Frank Herbert - Dune Book 4 - God Emperor Of Dune

by Frank Herbert

  "You could have saved my friends in the forest," she accused.

  "You, too, could have saved them."

  She clenched her fists and pressed them against her temples while she glared at him. "But you know everything!"

  "Siona!"

  "Did I have to learn it that way?" she whispered.

  He remained silent, forcing her to answer the question for herself. She had to be made to recognize that his primary consciousness worked in a Fremen way and that, like the terrible machines of that apocalyptic vision, the predator could follow any creature who left tracks.

  "The Golden Path," she whispered. "I can feel it." Then, glaring at him. "It's so cruel!"

  "Survival has always been cruel."

  "They couldn't hide," she whispered. Then loud: "What have you done to me?"

  "You tried to be a Fremen rebel," he said. "Fremen had an almost incredible ability to read signs on the desert. They could even read the faint tracery of windblown tracks in sand."

  He saw the beginnings of remorse in her, memories of her dead companions floating in her awareness. He spoke quickly, knowing that guilt would follow quickly and then anger against him. "Would you have believed me if I had merely brought you in and told you?"

  Remorse threatened to overwhelm her. She opened her mouth behind the mask and gasped with it.

  "You have not yet survived the desert," he told her.

  Slowly, her trembling subsided. The Fremen instincts he had set to work in her did their usual tempering.

  "I will survive," she said. She met his gaze. "You read us by our emotions, don't you?"

  "The igniters of thought," he said. "I can recognize the slightest behavioral nuance for its emotional origins."

  He saw her accept her own nakedness the way Moneo had accepted it, with fear and hate. It was of little matter. He probed the time ahead of them. Yes, she would survive his desert because her tracks were in the sand beside him . . . but he saw no sign of her flesh in those tracks. Just beyond her tracks, though, he saw a sudden opening where things had been concealed. Anteac's death-shout echoed through his prescient awareness . . . and the swarming of Fish Speakers attacking!

  Malky is coming, he thought. We will meet again, Malky and .

  Leto opened his outer eyes and saw Siona still there glaring at him.

  "I still hate you!" she said.

  "You hate the predator's necessary cruelty."

  She spoke with venomous elation: "But I saw another thing! You can't follow my tracks!"

  "Which is why you must breed and preserve this."

  Even as he spoke, it began to rain. The sudden cloud darkness and the downpour came upon them simultaneously. In spite of the fact that he had sensed weather control's oscillations, Leto was shocked by the onslaught. He knew it rained sometimes in the Sareer, a rain quickly dispersed as the water ran off and vanished. The few pools would evaporate as the sun returned. Most times, the downpour never touched the ground; it was ghost rain, vaporized when it hit the superheated air layer just above the desert's surface, then dispersing on the wind. But this rainfall drenched him.

  Siona pulled back her face flap and lifted her face greedily to the falling water, not even noticing the effect on Leto.

  As the first drenching swept in from behind the sandtrout overlappings, he stiffened and curled into a ball of agony. Separate drives of sandtrout and sandworm produced a new meaning for the word pain. He felt that he was being ripped apart. Sandtrout wanted to rush to the water and encapsulate it. Sandworm felt the drenching wash of death. Curls of blue smoke 'spurted from every place the rain touched him. The inner workings of his body began to manufacture the true spice-essence. Blue smoke lifted around him from where he lay in puddles of water. He writhed and groaned.

  The clouds passed and it was a few moments before Siona sensed his disturbance.

  "What's wrong with you?"

  He was unable to answer. The rain was gone but water remained on the rocks and in puddles all around and beneath him. There was no escape.

  Siona saw the blue smoke rising from every place the water touched him.

  "It's the water!"

  There was a slightly higher bulge of land off to the right where the water did not stay. Painfully, he made his way toward it, groaning at each new puddle. The bulge was almost dry when he reached it. The agony subsided slowly and he grew aware that Siona stood directly in front of him. She probed at him with words of false concern.

  "Why does water hurt you?"

  Hurt? What an inadequate word! There was no evading her questions, though. She knew enough now to go searching for the answer. That answer could be found. Haltingly, he explained the relationship of sandtrout and sandworm to water. She heard him out in silence.

  "But the moisture you gave me. . ."

  "Is buffered and masked by the spice."

  "Then why do you risk it out here without your cart?"

  "You can't be a Fremen in the Citadel or on a cart."

  She nodded.

  He saw the flame of rebellion return to her eyes. She did not have to feel guilty or dependent. She no longer could avoid belief in his Golden Path, but what difference did that make? His cruelties could not be forgiven! She could reject him, deny him a place in her family. He was not a human, not like her at all. And she possessed the secret of his undoing! Ring him with water, destroy his desert, immobilize him within a moat

  of agony! Did she think she hid her thoughts from him by turning away?

  And what can I do about it? he wondered. She must live now while I must demonstrate nonviolence.

  Now that he knew something of. Siona's nature, how easy it would be to surrender, to sink blindly into his own thoughts. It was seductive, this talon to live only within his memories, but his children still required another lesson-by-example if they were to escape the last threat to the Golden Path.

