The agony continued. Leto marveled that he could remain conscious, that he had a body to feel.
Instinct drove him. He clutched at a rock around which the torrent spilled him, felt a clutching finger torn from his hand before he could release his grip. The sensation of it was only a minor accent in the symphony of pain.
The river’s course swept to the left around a chasm buttress and, as though saying it had enough of him, it sent him rolling onto the sloping edge of a sandbar. He lay there a moment, the blue dye of spice-essence drifting away from him in the current. The agony moved him, the worm body moving of itself, retreating from the water. All the covering sandtrout were gone and he felt every touch more immediate, a lost sense restored when all it could bring him was pain. He could not see his body, but he felt the thing that would have been a worm as it made its writhing, crawling progress out of the water. He peered upward through eyes that saw everything in sheets of flame from which shapes coalesced of their own accord. At last, he recognized this place. The river had swept him to the turn where it left the Sareer forever. Behind him lay Tuono and, just a ways down the barrier Wall, was all that remained of Sietch Tabr—Stilgar’s realm, the place where all of Leto’s spice had been concealed.
Exhuding blue fumes, his agonized body writhed its way noisily along a shingle of beach, dragged its blue-dyed way across broken boulders and into a damp hole which might have been part of the original sietch. It was only a shallow cave now, blocked at its inner end by a rock fall. His nostrils reported the wet dirt smell and clean spice-essence.
Sounds intruded on his agony. He turned in the confinement of the cave and saw a rope dangling at the entrance. A figure slid down the rope. He recognized Nayla. She dropped to the rocks and crouched there, staring into the shadows at him. The flame which was Leto’s vision parted to reveal another figure dropping from the rope: Siona. She and Nayla scrambled toward him in a rattle of rocks and stopped, peering in at him. A third figure dropped off the rope: Idaho. He moved with frantic rage, hurling himself at Nayla, screaming:
“Why did you kill her! You weren’t supposed to kill Hwi!”
Nayla sent him sprawling with a casual, almost indifferent sweep of her left arm. She scrambled closer up the rocks and stopped on all fours to peer in at Leto.
“Lord? You live?”
Idaho was right behind her, snatching the lasgun from her holster. Nayla turned, astonished, as he leveled the weapon and pulled its trigger. The burning started at the top of Nayla’s head. It split her, the pieces slumping apart. A shining crysknife spilled from her burning uniform and shattered on the rocks. Idaho did not see it. A grimace of rage on his face, he kept burning and burning the pieces of Nayla until the weapon’s charge was gone. The blazing arc vanished. Only wet and smoking bits of meat and cloth lay scattered among the glowing rocks.
It was the moment for which Siona had waited. She scrambled up to him and pulled the useless lasgun from Idaho’s hands. He whirled toward her and she poised herself to subdue him, but all the rage was gone.
“Why?” he whispered.
“It’s done,” she said.
They turned and looked into the cave shadows at Leto.
Leto could not even imagine what they saw. The sandtrout skin was gone, he knew. There would be some kind of surface pocked with cilia holes from the departed skin. As for the rest, he could only look back at the two figures from a universe furrowed by sorrow. Through the vision flames he saw Siona as a female demon. The demon name came unbidden to his minds and he spoke it aloud, amplified by the cave and much louder than he had expected:
“Hanmya!”
“What?” She moved a step closer to him.
Idaho put both hands over his face.
“Look at what you’ve done to poor Duncan,” Leto said.
“He’ll find other loves.” How callous she sounded, an echo of his own angry youth.
“You don’t know what it is to love,” he said. “What have you ever given?” He could only wring his hands then, those travesties which once had been his hands. “Gods below! What I’ve given!”
She scrambled closer and reached toward him, then drew back.
“I am reality, Siona. Look upon me. I exist. You can touch me if you dare. Reach out your hand. Do it!”
Slowly, she reached toward what had been his front segment, the place where she had slept in the Sareer. Her hand was touched with blue when she withdrew it.
“You have touched me and felt my body,” he said. “Is that not strange beyond any other thing in this universe?”
She started to turn away.
“No! Don’t turn away from me! Look at what you have wrought, Siona. How is it that you can touch me but you cannot touch yourself?”
She whirled away from him.
“
There
is the difference between us,” he said. “You are God embodied. You walk around within the greatest miracle of this universe, yet you refuse to touch or see or feel or believe in it.”
Leto’s awareness went wandering then into a night-encircled place, a place where he thought he could hear the metal insect song of his hidden printers clacking away in their lightless room. There was a complete absence of radiation in this place, an Ixian no-thing which made it a place of anxiety and spiritual alienation because it had no connection with the rest of the universe.
But it will have a connection.
He sensed then that his Ixian printers had been set in motion, that they were recording his thoughts without any special command.
Remember what I did! Remember me! I will be innocent again!
The flame of his vision parted to reveal Idaho standing where Siona had stood. There was gesturing motion somewhere out of focus behind Idaho … ah, yes: Siona waving instructions to someone atop the barrier Wall.
“Are you still alive?” Idaho asked.
Leto’s voice came in wheezing gasps: “Let them scatter, Duncan. Let them run and hide anywhere they want in any universe they choose.”
“Damn you! What’re you saying? I’d have sooner let her live with you!”
“Let? I did not
let
anything.”
“Why did you let Hwi die?” Idaho moaned. “We didn’t know she was in there with you.”
Idaho’s head sagged forward.
