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Sand crunched beneath him as he rolled, flexing his body in pure animal enjoyment. He could feel his worm-self being restored, an electric sensation which sent messages of health all through him.
The sun was well above the horizon now, painting a golden line up the side of the tower. There was the smell of bitter dust in the air and an odor of distant spiny plants which had responded to the morning's trace-dew. Gently at first, then more rapidly, he moved out in a wide circle around the tower, thinking about Siona as he went.
There could be no more delays. She had to be tested. Moneo knew this as well as Leto did.
Just that morning, Moneo had said: "Lord, there is terrible violence in her."
"She has the begi
"Cold what, Lord?"
"It's an ancient expression. It means she must be subjected to a complete withdrawal. She must go through a necessity shock."
"Oh... I see."
For once, Leto realized, Moneo did see. Moneo had gone through his own cold-turkey time.
"The young generally are incapable of making hard decisions unless those decisions are associated with immediate violence and the consequent sharp flow of adrenalin," Leto had explained.
Moneo had held himself in reflexive silence, remembering, then: "It is a great peril."
"That's the violence you see in Siona. Even old people can cling to it, but the young wallow in it."
As he circled his tower in the growing light of the day, enjoying the feel of the sand even more as it dried, Leto thought about the conversation. He slowed his passage over the sand. A wind from behind him carried the vented oxygen and a burnt flint smell over his human nostrils. He inhaled deeply, lifting $ his magnified awareness to a new level.
This preliminary day contained a multiple purpose. He thought of the coming encounter much as an ancient bullfighter had thought about the first examination of a horned adversary. Siona possessed her own version of horns, although Moneo would make certain that she brought no physical weapons to this encounter. Leto had to be sure, though, that he knew Siona's every strength and every weakness. And he would have to create special susceptibilities in her wherever possible. She had to be prepared for the test, her psychic muscles blunted by well-planted barbs.
Shortly after noon, his worm-self satiated, Leto returned to the tower, crawled back onto his cart and lifted on suspensors to the very tip of a portal there which opened only at his command. Throughout the rest of the day, he lay there in the aerie, thinking, plotting.
The fluttering wings of an ornithopter whispered on the air just at nightfall to signal Moneo's arrival.
Faithful Moneo.
Leto caused a landing-lip to extrude from his aerie. The 'thopter glided in, its wings cupped. It settled gently onto the lip. Leto stared out through the gathering darkness. Siona emerged and darted in toward him, fearful of the unprotected height. She wore a white robe over a black uniform without insignia. She stole one look backward when she stopped just inside the tower, then she turned her attention to Leto's bulk waiting on the cart almost at the center of the aerie. The 'thopter lifted away and jetted off into the darkness. Leto left the lip extruded, the portal open.
"There is a balcony on the other side of the tower," he said. "We will go there."
"Why?"
Siona's voice carried almost pure suspicion.
"I'm told it's a cool place," Leto said. "And there is indeed a faint sensation of cold on my cheeks when I expose them to the breeze there."
Curiosity brought her closer to him.
Leto closed the portal behind her.
"The night view from the balcony is magnificent," Leto said.
"Why are we here?"
"Because here we will not be overheard."
Leto turned his cart and moved it silently out to the balcony.
The faintest of hidden illumination within the aerie showed her his movement. He heard her follow.
The balcony was a half-ring on the southeast arc of the tower, a lacy railing at chest-height around the perimeter. Siona moved to the rail and swept her gaze around the open land.
Leto sensed the waiting receptivity. Something was to be spoken here for her ears alone. Whatever it was, she would listen and respond from the well of her own motives. Leto looked across her toward the edge of the Sareer where the manmade boundary wall was a low flat line just barely visible in the light of First Moon lifting above the horizon. His amplified vision identified the distant movement of a convoy from O
He could call up a memory-image of the village nestled among the plants which grew in the moist area along the i
There would be nightbirds along the bankment now, Leto thought, creatures which would live in sunlight on another world. Dune had worked its evolutionary magic on them and they still lived at the mercies of the Sareer. Leto had seen the birds draw dumb shadows across the water and, when they dipped to drink, there were ripples which the river took away.
Even at this distance, Leto sensed a power in that faraway water, something forceful out of his past which moved away from him like the current slipping southward into the reaches of farm and forest. The water searched through rolling hills, along the margins of an abundant plant life which had replaced all of Dune's desert except for this one last place, this Sareer, this sanctuary of the past.
Leto recalled the growling thrust of Ixian machines which had inflicted that watercourse upon the landscape. It seemed such a short time ago, little more than three thousand years.
Siona stirred and looked back at him, but Leto remained silent, his attention fixed beyond her. A pale amber light shone above the horizon, reflection of a town on faraway clouds. From its direction and distance, Leto knew it to be the town of Wallport transplanted far into a warmer clime of the south from its once-austere location in the cold, low-slanted light of the north. The glow of the town was like a window into his past. He felt the beam of it striking through to his breast, straight through the thick and scaled membrane which had replaced his human skin. am vulnerable, he thought.
Yet, he knew himself to be the master of this place. And the planet was the master of him.
I am part of it.
He devoured the soil directly, rejecting only the water. His human mouth and lungs had been relegated to breathing just enough to sustain a remnant humanity... and talking.
Leto spoke to Siona's back: "I like to talk and I dread the day when I no longer will be able to engage in conversations."
With a certain diffidence, she turned and stared at him in the moonlight, quite obvious distaste in her expression.
"I agree that I am a monster in many human eyes," he said.
"Why am I here?"
Directly to the point! She would not deviate. Most of the Atreides had been that way, he thought. It was a characteristic which he hoped to maintain in the breeding of them. It spoke of a strong i