She scrambled closer and reached toward him, then drew back.
"I am reality, Siona. Look upon me. I exist. You can touch me if you dare. Reach out your hand. Do it!"
Slowly, she reached toward what had been his front segment, the place where she had slept in the Sareer. Her hand was touched with blue when she withdrew it.
"You have touched me and felt my body," he said. "Is that not strange beyond any other thing in this universe?"
She started to turn away.
"No! Don't turn away from me! Look at what you have wrought, Siona. How is it that you can touch me but you cannot touch yourself?"
She whirled away from him.
"There is the difference between us," he said. "You are God embodied. You walk around within the greatest miracle of this universe, yet you refuse to touch or see or feel or believe in it."
Leto's awareness went wandering then into a night-encircled place, a place where he thought he could hear the metal insect song of his hidden printers clacking away in their lightless room. There was a complete absence of radiation in this place, an Ixian nothing which made it a place of anxiety and spiritual alienation because it had no connection with the rest of the universe.
But it will have a connection.
He sensed then that his Ixian printers had been set in motion, that they were recording his thoughts without any special command.
Remember what I did! Remember me! I will be innocent again!
The flame of his vision parted to reveal Idaho standing where Siona had stood. There was gesturing motion somewhere out of focus behind Idaho ... ah, yes: Siona waving instructions to someone atop the barrier Wall.
"Are you still alive?" Idaho asked.
Leto's voice came in wheezing gasps: "Let them scatter, Duncan. Let them run and hide anywhere they want in any universe they choose."
"Damn you! What're you saying? I'd have sooner let her live with you!"
"Let? I did not let anything."
"Why did you let Hwi die?" Idaho moaned. "We didn't know she was in there with you."
Idaho's head sagged forward.
"You will be recompensed," Leto husked. "My Fish Speakers will choose you over Siona. Be kind to her, Duncan. She is more than Atreides and she carries the seed of your survival."
Leto sank back into his memories. They were delicate myths now, held fleetingly in his awareness. He sensed that he might have fallen into a time which, by its very being, had changed the past. There were sounds, though, and he struggled to interpret them. Someone scrambling on rocks? The flames parted to reveal Siona standing beside Idaho. They stood hand-in-hand like two children reassuring each other before venturing into an unknown place.
"How can he live like that?" Siona whispered.
Leto waited for the strength to respond. "Hwi helps me," he said. "We had something few experience. We were joined in our strengths rather than in our weaknesses."
"And look what it got you!" Siona sneered.
"Yes, and pray that you get the same," he husked. "Perhaps the spice will give you time."
"Where is your spice?" she demanded.
"Deep in Sietch Tabr," he said. "Duncan will find it. You know the place, Duncan. They call it Tabur now. The outlines are still there."
"Why did you do it?" Idaho whispered.
"My gift," Leto said. "Nobody will find the descendants of Siona. The Oracle cannot see her."
"What?" They spoke in unison, leaning close to hear his fading voice.
"I give you a new kind of time without parallels," he said. "It will always diverge. There will be no concurrent points on its curves. I give you the Golden Path. That is my gift. Never again will you have the kinds of concurrence that once you had."
Flames covered his vision. The agony was fading, but he could still sense odors and hear sounds with a terrible acuity. Both Idaho and Siona were breathing in quick, shallow gasps. Odd kinesthetic sensations began to weave their way through Leto--echoes of bones and joints which he knew he no longer possessed.
"Look!" Siona said.
"He's disintegrating." That was Idaho.
"No." Siona. "The outside is falling away. Look! The Worm!"
Leto felt parts of himself settling into warm softness. The agony removed itself.
"What're those holes in him?" Siona.
"I think they were the sandtrout. See the shapes?"
"I am here to prove one of my ancestors wrong," Leto said (or thought he said, which was the same thing as far as his journals were concerned). "I was born a man but I do not die a man."
"I can't look!" Siona said.
Leto heard her turn away, a rattle of rocks.
"Are you still there, Duncan?"
"Yes."
So I still have a voice.
"Look at me," Leto said. "I was a bloody bit of pulp in a human womb, a bit no larger than a cherry. Look at me, I say!"
"I'm looking." Idaho's voice was faint.
"You expected a giant and you found a gnome," Leto said. "Now, you're beginning to know the responsibilities which come as a result of actions. What will you do with your new power, Duncan?"
There was a long silence, then Siona's voice: "Don't listen to him! He was mad!"
"Of course," Leto said. "Madness in method, that is genius."
"Siona, do you understand this?" Idaho asked. How plaintive, the ghola voice.
"She understands," Leto said. "It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate. That's the way it always is with humans. Moneo understood at last."
"I wish he'd hurry up and die!" Siona said.
"I am the divided god and you would make me whole," Leto said. "Duncan? I think of all my Duncans I approve of you the most."
"Approve?" Some of the rage returned to Idaho's voice.
"There's magic in my approval," Leto said. "Anything's possible in a magic universe. Your life has been dominated by the Oracle's fatality, not mine. Now, you see the mysterious caprices and you would ask me to dispel this? I wished only to increase it."
The others within Leto began to reassert themselves. Without the solidarity of the colonial group to support his identity, he began to lose his place among them. They started speaking the language of the constant "IF." "If you had only ... If we had but ..." He wanted to shout them into silence.
"Only fools prefer the past!"
Leto did not know if he truly shouted or only thought it. The response was a momentary inner silence matched to an outer silence and he felt some of the threads of his old identity still intact. He tried to speak and knew the reality of it because Idaho said, "Listen, he's trying to say something."
"Do not fear the Ixians," he said, and he heard his own voice as a fading whisper. "They can make the machines, but they no longer can make arafel. I know. I was there."
