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"That was not what you intended, was it?" Idaho asked.
She shook her head and he saw that she was close to tears. "Why do you hate him so much?" he asked.
"We have no lives of our own!"
Idaho looked down at the village. "Are there many villages like this one?"
"This is the shape of the Worm's Empire!"
"What's wrong with it?"
"Nothing-if that's all you want."
"You're saying that this is all he allows?"
"This, a few market cities... O
"And I repeat: What's wrong with that?"
"It's a prison!"
"Then leave it."
"Where'? How? You think we can just get on a Guild ship and go anywhere else, anywhere we want'?" She pointed down toward Goygoa where the 'thopter could be seen off to one side, the Fish Speakers seated on the grass nearby. "Our jailers won't let us leave!"
"They leave," Idaho said. "They go anywhere they want." "Anywhere the Worm sends them!"
She pressed her face against her knees and spoke, her voice muffled. "What was it like in the old days?"
"It was different, often very dangerous." He looked around at the walls which set off pastureland, gardens and orchards. "Here on Dune, there were no imaginary lines to show the limits of ownership on the land. It was all the Dukedom of the Atreides."
"Except for the Fremen."
"Yes. But they knew where they belonged-on this side of a particular escarpment... or beyond where the pan turns white against the sand."
"They could go wherever they wanted!"
"With some limits."
"Some of us long for the desert," she said.
"You have the Sareer."
She lifted her head to glare at him. "That little thing!"
"Fifteen hundred kilometers by five hundred-not so little."
Siona got to her feet. "Have you asked the Worm why he confines us this way?"
"Leto's Peace, the Golden Path to insure our survival. That's what he says."
"Do you know what he told my father? I spied on them when I was a child. I heard him."
"What did he say'?"
"He said he denies us most crises, to limit our forming forces. He said: `People can be sustained by affliction. but I am the affliction now. Gods can become afflictions.' Those were his words, Duncan. The Worm is a sickness!"
Idaho did not doubt the accuracy of her recital, but the words failed to stir him. He thought instead of the Corrino he had been ordered to kill. Affliction. The Corrino, descendant of a Family which once had ruled this Empire, had been revealed as a softly fat middle-aged man who hungered after power and conspired for spice. Idaho had ordered a Fish Speaker to kill him, an act which had aroused Moneo to a fit of intense questioning.
"Why didn't you kill him yourself?"
"I wanted to see how the Fish Speakers performed."
"And your judgment of their performance?"
"Efficient."
But the death of the Corrino had inflicted Idaho with a sense of unreality. A fat little man lying in a pool of his own blood, an undistinguished shadow among the night shadows of a plastone street. It was unreal. Idaho could remember Muad'Dib saying: "The mind imposes this framework which it calls `reality.' That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report." What reality moved the Lord Leto'?
Idaho looked at Siona standing against the orchard background and the green hills of Goygoa. "Let's go down to the village and find our quarters. I'd like to be alone."
"The Fish Speakers will put us in the same quarters."
"With them?"
"No, just the two of us together. The reason's simple enough. The Worm wants me to breed with the great Duncan Idaho."
"I pick my own partners," Idaho growled.
"I'm sure one of our Fish Speakers would be delighted," Siona said. She whirled away from him and set off down the hill.
Idaho watched her for a moment, the lithe young body swaying like the limbs of the orchard trees in the wind.
"I'm not his stud," Idaho muttered. "That's one thing he'll have to understand."
***
As each day passes, you become increasingly unreal, more alien and remote from what I find myself to be on that new day. I am the only reality and, as you differ from me, you lose reality. The more curious I become, the less curious are those who worship me. Religion suppresses curiosity. What I do subtracts from the worshipper. Thus it is that eventually I will do nothing, giving it all back to frightened people who will,find themselves on that day alone and forced to act for themselves.
IT was a sound like no other, the sound of a waiting mob. and it came down the long tu
Inmeir and the others of his Fish Speaker escort had brought Idaho here in the first hour after dawn, coming down to the plaza of O
The new escort, vibrant with repressed emotion, had taken him into a region deep beneath the plaza, a place not on any of the city charts Idaho had studied. It was a maze-first one direction and then another through corridors wide enough and high enough to accommodate the Royal Cart. Idaho lost track of directions and fell to reflecting on the preceding night.
The sleeping quarters in Goygoa, although Spartan and small, had been comfortable-two cots to a room, each room a box with white-washed walls, a single window and a single door. The rooms were strung along a corridor in a building designated as Goygoa's "Guest House."
And Siona had been right. Without asking if it suited him, Idaho had been quartered with her, Inmeir acting as though this were an accepted thing.
When the door closed on them, Siona said: "If you touch me, I will try to kill you."
It was uttered with such dry sincerity that Idaho almost laughed. "I would prefer privacy," he said. "Consider yourself alone."
He had slept with a light wariness, remembering dangerous nights in the Atreides service, the readiness for combat. The room was seldom truly dark-moonlight coming through the curtained window, even starlight reflecting from the chalk-white walls. He had found himself nervously sensitive to Siona, to the smell of her, the stirrings, her breathing. Several times he had come fully awake to listen, aware on two of those occasions that she, too, was listening.
Morning and the flight to O
Siona spoke to him only once, leaning out of the 'thopter as he left it in the plaza.
"It would not offend me to be your friend," she said.
Such a curious way of putting it. He had felt vaguely embarrassed. "Yes... well, certainly."
The new escort had led him away then, coming at last to a terminal in the maze. Leto awaited him there on the Royal Cart. The meeting place was a wide spot in a corridor which stretched off into the converging distance on Idaho's right. The walls were dark brown streaked with golden lines which glittered in the yellow light of glowglobes. The escort took up positions behind the cart, moving smartly and leaving Idaho to stand confronting Leto's cowled face.