Frank Herbert - Dune Book 4 - God Emperor Of Dune

by Frank Herbert

  Idaho nodded.

  "Really? I think perhaps I don't know her." Siona looked at Moneo. "Do I know her, father?"

  Moneo shrugged.

  "But you speak of trust, father," Siona said. "Who does the powerful minister, Moneo, trust?"

  Idaho turned to see the effect of these words on the majordomo. The man's face appeared brittle with repressed emotion. Anger? No . . . something else.

  I trust the God Emperor," Moneo said. "And, in the hope that it will teach both of you something, I am here to convey his wishes to you."

  "His wishes!" Siona taunted. "Hear that, Duncan? The God Emperor's commands are now wishes."

  "Speak your piece," Idaho said. "I know we have little choice in whatever it is."

  "You always have a choice," Moneo said.

  "Don't listen to him," Siona said. "He's full of tricks. They expect us to fall into each other's arms and breed more like my father. Your descendant, my father!"

  Moneo's face went pale. He gripped the edge of his worktable with both hands and leaned forward. "You are both fools! But I will try to save you. In spite of yourselves, I will try to save you."

  Idaho saw Moneo's cheeks tremble, the intensity of the man's stare, and felt oddly moved by this. "I'm not his stud, but I'll listen to you."

  "Always a mistake," Siona said.

  "Be still, woman," Idaho said.

  She glared at the top of Idaho's head. "Don't address me that way or I'll wrap your neck around your ankles!"

  Idaho stiffened and started to turn.

  Moneo grimaced and waved a hand for Idaho to remain seated. "I caution you, Duncan, that she could probably do it. I am no match for her and you do recall your attempt at violence against me?"

  Idaho inhaled a deep, quick breath, let it out slowly, then: "Say what you have to say."

  Siona moved to perch at the end of Moneo's table and looked down at both of them. "Much better," she said. "Let him have his say, but don't listen."

  Idaho pressed his lips tightly together.

  Moneo released his grip on the edge of his desk. He sat back and looked from Idaho to Siona. "I have almost completed the arrangements for the God Emperor's wedding to Hwi Noree. During those festivities, I want you both out of the way."

  Siona turned a questioning look on Moneo. "Your idea or his?"

  "Mine!" Moneo returned his daughter's glare. "Have you no sense of honor and duty? Have you learned nothing from being with him?"

  "Oh, I learned what you learned, father. And I gave my word, which I will keep."

  "Then you'll command the Fish Speakers?"

  "Whenever he trusts me with command. You know, father, he's ever so much more devious than you are."

  "Where are you sending us?" Idaho asked.

  "Provided we agree to go," Siona said.

  "There is a small village of Museum Fremen at the edge of the Sareer," Moneo said. "It is called Tuono. The village is

  relatively pleasant. It's in the shadow of the Wall with the river just beyond the Wall. There is a well and the food is good."

  Tuono? Idaho wondered. The name sounded familiar. "There was a Tuono Basin on the way to Sietch Tabr," he said.

  "And the nights are long and there's no entertainment," Siona said.

  Idaho shot a sharp glance at her. She returned it. "He wants us breeding and the Worm satisfied," she said. "He wants babies in my belly, new lives to warp and twist. I'll see him dead before I'll give him that!"

  Idaho looked back at Moneo with a bemused expression. "And if we refuse to go?"

  "I think you'll go," Moneo said.

  Siona's lips twitched. "Duncan, have you even seen one of these little desert villages? No comforts, no. . ."

  "I have seen Tabur Village," Idaho said.

  "I'm sure that is a metropolis beside Tuono. Our God Emperor would not celebrate his nuptials in any cluster of mud hovels! Oh, no. Tuono will be mud hovels and no amenities, as close to the original Fremen as possible."

  Idaho kept his attention on Moneo while speaking: "Fremen did not live in mud huts."

  "Who cares where they conducted their cultish games?" she sneered.

  Still looking at Moneo, Idaho said: "Real Fremen had only one cult, the cult of personal honesty. I worry more about honesty than about comfort."

  "Don't expect comfort from me!" Siona snapped.

  "I don't expect anything from you," Idaho said. "When would we leave for this Tuono, Moneo?"

  "You're going?" she asked.

  "I am considering an acceptance of your father's kindness," Idaho said.

  "Kindness!" She looked from Idaho to Moneo.

  "You would leave immediately," Moneo said. "I have detailed a detachment of Fish Speakers under Nayla to escort you and provide for you at Tuono."

  "Nayla?" Siona asked. "Really? Will she stay with us there?"

  "Until the day of the wedding."

  Siona nodded slowly. "Then we accept."

  "Accept for yourself!" Idaho snapped.

  Siona smiled. "Sorry. May I formally request that the great

  Duncan Idaho join me at this primitive garrison where he will keep his hands off my person?"

  Idaho peered up at her from under his brows. "Have no fears about where I will put my hands." He looked at Moneo. "Are you being kind, Moneo? Is that why you're sending me away?"

  "It's a question of trust," Siona said. "Who does he trust?"

  "Will I be forced to go with your daughter?" Idaho insisted.