He fell silent, gathering his strength, but he felt the energy flowing from him even as he tried to hold it. Once more, the clamor arose within him--voices pleading and shouting.
"Stop that foolishness!" he cried, or thought he cried.
Idaho and Siona heard only a gasping hiss.
Presently, Siona said: "I think he's dead."
"And everyone thought he was immortal," Idaho said.
"Do you know what the Oral History says?" Siona asked. "If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal."
"That sounds like him," Idaho accused.
"I think it was," she said.
"What did he mean about your descendants ... hiding, not finding them?" Idaho asked.
"He created a new kind of mimesis," she said, "a new biological imitation. He knew he had succeeded. He could not see me in his futures."
"What are you?" Idaho demanded.
"I'm the new Atreides."
"Atreides!" It was a curse in Idaho's voice.
Siona stared down at the disintegrating hulk which once had been Leto Atreides II ... and something else. The somet
hing else was sloughing away in faint wisps of blue smoke where the smell of melange was strongest. Puddles of blue liquid formed in the rocks beneath his melting bulk. Only faint vague shapes which might once have been human remained--a collapsed foaming pinkness, a bit of red-streaked bone which could have held the forms of cheeks and brow ...
Siona said: "I am different, but still I am what he was."
Idaho spoke in a hushed whisper: "The ancestors, all of ..."
"The multitude is there but I walk silently among them and no one sees me. The old images are gone and only the essence remains to light his Golden Path."
She turned and took Idaho's cold hand in hers. Carefully, she led him out of the cave into the light where the rope dangled invitingly from the barrier Wall's top, from the place where the frightened Museum Fremen waited.
Poor material with which to shape a new universe, she thought, but they would have to serve. Idaho would require gentle seduction, a care within which love might appear.
When she looked down the river to where the flow emerged from its man-made chasm to spread across the green lands, she saw a wind from the south driving dark clouds toward her.
Idaho withdrew his hand from hers, but he appeared calmer. "Weather control is increasingly unstable," he said. "Moneo thought it was the Guild's doing."
"My father was seldom mistaken about such things," she said. "You will have to look into that."
Idaho experienced a sudden memory of the silvery shapes of sandtrout darting away from Leto's body in the river.
"I heard the Worm," Siona said. "The Fish Speakers will follow you, not me."
Again, Idaho sensed the temptation from the ritual of Siaynoq. "We will see," he said. He turned and looked at Siona. "What did he mean when he said the Ixians cannot create arafel?"
"You haven't read all the journals," she said. "I'll show you when we return to Tuono."
"But what does it mean--arafel?"
"That's the cloud-darkness of holy judgment. It's from an old story. You'll find it all in my journals."
Excerpt from the Hadi Benotto secret summation on the discoveries at Dar-es-Balat:
Herewith the minority report. We will, of course, comply with the majority decision to apply a careful screening, editing and censorship to the journals from Dar-es-Balat, but our arguments must be heard. We recognize the interest of Holy Church in these matters and the political dangers have not escaped our notice. We share a desire with the Church that Rakis and the Holy Reservation of the Divided God not become "an attraction for gawking tourists."
However, now that all of the journals are in our hands, authenticated and translated, the clear shape of the Atreides Design emerges. As a woman trained by the Bene Gesserit to understand the ways of our ancestors, I have a natural desire to share the pattern we have exposed--which is so much more than Dune to Arrakis to Dune, thence to Rakis.
The interests of history and science must be served. The journals throw a valuable new light onto that accumulation of personal recollections and biographies from the Duncan Days, the Guard Bible. We cannot be unmindful of those familiar oaths: "By the Thousand Sons of Idaho!" and "By the Nine Daughters of Siona!" The persistent Cult of Sister Chenoeh assumes new significance because of the journals' disclosures. Certainly, the Church's characterization of Judas/Nayla deserves careful reevaluation.
We of the Minority must remind the political censors that the poor sandworms in their Rakian Reservation cannot provide us with an alternative to Ixian Navigation Machines, nor are the tiny amounts of Church-controlled melange any real commercial threat to the products of the Tleilaxu vats. No! We argue that the myths, the Oral History, the Guard Bible, and even the Holy Books of the Divided God must be compared with the journals from Dar-es-Balat. Every historical reference to the Scattering and the Famine Times has to be taken out and reexamined! What have we to fear? No Ixian machine can do what we, the descendants of Duncan Idaho and Siona, have done. How many universes have we populated? None can guess. No one person will ever know. Does the Church fear the occasional prophet? We know that the visionaries cannot see us nor predict our decisions. No death can find all of humankind. Must we of the Minority join our fellows of the Scattering before we can be heard? Must we leave the original core of humankind ignorant and uninformed? If the Majority drives us out, you know we never again can be found!
We do not want to leave. We are held here by those pearls in the sand. We are fascinated by the Church's use of the pearl as "the sun of understanding." Surely, no reasoning human can escape the journals' revelations in this regard. The admittedly fugitive but vital uses of archeology must have their day! Just as the primitive machine with which Leto II concealed his journals can only teach us about the evolution of our machines, just so, that ancient awareness must be allowed to speak to us. It would be a crime against both historical accuracy and science for us to abandon our attempts at communication with those "pearls of awareness" which the journals have located. Is Leto II lost in his endless dream or could he be reawakened to our times, brought to full consciousness as a storehouse of historical accuracy? How can Holy Church fear this truth?
For the Minority, we have no doubt that historians must listen to that voice from our beginnings. If it is only the journals, we must listen. We must listen across at least as many years into our future as those journals lay hidden in our past. We will not try to predict the discoveries yet to be made within those pages. We say only that they must be made. How can we turn our backs on our most important inheritance? As the poet, Lon Bramlis, has said: "We are the fountain of surprises!"
Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune
(Series: Dune # 4)
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends