God Emperor of Dune (50 page)

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Authors: Frank Herbert

Tags: #Science Fiction - General

BOOK: God Emperor of Dune
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Leto took a moment composing his reply. It always astonished him how a desert provoked thoughts of religion.
“You dare ask me if I have a personal religion?” he demanded.
Betraying no surface sign of the fears he knew she felt, Siona turned and stared down at him. Audacity was always an Atreides hallmark, he reminded himself.
When she didn’t answer, he said: “You are an Atreides for sure.”
“Is that your answer?” she asked.
“What is it you really want to know, Siona?”
“What
you
believe!”
“Ho! You ask after my faith. Well, now—I believe that something cannot emerge from nothing without divine intervention.”
His answer puzzled her. “How is that an …”
“Natura non facit saltus,”
he said.
She shook her head, not understanding the ancient allusion which had sprung to his lips. Leto translated:
“Nature makes no leaps.”
“What language was that?” she asked.
“A language no longer spoken anywhere else in my universe.”
“Why did you use it then?”
“To prod your ancient memories.”
“I don’t have any! I just need to know why you brought me here.”
“To give you a taste of your past. Come down here and climb onto my back.” She hesitated at first, then seeing the futility of defiance, slid down the dune and clambered onto his back.
Leto waited until she was kneeling atop him. It was not the same as the old times he knew. She had no Maker hooks and could not stand on his back. He lifted his front segments slightly off the surface.
“Why am I doing this?” she asked. Her tone said she felt silly up there.
“I want you to taste the way our people once moved proudly across this land, high atop the back of a giant sandworm.”
He began to glide along the dune just below the crest. Siona had seen holos. She knew this experience intellectually, but the pulse of reality had a different beat and he knew she would resonate to it.
Ahhh, Siona,
he thought,
you do not even begin to suspect how I will test you.
Leto steeled himself then.
I must have no pity. If she dies, she dies. If any of them dies, that is a required event, no more.
And he had to remind himself that this applied even to Hwi Noree. It was just that
all
of them could not die.
He sensed it when Siona began to enjoy the sensation of riding on his back. He felt a faint shift in her weight as she eased back onto her legs to lift her head.
He drove outward then along a curving
barracan
, joining Siona in enjoyment of the old sensations. Leto could just glimpse the remnant hills at the horizon ahead of him. They were like a seed from the past waiting there, a reminder of the self-sustaining and expanding force which operated in a desert. He could forget for a moment that on this planet where only a small fraction of the surface remained desert, the Sareer’s dynamism existed in a precarious environment.
The illusion of the past was here, though. He felt it as he moved. Fantasy, of course, he told himself, a vanishing fantasy as long as his enforced tranquility continued. Even the sweeping
barracan
which he traversed now was not as great as the ones of the past. None of the dunes were that great.
This whole
maintained
desert struck him suddenly as ridiculous. He almost stopped on a pebbled surface between the dunes, continuing but more slowly as he tried to conjure up the necessities which kept the whole system working. He imagined the planet’s rotation setting up great air currents which shifted cold and heated air to new regions in enormous volume—everything monitored and ruled by those tiny satellites with their Ixian instruments and heat-focusing dishes. If the high monitors
saw
anything, they saw the Sareer partly as a “relief desert” with both physical and cold-air walls girdling it. This tended to create ice at the edges and required even more climatic adjustments.
It was not easy and Leto forgave the occasional mistakes for that reason.
As he moved once more out onto dunes, he lost that sense of delicate balance, put aside memories of the pebbly wastelands outside the central sands, and gave himself up to enjoyment of his “petrified ocean” with its frozen and apparently immovable waves. He turned southward, parallel to the remnant hills.
He knew that most people were offended by his infatuation with desert. They were uneasy and turned away. Siona, however, could not turn away. Everywhere she looked, the desert demanded recognition. She rode silently on his back, but he knew her eyes were full. And the old-old memories were beginning to churn.
He came within three hours to a region of cylindrical whaleback dunes, some of them more than one hundred and fifty kilometers long at an angle to the prevailing wind. Beyond them lay a rocky corridor between dunes and into a region of star dunes almost four hundred meters high. Finally, they entered the braided dunes of the central erg where the general high pressure and electrically charged air gave his spirits a lift. He knew the same magic would be working on Siona.
“Here is where the songs of the Long Trek originated,” he said. “They are perfectly preserved in the Oral History.”
She did not answer, but he knew she heard.
Leto slowed his pace and began to speak to Siona, telling her about their Fremen past. He sensed the quickening of her interest. She even asked questions occasionally, but he could also feel her fears building. Even the base of his Little Citadel was no longer visible here. She could recognize nothing man-made. And she would think he engaged now in small talk, unimportant things to put off something portentous.
“Equality between our men and women originated here,” he said.
