God Emperor of Dune dc-4

by Frank Herbert

  Ixian satellites controlled this sky, not always to the perfection he might desire. Such perfection was a machine-fantasy which faltered under human management. Still, the satellites held a sufficiently steady grip to give him this morning of desert stillness. He gave his human lungs a deep breath of it and listened for Siona's approach. She had stopped. He knew she was admiring the view.

  Leto felt his imagination like a conjurer calling up everything which had produced the physical setting for this moment. He felt the satellites. Fine instruments which played the music for the dance of warming and cooling air masses, perpetually monitoring and adjusting the powerful vertical and horizontal currents. It amused him to recall that the lxians had thought he would use this exquisite machinery in a new kind of hydraulic despotism-withholding moisture from those who defied their ruler, punishing others with terrible storms. How surprised they had been to f-and themselves mistaken!

  My controls are more subtle.

  Slowly, gently, he began to move, swimming on the sand surface, gliding down off the dune, never once looking back at the thin spire of his tower, knowing that it would vanish presently into the haze of daytime heat.

  Siona followed him with an uncharacteristic docility. Doubt had done its work. She had read the stolen journals. She had listened to the admonitions of her father. Now, she did not know what to think.

  "What is this test?" she had asked Moneo. "What will he do?"

  "It is never the same."

  "How did he test you?"

  "It will be different with you. I would only confuse you if I told you my experience."

  Leto had listened secretly while Moneo prepared his daughter, dressing her in an authentic Fremen stillsuit with a dark robe over it, fitting the boot-pumps correctly. Moneo had not forgotten.

  Moneo had looked up from where he bent to adjust her boots. "The Worm will come. That is all I can tell you. You must find a way to live in the presence of the Worm."

  He had stood then, explaining about the stillsuit, how it recycled her body's own waters. He made her pull the tube from a catchpocket and suck on it, then reseal the tube.

  "You will be alone with him on the desert," Moneo had said. "Shai-Hulud is never far away when you're on the desert."

  "What if I refuse to go?" she asked.

  "You will go... but you may not return."

  This conversation had occurred in the ground-level chamber of the Little Citadel while Leto waited in the aerie. He had come down when he knew Siona was ready, drifting down in the predawn darkness on his cart's suspensors. The cart had gone into the ground level room after Moneo and Siona emerged. While Moneo marched across-the flat ground to his 'thopter and left in a whispering of wings, Leto had required Siona to test the sealed portal of the ground-level chamber, then look upward at the tower's impossible heights.

  "The only way out is across the Sareer," he said.

  He led her away from the tower then, not even commanding her to follow, depending on her good sense, her curiosity and her doubts.

  Leto's swimming progress took him down the dune's slipface and onto an exposed section of the rocky basement complex, then up another sandy face at a shallow angle, creating a path for Siona to follow. Fremen had called such compression tracks "God's gift to the weary." He moved slowly, giving Siona plenty of time in which to recognize that this was his domain, his natural habitat.

  He came out atop another dune and turned to watch her progress. She held to the track he had provided and stopped only when she reached the top. Her glance went once to his face then she turned a full circle to examine the horizon. He heard the sharp intake of her breath. Heat haze hid the spire's top. The base might have been a distant outcropping.

  "This is how it was," he said.

  There was something about the desert which spoke to the eternal soul of people who possessed Fremen blood, he knew. He had chosen this place for its desert impact-a dune slightly higher than the others.

  "Take a good look at it," he said, and he slipped down the dune's other side to remove his bulk from her view.

  Siona took one more slow turn, looking outward.

  Leto knew the innermost sensation of what she saw. Except for that insignificant, blurred blip of his tower's base, there was not the slightest lift of horizon-flat, everywhere flat. No plants, no living movement. From her vantage, there was a limit of approximately eight kilometers to the line where the planet's curvature hid everything beyond.

  Leto spoke from where he had stopped, just below the dune's crest. "This is the real Sareer. You only know it when you're down here afoot. This is all that's left of the bahr bela ma."

  "The ocean without water," she whispered.

  Again, she turned and examined the entire horizon.

  There was no wind and, Leto knew, without wind, the silence ate at the human soul. Siona was feeling the loss of all familiar reference points. She was abandoned in dangerous space.

  Leto glanced at the next dune. In that direction, they would come presently to a low line of hills which originally had been mountains but now were broken into remnant slag and rubble. He continued to rest quietly, letting the silence do his work for him. It was even pleasant to imagine that these dunes went on, as they once had, without end completely around the planet. But even these few dunes were degenerating. Without the original Coriolis storms of Dune, the Sareer saw nothing stronger than a stiff breeze and occasional heat vortices which had no more than local effect.

  One of these tiny "wind devils" danced across the middle distance to the south. Siona's gaze followed its track. She spoke abruptly: "Do you have a personal religion?"

  Leto took a moment composing his reply. It always astonished him how a desert provoked thoughts of religion.

  "You dare ask me if I have a personal religion?" he demanded.

  Betraying no surface sign of the fears he knew she felt, Siona turned and stared down at him. Audacity was always an Atreides hallmark, he reminded himself.