  Siona stood. "We either accept or the troopers will bind us and carry us out in a most uncomfortable fashion. You can see it in his face."

  "So I really have no choice," Idaho said.

  "You have the choice anyone has," Siona said. "Die now or later."

  Still, Idaho stared at Moneo. "Your real intentions, Moneo? Won't you satisfy my curiosity?"

  "Curiosity has kept many people alive when all else failed," Moneo said. "I am trying to keep you alive, Duncan. I have never done that before."

  ===

  It required almost a thousand years before the dust of Dune's old planet-wide desert left the atmosphere to be bound up in soil and water. The wind called sandblaster has not been seen on Arrakis for some twenty-five hundred years. Twenty billion tons of dust could be carried suspended in the wind of just one of those storms. The sky often had a silvery look to it then. Fremen said: "The desert is a surgeon cutting away the skin to expose what's underneath." The planet and the people had layers. You could see them. My Sareer is but a weak echo of what was. I must be the sandblaster today.

  -The Stolen Journals

  "You sent them to Tuono without consulting me? How surprising of you, Moneo! You've not done such an independent thing in a long while."

  Moneo stood about ten paces from Leto in the gloomy center of the crypt, head bowed, using every artifice he knew to keep from trembling, aware that even this could be seen and interpreted by the God Emperor. It was almost midnight. Leto had kept his majordomo waiting and waiting.

  "I pray I have not offended my Lord," Moneo said.

  "You have amused me, but take no heart from that. Lately, I cannot separate the comic from the sad."

  "Forgive me, Lord," Moneo whispered.

  "What is this forgiveness you ask? Must you always require judgment? Can't your universe merely be?"

  Moneo lifted his gaze to that awful cowled face. He is both ship and storm. The sunset exists in itself. Moneo felt that he stood on the brink of terrifying revelations. The God Emperor's eyes bored into him, burning, probing. "Lord, what would you have of me?"

  "That you have faith in yourself."

  Feeling that something might explode in him, Moneo said: "Then the fact that I did not consult you before. . ."

  "How enlightened of you, Moneo! Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves."

  The words were shattering to Moneo. He sensed accusation in them, confession. He felt his hold on a fea
rsome but infinitely desirable thing weakening. He tried to find words to call it back, but his mind remained blank. Perhaps if he asked the God Emperor . . .

  "Lord, if you would but tell me your thoughts on..

  ."

  "My thoughts vanish on contact!"

  Leto stared down at Moneo. How strange were the majordomo's eyes perched there above that hawkish Atreides nose-free-verse eyes in a metronome face. Did Moneo hear that rhythmic pulse-beat: Malky is coming! Malky is coming! Malky is coming!?

  Moneo wanted to cry out in anguish. The thing he had felt- all gone! He put both his hands over his mouth.

  "Your universe is a two-dimensional hourglass," Leto accused. "Why do you try to hold back the sand?"

  Moneo lowered his hands and sighed. "Do you wish to hear about the wedding arrangements, Lord?"

  "Don't be tiresome! Where is Hwi?"

  "The Fish Speakers are preparing her for. . ."

  "Have you consulted her about the arrangements?"

  "Yes, Lord."

  "She approved?"

  "Yes, Lord, but she accused me of living for the quantity of activity and not for the quality."

  "Isn't she marvelous, Moneo? Does she see the unrest among the Fish Speakers?"

  "I think so, Lord."

  "The idea of my marriage disturbs them."

  "It's why I sent the Duncan away, Lord."

  "Of course it is, and Siona with him to. . ."

  "Lord, I know you have tested her and she. . ."

  "She senses the Golden Path as deeply as you do, Moneo." "Then why do I fear her, Lord?"

  "Because you raise reason above all else."

  "But I do not know the reason for my fear!"

  Leto smiled. This was like playing bubble dice in an infinite bowl. Moneo's emotions were a marvelous play performed only on this stage. How near the edge he walked without ever seeing it!

  "Moneo, why do you insist on taking pieces out of the continuum?" Leto asked. "When you see a spectrum, do you desire one color there above all the others?"

  "Lord, I don't understand you!"

  Leto closed his eyes, remembering the countless times he had heard this cry. The faces were an unseparated blend. He opened his eyes to erase them.

  "As long as one human remains alive to see them, the colors will not suffer a linear mortis even if you die, Moneo."

  "What is this thing of colors, Lord?"

  "The continuum, the never-ending, the Golden Path."

  "But you see things which we do not, Lord!"

  "Because you refuse!"

  Moneo sank his chin to his chest. "Lord, I know you have evolved beyond the rest of us. That is why we worship you and..."

  "Damn you, Moneo!"

  Moneo jerked his head up and stared at Leto in terror.

  "Civilizations collapse when their powers outrun their religions!" Leto said. "Why can't you see this? Hwi does."

  "She is Ixian, Lord. Perhaps she. . ."

  "She's a Fish Speaker! She has been from birth, born to serve me. No!" Leto raised one of his tiny hands as Moneo tried to speak. "The Fish Speakers are disturbed because I called them my brides, and now they see a stranger not trained in Siaynoq who knows it better than they."

