God Emporer of Dune by Frank Herbert

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 Onn, a dull glow of lights from the beast-drawn vehicles pacing along the high road toward Tabur Village. He could call up a memory-image of the village nestled among the plants which grew in the moist area along the inner base of the wall. His Museum Fremen tended date palms, tall grasses and even truck gardens there. It was not like the old days when any inhabited place, even a tiny basin with a few low plants fed by a single cistern and windtrap, could appear lush by comparison with the open sand. Tabur Village was a water-rich paradise when compared with Sietch Tabr. Everyone in today’s village knew that just beyond the Sareer’s boundary wall the Idaho River slid southward in a long straight line which would be silver now in the moonlight. Museum Fremen could not climb the wall’s sheer inner face, but they knew the water was there. The earth knew, too. If a Tabur inhabitant put an ear against the ground, the earth spoke with the sound of distant rapids. 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 inner sense of identity. “I need to find out what Time has done to you,” he said. “Why do you need that?” A little fear in her voice there, he thought. She thinks I will probe after her puny rebellion and the names of her surviving associates. When he remained silent, she said: “Do you intend to kill me the way you killed my friends?” So she has heard about the fight at the Embassy. And she assumes I know all about her past rebellious activities. Moneo has been lecturing her, damn him! Well. . .I might have done the same in his circumstances. “Are you really a god?” she demanded. “I don’t understand why my father believes that.”

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