“You will be recompensed,” Leto husked. “My Fish Speakers will choose you over Siona. Be kind to her, Duncan. She is more than Atreides and she carries the seed of your survival.”
Leto sank back into his memories. They were delicate myths now, held fleetingly in his awareness. He sensed that he might have fallen into a time which, by its very being, had changed the past. There were sounds, though, and he struggled to interpret them.
Someone scrambling on rocks?
The flames parted to reveal Siona standing beside Idaho. They stood hand-in-hand like two children reassuring each other before venturing into an unknown place.
“How can he live like that?” Siona whispered.
Leto waited for the strength to respond. “Hwi helps me,” he said. “We had something few experience. We were joined in our strengths rather than in our weaknesses.”
“And look what it got you!” Siona sneered.
“Yes, and pray that you get the same,” he husked. “Perhaps the spice will give you time.”
“Where is your spice?” she demanded.
“Deep in Sietch Tabr,” he said. “Duncan will find it. You know the place, Duncan. They call it Tabur now. The outlines are still there.”
“Why did you do it?” Idaho whispered.
“My gift,” Leto said. “Nobody will find the descendants of Siona. The Oracle cannot see her.”
“What?” They spoke in unison, leaning close to hear his fading voice.
“I give you a new kind of time without parallels,” he said. “It will always diverge. There will be no concurrent points on its curves. I give you the Golden Path. That is my gift. Never again will you have the kinds of concurrence that once you had.”
Flames covered his vision. The agony was fading, but he could still sense odors and hear sounds with a terrible acuity. Both Idaho and Siona were breathing in quick, shallow gasps. Odd kinesthetic sensations began to weave their way through Leto—echoes of bones and joints which he knew he no longer possessed.
“Look!” Siona said.
“He’s disintegrating.” That was Idaho.
“No.” Siona. “The outside is falling away. Look! The Worm!”
Leto felt parts of himself settling into warm softness. The agony removed itself.
“What’re those holes in him?” Siona.
“I think they were the sandtrout. See the shapes?”
“I am here to prove one of my ancestors wrong,” Leto said (or thought he said, which was the same thing as far as his journals were concerned). “I was born a man but I do not die a man.”
“I can’t look!” Siona said.
Leto heard her turn away, a rattle of rocks.
“Are you still there, Duncan?”
“Yes.”
So I still have a voice.
“Look at me,” Leto said. “I was a bloody bit of pulp in a human womb, a bit no larger than a cherry. Look at me, I say!”
“I’m looking.” Idaho’s voice was faint.
“You expected a giant and you found a gnome,” Leto said. “Now, you’re beginning to know the responsibilities which come as a result of actions. What will you do with your new power, Duncan?”
There was a long silence, then Siona’s voice: “Don’t listen to him! He was mad!”
“Of course,” Leto said. “Madness in method, that is genius.”
“Siona, do you understand this?” Idaho asked. How plaintive, the ghola voice.
“She understands,” Leto said. “It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate. That’s the way it always is with humans. Moneo understood at last.”
“I wish he’d hurry up and die!” Siona said.
“I am the divided god and you would make me whole,” Leto said. “Duncan? I think of all my Duncans I approve of you the most.”
“Approve?” Some of the rage returned to Idaho’s voice.
“There’s magic in my approval,” Leto said. “Anything’s possible in a magic universe.
Your
life has been dominated by the Oracle’s fatality, not mine. Now, you see the mysterious caprices and you would ask me to dispel this? I wished only to increase it.”
The
others
within Leto began to reassert themselves. Without the solidarity of the colonial group to support his identity, he began to lose his place among them. They started speaking the language of the constant “IF.” “If you had only … If we had but …” He wanted to shout them into silence.
“Only fools prefer the past!”
Leto did not know if he truly shouted or only thought it. The response was a momentary inner silence matched to an outer silence and he felt some of the threads of his old identity still intact. He tried to speak and knew the reality of it because Idaho said, “Listen, he’s trying to say something.”
“Do not fear the Ixians,” he said, and he heard his own voice as a fading whisper. “They can make the machines, but they no longer can make
arafel.
I know. I was there.”
He fell silent, gathering his strength, but he felt the energy flowing from him even as he tried to hold it. Once more, the clamor arose within him—voices pleading and shouting.
“Stop that foolishness!” he cried, or thought he cried.
Idaho and Siona heard only a gasping hiss.
Presently, Siona said: “I think he’s dead.”
“And everyone thought he was immortal,” Idaho said.
“Do you know what the Oral History says?” Siona asked. “If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal.”
“That sounds like
him
,” Idaho accused.
“I think it was,” she said.
“What did he mean about your descendants … hiding, not finding them?” Idaho asked.
“He created a new kind of mimesis,” she said, “a new biological imitation. He knew he had succeeded. He could not see me in his futures.”
“What are you?” Idaho demanded.
“I’m the new Atreides.”
“Atreides!” It was a curse in Idaho’s voice.
Siona stared down at the disintegrating hulk which once had been Leto Atreides II … and something else. The
something
else was sloughing away in faint wisps of blue smoke where the smell of melange was strongest. Puddles of blue liquid formed in the rocks beneath his melting bulk. Only faint vague shapes which might once have been human remained—a collapsed foaming pinkness, a bit of red-streaked bone which could have held the forms of cheeks and brow …
Siona said: “I am different, but still I am what he was.”