My controls are more subtle.
Slowly, gently, he began to move, swimming on the sand surface, gliding down off the dune, never once looking back at the thin spire of his tower, knowing that it would vanish presently into the haze of daytime heat.
Siona followed him with an uncharacteristic docility. Doubt had done its work. She had read the stolen journals. She had listened to the admonitions of her father. Now, she did not know what to think.
"What is this test?" she had asked Moneo. "What will he do?"
"It is never the same."
"How did he test you?"
"It will be different with you. I would only confuse you if I told you my experience."
Leto had listened secretly while Moneo prepared his daughter, dressing her in an authentic Fremen stillsuit with a dark robe over it, fitting the boot-pumps correctly. Moneo had not forgotten.
Moneo had looked up from where he bent to adjust her boots. "The Worm will come. That is all I can tell you. You must find a way to live in the presence of the Worm."
He had stood then, explaining about the stillsuit, how it recycled her body's own waters. He made her pull the tube from a catchpocket and suck on it, then reseal the tube.
"You will be alone with him on the desert," Moneo had said. "Shai-Hulud is never far away when you're on the desert."
"What if I refuse to go?" she asked.
"You will go... but you may not return."
This conversation had occurred in the ground-level chamber of the Little Citadel while Leto waited in the aerie. He had come down when he knew Siona was ready, drifting down in the predawn darkness on his cart's suspensors. The cart had gone into the ground level room after Moneo and Siona emerged. While Moneo marched across-the flat ground to his 'thopter and left in a whispering of wings, Leto had required Siona to test the sealed portal of the ground-level chamber, then look upward at the tower's impossible heights.
"The only way out is across the Sareer," he said.
He led her away from the tower then, not even commanding her to follow, depending on her good sense, her curiosity and her doubts.
Leto's swimming progress took him down the dune's slipface and onto an exposed section of the rocky basement complex, then up another sandy face at a shallow angle, creating a path for Siona to follow. Fremen had called such compression tracks "God's gift to the weary." He moved slowly, giving Siona plenty of time in which to recognize that this was his domain, his natural habitat.
He came out atop another dune and turned to watch her progress. She held to the track he had provided and stopped only when she reached the top. Her glance went once to his face then she turned a full circle to examine the horizon. He heard the sharp intake of her breath. Heat haze hid the spire's top. The base might have been a distant outcropping.
"This is how it was," he said.
There was something about the desert which spoke to the eternal soul of people who possessed Fremen blood, he knew. He had chosen this place for its desert impact-a dune slightly higher than the others.
"Take a good look at it," he said, and he slipped down the dune's other side to remove his bulk from her view.
Siona took one more slow turn, looking outward.
Leto knew the innermost sensation of what she saw. Except for that insignificant, blurred blip of his tower's base, there was not the slightest lift of horizon-flat, everywhere flat. No plants, no living movement. From her vantage, there was a limit of approximately eight kilometers to the line where the planet's curvature hid everything beyond.
Leto spoke from where he had stopped, just below the dune's crest. "This is the real Sareer. You only know it when you're down here afoot. This is all that's left of the bahr bela ma."
"The ocean without water," she whispered.
Again, she turned and examined the entire horizon.
There was no wind and, Leto knew, without wind, the silence ate at the human soul. Siona was feeling the loss of all familiar reference points. She was abandoned in dangerous space.
Leto glanced at the next dune. In that direction, they would come presently to a low line of hills which originally had been mountains but now were broken into remnant slag and rubble. He continued to rest quietly, letting the silence do his work for him. It was even pleasant to imagine that these dunes went on, as they once had, without end completely around the planet. But even these few dunes were degenerating. Without the original Coriolis storms of Dune, the Sareer saw nothing stronger than a stiff breeze and occasional heat vortices which had no more than local effect.
One of these tiny "wind devils" danced across the middle distance to the south. Siona's gaze followed its track. She spoke abruptly: "Do you have a personal religion?"
Leto took a moment composing his reply. It always astonished him how a desert provoked thoughts of religion.
"You dare ask me if I have a personal religion?" he demanded.
Betraying no surface sign of the fears he knew she felt, Siona turned and stared down at him. Audacity was always an Atreides hallmark, he reminded himself.
When she didn't answer, he said: "You are an Atreides for sure."
"Is that your answer?" she asked.
"What is it you really want to know, Siona?"
"What you believe!"
"Ho! You ask after my faith. Well, now-I believe that something cannot emerge from nothing without divine intervention."
His answer puzzled her. "How is that an..."
"Natura non facit saltus," he said.
She shook her head, not understanding the ancient allusion which had sprung to his lips. Leto translated: