"Why?"
Siona's voice carried almost pure suspicion.
"I'm told it's a cool place," Leto said. "And there is indeed a faint sensation of cold on my cheeks when I expose them to the breeze there."
Curiosity brought her closer to him.
Leto closed the portal behind her.
"The night view from the balcony is magnificent," Leto said.
"Why are we here?"
"Because here we will not be overheard."
Leto turned his cart and moved it silently out to the balcony. The faintest of hidden illumination within the aerie showed her his movement. He heard her follow.
The balcony was a half-ring on the southeast arc of the tower, a lacy railing at chest-height around the perimeter. Siona moved to the rail and swept her gaze around the open land.
Leto sensed the waiting receptivity. Something was to be spoken here for her ears alone. Whatever it was, she would listen and respond from the well of her own motives. Leto looked across her toward the edge of the Sareer where the man-made boundary wall was a low flat line just barely visible in the light of First Moon lifting above the horizon. His amplified vision identified the distant movement of a convoy from Onn, a dull glow of lights from the beast-drawn vehicles pacing along the high road toward Tabur Village.
He could call up a memory-image of the village nestled among the plants which grew in the moist area along the inner base of the wall. His Museum Fremen tended date palms, tall grasses and even truck gardens there. It was not like the old days when any inhabited place, even a tiny basin with a few low plants fed by a single cistern and windtrap, could appear lush by comparison with the open sand. Tabur Village was a water-rich paradise when compared with Sietch Tabr. Everyone in today's village knew that just beyond the Sareer's boundary wall the Idaho River slid southward in a long straight line which would be silver now in the moonlight. Museum Fremen could not climb the wall's sheer inner face, but they knew the water was there. The earth knew, too. If a Tabur inhabitant put an ear against the ground, the earth spoke with the sound of distant rapids.
There would be nightbirds along the bankment now, Leto thought, creatures which would live in sunlight on another world. Dune had worked its evolutionary magic on them and they still lived at the mercies of the Sareer. Leto had seen the birds draw dumb shadows across the water and, when they dipped to drink, there were ripples which the river took away.
Even at this distance, Leto sensed a power in that faraway water, something forceful out of his past which moved away from him like the current slipping southward into the reaches of farm and forest. The water searched through rolling hills, along the margins of an abundant plantlife which had replaced all of Dune's desert except for this one last place, this Sareer, this sanctuary of the past.
Leto recalled the growling thrust of Ixian machines which had inflicted that watercourse upon the landscape. It seemed such a short time ago, little more than three thousand years.
Siona stirred and looked back at him, but Leto remained silent, his attention fixed beyond her. A pale amber light shone above the horizon, reflection of a town on faraway clouds. From its direction and distance, Leto knew it to be the town of Wallport transplanted far into a warmer clime of the south from its once-austere location in the cold, low-slanted light of the north. The glow of the town was like a window into his past. He felt the beam of it striking through to his breast, straight through the thick and scaled membrane which had replaced his human skin.
I am vulnerable, he thought.
Yet, he knew himself to be the master of this place. And the planet was the master of him.
I am part of it.
He devoured the soil directly, rejecting only the water. His human mouth and lungs had been relegated to breathing just enough to sustain a remnant humanity ... and talking.
Leto spoke to Siona's back: "I like to talk and I dread the day when I no longer will be able to engage in conversations."
With a certain diffidence, she turned and stared at him in the moonlight, quite obvious distaste in her expression.
"I agree that I am a monster in many human eyes," he said.
"Why am I here?"
Directly to the point! She would not deviate. Most of the Atreides had been that way, he thought. It was a characteristic which he hoped to maintain in the breeding of them. It spoke of a strong inner sense of identity.
"I need to find out what Time has done to you," he said.
"Why do you need that?"
A little fear in her voice there, he thought. She thinks I will probe after her puny rebellion and the names of her surviving associates.
When he remained silent, she said: "Do you intend to kill me the way you killed my friends?"
So she has heard about the fight at the Embassy. And she assumes I know all about her past rebellious activities. Moneo has been lecturing her, damn him! Well ... I might have done the same in his circumstances.
"Are you really a god?" she demanded. "I don't understand why my father believes that."
She has some doubts, he thought. I still have room to maneuver.
"Definitions vary," he said. "To Moneo, I am a god ... and that is a truth."
"You were human once."
He began to enjoy the leaps of her intellect. She had that sure, hunting curiosity which was the hallmark of the Atreides.
"You are curious about me," he said. "It is the same with me. I am curious about you."
"What makes you think I'm curious?"
