The morning sun was hot on Idaho's back. He could hear Siona's efforts to reach the relatively simple support position of a narrow ledge far below him. The position was virtually useless to Idaho, but it had been the argument which had brought Siona finally into agreement that they should attempt this climb.
They.
She had objected that he might try it alone.
Nayla, three of her Fish Speaker aides, Garun and three chosen from his Museum Fremen waited on the sand at the foot of the barrier Wall which enclosed the Sareer.
Idaho did not think about the Wall's height. He thought only about where he would next put a hand or a foot. He thought about the coil of light rope around his shoulders. That rope was the tallness of this Wall. He had measured it out on the ground, triangulating across the sand, not counting his steps. When the rope was long enough it was long enough. The Wall was as high as the rope was long. Any other way of thinking could only dull his mind.
Feeling for handholds which he could not see, Idaho groped his way up the sheer face... well, not quite sheer. Wind and sand and even some rain, the forces of cold and heat, had been at their erosive work here for more than three thousand years. For one full day, Idaho had sat on the sand below the Wall and he had studied what had been accomplished by Time. He had fixed certain patterns in his mind-a slanting shadow, a thin line, a crumbling bulge, a tiny lip of rock here and another over there.
His fingers wriggled upward into a sharp crack. He tested his weight gently on the support. Yes. Briefly, he rested, pressing his face against warm rock, not looking up or down. He was simply here. Everything was a matter of the pacing. His shoulders must not be allowed to tire too soon. Weight must be adjusted between feet and arms. Fingers took inevitable damage, but while bone and tendons held, the skin could be ignored.
Once more, he crept upward. A bit of rock broke away from his hand; dust and shards fell across his right cheek, but he did not even feel it. Every bit of his awareness concentrated on the groping hand, the balance of his feet on the tiniest of protrusions. He was a mote, a particle which defied gravity... a finger-hold here, a toehold there, clinging to the rock surface at times by the sheer power of his will.
Nine makeshift pitons bulged one of his pockets, but he resisted using them. The equally makeshift hammer dangled from his belt on a short cord whose knot his fingers had memorized.
Nayla had been difficult. She would not give up her lasgun. She had, however, obeyed Siona's direct order to accompany them. A strange woman... strangely obedient.
"Have you not sworn to obey me?" Siona had demanded.
Nayla's reluctance had vanished.
Later, Siona had said: "She always obeys my direct orders."
"Then we may not have to kill her," Idaho had said.
"I would rather not attempt it. I don't think you have even the faintest idea of her strength and quickness."
Garun, the Museum Fremen who dreamed of becoming a "true Naib in the old fashion," had set the stage for this climb by answering Idaho's question: "How will the God Emperor come to Tuono?"
"In the same way he chose for a visit during my great-grandfather's time."
"And that was?" Siona had prompted him.
They had been sitting in the dusty shadows outside the guest house, sheltering from the afternoon sun on the day of the announcement that the Lord Leto would be wed in Tuono. A semicircle of Garun's aides squatted around the doorstep where Siona and Idaho sat with Garun. Two Fish Speakers lounged nearby, listening. Nayla was due to arrive momentarily.
Garun pointed to the high Wall behind the village, its rim glistening distant gold in the sunlight. "The Royal Road runs there and the God Emperor has a device which lowers him gently from the heights."
"It's built into his cart," Idaho said.
"Suspensors," Siona agreed. "I've seen them."
"My great-grandfather said they came along the Royal Road, a great troop of them. The God Emperor glided down to our village square on his device. The others came down on ropes."
Idaho spoke thoughtfully: "Ropes."
"Why did they come?" Siona asked.
"To affirm that the God Emperor had not forgotten his Fremen, so my great-grandfather said. It was a great honor, but not as great as this wedding."
Idaho arose while Garun was still talking. There was a clear view of the high Wall from nearby-straight down the central street, a view from the base in the sand to the top in the sunlight. Idaho strode to the corner of the guest house out into the central street. He stopped there, turned and looked at the Wall. The first look told why everyone said it was not possible to climb that face. Even then, he resisted thinking about a measurement of the height. It could be five hundred meters or five thousand. The important thing lay in what a more careful study revealed tiny transverse cracks, broken places, even a narrow ledge about twenty meters above the drifting sand at the bottom... and another ledge about two-thirds of the way up the face.
He knew that an unconscious part of him, an ancient and dependable part, was making the necessary measurements, scaling them to his own body-so many Duncan-lengths to that place, a handgrip here, another there. His own hands. He could already feel himself climbing.
Siona's voice came from near his right shoulder as he stood in that first examination. "What're you doing?" She had come up soundlessly, looking now where he looked.
"I can climb that Wall," Idaho said. "If I carried a light rope, I could pull up a heavier rope. The rest of you could climb it easily then."
Garun joined them in time to hear this. "Why would you climb the Wall, Duncan Idaho?"
Siona answered for him, smiling at Garun. "To provide a suitable greeting for the God Emperor."
This had been before her doubts, before her own eyes and the ignorance of such a climb, had begun to erode that first confidence.
With that first elation, Idaho asked: "How wide is the Royal Road up there?"