  "How can that be, Lord, when your Fish..

  ."

  "What are you saying? Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do."

  Moneo opened his mouth but closed it without speaking.

  "Small children know," Leto said. "It's only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves. Moneo! Uncover yourself!"

  "Lord, I cannot!" The words were torn from Moneo. He

  trembled with anguish. "I do not have your powers, your knowledge of. . ."

  "Enough!"

  Moneo fell silent. His body shook.

  Leto spoke soothingly to him. "It's all right, Moneo. I asked too much of you and I can see your fatigue."

  Slowly, Moneo's trembling subsided. He drew in deep, gulping breaths.

  Leto said: "There will be some change in my Fremen wedding. We will not use the water rings of my sister, Ghanima. We will use, instead, the rings of my mother."

  "The Lady Chani, Lord? But where are her rings?"

  Leto twisted his bulk on the cart and pointed to the intersection of two cavernous spokes on his left where the dim light revealed the earliest burial niches of the Atreides on Arrakis. "In her tomb, the first niche. You will remove those rings, Moneo, and bring them to the ceremony."

  Moneo stared across the gloomy distance of the crypt. "Lord . . . is it not a desecration to. . ."

  "You forget, Moneo, who lives in me." He spoke then in Chani's voice: "I can do what I want with my water rings!"

  Moneo cowered. "Yes, Lord. I will bring them with me to Tabur Village when..."

  "Tabur Village?" Leto asked in his usual voice. "But I have changed my mind. We will be wed at Tuono Village!"

  Most civilization is based on cowardice. It's so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

  The Stolen Journals

  IDAHO STOOD aghast at his first close glimpse of Tuono Village. That was the home of Fremen?

  The Fish Speaker troop had taken them from the Citadel at daybreak, Idaho and Siona bundled into a large ornithopter, accompanied by two smaller guard ships. And the flight had been slow, almost three hours. They had landed at a flat, round plastone hangar almost a kilometer from the village, separated from it by old dunes locked in shape with plantings of poverty grasses and a few scrubby bushes. As they came down, the wall directly behind the village had seemed to grow taller and taller, the village shrinking beneath such immensity.

  "The Museum Fremen are kept generally uncontaminated by off-planet technology," Nayla had explained as the escort sealed the 'thopters into the low hangar. One of the troop already had been sent trotting off toward Tuono with the announcement of their arrival.

  Siona had remained mostly silent all during the flight, but she had studied Nayla with covert intensity.

  For a time during the march across the morning-lighted dunes, Idaho had tried to imagine that he was back in the old

  days. Sand was visible in the plantings and, in the valleys between dunes, there was parched ground, yellow grass, the sticklike shrubs. Three vultures, their gap-tipped wings spread wide, circled in the vault of sky-"the soaring search," Fremen had called it. Idaho had tried to explain this to Siona walking beside him. You worried about the carrion-eaters only when they began to descend.

  "I have been told about vultures," she said, her voice cold.

  Idaho had noted the perspiration on her upper lip. There was a spicy smell of sweat in the troop pressed close around them.

  His imagination was not equal to the task of defocusing the differences between the past and this time. The issue stillsuits they wore were more for show than for efficient collection of the body's water. No true Fremen would have trusted his life to one of them, not even here, where the air smelled of nearby water. And the Fish Speakers of Nayla's troop did not walk in Fremen silence. They chattered among themselves like children.

  Siona trudged beside him in sullen withdrawal, her attention frequently on the broad muscular back of Nayla, who strode along a few paces ahead of the troop.

  What was between those two women? Idaho wondered. Nayla appeared devoted to Siona, hanging on Siona's every word, obeying every whim Siona uttered . . . except that Nayla would not deviate from the orders which brought them to Tuono Village. Still, Nayla deferred to Siona and called her "Commander." There was something deep between those two, something which aroused awe and fear in Nayla.

  They came at last to a slope which dropped down to the village and the wall behind it. From the air, Tu
ono had been a cluster of glittering rectangles just outside the shadow of the wall. From this close vantage, though, it had been reduced to a cluster of decaying huts made even more pitiful by attempts to decorate the place. Bits of shiny minerals and scraps of metal picked out scroll designs on the building walls. A tattered green banner fluttered from a metal pole atop the largest structure. A fitful breeze brought the smell of garbage and uncovered cesspools to Idaho's nostrils. The central street of the village extended out across the sparsely planted sand toward the troop, ending in a ragged edge of broken paving.

  A robed delegation waited near the building of the green flag, standing there expectantly with the Fish Speaker messenger Nayla had sent on ahead. Idaho counted eight in the delegation, all men in what appeared to be authentic Fremen robes of dark brown. A green headband could be glimpsed beneath the hood on one of the delegation-the Naib, no doubt. Children waited to one side with flowers. Black-hooded women could be seen peering from side-streets in the background. Idaho found the whole scene distressing.

  "Let's get it over with," Siona said.

  Nayla nodded and led the way down the slope onto the street. Siona and Idaho stayed a few paces behind her. The rest of the troop straggled along after them, silent now and peering around with undisguised curiosity.