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"Were you interested?"
"Yes."
"Then why didn't you ask?"
"I thought at first there might be a record somewhere. I looked. There was nothing. I reasoned then that they would not answer my question."
"For what it tells me about you, Hwi, that answer pleases me very much. I, too, am ignorant of your background, but I can make an enlightened guess at your birthplace."
Her eyes focused on his face with a charged intensity which had no pretense in it.
"You were born within this machine your masters are trying to perfect for the Guild," Leto said. "You were conceived there, as well. It may even be that Malky was your father. That is not important. Do you know about this machine, Hwi?"
"I'm not supposed to know about it, Lord, but ..."
"Another indiscretion by one of your teachers?"
"By my uncle himself."
A burst of laughter erupted from Leto. "What a rogue!" he said. "What a charming rogue!"
"Lord?"
"This is his revenge on your masters. He did not like being removed from my court. He told me at the time that his replacement was less than a fool."
Hwi shrugged. "A complex man, my uncle."
"Listen to me carefully, Hwi. Some of your associations here on Arrakis could be dangerous to you. I will protect you as I can. Do you understand?"
"I think so, Lord." She stared up at him solemnly.
"Now, a message for your masters. It is clear to me that they have been listening to a Guild steersman and they have joined themselves to the Tleilaxu in a perilous fashion. Tell them for me that their purposes are quite transparent."
"Lord, I have no knowledge of ..."
"I am aware of how they use you, Hwi. For this reason you may tell your masters also that you are to be the permanent Ambassador to my court. I will not welcome another Ixian. And should your masters ignore my warnings, trying further interference with my wishes, I shall crush them."
Tears welled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks, but Leto was grateful that she did not indulge in any other display such as falling to her knees.
"I already have warned them," she said. "Truly I did. I told them they must obey you."
Leto could see that this was true.
What a marvelous creature, this Hwi Noree, he thought. She appeared the epitome of goodness, obviously bred and conditioned for this quality by her Ixian masters with their careful calculation of the effect this would have on the God Emperor.
Out of his thronging ancestral memories, Leto could see her as an idealized nun, kindly and self-sacrificing, all sincerity. It was her most basic nature, the place where she lived. She found it easiest to be truthful and open, capable of shading this only to prevent pain for others. He saw this latter trait as the deepest change the Bene Gesserit had been able to effect in her. Hwi's real manner remained outgoing, sensitive and naturally sweet. Leto could find little sense of manipulative calculation in her. She appeared immediately responsive and wholesome, excellent at listening (another Bene Gesserit attribute). There was nothing openly seductive about her, yet this very fact made her profoundly seductive to Leto.
As he had remarked to one of the earlier Duncans on a similar occasion: "You must understand this about me, a thing which some obviously suspect--sometimes it's unavoidable that I have delusionary sensations, the feeling that somewhere inside this changeling form of mine there exists an adult human body with all of the necessary functions."
"All of them, Lord?" the Duncan had asked.
"All! I feel the vanished parts of myself. I can feel my legs, quite unremarkable and so real to my senses. I can feel the pumping of my human glands, some of which no longer exist. I can even feel genitalia which I know, intellectually, vanished centuries ago."
"But surely if you know ..."
"Knowledge does not suppress such feelings. The vanished parts of myself are still there in my personal memories and in the multiple identity of all my ancestors."
As Leto looked at Hwi standing in front of him, it helped not one whit to know he had no skull and that what once had been his brain was now a massive web of ganglia spread through his pre-worm flesh. Nothing helped. He could still feel his brain aching where it once had reposed; he could still feel his skull throbbing.
By just standing there in front of him, Hwi cried out to his lost humanity. It was too much for him and he moaned in despair:
"Why do your masters torture me?"
"Lord?"
"By sending you!"
"I would not hurt you, Lord."
"Just by existing you hurt me!"
"I did not know." Tears fell unrestrained from her eyes. "They never told me what they were really doing."
He calmed himself and spoke softly: "Leave me now, Hwi. Go about your business, but return quickly if I summon you!"
She left quietly, but Leto could see that Hwi, too, was tortured. There was no mistaking the deep sadness in her for the humanity Leto had sacrificed. She knew what Leto knew: they would have been friends, lovers, companions in an ultimate sharing between the sexes. Her masters had planned for her to know.
The Ixians are cruel! he thought. They knew what our pain would be.
