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Moneo will have to bury the body in the sand, Leto thought. There is as yet no worm to come and devour the evidence. Leto turned then and looked across the chamber. Moneo stood leaning over the railing, peering down ... down ... down ...
I cannot pray for you, Malky, nor for you, Moneo, Leto thought. I may be the only religious consciousness in the Empire because I am truly alone ... so I cannot pray.
You cannot understand history unless you understand its flowings, its currents and the ways leaders move within such forces. A leader tries to perpetuate the conditions which demand his leadership. Thus, the leader requires the outsider. I caution you to examine my career with care. I am both leader and outsider. Do not make the mistake of assuming that I only created the Church which was the State. That was my function as leader and I had many historical models to use as pattern. For a clue to my role as outsider, look at the arts of my time. The arts are barbaric. The favorite poetry? The Epic. The popular dramatic ideal? Heroism. Dances? Wildly abandoned. From Moneo's viewpoint, he is correct in describing this as dangerous. It stimulates the imagination. It makes people feel the lack of that which I have taken from them. What did I take from them? The right to participate in history.
--THE STOLEN JOURNALS
Idaho, stretched out on his cot with his eyes closed, heard a weight drop onto the other cot. He sat up into the midafternoon light which slanted through the room's single window at a sharp angle, reflecting off the white-tiled floor onto the light yellow walls. Siona, he saw, had come in and stretched herself on her cot. She already was reading one of the books she carried around with her in a green fabric pack.
Why books? he wondered.
He swung his feet to the floor and glanced around the room. How could this high-ceilinged, spacious box be considered even remotely Fremen? A wide table/desk of some dark brown local plastic separated the two cots. There were two doors. One led directly outside across a garden. The other admitted them to a luxurious bath whose pale blue tiles glistened under a broad skylight. The bath contained, among its many functional services, a sunken tub and a shower, each at least two meters square. The door to this sybaritic space remained open and Idaho could hear water running out of the tub. Siona appeared oddly fond of bathing in an excess of water.
Stilgar, Idaho's Naib of the ancient days on Dune, would have looked on that room with scorn. "Shameful!" he would have said. "Decadent! Weak!" Stilgar would have used many scornful words about this entire village which dared to compare itself with a true Fremen sietch.
Paper rustled as Siona turned a page. She lay with her head propped on two pillows, a thin white robe covering her body. The robe still revealed clinging wetness from her bath.
Idaho shook his head. What was it on those pages which held her interest this way? She had been reading and re-reading since their arrival at Tuono. The volumes were thin but numerous, bearing only numbers on their black bindings. Idaho had seen a number nine.
Swinging his feet to the floor, he stood and went to the window. There was an old man out there at a distance, digging in flowers. The garden was protected by buildings on three sides. The flowers bore large blossoms--red on the outside but, when they unfolded, white in the center. The old Man's uncovered gray hair was a kind of blossom waving among the floral white and jeweled buds. Idaho smelled moldering leaves and freshly turned dirt against a background of pungent floral perfume.
A Fremen tending flowers in the open!
Siona volunteered nothing about her strange reading matter. She's taunting me, Idaho thought. She wants me to ask.
He tried not to think about Hwi. Rage threatened to engulf him when he did. He remembered the Fremen word for that intense emotion: kanawa, the iron ring of jealousy. Where is Hwi? What is she doing at this moment?
The door from the garden opened without a knock and Teishar, an aide to Garun, entered. Teishar had a dead colored face full of dark wrinkles. His eyes were sunken with pale yellow around the pupils. Teishar wore a brown robe. He had hair like old grass that had been left out to rot. He seemed unnecessarily ugly, like a dark and elemental spirit. Teishar closed the door and stood there looking at them.
Siona's voice came from behind Idaho. "Well, what is it?"
Idaho noticed then that Teishar seemed strangely excited, vibrating with it.
"The God Emperor ..." Teishar cleared his throat and began again. "The God Emperor will come to Tuono!"
Siona sat upright on the bed, folding her white robe over her knees. Idaho glanced back at her, then once more to Teishar.
