closely
cropped blonde hair and the right side of her face, emphasizing the square block
of jaw. The jaw moved with silent words as her thick fingers carefully depressed
the keys of a thin keyboard on the desk. She handled the machine with a
deference which had
originated as awe and moved reluctantly into fearsome excitement. Long
familiarity with the machine had eliminated neither emotion.
As she wrote, words appeared on a screen concealed within the wall rectangle
exposed by the downward folding of the desk.
"Siona continues actions which predict violent attack on Your Holy Person," she
wrote. "Siona remains unswerving in her avowed purpose. She told me today that
she will give copies of the stolen books to groups whose loyalty to You cannot
be trusted. The named recipients are the Bene Gesserit, the Guild and the
Ixians. She says the books contain Your enciphered words and, by this gift, she
seeks help in translating Your Holy Words.
"Lord, I do not know what great revelations may be concealed on those pages but
if they contain anything of threat to Your Holy Person, I beg You to relieve me
from my vow of obedience to Siona. I do not understand why You made me take this
vow, but I fear it.
"I remain Your worshipful servant, Nayla."
The chair creaked as Nayla sat back and thought about her words. The room fell
into the almost soundless withdrawal of thick insulation. There was only Nayla's
faint breathing and a distant throbbing of machinery felt more in the floor than
in the air.
Nayla stared at her message on the screen. Destined only for the eyes of the God
Emperor, it required more than holy truthfulness. It demanded a deep candor
which she found draining. Presently, she nodded and pressed the key which would
encode the words and prepare them for transmission. Bowing her head, she prayed
silently before concealing the desk within the wall. These actions, she knew,
transmitted the message. God himself had implanted a physical device within her
head, swearing her to secrecy and warning her that there might come a time when
he would speak to her through the thing within her skull. He had never done
this. She suspected that Ixians had fashioned the device. It had possessed some
of their look. But God Himself had done this thing and she could ignore the
suspicion that there might be a computer in it, that it might be prohibited by
the Great Convention.
"Make no device in the likeness of the mind!"
Nayla shuddered. She stood then and moved her chair to its regular position
beside the cot. Her heavy, muscular body
strained against the thin blue garment. There was a steady deliberation about
her, the actions of someone constantly adjusting to great physical strength. She
turned at the cot and studied the place where the desk had been. There was only
a rectangular gray panel like all the others. No bit of lint, no strand of hair,
nothing caught there to reveal the panel's secret.
Nayla took a deep, restorative breath and let herself out of the room's only
door into a gray passage dimly lighted by widely spaced white glowglobes. The
machinery sounds were louder here. She turned left and a few minutes later was
with Siona in a somewhat larger room, a table at its center upon which things
stolen from the Citadel had been arranged. Two silvery glowglobes illuminated
the scene-Siona seated at the table, with an assistant named Topri standing
beside her.
Nayla nurtured grudging admiration for Siona, but Topri, there was a man worthy
of nothing except active dislike. He was a nervous fat man with bulging green
eyes, a pug nose and thin lips above a dimpled chin. Topri squeaked when he
spoke.
"Look here, Nayla! Look what Siona has found pressed between the pages of these
two books."
Nayla closed and locked the room's single door.
"You talk too much, Topri," Nayla said. "You're a blurter. How could you know if
I was alone in the passage?"
Topri paled. An angry scowl settled onto his face.
"I'm afraid she's right," Siona said. "What made you think I wanted Nayla to
know about my discovery?"
"You trust her with everything!"
Siona turned her attention to Nayla. "Do you know why I trust you, Nayla?" The
question was asked in a flat, unemotional voice.
Nayla put down a sudden surge of fear. Had Siona discovered her secret?
Have I failed my Lord?
"Have you no response to my question?" Siona asked.
"Have I ever given you cause to do otherwise?" Nayla asked.
"That's not a sufficient cause for trust," Siona said. "There's no such thing as
perfection-not in human or machine."
"Then why do you trust me?"
"Your words and your actions always agree. It's a marvelous quality. For
instance, you don't like Topri and you never try to conceal your dislike."
Nayla glanced at Topri, who cleared his throat.
"I don't trust him," Nayla said.
The words popped into her mind and out of her mouth without reflection. Only
after she had spoken did Nayla realize the true core of her dislike: Topri would
betray anyone for personal gain.
Has he found me out?
Still scowling, Topri said, "I am not going to stand here and accept your
abuse." He started to leave but Siona held up a restraining hand. Topri
hesitated.
"Although we speak the old Fremen words and swear our loyalty to each other,
that is not what holds us together," Siona said. "Everything is based on
performance. That is all I measure. Do you understand, both of you?"
Topri nodded automatically, but Nayla shook her head from side to side.
Siona smiled up at her. "You don't always agree with my decisions, do you,
Nayla?"
"No." The word was forced from her.
"And you have never tried to conceal your disagreement, yet you always obey me.
Why?"
"That is what I have sworn to do."
"But I have said this is not enough."
Nayla knew she was perspiring, knew this was revealing, but she could not move.
What am Ito do? I swore to God that I would obey Siona but I cannot tell her
this.
"You must answer my question." Siona said. "I command it."
Nayla caught her breath. This was the dilemma she had most feared. There was no
way out. She said a silent prayer and spoke in a low voice.
