“What of my question?” Moneo pressed.
Leto blinked at him, thinking:
I, on the other hand, feel that words are mostly useful if they open for me a glimpse of attractive and undiscovered places. But the use of words is so little understood by a civilization which still believes unquestioningly in a mechanical universe of absolute cause and effect—obviously reducible to one single root-cause and one primary seminal-effect.
“How like a limpet the Ixian-Tleilaxu fallacy clings to human affairs,” Leto said.
“Lord, it disturbs me deeply when you don’t pay attention.”
“But I do pay attention, Moneo.”
“Not to me.”
“Even to you.”
“Your attention wanders, Lord. You do not have to conceal that from me. I would betray myself before I would betray you.”
“You think I’m woolgathering?”
“Whatgathering, Lord?” Moneo had never questioned this word earlier, but now …
Leto explained the allusion, thinking:
How ancient!
The looms and shuttles clicked in Leto’s memory.
Animal fur to human garments … huntsman to herds-man … the long steps up the ladder of awareness … and now they must make another long step, longer even than the ancient ones.
“You indulge in idle thoughts,” Moneo accused.
“I have time for idle thoughts. That’s one of the most interesting things about my existence as a singular multitude.”
“But, Lord, there are matters which demand our …”
“You’d be surprised what comes of idle thinking, Moneo. I’ve never minded spending an entire day on things a human would not bother with for one minute. Why not? With my life expectancy of some four thousand years, what’s one day more or less? How much time does one human life count? A million minutes? I’ve already experienced almost that many days.”
Moneo stood frozen in silence, diminished by this comparison. He felt his own lifetime reduced to a mote in Leto’s eye. The source of the allusion did not escape him.
Words … words … words
, Moneo thought.
“Words are often almost useless in sentient affairs,” Leto said.
Moneo held his breathing to a shallow minimum.
The Lord
can
read thoughts!
“Throughout our history,” Leto said, “the most potent use of words has been to round out some transcendental event, giving that event a place in the accepted chronicles,
explaining
the event in such a way that ever afterward we can use those words and say: “This is what it meant.”
Moneo felt beaten down by these words, terrified by unspoken things they might make him think.
“That’s how events get lost in history,” Leto said.
After a long silence, Moneo ventured: “You have not answered my question, Lord. The wedding?”
How tired he sounds
, Leto thought.
How utterly defeated.
Leto spoke briskly: “I have never needed your good offices more. The wedding must be managed with utmost care. It must have the precision of which only you are capable.”
“Where, Lord?”
A bit more life in his voice.
“At Tabur Village in the Sareer.”
“When?”
“I leave the date to you. Announce it when all things are arranged.”
“And the ceremony itself?”
“I will conduct it.”
“Will you need assistants, Lord? Artifacts of any kind?”
“The trappings of ritual?”
“Any particular thing which I may not …”
“We will not need much for our little charade.”
“Lord! I beg of you! Please …”
“You will stand beside the bride and give her in marriage,” Leto said. “We will use the Old Fremen ritual.”
“We will need water rings then,” Moneo said.
“Yes! I will use Ghani’s water rings.”
“And who will attend, Lord?”
“Only a Fish Speaker guard and the aristocracy.”
Moneo stared at Leto’s face. “What … what does my Lord mean by ‘aristocracy’?”
“You, your family, the household entourage, the courtiers of the Citadel.”
“My fam …” Moneo swallowed. “Do you include Siona?”
“If she survives the test.”
“But …”
“Is she not family?”
“Of course, Lord. She is Atreides and …”
“Then by all means include Siona!”
Moneo brought a tiny memocorder from his pocket, a dull black Ixian artifact whose existence crowded the proscriptions of the Butlerian Jihad. A soft smile touched Leto’s lips. Moneo knew his duties and would now perform them.
The clamor of Duncan Idaho outside the portal grew more strident, but Moneo ignored the sound.
Moneo knows the price of his privileges
, Leto thought.
It is another kind of marriage—the marriage of privilege and duty. It is the aristocrat’s explanation and his excuse.
Moneo finished his note taking.
“A few details, Lord,” Moneo said. “Will there be some special garb for Hwi?”
“The stillsuit and robe of a Fremen bride, real ones.”
“Jewelry or other baubles?”
Leto’s gaze locked on Moneo’s fingers scrabbling over the tiny recorder, seeing there a dissolution.
Leadership, courage, a sense of knowledge and order—Moneo has these in abundance. They surround him like a holy aura, but they conceal from all eyes except mine the rot which eats from within. It is inevitable. Were I gone, it would be visible to everyone.
“Lord?” Moneo pressed. “Are you woolgathering?”
Ahhh! He likes that word!
“That is all,” Leto said. “Only the robe, the stillsuit and the water rings.”
Moneo bowed and turned away.
He is looking ahead now,
Leto thought,
but even this new thing will pass. He will turn toward the past once more. And I had such high hopes for him once. Well … perhaps Siona …
“Make no heroes,” my father said.
—THE VOICE OF GHANIMA, FROM THE ORAL HISTORY
Just by the way Idaho strode across the small chamber, his loud demands for audience now gratified, Leto could see an important transformation in the ghola. It was a thing repeated so many times that it had become deeply familiar to Leto. The Duncan had not even exchanged words of greeting with the departing Moneo. It all fitted into the pattern. How boring that pattern had become!
