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"Why isn't a signal device necessary?"
"It would teach you nothing."
He moved out around her along the track indicated by the Pointers. "Come. Let us use this night to our profit."
She came hurrying up to walk beside his cowled face. "What happens if I don't learn your damned lesson?"
"You'll probably die," he said.
That silenced her for a time. She trudged along beside him with only an occasional sideward glance, ignoring the worm-body, concentrating on the visible remnants of his humanity. After a time, she said: "The Fish Speakers told me that you ordered the mating from which I was born."
"That's true."
"They say you keep records and that you order these Atreides matings for your own purposes."
"That also is true."
"Then the Oral History is correct."
"I thought you believed the Oral History without question?"
She was on a single track, though: "What if one of us objects when you order a mating?"
"I allow a wide latitude just as long as there are the children I have ordered."
"Ordered?" She was outraged.
"That's what I do."
"You can't creep into every bedroom or follow every one of us every minute of our lives! How do you know your orders are obeyed?"
"I know."
"Then you know I'm not going to obey you!"
"Are you thirsty, Siona?"
She was startled. "What?"
"Thirsty people speak of water, not of sex."
Still, she did not seal her mouth flap, and he thought: Atreides passions always did run strong, even at the expense of reason.
Within two hours, they came down out of the dunes onto a wind-scoured flat of pebbles. Leto moved onto it, Siona close to his side. She looked frequently at the Pointers. Both moons were low on the horizon now and their light cast long shadows behind every boulder.
In some ways, Leto found such places more comfortable to traverse than the sand. Solid rock was a better heat conductor than sand. He could flatten himself against the rock and ease the working of his chemical factories. Pebbles and even sizable rocks did not impede him.
Siona had more trouble here, though, and almost turned an ankle several times.
The flatland could be a very trying place for humans unaccustomed to it, he thought. If they stayed close to the ground, they saw only the great emptiness, an eerie place especially in moonlight--dunes at a distance, a distance which seemed not to change as the traveler moved--nothing anywhere except the seemingly eternal wind, a few rocks and, when they looked upward, stars without mercy. This was the desert of the desert.
"Here's where Fremen music acquired its eternal loneliness," he said, "not up on the dunes. Here's where you really learn to think that heaven must be the sound of running water and relief--any relief--from that endless wind."
Even this did not remind her of that face flap. Leto began to despair.
Morning found them far out on the flat.
Leto stopped beside three large boulders, all piled against each other, one of them taller even than his back. Siona leaned against him for a moment, a gesture which restored Leto's hopes somewhat. She pushed herself away presently and clambered up onto the highest boulder. He watched her turn up there, examining the landscape.
Without even looking at it Leto knew what she saw: blowing sand like fog on the horizon obscured the rising sun. For the rest, there was only the flat and the wind.
The rock was cold beneath him with the chill of a desert morning. The cold made the air much drier and he found it more pleasant. Without Siona, he would have moved on, but she was visibly exhausted. She leaned against him once more when she came down from the rock and it was almost a minute before he realized that she was listening.
"What do you hear?" he asked.
She spoke sleepily. "You rumble inside."
"The fire never goes completely out."
This interested her. She pushed herself away from his side and came around to look into his face. "Fire?"
"Every living thing has a fire within it, some slow, some very fast. Mine is hotter than most."
She hugged herself against the chill. "Then you're not cold here?"
"No, but I can see that you are." He pulled his face partly into its cowl and created a depression at the bottom arc of his first segment. "It's almost like a hammock," he said, looking down. "If you curl up there, you will be warm."
Without hesitating, she accepted his invitation.
Even though he had prepared her for it, he found the trusting response touching. He had to fight against a feeling of pity far stronger than any he had experienced before knowing Hwi. There could be no room for pity out here, though, he told himself. Siona was betraying clear signs that she would more than likely die here. He had to prepare himself for disappointment.
Siona shielded her face with an arm, closed her eyes and went to sleep.