"He will be wed here, here in Tuono!" Teishar said. "It will be done in the ancient Fremen way! The God Emperor and his bride will be guests of Tuono!"
Full in the grip of kanawa, Idaho glared at him, fists clenched. Teishar bobbed his head briefly, turned and let himself out, shutting the door hard.
"Let me read you something, Duncan," Siona said.
Idaho was a moment understanding her words. Fists still clenched at his sides, he turned and looked at her. Siona sat on the edge of her cot, a book in her lap. She took his attention as agreement.
"Some believe," she read, "that you must compromise integrity with a certain amount of dirty work before you can put genius to work. They say the compromise begins when you come out of the sanctus intending to realize your ideals. Moneo says my solution is to stay within the sanctus, sending others to do my dirty work."
She looked up at Idaho. "The God Emperor--his own words."
Slowly, Idaho relaxed his fists. He knew he needed this distraction. And it interested him that Siona had emerged from her silence.
"What is that book?" he asked.
Briefly, she told him how she and her companions had stolen the Citadel charts and the copies of Leto's journals.
"Of course you knew about that," she said. "My father has made it plain that spies betrayed our raid."
He saw the tears latent in her eyes. "Nine of you killed by the wolves?" She nodded.
"You're a lousy Commander!" he said.
She bristled but before she could speak, he asked: "Who translated them for you?"
"This is from Ix. They say the Guild found the Key."
"We already knew our God Emperor indulged in expedience," Idaho said. "Is that all he has to say?"
"Read it for yourself." She rummaged in her pack beside the cot and came up with the first volume of the translation, which she tossed across to his cot. As Idaho returned to the cot, she demanded: "What do you mean I'm a lousy Commander?"
"Wasting nine of your friends that way."
"You fool!" She shook her head. "You obviously never saw those wolves!"
He picked up the book and found it heavy, realizing then that it had been printed on crystal paper. "You should have armed yourselves against the wolves," he said, opening the volume.
"What arms? Any arms we could get would've been useless!"
"Lasguns?" he asked, turning a page.
"Touch a lasgun on Arrakis and the Worm knows it!"
He turned another page. "Your friends got lasguns eventually."
"And look what it got them!"
Idaho read a line, then: "Poisons were available."
She swallowed convulsively.
Idaho looked at her. "You did poison the wolves after all, didn't you?" Her voice was almost a whisper: "Yes."
"Then why didn't you do that in advance?" he asked.
"We ... didn't ... know ... we ... could."
"But you didn't test it," Idaho said. He turned back to the open volume. "A lousy Commander."
"He's so devious!" Siona said.
Idaho read a passage in the volume before returning his attention to Siona. "That hardly describes him. Have you read all of this?"
"Every word! Some of them several times."
Idaho looked at the open page and read aloud: "I have created what I intended--a powerful spiritual tension throughout my Empire. Few sense the strength of it. With what energies did I create this condition? I a
m not that strong. The only power I possess is the control of individual prosperity. That is the sum of all the things I do. Then why do people seek my presence for other reasons? What could lead them to certain death in the futile attempt to reach my presence? Do they want to be saints? Do they think that thus they gain the vision of God?"
"He's the ultimate cynic," Siona said, tears apparent in her voice.
"How did he test you?" Idaho asked.
"He showed me a ... he showed me his Golden Path."
"That's convenient ..."
"It's real enough, Duncan." She looked up at him, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. "But if it was ever a reason for our God Emperor, it is not reason for what he has become!"
Idaho inhaled deeply, then: "The Atreides come to this!"
"The Worm must go!" Siona said.
"I wonder when he's arriving?" Idaho said.
"Garun's little rat friend didn't say."
"We must ask," Idaho said.
"We have no weapons," Siona said.
"Nayla has a lasgun," he said. "We have knives ... rope. I saw rope in one of Garun's storage rooms."
"Against the Worm?" she asked. "Even if we could get Nyala's lasgun, you know it won't touch him."
"But is his cart proof against it?" Idaho asked.