"You used to watch me very carefully when you were a child. I see that same look in your eyes tonight."
"Yes, I have wondered what it's like to be you."
He studied her for a moment. The moonlight drew shadows under her eyes, concealing them. He could let himself imagine that her eyes were the total blue of his own eyes, the blue of spice addiction. With that imaginative addition, Siona bore a curious resemblance to his long-dead Ghani. It was in the outline of her face and the placement of the eyes. He almost told Siona this, then thought better of it.
"Do you eat human food?" Siona asked.
"For a long time after I put on the sandtrout skin, I felt stomach hunger," he said. "Occasionally, I would attempt food. My stomach mostly rejected it. The cilia of the sandtrout spread almost everywhere in my human flesh. Eating became a bothersome thing. These days, I only ingest dry substances which sometimes contain a bit of the spice."
"You ... eat melange?"
"Sometimes."
"But you no longer have human hungers?"
"I didn't say that."
She stared at him, waiting.
Leto admired the way she let unspoken questions work for her. She was bright and she had learned much during her short life.
"The stomach hunger was a black feeling, a pain I could not relieve," he said. "I would run then, run like an insane creature across the dunes."
"You ... ran?"
"My legs were longer in proportion to my body in those days. I could move myself about quite easily. But the hungry pain has never left me. I think it's hunger for my lost humanity."
He saw the beginnings of reluctant sympathy in her, the questioning.
"You still have this ... pain?"
"It's only a soft burning now. That's one of the signs of my final metamorphosis. In a few hundred years, I'll be back under the sand."
He saw her clench her fists at her sides. "Why?" she demanded. "Why did you do this?"
"This change isn't all bad. Today, for example, has been very pleasant. I feel quite mellow."
"There are changes we cannot see," she said. "I know there must be." She relaxed her hands.
"My sight and hearing have become extremely acute, but not my sense of touch. Except for my face, I don't feel things the way I could once. I miss that."
Again, he noted the reluctant sympathy, the striving toward an empathic understanding. She wanted to know!
"When you live so long," she said, "how does the passage of T
ime feel? Does it move more rapidly as the years go by?"
"That's a strange thing, Siona. Sometimes, Time rushes by me; sometimes, it creeps."
Gradually, as they spoke, Leto had been dimming the concealed lights of his aerie, moving his cart closer and closer to Siona. Now, he shut off the lights, leaving only the moon. The front of his cart protruded onto the balcony, his face only about two meters from Siona.
"My father tells me," she said, "that the older you get, the slower your time goes. Is that what you told him?"
Testing my veracity, he thought. She's not a Truthsayer, then.
"All things are relative, but compared to the human time-sense, this is true."
"Why?"
"It is involved in what I will become. At the end, Time will stop for me and I will be frozen like a pearl caught in ice. My new bodies will scatter, each with a pearl hidden within it."
She turned and looked away from him, peering out at the desert, speaking without looking at him.
"When I talk to you like this here in the darkness I can almost forget what you are."
"That's why I chose this hour for our meeting."
"But why this place?"
"Because it is the last place where I can feel at home."
Siona turned against the rail, leaning on it and looking at him. "I want to see you."
He turned on all of the aerie's lights, including the harsh white globes along the roof of the balcony's outer edge. As the light came on, an Ixian-made transparent mask slid out of wall recesses and sealed off the balcony behind Siona. She felt it move behind her and was startled, but nodded as though she understood. She thought it was a defense against attack. It was not. The wall merely kept out the damp insects of the night.
Siona stared at Leto, sweeping her gaze along his body, pausing at the stubs which once had been his legs, bringing her attention then to his arms and hands, then to his face.
"Your approved histories tell us that all Atreides are descended from you and your sister, Ghanima," she said. "The Oral History disagrees."
"The Oral History is correct. Your ancestor was Harq al-Ada. Ghani and I were married only in name, a move to consolidate the power."
"Like your marriage to this Ixian woman?"
"That is different."
"You will have children?"
"I have never been capable of having children. I chose the metamorphosis before that was possible."
"You were a child and then you were"--she pointed--"this?"
"Nothing between."
"How does a child know what to choose?"
"I was one of the oldest children this universe has ever seen. Ghani was the other."
"That story about your ancestral memories!"
"A true story. We're all here. Doesn't the Oral History agree?"
She whirled away and held her back stiffly presented to him. Once more, Leto found himself fascinated by this human gesture: rejection coupled to vulnerability. Presently, she turned around and concentrated on his features within the hooded folds.
"You have the Atreides look," she said.
"I come by it just as honestly as you do."
"You're so old ... why aren't you wrinkled?"
