Children of Dune - Frank Herbert

She picked up one of the report spools. And Muriz! The man was hysterical. That was the only possible explanation. Otherwise she'd have to believe in miracles. No human, let alone a child (even a child such as Leto) could leap from the butte at Shuloch and survive to flee across the desert in leaps that took him from dunecrest to dunecrest.

Alia felt the coldness of the shigawire under her hand.

Where was Leto, then? Ghanima refused to believe him other than dead. A Truthsayer had confirmed her story: Leto slain by a Laza tiger. Then who was the child reported by Namri and Muriz?

She shuddered.

Forty qanats had been breached, their waters loosed into the sand. The loyal Fremen and even the rebels, superstitious louts, all! Her reports were flooded with stories of mysterious occurrences. Sandtrout leaped into qanats and shattered to become hosts of small replicas. Worms deliberately drowned themselves. Blood dripped from Second Moon and fell to Arrakis, where it stirred up great storms. And the storm frequency was increasing!

She thought of Duncan incommunicado at Tabr, fretting under the restraints she'd exacted from Stilgar. He and Irulan talked of little else than the real meaning behind these omens. Fools! Even her spies betrayed the influence of these outrageous stories!

Why did Ghanima insist on her story of the Laza tiger?

Alia sighed. Only one of the reports on the shigawire spools reassured her. Farad'n had sent a contingent of his household guard "to help you in troubles and to prepare the way for the Official Rite of Betrothal." Alia smiled to herself and shared the chuckle which rumbled in her skull. That plan, at least, remained intact. Logical explanations would be found to dispel all of this other superstitious nonsense.

Meanwhile she'd use Farad'n's men to help close down Shuloch and to arrest the known dissidents, especially among the Naibs. She debated moving against Stilgar, but the inner voice cautioned against this.

"Not yet."

"My mother and the Sisterhood still have some plan of their own," Alia whispered. "Why is she training Farad'n?"

"Perhaps he excites her," the Old Baron said.

"Not that cold one."

"You're not thinking of asking Farad'n to return her?"

"I know the dangers in that!"

"Good. Meanwhile, that young aide Zia recently brought in. I believe his name's Agarves - Buer Agarves. If you'd invite him here tonight..."

"No!"

"Alia..."

"It's almost dawn, you insatiable old fool! There's a Military Council meeting this morning, the Priests will have -"

"Don't trust them, darling Alia."

"Of course not!"

"Very well. Now, this Buer Agarves..."

"I said no!"

The Old Baron remained silent within her, but she began to feel a headache. A slow pain crept upward from her left cheek into her skull. Once he'd sent her raging down the corridors with this trick. Now, she resolved to resist him.

"If you persist, I'll take a sedative," she said.

He could see she meant it. The headache began to recede.

"Very well." Petulant. "Another time, then."

"Another time," she agreed.

***

Thou didst divide the sand by thy strength; Thou breakest the heads of the dragons in the desert. Yea, I behold thee as a beast coming up from the dunes; thou hast the two horns of the lamb, but thou speakest as the dragon.

It was the immutable prophecy, the threads become rope, a thing Leto now seemed to have known all of his life. He looked out across the evening shadows on the Tanzerouft. One hundred and seventy kilometers due north lay Old Gap, the deep and twisting crevasse through the Shield Wall by which the first Fremen had migrated into the desert.

No doubts remained in Leto. He knew why he stood here alone in the desert, yet filled with a sense that he owned this entire land, that it must do his bidding. He felt the chord which connected him with all of humankind and that profound need for a universe of experiences which made logical sense, a universe of recognizable regularities within its perpetual changes.

I know this universe.

The worm which had brought him here had come to the stamping of his foot and, rising up in front of him, had stopped like an obedient beast. He'd leaped atop it and, with only his membrane-amplified hands, had exposed the leading lip of the worm's rings to keep it on the surface. The worm had exhausted itself in the nightlong dash northward. Its silicon-sulfur internal "factory" had worked at capacity, exhaling lavish gusts of oxygen which a following wind had sent in enveloping eddies around Leto. At times the warm gusts had made him dizzy, filled his mind with strange perceptions. The reflexive and circular subjectivity of his visions had turned inward upon his ancestry, forcing him to relive portions of his Terranic past, then comparing those portions with his changing self.