  When she didn't answer, he said: "You are an Atreides for sure."

  "Is that your answer?" she asked.

  "What is it you really want to know, Siona?"

  "What you believe!"

  "Ho! You ask after my faith. Well, now-I believe that something cannot emerge from nothing without divine intervention."

  His answer puzzled her. "How is that an..."

  "Natura non facit saltus," he said.

  She shook her head, not understanding the ancient allusion which had sprung to his lips. Leto translated:

  "Nature makes no leaps."

  "What language was that?" she asked.

  "A language no longer spoken anywhere else in my universe."

  "Why did you use it then?"

  "To prod your ancient memories."

  "I don't have any! I just need to know why you brought me here."

  "To give you a taste of your past. Come down here and climb onto my back."

  She hesitated at first, then seeing the futility of defiance, slid down the dune and clambered onto his back.

  Leto waited until she was kneeling atop him. It was not the same as the old times he knew. She had no Maker hooks and could not stand on his back. He lifted his front segments slightly off the surface.

  "Why am I doing this?" she asked. Her tone said she felt silly up there.

  "I want you to taste the way our people once moved proudly across this land, high atop the back of a giant sandworm."

  He began to glide along the dune just below the crest. Siona had seen holos. She knew this experience intellectually, but the pulse of reality had a different beat and he knew she would resonate to it.

  Ahhh, Siona, he thought, you do not even begin to suspect how I will test you.

  Leto steeled himself then. I must have no pity. If she dies, she dies. If any of them dies, that is a required event, no more.

  And he had to remind himself that this applied even to Hwi Noree. It was just that all of them could not die.

 
He sensed it when Siona began to enjoy the sensation of riding on his back. He felt a faint shift in her weight as she eased back onto her legs to lift her head.

  He drove outward then along a curving barracan, joining Siona in enjoyment of the old sensations. Leto could just glimpse the remnant hills at the horizon ahead of him. They were like a seed from the past waiting there, a reminder of the self-sustaining and expanding force which operated in a desert. He could forget for a moment that on this planet where only a small fraction of the surface remained desert, the Sareer's dynamism existed in a precarious environment.

  The illusion of the past was here, though. He felt it as he moved. Fantasy, of course, he told himself, a vanishing fantasy as long as his enforced tranquility continued. Even the sweeping barracan which he traversed now was not as great as the ones of the past. None of the dunes were that great.

  This whole maintained desert struck him suddenly as ridiculous. He almost stopped on a pebbled surface between the dunes, continuing but more slowly as he tried to conjure up the necessities which kept the whole system working. He imagined the planet's rotation setting up great air currents which shifted cold and heated air to new regions in enormous volume-everything monitored and ruled by those tiny satellites with their Ixian instruments and heat-focusing dishes. If the high monitors saw anything, they saw the Sareer partly as a "relief desert" with both physical and cold-air walls girdling it. This tended to create ice at the edges and required even more climatic adjustments.

  It was not easy and Leto forgave the occasional mistakes for that reason.

  As he moved once more out onto dunes, he lost that sense of delicate balance, put aside memories of the pebbly wastelands outside the central sands, and gave himself up to enjoyment of his "petrified ocean" with its frozen and apparently immovable waves. He turned southward, parallel to the remnant hills.

  He knew that most people were offended by his infatuation with desert. They were uneasy and turned away. Siona, however, could not turn away. Everywhere she looked, the desert demanded recognition. She rode silently on his back, but he knew her eyes were full. And the old-old memories were beginning to churn.

  He came within three hours to a region of cylindrical whaleback dunes, some of them more than one hundred and fifty kilometers long at an angle to the prevailing wind. Beyond them lay a rocky corridor between dunes and into a region of star dunes almost four hundred meters high. Finally, they entered the braided dunes of the central erg where the general high pressure and electrically charged air gave his spirits a lift. He knew the same magic would be working on Siona.

  "Here is where the songs of the Long Trek originated," he said. "They are perfectly preserved in the Oral History."

  She did not answer, but he knew she heard.

  Leto slowed his pace and began to speak to Siona, telling her about their Fremen past. He sensed the quickening of her interest. She even asked questions occasionally, but he could also feel her fears building. Even the base of his Little Citadel was no longer visible here. She could recognize nothing manmade. And she would think he engaged now in small talk, unimportant things to put off something portentous.

  "Equality between our men and women originated here," he said.

  "Your Fish Speakers deny that men and women are equal," she said.

  Her voice, full of questioning disbelief, was a better locator than the sensation of her crouched on his back. Leto stopped at the intersection of two braided dunes and let the venting of his heat-generated oxygen subside.

  "Things are not the same today," he said. "But men and women do have different evolutionary demands upon them. With the Fremen, though, there was an interdependence. That fostered equality out here where questions of survival can become immediate."

  "Why did you bring me here?" she demanded.

  "Look behind us," he said.

  He felt her turn. Presently, she said: "What am I supposed to see?"

  "Have we left any tracks? Can you tell where we've been?"

  "There's a little wind now."