"I have sworn to God that I will obey you."
Siona clapped her hands in glee and laughed.
"I knew it!"
Topri chuckled.
"Shut up, Topri," Siona said. "I am trying to teach you a lesson. You don't
believe in anything, not even in yourself."
"But I...
"Be still, I say! Nayla believes. I believe. This is what holds us together.
Belief."
Topri was astonished. "Belief? You believe in. .."
"Not in the God Emperor, you fool! We believe that a higher power will settle
with the tyrant worm. We are that higher power. "
Nayla took a trembling breath.
"It's all right, Nayla," Siona said. "I don't care where you draw your strength,
just as long as you believe."
Nayla managed a smile, then grinned. She had never been more profoundly stirred
by the wisdom of her Lord. I may speak the truth and it works only for my God!
"Let me show you what I've found in these books," Siona said. She gestured at
some sheets of ordinary paper on the table. "Pressed between the pages."
Nayla stepped around the table and looked down at it.
"First, there's this." Siona held up an object which Nayla had not noticed. It
was a thin strand of something . . . and what appeared to be a . . .
"A flower?" Nayla asked.
"This was between two pages of paper. On the paper was written this."
Siona leaned over the table and read: "A strand of Ghanima's hair with a
starflower blossom which she once brought me."
Looking up at Nayla, Siona said: "Our God Emperor is revealed as a
sentimentalist. That is a weakness I had not expected."
"Ghanima?" Nayla asked.
"His sister! Remember your Oral History."
"Oh . . . oh, yes. The Prayer to Ghanima."
"Now, listen to this." Siona took up another sheet of paper and read from it.
"The sand beach as gray as a dead cheek, A green tideflow reflects cloud
ripples; II stand on the dark wet edge. Cold foam cleanses my toes. I smell
driftwood smoke. "
Again, Siona looked up at Nayla. "This is identified as `Words I wrote when told
of Ghani's death.' What do you think of that?"
"He . . . he loved his sister."
"Yes! He is capable of love. Oh, yes! We have him now."
===
Sometimes I indulge myself in safaris which no other being may take. I strike
inward along the axis of my memories. Like a schoolchild reporting on a vacation
trip, I take up my subject. Let it be . . . female intellectuals! I course
backward into the ocean which is my ancestors. I am a great winged fish in the
depths. The mouth of my awareness opens and I scoop them up! Sometimes...
sometimes I hunt out specific persons recorded in our histories. What a private
joy to relive the life of such a one while I mock the academic pretentions which
supposedly formed a biography.
-The Stolen Journals
MONEO DESCENDED to the crypt with sad resignation. There was no escaping the
duties required of him now. The God Emperor required a small passage of time to
grieve the loss of another Duncan . . . but then life went on . . . and on . . .
and on....
The lift slid silently downward with its superb Ixian dependability. Once, just
once, the God Emperor had cried out to his majordomo: "Moneo! Sometimes I think
you were made by the Ixians!"
Moneo felt the lift stop. The door opened and he looked out across the crypt at
the shadowy bulk on the Royal Cart. There was no indication that Leto had
noticed the arrival. Moneo sighed and began the long walk through the echoing
gloom. There was a body on the floor near the cart. No need for deja
vu. This was merely familiar.
Once, in Moneo's early days of service. Leto had said: "You don't like this
place, Moneo. I can see that."
"No, Lord."
With just a little prodding of memory, Moneo could hear his own voice in that
naive past. And the voice of the God Emperor responding:
"You don't think of a mausoleum as a comforting place, Moneo. I find it a source
of infinite strength."
Moneo remembered that he had been anxious to get off this topic. "Yes, Lord."
Leto had persisted: "There are only a few of my ancestors here. The water of
Muad'Dib is here. Ghani and Harq-al-Ada are here, of course, but they're not my
ancestors. No, if there's any true crypt of my ancestors, l am that crypt. This
is mostly the Duncans and the products of my breeding program. You'll be here
someday."
Moneo found that these memories had slowed his pace. He sighed and moved a bit
faster. Leto could be violently impatient on occasion but there was still no
sign from him. Moneo did not take this to mean that his approach went
unobserved.
Leto lay with his eyes closed and only his other senses to record Moneo's
progress across the crypt. Thoughts of Siona had been occupying Leto's
attention.
Siona is my ardent enemy, he thought. I do not need Nayla's words to confirm
this. Siona is a woman of action. She lives on the surface of enormous energies
which fill me with fantasies of delight. I cannot contemplate those living
energies without a feeling of ecstasy. They are my reason for being, the
justification for everything I have ever done . . . even for the corpse of this
foolish Duncan in front of me now.
Leto's ears told him that Moneo had not yet crossed half the distance to the
Royal Cart. The man moved slower and slower, then picked up his pace.
What a gift Moneo has given me in this daughter, Leto thought. Siona is fresh
and precious. She is the new while I am a collection of the obsolete, a relic of
the damned, of the lost and strayed. I am the waylaid pieces of history which
sank out of sight in all of our pasts. Such an accumulation of riffraff has
never before been imagined.
Leto paraded the past within him then to let them observe what had happened in
the crypt.
The minutiae are mine!
Siona, though . . . Siona was like a clean slate upon which great things might
yet be written.
I guard that slate with infinite care. I am preparing it, cleansing it.
