and he knew the things which were emerging. She had the beginnings of that intense loyalty to traveling companions which desert folk always trusted.
We know, he thought. If you are separated from your companions, you are lost among dunes and rocks. The lone traveler in the desert is dead. Only the worm lives alone out here.
He let her get well ahead of him where the grating sand of his passage would not be too prominent. She had to think of his human-self. He counted on loyalty to work for him. Siona was brittle, though, filled with suppressed rage-more of a rebel than any other he had ever tested.
Leto glided along behind her, reviewing the breeding program, shaping the necessary decisions for a replacement should she fail.
As the night progressed, Siona moved slower and slower. First Moon was high overhead and Second Moon well above the horizon before she stopped to rest and eat.
Leto was glad of the pause. Friction had set up a worm dominance, the air around him full of the chemical exhalations from his temperature adjustments. The thing he thought of as his oxygen supercharger vented steadily, making him intensely aware of the protein factories and amino acid resources his worm-self had acquired to accommodate the placental relationship with his human cells. Desert quickened the movement toward his final metamorphosis.
Siona had stopped near the crest of a star dune. 'Is it true that you eat the sand?' she asked as he came up to her.
'It's true.'
She stared all around the moon-frosted horizon. 'Why didn't we bring a signal device?'
'I wanted you to learn about possessions.'
She turned toward him. He sensed her breath close to his face. She was losing too much moisture into the dry air. Still, she did not remember Moneo's admonition. It would be a bitter lesson, no doubt of that.
'I don't understand you at all,' she said.
'Yet, you are committed to doing just that.'
'Am I?'
'How else can you give me something of value in exchange for what I give you?'
'What do you give me?' All of the bitterness was there and a hint of the spice from her dried food.
'I give you this opportunity to be alone with me, to share with me, and you spend this time without concern. You waste it.'
'What about possessions?' she demanded.
He heard fatigue in her voice, the water message beginning to scream within her.
'They were magnificently alive in the old days, those Fremen,' he said. 'And their eye for beauty was limited to that which was useful. I never met a greedy Fremen.'
'What's that supposed to mean?'
'In the old days, everything you took into the desert was a necessity and that was all you took. Your life is no longer free of possessions, Siona, or you would not have asked about a signal device.'
'Why isn't a signal device necessary?'
'It would teach you nothing.'
He moved out around her along the track indicated by the Pointers. 'Come. Let us use this night to our profit.'
She came hurrying up to walk beside his cowled face. 'What happens if I don't learn your damned lesson?'
'You'll probably die,' he said.
That silenced her for a time. She trudged along beside him with only an occasional sideward glance, ignoring the worm-body, concentrating on the visible remnants of his humanity. After a time, she said: 'The Fish Speakers told me that you ordered the mating from which I was born.'
'That's true.'
'They say you keep records and that you order these Atreides matings for your own purposes.'
'That also is true.'
'Then the Oral History is correct.'
'I thought you believed the Oral History without question?'
She was on a single track, though: 'What if one of us objects when you order a mating?'
'I allow a wide latitude just as long as there are the children I have ordered.'
'Ordered?' She was outraged.
'That's what I do.'
'You can't creep into every bedroom or follow every one of us every minute of our lives! How do you know your orders are obeyed?'
'I know.'
'Then you know I'm not going to obey you!'
'Are you thirsty, Siona?'
She was startled. 'What?'
'Thirsty people speak of water, not of sex.'
Still, she did not seal her mouth flap, and he thought: Atreides passions always did run strong, even at the expense of reason.
Within two hours, they came down out of the dunes onto a wind-scoured flat of pebbles. Leto moved onto it, Siona close to his side. She looked frequently at the Pointers. Both moons were low on the horizon now and their light cast long shadows behind every boulder.
In some ways, Leto found such places more comfortable to traverse than the sand. Solid rock was a better heat conductor than sand. He could flatten himself against the rock and ease the working of his chemical factories. Pebbles and even sizable rocks did not impede him.
Siona had more trouble here, though, and almost turned an ankle several times.
The flatland could be a very trying place for humans unaccustomed to it, he thought. If they stayed close to the ground, they saw only the great emptiness, an eerie place especially in moonlight-dunes at a distance, a distance which seemed not to change as the traveler moved-nothing anywhere except the seemingly eternal wind, a few rocks and, when they looked upward, stars without mercy. This was the desert of the desert.
'Here's where Fremen music acquired its eternal loneliness,' he said, 'not up on the dunes. Here's where you really learn to think that heaven must be the sound of running water and relief-any relief-from that endless wind.'
Even this did not remind her of that face flap. Leto began to despair.
Morning found them far out on the flat.
Leto stopped beside three large boulders, all piled against each other, one of them taller even than his back. Siona leaned against him for a moment, a gesture which restored Leto's hopes somewhat. She pushed herself away presently and clambered up onto the highest boulder. He watched her turn up there, examining the landscape.
Without even looking at it Leto knew what she saw: blowing sand like fog on the horizon obscured the rising sun. For the rest, there was only the flat and the wind.
The rock was cold beneath him with the chill of a desert morning. The cold made the air much drier and he found it more pleasant. Without Siona, he would have moved on, but she was visibly exhausted. She leaned against him once more when she came down from the rock and it was almost a minute before he realized that she was listening.
'What do you hear?' he asked.
She spoke sleepily. 'You rumble inside.'
'The fire never goes completely out.'
This interested her. She pushed herself away from his side and came around to look into his face. 'Fire?'
'Every living thing has a fire within it, some slow, some very fast. Mine is hotter than most.'
She hugged herself against the chill. 'Then you're not cold here?'
'No, but I can see that you are.' He pulled his face partly into its cowl and created a depression at the bottom
