God Emperor of Dune (52 page)

Read God Emperor of Dune Online

Authors: Frank Herbert

Tags: #Science Fiction - General

BOOK: God Emperor of Dune
13.2Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
 
 
 
 
Leto and Siona lay all day in the duneshadows, moving only as the sun moved. He taught her how to protect herself under a blanket of sand in the noontime heat; it never grew too warm at the rock-level between the dunes.
In the afternoon, Siona crept close to Leto for warmth, a warmth he knew he had in excess these days.
They talked sporadically. He told her about the Fremen graces which once had dominated this landscape. She probed for secret knowledge of him.
Once, he said: “You may find it odd, but out here is where I can be most human.”
His words failed to make her fully conscious of her human vulnerability and the fact that she might die out here. Even when she was not talking, she did not restore the face flap of her stillsuit.
Leto recognized the unconscious motivation behind this failure, but knew the futility of addressing that directly.
In the late afternoon, night’s chill already starting to creep over the land, he began regaling her with songs of the Long Trek which had not been saved in the Oral History. He enjoyed the fact that she liked one of his favorites, “Liet’s March.”
“The tune is really ancient,” he said, “a pre-space thing of Old Terra.”
“Would you sing it again?”
He chose one of his best baritones, a long-dead artist who had filled many a concert hall.
 
“The wall of past-beyond-recall
Hides me from an ancient fall
Where all the waters tumble!
And plays of sprays
Carve caves in clays
Beneath a torrent’s rumble.”
 