“Your Fish Speakers deny that men and women are equal,” she said.
Her voice, full of questioning disbelief, was a better locator than the sensation of her crouched on his back. Leto stopped at the intersection of two braided dunes and let the venting of his heat-generated oxygen subside.
“Things are not the same today,” he said. “But men and women do have different evolutionary demands upon them. With the Fremen, though, there was an interdependence. That fostered equality out here where questions of survival can become immediate.”
“Why did you bring me here?” she demanded.
“Look behind us,” he said.
He felt her turn. Presently, she said: “What am I supposed to see?”
“Have we left any tracks? Can you tell where we’ve been?”
“There’s a little wind now.”
“It has covered our tracks?”
“I guess so … yes.”
“This desert made us what we were and are,” he said. “It’s the real museum of all our traditions. Not one of those traditions has really been lost.”
Leto saw a small sandstorm, a
ghibli
, moving across the southern horizon. He noted the narrow ribbons of dust and sand moving out ahead of it. Surely, Siona had seen it.
“Why won’t you tell me why you brought me here?” she asked. Fear was obvious in her voice.
“But I have told you.”
“You have not!”
“How far have we come, Siona?”
She thought about this. “Thirty kilometers? Twenty?”
“Farther,” he said. “I can move very fast in my own land. Didn’t you feel the wind on your face?”
“Yes.” Sullen. “So why ask
me
how far?”
“Come down and stand where I can see you.”
“Why?”
Good
, he thought.
She believes I will abandon her here and speed off faster than she can follow.
“Come down and I’ll explain,” he said.
She slid off his back and came around to where she could look into his face.
“Time passes swiftly when your senses are full,” he said. “We have been out almost four hours. We have come about sixty kilometers.”
“Why is
that
important?”
“Moneo put dried food in the pouch of your robe,” he said. “Eat a little and I will tell you.”
She found a dried cube of protomor in the pouch and chewed on it while she watched him. It was the authentic old Fremen food even to the slight addition of melange.
“You have felt your past,” he said. “Now, you must be sensitized to your future, to the Golden Path.”
She swallowed. “I don’t believe in your Golden Path.”
“If you are to live, you will believe in it.”
“Is
that
your test? Have faith in the Great God Leto or die?”
“You need no faith in me whatsoever. I want you to have faith in yourself.”
“Then why is it important how far we’ve come?”
“So you’ll understand how far you still have to go.”
She put a hand to her cheek. “I don’t …”
“Right where you stand,” he said, “you are in the unmistakable midst of Infinity. Look around you at the meaning of Infinity.”
She glanced left and right at the unbroken desert.
“We are going to walk out of my desert together,” he said. “Just the two of us.”
“You don’t walk,” she sneered.
“A figure of speech. But
you
will walk. I assure you of that.”
She looked in the direction they had come. “So that’s why you asked me about tracks.”
“Even if there were tracks, you could not go back. There is nothing at my Little Citadel that you could get to and use for survival.”
“No water?”
“Nothing.”
She found the catchpocket tube at her shoulder, sucked at it and restored it. He noted the care with which she sealed the end, but she did not pull the face flap across her mouth, although Leto had heard her father warning her about this. She wanted her mouth free for talking!
“You’re telling me I can’t run away from you,” she said.
“Run away if you want.”
She turned a full circle, examining the wasteland.
“There is a saying about the open land,” he said, “that one direction is as good as another. In some ways, that’s still true, but I would not depend on it.”
“But I’m really free to leave you if I want?”
“Freedom can be a very lonely estate,” he said.
She pointed to the steep side of the dune on which they had stopped. “But I could just go down there and …”
“Were I you, Siona, I would not go down where you are pointing.”
She glared at him. “Why?”
“On the dune’s steep side, unless you follow the natural curves, the sand may slide down upon you and bury you.”
She looked down the slope, absorbing this.
“See how beautiful words can be?” he asked.
She returned her attention to his face. “Should we be going?”
“You learn to value leisure out here. And courtesy. There’s no hurry.”
“But we have no water except the …”
“Used wisely, that stillsuit will keep you alive.”
“But how long will it take us to …”
“Your impatience alarms me.”
“But we have only this dried food in my pouch. What will we eat when …”
“Siona! Have you noticed that you are expressing our situation as mutual. What will
we
eat?
We
have no water. Should
we
be going? How long will it take
us
?”
He sensed the dryness of her mouth as she tried to swallow.
“Could it be that we’re interdependent?” he asked.
She spoke reluctantly. “I don’t know how to survive out here.”
“But I do?”
She nodded.
“Why should I share such precious knowledge with you?” he asked.
She shrugged, a pitiful gesture which touched him. How quickly the desert cut away previous attitudes.
“I will share my knowledge with you,” he said. “And you must find something valuable that you can share with me.”
Her gaze traversed his length, paused a moment at the flippers which once were his legs and feet, then came back to his face.
“Agreement bought with threats is no agreement,” she said.
“I offer you no violence.”
“There are many kinds of violence,” she said.
“And I brought you out here where you may die?”
“Did I have a choice in it?”
“It is difficult to be born an Atreides,” he said. “Believe me, I know.”
“You don’t have to do it this way,” she said.

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