Frank Herbert - Dune Book 4 - God Emperor Of Dune

by Frank Herbert

"I leave the date to you. Announce it when all things are arranged."

  "And the ceremony itself ?"

  "I will conduct it."

  "Will you need assistants, Lord? Artifacts of any kind?"

  "The trappings of ritual?"

  "Any particular thing which I may not. . ."

  "We will not need much for our little charade."

  "Lord! I beg of you! Please. . ."

  "You will stand beside the bride and give her in marriage," Leto said. "We will use the Old Fremen ritual."

  "We will need water rings then," Moneo said.

  "Yes! I will use Ghani's water rings."

  "And who will attend, Lord?"

  "Only a Fish Speaker guard and the aristocracy."

  Moneo stared at Leto's face. "What . . . what does my Lord mean by `aristocracy'?"

  "You, your family, the household entourage, the courtiers of the Citadel."

  "My fam . . ." Moneo swallowed. "Do you include Siona?"

  "If she survives the test."

  "But. . .

  "Is she not family?"

  "Of course, Lord. She is Atreides and. . ."

  "Then by all means include Siona!"

  Moneo brought a tiny memocorder from his pocket, a dull black Ixian artifact whose existence crowded the proscriptions of the Butlerian Jihad. A soft smile touched Leto's lips. Moneo knew his duties and would now perform them.

  The clamor of Duncan Idaho outside the portal grew more strident, but Moneo ignored the sound.

  Moneo knows the price of his privileges, Leto thought. It is another kind of marriage-the marriage of privilege and duty. It is the aristocrat's explanation and his excuse.

  Moneo finished his note taking.

  "A few details, Lord," Moneo said. "Will there be some special garb for Hwi?"

  "The stillsuit and robe of a Fremen bride, real ones."

  "Jewelry or other baubles?"

  Leto's gaze locked on Moneo's fingers scrabbling over the tiny recorder, seeing there a dissolution.

  Leadership, courage, a .sense of knowledge and order Moneo has these in abundance. They surround him like a holy aura, but they conceal from all eyes except mine the rot which eats from within. It is inevitable. Were I gone, it would be visible to everyone.

  "Lord?" Moneo pressed. "Are you woolgathering?"

  Ahhh! He likes that word!

  "That is all," Leto said. "Only the robe, the stillsuit and the water rings."

  Moneo bowed and turned away.

  He is looking ahead now, Leto thought, but even this new thing will pass. He will turn toward the past once more. And I had such high hopes for him once. Well . . . perhaps Siona . . .

  ===

  "Make no heroes," my father said.

  -The voice of Ghanima,

  From the Oral History

  JUST BY the way Idaho strode across the small chamber, his loud demands for audience now gratified, Leto could see an important transformation in the ghola. It was a thing repeated so many times that it had become deeply familiar to Leto. The Duncan had not even exchanged words of greeting with the departing Moneo. It all fitted into the pattern. How boring that pattern had become!

  Leto had a name for this transformation of the Duncans. He called it "The Since Syndrome."

  The gholas often nurtured suspicions about the secret things which might have been developed across the centuries of oblivion since they last knew awareness. What had people been doing all that time? Why could they possibly want me, this relic from their past? No ego could overcome such doubts forever-especially in a doubting man.

  One of the gholas had accused Leto: "You've put things in my body, things I know nothing about! These things in my body tell you everything I'm doing! You spy on me everywhere!"

  Another had charged him with possessing a "manipulative machine which makes us want to do whatever you want."

  Once it started, the Since Syndrome could never be entirely eliminated. It could be checked, even diverted, but the dormant seed might sprout at the slightest provocation.

  Idaho stopped where Moneo had stood and there was a veiled look of nonspecific suspicions in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders. Leto allowed the situation to simmer, bringing the condition to a head. Idaho locked gazes with him, then

  broke away to dart his glances around the room. Leto recognized the manner behind the gaze.

  The Duncans never forget!

  As he studied the room, using the sightful ways he had been taught centuries before by the Lady Jessica and the Mentat Thufir Hawat, Idaho began to feel a giddy sense of dislocation. He thought the room rejected him, each thing-the soft cushions: big bulbous things in gold, green and a red that was almost purple; the Fremen rugs, each a museum piece, lapping over each other in thick piles around Leto's pit; the false sunlight of Ixian glowglobes, light which enveloped the Emperor's face in dry warmth, making the shadows around it deeper and more mysterious; the smell of spice-tea somewhere nearby; and that rich melange odor which radiated from the worm-body.

  Idaho felt that too much had happened to him too fast since the Tleilaxu had abandoned him to the mercies of Luli and Friend in that featureless prison-cell room.

  Too much . . . too much . . .

  Am I really here? he wondered. Is this me? What are these thoughts that I think?

  He stared at Leto's quiescent body, the shadowy and enormous mass which lay so silently there on its cart within the pit. The very quietness of that fleshly mass only suggested mysterious energies, terrible energies which might be unleashed in ways nobody could anticipate.