Already he could feel how far he'd drifted from something recognizably human. Seduced by the spice which he gulped from every trace he found, the membrane which covered him no longer was sandtrout, just as he was no longer human. Cilia had crept into his flesh, forming a new creature which would seek its own metamorphosis in the eons ahead.

You saw this, father, and rejected it, he thought. It was a thing too terrible to face.

Leto knew what was believed of his father, and why.

Muad'Dib died of prescience.

But Paul Atreides had passed from the universe of reality into the alam al-mythal while still alive, fleeing from this thing which his son had dared.

Now there was only The Preacher.

Leto squatted on the sand and kept his attention northward. The worm would come from that direction, and on its back would ride two people: a young Fremen and a blind man.

A flight of pallid bats passed over Leto's head, bending their course southeast. They were random specks in the darkening sky, and a knowledgeable Fremen eye could mark their back-course to learn where shelter lay that way. The Preacher would avoid that shelter, though. His destination was Shuloch, where no wild bats were permitted lest they guide strangers to a secret place.

The worm appeared first as a dark movement between the desert and the northern sky. Matar, the rain of sand dropped from high altitudes by a dying stormwind, obscured the view for a few minutes, then it returned clearer and closer.

The cold-line at the base of the dune where Leto crouched began to produce its nightly moisture. He tasted the fragile dampness in his nostrils, adjusted the bubble cap of the membrane over his mouth. There no longer was any need for him to find soaks and sip-wells. From his mother's genes he had that longer, larger Fremen large intestine to take back water from everything which came its way. The living stillsuit grasped and retained every bit of moisture it encountered. And even while he sat here the membrane which touched sand extruded pseudopod-cilia to hunt for bits of energy which it could store.

Leto studied the approaching worm. He knew the youthful guide had seen him by this time, noting the spot atop the dune. The worm rider would discern no principle in this object seen from a distance, but that was a problem Fremen had learned how to handle. Any unknown object was dangerous. The young guide's reactions would be quite predictable, even without the vision.

True to that prediction, the worm's course shifted slightly and aimed directly at Leto. Giant worms were a weapon which Fremen had employed many times. Worms had helped beat Shaddam at Arrakeen. This worm, however, failed to do its rider's bidding. It came to a halt ten meters away and no manner of goading would send it across another grain of sand.

Leto arose, feeling the cilia snap back into the membrane behind him. He freed his mouth and called out: "Achlan, wasachlan!" Welcome, twice welcome!

The blind man stood behind his guide atop the worm, one hand on the youth's shoulder. The man held his face high, nose pointed over Leto's head as though trying to sniff out this interruption. Sunset painted orange on his forehead.

"Who is that?" the blind man asked, shaking his guide's shoulder. "Why have we stopped?" His voice was nasal through the stillsuit plugs.

The youth stared fearfully down at Leto, said: "It is only someone alone in the desert. A child by his looks. I tried to send the worm over him, but the worm won't go."

"Why didn't you say?" the blind man demanded.

"I thought it was only someone alone in the desert!" the youth protested. "But it's a demon."

"Spoken like a true son of Jacurutu," Leto said. "And you, sire, you are The Preacher."

"I am that one, yes." And there was fear in The Preacher's voice because, at last, he had met his own past.

"This is no garden," Leto said, "but you are welcome to share this place with me tonight."

"Who are you?" The Preacher demanded. "How have you stopped our worm?" There was an ominous tone of recognition in The Preacher's voice. Now he called up the memories of this alternate vision... knowing he could reach an end here.

"It's a demon!" the young guide protested. "We must flee this place or our souls -"

"Silence!" The Preacher roared.

"I am Leto Atreides," Leto said. "Your worm stopped because I commanded it."

The Preacher stood in frozen silence.

"Come, father," Leto said. "Alight and spend the night with me. I'll give you sweet syrup to sip. I see you've Fremkits with food and water jars. We'll share our riches here upon the sand."

"Leto's yet a child," The Preacher protested. "And they say he's dead of Corrino treachery. There's no childhood in your voice."

"You know me, sire," Leto said. "I'm small for my age as you were, but my experience is ancient and my voice has learned."

"What do you here in the Inner Desert?" The Preacher asked.

"Bu ji," Leto said. Nothing from nothing. It was the answer of a Zensunni wanderer, one who acted only from a position of rest, without effort and in harmony with his surroundings.

The Preacher shook his guide's shoulder. "Is it a child, truly a child?"

