primary consciousness worked in a Fremen way and that, like the terrible machines of that apocalyptic vision, the predator could follow any creature who left tracks.
'The Golden Path,' she whispered. 'I can feel it.' Then, glaring at him. 'It's so cruel!'
'Survival has always been cruel.'
'They couldn't hide,' she whispered. Then loud: 'What have you done to me?'
'You tried to be a Fremen rebel,' he said. 'Fremen had an almost incredible ability to read signs on the desert. They could even read the faint tracery of windblown tracks in sand.'
He saw the beginnings of remorse in her, memories of her dead companions floating in her awareness. He spoke quickly, knowing that guilt would follow quickly and then anger against him. 'Would you have believed me if I had merely brought you in and told you?'
Remorse threatened to overwhelm her. She opened her mouth behind the mask and gasped with it.
'You have not yet survived the desert,' he told her.
Slowly, her trembling subsided. The Fremen instincts he had set to work in her did their usual tempering.
'I will survive,' she said. She met his gaze. 'You read us by our emotions, don't you?'
'The igniters of thought,' he said. 'I can recognize the slightest behavioral nuance for its emotional origins.'
He saw her accept her own nakedness the way Moneo had accepted it, with fear and hate. It was of little matter. He probed the time ahead of them. Yes, she would survive his desert because her tracks were in the sand beside him... but he saw no sign of her flesh in those tracks. Just beyond her tracks, though, he saw a sudden opening where things had been concealed. Anteac's death-shout echoed through his prescient awareness... and the swarming of Fish Speakers attacking!
Malky is coming, he thought. We will meet again, Malky and.
Leto opened his outer eyes and saw Siona still there glaring at him.
'I still hate you!' she said.
'You hate the predator's necessary cruelty.'
She spoke with venomous elation: 'But I saw another thing! You can't follow my tracks!'
'Which is why you must breed and preserve this.'
Even as he spoke, it began to rain. The sudden cloud darkness and the downpour came upon them simultaneously. In spite of the fact that he had sensed weather control's oscillations, Leto was shocked by the onslaught. He knew it rained sometimes in the Sareer, a rain quickly dispersed as the water ran off and vanished. The few pools would evaporate as the sun returned. Most times, the downpour never touched the ground; it was ghost rain, vaporized when it hit the superheated air layer just above the desert's surface, then dispersing on the wind. But this rainfall drenched him.
Siona pulled back her face flap and lifted her face greedily to the falling water, not even noticing the effect on Leto.
As the first drenching swept in from behind the sandtrout overlappings, he stiffened and curled into a ball of agony. Separate drives of sandtrout and sandworm produced a new meaning for the word pain. He felt that he was being ripped apart. Sandtrout wanted to rush to the water and encapsulate it. Sandworm felt the drenching wash of death. Curls of blue smoke 'spurted from every place the rain touched him. The inner workings of his body began to manufacture the true spice-essence. Blue smoke lifted around him from where he lay in puddles of water. He writhed and groaned.
The clouds passed and it was a few moments before Siona sensed his disturbance.
'What's wrong with you?'
He was unable to answer. The rain was gone but water remained on the rocks and in puddles all around and beneath him. There was no escape.
Siona saw the blue smoke rising from every place the water touched him.
'It's the water!'
There was a slightly higher bulge of land off to the right where the water did not stay. Painfully, he made his way toward it, groaning at each new puddle. The bulge was almost dry when he reached it. The agony subsided slowly and he grew aware that Siona stood directly in front of him. She probed at him with words of false concern.
'Why does water hurt you?'
Hurt? What an inadequate word! There was no evading her questions, though. She knew enough now to go searching for the answer. That answer could be found. Haltingly, he explained the relationship of sandtrout and sandworm to water. She heard him out in silence.
'But the moisture you gave me...'
'Is buffered and masked by the spice.'
'Then why do you risk it out here without your cart?'
'You can't be a Fremen in the Citadel or on a cart.'
She nodded.
He saw the flame of rebellion return to her eyes. She did not have to feel guilty or dependent. She no longer could avoid belief in his Golden Path, but what difference did that make? His cruelties could not be forgiven! She could reject him, deny him a place in her family. He was not a human, not like her at all. And she possessed the secret of his undoing! Ring him with water, destroy his desert, immobilize him within a moat of agony! Did she think she hid her thoughts from him by turning away?
And what can I do about it? he wondered. She must live now while I must demonstrate nonviolence.
Now that he knew something of. Siona's nature, how easy it would be to surrender, to sink blindly into his own thoughts. It was seductive, this talon to live only within his memories, but his children still required another lesson-by-example if they were to escape the last threat to the Golden Path.
What a painful decision! He experienced a new sympathy for the Bene Gesserit. His quandary was akin to the one they had experienced when they had confronted the fact of Muad'Dib. The ultimate goal of their breeding program-my father-they could not contain him, either.
Once more into the breach, dear friends, he thought. and he suppressed a wry smile at his own histrionics. -= Given enough time for the generations to evolve, the predator produces particular survival adaptations in its prey which, through the circular operation of feedback, produce changes in the predator which again change the prey etcetera, etcetera, etcetera... Many powerful forces do the same thing. You can count religions among such forces.
- The Stolen Journals 'THE LORD has commanded me to tell you that your daughter lives.'
Nayla delivered the message to Moneo in a singsong voice, looking down across the workroom table at his figure seated there amidst a chaos of notes and papers and communications instruments.
Moneo pressed his palms together firmly and looked down at the elongated shadow drawn on his table by late afternoon sunlight across the jeweled tree of his paperweight.
Without looking up at Nayla's stocky figure standing at proper attention in front of him, he asked: 'Both of them have returned to the Citadel?'
'Yes.'
Moneo looked out the window to his left, not really seeing the flinty borderline of darkness hanging on the Sareer's horizon nor the greedy wind collecting sand grains from every dunetop.
'That matter which we discussed earlier?' he asked.
'It has been arranged.'
'Very well.' He waved to dismiss her, but Nayla remained standing in front of him. Surprised, Moneo actually focused on her for the first time since she had entered.
'Is it required that I personally attend this-' she swallowed-'wedding?'
'The Lord Leto has commanded it. You will be the only one there armed with a lasgun. It is an honor.'
She remained in position, her gaze fixed somewhere over Moneo's head.
'Yes?' he prompted.
Nayla's great lantern jaw worked convulsively, then: 'He is God and I am mortal.' She turned on one heel and left the workroom.
