Is it my time?
Leto spoke in a musing tone. "You cannot succeed by taking hostages. That is a form of enslavement. One kind of human cannot own another kind of human. This universe will not permit it."
The words lay there, simmering in Moneo's awareness, a terrifying contrast to the rumblings of transformation which he sensed in his Lord.
The Worm comes!
Again, Moneo glanced around the crypt chamber. This place was far worse than the aerie! Sanctuary was too remote.
"Well, Moneo, do you have any response?" Leto asked.
Moneo ventured a whisper: "The Lord's words enlighten me."
"Enlighten? You are not enlightened!"
Moneo spoke out of desperation. "But I serve my Lord!"
"You claim service to God?"
"Yes, Lord."
"Who created your religion, Moneo?"
"You did, Lord."
"That's a sensible answer."
"Thank you, Lord."
"Don't thank me! Tell me what religious institutions perpetuate!"
Moneo backed away four steps.
"Stand where you are!" Leto ordered.
Trembling all through his body, Moneo shook his head dumbly. At last, he had encountered the question without answer. Failure to answer would precipitate his death. He waited for it, head bowed.
"Then I will tell you, poor servant," Leto said.
Moneo dared to hope. He lifted his gaze to the God Emperor's face, noting that the eyes were not glazed... and the hands were not trembling. Perhaps the Worm did not come.
"Religious institutions perpetuate a mortal master-servant relationship," Leto said. "They create an arena which attracts prideful human power-seekers with all of their nearsighted prejudices!"
Moneo could only nod. Was that a trembling in the God Emperor's hands? Was the terrible face withdrawing slightly into its cowl?
"The secret revelations of infamy, that is what the Duncans ask after," Leto said. "The Duncans have too much compassion for their fellows and too sharp a limit on fellowship."
Moneo had studied holos of Dune's ancient sandworms, the gigantic mouths full of crysknife teeth around consuming fire. He noted the tumescence of the latent rings on Leto's tubular surface. Were they more prominent? Would a new mouth open below that cowled face?
"The Duncans know in their hearts," Leto said, "that I have deliberately ignored the admonition of Mohammed and Moses. Even you know it, Moneo!"
It was an accusation. Moneo started to nod, then shook his head from side to side. He wondered if he dared renew his retreat. Moneo knew from experience that lectures in this tenor did not long continue without the coming of the Worm.
"What might that admonition be?" Leto asked. There was a mocking lightness in his voice.
Moneo allowed himself a faint shrug.
Abruptly, Leto's voice filled the chamber with a rumbling baritone, an ancient voice which spoke across the centuries: "You are servants unto God, not servants unto servants!"
Moneo wrung his hands and cried out: "I serve you, Lord!"
"Moneo, Moneo," Leto said, his voice low and resonant, "a million wrongs cannot give rise to one right. The right is known because it endures."
Moneo could only stand in trembling silence.
"I had intended Hwi to mate with you, Moneo," Leto said. "Now, it is too late."
The words took a moment penetrating Moneo's consciousness. He felt that their meaning was out of any known context. Hwi? Who was Hwi? Oh, yes-the God Emperor's Ixian bride-to-be. Mate... with me?
Moneo shook his head.
Leto spoke with infinite sadness: "You, too, shall pass away.
Will all your works be as dust forgotten?"
Without any warning, even as he spoke, Leto's body convulsed in a thrashing roll which heaved him from the cart. The speed of it, the monstrous violence, threw him within centimeters of Moneo, who screamed and fled across the crypt.
"Moneo!"
Leto's call stopped the majordomo at the entrance to the lift "The test, Moneo! I will test Siona tomorrow!" -= The realization of what I am occurs in the timeless awareness which does not stimulate nor delude. I create a field without self or center, a field where even death becomes only analogy. I desire no results. I merely permit this field which has no goals nor desires, no perfections nor even visions of achievements. In that field, omnipresent primal awareness is all. It is the light which pours through the windows of my universe.
- The Stolen Journals THE SUN came up, sending its harsh glare across the dunes. Leto felt the sand beneath him as a soft caress. Only his human ears, hearing the abrasive rasp of his heavy body, reported otherwise. It was a sensory conflict which he had learned to accept.
He heard Siona walking behind him, a lightness in her tread, a gentle spilling of sand as she climbed to his level atop a dune.
The longer I endure, the more vulnerable I become, he thought.
This thought often occurred to him these days when he went into his desert. He peered upward. The sky was cloudless with a blue density which the old days of Dune had never seen.
What was a desert without a cloudless sky? Too bad it could not have Dune's silvery hue.
Ixian satellites controlled this sky, not always to the perfection he might desire. Such perfection was a machine-fantasy which faltered under human management. Still, the satellites held a sufficiently steady grip to give him this morning of desert stillness. He gave his human lungs a deep breath of it and listened for Siona's approach. She had stopped. He knew she was admiring the view.
Leto felt his imagination like a conjurer calling up everything which had produced the physical setting for this moment. He felt the satellites. Fine instruments which played the music for the dance of warming and cooling air masses, perpetually monitoring and adjusting the powerful vertical and horizontal currents. It amused him to recall that the lxians had thought he would use this exquisite machinery in a new kind of hydraulic despotism-withholding moisture from those who defied their ruler, punishing others with terrible storms. How surprised they had been to f-and themselves mistaken!