AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He found that he could not respond. She took his silence as an invitation to continue. "He said that you were the ultimate artist at probing the soul, your own soul first."
"But your Uncle Malky denied that he had a soul of his own!"
She heard the harshness in his voice, but was not deterred. "Still, I think he was right. You are the genius of the soul, the brilliant one."
"You need only the plodding perseverance of duration," he said. "No brilliance."
They were well onto the long climb to the top of the Sareer's perimeter Wall now. He lowered his cart's wheels and deactivated the suspensors.
Hwi spoke softly, her voice barely audible above the grating sound of the cart's wheels and the running feet all around them. "May I call you Love, anyway?"
He spoke around a remembered tightness in a throat which was no longer completely human. "Yes."
"I was born an Ixian, Love," she said. "Why don't I share their mechanical view of our universe? Do you know my view, Leto my love?"
He could only stare at her.
"I sense the supernatural at every turning," she said.
Leto's voice rasped, sounding angry even to him: "Each person creates his own supernatural."
"Don't be angry with me, Love."
Again, that awful rasping: "It is impossible for me to be angry with you."
"But something happened between you and Malky once," she said. "He would never tell me what it was, but he said he often wondered why you spared him."
"Because of what he taught me."
"What happened between you two, Love?"
"I would rather not talk about Malky."
"Please, Love. I feel that it's important for me to know."
"I suggested to Malky that there might be some things men should not invent."
"And that's all?"
"No." He spoke reluctantly. "My words angered him. He said: 'You think that in a world without birds, men would not invent aircraft! What a fool you are! Men can invent anything!' "
"He called you a fool?" There was shock in Hwi's voice.
"He was right. And although he denied it, he spoke the truth. He taught me that there was a reason for running away from inventions."
"Then you fear the Ixians?"
"Of course I do! They can invent catastrophe."
"Then what could you do?"
"Run faster. History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps but it's never enough. You also must run."
"You are sharing your soul with me, Love. Do you know that?"
Leto looked away from her and focused on Moneo's back, the motions of the majordomo, the tucked-in pretenses of secrecy so apparent there. The procession had come off the first gentle incline. It turned now to begin the climb onto Ringwall West. Moneo moved as he had always moved, one foot ahead of another, aware of the ground where he would place each step, but there was something new in the majordomo. Leto could feel the man drawing away, no longer content to march beside his Lord's cowled face, no longer trying to match himself to his master's destiny. Off to the east, the Sareer waited. Off to the west, there was the river, the plantations. Moneo looked neither left nor right. He had seen another destination.
"You do not answer me," Hwi said.
"You already know the answer."
"Yes. I am beginning to understand something of you," she said. "I can sense some of your fears. And I think I already know where it is that you live."
He turned a startled glance on her and found himself locked in her gaze. It was astonishing. He could not move his eyes away from her. A profound fear coursed through and he felt his hands begin to twitch.
"You live where the fear of being and the love of being are combined, all in one person," she said.
He could not blink.
"You are a mystic," she said, "gentle to yourself only because you are in the middle of that universe looking outward, looking in ways that others cannot. You fear to share this, yet you want to share it more than anything else."
"What have you seen?" he whispered.
"I have no inner eye, no inner voices," she said. "But I have seen my Lord Leto, whose soul I love, and I know the only thing that you truly understand."
He broke from her gaze, fearful of what she might say. The trembling of his hands could be felt all through his front segment.
"Love, that is what you understand," she said. "Love, and that is all of it."
His hands stopped trembling. A tear rolled down each of his cheeks. When the tears touched his cowl, wisps of blue smoke erupted. He sensed the burning and was thankful for the pain.
"You have faith in life," Hwi said. "I know that the courage of love can reside only in this faith."
She reached out with her left hand and brushed the tears from his cheeks. It surprised him that the cowl did not react with its ordinary reflex to prevent the touch.
"Do you know," he asked, "that since I have become thus, you are the first person to touch my cheeks?"
"But I know what you are and what you were," she said.
"What I was ... ahhh, Hwi. What I was has become only this face, and all the rest is lost in the shadows of memory ... hidden ... gone."
"Not hidden from me, Love."
He looked directly at her, no longer afraid to lock gazes. "Is it possible that the Ixians know what they have created in you?"
"I assure you, Leto, love of my soul, that they do not know. You are the first person, the only person to whom I have ever completely revealed myself."
"Then I will not mourn for what might have been," he said. "Yes, my love, I will share my soul with you."
Think of it as plastic memory, this force within you which trends you and your fellows toward tribal forms. This plastic memory seeks to return to its ancient shape, the tribal society. It is all around you--the feudatory, the diocese, the corporation, the platoon, the sports club, the dance troupes, the rebel cell, the planning council, the prayer group ... each with its master and servants, its host and parasites. And the swarms of alienating devices (including these very words!) tend eventually to be enlisted in the argument for a return to "those better times." I despair of teaching you other ways. You have square thoughts which resist circles.
--THE STOLEN JOURNALS
Idaho found he could manage the climb without thinking about it. This body grown by the Tleilaxu remembered things the Tleilaxu did not even suspect. His original youth might be lost in the eons, but his muscles were Tleilaxu-young and he could bury his childhood in forgetfulness while he climbed. In that childhood, he had learned survival by flight into the high rocks of his home planet. It did not matter that these rocks in front of him now had been brought here by men, they also had been shaped by ages of weather.
The morning sun was hot on Idaho's back. He could hear Siona's efforts to reach the relatively simple support position of a narrow ledge far below him. The position was virtually useless to Idaho, but it had been the argument which had brought Siona finally into agreement that they should attempt this climb.
They.
