“I would become very angry. I would …” She broke off.
“Reason is valuable,” he said, “only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.”
Her brows drew together in thought. It fascinated Leto to sense the arousal of her awareness. “Ahhhh.” She breathed the word.
“No reasoning creature will ever again be able to deny the Leto experience,” he said. “I see your understanding begin. Beginnings! They are what life is all about!”
She nodded.
No arguments
, he thought.
When she sees the tracks, she follows them to find where they will lead.
“As long as there is life, every ending is a beginning,” he said. “And I would save humankind, even from itself.”
Again, she nodded. The tracks still led onward.
“This is why no death in the perpetuation of humankind can be a complete failure,” he said. “This is why a birth touches us so deeply. This is why the most tragic death is the death of a youth.”
“Does Ix still threaten your Golden Path? I’ve always known they conspired in something evil.”
They
conspire. Hwi does not hear the inner message of her own words. She has no need to hear it.
He stared at her, full of the marvel that was Hwi. She possessed a form of honesty which some would call naive, but which Leto recognized as merely non-self-conscious. The honesty was not her core, it was Hwi herself.
“Then I will arrange a performance in the plaza tomorrow,” Leto said. “It will be a performance of the surviving Face Dancers. Afterward, our betrothal will be announced.”
Let there be no doubt that I am the assemblage of our ancestors, the arena in which they exercise my moments. They are my cells and I am their body. This is the
favrashi
of which I speak, the soul, the collective unconscious, the source of archetypes, the repository of all trauma and joy. I am the choice of their awakening. My
samhadi
is their
samhadi
. Their experiences are mine! Their knowledge distilled is my inheritance. Those billions are my one.
—THE STOLEN JOURNALS
The Face Dancer performance occupied almost two hours of the morning, and afterward came the announcement which sent shock waves through the Festival City.
“It has been centuries since he took a bride!”
“More than a thousand years, my dear.”
The trooping of the Fish Speakers had been brief. They cheered him loudly, but they were disturbed.
“You are my only brides,”
he had said. Was that not the meaning of Siaynoq?
Leto thought the Face Dancers performed well despite their obvious terror. Garments had been found in the depths of a Fremen museum—hooded black robes with white cord belts, spread-winged green hawks appliquéd across the shoulders at the back—uniforms of Muad’Dib’s itinerant priests. The Face Dancers had put on dark, seamed faces with these robes and performed a dance which told how Muad’Dib’s legions had spread
their
religion through the Empire.
Hwi, wearing a brilliant silver dress with a green jade necklace, sat beside Leto on the Royal Cart throughout the ritual. Once, she leaned close to his face and asked: “Is that not a parody?”
“To me, perhaps.”
“Do the Face Dancers know?”
“They suspect.”
“Then they are not as frightened as they appear.”
“Oh, yes, they are frightened. It’s just that they are braver than most people expect them to be.”
“Bravery can be so foolish,” she whispered.
“And vice-versa.”
She had favored him with a measuring stare before returning her attention to the performance. Almost two hundred Face Dancers had survived unscathed. All of them had been pressed into the dance. The intricate weavings and posturings could fascinate the eye. It was possible to watch them and, for a time, forget the bloody preliminaries to this day.
Leto remembered this as he lay alone in his small reception room shortly before noon when Moneo arrived. Moneo had seen the Reverend Mother Anteac onto a Guild lighter, had conferred with the Fish Speaker Command about the previous night’s violence, had made a quick flight to the Citadel and back to make sure Siona was under a secure watch and that she had not been implicated in the Embassy attack. He had returned to Onn just after the betrothal announcement, having had no previous warning.
Moneo was furious. Leto had never seen him this angry. He stormed into the room and stopped only two meters from Leto’s face.
“Now the Tleilaxu lies will be believed!” he said.
Leto responded in a reasoned tone. “How persistent it is, this demand that our gods be perfect. The Greeks were much more reasonable about such things.”
“Where is she?” Moneo demanded. “Where is this …”
“Hwi is resting. It was a difficult night and a long morning. I want her well rested when we return to the Citadel this evening.”
“How did she work this?” Moneo demanded.
“Really, Moneo! Have you lost all sense of caution?”
“I am concerned about you! Have you any idea what they’re saying in the City?”
“I’m fully aware of the stories.”
“What
are
you doing?”
“You know, Moneo, I think that only the old pantheists had the right idea about deities: mortal foibles in immortal guise.”
Moneo raised both arms to the heavens. “I saw the looks on their faces!” He lowered his arms. “It’ll be all over the Empire within two weeks.”
“Surely it’ll take longer than that.”
“If your enemies needed one thing to bring them all together …”
“The defiling of the god is an ancient human tradition, Moneo. Why should I be an exception?”
Moneo tried to speak, found he could not utter a word. He stamped down along the edge of the pit which held Leto’s cart, stamped back and resumed his former position glaring into Leto’s face.
“If I am to help you, I need an explanation,” Moneo said. “Why are you doing this?”
“Emotions.”
Moneo’s mouth formed the word without speaking it.
