"Leave her out of this!"
"Oh, yes. Leave her out. Leave out that pain! You share sex with her and you never think about parting. Tell me, fool, how do you give of yourself in the face of that?"
Abashed, Idaho inhaled deeply. He had not suspected such passion smoldering in the quiet Moneo, but this attack, this could not be...
"You think I'm cruel?" Moneo demanded. "I make you think about things you'd rather avoid. Hah! Crueler things have been done to the Lord Leto for no better reason than the cruelty!"
"You defend him? You..."
"I know him best!"
"He uses you!"
"To what ends?"
"You tell me!"
"He's our best hope to perpetuate..."
"Perverts don't perpetuate!"
Moneo spoke in a soothing tone, but his words shook Idaho. "I will tell you this only once. Homosexuals have been among the best warriors in our history, the berserkers of last resort. They were among our best priests and priestesses. Celibacy was no accident in religions. It is also no accident that adolescents make the best soldiers."
"That's perversion!"
"Quite right. Military commanders have known about the perverted displacement of sex into pain for thousands upon thousands of centuries."
"Is that what the Great Lord Leto's doing?"
Still mild, Moneo said: "Violence requires that you inflict pain and suffer it. How much more manageable a military force driven to this by its deepest urgings."
"He's made a monster out of you, too!"
"You suggested that he uses me," Moneo said. "I permit this because I know that the price he pays is much greater than what he demands of me."
"Even your daughter?"
"He holds back nothing. Why should I? Ohhh, I think you understand this about the Atreides. The Duncans are always good at that."
"The Duncans! Damn you, I won't be..."
"You just haven't the guts to pay the price he's asking," Moneo said.
In one blurred motion, Idaho whipped his knife from its sheath and lunged at Moneo. As fast as he moved, Moneo moved faster-sidestepping, tripping Idaho and propelling him face-down onto the floor. Idaho scrambled forward, rolled and started to leap to his feet, then hesitated, realizing that he had actually tried to attack an Atreides. Moneo was Atreides. Shock held Idaho immobile.
Moneo stood unmoving, looking down at him. There was an odd look of sadness on the majordomo's face.
"If you're going to kill me, Duncan, you'd best do it in the back by stealth," Moneo said. "You might succeed that way."
Idaho levered himself to one knee, put a foot flat on the floor, but remained there still clutching his knife. Moneo had moved so quickly and with such grace-so... so casually! Idaho cleared his throat. "How did you..."
"He has been breeding us for a long time, Duncan, strengthening many things in us. He has bred us for speed, for intelligence, for self-restraint, for sensitivity. You're... you're just an older model." -= Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to assess the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies-in any system which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.
- The Stolen Journals LETO AND Siona lay all day in the dune-shadows, moving only as the sun moved. He taught her how to protect herself under a blanket of sand in the noontime heat; it never grew too warm at the rock-level between the dunes.
In the afternoon, Siona crept close to Leto for warmth, a warmth he knew he had in excess these days.
They talked sporadically. He told her about the Fremen graces which once had dominated this landscape. She probed for secret knowledge of him.
Once, he said: "You may find it odd, but out here is where I can be most human."
His words failed to make her fully conscious of her human vulnerability and the fact that she might die out here. Even when she was not talking, she did not restore the face flap of her stillsuit.
Leto recognized the unconscious motivation behind this failure, but knew the futility of addressing that directly.
In the late afternoon, night's chill already starting to creep over the land, he began regaling her with songs of the Long Trek which had not been saved in the Oral History. He enjoyed the fact that she liked one of his favorites, "Liet's March."
"The tune is really ancient," he said, "a pre-space thing of Old Terra."
"Would you sing it again?"
He chose one of his best baritones, a long-dead artist who had filled many a concert hall.
"The wall of past-beyond-recall Hides me from an ancient fall Where all the waters tumble! And plays of sprays Carve caves in clays Beneath a torrent's rumble."
When he had finished, she was silent for a moment, then: "That's an odd song for marching."
"They liked it because they could dissect it," he said.
"Dissect?"
"Before our Fremen ancestors came to this planet, night was the time for storytelling, songs and poetry. In the Dune days, though, that was reserved for the false dark, the daytime gloom of the sietch. The night was when they could emerge and move about... just as we do now."
"But you said dissect."
"What does that song mean?" he asked.
"Oh. It's... it's just a song."
"Siona!"
She heard anger in his voice and remained silent.
"This planet is the child of the worm," he warned her, "and I am that worm."
She responded with a surprising insouciance: "Then tell me what it means."
"The insect has no more freedom from its hive than we have freedom from our past," he said. "The caves are there and all of the messages written in the sprays of the torrents."
"I prefer dancing songs," she said.
It was a flippant answer, but Leto chose to take it as a change of subject. He told her about the marriage dance of
Fremen women, tracing the steps back to the whirling of dust devils. Leto prided himself on telling a good story. It was clear from her rapt attention that she could see the women whirling before her inner eye, long black hair thrown in the ancient movements, straggling across long-dead faces.
Darkness was almost upon them when he finished.
"Come," he said. "Morning and evening are still the times of silhouettes. Let us see if anyone shares our desert."
Siona followed him up to a dune-crest and they stared all around at the darkening desert. There was only one bird high overhead, attracted by their movements. From the splayed-gap tips on its wings and the shape, he knew it was a vulture. He pointed this out to Siona.
"But what do they eat?" she asked.
"Anything that's dead or nearly so."
This hit her and she stared up at the last of the sunlight gilding the lone bird's flight feathers.
Leto pressed it: "A few people still venture into my Sareer. Sometimes, a Museum Fremen wanders off and gets lost. They're really only good at the rituals. And then there are the desert's edges and the remains of whatever my wolves leave."
At this, she whirled away from him, but not before he saw the passion still consuming her. Siona was being sorely tested.
"There's little daytime graciousness about a desert," he said. "That's another reason we travel by night. To a Fremen, the image of the day was that of windblown sand filling your tracks."
Her eyes glistened with unshed tears when she turned back to him, but her features were composed..
"What lives here now?" she asked.
"The vultures, a few night creatures, an occasional remnant of plant life out of the old days, burrowing things."
"Is that all?"
"Yes." .,Why?"
"Because this is where they were born and I permit them to know nothing better."