God Emperor of Dune Page 6

  "But I was young and foolish, Lord."

  "Young and brash, never foolish."

  Moneo managed a tight smile at this compliment, his thoughts leaning more and more toward the belief that he now understood Leto's intentions. The dangers, though!

  Feeding his belief, Leto said: "You know how much I enjoy surprises."

  That is true, Leto thought. Moneo does know it. But even while Siona surprises me, she reminds me of what I fear most--the sameness and boredom which could break the Golden Path. Look at how boredom put me temporarily in the Duncan's power! Siona is the contrast by which I know my deepest fears. Moneo's concern for me is well grounded.

  "My agent will continue to watch her new companions, Lord," Moneo said. "I do not like them."

  "Her companions? I myself had such companions once long ago."

  "Rebellious, Lord? You?" Moneo was genuinely surprised.

  "Have I not proved a friend of rebellion?"

  "But Lord ..."

  "The aberrations of our past are more numerous than you may think!"

  "Yes, Lord." Moneo was abashed, yet still curious. And he knew that the God Emperor sometimes waxed loquacious after the death of a Duncan. "You must have seen many rebellions, Lord."

  Involuntarily, Leto's thoughts sank into the memories aroused by these words.

  "Ahhh, Moneo," he muttered. "My travels in the ancestral mazes have memorized uncounted places and events which I never desire to see repeated."

  "I can imagine your inward travels, Lord."

  "No, you cannot. I have seen peoples and planets in such numbers that they lose meaning even in imagination. Ohhh, the landscapes I have passed. The calligraphy of alien roads glimpsed from space and imprinted upon my innermost sight. The eroded sculpture of canyons and cliffs and galaxies has imprinted upon me the certain knowledge that I am a mote."

  "Not you, Lord. Certainly not you."

  "Less than a mote! I have seen people and their fruitless societies in such repetitive posturings that their nonsense fills me with boredom, do you hear?"

  "I did not mean to anger my Lord." Moneo spoke meekly.

  "You don't anger me. Sometimes you irritate me, that is the extent of it. You cannot imagine what I have seen--caliphs and mjeeds, rakahs, rajas and bashars, kings and emperors, primitos and presidents--I've seen them all. Feudal chieftains, every one. Every one a little pharaoh."

  "Forgive my presumption, Lord."

  "Damn the Romans!" Leto cried.

  He spoke it inwardly to his ancestors: "Damn the Romans!"

  Their laughter drove him from the inward arena.

  "I don't understand, Lord," Moneo ventured.

  "That's true. You don't understand. The Romans broadcast the pharaonic disease like grain farmers scattering the seeds of next season's harvest--Caesars, kaisers, tsars, imperators, caseris ... palatos ... damned pharaohs!"

  "My knowledge does not encompass all of those titles, Lord."

  "I may be the last of the lot, Moneo. Pray that this is so."

  "Whatever my Lord commands."

  Leto stared down at the man. "We are myth-killers, you and I, Moneo. That's the dream we share. I assure you from a God's Olympian perch that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies."

  "Thus you have taught me, Lord."

  "That man-machine, the Army, created our present dream, my friend."

  Moneo cleared his throat.

  Leto recognized the small signs of the majordomo's impatience.

  Moneo understands about armies. He knows it was a fool's dream that armies were the basic instrument of governance.

  As Leto continued silent, Moneo crossed to the lasgun and retrieved it from the crypt's cold floor. He began disabling it.

  Leto watched him, thinking how this tiny scene encapsulated the essence of the Army myth. The Army fostered technology because the power of machines appeared so obvious to the shortsighted.

  That lasgun is no more than a machine. But all machines fail or are superceded. Still, the Army worships at the shrine of such things--both fascinated and fearful. Look at how people fear the Ixians! In its guts, the Army knows it is the Sorcerer's Apprentice. It unleashes technology and never again can the magic be stuffed back into the bottle.

  I teach them another magic.

  Leto spoke to the hordes within then:

  "You see? Moneo has disabled the deadly instrument. A connection broken here, a small capsule crushed there."

  Leto sniffed. He smelled the esters of a preservative oil riding on the stink of Moneo's perspiration.

  Still speaking inwardly, Leto said: "But the genie is not dead. Technology breeds anarchy. It distributes these tools at random. And with them goes the provocation for violence. The ability to make and use savage destroyers falls inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group is a single individual."

  Moneo returned to a point below Leto, holding the disabled lasgun casually in his right hand. "There is talk on Parella and the planets of Dan about another jihad against such things as this."

  Moneo lifted the lasgun and smiled, signaling that he knew the paradox in such empty dreams.

  Leto closed his eyes. The hordes within wanted to argue, but he shut them off, thinking: Jihads create armies. The Butlerian Jihad tried to rid our universe of machines which simulate the mind of man. The Butlerians left armies in their wake and the Ixians still make questionable devices ... for which I thank them. What is anathema? The motivation to ravage, no matter the instruments.