  Idaho had heard the stories about the fight at the Ixian Embassy, but the Fish Speaker accounts had an aura of miraculous visitation about them which obscured the physical data.

  "He flew down from above them and executed a terrible slaughter among the sinners."

  "How did he do that?" Idaho had asked.

  "He was an angry God," his informant had said.

  Angry, Idaho thought. Was it because of the threat to Hwi? The stories he had heard! None were believable. Hwi wedded to this gross . . . It was not possible! Not the lovely Hwi, the Hwi of gentle delicacy. He is playing some terrible game, testing us . . . testing us . . . There was no honest reality in these times, no peace except in the presence of Hwi. All else was insanity.

  As he returned his attention to Leto's face-that silently waiting Atreides face-the sense of dislocation grew stronger in Idaho. He began to wonder if, by a slight increase in mental

  effort along some strange new pathway, he might break through ghostly barriers to remember all of the experiences of the other Ghola Idahos.

  What did they think when they entered this room? Did they feel this dislocation, this rejection?

  Just a little extra effort.

  He felt dizzy and wondered if he were going to faint.

  "Is something wrong, Duncan?" It was Leto's most reasonable and calming tone.

  "It's not real," Idaho said. "I don't belong here."

  Leto chose to misunderstand. "But my guard tells me you came here of your own accord, that you flew back from the Citadel and demanded an immediate audience."

  "I mean here, now! In this time!"

  "But I need you."

  "For what?"

  "Look around you, Duncan. The ways you can help me are so numerous that you could not do them all."

  "But your women won't let me fight! Every time I want to go where.. ."

  "Do you question that you're more valuable alive than dead?" Leto made a clucking sound, then: "Use your wits, Duncan! That's what I value."

  "And my sperm. You value that."

  "Your sperm is your own to put where you wish."

  "I will not leave a widow and orphans behind me the way...

  "Duncan! I've said the choice is yours."

  Idaho swallowed, then: "You've committed a crime against us, Leto, against all of us=the gholas you resurrect without ever asking us if that's what we want."

  This was a new
turn in Duncan-thinking. Leto peered at Idaho with renewed interest.

  "What crime?"

  "Oh, I've heard you spouting your deep thoughts," Idaho accused. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing at the room's entrance. "Did you know you can be heard out there in the anteroom?"

  "When I wish to be heard, yes." But only my journals hear it all! "I would like to know the nature of my crime, though."

  "There's a time, Leto, a time when you're alive. A time when you're supposed to be alive. It can have a magic, that

  time, while you're living it. You know you're never going to see a time like that again."

  Leto blinked, touched by the Duncan's distress. The words were evocative.

  Idaho raised both hands, palms up, to chest-height, a beggar Asking for something he knew he could not receive.

  "Then . . . one day you wake up and you remember dying . . . and you remember the axlotl tank . . . and the Tleilaxu nastiness which awakened you . . . and it's supposed to start all over again. But it doesn't. It never does, Leto. That's a crime!"

  "I have taken away the magic?"

  "Yes!"

  Idaho dropped his hands to his sides and clenched them into fists. He felt that he stood alone in the path of a millrace tide which would overwhelm him at his slightest relaxation.

  And what of my time? Leto thought. This, too, will never happen again. But the Duncan would not understand the difference.

  "What brought you rushing back from the Citadel?" Leto asked.

  Idaho took a deep breath, then: "Is it true? You're to be married?"

  "That's correct."

  "To this Hwi Noree, the Ixian Ambassador?"

  "True."

  Idaho darted a quick glance along Leto's supine length.

  They always look for genitalia, Leto thought. Perhaps I should have something made, a gross protuberance to shock them. He choked back the small burst of amusement which threatened to erupt from his throat. Another emotion amplified. Thank you, Hwi. Thank you, lxians.

  Idaho shook his head. "But you. . ."

  "There are strong elements to a marriage other than sex," Leto said. "Will we have children of our flesh? No. But the effects of this union will be profound."

  "I listened while you were talking to Moneo," Idaho said. "I thought it must be some kind of joke, a . . ."

  "Careful, Duncan!"

  "Do you love her?"

  "More deeply than any man ever loved a woman."

  "Well, what about her? Does she.. ."

  "She feels . . . a compelling compassion, a need to share

  with me, to give whatever she can give. It is her nature."

  Idaho suppressed a feeling of revulsion.

  "Moneo's right. They'll believe the Tleilaxu stories."

  "That is one of the profound effects."

  "And you still want me to . . . to mate with Siona!"

  "You know my wishes. I leave the choice to you."

  "Who's that Nayla woman?"

  "You've met Nayla! Good."

  "She and Siona act like sisters. That big hunk! What's going on there, Leto?"

  "What would you want to go on? And what does it matter?" "I've never met such a brute! She reminds me of Beast Rabban. You'd never know she was female if she didn't. . ."

  "You have met her before," Leto said. "You knew her as Friend."

  Idaho stared at him in quick silence, the silence of a burrowing creature who senses the hawk.

  "Then you trust her," Idaho said.

  "Trust? What is trust?"