"Nothing about the human part of me ages in a normal way."
"Is that why you did this to yourself?"
"To enjoy long life? No."
"I don't see how anyone could make such a choice," she muttered. Then louder: "Never to know love ..."
"You're playing the fool!" he said. "You don't mean love, you mean sex."
She shrugged.
"You think the most terrible thing I gave up was sex? No, the greatest loss was something far different."
"What?" She asked it reluctantly, betraying how deeply he touched her.
"I cannot walk among my fellows without their special notice. I am no longer one of you. I am alone. Love? Many people love me, but my shape keeps us apart. We are separated, Siona, by a gulf that no other human dares to bridge."
"Not even your Ixian woman?"
"Yes, she would if she could, but she cannot. She's not an Atreides."
"You mean that I ... could?" She touched her breast with a finger.
"If there were enough sandtrout around. Unfortunately, all of them enclose my flesh. However, if I were to die ..."
She shook her head in dumb horror at the thought.
"The Oral History tells it accurately," he said. "And we must never forget that you believe the Oral History."
She continued to shake her head from side to side.
"There's no secret about it," he said. "The first moments of the transformation are the critical ones. Your awareness must drive inward and outward simultaneously, one with Infinity. I could provide you with enough melange to accomplish this. Given enough spice, you can live through those first awful moments ... and all the other moments."
She shuddered uncontrollably, her gaze fixed on his eyes.
"You know I'm telling you the truth, don't you?"
She nodded, inhaled a deep trembling breath, then: "Why did you do it?"
"The alternative was far more horrible."
"What alternative?"
"In time, you may understand it. Moneo did."
"Your damned Golden Path!"
"Not damned at all. Quite holy."
"You think I'm a fool who can't ..."
"I think you're inexperienced, but possessed of great capability whose potential you do not even suspect."
She took three deep breaths and regained some of her composure, then: "If you can't mate with the Ixian, what ..."
"Child, why do you persist in misunderstanding? It's not sex. Before Hwi, I could not pair. I had no other like me. In all of the cosmic void, I was the only one."
"She's like ... you?"
"Deliberately so. The Ixians made her that way."
"Made her ..."
"Don't be a complete fool!" he snapped. "She is the essential god-trap. Even the victim cannot reject her."
"Why do you tell me these things?" she whispered.
"You stole two copies of my journals," he said. "You've read the Guild translations and you already know what could catch me."
"You knew?"
He saw boldness return to her stance, a sense of her own power. "Of course you knew," she said, answering her own question.
"It was my secret," he said. "You cannot imagine how many times I have loved a companion and seen that companion slip away ... as your father is slipping away now."
"You love ... him?"
"And I loved your mother. Sometimes they go quickly; sometimes with agonizing slowness. Each time I am wracked. I can play callous and I can make the necessary decisions, even decisions which kill, but I cannot escape the suffering. For a long, long time--those journals you stole tell it truly--that was the only emotion I knew."
He saw the moistness in her eyes, but the line of her jaw still spoke of angry resolution.
"None of this gives you the right to govern," she said.
Leto suppressed a smile. At last they were down to the root of Siona's rebellion.
By what right? Where is justice in my rule? By imposing my rules upon them with the weight of Fish Speaker arms, am I being fair to the evolutionary thrust of humankind? I know all of the revolutionary cant, the catch-prattle and the resounding phrases.
"Nowhere do you see your own rebellious hand in the power I wield," he said.
Her youth still demanded its moment.
"I never chose you to govern," she said.
"But you strengthen me."
"How?"
"By opposing me. I sharpen my claws on the likes of you."
She shot a sudden glance at his hands.
"A figure of speech," he said.
"So I've offended you at last," she said, hearing only the cutting anger in his words and tone.
"You've not offended me. We're related and can speak bluntly to each other within the family. The fact is, I have much more
to fear from you than you from me."
This took her aback, but only momentarily. He saw belief stiffen her shoulders, then doubt. Her chin lowered and she peered upward at him.
"What could the great God Leto fear from me?"
"Your ignorant violence."
"Are you saying that you're physically vulnerable?"
"I will not warn you again, Siona. There are limits to the word games I will play. You and the Ixians both know that it's the ones I love who are physically vulnerable. Soon, most of the Empire will know it. This is the kind of information which travels fast."
"And they'll all ask what right you have to rule!"
There was glee in her voice. It aroused an abrupt anger in Leto. He found it difficult to suppress. This was a side of human emotions he detested. Gloating! It was some time before he dared answer, then he chose to slash through her defenses at the vulnerability he already had seen.