Leto had a name for this transformation of the Duncans. He called it “The Since Syndrome.”
The gholas often nurtured suspicions about the
secret things
which might have been developed across the centuries of oblivion
since
they last knew awareness. What had people been doing all that time? Why could they possibly want me, this relic from their past? No ego could overcome such doubts forever—especially in a doubting man.
One of the gholas had accused Leto: “You’ve put things in my body, things I know nothing about! These things in my body tell you everything I’m doing! You spy on me everywhere!”
Another had charged him with possessing a “manipulative machine which makes us want to do whatever you want.”
Once it started, the Since Syndrome could never be entirely eliminated. It could be checked, even diverted, but the dormant seed might sprout at the slightest provocation.
Idaho stopped where Moneo had stood and there was a veiled look of nonspecific suspicions in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders. Leto allowed the situation to simmer, bringing the condition to a head. Idaho locked gazes with him, then broke away to dart his glances around the room. Leto recognized the manner behind the gaze.
The Duncans never forget!
As he studied the room, using the sightful ways he had been taught centuries before by the Lady Jessica and the Mentat Thufir Hawat, Idaho began to feel a giddy sense of dislocation. He thought the room rejected him, each thing—the soft cushions: big bulbous things in gold, green and a red that was almost purple; the Fremen rugs, each a museum piece, lapping over each other in thick piles around Leto’s pit; the false sunlight of Ixian glowglobes, light which enveloped the Emperor’s face in dry warmth, making the shadows around it deeper and more mysterious; the smell of spice-tea somewhere nearby; and that rich melange odor which radiated from the worm-body.
Idaho felt that too much had happened to him too fast since the Tleilaxu had abandoned him to the mercies of Luli and Friend in that featureless prison-cell room.
Too much … too much …
Am I really here?
he wondered.
Is this me? What are these thoughts that I think?
He stared at Leto’s quiescent body, the shadowy and enormous mass which lay so silently there on its cart within the pit. The very quietness of that fleshly mass only suggested mysterious energies, terrible energies which might be unleashed in ways nobody could anticipate.
Idaho had heard the stories about the fight at the Ixian Embassy, but the Fish Speaker accounts had an aura of
miraculous visitation
about them which obscured the physical data.
“He flew down from above them and executed a terrible slaughter among the sinners.”
“How did he do that?” Idaho had asked.
“He was an
angry
God,” his informant had said.
Angry
, Idaho thought.
Was it because of the threat to Hwi?
The stories he had heard! None were believable. Hwi wedded to this gross … It was not possible! Not the lovely Hwi, the Hwi of gentle delicacy.
He is playing some terrible game, testing us … testing us
… There was no honest reality in these times, no peace except in the presence of Hwi. All else was insanity.
As he returned his attention to Leto’s face—that silently waiting Atreides face—the sense of dislocation grew stronger in Idaho. He began to wonder if, by a slight increase in mental effort along some strange new pathway, he might break through ghostly barriers to remember all of the experiences of the other Ghola Idahos.
What did they think when they entered this room? Did they feel this dislocation, this rejection?
Just a little extra effort.
He felt dizzy and wondered if he was going to faint.
“Is something wrong, Duncan?” It was Leto’s most reasonable and calming tone.
“It’s not real,” Idaho said. “I don’t belong here.”
Leto chose to misunderstand. “But my guard tells me you came here of your own accord, that you flew back from the Citadel and demanded an immediate audience.”
“I mean
here
, now! In this time!”
“But I need you.”
“For what?”
“Look around you, Duncan. The ways you can help me are so numerous that you could not do them all.”
“But your women won’t let me fight! Every time I want to go where …”
“Do you question that you’re more valuable alive than dead?” Leto made a clucking sound, then: “Use your wits, Duncan! That’s what I value.”
“And my sperm. You value that.”
“Your sperm is your own to put where you wish.”
“I will not leave a widow and orphans behind me the way …”
“Duncan! I’ve said the choice is yours.”
Idaho swallowed, then: “You’ve committed a crime against us, Leto, against all of us—the gholas you resurrect without ever asking us if that’s what we want.”
This was a new turn in Duncan-thinking. Leto peered at Idaho with renewed interest.
“What crime?”
“Oh, I’ve heard you spouting your deep thoughts,” Idaho accused. He hooked a thumb over his shoulder, pointing at the room’s entrance. “Did you know you can be heard out there in the anteroom?”
“When I wish to be heard, yes.”
But only my journals hear it all!
“I would like to know the nature of my crime, though.”
“There’s a time, Leto, a time when you’re alive. A time when you’re supposed to be alive. It can have a magic, that time, while you’re living it. You know you’re never going to see a time like that again.”
Leto blinked, touched by the Duncan’s distress. The words were evocative.
Idaho raised both hands, palms up, to chest-height, a beggar asking for something he knew he could not receive.
“Then … one day you wake up and you remember dying … and you remember the axlotl tank … and the Tleilaxu nastiness which awakened you … and it’s supposed to start all over again. But it doesn’t. It never does, Leto. That’s a crime!”