  The moment arrives, Leto thought. He could see it shaping in Idaho's thoughts.

  "Trust is what goes with a pledge of loyalty," Idaho said. "Such as the trust between you and me?" Leto asked.

  A bitter smile touched Idaho's lips. "So that's what you're doing with Hwi Noree? A marriage, a pledge..."

  "Hwi and I already have trust for each other."

  "Do you trust me, Leto?"

  "If I cannot trust Duncan Idaho, I cannot trust anyone."

  "And if I can't trust you?"

  "Then I pity you."

  Idaho took this as almost a physical shock. His eyes were wide with unspoken demands. He wanted to trust. He wanted the magic which would never come again.

  Idaho indicated his thoughts were taking off in an odd tangent then.

  "Can they hear us out in the anteroom?" he asked.

  "No." But my journals hear!

  "Moneo was furious. Anyone could see it. But he went away like a docile lamb."

  "Moneo is an aristocrat. He is married to duty, to responsibilities. When he is reminded of these things, his anger vanishes."

  "So that's how you control him," Idaho said.

  "He controls himself," Leto said, remembering how Moneo had glanced up from the note-taking, not for reassurances, but to prompt his sense of duty.

  "No," Idaho said. "He doesn't control himself. You do it."

  "Moneo has locked himself into his past. I did not do that."

  "But he's an aristocrat . . . an Atreides."

  Leto recalled Moneo's aging features, thinking how inevitable it was that the aristocrat would refuse his final duty-which was to step aside and vanish into history. He would have to be driven aside. And he would be. No aristocrat had ever overcome the demands of change.

  Idaho was not through. "Are you an aristocrat, Leto?"

  Leto smiled. "The ultimate aristocrat dies within me." And he thought: Privilege becomes arrogance. Arrogance promotes injustice. The seeds of ruin blossom.

  "Maybe I will not attend your wedding," Idaho said. "I never thought of myself as an aristocrat."

  "But you were. You were the aristocrat of the sword."

  "Paul was better," Idaho said.

  Leto spoke in the voice of Muad'Dib: "Because you taught me!" He resumed his normal tones: "The aristocrat's unspoken duty-to teach, and sometimes by horrible example."

  And he thought: Pride of birth trails out into penury and the weaknesses of interbreeding. The way is opened for pride of wealth and accomplishment. Enter the nouveaux riches, riding to power as the Harkonnens did, on the backs of the ancient regime.

  The cycle repeated itself with such persistence that Leto felt anyone should have seen how it must be built into long forgotten survival patterns which the species had outgrown, but never lost.

  But no, we still carry the detritus which I must weed out.

  "Is there some frontier?" Idaho asked. "Is there some frontier where I could go and never again be a part of this?"

  "If there is to be any frontier, you must help me create it," Leto said. "There is now no place to go where others of us cannot follow and find you."

  "Then you won't let me go."

  "Go if you wish. Others of you have tried it. I tell you there is no frontier, no place to hide. Right now, as it has been for a long, long time, humankind is like a single-celled creature, bound together by a dangerous glue."

  "No new planets? No strange.. ."

  "Oh, we grow, but we do not separate."

  "Because you hold us together!" he accused.

  "I do not know if you can understand this, Duncan, but if there is a frontier, any kind of frontier, then what lies behind you cannot be more important than what lies ahead."

  "You're the past!"

  "No, Moneo is the past. He is quick to raise the traditional aristocratic barriers against all frontiers. You must understand the power of those barriers. They not only enclose planets and land on those planets, they enclose ideas. They repress change."

  "You repress change!"

  He will not deviate, Leto thought. One more try.

  "The surest sign that an aristocracy exists is the discovery of barriers against change, curtains of iron or steel or stone or of any substance which excludes the new, the different."

  "I know there must be a frontier somewhere," Idaho said. "You're hiding it."

  "I hide nothing of frontiers. I want frontiers! I want surprises!"

  T
hey come right up against it, Leto thought. Then they refuse to enter.

  True to this prediction, Idaho's thoughts darted off on a new tack. "Did you really have Face Dancers perform at your betrothal?"

  Leto felt a surge of anger, followed immediately by a wry enjoyment of the fact that he could experience the emotion in such depth. He wanted to let it shout at Duncan . . . but that would solve nothing

  "The Face Dancers performed," he said.

  .Why?"

  "I want everyone to share in my happiness."

  Idaho stared at him as though just discovering a repellent insect in his drink. In a flat voice, Idaho said: "That is the most cynical thing I have ever heard an Atreides say."

  "But an Atreides said it."

  "You're deliberately trying to put me off! You're avoiding my question."

  Once more into the fray, Leto thought. He said: "The Face Dancers of the Bene Tleilax are a colony organism. Individually, they are mules. This is a choice they made for and by themselves."

  Leto waited, thinking: I must be patient. They have to discover it for themselves. If I say it, they will not believe. Think, Duncan. Think!

  After a long silence, Idaho said: "I have given you my oath. That is important to me. It is still important. I don't know what you're doing or why. I can only say I don't like what's happening. There! I've said it."