  "It has covered our tracks?"

  "I guess so... yes."

  "This desert made us what we were and are," he said. "It's the real museum of all our traditions. Not one of those traditions has really been lost."

  Leto saw a small sandstorm, a ghibli, moving across the southern horizon. He noted the narrow ribbons of dust and sand moving out ahead of it. Surely, Siona had seen it.

  "Why won't you tell me why you brought me here?" she asked. Fear was obvious in her voice.

  "But I have told you."

  "You have not!"

  "How far have we come, Siona?"

  She thought about this. "Thirty kilometers? Twenty?"

  "Farther," he said. "I can move very fast in my own land. Didn't you feel the wind on your face?"

  "Yes." Sullen. "So why ask me how far?"

  "Come down and stand where I can see you." ..Why?"

  Good, he thought. She believes I will abandon her here and speed off faster than she can follow.

  "Come down and I'll explain," he said.

  She slid off his back and came around to where she could look into his face.

  "Time passes swiftly when your senses are full," he said.

  "We have been out almost four hours. We have come about sixty kilometers."

  "Why is that important?"

  "Moneo put dried food in the pouch of your robe," he said. "Eat a little and I will tell you."

  She found a dried cube of protomor in the pouch and chewed on it while she watched him. It was the authentic old Fremen food even to the slight addition of melange.

  "You have felt your past," he said. "Now, you must be sensitized to your future, to the Golden Path."

  She swallowed. "I don't believe in your Golden Path."

  "If you are to live, you will believe in it."

  "Is that your test? Have faith in the Great God Leto or die?"

  "You need no faith in me whatsoever. I want you to have faith in yourself."

  "Then why is it important how far we've come?"

  "So you'll understand how far you still have to go."

  She put a hand to her cheek. "I don't..."

  "Right where you stand," he said, "you are in the unmistakable midst of Infinity. Look around you at the meaning of Infinity."

  She glanced left and right at the unbroken desert.

  "We are going to walk out of my desert together," he said. "Just the two of us."

  "You don't walk," she sneered.

  "A figure of speech. But you will walk. I assure you of that."

  She looked in the direction they had come. "So that's why you asked me about tracks."

  "Even if there were tracks, you could not go back. There is nothing at my Little Citadel that you could get to and use for survival."

  "No water?"

  "Nothing."

  She found the catchpocket tube at her shoulder, sucked at it and restored it. He noted the care with which she sealed the end, but she did not pull the face flap across her mouth, although Leto had heard her father warning her about this. She wanted her mouth free for talking!

  "You're telling me I can't run away from you," she said.

  "Run away if you want."

  She turned a full circle, examining the wasteland.

  "There is a saying about the open land," he said, "that one direction is as good as another. In some ways, that's still true, but I would not depend on it."

  "But I'm really free to leave you if I want?"

  "Freedom can be a very lonely estate," he said.

  She pointed to the steep side of the dune on which they had stopped. "But I could just go down there and..."

  "Were I you, Siona, I would not go down where you are pointing."

  She glared at him. "Why?"

  "On the dune's steep side, unless you follow the natural curves, the sand may slide down upon you and bury you."

  She looked down the slope, absorbing this.

  "See h
ow beautiful words can be?" he asked.

  She returned her attention to his face. "Should we be going?"

  "You learn to value leisure out here. And courtesy. There's no hurry."

  "But we have no water except the..

  ."

  "Used wisely, that stillsuit will keep you alive."

  "But how long will it take us to..."

  "Your impatience alarms me."

  "But we have only this dried food in my pouch. What will we eat when..."

  "Siona! Have you noticed that you are expressing our situation as mutual. What will we eat? We have no water. Should we be going? How long will it take us?"

  He sensed the dryness of her mouth as she tried to swallow.

  "Could it be that we're interdependent?" he asked.

  She spoke reluctantly. "I don't know how to survive out here."

  "But I do?"

  She nodded.

  "Why should I share such precious knowledge with you?" he asked.

  She shrugged, a pitiful gesture which touched him. How quickly the desert cut away previous attitudes.

  "I will share my knowledge with you," he-said. "And you must find something valuable that you can share with me."

  Her gaze traversed his length, paused a moment at the flippers which once were his legs and feet, then came back to his face.

  "Agreement bought with threats is no agreement," she said.

  "I offer you no violence."

  "There are many kinds of violence," she said.

  "And I brought you out here where you may die?"

  "Did I have a choice in it?"

  "It is difficult to be born an Atreides," he said. "Believe me, I know."

  "You don't have to do it this way," she said.

  "And there you are wrong."

  He turned away from her and set off in a sinusoidal track down the dune. He heard her slipping and stumbling as she followed. Leto stopped well into the dune shadow.

  "We'll wait out the day here," he said. "It uses less water to travel by night."

  ***

  One of the most terrible words in any language is Soldier. The synonyms parade through our history: yogahnee, trooper, hussar, kareebo, cossack, deranzeef, legionnaire, sardaukar, fish speaker... I know them all. They stand there in the ranks of my memory to remind me: Always make sure you have the army with you.