What did the Duncan mean when he called out her name?
Moneo approached the cart diffidently yet consummately aware. Surely Leto did
not sleep.
Leto opened his eyes and looked down as Moneo came to a stop near the corpse. At
this moment, Leto found the majordomo a delight to observe. Moneo wore a white
Atreides uniform with no insignia, a subtle comment. His face, almost as well
known as Leto's, was all the insignia he needed. Moneo waited patiently. There
was no change of expression on his flat, even features. His thick, sandy hair
lay in a neat, equally divided part. Deep within his gray eyes there was that
look of directness which went with knowledge of great personal power. It was a
look which he modified only in the God Emperor's presence, and sometimes not
even there. Not once did he glance toward the body on the crypt's floor.
When Leto continued silent, Moneo cleared his throat, then: "I am saddened,
Lord."
Exquisite! Leto thought. He knows l feel true remorse about the Duncans. Moneo
has seen their records and has seen enough of them dead. He knows that only
nineteen Duncans died what people usually refer to as natural deaths.
"He had an Ixian lasgun," Leto said.
Moneo's gaze went directly to the gun on the floor of the crypt off to his left,
demonstrating that he already had seen it. He returned his attention to Leto,
sweeping a glance down the length of the great body.
"You are injured, Lord?"
"Inconsequential."
"But he hurt you."
"Those flippers are useless to me. They will be entirely gone within another two
hundred years."
"I will dispose of the Duncan's body personally, Lord," Moneo said. "Is there. .
."
"The piece of me he burned away is entirely ash. We will let it blow away. This
is a fitting place for ashes."
"As my Lord says."
"Before you dispose of the body, disable the lasgun and keep it where I can
present it to the Ixian ambassador. As for
the Guildsman who warned us about it, present him personally with ten grams of
spice. Oh-and our priestesses on Giedi Prime should be alerted to a hidden store
of melange there, probably old Harkonnen contraband."
"What do you wish done with it when it's found, Lord?"
"Use a bit of it to pay the Tleilaxu for the new ghola. The rest of it can go
into our stores here in the crypt."
"Lord." Moneo acknowledged the orders with a nod, a gesture which was not quite
a bow. His gaze met Leto's.
Leto smiled. He thought: We both know that Moneo will not leave without
addressing directly the matter which most concerns us.
"I have seen the report on Siona," Moneo said.
Leto's smile widened. Moneo was such a pleasure in these moments. His words
conveyed many things which did not require open discussion between them. His
words and actions were in precise alignment, carried on the mutual awareness
that he, of course, spied on everything. Now, there was a natural concern for
his daughter, but he wished it understood that his concern for the God Emperor
remained paramount. From his own traverse through a similar evolution, Moneo
knew with precision the delicate nature of Siona's present fortunes.
"Have I not created her, Moneo?" Leto asked. "Have I not controlled the
conditions of her ancestry and her upbringing?"
"She is my only daughter, my only child, Lord."
"In a way, she reminds me of Harq al-Ada," Leto said. "There doesn't appear to
be much of Ghani in her, although that has to be there. Perhaps she harks back
to our ancestors in the Sisterhood's breeding program."
"Why do you say that, Lord?"
Leto reflected. Was there need for Moneo to know this peculiar thing about his
daughter? Siona could fade from the prescient view at times. The Golden Path
remained, but Siona faded. Yet ...she was not prescient. She was a unique
phenomenon . . . and if she survived . . . Leto decided he would not cloud
Moneo's efficiency with unnecessary information.
"Remember your own past," Leto said.
"Indeed, Lord! And she has such a potential, so much more than I ever had. But
that makes her dangerous, too."
"And she will not listen to you," Leto said.
"No, but I have an agent in her rebellion."
That will be Topri, Leto thought.
It required no prescience to know that Moneo would have
an agent in place. Ever since the death of Siona's mother, Leto had known with
increasing sureness the course of Moneo's actions. Nayla's suspicions pinpointed
Topri. And now, Moneo paraded his fears and actions, offering them as the price
of his daughter's continued safety.
How unfortunate he fathered only the one child on that mother.
"Recall how I treated you in similar circumstances," Leto said. "You know the
demands of the Golden Path as well as I do."
"But I was young and foolish, Lord."
"Young and brash, never foolish."
Moneo managed a tight smile at this compliment, his thoughts leaning more and
more toward the belief that he now understood Leto's intentions. The dangers,
though!
Feeding his belief, Leto said: "You know how much I enjoy surprises."
That is true, Leto thought. Moneo does know it. But even while Siona surprises
me, she reminds me of what I fear most-the sameness and boredom which could
break the Golden Path. Look at how boredom put me temporarily in the Duncan's
power! Siona is the contrast by which I know my deepest fears. Moneo's concern
for me is well grounded.
"My agent will continue to watch her new companions, Lord," Moneo said. "I do
not like them."
"Her companions? I myself had such companions once long ago."
"Rebellious, Lord? You?" Moneo was genuinely surprised.
"Have I not proved a friend of rebellion?"
"But Lord. . ."
"The aberrations of our past are more numerous than you may think!"
"Yes, Lord." Moneo was abashed, yet still curious. And he knew that the God
Emperor sometimes waxed loquacious after the death of a Duncan. "You must have
seen many rebellions, Lord."