"Aiya," the youth said, keeping a fearful attention on Leto.

A great shuddering sigh shook The Preacher. "No," he said.

"It is a demon in child form," the guide said.

"You will spend the night here," Leto said.

"We will do as he says," The Preacher said. He released his grip on the guide, slipped off the worm's side and slid down a ring to the sand, leaping clear when his feet touched. Turning, he said: "Take the worm off and send it back into the sand. It is tired and will not bother us."

"The worm will not go!" the youth protested.

"It will go," Leto said. "But if you try to flee on it, I'll let it eat you." He moved to one side out of the worm's sensory range, pointed in the direction they had come. "Go that way."

The youth tapped a goad against the ring behind him, wiggled a hook where it held a ring open. Slowly the worm began to slide over the sand, turning as the youth shifted his hook down a side.

The Preacher, following the sound of Leto's voice, clambered up the duneslope and stood two paces away. It was done with a swift sureness which told Leto this would be no easy contest.

Here the visions parted.

Leto said: "Remove your suit mask, father."

The Preacher obeyed, dropping the fold of his hood and withdrawing the mouth cover.

Knowing his own appearance, Leto studied this face, seeing the lines of likeness as though they'd been outlined in light. The lines formed an indefinable reconciliation, a pathway of genes without sharp boundaries, and there was no mistaking them. Those lines came down to Leto from the humming days, from the water-dripping days, from the miracle seas of Caladan. But now they stood at a dividing point on Arrakis as night waited to fold itself into the dunes.

"So father," Leto said glancing to the left where he could see the youthful guide trudging back to them from where the worm had been abandoned.

"Mu zein! "'The Preacher said, waving his right hand in a cutting gesture. This is no good!

"Koolish zein," Leto said, voice soft. This is all the good we may ever have. And he added, speaking in Chakobsa, the Atreides battle language: "Here I am; here I remain! We cannot forget that, father."

The Preacher's shoulders sagged. He put both hands to his empty sockets in a long-unused gesture.

"I gave you the sight of my eyes once and took your memories," Leto said. "I know your decisions and I've been to that place where you hid yourself."

"I know." The Preacher lowered his hands. "You will remain?"

"You named me for the man who put that on his coat of arms," Leto said. "J'y suis, j'y reste!"

The Preacher sighed deeply. "How far has it gone, this thing you've done to yourself?"

"My skin is not my own, father."

The Preacher shuddered. "Then I know how you found me here."

"Yes, I fastened my memory to a place my flesh had never known," Leto said. "I need an evening with my father."

"I'm not your father. I'm only a poor copy, a relic." He turned his head toward the sound of the approaching guide. "I no longer go to the visions for my future."

As he spoke, darkness covered the desert. Stars leaped out above them and Leto, too, turned toward the approaching guide. "Wubakh ul kuhar!" Leto called to the youth. "Greetings!"

Back came the response: "Subakh un nar!"

Speaking in a hoarse whisper, The Preacher said: "That young Assan Tariq is a dangerous one."

"All of the Cast Out are dangerous," Leto said. "But not to me." He spoke in a low, conversational tone.

"If that's your vision, I will not share it," The Preacher said.

"Perhaps you have no choice," Leto said. "You are the fit-haquiqa. The Reality. You are Abu Dhur, Father of the Indefinite Roads of Time."

"I'm no more than bait in a trap," The Preacher said, and his voice was bitter.

"And Alia already has eaten that bait," Leto said. "But I don't like its taste."

"You cannot do this!" The Preacher hissed.

"I've already done it. My skin is not my own."

"Perhaps it's not too late for you to -"

"It is too late." Leto bent his head to one side. He could hear Assan Tariq trudging up the duneslope toward them, coming to the sound of their voices. "Greetings, Assan Tariq of Shuloch," Leto said.

The youth stopped just below Leto on the slope, a dark shadow there in the starlight. There was indecision in the set of his shoulders, the way he tipped his head.

"Yes," Leto said, "I'm the one who escaped from Shuloch."

"When I heard..." The Preacher began. And again: "You cannot do this!"

"I am doing it. What matter if you're made blind once more?"

"You think I fear that?" The Preacher asked. "Do you not see the fine guide they have provided for me?"

"I see him." Again Leto faced Tariq. "Didn't you hear me, Assan? I'm the one who escaped from Shuloch."