When he had finished, she was silent for a moment, then: “That’s an odd song for marching.”
“They liked it because they could dissect it,” he said.
“Dissect?”
“Before our Fremen ancestors came to this planet, night was the time for storytelling, songs and poetry. In the Dune days, though, that was reserved for the false dark, the daytime gloom of the sietch. The night was when they could emerge and move about … just as we do now.”
“But you said
dissect.
”
“What does that song mean?” he asked.
“Oh. It’s … it’s just a song.”
“Siona!”
She heard anger in his voice and remained silent.
“This planet is the child of the worm,” he warned her, “and
I
am that worm.”
She responded with a surprising insouciance: “Then tell me what it means.”
“The insect has no more freedom from its hive than we have freedom from our past,” he said. “The caves are there and all of the messages written in the sprays of the torrents.”
“I prefer dancing songs,” she said.
It was a flippant answer, but Leto chose to take it as a change of subject. He told her about the marriage dance of Fremen women, tracing the steps back to the whirling of dust devils. Leto prided himself on telling a good story. It was clear from her rapt attention that she could see the women whirling before her inner eye, long black hair thrown in the ancient movements, straggling across long-dead faces.
Darkness was almost upon them when he finished.
“Come,” he said. “Morning and evening are still the times of silhouettes. Let us see if anyone shares our desert.”
Siona followed him up to a dunecrest and they stared all around at the darkening desert. There was only one bird high overhead, attracted by their movements. From the splayed-gap tips on its wings and the shape, he knew it was a vulture. He pointed this out to Siona.
“But what do they eat?” she asked.
“Anything that’s dead or nearly so.”
This hit her and she stared up at the last of the sunlight gilding the lone bird’s flight feathers.
Leto pressed it: “A few people still venture into my Sareer. Sometimes, a Museum Fremen wanders off and gets lost. They’re really only good at the rituals. And then there are the desert’s edges and the remains of whatever my wolves leave.”
At this, she whirled away from him, but not before he saw the passion still consuming her. Siona was being sorely tested.
“There’s little daytime graciousness about a desert,” he said. “That’s another reason we travel by night. To a Fremen, the image of the day was that of windblown sand filling your tracks.”
Her eyes glistened with unshed tears when she turned back to him, but her features were composed.
“What lives here now?” she asked.
“The vultures, a few night creatures, an occasional remnant of plant life out of the old days, burrowing things.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because this is where they were born and I permit them to know nothing better.”
It was almost dark with that sudden glowing light his desert acquired in these moments. He studied her in that luminous moment, recognizing that she had not yet understood his other message. He knew that message would sit there, though, and fester in her.
“Silhouettes,” she said, reminding him. “What did you expect to find when we came up here?”
“Perhaps people at a distance. You’re never certain.”
“What people?”
“I’ve already told you.”
“What would you’ve done if you’d seen anyone?”
“It was the Fremen custom to treat distant people as hostile until they threw sand into the air.”
As he spoke, darkness fell over them like a curtain.
Siona became ghostly movement in the sudden starlight. “Sand?” she asked.
“Thrown sand is a profound gesture. It says: ‘We share the same burden. Sand is our only enemy. This is what we drink. The hand that holds sand holds no weapon.’ Do you understand this?”
“No!” She taunted him with a defiant falsehood.
“You will,” he said.
Without a word, she set out along the arc of their dune, striding away from him with an angry excess of energy. Leto allowed himself to fall far behind her, interested that she had instinctively chosen the right direction. Fremen memories could be felt churning in her.
Where the dune dipped to cross another, she waited for him. He saw that the face flap of her stillsuit remained open, hanging loose. It was not yet time to chide her about this. Some unconscious things had to run their natural course.
As he came up to her, she said: “Is this as good a direction as any other?”
“If you keep to it,” he said.
She glanced up at the stars and he saw her identify the Pointers, those Fremen Arrows which had led her ancestors across this land. He could see, though, that her recognition was mostly intellectual. She had not yet come to accept the other things working within her.
Leto lifted his front segments to peer ahead in the starlight. They were moving a little west of north on a track that once had led across Habbanya Ridge and Cave of Birds into the erg below False Wall West and the way to Wind Pass. None of those landmarks remained. He sniffed a cool breeze with flint smells in it and more moisture than he found pleasant.
Once more, Siona set off—slower this time, holding her course by occasional glances at the stars. She had trusted Leto to confirm the way, but now she guided herself. He sensed the turmoil beneath her wary thoughts, and he knew the things which were emerging. She had the beginnings of that intense loyalty to traveling companions which desert folk always trusted.
We know
, he thought.
If you are separated from your companions, you are lost among dunes and rocks. The lone traveler in the desert is dead. Only the worm lives alone out here.
He let her get well ahead of him where the grating sand of his passage would not be too prominent. She had to think of his human-self. He counted on loyalty to work for him. Siona was brittle, though, filled with suppressed rage—more of a rebel than any other he had ever tested.
Leto glided along behind her, reviewing the breeding program, shaping the necessary decisions for a replacement should she fail.
As the night progressed, Siona moved slower and slower. First Moon was high overhead and Second Moon well above the horizon before she stopped to rest and eat.
Leto was glad of the pause. Friction had set up a worm-dominance, the air around him full of the chemical exhalations from his temperature adjustments. The thing he thought of as his
oxygen supercharger
vented steadily, making him intensely aware of the protein factories and amino acid resources his worm-self had acquired to accommodate the placental relationship with his human cells. Desert quickened the movement toward his final metamorphosis.
Siona had stopped near the crest of a star dune. “Is it true that you eat the sand?” she asked as he came up to her.
“It’s true.”
She stared all around the moon-frosted horizon. “Why didn’t we bring a signal device?”
“I wanted you to learn about possessions.”
She turned toward him. He sensed her breath close to his face. She was losing too much moisture into the dry air. Still, she did not remember Moneo’s admonition. It would be a bitter lesson, no doubt of that.
“I don’t understand you at all,” she said.
“Yet, you are committed to doing just that.”
“Am I?”
“How else can you give me something of value in exchange for what I give you?”
“What do you give me?” All of the bitterness was there and a hint of the spice from her dried food.
“I give you this opportunity to be alone with me, to share with me, and you spend this time without concern. You waste it.”
“What about possessions?” she demanded.
He heard fatigue in her voice, the water message beginning to scream within her.
“They were magnificently alive in the old days, those Fremen,” he said.
“And their eye for beauty was limited to that which was useful. I never met a greedy Fremen.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“In the old days, everything you took into the desert was a necessity and that was all you took. Your life is no longer free of possessions, Siona, or you would not have asked about a signal device.”
“Why isn’t a signal device necessary?”
“It would teach you nothing.”
He moved out around her along the track indicated by the Pointers. “Come. Let us use this night to our profit.”
She came hurrying up to walk beside his cowled face. “What happens if I don’t learn your damned lesson?”
“You’ll probably die,” he said.
That silenced her for a time. She trudged along beside him with only an occasional sideward glance, ignoring the worm-body, concentrating on the visible remnants of his humanity. After a time, she said: “The Fish Speakers told me that you ordered the mating from which I was born.”
“That’s true.”
“They say you keep records and that you order these Atreides matings for your own purposes.”
“That also is true.”
“Then the Oral History is correct.”
“I thought you believed the Oral History without question?”
She was on a single track, though: “What if one of us objects when you order a mating?”
“I allow a wide latitude just as long as there are the children I have ordered.”
“Ordered?” She was outraged.
“That’s what I do.”
“You can’t creep into every bedroom or follow every one of us every minute of our lives! How do you know your
orders
are obeyed?”
“I know.”
“Then you know I’m not going to obey you!”
“Are you thirsty, Siona?”
She was startled. “What?”
“Thirsty people speak of water, not of sex.”
Still, she did not seal her mouth flap, and he thought:
Atreides passions always did run strong, even at the expense of reason.
Within two hours, they came down out of the dunes onto a wind-scoured flat of pebbles. Leto moved onto it, Siona close to his side. She looked frequently at the Pointers. Both moons were low on the horizon now and their light cast long shadows behind every boulder.
In some ways, Leto found such places more comfortable to traverse than the sand. Solid rock was a better heat conductor than sand. He could flatten himself against the rock and ease the working of his chemical factories. Pebbles and even sizable rocks did not impede him.
Siona had more trouble here, though, and almost turned an ankle several times.
The flatland could be a very trying place for humans unaccustomed to it, he thought. If they stayed close to the ground, they saw only the great emptiness, an eerie place especially in moonlight—dunes at a distance, a distance which seemed not to change as the traveler moved—nothing anywhere except the seemingly eternal wind, a few rocks and, when they looked upward, stars without mercy. This was the desert of the desert.

Other books

Maldad bajo el sol by Agatha Christie
Thick as Thieves by Catherine Gayle
Hurricane Stepbrother by Brother, Stephanie
Escapology by Ren Warom
Avenger of Antares by Alan Burt Akers
Reckoning by Molly M. Hall
The Reich Device by Richard D. Handy