Involuntarily, Leto's thoughts sank into the memories aroused by these words.
"Ahhh, Moneo," he muttered. "My travels in the ancestral mazes have memorized
uncounted places and events which I never desire to see repeated."
"I can imagine your inward travels, Lord."
"No, you cannot. I have seen peoples and planets in such
numbers that they lose meaning even in imagination. Ohhh, the landscapes I have
passed. The calligraphy of alien roads glimpsed from space and imprinted upon my
innermost sight. The eroded sculpture of canyons and cliffs and galaxies has
imprinted upon me the certain knowledge that I am a mote."
"Not you, Lord. Certainly not you."
"Less than a mote! I have seen people and their fruitless societies in such
repetitive posturings that their nonsense fills me with boredom, do you hear?"
"I did not mean to anger my Lord." Moneo spoke meekly.
"You don't anger me. Sometimes you irritate me, that is the extent of it. You
cannot imagine what I have seen-caliphs and mjeeds, rakahs, rajas and bashars,
kings and emperors, primitos and presidents-I've seen them all. Feudal
chieftains, every one. Every one a little pharaoh."
"Forgive my presumption, Lord."
"Damn the Romans!" Leto cried.
He spoke it inwardly to his ancestors: "Damn the Romans!"
Their laughter drove him from the inward arena.
"I don't understand, Lord," Moneo ventured.
"That's true. You don't understand. The Romans broadcast the pharaonic disease
like grain farmers scattering the seeds of next season's harvest -Caesars,
kaisers, tsars, imperators, caseris . . . palatos . . . damned pharaohs?"
"My knowledge does not encompass all of those titles, Lord."
"I may be the last of the lot, Moneo. Pray that this is so."
"Whatever my Lord commands."
Leto stared down at the man. "We are myth-killers, you and I, Moneo. That's the
dream we share. I assure you from a God's Olympian perch that government is a
shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies."
"Thus you have taught me, Lord."
"That man-machine, the Army, created our present dream, my friend."
Moneo cleared his throat.
Leto recognized the small signs of the majordomo's impatience.
Moneo understands about armies. He knows it was a fool's dream that armies were
the basic instrument of governance.
As Leto continued silent, Moneo crossed to the lasgun and retrieved it from the
crypt's cold floor. He began disabling it.
Leto watched him, thinking how this tiny scene encapsulated ..fostered
the essence of the Army myth. The Army fostered technology because the power of
machines appeared so obvious to the shortsighted.
That lasgun is no more than a machine. But all machines fail or are superceded.
Still, the Army worships at the shrine of such things-both fascinated and
fearful. Look at how people fear the Ixians! In its guts, the Army knows it is
the Sorcerer's Apprentice. It unleashes technology and never again can the magic
be stuffed back into the bottle.
I teach them another magic.
Leto spoke to the hordes within then:
"You see? Moneo has disabled the deadly instrument. A connection broken here, a
small capsule crushed there."
Leto sniffed. He smelled the esters of a preservative oil riding on the stink of
Moneo's perspiration.
Still speaking inwardly, Leto said: "But the genie is not dead. Technology
breeds anarchy. It distributes these tools at random. And with them goes the
provocation for violence. The ability to make and use savage destroyers falls
inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group
is a single individual."
Moneo returned to a point below Leto, holding the disabled lasgun casually in
his right hand. "There is talk on Parella and the planets of Dan about another
jihad against such things as this."
Moneo lifted the lasgun and smiled, signaling that he knew the paradox in such
empty dreams.
Leto closed his eyes. The hordes within wanted to argue, but he shut them off,
thinking: Jihads create armies. The Butlerian Jihad tried to rid our universe of
machines which simulate the mind of man. The Butlerians left armies in their
wake and the lxians still make questionable devices . . . for which I thank
them. What is anathema? The motivation to ravage, no matter the instruments.
"It happened," he muttered.
"Lord?"
Leto opened his eyes. "I will go to my tower," he said. "I must have more time
to mourn my Duncan."
"The new one is already on his way here," Moneo said.
===
You, the first person to encounter my chronicles for at least four thousand
years, beware. Do not feel honored by your primacy in reading the revelations of
my Ixian storehouse. You will find much pain in it. Other than the few glimpses
required to assure me that the Golden Path continued. I never wanted to peer
beyond those four millennia. Therefore, I am not sure what the events in my
journals may signify to your times. I only know that my journals have suffered
oblivion and that the events which I recount have undoubtedly been submitted to
historical distortion for eons. I assure you that the ability to view our
futures can become a bore. Even to be thought of as a god, as I certainly was,
can become ultimately boring. It has occurred to me more than once that holy
boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
-Inscription on the storehouse at bar-es-Balat
I am Duncan Idaho.
That was about all he wanted to know for sure. He did not like the Tleilaxu
explanations, their stories. But then the Tleilaxu had always been feared.
Disbelieved and feared.
They had brought him down to the planet on a small Guild shuttle, arriving at
the dusk line with a green glimmer of sun corona along the horizon as they
dipped into the shadow. The spaceport had not looked at all like anything he
remembered.
It was larger and with a ring of strange buildings.
"Are you sure this is Dune'?" he had asked.
"Arrakis," his Tleilaxu escort had corrected him.