  "It happened," he muttered.

  "Lord?"

  Leto opened his eyes. "I will go to my tower," he said. "I must have more time to mourn my Duncan."

  "The new one is already on his way here," Moneo said.

  You, the first person to encounter my chronicles for at least four thousand years, beware. Do not feel honored by your primacy in reading the revelations of my Ixian storehouse. You will find much pain in it. Other than the few glimpses required to assure me that the Golden Path continued, I never wanted to peer beyond those four millennia. Therefore, I am not sure what the events in my journals may signify to your times. I only know that my journals have suffered oblivion and that the events which I recount have undoubtedly been submitted to historical distortion for eons. I assure you that the ability to view our futures can become a bore. Even to be thought of as a god, as I certainly was, can become ultimately boring. It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

  --INSCRIPTION ON THE STOREHOUSE AT DAR-ES-BALAT

  am Duncan Idaho.

  I That was about all he wanted to know for sure. He did not like the Tleilaxu explanations, their stories. But then the Tleilaxu had always been feared. Disbelieved and feared.

  They had brought him down to the planet on a small Guild shuttle, arriving at the dusk line with a green glimmer of sun corona along the horizon as they dipped into the shadow. The spaceport had not looked at all like anything he remembered. It was larger and with a ring of strange buildings.

  "Are you sure this is Dune?" he had asked.

  "Arrakis," his Tleilaxu escort had corrected him.

  They had sped him in a sealed groundcar to this building somewhere within a city they called Onn, giving the "n" sound a strange rising nasal inflection. The room in which they left him was about three meters square, a cube really. There was no sign of glowglobes, but the place was filled with warm yellow light.

  I am a ghola, he told himself.

  That had been a shock, but he had to believe it. To find himself living when he knew he had died, that was proof enough. The Tleilaxu had taken cells from his dead flesh and they had grown a bud in one of their axlotl tanks. That bud had become this body in a process which had made him feel at first an alien in his own flesh.

  He looked down at the body. It was clothed in dark brown trousers and jacket of a coarse weave which irritated his skin. Sandals p
rotected his feet. Except for the body, that was all they had given him, a parsimony which said something about the real Tleilaxu character.

  There was no furniture in the room. They had let him in through a single door which had no handle on the inside. He looked up at the ceiling and around at the walls, at the door. Despite the featureless character of the place, he felt that he was being watched.

  "Women of the Imperial Guard will come for you," they had said. Then they had gone away, smiling slyly among themselves.

  Women of the Imperial Guard?

  The Tleilaxu escort had taken sadistic delight in exposing their shape-changing abilities. He had not known from one minute to the next what new form the plastic flow of their flesh would present.

  Damned Face Dancers!

  They had known all about him, of course, had known how much the Shape Changers disgusted him.

  What could he trust if it came from Face Dancers? Very little. Could anything they said be believed?

  My name. I know my name.

  And he had his memories. They had shocked the identity back into him. Gholas were supposed to be incapable of recovering the original identity. But the Tleilaxu had done it and he was forced to believe because he understood how it had been done.

  In the beginning, he knew, there had been the fully formed ghola, adult flesh without name or memories--a palimpsest upon which the Tleilaxu could write almost anything they wished.

  "You are Ghola," they had said. That had been his only name for a long time. Ghola had been taken like a malleable infant and conditioned to kill a particular man--a man so like the original Paul Muad'Dib he had served and adored that Idaho now suspected it might have been another ghola. But if that were true, where had they obtained the original cells?

  Something in the Idaho cells had rebelled at killing an Atreides. He had found himself standing with a knife in one hand, the bound form of the pseudo-Paul staring up at him in angry terror.

  Memories had gushered into his awareness. He remembered Ghola and he remembered Duncan Idaho.

  I am Duncan Idaho, swordmaster of the Atreides.

  He clung to this memory as he stood in the yellow room.

  I died defending Paul and his mother in a cave-sietch beneath the sands of Dune. I have been returned to that planet, but Dune is no more. Now it is only Arrakis.

  He had read the truncated history which the Tleilaxu provided, but he did not believe it. More than thirty-five hundred years? Who could believe his flesh existed after such a time? Except ... with the Tleilaxu it was possible. He had to believe his own senses.

  "There have been many of you," his instructors had said.

  "How many?"

  "The Lord Leto will provide that information."

  The Lord Leto?

  The Tleilaxu history said this Lord Leto was Leto II, grandson of the Leto whom Idaho had served with fanatical devotion. But this second Leto (so the history said) had become something ... something so strange that Idaho despaired of understanding the transformation.

  How could a human slowly turn into a sandworm? How could any thinking creature live more than three thousand years? Not even the wildest projections of geriatric spice allowed such a lifespan.

  Leto II, the God Emperor?