"I have never seen it," Garun said. "But I am told it is very wide. A great troop can march abreast along it, so they say. And there are bridges, places to view the river and... and... oh, it is a marvel."
"Why have you never gone up there to see it yourself?" Idaho asked.
Garun merely shrugged and pointed at the Wall.
Nayla arrived then and the argument about the climb had begun. Idaho thought about that argument as he climbed. How strange, the relationship between Nayla and Siona! They were like two conspirators... yet not conspirators. Siona commanded and Nayla obeyed. But Nayla was a Fish Speaker, the Friend who was trusted by Leto to make a first examination of the new ghola. She admitted that she had been in the Royal Constabulary since childhood. Such strength in her! Given that strength, there was something awesome about the way she bowed to Siona's will. It was as though Nayla listened for secret voices which told her what to do. Then she obeyed.
Idaho groped upward for another handhold. His fingers wriggled along the rock, up and outward to the right, finding at last an unseen crack where they might enter. His memory provided the natural line of ascent, but only his body could learn the way by following that line. His left foot found a toehold... up... up... slowly, testing. Left hand up now... no crack but a ledge. His eyes, then his chin lifted over the high ledge he had seen from below. He elbowed his way onto it, rolled over and rested, looking only outward, not up or down. It was a sand horizon out there, a breeze with dust in it limiting the view. He had seen many such horizons in the Dune days.
Presently, he turned to face the Wall, lifted himself onto his knees, hands groping upward, and he resumed the climb. The picture of the Wall remained in his mind as he had seen it from below. He had only to close his eyes and the pattern lay there, fixed the way he had learned to do it as a child hiding from Harkonnen slave raiders. Fingertips found a crack where they could be wedged. He clawed his way upward.
Watching from below, Nayla experienced a growing affinity for the climber. Idaho had been reduced by distance to such a small and lonely
shape upon the Wall. He must know what it was like to be alone with momentous decisions. l would like to have his child, she thought. A child from both of us would be strong and resourceful. What is it that God wants from a child of Siona and this man?
Nayla had awakened before dawn and had walked out to the top of a low dune at the village edge to think about this thing that Idaho proposed. It had been a lime dawn with a familiar winding cloth of dust in the distance, then steel day and the baleful immensity of the Sareer. She knew then that these matters certainly had been anticipated by God. What could be hidden from God? Nothing could be hidden, not even the remote figure of Duncan Idaho groping for a pathway up to the edge of heaven.
As she watched Idaho climb, Nayla's mind played a trick on her, tipping the wall to the horizontal. Idaho became a child crawling across a broken surface. How small he looked... and growing smaller.
An aide offered Nayla water which she drank. The water brought the Wall back into its true perspective.
Siona crouched on the first ledge, leaning out to peer up- ward. "If you fall, I will try it," Siona had promised Idaho. Nayla had thought it a strange promise. Why would both of them want to try the impossible?
Idaho had failed to dissuade Siona from the impossible promise.
It is fate, Nayla thought. It is God's will.
They were the same thing.
A bit of rock fell from where Idaho clutched at it. That had happened several times. Nayla watched the falling rock. It took a long time coming down, bounding and rebounding from the Wall's face, demonstrating that the eye did not report truthfully when it said the Wall was sheer.
He will succeed or he will not,- Nayla thought. Whatever happens, it is God's will.
She could feel her heart hammering, though. Idaho's venture was like sex, she thought. It was not passively erotic, but akin to rare magic in the way it seized her. She had to keep reminding herself that Idaho was not for her.
He is for Siona. If he survives.
And if he failed, then Siona would try. Siona would succeed or she would not. Nayla wondered, though, if she might experience an orgasm should Idaho reach the top. He was so close to it now.
Idaho took several deep breaths after dislodging the rock. It was a bad moment and he took the time to recover, clinging to a three-point hold on the Wall. Almost of its own accord, his free hand groped upward once more, wriggling past the rotten place into another slender crack. Slowly, he shifted his weight onto that hand. Slowly... slowly. His left knee felt the place where a toehold could be achieved. He lifted his foot to that place, tested it. Memory told him the top was near, but he pushed the memory aside. There was only the climb and the knowledge that Leto would arrive tomorrow.
Leto and Hwi.
He could not think about that, either. But it would not go away. The top... Hwi... Leto... tomorrow...
Every thought fed his desperation, forced him into the immediate remembrance of the climbs of his childhood. The more he remembered consciously, the more his abilities were blocked. He was forced to pause, breathing deeply in the attempt to center himself, to go back to the natural ways of his past.
But were those ways natural?
There was a blockage in his mind. He could sense intrusions, a finality... the fatality of what might have been and now would never be.
Leto would arrive up there tomorrow.
Idaho felt perspiration run down his face around the place where he pressed a cheek against the rock.
Leto. will defeat you, Leto. I will defeat you for myself, not for Hwi, but only for myself.
A sensation of cleansing began to spread through him. It was like the thing which had happened in the night while he prepared himself mentally for this climb. Siona had sensed his sleeplessness. She had begun to talk to him, telling him the smallest details of her desperate run through the Forbidden Forest and her oath at the edge of the river.
