God Emperor of Dune (49 page)

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Authors: Frank Herbert

Tags: #Science Fiction - General

BOOK: God Emperor of Dune
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“As though repetition could elicit the truth, yes.”
Moneo allowed himself to hope that this might be the whole of his Lord’s concern. “Why do the Duncans always do this, Lord?”
“It was their early training, the Atreides training.”
“But how did that differ from …”
“The Atreides lived in the service of the people they governed. The measure of their government was found in the lives of the governed. Thus, the Duncans always want to know how the people live.”
“He has spent a night in one village, Lord. He has been to some of the towns. He has seen …”
“It’s all in how you interpret the results, Moneo. Evidence is nothing without judgments.”
“I have observed that he judges, Lord.”
“We all do, but the Duncans tend to believe that this universe is hostage to my will. And they know that you cannot do wrong in the name of right.”
“Is that what he says you …”
“It is what
I
say, what all of the Atreides in me say. This universe will not permit it. The things you attempt will not endure if you …”
“But, Lord! You do no wrong!”
“Poor Moneo. You cannot see that I have created a vehicle of injustice.”
Moneo could not speak. He realized that he had been diverted by a seeming return to mildness in the God Emperor. But now, Moneo sensed changes moving in that great body, and at this proximity … Moneo glanced around the crypt’s central chamber, reminding himself of the many deaths which had occurred here and which were enshrined here.
Is it my time?
Leto spoke in a musing tone. “You cannot succeed by taking hostages. That is a form of enslavement. One kind of human cannot own another kind of human. This universe will not permit it.”
The words lay there, simmering in Moneo’s awareness, a terrifying contrast to the rumblings of transformation which he sensed in his Lord.
The Worm comes!
Again, Moneo glanced around the crypt chamber. This place was far worse than the aerie! Sanctuary was too remote.
“Well, Moneo, do you have any response?” Leto asked.
Moneo ventured a whisper: “The Lord’s words enlighten me.” “Enlighten? You are not enlightened!”
Moneo spoke out of desperation. “But I serve my Lord!”
“You claim service to God?”
“Yes, Lord.”
“Who created your religion, Moneo?”
“You did, Lord.”
“That’s a sensible answer.”
“Thank you, Lord.”
“Don’t thank me! Tell me what religious institutions perpetuate!”
Moneo backed away four steps.
“Stand where you are!” Leto ordered.
Trembling all through his body, Moneo shook his head dumbly. At last, he had encountered the question without answer. Failure to answer would precipitate his death. He waited for it, head bowed.
“Then I will tell you, poor servant,” Leto said.
Moneo dared to hope. He lifted his gaze to the God Emperor’s face, noting that the eyes were not glazed … and the hands were not trembling. Perhaps the Worm did not come.
“Religious institutions perpetuate a mortal master-servant relationship,” Leto said. “They create an arena which attracts prideful human power-seekers with all of their nearsighted prejudices!”
Moneo could only nod. Was that a trembling in the God Emperor’s hands? Was the terrible face withdrawing slightly into its cowl?
“The secret revelations of infamy, that is what the Duncans ask after,” Leto said. “The Duncans have too much compassion for their fellows and too sharp a limit on fellowship.”
Moneo had studied holos of Dune’s ancient sandworms, the gigantic mouths full of crysknife teeth around consuming fire. He noted the tumescence of the latent rings on Leto’s tubular surface. Were they more prominent? Would a new mouth open below that cowled face?
“The Duncans know in their hearts,” Leto said, “that I have deliberately ignored the admonition of Mohammed and Moses. Even you know it, Moneo!”
It was an accusation. Moneo started to nod, then shook his head from side to side. He wondered if he dared renew his retreat. Moneo knew from experience that lectures in this tenor did not long continue without the coming of the Worm.
“What might that admonition be?” Leto asked. There was a mocking lightness in his voice.
Moneo allowed himself a faint shrug.
Abruptly, Leto’s voice filled the chamber with a rumbling baritone, an ancient voice which spoke across the centuries: “You are servants unto
God
, not servants unto servants!”
Moneo wrung his hands and cried out: “I
serve
you, Lord!”
“Moneo, Moneo,” Leto said, his voice low and resonant, “a million wrongs cannot give rise to one right. The right is known because it endures.”
Moneo could only stand in trembling silence.
“I had intended Hwi to mate with
you
, Moneo,” Leto said. “Now, it is too late.”
The words took a moment penetrating Moneo’s consciousness. He felt that their meaning was out of any known context.
Hwi? Who was Hwi? Oh, yes—the God Emperor’s Ixian bride-to-be. Mate … with me?
Moneo shook his head.
Leto spoke with infinite sadness: “You, too, shall pass away. Will all your works be as dust forgotten?”
Without any warning, even as he spoke, Leto’s body convulsed in a thrashing roll which heaved him from the cart. The speed of it, the monstrous violence, threw him within centimeters of Moneo, who screamed and fled across the crypt.
“Moneo!”
Leto’s call stopped the majordomo at the entrance to the lift.
“The test, Moneo! I will test Siona tomorrow!”
The realization of what I am occurs in the timeless awareness which does not stimulate nor delude. I create a field without self or center, a field where even death becomes only analogy. I desire no results. I merely permit this field which has no goals nor desires, no perfections nor even visions of achievements. In that field, omnipresent primal awareness is all. It is the light which pours through the windows of my universe.
—THE STOLEN JOURNALS
 
 
 
 
The sun came up, sending its harsh glare across the dunes. Leto felt the sand beneath him as a soft caress. Only his human ears, hearing the abrasive rasp of his heavy body, reported otherwise. It was a sensory conflict which he had learned to accept.
He heard Siona walking behind him, a lightness in her tread, a gentle spilling of sand as she climbed to his level atop a dune.
The longer I endure, the more vulnerable I become
, he thought.
This thought often occurred to him these days when he went into his desert. He peered upward. The sky was cloudless with a blue density which the old days of Dune had never seen.
What was a desert without a cloudless sky? Too bad it could not have Dune’s silvery hue.
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 Ixians 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 find 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 slip-face 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?”

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