Once more, tears flowed down her cheeks. Leto longed to touch them, but they were water... painful water.
'It must be done this way,' he said.
'Will you explain it to me, Lord?'
'When I am gone, they must call me Shaitan, the Emperor of Gehenna. The wheel must turn and turn and turn along the Golden Path.'
'Lord, could the anger not be directed at me alone? I would not...'
'No! The lxians made you much more perfectly than they thought. I truly love you. I cannot help it.'
'I do not wish to cause you pain!' The words were wrenched from her.
'What's done is done. Do not mourn it.'
'Help me to understand.'
'The hate which will blossom after I am gone, that, too, will fade into the inevitable past. A long time will pass. Then, on a far-distant day, my journals will be found.'
'Journals?' She was shaken by the seeming shift of subject.
'My chronicle of my time. My arguments, the apologia. Copies exist and scattered fragments will survive, some in distorted form, but the original journals will wait and wait and wait. I have hidden them well.'
'And when they are discovered?'
'People will learn that I was something quite different from what they supposed.'
Her voice came in a trembling hush. 'I already know what they will learn.'
'Yes, my darling Hwi, I think you do.'
'You are neither devil nor god, but something never seen before and never to be seen again because your presence removes the need.'
She brushed tears from her cheeks.
'Hwi, do you realize how dangerous you are?'
Alarm showed in her expression, the tensing of her arms.
'You have the makings of a saint,' he said. _'Do you understand how painful it can be to find a saint in the wrong place and the wrong time?'
She shook her head.
'People have to be prepared for saints,' he said. 'Otherwise, they simply become followers, supplicants, beggars and weakened sycophants forever in the shadow of the saint. People are destroyed by this because it nurtures only weakness.'
After a moment of thought, she nodded, then: 'Will there be saints when you are gone?'
'That's the purpose of my Golden Path.'
'Moneo's daughter, Siona, will she...'
'For now she is only a rebel. As to sainthood, we will let her decide. Perhaps she will only do what she was bred to do.'
'What is that, Lord?'
'Stop calling me Lord,' he said. 'We will be Worm and wife. Call me Leto if you wish. Lord interferes.'
'Yes, L... Leto. But what is...'
'Siona was bred to rule. There is danger in such breeding. When you rule, you gain knowledge of power. This can lead into impetuous irresponsibility, into painful excesses and that can lead to the terrible destroyer-wild hedonism.'
'Siona would...'
'All we know about Siona is that she can remain dedicated to a particular performance, to the pattern which fills her senses. She is necessarily an aristocrat, but aristocracy looks mostly to the past. That's a failure. You don't see much of any path unless you are Janus, looking simultaneously backward and forward.'
'Janus? Oh, yes, the god with the two opposed faces.' She wet her lips with her tongue. 'Are you Janus, Leto?'
'I am Janus magnified a billion-fold. And I am also something less. I have been, for example, what my administrators admire most-the decision-maker whose every decision can be made to work.'
'But if you fail them...'
'They will turn against me, yes.'
'Will Siona replace you if...'
'Ahhh, what an enormous if! You observe that Siona threatens my person. However, she does not threaten the Golden Path. There is also the fact that my Fish Speakers have a certain attachment to the Duncan.'
'Siona seems... so young.'
'And I am her favorite poseur, the sham who holds power under false pretenses, never consulting the needs of his people.'
'Could I not talk to her and...'
'No! You must never try to persuade Siona of anything. Promise me, Hwi.'
'If you ask it, of course, but I...'
'All gods have this problem, Hwi. In the perception of deeper needs, I must often ignore immediate ones. Not addressing immediate needs is an offense to the young.'
'Could you not reason with her and...'
'Never attempt to reason with people who know they are right!'
'But when you know they are wrong...'
'Do you believe in me?'
'Yes.'
'And if someone tried to convince you that I am the greatest evil of all time...'
'I would become very angry. I would...' She broke off.
'Reason is valuable,' he said, 'only when it performs against the wordless physical background of the universe.'
Her brows drew together in thought. It fascinated Leto to sense the arousal of her awareness. 'Ahhh.' She breathed the word.
'No reasoning creature will ever again be able to deny the Leto experience,' he said. 'I see your understanding begin. Beginnings! They are what life is all about!'
She nodded.
No arguments, he thought. When she sees the tracks, she follows them to find where they will lead.
'As long as there is life, every ending is a beginning,' he said. 'And I would save humankind, even from itself.'
Again, she nodded. The tracks still led onward.
'This is why no death in the perpetuation of humankind can be a complete failure,' he said. 'This is why a birth touches us so deeply. This is why the most tragic death is the death of a youth.'
'Does Ix still threaten your Golden Path? I've always known they conspired in something evil.'
They conspire. Hwi does not hear the inner message of her own words. She has no need to hear it.
He stared at her, full of the marvel that was Hwi. She possessed a form of honesty which some would call naive, but which Leto recognized as merely non-self-conscious. The honesty was not her core, it was Hwi herself.
'Then I will arrange a performance in the plaza tomorrow,' Leto said. 'It will be a performance of the surviving Face Dancers. Afterward, our betrothal will be announced.' -= Let there be no doubt that I am the assemblage of our ancestors, the arena in which they exercise my moments. They are my cells and I am their body. This is the favrashi of which I speak, the soul, the collective unconscious, the source of archetypes, the repository of all trauma and joy. I am the choice of their awakening. My samhadi is their samhadi. Their experiences are mine! Their knowledge distilled is mfr inheritance. Those billions are my one.
- The Stolen Journals THE FACE DANCER performance occupied almost two hours of the morning, and afterward came the announcement which sent shock waves through the Festival City.