"Now I have given an oath to command his Fish Speakers," she said. "I will honor that oath, but I hope it will not happen in the way he wants."
"What does he want?" Idaho asked.
"He has many motives and I cannot see them all. Who could possibly understand him? I only know that I will never forgive him."
This memory brought Idaho back to the sensation of the Wall's rock against his cheek. His perspiration had dried in the light breeze and he felt chilled. But he had found his center.
Never forgive.
Idaho felt the ghosts of all his other selves, the gholas who had died in Leto's service. Could he believe Siona's suspicions? Yes. Leto was capable of killing with his own body, his own hands. The rumor which Siona recounted had a feeling of truth in it. And Siona, too, was Atreides. Leto had become something else... no longer Atreides, not even human. He had become not so much a living creature as a brute fact of nature, opaque and impenetrable, all of his experiences sealed off within him. And Siona opposed him. The real Atreides turned away from him.
As I do.
A brute fact of nature, nothing more. Just like this Wall.
Idaho's right hand groped upward and found a sharp ledge. He could feel nothing above the ledge and tried to remember a wide crack at this place in the pattern. He could not dare to allow himself into the belief that he had reached the top... not
yet. The sharp edge cut into his fingers as he put his weight on it. He brought his left hand up to that level, found a purchase and pulled himself slowly upward. His eyes reached the level of his hands. He stared across a flat space which reached outward... outward into blue sky. The surface where his hands clutched showed ancient weather cracks. He crawled his fingers across that surface, one hand at a time, seeking out the cracks, dragging his chest up... his waist... his hips. He rolled then, twisting and crawling until the Wall was far behind him. Only then did he stand and tell himself what his senses reported.
The top. And he had not required pitons or hammer.
A faint sound reached him. Cheering?
He walked back to the edge and looked down, waving to them. Yes, they were cheering. Turning back, he strode to the center of the roadway, letting elation still the trembling of his muscles, soothe the aching of his shoulders. Slowly, he turned full circle, examining the top while he let his memories at last estimate the height of that climb.
Nine hundred meters... at least that.
The Royal Roadway interested him. It was not like what he had seen on the way to Onn. It was wide, wide... at least five hundred meters. The roadbed was a smooth, unbroken gray with its edge some one hundred meters from each lip of the Wall. Rock pillars at man height marked the road's edge, stretching away like sentinels along the path Leto would use.
Idaho walked to the far side of the Wall opposite the Sareer and peered down. Far away in the depths, a hurtling green flow of river battered itself into foam against buttress rocks. He looked to the right. Leto would come from there. Road and Wall curved gently to the right, the curve beginning about three hundred meters from the place where Idaho stood. Idaho returned to the road and walked along its edge, following the curve until it made a returning "S" and narrowed, sloping gently downward. He stopped and looked at what was revealed for him, seeing the new pattern take shape.
About three kilometers away down the gentle slope, the roadway narrowed and crossed the river gorge on a bridge whose faery trusses appeared insubstantial and toy like at this distance. Idaho remembered a similar bridge on the road to Onn, the substantial feel of it beneath his feet. He trusted his memory, thinking about bridges as a military leader was forced to think about them-passages or traps.
Moving out to his left, he looked down and outward to
another high Wall at the far anchor of the faery bridge. The road continued there, turning gently until it was a line running straight northward. There were two Walls along there and the river between them. The river glided in a man-made chasm, its moisture confined and channeled into a northward wind drift while the water itself flowed southward.
Ida
ho ignored the river then. It was there and it would be there tomorrow. He fixed his attention on the bridge, letting his military training examine it. He nodded once to himself before turning back the way he had come, lifting the light rope from his shoulders as he walked.
It was only when she saw the rope come snaking down that Nayla had her orgasm.
***
What am I eliminating? The bourgeois infatuation with peaceful conservation of the past. This is a binding force, a thing which holds humankind into one vulnerable unit in spite of illusionary separations across parsecs of space. If I can find the scattered bits, others can find them. When you are together, you can share a common catastrophe. You can be exterminated together. Thus, I demonstrate the terrible danger of a gliding, passionless mediocrity, a movement without ambitions or aims. I show you that entire civilizations can do this thing. I give you eons of life which slips gently toward death without fuss or stirring, without even asking 'Why?' I show you the false happiness and the shadow-catastrophe called Leto, the God Emperor. Now, will you learn the real happiness?
- The Stolen Journals
HAVING SPENT the night with only one brief catnap, Leto was awake when Moneo emerged from the guest house at dawn. The Royal Cart had been parked almost in the center of a three-sided courtyard. The cart's cover had been set on one-way opaque, concealing its occupant, and was tightly sealed against moisture. Leto could hear the faint stirring of the fans which pulsed his air through a drying cycle.
Moneo's feet scratched on the courtyard's cobbles as he approached the cart. Dawn light edged the guest house roof with orange above the majordomo.
Leto opened the cart's cover as Moneo stopped in front of him. There was a yeasting dirt smell to the air and the accumulation of moisture in the breeze was painful.
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