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"Because of us."
"Oh. But who ..."
"You have agreed to wed me, Hwi, and I ..." He raised a hand to silence her as she started to speak. "Anteac has told us what you revealed to her, but this did not originate with Anteac."
"Then who is ..."
"The who is not important. It is important that you reconsider. I must give you this opportunity to change your mind."
She lowered her gaze.
How sweet her features are, he thought.
It was possible for him to create only in his imagination an entire human lifetime with Hwi. Enough examples lay in the welter of his memories upon which to build a fantasy of wedded life. It gathered nuances in his fancy-- small details of mutual experience, a touch, a kiss, all of the sweet sharings upon which arose something of painful beauty. He ached with it, a pain far deeper than the physical reminders of his violence at the Embassy.
Hwi lifted her chin and looked into his eyes. He saw there a compassionate longing to help him.
"But how else may I serve you, Lord?"
He reminded himself that she was a primate, while he no longer was fully primate. The differences grew deeper by the minute.
The ache remained within him.
Hwi was an inescapable reality, something so basic that no word could ever fully express it. The ache within him was almost more than he could bear.
"I love you, Hwi. I love you as a man loves a woman ... but it cannot be. That will never be."
Tears flowed from her eyes. "Should I leave? Should I return to Ix?"
"They would only hurt you, trying to find out what went wrong with their plan."
She has seen my pain, he thought. She knows the futility and frustration. What will she do? She will not lie. She will not say she returns my love as a woman to a man. She recognizes the futility. And she knows her own feelings for me--compassion, awe, a questioning which ignores fear.
"Then I will stay," she said. "We will take such pleasure as we can from being together. I think it is best that we do this. If it means we should wed, so be it."
"Then I must share knowledge with you which I have shared with no other person," he said. "It will give you a power over me which ..."
"Do not do this, Lord! What if someone forced me to ..."
"You will never again leave my household. My quarters here, the Citadel, the safe places of the Sareer--these will be your home."
"As you will."
How gentle and open her quiet acceptance, he thought.
The aching pulse within him had to be calmed. In itself, it was a danger to him and to the Golden Path.
Those clever Ixians!
Malky had seen how the all-powerful were forced to contend with a constant siren song--the will to self-delight.
Constant awareness of the power in your slightest whim.
Hwi took his silence to be uncertainty. "Will we wed, Lord?"
"Yes."
"Should anything be done about the Tleilaxu stories which ..."
"Nothing."
She stared at him, remembering their earlier conversation. The seeds of dissolution were being planted.
"It is my fear, Lord, that I will weaken you," she said.
"Then you must find ways to strengthen me."
"Can it strengthen you if we diminish belief in the God Leto?"
He heard a hint of Malky in her voice, that measured weighing which had made him so revoltingly charming. We never completely escape the teachers of our childhood.
"Your question begs the answer," he said. "Many will continue to worship according to my design. Others will believe the lies."
"Lord ... would you ask me to lie for you?"
"Of course not. But I will ask you to remain silent when you might wish to speak."
"But if they revile ..."
"You will not protest."
Once more, tears flowed down her cheeks. Leto longed to touch them, but they were water ... painful water.
"It must be done this way," he said.
"Will you explain it to me, Lord?"
"When I am gone, they must call me Shaitan, the Emperor of Gehenna. The wheel must turn and turn and turn along the Golden Path."
"Lord, could the anger not be directed at me alone? I would not ..."
"No! The Ixians made you much more perfectly than they thought. I truly love you. I cannot help it."
"I do not wish to cause you pain!" The words were wrenched from her.
"What's done is done. Do not mourn it."
"Help me to understand."
"The hate which will blossom after I am gone, that, too, will fade into the inevitable past. A long time will pass. Then, on a far-distant day, my journals will be found."
"Journals?" She was shaken by the seeming shift of subject.
"My chronicle of my time. My arguments, the apologia. Copies exist and scattered fragments will survive, some in distorted form, but the original journals will wait and wait and wait. I have hidden them well."
"And when they are discovered?"
"People will learn that I was something quite different from what they supposed."
Her voice came in a trembling hush. "I already know what they will learn."
"Yes, my darling Hwi, I think you do."
"You are neither devil nor god, but something never seen before and never to be seen again because your presence removes the need."
She brushed tears from her cheeks.
"Hwi, do you realize how dangerous you are?"
Alarm showed in her expression, the tensing of her arms.
"You have the makings of a saint," he said. "Do you understand how painful it can be to find a saint in the wrong place and the wrong time?"
She shook her head.
"People have to be prepared for saints," he said. "Otherwise, they simply become followers, supplicants, beggars and weakened sycophants forever in the shadow of the saint. People are destroyed by this because it nurtures only weakness."
After a moment of thought, she nodded, then: "Will there be saints when you are gone?"
"That's the purpose of my Golden Path."
"Moneo's daughter, Siona, will she ..."
"For now she is only a rebel. As to sainthood, we will let her decide. Perhaps she will only do what she was bred to do."
"What is that, Lord?"
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"Stop calling me Lord," he said. "We will be Worm and wife. Call me Leto if you wish. Lord interferes."
"Yes, L ... Leto. But what is ..."
"Siona was bred to rule. There is danger in such breeding. When you rule, you gain knowledge of power. This can lead into impetuous irresponsibility, into painful excesses and that can lead to the terrible destroyer--wild hedonism."
"Siona would ..."
"All we know about Siona is that she can remain dedicated to a particular performance, to the pattern which fills her senses. She is necessarily an aristocrat, but aristocracy looks mostly to the past. That's a failure. You don't see much of any path unless you are Janus, looking simultaneously backward and forward."