  What a painful decision! He experienced a new sympathy for the Bene Gesserit. His quandary was akin to the one they had experienced when they had confronted the fact of Muad'Dib. The ultimate goal of their breeding program-my father-they could not contain him, either.

  Once more into the breach, dear friends, he thought. and he suppressed a wry smile at his own histrionics.

  ===

  Given enough time for the generations to evolve, the predator produces particular survival adaptations in its prey which, through the circular operation of feedback, produce changes in the predator which again change the prey etcetera, etcetera, etcetera .... Many powerful forces do the same thing. You can count religions among such forces.

  -The Stolen Journals

  "THE LORD has commanded me to tell you that your daughter lives."

  Nayla delivered the message to Moneo in a singsong voice, looking down across the workroom table at his figure seated there amidst a chaos of notes and papers and communications instruments.

  Moneo pressed his palms together firmly and looked down at the elongated shadow drawn on his table by late afternoon sunlight across the jeweled tree of his paperweight.

  Without looking up at Nayla's stocky figure standing at proper attention in front of him, he asked: "Both of them have returned to the Citadel?"

  "Yes."

  Moneo looked out the window to his left, not really seeing the flinty borderline of darkness hanging on the Sareer's horizon nor the greedy wind collecting sand grains from every dunetop.

  "That matter which we discussed earlier?" he asked.

  "It has been arranged."

  "Very well." He waved to dismiss her, but Nayla remained standing in front of him. Surprised, Moneo actually focused

  on her for the first time since she had entered.

  "Is it required that I personally attend this-" she swallowed-"wedding?"

  "The Lord Leto has commanded it. You will be the only one there armed with a lasgun. It is an honor."

  She remained in position, her gaze fixed somewhere over Moneo's head.

  "Yes?" he prompted.


  Nayla's great lantern jaw worked convulsively, then: "He is God and I am mortal." She turned on one heel and left the workroom.

  Moneo wondered vaguely what was bothering that hulking Fish Speaker, but his thoughts turned like a compass arrow to Siona.

  She has survived as I did. Siona now had an inner sense which told her that the Golden Path remained unbroken. As I have. He found no sense of sharing in this, nothing to make him feel closer to his daughter. It was a burden and it would inevitably curb her rebellious nature. No Atreides could go against the Golden Path. Leto had seen to that!

  Moneo remembered his own rebel days. Every night a new bed and the constant urge to run. The cobwebs of his past clung to his mind, sticking there no matter how hard he tried to shake away troublesome memories.

  Siona has been caged. As I was caged. As poor Leto was caged.

  The tolling of the nightfall bell intruded on his thoughts and activated his workroom's lights. He looked down at the work still undone in preparation for the God Emperor's wedding to Hwi Noree. So much work! Presently, he pressed a call-button and asked the Fish Speaker acolyte who appeared at the summons to bring him a tumbler of water and then call Duncan Idaho to the workroom.

  She returned quickly with the water and placed the tumbler near his left hand on the table. He noted the long fingers, a lute-player's fingers, but did not look up at her face.

  "I have sent someone for Idaho," she said.

  He nodded and went on with his work. He heard her leave and only then did he look up to drink the water.

  Some live lives like summer moths, he thought. But I have burdens without end.

  The water tasted flat. It weighed down his senses, making his body feel torpid. He looked out at the sunset colors on the

  Sareer as they shaded away into darkness, thinking that he should recognize beauty in that familiar sense, but all he could think was that the light changed in its own patterns. It is not moved by me at all.

  With the full darkness, the light level of his workroom increased automatically, bringing a clarity of thought with it. He felt himself quite prepared for Idaho. This one had to be taught the necessities, and quickly.

  Moneo's door opened, the acolyte again. "Will you eat now?"

  "Later." He raised a hand as she started to leave. "I would like the door left open."

  She frowned.

  "You may practice your music," he said. "I want to listen."

  She had a smooth, round, almost childlike face which became radiant when she smiled. The smile still on her lips, she turned away.

  Presently, he heard the sounds of a biwa lute in the outer office. Yes, that young acolyte had a talent. The bass strings were like rain drumming on a rooftop, a whisper of middle strings underneath. Perhaps she could move up to the baliset someday. He recognized the song: a deeply humming memory of autumn wind from some faraway planet where they had never known a desert. Sad music, pitiful music, yet marvelous.

  It is the cry of the caged, he thought. The memory of free-

  dom. This thought struck him as odd. Was it always the case

  that freedom required rebellion?

  The lute fell silent. There came the sound of low voices. Idaho entered the workroom. Moneo watched him enter. A trick of light gave Idaho a face like a grimacing mask with pitted eyes. Without invitation, he sat down across from Moneo and the trickery was gone. Just another Duncan. He had changed into a plain black uniform without insignia.

  "I have been asking myself a peculiar question," Idaho said. "I'm glad you summoned me. I want to ask this question of you. What is it, Moneo, that my predecessor did not learn?"

  Stiff with surprise, Moneo sat up straight. What an unDuncan question! Could there be a peculiar Tleilaxu difference in this one after all?

  "What prompts this question?" Moneo asked.