They had sped him in a sealed groundcar to this building somewhere within a city
they called Onn, giving the "n" sound a strange rising nasal inflection. The
room in which they left him was about three meters square, a cube really. There
was no sign of glowglobes, but the place was filled with warm yellow light.
I am a ghola, he told himself.
That had been a shock, but he had to believe it. To find himself living when he
knew he had died, that was proof enough. The Tleilaxu had taken cells from his
dead flesh and they had grown a bud in one of their axlotl tanks. That bud had
become this body in a process which had made him feel at first an alien in his
own flesh.
He looked down at the body. It was clothed in dark brown trousers and jacket of
a coarse weave which irritated his skin. Sandals protected his feet. Except for
the body, that was all they had given him, a parsimony which said something
about the real Tleilaxu character.
There was no furniture in the room. They had let him in through a single door
which had no handle on the inside. He looked up at the ceiling and around at the
walls, at the door. Despite the featureless character of the place, he felt that
he was being watched.
"Women of the Imperial Guard will come for you," they had said. Then they had
gone away, smiling slyly among themselves.
Women of the Imperial Guard?
The Tleilaxu escort had taken sadistic delight in exposing their shapechanging
abilities. He had not known from one minute to the next what new form the
plastic flow of their flesh would present.
Damned Face Dancers!
They had known all about him, of course, had known how much the Shape Changers
disgusted him.
What could he trust if it came from Face Dancers'? Very little. Could anything
they said be believed?
My name. I know my name.
And he had his memories. They had shocked the identity back into him. Gholas
were supposed to be incapable of recovering the original identity. But the
Tleilaxu had done it and
he was forced to believe because he understood how it had been done.
In the beginning, he knew, there had been the fully formed ghola, adult flesh
without name or memories-a palimpsest upon which the Tleilaxu could write almost
anything they wished.
"You are Ghola," they had said. That had been his only name for a long time.
Ghola had been taken like a malleable infant and conditioned to kill a
particular man-a man so like the original Paul Muad'Dib he had served and adored
that Idaho now suspected it might have been another ghola. But if that were
true, where had they obtained the original cells?
Something in the Idaho cells had rebelled at killing an Atreides. He had found
himself standing with a knife in one hand, the bound form of the pseudo-Paul
staring up at him in angry terror.
Memories had gushered into his awareness. He remembered Ghola and he remembered
Duncan Idaho.
am Duncan Idaho, swordmaster of the Atreides.
He clung to this memory as he stood in the yellow room.
I died defending Paul and his mother in a cave-sietch beneath the sands of Dune.
I have been returned to that planet, but Dune is no more. Now it is only
Arrakis.
He had read the truncated history which the Tleilaxu provided, but he did not
believe it. More than thirty-five hundred years? Who could believe his flesh
existed after such a time? Except . . . with Tleilaxu it was possible. He had to
believe his own senses.
"There have been many of you," his instructors had said.
"How many?"
"The Lord Leto will provide that information."
The Lord Leto?
The Tleilaxu history said this Lord Leto was Leto II, grandson of the Leto whom
Idaho had served with fanatical devotion. But this second Leto (so the history
said) had become something . . . something so strange that Idaho despaired of
understanding the transformation.
How could a human slowly turn into a sandworm? How could any thinking creature
live more than three thousand years? Not even the wildest projections of
geriatric spice allowed such a lifespan.
Leto II, the God Emperor?
The Tleilaxu history was not to be believed!
Idaho remembered a strange child-twins, really: Leto and Ghanima, Paul's
children, the children of Chani, who had died delivering them. The Tleilaxu
history said Ghanima had died after a relatively normal life, but the God
Emperor Leto lived on and on and on ....
"He is a tyrant," Idaho's instructors had said. "He has ordered us to produce
you from our axlotl tanks and to send you into his service. We do not know what
has happened to your predecessor."
And here I am.
Once more, Idaho let his gaze wander around the featureless walls and ceiling.
The faint sound of voices intruded upon his awareness. He looked at the door.
The voices were muted, but at least one of them sounded female.
Women of the Imperial Guard?
The door swung inward on noiseless hinges. Two women entered. The first thing to
catch his attention was the fact that one of the women wore a mask, a cibus hood
of shapeless, light-drinking black. She would see him clearly through the hood,
he knew, but her features would never reveal themselves, not even to the most
subtle instruments of penetration. The hood said that the Ixians or their
inheritors were still at work in the Imperium. Both women wore one-piece
uniforms of rich blue with the Atreides hawk in red braid at the left breast.
Idaho studied them as they closed the door and faced him.
The masked woman had a blocky, powerful body. She moved with the deceptive care
of a professional muscle fanatic. The other woman was graceful and slender with
almond eyes in sharp, high-boned features. Idaho had the feeling that he had
seen her somewhere, but he could not fix the memory. Both women carried needle
knives in hip sheaths. Something about their movements told Idaho these women
would be extremely competent with such weapons.
The slender one spoke first.
"My name is Luli. Let me be the first to address you as Commander. My companion
must remain anonymous. Our Lord Leto has commanded it. You may address her as
Friend."
"Commander?" he asked.
"It is the Lord Leto's wish that you command his Royal Guard," Luli said.
"That so? Let's go talk to him about it."
"Oh, no!" Luli was visibly shocked. "The Lord Leto will
summon you when it is time. For now, he wishes us to make you comfortable and
happy."
