Dune

You think power may be the most unstable of all human achievements? Then what of the apparent exceptions to this inherent instability? Some families endure. Very powerful religious bureaucracies have been known to endure. Consider the relationship between faith and power. Are they mutually exclusive when each depends upon the other? The Bene Gesserit have been reasonably secure within the loyal walls of faith for thousands of years. But where has their power gone?

—THE STOLEN JOURNALS

Moneo spoke in a petulant tone: “Lord, I wish you had given me more time.”

He stood outside the Citadel in the short shadows of noon. Leto lay directly in front of him on the Imperial Cart, its bubble hood retracted. He had been touring the environs with Hwi Noree, who occupied a newly installed seat within the bubble cover’s perimeter and just beside Leto’s face. Hwi appeared merely curious about all the bustle which was beginning to increase around them.

How calm she is, Moneo thought. He repressed an involuntary shudder at what he had learned of her from Malky. The God Emperor was right. Hwi was exactly what she appeared to be—an ultimately sweet and sensible human being. Would she really have mated with me? Moneo wondered.

Distractions drew his attention away from her. While Leto had toured Hwi around the Citadel on the suspensor-borne cart, a great troop of courtiers and Fish Speakers had been assembled here, all the courtiers in celebration finery, brilliant reds and golds dominant. The Fish Speakers wore their best dark blues, distinguished only by the different colors in the piping and hawks. A baggage caravan on suspensor sleds had been drawn up at the rear with Fish Speakers to pull it. The air was full of dust and the sounds and smells of excitement. Most of the courtiers had reacted with dismay when told their destination. Some had immediately purchased their own tents and pavilions. These had been sent on ahead with the other impediments piled now on the sand just outside Tuono’s view. The Fish Speakers in the entourage were not taking this in a festive mood. They had complained loudly when told they could not carry lasguns.

“Just a little more time, Lord,” Moneo was saying. “I still don’t know how we will . . .”

“There’s no substitute for time in solving many problems,” Leto said. “However, you can place too much reliance on it. I can accept no more delays.”

“We will be three days just getting there,” Moneo complained.

Leto thought about that time—the swift walk-trot-walk of a peregrination . . . one hundred and eighty kilometers. Yes, three days.

“I’m sure you’ve made good arrangements for the way-stops,” Leto said. “Plenty of hot water for the muscle cramps?”

“We’ll be comfortable enough,” Moneo said, “but I don’t like leaving the Citadel in these times! And you know why!”

“We have communications devices, loyal assistants. The Guild is suitably chastened. Calm yourself, Moneo.”

“We could hold the ceremony in the Citadel!”

For answer, Leto closed the bubble cover around him, isolating Hwi with him.

“Is there danger, Leto?” she asked.

“There’s always danger.”

Moneo sighed, turned and trotted toward where the Royal Road began its long climb eastward before turning south around the Sareer. Leto set his cart in motion behind the majordomo, heard his motley troop fall into step behind them.

“Are we all moving?” Leto asked.

Hwi glanced backward around him. “Yes.” She turned toward his face. “Why was Moneo being so difficult?”

“Moneo has discovered that the instant which has just left him is forever beyond his reach.”

“He has been very moody and distracted since you returned from the Little Citadel. He’s not the same at all.”

“He is an Atreides, my love, and you were designed to please an Atreides.”

“It’s not that. I would know if it were that.”

“Yes . . . well, I think Moneo has also discovered the reality of death.”

“What’s it like at the Little Citadel when you’re there with Moneo?” she asked.

“It’s the loneliest place in my Empire.”

“I think you avoid my questions,” she said.

“No, love. I share your concern for Moneo, but no explanation of mine will help him now. Moneo is trapped. He has learned that it is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.”

“I think it’s you who have trapped him, Leto.”

“But he must free himself.”

“Why can’t you free him?”

“Because he thinks my memories are his key to freedom. He thinks I am building our future out of our past.”

“Isn’t that always the way of it, Leto?”

“No, dear Hwi.”

“Then how is it?”

“Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.”

“And you with all of your memories know otherwise.”

Leto turned his face within its cowl to stare at her, probing . . . remembering. Out of the multitudes within him, he could form a composite, a genetic suggestion of Hwi, but the suggestion fell far short of the living flesh. That was it, of course. The past became row-on-row of eyes staring outward like the eyes of gasping fish, but Hwi was vibrant life. Her mouth was set in Grecian curves designed for a Delphic chant, but she hummed no prophetic syllables. She was content to live, an opening person like a flower perpetually unfolding into fragrant blossom.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

“I was basking in the love of you.”

“Love, yes.” She smiled. “I think that since we cannot share the love of the flesh, we must share the love of the soul. Would you share that with me, Leto?”

He was taken aback. “You ask about my soul?”

“Surely others have asked.”

He spoke shortly: “My soul digests its experiences, nothing more.”

