“I did not mean to anger my Lord.” Moneo spoke meekly.
“You don’t anger me. Sometimes you irritate me, that is the extent of it. You cannot imagine what I have seen-caliphs and mjeeds, rakahs, rajas and bashars, kings and emperors, primitos and presidents-I’ve seen them all. Feudal chieftains, every one. Every one a little pharaoh.”
“Forgive my presumption, Lord.”
“Damn the Romans!” Leto cried.
He spoke it inwardly to his ancestors: “Damn the Romans!”
Their laughter drove him from the inward arena.
“I don’t understand, Lord,” Moneo ventured.
“That’s true. You don’t understand. The Romans broadcast the pharaonic disease like grain farmers scattering the seeds of next season’s harvest -Caesars, kaisers, tsars, imperators, caseris . . . palatos . . . damned pharaohs?”
“My knowledge does not encompass all of those titles, Lord.”
“I may be the last of the lot, Moneo. Pray that this is so.”
“Whatever my Lord commands.”
Leto stared down at the man. “We are myth-killers, you and I, Moneo. That’s the dream we share. I assure you from a God’s Olympian perch that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies.”
“Thus you have taught me, Lord.”
“That man-machine, the Army, created our present dream, my friend.”
Moneo cleared his throat.
Leto recognized the small signs of the majordomo’s impatience.
Moneo understands about armies. He knows it was a fool’s dream that armies were the basic instrument of governance.
As Leto continued silent, Moneo crossed to the lasgun and retrieved it from the crypt’s cold floor. He began disabling it.
Leto watched him, thinking how this tiny scene encapsulated ..fostered
the essence of the Army myth. The Army fostered technology because the power of machines appeared so obvious to the shortsighted.
That lasgun is no more than a machine. But all machines fail or are superceded. Still, the Army worships at the shrine of such things-both fascinated and fearful. Look at how people fear the Ixians! In its guts, the Army knows it is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It unleashes technology and never again can the magic be stuffed back into the bottle.
I teach them another magic.
Leto spoke to the hordes within then:
“You see? Moneo has disabled the deadly instrument. A connection broken here, a small capsule crushed there.”
Leto sniffed. He smelled the esters of a preservative oil riding on the stink of Moneo’s perspiration.
Still speaking inwardly, Leto said: “But the genie is not dead. Technology breeds anarchy. It distributes these tools at random. And with them goes the provocation for violence. The ability to make and use savage destroyers falls inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group is a single individual.”
Moneo returned to a point below Leto, holding the disabled lasgun casually in his right hand. “There is talk on Parella and the planets of Dan about another jihad against such things as this.”
Moneo lifted the lasgun and smiled, signaling that he knew the paradox in such empty dreams.
Leto closed his eyes. The hordes within wanted to argue, but he shut them off, thinking: Jihads create armies. The Butlerian Jihad tried to rid our universe of machines which simulate the mind of man. The Butlerians left armies in their wake and the lxians still make questionable devices . . . for which I thank them. What is anathema? The motivation to ravage, no matter the instruments.
“It happened,” he muttered.
“Lord?”
Leto opened his eyes. “I will go to my tower,” he said. “I must have more time to mourn my Duncan.”
“The new one is already on his way here,” Moneo said.
=== You, the first person to encounter my chronicles for at least four thousand years, beware. Do not feel honored by your primacy in reading the revelations of my Ixian storehouse. You will find much pain in it. Other than the few glimpses required to assure me that the Golden Path continued. I never wanted to peer beyond those four millennia. Therefore, I am not sure what the events in my journals may signify to your times. I only know that my journals have suffered oblivion and that the events which I recount have undoubtedly been submitted to historical distortion for eons. I assure you that the ability to view our futures can become a bore. Even to be thought of as a god, as I certainly was, can become ultimately boring. It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.