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"Lord, the Tleilaxu do not have a successor for him ready to deliver."
"And we need this one?"
"You said it yourself, Lord. It is a paradox which I do not understand, but you did say it."
"How long until there could be a replacement?"
"At least a year, Lord. Shall I inquire as to a specific date?"
"Do it today."
"He may hear about it, Lord. The previous one did."
"I do not want it to happen this way, Moneo!"
"I know, Lord."
"And I dare not speak of this to Noree," Leto said. "The Duncan is not for her. Yet, I ca
Moneo stood in awed silence.
"Can't you see this?" Leto demanded. "Moneo, help me."
"I see that it is different with Noree," Moneo said. "But I do not know what to do."
"What is different?" Leto's voice had a penetrating quality which cut right through Moneo.
"I mean your attitude toward her, Lord. It is different from anything I have ever seen in you."
Moneo noted then the first signs-twitching in the God Emperor's hands, the begi
"Lord," Moneo said, "I have read the accounts and heard your own words about your marriage to your sister, Ghanima."
"If only she were with me now," Leto said.
"She was never your mate, Lord."
"What're you suggesting?" Leto demanded.
The twitching of Leto's hands had become a- spasmodic vibration.
"She was... I mean, Lord, that Ghanima was Harq al-Ada's mate."
"Of course she was! All of you Atreides are descended from them!"
"Is there something you have not told me, Lord? Is it possible... that is, with Hwi Noree... could you mate?"
Leto's hands shook so strongly Moneo wondered that their owner did not know it. The glazing of the great blue eyes deepened.
Moneo backed another step toward the door to the stairs leading down from this deadly place.
"Do not question me about possibilities," Leto said, and his voice was hideously distant, gone somewhere into the layers of his past.
"Never again, Lord," Moneo said. He bowed himself back to only a single pace from the door. "I will speak to Noree, Lord... and to the Duncan."
"Do what you can." Leto's voice was far away in those interior chambers which only he could enter.
Softly, Moneo let himself out of the door. He closed it behind him and placed his back against it, trembling. Ahhh, that was the closest ever.
And the paradox remained. Where did it point? What was the meaning of the God Emperor's odd and painful decisions? What had brought The Worm Who Is God?
A thumping sounded from within Leto's aerie, a heavy beating against stone. Moneo dared not open the door to investigate. He pushed himself away from the surface which reflected that dreadful thumping -and went down the stairs, moving cautiously, not drawing an easy breath until he reached ground level and the Fish Speaker guard there.
"Is he disturbed?" she asked, looking up the stairs.
Moneo nodded. They both could hear the thumping quite plainly.
"What disturbs him?" the guard asked.
"He is God and we are mortal," Moneo said. This was an answer which usually satisfied Fish Speakers, but new forces were at work now.
She looked directly at him and Moneo saw the killer training close to the surface of her soft features. She was a relatively young woman with auburn hair and a face usually dominated by a turned-up nose and full lips, but now her eyes were hard and demanding. Only a fool would turn his back on those eyes.
"I did not disturb him," Moneo said.
"Of course not," she agreed. Her look softened slightly.
"But I would like to know who or what did."
"I think he is impatient for his marriage," Moneo said. "I think that's all it is."
"Then hurry the day!" she said.
"That's what I'm about," Moneo said. He turned and hurried away down the long hall to his own area of the Citadel. Gods! The Fish Speakers were becoming as dangerous as the God Emperor.
That stupid Duncan! He puts us all in peril. And Hwi Noree! What's to be done about her?
***
The pattern of monarchies and similar systems has a message of value for all political forms. My memories assure me that governments of any kind could profit from this message. Governments can be useful to the governed only so long as inherent tendencies toward tyra
Leto PREPARED with patient care for his first private meeting with Siona since her childhood banishment to the Fish Speaker schools in the Festival City. He told Moneo that he would see her at the Little Citadel, a vantage tower he had built in the central Sareer. The site had been chosen to provide views of old and new and places between. There were no roads to the Little Citadel. Visitors arrived by 'thopter. Leto went there as though by magic.
With his own hands, in the early days of his ascendancy, Leto has used an Ixian machine to dig a secret tu
One of his delights was to go out alone onto the sand. No cart. Only his pre-worm body to carry him. The sand felt luxuriously sensuous against him. The heat of his passage through the dunes in the day's first light sent up a wake of steam which required him to keep moving. He brought himself to a stop only when he found a relatively dry pocket about five kilometers out. He lay there at the center of an uncomfortable dampness from the trace-dew, his body just outside the long shadow of the tower which stretched eastward from him across the dunes.
From a distance, the three thousand meters of the tower could be seen as an impossible needle stabbing the sky. Only the inspired blend of Leto's commands and Ixian imagination made the structure conceivable. One hundred and fifty meters in diameter, the tower sat on a foundation which plunged as deeply under the sand as it climbed above. The magic of plasteel and superlight alloys kept it supple in the wind and resistant to sandblast abrasions.
Leto enjoyed the place so much that he rationed his visits, making up a long list of personal rules which had to be met. The rules added up to "Great Necessity."
For a few moments while he lay there, he could shed the loads of the Golden Path. Moneo, good and reliable Moneo, would see that Siona arrived promptly, just at nightfall. Leto had a full day in which to relax and think, to play and pretend that he possessed no cares, to drink up the raw sustenance of the earth in a feeding frenzy which he could never indulge in at O