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There was a long silence, then Siona's voice: "Don't listen to him! He was mad!"
"Of course," Leto said. "Madness in method, that is genius."
"Siona, do you understand this?" Idaho asked. How plaintive, the ghola voice.
"She understands," Leto said. "It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate. That's the way it always is with humans. Moneo understood at last."
"I wish he'd hurry up and die!" Siona said.
"I am the divided god and you would make me whole," Leto said. "Duncan? I think of all my Duncans I approve of you the most."
"Approve?" Some of the rage returned to Idaho's voice.
"There's magic in my approval," Leto said. "Anything's possible in a magic universe. Your life has been dominated by the Oracle's fatality, not mine. Now, you see the mysterious caprices and you would ask me to dispel this? I wished only to increase it." The others within Leto began to reassert themselves. Without the solidarity of the colonial group to support his identity, he began to lose his place among them. They started speaking the language of the constant "IF." "If you had only... If we had but..." He wanted to shout them into silence.
"Only fools prefer the past!"
Leto did not know if he truly shouted or only thought it. The response was a momentary i
"Do not fear the lxians," he said, and he heard his own voice as a fading whisper. "They can make the machines, but they no longer can make arafel. I know. I was there."
He fell silent, gathering his strength, but he felt the energy flowing from him even as he tried to hold it. Once more, the clamor arose within him-voices pleading and shouting.
"Stop that foolishness!" he cried, or thought he cried.
Idaho and Siona heard only a gasping hiss.
Presently, Siona said: "I think he's dead."
"And everyone thought he was immortal," Idaho said.
"Do you know what the Oral History says?" Siona asked. "If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal."
"That sounds like him," Idaho accused.
"I think it was," she said.
"What did he mean about your descendants... hiding, not finding them?" Idaho asked.
"He created a new kind of mimesis," she said, "a new biological imitation. He knew he had succeeded. He could not see me in his futures."
"What are you?" Idaho demanded.
"I'm the new Atreides."
"Atreides!" It was a curse in Idaho's voice.
Siona stared down at the disintegrating hulk which once had been Leto Atreides II... and something else. The something else was sloughing away in faint wisps of blue smoke where the smell of melange was strongest. Puddles of blue liquid formed in the rocks beneath his melting bulk. Only faint vague shapes which might once have been human remained-a collapsed foaming pinkness, a bit of red-streaked bone which could have held the forms of cheeks and brow...
Siona said: "I am different, but still I am what he was."
Idaho spoke in a hushed whisper: "The ancestors, all of..."
"The multitude is there but I walk silently among them and no one sees me. The old images are gone and only the essence remains to light his Golden Path."
She turned and took Idaho's cold hand in hers. Carefully, she led him out of the cave into the light where the rope dangled invitingly from the barrier Wall's top, from the place where the frightened Museum Fremen waited.
Poor material with which to shape a new universe, she thought, but they would have to serve. Idaho would require gentle seduction, a care within which love might appear.
When she looked down the river to where the flow emerged from its man-made chasm to spread across the green lands, she saw a wind from the south driving dark clouds toward her.
Idaho withdrew his hand from hers, but he appeared calmer. "Weather control is increasingly unstable," he said. "Moneo thought it was the Guild's doing."
"My father was seldom mistaken about such things," she said. "You will have to look into that."
Idaho experienced a sudden memory of the silvery shapes of sandtrout darting away from Leto's body in the river.
"I heard the Worm," Siona said. "The Fish Speakers will follow you, not me."
Again, Idaho sensed the temptation from the ritual of Siaynoq. "We will see," he said. He turned and looked at Siona. "What did he mean when he said the lxians ca
"You haven't read all the journals," she said. "I'll show you when we return to Tuono."
"But what does it mean - arafel?"
"That's the cloud-darkness of holy judgment. It's from an old story. You'll find it all in my journals."
***
Excerpt from the Hadi Benotto secret summation on the discoveries at Dar-es-Balat:
Herewith THE minority report. We will, of course, comply with the majority decision to apply a careful screening, editing and censorship to the journals from Dar-es-Balat, but our arguments must be heard. We recognize the interest of Holy Church in these matters and the political dangers have not escaped our notice. We share a desire with the Church that Rakis and the Holy Reservation of the Divided God not become "an attraction for gawking tourists."
However, now that all of the journals are in our hands, authenticated and translated, the clear shape of the Atreides Design emerges. As a woman trained by the Bene Gesserit to understand the ways of our ancestors, I have a natural desire to share the pattern we have exposed which is so much more than Dune to Arrakis to Dune, thence to Rakis.
The interests of history and science must be served. The journals throw a valuable new light onto that accumulation of personal recollections and biographies from the Duncan Days, the Guard Bible. We ca
We of the Minority must remind the political censors that the poor sandworms in their Rakian Reservation ca
We do not want to leave. We are held here by those pearls in the sand. We are fascinated by the Church's use of the pearl as "the sun of understanding." Surely, no reasoning human can escape the journals' revelations in this regard. The admittedly fugitive but vital uses of archeology must have their day! Just as the primitive machine with which Leto I concealed his journals can only teach us about the evolution of our machines, just so, that ancient awareness must be allowed to speak to us. It would be a crime against both historical accuracy and science for us to abandon our attempts at communication with those "pearls of awareness" which the journals have located. Is Leto II lost in his endless dream or could he be reawakened to our times, brought to full consciousness as a storehouse of historical accuracy? How can Holy Church fear this truth?