"And I must obey?"
Luli merely shook her head in puzzlement.
"Am I a slave?"
Luli relaxed and smiled. "By no means. It's just. that the Lord Leto has many
great concerns which require his personal attention. He must make time for you.
He sent us because he was concerned about his Duncan Idaho. You have been a long
time in the hands of the dirty Tleilaxu."
Dirty Tleilaxu, Idaho thought.
That, at least, had not changed.
He was concerned, though, by a particular reference in Luli's explanation.
"His Duncan Idaho?"
"Are you not an Atreides warrior?" Luli asked.
She had him there. Idaho nodded, turning his head slightly to stare at the
enigmatic masked woman.
"Why are you masked?"
"It must not be known that I serve the Lord Leto," she said. Her voice was a
pleasant contralto, but Idaho suspected that this, too, was masked by the cibus
hood.
"Then why are you here?"
"The Lord Leto trusts me to determine if you have been tampered with by the
dirty Tleilaxu."
Idaho tried to swallow in a suddenly dry throat. This thought had occurred to
him several times aboard the Guild transport. If the Tleilaxu could condition a
ghola to attempt the murder of a dear friend, what else might they plant in the
psyche of the regrown flesh?
"I see that you have thought about this," the masked woman said.
"Are you a mentat?" Idaho asked.
"Oh, no!" Luli interrupted. "The Lord Leto does not permit the training of
mentats."
Idaho glanced at Luli, then returned his attention to the masked woman. No
mentats. The Tleilaxu history had not mentioned that interesting fact. Why would
Leto prohibit mentats? Surely, the human mind trained in the super abilities of
computation still had its uses. The Tleilaxu had assured him that the Great
Convention remained in force and that mechanical computers were still anathema.
Surely, these women would know that the Atreides themselves had used mentats.
"What is your opinion?" the masked woman asked. "Have the dirty Tleilaxu
tampered with your psyche?"
"I don't . . . think so."
"But you are not certain?"
..No."
"Do not fear, Commander Idaho," she said. "We have ways of making sure and ways
of dealing with such problems should they arise. The dirty Tleilaxu have tried
it only once and they paid dearly for their mistake."
"That's reassuring. Did the Lord Leto send me any messages?"
Luli spoke up: "He told us to assure you that he still loves you as the Atreides
have always loved you." She was obviously awed by her own words.
Idaho relaxed slightly. As an old Atreides hand, superbly trained by them, he
had found it easy to determine several things from this encounter. These two had
been heavily conditioned to a fanatic obedience. If a cibus mask could hide the
identity of that woman, there had to be many more whose bodies were very
similar. All of this spoke of dangers around Leto which still required the old
and subtle services of spies and an imaginative arsenal of weapons.
Luli looked at her companion. "What say you, Friend?"
"He may be brought to the Citadel," the masked woman said. "This is not a good
place. Tleilaxu have been here."
"A warm bath and change of clothing would be pleasant," Idaho said.
Luli continued to look at her Friend. "You are certain?"
"The wisdom of the Lord cannot be questioned," the masked woman said.
Idaho did not like the sound of fanaticism in this Friend's voice, but he felt
secure in the integrity of the Atreides. They could appear cynical and cruel to
outsiders and enemies, but to their own people they were just and they were
loyal. Above all else, the Atreides were loyal to their own.
And I am one of theirs, Idaho thought. But what happened to the me that I am
replacing? He felt strongly that these two would not answer this question.
But Leto will.
"Shall we go?" he asked. "I'm anxious to wash the stink of the dirty Tleilaxu
off me."
Luli grinned at him.
"Come. I shall bathe you myself."
Enemies strengthen you.
Allies weaken.
===
I tell you this in the hope that it will help you understand why I ad as I do in
the full knowledge that great forces accumulate in my Empire with but one wishthe
wish to destroy me. You who read these words may know full well what
actually happened, but I doubt that you understand it.
-The Stolen Journals
THE CEREMONY of "Showing" by which the rebels began their meetings dragged on
interminably for Siona. She sat in the front row and looked everywhere but at
Topri, who was conducting the ceremony only a few paces away. This room in the
service burrows beneath Onn was one they had never used before but it was so
like all of their other meeting places that it could have been used as a
standard model.
Rebel Meeting Room-class B, she thought.
It was officially designated as a storage chamber and the fixed glowglobes could
not be tuned away from their blank white glaring. The room was about thirty
paces long and slightly less in width. It could be reached only through a
labyrinthine series of similar chambers, one of which was conveniently stocked
with a supply of stiff folding chairs intended for the small sleeping chambers
of the service personnel. Nineteen of Siona's fellow rebels now occupied these
chairs around her, with a few empty for any latecomers who might still make the
meeting.
The time had been set between the midnight and morning
shifts to mask the flow of extra people in the service warrens. Most of the
rebels wore energy-worker disguises-thin gray disposable trousers and jackets.
Some few, including Siona, were garbed in the green of machinery inspectors.
Topri's voice was an insistent monotone in the room. He did not squeak at all
while conducting the ceremony. In fact, Siona had to admit he was rather good at
it, especially with new recruits. Since Nayla's flat statement that she did not
trust the man, though, Siona had looked at Topri in a different way. Nayla could
speak with a cutting naiveté which pulled away masks. And there were things that
Siona had learned about Topri since that confrontation.