Nobody has ever had as many yesterdays as I have had, he reminded himself.
From the popular human viewpoint, he knew that the things he did here could only appear cruel and callous. He was forced now to strengthen himself by retreating into his memories, deliberately selecting mistakes of our common past. First-hand access to human mistakes was his greatest strength now. Knowledge of mistakes taught him long-term corrections. He had to be constantly aware of consequences. If consequences were lost or concealed, lessons were lost.
But the closer he came to being a sandworm, the harder he found it to make decisions which others would call inhuman. Once, he had done it with ease. As his humanity slipped away, though, he found himself filled with more and more human concerns.
In the cradle of our past, I lay upon my back in a cave so shallow I could penetrate it only by squirming, not by crawling. There, by the dancing light of a resin torch, I drew upon walls and ceiling the creatures of the hunt and the souls of my people. How illuminating it is to peer backward through a perfect circle at that ancient struggle for the visible moment of the soul. All time vibrates to that call: "Here I am!" With a mind informed by artist-giants who came afterward, I peer at handprints and flowing muscles drawn upon the rock with charcoal and vegetable dyes. How much more we are than mere mechanical events! And my anticivil self demands: "Why is it that they do not want to leave the cave?"
--THE STOLEN JOURNALS
The invitation to attend Moneo in his workroom came to Idaho late in the afternoon. All day, Idaho had sat upon the sling couch of his quarters, thinking. Every thought radiated outward from the ease with which Moneo had spilled him onto the corridor floor that morning.
"You're just an older model."
With every thought, Idaho felt himself diminished. He sensed the will to live as it faded, leaving ashes where his anger had burned itself out.
I am the conveyance of some useful sperm and nothing more, he thought.
It was a thought which invited either death or hedonism. He felt himself impaled on a thorn of chance with irritating forces pecking at him from all sides.
The young messenger in her neat blue uniform was merely another irritation. She entered at his low-voiced response to her knock and she stopped under the arched portal from his anteroom, hesitating until she had assessed his mood.
How quickly the word travels, he thought.
He saw her there, framed in the portal, a projection of Fish Speaker essence--more voluptuous than some, but no more blatantly sexual. The blue uniform did not conceal graceful hips, firm breasts. He looked up at her puckish face under a brush of blonde hair--acolyte cut.
"Moneo sends me to inquire after you," she said. "He asks that you attend him in his workroom."
Idaho had seen that workroom several times, but still remembered it best from his first view of it. He had known on entering the room that it was where Moneo spent most of his time. There was a table of dark brown wood streaked by fine golden graining, a table about two meters by one meter and set low on stubby leg
s in the midst of gray cushions. The table had struck Idaho as something rare and expensive, chosen for a single accent. It and the cushions--which were the same gray as floor, walls and ceiling--were the only furnishings.
Considering the power of its occupant, the room was small, no more than five meters by four, but with a high ceiling. Light came from two slender glazed windows opposite each other on the narrower walls. The windows looked out from a considerable height, one onto the northwest fringes of the Sareer and the bordering green of the Forbidden Forest, the other providing a southwest view over rolling dunes.
Contrast.
The table had put an interesting accent on this initial thought. The surface had appeared as an arrangement demonstrating the idea of clutter. Thin sheets of crystal paper lay scattered across the surface, leaving only glimpses of the wood grain underneath. Fine printing covered some of the paper. Idaho recognized words in Galach and four other languages, including the rare transite tongue of Perth. Several sheets of the paper revealed plan drawings and some were scrawled with black strokes of brush-script in the bold style of the Bene Gesserit. Most interesting of all had been four rolled white tubes about a meter long--tri-D printouts from an illegal computer. He had suspected the terminal lay concealed behind a panel in one of the walls.
The young messenger from Moneo cleared her throat to awaken Idaho from his reverie. "What response shall I return to Moneo?" she asked.
Idaho focused on her face. "Would you like me to impregnate you?" he asked.