  "I've been thinking like a Fremen."

  "You weren't a Fremen."

  "Closer to it than you think. Stilgar the Naib once said I

  was probably born Fremen without knowing it until I came to Dune."

  "What happens when you think like a Fremen?"

  "You remember that you should never be in company that you wouldn't want to die with."

  Moneo put his hands palms down on the surface of his table. A wolfish smile came over Idaho's face.

  "Then what are you doing here?" Moneo asked.

  "I suspect that you may be good company, Moneo. And I ask myself why Leto would choose you as his closest companion?"

  "I passed the test."

  "The same one your daughter passed?"

  So he has heard they are back. It meant some of the Fish Speakers were reporting things to him . . . unless the God Emperor had summoned the Duncan . . . . No, I would have heard.

  "The tests are never identical," Moneo said. "I was made to go alone into a cavern maze with nothing but a bag of food and a vial of spice-essence."

  "Which did you choose?"

  "What? Oh . . . if you are tested, you will learn."

  "There's a Leto I don't know," Idaho said.

  "Have I not told you this?"

  "And there's a Leto you don't know," Idaho said.

  "Because he's the loneliest person this universe has ever seen," Moneo said.

  "Don't play mood games trying to arouse my sympathy," Idaho said.

  "Mood games, yes. That's very good," Moneo nodded. "The God Emperor's moods are like a river-smooth where nothing obstructs him, foaming and violent at the least suggestion of a barrier. He is not be be obstructed."

  Idaho looked around at the brightly lighted workroom, turned his gaze to the outside darkness and thought about the tamed course of the Idaho River somewhere out there. Bringing his attention back to Moneo, he asked: "What do you know of rivers?"

  "In my youth, I traveled for him. I have even trusted my life to a floating shell of a vessel on a river and then on a sea whose shores were lost in the crossing."

  As he spoke, Moneo felt that he had brushed against a clue to some deep truth in the Lord Leto. The sensation dropped Moneo into reverie, thinking of that far planet where he had

  crossed a sea from one shore to another. There had been a storm on the first evening of that passage and, somewhere deep within the ship, an irritating non-directional "sug-sug-sug-sugsug" of laboring engines. He had stood on deck with the captain. His mind had kept focusing on the engine sound, retreating and coming back to it like the oversurging of the watery green-black mountains which passed and came, repeating and repeating. Each down crash of the keel opened the sea's flesh like a fist smashing. It was insane motion, a sodden shaking, up . . . up, down! His lungs had ached with repressed fear. The lunging of the ship and the sea trying to put them down-wild explosions of solid water, hour after hour, white blisters of water spilling off the decks, then another sea and another. . .

  All of this was a clue to the God Emperor.

  He is both the storm and the ship.

  Moneo focused on Idaho seated across the table from him in the workroom's cold light. Not a tremor in the man, but a hungering was there.

  "So you will not help me learn what the other Duncan Idahos did not learn," Idaho said.

  "But I will help you."

  "Then what have I always failed to learn?"

  "How to trust."

  Idaho pushed himself back from the table and glared at Moneo. When Idaho's voice came, it was harsh and rasping: "I'd say I trusted too much."

  Moneo was implacable. "But how do you trust?"

  "What do you mean?"

  Moneo put his hands in his lap. "You choose male companions for their ability to fight and die on the side of right as you see it. You choose females who can complement this masculine view of yourself. You allow for no differences which can come from good will."

  Something moved in the doorway to Moneo's workroom. He looked up in time to see Siona enter. She stopped, one hand on her hip.

  "Well, father, up to your old tricks, I see."

&n
bsp; Idaho jerked around to stare at the speaker.

  Moneo studied her, looking for signs of the change. She had bathed and put on a fresh uniform, the black and gold of Fish Speaker command, but her face and hands still betrayed the evidence of her desert ordeal. She had lost weight and her cheekbones stood out. Unguent did little to conceal cracks in

  her lips. Veins stood out on her hands. Her eyes looked ancient and her expression was that of someone who had tasted bitter dregs.

  "I've been listening to you two," she said. She dropped her hand from her hip and moved farther into the room. "How dare you speak of good will, father?"

  Idaho had noted the uniform. He pursed his lips in thought. Fish Speaker Command? Siona?

  "I understand your bitterness," Moneo said. "I -had similar feelings once."

  "Did you really?" She came closer, stopping just beside Idaho, who continued to regard her with a look of speculation.

  "I am filled with joy to see you alive," Moneo said.

  "How gratifying. for you to see me safely into the God Emperor's Service," she said. "You waited so long to have a child and look! See how successful I am." She turned slowly to display her uniform. "Commander of the Fish Speakers. A commander with a troop of one, but nonetheless a commander."

  Moneo forced his voice to be cold and professional. "Sit down."

  "I prefer to stand." She looked down at Idaho's upturned face. "Ahhh, Duncan Idaho, my intended mate. Don't you find this interesting, Duncan? The Lord Leto tells me I will befitted into the command structure of the Fish Speakers in time. Meanwhile, I have one attendant. Do you know the one called Nayla, Duncan?"