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"But I was young and foolish, Lord."
"Young and brash, never foolish."
Moneo managed a tight smile at this compliment, his thoughts leaning more and more toward the belief that he now understood Leto's intentions. The dangers, though!
Feeding his belief, Leto said: "You know how much I enjoy surprises."
That is true, Leto thought. Moneo does know it. But even while Siona surprises me, she reminds me of what I fear most--the sameness and boredom which could break the Golden Path. Look at how boredom put me temporarily in the Duncan's power! Siona is the contrast by which I know my deepest fears. Moneo's concern for me is well grounded.
"My agent will continue to watch her new companions, Lord," Moneo said. "I do not like them."
"Her companions? I myself had such companions once long ago."
"Rebellious, Lord? You?" Moneo was genuinely surprised.
"Have I not proved a friend of rebellion?"
"But Lord ..."
"The aberrations of our past are more numerous than you may think!"
"Yes, Lord." Moneo was abashed, yet still curious. And he knew that the God Emperor sometimes waxed loquacious after the death of a Duncan. "You must have seen many rebellions, Lord."
Involuntarily, Leto's thoughts sank into the memories aroused by these words.
"Ahhh, Moneo," he muttered. "My travels in the ancestral mazes have memorized uncounted places and events which I never desire to see repeated."
"I can imagine your inward travels, Lord."
"No, you cannot. I have seen peoples and planets in such numbers that they lose meaning even in imagination. Ohhh, the landscapes I have passed. The calligraphy of alien roads glimpsed from space and imprinted upon my innermost sight. The eroded sculpture of canyons and cliffs and galaxies has imprinted upon me the certain knowledge that I am a mote."
"Not you, Lord. Certainly not you."
"Less than a mote! I have seen people and their fruitless societies in such repetitive posturings that their nonsense fills me with boredom, do you hear?"
"I did not mean to anger my Lord." Moneo spoke meekly.
"You don't anger me. Sometimes you irritate me, that is the extent of it. You cannot imagine what I have seen--caliphs and mjeeds, rakahs, rajas and bashars, kings and emperors, primitos and presidents--I've seen them all. Feudal chieftains, every one. Every one a little pharaoh."
"Forgive my presumption, Lord."
"Damn the Romans!" Leto cried.
He spoke it inwardly to his ancestors: "Damn the Romans!"
Their laughter drove him from the inward arena.
"I don't understand, Lord," Moneo ventured.
"That's true. You don't understand. The Romans broadcast the pharaonic disease like grain farmers scattering the seeds of next season's harvest--Caesars, kaisers, tsars, imperators, caseris ... palatos ... damned pharaohs!"
"My knowledge does not encompass all of those titles, Lord."
"I may be the last of the lot, Moneo. Pray that this is so."
"Whatever my Lord commands."
Leto stared down at the man. "We are myth-killers, you and I, Moneo. That's the dream we share. I assure you from a God's Olympian perch that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies."
"Thus you have taught me, Lord."
"That man-machine, the Army, created our present dream, my friend."
Moneo cleared his throat.
Leto recognized the small signs of the majordomo's impatience.
Moneo understands about armies. He knows it was a fool's dream that armies were the basic instrument of governance.
As Leto continued silent, Moneo crossed to the lasgun and retrieved it from the crypt's cold floor. He began disabling it.
Leto watched him, thinking how this tiny scene encapsulated the essence of the Army myth. The Army fostered technology because the power of machines appeared so obvious to the shortsighted.
That lasgun is no more than a machine. But all machines fail or are superceded. Still, the Army worships at the shrine of such things--both fascinated and fearful. Look at how people fear the Ixians! In its guts, the Army knows it is the Sorcerer's Apprentice. It unleashes technology and never again can the magic be stuffed back into the bottle.
I teach them another magic.
Leto spoke to the hordes within then:
"You see? Moneo has disabled the deadly instrument. A connection broken here, a small capsule crushed there."
Leto sniffed. He smelled the esters of a preservative oil riding on the stink of Moneo's perspiration.
Still speaking inwardly, Leto said: "But the genie is not dead. Technology breeds anarchy. It distributes these tools at random. And with them goes the provocation for violence. The ability to make and use savage destroyers falls inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group is a single individual."
Moneo returned to a point below Leto, holding the disabled lasgun casually in his right hand. "There is talk on Parella and the planets of Dan about another jihad against such things as this."
Moneo lifted the lasgun and smiled, signaling that he knew the paradox in such empty dreams.
Leto closed his eyes. The hordes within wanted to argue, but he shut them off, thinking: Jihads create armies. The Butlerian Jihad tried to rid our universe of machines which simulate the mind of man. The Butlerians left armies in their wake and the Ixians still make questionable devices ... for which I thank them. What is anathema? The motivation to ravage, no matter the instruments.
"It happened," he muttered.
"Lord?"
Leto opened his eyes. "I will go to my tower," he said. "I must have more time to mourn my Duncan."
"The new one is already on his way here," Moneo said.
You, the first person to encounter my chronicles for at least four thousand years, beware. Do not feel honored by your primacy in reading the revelations of my Ixian storehouse. You will find much pain in it. Other than the few glimpses required to assure me that the Golden Path continued, I never wanted to peer beyond those four millennia. Therefore, I am not sure what the events in my journals may signify to your times. I only know that my journals have suffered oblivion and that the events which I recount have undoubtedly been submitted to historical distortion for eons. I assure you that the ability to view our futures can become a bore. Even to be thought of as a god, as I certainly was, can become ultimately boring. It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
--INSCRIPTION ON THE STOREHOUSE AT DAR-ES-BALAT
am Duncan Idaho.
I That was about all he wanted to know for sure. He did not like the Tleilaxu explanations, their stories. But then the Tleilaxu had always been feared. Disbelieved and feared.
They had brought him down to the planet on a small Guild shuttle, arriving at the dusk line with a green glimmer of sun corona along the horizon as they dipped into the shadow. The spaceport had not looked at all like anything he remembered. It was larger and with a ring of strange buildings.
"Are you sure this is Dune?" he had asked.
"Arrakis," his Tleilaxu escort had corrected him.
They had sped him in a sealed groundcar to this building somewhere within a city they called Onn, giving the "n" sound a strange rising nasal inflection. The room in which they left him was about three meters square, a cube really. There was no sign of glowglobes, but the place was filled with warm yellow light.
I am a ghola, he told himself.
That had been a shock, but he had to believe it. To find himself living when he knew he had died, that was proof enough. The Tleilaxu had taken cells from his dead flesh and they had grown a bud in one of their axlotl tanks. That bud had become this body in a process which had made him feel at first an alien in his own flesh.
He looked down at the body. It was clothed in dark brown trousers and jacket of a coarse weave which irritated his skin. Sandals p
rotected his feet. Except for the body, that was all they had given him, a parsimony which said something about the real Tleilaxu character.
There was no furniture in the room. They had let him in through a single door which had no handle on the inside. He looked up at the ceiling and around at the walls, at the door. Despite the featureless character of the place, he felt that he was being watched.
"Women of the Imperial Guard will come for you," they had said. Then they had gone away, smiling slyly among themselves.
Women of the Imperial Guard?
The Tleilaxu escort had taken sadistic delight in exposing their shape-changing abilities. He had not known from one minute to the next what new form the plastic flow of their flesh would present.
Damned Face Dancers!