“They have come over me just when I thought them gone forever,” Leto said. “How sweet these last few sips of humanity are.”
“With Hwi? But you surely cannot …”
“Memories of emotions are never enough, Moneo.”
“Are you telling me that you are indulging yourself in a …”
“Indulgence? Certainly not! But the tripod upon which Eternity swings is composed of flesh and thought and emotion. I felt that I had been reduced to flesh and thought.”
“She has worked some kind of witchery,” Moneo accused.
“Of course she has. And how grateful I am for it. If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection; we cannot define what our senses report. If we deny the flesh, we unwheel the vehicle which bears us. But if we deny emotion, we lose all touch with our internal universe. It was emotions which I missed the most.”
“I insist, Lord, that you …”
“You are making me angry, Moneo. That
is
an emotion.”
Leto saw Moneo’s frustrated fury cool, quenched like a hot iron plunged into icy water. There was still some steam in him, though.
“I care not for myself, Lord. My concern is mostly for you, and you know this.”
Leto spoke softly. “It is your
emotion,
Moneo, and I hold it dear.”
Moneo inhaled a deep, trembling breath. He had never before seen the God Emperor in this mood, reflecting this
emotion.
Leto appeared both elated and resigned, if Moneo were reading it correctly. One could not be certain.
“That which makes life sweet for the living,” Leto said, “that which makes life warm and filled with beauty, that is what I would preserve even though it were denied to me.”
“Then this Hwi Noree …”
“She makes me recall the Butlerian Jihad in a poignant way. She is the antithesis of all that’s mechanical and non-human. How odd it is, Moneo, that the Ixians, of all people, should produce this one person who so perfectly embodies those qualities which I hold most dear.”
“I do not understand your reference to the Butlerian Jihad, Lord. Machines that think have no place in …”
“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”
“Lord, I still resent the fact that you welcome this …”
“Moneo! Hwi reassures me merely by her presence. For the first time in centuries, I am not lonely unless she is away from my side. If I had no other proof of the emotion, this would serve.”
Moneo fell silent, obviously touched by Leto’s evocation of loneliness. Surely, Moneo could understand the absence of the intimate sharing in love. His expression betrayed as much.
For the first time in a long while, Leto noted how much Moneo had aged.
It happens so suddenly to them
, Leto thought.
It made Leto deeply aware of how much he cared for Moneo.
I should not let attachments happen to me, but I cannot help it … especially now that Hwi is here.
“They will laugh at you and make obscene jests,” Moneo said.
“That is a good thing.”
“How can it be good?”
“This is something new. Our task has always been to bring the new into balance and, with it, modify behavior while not suppressing survival.”
“Even so, how can you welcome this?”
“The making of obscenities?” Leto asked. “What is the opposite of obscenity?”
Moneo’s eyes went wide with a sudden questioning awareness. He had seen the action of many polarities—the thing made known by its opposite.
The thing stands out against a background which defines it
, Leto thought.
Surely Moneo will see this.
“It’s too dangerous,” Moneo said.
The ultimate verdict of conservatism!
Moneo was not convinced. A deep sigh wracked him.
I must remember not to take away their doubts
, Leto thought.
That’s how I failed my Fish Speakers in the plaza. The Ixians are holding on to the ragged end of human doubts. Hwi is the evidence of that.
A disturbance sounded in the anteroom. Leto sealed the portal against impetuous intrusions.
“My Duncan has come,” he said.
“He’s probably heard about your wedding plans—”
“Probably.”
Leto watched Moneo wrestle with doubts, his thoughts utterly transparent. In that moment, Moneo fit so precisely into his human niche that Leto wanted to hug him.
He has the full spectrum: doubt-to-trust, love-to-hate … everything! All of those dear qualities which come to fruition in the warmth of emotion, in the willingness to spend yourself on Life.
“Why is Hwi accepting this?” Moneo asked.
Leto smiled.
Moneo cannot doubt me; he must doubt others.
“I admit it is not a conventional union. She is a primate and I no longer am fully primate.”
Again, Moneo wrestled with things he could only feel and not express.
Watching Moneo, Leto felt the flow of an observational-awareness, a thought process which occurred so rarely but with such vivid amplication when it did occur, that Leto did not stir lest he cause a ripple in the flow.
The primate thinks and, by thinking, survives. Beneath his thinking is a thing which came with his cells. It is the current of human concerns for the species. Sometimes, they cover it up, wall it off and hide it behind thick barriers, but I have deliberately sensitized Moneo to these workings of his innermost self. He follows me because he believes I hold the best course for human survival. He knows there is a cellular awareness. It is what I find when I scan the Golden Path. This is humanity and both of us agree: it must endure!
“Where, when and how will the wedding ceremony be conducted?” Moneo asked.
Not
why? Leto noted. Moneo no longer sought to understand the
why.
He had returned to safe ground. He was the majordomo, the director of the God Emperor’s household, the First Minister.
He has names and verbs and modifiers with which he can perform. The words will work for him in their usual ways. Moneo may never glimpse the transcendental potential of his words, but he well understands their everyday, mundane uses.