Hwi's departure ignited memories of her Uncle Malky. Malky was cruel, but Leto had rather enjoyed his company. Malky had possessed all of the industrious virtues of his people and enough of their vices to make him thoroughly human. Malky had reveled in the company of Leto's Fish Speakers. "Your houris," he had called them, and Leto could seldom think of the Fish Speakers thereafter without recalling Malky's label.
Why do I think of Malky now? It's not just because of Hwi. I shall ask her what charge her masters gave her when they sent her to me.
Leto hesitated on the verge of calling her back.
She'll tell me if I ask.
Ixian ambassadors had always been told to find out why the God Emperor tolerated Ix. They knew they could not hide from him. This stupid attempt to plant a colony beyond his vision! Were they testing his limits? The Ixians suspected that Leto did not really need their industries.
I've never concealed my opinion of them. I said it to Malky:
"Technological innovators? No! You are the criminals of science in my Empire!"
Malky had laughed.
Irritated, Leto had accused: "Why try to hide secret laboratories and factories beyond the Empire's rim? You cannot escape me."
"Yes, Lord." Laughing.
"I know your intent: leak a bit of this and some of that back into my Imperial domains. Disrupt! Cause doubts and questioning!"
"Lord, you yourself are one of our best customers!"
"That's not what I mean and you know it, you terrible man!"
"You like me because I'm a terrible man. I tell you stories about what we do out there."
"I know it without your stories!"
"But some stories are believed and some are doubted. I dispel your doubts."
"I have no doubts!"
Which had only ignited more of Malky's laughter.
And I must continue tolerating them, Leto thought. The Ixians operated in the terra incognita of creative invention which had been outlawed by the Butlerian Jihad. They made their devices in the image of the mind--the very thing which had ignited the Jihad's destruction and slaughter. That was what they did on Ix and Leto could only let them continue.
I buy from them! I could not even write my journals without their dictatels to respond to my unspoken thought. Without Ix, I could not have hidden my journals and the printers.
But they must be reminded of the dangers in what they do!
And the Guild could not be allowed to forget. That was easier. Even while Guildsmen cooperated with Ix, they distrusted the Ixians mightily.
If this new Ixian machine works, the Guild has lost its monopoly on space travel!
From that welter of memories which I can tap at will, patterns emerge. They are like another language which I see so clearly. The social-ala
rm signals which put societies into the postures of defense/attack are like shouted words to me. As a people, you react against threats to innocence and the peril of the helpless young. Unexplained sounds, visions and smells raise the hackles you have forgotten you possess. When alarmed, you cling to your native language because all the other patterned sounds are strange. You demand acceptable dress because a strange costume is threatening. This is system-feedback at its most primitive level. Your cells remember.
--THE STOLEN JOURNALS
The acolyte Fish Speakers who served as pages at the portal of Leto's audience chamber brought in Duro Nunepi, the Tleilaxu Ambassador. It was early for an audience and Nunepi was being taken out of his announced order, but he moved calmly with only the faintest hint of resigned acceptance.
Leto waited silently stretched out along his cart on the raised platform at the end of the chamber. As he watched Nunepi approach, Leto's memories produced a comparison: the swimming-cobra of a periscope brushing its almost invisible wake upon water. The memory brought a smile to Leto's lips. That was Nunepi--a proud, flinty-faced man who had come up through the ranks of Tleilaxu management. Not a Face Dancer himself, he considered the Dancers his personal servants; they were the water through which he moved. One had to be truly adept to see his wake. Nunepi was a nasty piece of business who had left his traces in the attack along the Royal Road.
Despite the early hour, the man wore his full ambassadorial regalia-- billowing black trousers and black sandals trimmed in gold, a flowery red jacket open at the breast to reveal a bushy chest behind his Tleilaxu crest worked in gold and jewels.
At the required ten paces distance, Nunepi stopped and swept his gaze along the rank of armed Fish Speaker guards in an arc around and behind Leto. Nunepi's gray eyes were bright with some secret amusement when he brought his attention to his Emperor and bowed slightly.
Duncan Idaho entered then, a lasgun holstered at his hip, and took up his position beside the God Emperor's cowled face.
Idaho's appearance required a careful study by Nunepi, a study which did not please the Ambassador.
"I find Shape Changers particularly obnoxious," Leto said.
"I am not a Shape Changer, Lord," Nunepi said. His voice was low and cultured, with only a trace of hesitancy in it.
"But you represent them and that makes you an item of annoyance," Leto said.