“Have I asked too much of you?” she asked.

“I think that you cannot ask too much of me.”

“Then I presume upon our love to disagree with you. My Uncle Malky talked about your soul.”

He found that he could not respond. She took his silence as an invitation to continue. “He said that you were the ultimate artist at probing the soul, your own soul first.”

“But your Uncle Malky denied that he had a soul of his own!”

She heard the harshness in his voice, but was not deterred. “Still, I think he was right. You are the genius of the soul, the brilliant one.”

“You need only the plodding perseverance of duration,” he said. “No brilliance.”

They were well onto the long climb to the top of the Sareer’s perimeter Wall now. He lowered his cart’s wheels and deactivated the suspensors.

Hwi spoke softly, her voice barely audible above the grating sound of the cart’s wheels and the running feet all around them. “May I call you Love, anyway?”

He spoke around a remembered tightness in a throat which was no longer completely human. “Yes.”

“I was born an Ixian, Love,” she said. “Why don’t I share their mechanical view of our universe? Do you know my view, Leto my love?”

He could only stare at her.

“I sense the supernatural at every turning,” she said.

Leto’s voice rasped, sounding angry even to him: “Each person creates his own supernatural.”

“Don’t be angry with me, Love.”

Again, that awful rasping: “It is impossible for me to be angry with you.”

“But something happened between you and Malky once,” she said. “He would never tell me what it was, but he said he often wondered why you spared him.”

“Because of what he taught me.”

“What happened between you two, Love?”

“I would rather not talk about Malky.”

“Please, Love. I feel that it’s important for me to know.”

“I suggested to Malky that there might be some things men should not invent.”

“And that’s all?”

“No.” He spoke reluctantly. “My words angered him. He said: ‘You think that in a world without birds, men would not invent aircraft! What a fool you are! Men can invent anything!’”

“He called you a fool?” There was shock in Hwi’s voice.

“He was right. And although he denied it, he spoke the truth. He taught me that there was a reason for running away from inventions.”

“Then you fear the Ixians?”

“Of course I do! They can invent catastrophe.”

“Then what could you do?”

“Run faster. History is a constant race between invention and catastrophe. Education helps but it’s never enough. You also must run.”

“You are sharing your soul with me, Love. Do you know that?”

Leto looked away from her and focused on Moneo’s back, the motions of the majordomo, the tucked-in pretenses of secrecy so apparent there. The procession had come off the first gentle incline. It turned now to begin the climb onto Ringwall West. Moneo moved as he had always moved, one foot ahead of another, aware of the ground where he would place each step, but there was something new in the majordomo. Leto could feel the man drawing away, no longer content to march beside his Lord’s cowled face, no longer trying to match himself to his master’s destiny. Off to the east, the Sareer waited. Off to the west, there was the river, the plantations. Moneo looked neither left nor right. He had seen another destination.

“You do not answer me,” Hwi said.

“You already know the answer.”

“Yes. I am beginning to understand something of you,” she said. “I can sense some of your fears. And I think I already know where it is that you live.”

He turned a startled glance on her and found himself locked in her gaze. It was astonishing. He could not move his eyes away from her. A profound fear coursed through and he felt his hands begin to twitch.

“You live where the fear of being and the love of being are combined, all in one person,” she said.

He could not blink.

“You are a mystic,” she said, “gentle to yourself only because you are in the middle of that universe looking outward, looking in ways that others cannot. You fear to share this, yet you want to share it more than anything else.”

“What have you seen?” he whispered.

“I have no inner eye, no inner voices,” she said. “But I have seen my Lord Leto, whose soul I love, and I know the only thing that you truly understand.”

He broke from her gaze, fearful of what she might say. The trembling of his hands could be felt all through his front segment.

“Love, that is what you understand,” she said. “Love, and that is all of it.”

His hands stopped trembling. A tear rolled down each of his cheeks. When the tears touched his cowl, wisps of blue smoke erupted. He sensed the burning and was thankful for the pain.

“You have faith in life,” Hwi said. “I know that the courage of love can reside only in this faith.”

She reached out with her left hand and brushed the tears from his cheeks. It surprised him that the cowl did not react with its ordinary reflex to prevent the touch.

“Do you know,” he asked, “that since I have become thus, you are the first person to touch my cheeks?”

“But I know what you are and what you were,” she said.

“What I was . . . ahhh, Hwi. What I was has become only this face, and all the rest is lost in the shadows of memory . . . hidden . . . gone.”

“Not hidden from me, Love.”

He looked directly at her, no longer afraid to lock gazes. “Is it possible that the Ixians know what they have created in you?”

“I assure you, Leto, love of my soul, that they do not know. You are the first person, the only person to whom I have ever completely revealed myself.”

“Then I will not mourn for what might have been,” he said. “Yes, my love, I will share my soul with you.”