  The Tleilaxu history was not to be believed!

  Idaho remembered a strange child--twins, really: Leto and Ghanima, Paul's children, the children of Chani, who had died delivering them. The Tleilaxu history said Ghanima had died after a relatively normal life, but the God Emperor Leto lived on and on and on... .

  "He is a tyrant," Idaho's instructors had said. "He has ordered us to produce you from our axlotl tanks and to send you into his service. We do not know what has happened to your predecessor."

  And here I am.

  Once more, Idaho let his gaze wander around the featureless walls and ceiling.

  The faint sound of voices intruded upon his awareness. He looked at the door. The voices were muted, but at least one of them sounded female.

  Women of the Imperial Guard?

  The door swung inward on noiseless hinges. Two women entered. The first thing to catch his attention was the fact that one of the women wore a mask, a cibus hood of shapeless, light-drinking black. She would see him clearly through the hood, he knew, but her features would never reveal themselves, not even to the most subtle instruments of penetration. The hood said that the Ixians or their inheritors were still at work in the Imperium. Both women wore one-piece uniforms of rich blue with the Atreides hawk in red braid at the left breast.

  Idaho studied them as they closed the door and faced him.

  The masked woman had a blocky, powerful body. She moved with the deceptive care of a professional muscle fanatic. The other woman was graceful and slender with almond eyes in sharp, high-boned features. Idaho had the feeling that he had seen her somewhere, but he could not fix the memory. Both women carried needle knives in hip sheaths. Something about their movements told Idaho these women would be extremely competent with such weapons.

  The slender one spoke first.

  "My name is Luli. Let me be the first to address you as Commander. My companion must remain anonymous. Our Lord Leto has commanded it. You may address her as Friend."

  "Commander?" he asked.

  "It is the Lord Leto's wish that you command his Royal Guard," Luli said.

  "That so? Let's go talk to him about it."

  "Oh, no!" Luli was visibly shocked. "The Lord Leto will summon you when it is time. For now, he wishes us to make you comfortable and happy."

  "And I must obey?"

  Luli merely shook her head in puzzlement.

  "Am I a slave?"

  Luli relaxed and smiled. "By no means. It's just that the Lord Leto has many great concerns which require his personal attention. He must make time for you. He sent us because he was concerned about his Duncan Idaho. You have been a long time in the hands of the dirty Tleilaxu."

  Dirty Tleilaxu, Idaho thought.

  That, at least, had not changed.

  He was concerned, though, by a particular reference in Luli's explanation.

  "His Duncan Idaho?"

  "Are you not an Atreides warrior?" Luli asked.

  She had him there. Idaho nodded, turning his head slightly to stare at the enigmatic masked woman.

  "Why are you masked?"

  "It must not be known that I serve the Lord Leto," she said. Her voice was a pleasant contralto, but Idaho suspected that this, too, was masked by the cibus hood.

  "Then why are you here?"

  "The Lord Leto trusts me to determine if you have been tampered with by the dirty Tleilaxu."

  Idaho tried to swallow in a suddenly dry throat. This thought had occurred to him several times aboard the Guild transport. If the Tleilaxu could condition a ghola to attempt the murder of a dear friend, what else might they plant in the psyche of the regrown flesh?

  "I see that you have thought about this," the masked woman said.

  "Are you a mentat?" Idaho asked.

  "Oh, no!" Luli interrupted. "The Lord Leto does not permit the training of mentats."

  Idaho glanced at Luli, then returned his attention to the masked woman. No mentats. The Tleilaxu history had not mentioned that interesting fact. Why would Leto prohibit mentats? Surely, the human mind trained in the super abilities of computation still had its uses. The Tleilaxu had assured him that the Great Convention remained in force and that mechanical computers were still anathema. Surely, these women would know that the Atreides themselves had used mentats.

  "What is your opinion?" the masked woman asked. "Have the dirty Tleilaxu tampered with your psyche?"

  "I don't ... think so."

  "But you are not certain?"

  "No."

  "Do not fear, Commander Idaho," she said. "We have ways of making sure and ways of dealing with such problems should they arise. The dirty Tleilaxu have tried it only once and they paid dearly for their mistake."

  "That's rea
ssuring. Did the Lord Leto send me any messages?"

  Luli spoke up: "He told us to assure you that he still loves you as the Atreides have always loved you." She was obviously awed by her own words.

  Idaho relaxed slightly. As an old Atreides hand, superbly trained by them, he had found it easy to determine several things from this encounter. These two had been heavily conditioned to a fanatic obedience. If a cibus mask could hide the identity of that woman, there had to be many more whose bodies were very similar. All of this spoke of dangers around Leto which still required the old and subtle services of spies and an imaginative arsenal of weapons.

  Luli looked at her companion. "What say you, Friend?"

  "He may be brought to the Citadel," the masked woman said. "This is not a good place. Tleilaxu have been here."