Siona turned at last and looked at the man. The cold silvery light did not help
Topri's pale skin. He used a copy of a crysknife in the ceremony, a contraband
copy bought from the Museum Fremen. Siona recalled the transaction as she looked
at the blade in Topri's hands. It had been Topri's idea, and she had thought it
a good one at the time. He had led her to the rendezvous in a hovel on the
city's outskirts, leaving Onn just at dusk. They had waited well into the night
until darkness could mask the Museum Freemen's coming. Fremen were not supposed
to leave their sietch quarters without a special dispensation from the God
Emperor.
She had almost given up on him when the Fremen arrived, slipping in out of the
night, his escort left behind to guard the door. Topri and Siona had been
waiting on a crude bench against a dank wall of the absolutely plain room. The
only light had come from a dim yellow torch supported on a stick driven into the
crumbling mud wall.
The Fremen's first words had filled Siona with misgivings.
"Have you brought the money?"
Both Topri and Siona had risen at his entry. Topri did not appear bothered by
the question. He tapped the pouch beneath his robe, making it jingle.
"I have the money right here."
The Fremen was a wizened figure, crabbed and bent, wearing a copy of the old
Fremen robes and some glistening garment underneath, probably their version of a
stillsuit. His hood was drawn forward, shading his features. The torchlight sent
shadows dancing across his face.
He peered first at Topri then at Siona before removing an object wrapped in
cloth from beneath his robe.
"It is a true copy, but it is made of plastic," he said. "It will not cut cold
grease."
He pulled the blade from its wrappings then and held it up.
Siona, who had seen crysknives only in museums and in the rare old visual
recordings of her family's archives, had found herself oddly gripped by the
sight of the blade in this setting. She felt something atavistic working on her
and imagined this poor Museum Fremen with his plastic crysknife as a real Fremen
of the old days. The thing he held was suddenly a silver-bladed crysknife
shimmering in the yellow shadows.
"I guarantee the authenticity of the blade from which we copied it," the Fremen
said. He spoke in a low voice, somehow made menacing by its lack of emphasis.
Siona heard it then, the way he carried his venom in a sleeve of soft vowels and
she was suddenly alerted.
"Try treachery and we will hunt you down like vermin," she said.
Topri shot a startled glance at her.
The Museum Fremen appeared to shrivel, drawing in upon himself. The blade
trembled in his hand, but his gnome fingers still curled inward around it as
though clasping a throat.
"Treachery, Lady? Oh, no. But it occurred to us that we asked too little for
this copy. Poor as it is, making it and selling it this way puts us in dreadful
peril."
Siona glared at him, thinking of the old Fremen words from the Oral History:
"Once you acquire a marketplace soul, the suk is the totality of existence."
"How much do you want?" she demanded.
He named a sum twice his original figure.
Topri gasped.
Siona looked at Topri. "Do you have that much?"
"Not quite, but we agreed on. . ."
"Give him what you have, all of it," Siona said.
"All of it?"
"Isn't that what I said? Every coin in that bag." She faced the Museum Fremen.
"You will accept this payment." It was not a question and the old man heard her
correctly. He wrapped the blade in its cloth and passed it to her.
Topri handed over the pouch of coins, muttering under his breath.
Siona addressed herself to the Museum Fremen. "We know your name. You are
Teishar, aide to Garun of Tuono. You
have a suk mentality and you make me shudder at what Fremen have become."
"Lady, we all have to live," he protested.
"You are not alive," she said. "Be gone!"
Teishar had turned and scurried away, clutching the money pouch close to his
chest.
Memory of that night did not sit well in Siona's mind as she watched Topri wave
the crysknife copy in their rebel ceremony. We're no better than Teishar, she
thought. A copy is worse than nothing. Topri brandished the stupid blade over
his head as he neared the ceremony's conclusion.
Siona looked away from him and stared at Nayla seated off to her left. Nayla was
looking first one direction and now another. She paid special attention to the
new cadre of recruits at the back of the room. Nayla did not give her trust
easily. Siona wrinkled her nose as a stirring of the air brought the smell of
lubricants. The depths of Onn always smelled dangerously mechanical! She
sniffed. And this room! She did not like their meeting place. It could easily be
a trap. Guards could seal off the outer corridors and send in armed searchers.
This could be too easily the place where their rebellion ended. Siona was made
doubly uneasy by the fact that this room had been Topri's choice.
One of Ulot's few mistakes, she thought. Poor dead Ulot had approved Topri's
admission to the rebellion.
"He is a minor functionary in city services," Ulot had explained. "Topri can
find us many useful places to meet and arm ourselves."
Topri had reached almost the end of his ceremony. He placed the knife in an
ornate case and put the case on the floor beside him.
"My face is my pledge," he said. He turned his profile to the room, first one
side and then the other. "I show my face that you may know me anywhere and know
that I am one of
you."
Stupid ceremony, Siona thought.
But she dared not break the pattern of it. And when Topri pulled a black gauze
mask from a pocket and placed it over his head, she took out her own mask and
donned it. Everyone in the room did the same thing. There was a stirring around
the room now. Most of the people here had been alerted that Topri had brought a
special visitor. Siona secured her mask's tie behind her neck. She was anxious
to see this visitor.
Topri moved to the room's one door. There was a clattering bustle as everyone
stood and the chairs were folded and stacked against the wall opposite the door.
At a signal from Siona, Topri tapped three times on the door panel. waited for a
two count, then tapped four times.
The door opened and a tall man in a dark brown official singlet slipped into the
room. He wore no mask, his face open for all of them to see - thin and imperious
with a narrow mouth, a skinny blade of a nose, dark brown eyes deeply set under
bushy brows. It was a face recognized by most of the room's occupants.
"My friends," Topri said, "I present Iyo Kobat, Ambassador from Ix."
"Ex-Ambassador," Kobat said. His voice was guttural and tightly controlled. He
took a position with his back to the wall facing the masked people in the room.
"I have this day received orders from our God Emperor to leave Arrakis in
disgrace."
"Why?"
Siona snapped the question at him without formality.
Kobat jerked his head around, a quick movement which fixed his gaze on her
masked face. "There has been an attempt on the God Emperor's life. He traced the
weapon to me."
Siona's companions opened a space between her and the ex-Ambassador, clearly
signaling that they deferred to her.
"Then why didn't he kill you?" she demanded.
"I think he is telling me that I am not worth killing. There is also the fact
that he uses me now to carry a message to Ix."
"What message?" Siona moved through the cleared space to stop within two paces
of Kobat. She recognized the sexual alertness in him as he studied her body.
"You are Moneo's daughter," he said.
Soundless tension exploded across the room. Why did he reveal that he recognized
her? Who else did he recognize here? Kobat did not appear the fool. Why had he
done this?
"Your body, your voice and your manner are well known here in Onn," he said.
"That mask is a foolishness."
She ripped the mask from her head and smiled at him. "I agree. Now answer my
question."
She heard Nayla move up close on her left; two more aides chosen by Nayla came
up beside her.
Siona saw the moment of realization come over Kobat
his death if he failed to satisfy her demands. His voice did not lose its tight
control but he spoke slower, choosing his words more carefully.
"The God Emperor has told me that he knows about an agreement between Ix and the
Guild. We are attempting to make a mechanical amplifier of... those Guild
navigational talents which presently rely on melange."
"In this room we call him the Worm," Siona said. "What would your Ixian machine
do?"
"You are aware that Guild Navigators require the spice before they can see the
safe path to traverse?"
"You would replace the navigators with a machine?"
"It may be possible."
"What message do you carry to your people concerning this machine?"
"I am to tell my people that they may continue the project only if they send him
daily reports on their progress."
She shook her head. "He needs no such reports! That's a stupid message."
Kobat swallowed no longer concealing nervousness.
"The Guild and the Sisterhood are excited by our project," he said. "They are
participating."
Siona nodded once. "And they pay for their participation by sharing spice with
Ix."
Kobat glared at her. "It's expensive work and we need the spice for comparative
testing by Guild Navigators."
"It is a lie and a cheat," she said. "Your device will never work and the Worm
knows it."
"How dare you accuse us of. . ."
"Be still! I have just told you the real message. The Worm is telling you Ixians
to continue cheating the Guild and the Bene Gesserit. It amuses him."
"It could work!" Kobat insisted.
She merely smiled at him. "Who tried to kill the Worm?"
"Duncan Idaho."
Nayla gasped. There were other small signs of surprise around the room, a frown,
an indrawn breath.
"Is Idaho dead?" Siona asked.
"I presume so, but the . . . ahhh, Worm refuses to confirm it."
"Why do you presume him dead?"
"The Tleilaxu have sent another Idaho ghola."
"I see."
Siona turned and signaled to Nayla. who went to the side of the room and
returned with a slim package wrapped in pink Suk paper, the kind of paper
shopkeepers used to enclose small purchases. Nayla handed the package to Siona.
"This is the price of our silence," Siona said, extending the package to Kobat.
"This is why Topri was permitted to bring you here tonight."
Kobat took the package without removing his attention from her face.
"Silence?" he asked.
"We undertake not to inform the Guild and Sisterhood that you are cheating
them."
"We are not cheat. . ."
"Don't be a fool!"
Kobat tried to swallow in a dry throat. Her meaning had become plain to him:
true or not, if the rebellion spread such a story it would be believed. It was
"common sense" as Topri was fond of saying.
Siona glanced at Topri who stood just behind Kobat. No one joined this rebellion
for reasons of "common sense." Did Topri not realize that his "common sense"
might betray him? She returned her attention to Kobat.
"What's in this package?" he asked.
Something in the way he asked it told Siona he already knew.
"That is something I am sending to Ix. You will take it there for me. That is
copies of two volumes we removed from the Worm's fortress."
Kobat stared down at the package in his hands. It was obvious that he wanted to
drop the thing, that his venture into rebellion had loaded him with a burden
more deadly than he had expected. He shot a scowling glance at Topri which said
as though he had spoken it: "Why didn't you warn me?"
"What. . ." He brought his gaze back to Siona, cleared his throat. "What's in
these . . . volumes?"
"Your people may tell us that. We think they are the Worm's own words, written
in a cipher which we cannot read."
"What makes you think we..."
"You Ixians are clever at such things."
"And if we fail?"
She shrugged. "We will not blame you for that. However, should you use those
volumes for any other purpose or fail to report a success fully. . ."
"How can anyone be sure we. . ."