"Nature makes no leaps."
"What language was that?" she asked.
"A language no longer spoken anywhere else in my universe."
"Why did you use it then?"
"To prod your ancient memories."
"I don't have any! I just need to know why you brought me here."
"To give you a taste of your past. Come down here and climb onto my back."
She hesitated at first, then seeing the futility of defiance, slid down the dune and clambered onto his back.
Leto waited until she was kneeling atop him. It was not the same as the old times he knew. She had no Maker hooks and could not stand on his back. He lifted his front segments slightly off the surface.
"Why am I doing this?" she asked. Her tone said she felt silly up there.
"I want you to taste the way our people once moved proudly across this land, high atop the back of a giant sandworm."
He began to glide along the dune just below the crest. Siona had seen holos. She knew this experience intellectually, but the pulse of reality had a different beat and he knew she would resonate to it.
Ahhh, Siona, he thought, you do not even begin to suspect how I will test you.
Leto steeled himself then. I must have no pity. If she dies, she dies. If any of them dies, that is a required event, no more.
And he had to remind himself that this applied even to Hwi Noree. It was just that all of them could not die.
He sensed it when Siona began to enjoy the sensation of riding on his back. He felt a faint shift in her weight as she eased back onto her legs to lift her head.
He drove outward then along a curving barracan, joining Siona in enjoyment of the old sensations. Leto could just glimpse the remnant hills at the horizon ahead of him. They were like a seed from the past waiting there, a reminder of the self-sustaining and expanding force which operated in a desert. He could forget for a moment that on this planet where only a small fraction of the surface remained desert, the Sareer's dynamism existed in a precarious environment.
The illusion of the past was here, though. He felt it as he moved. Fantasy, of course, he told himself, a vanishing fantasy as long as his enforced tranquility continued. Even the sweeping barracan which he traversed now was not as great as the ones of the past. None of the dunes were that great.
This whole maintained desert struck him suddenly as ridiculous. He almost stopped on a pebbled surface between the dunes, continuing but more slowly as he tried to conjure up the necessities which kept the whole system working. He imagined the planet's rotation setting up great air currents which shifted cold and heated air to new regions in enormous volume-everything monitored and ruled by those tiny satellites with their Ixian instruments and heat-focusing dishes. If the high monitors saw anything, they saw the Sareer partly as a "relief desert" with both physical and cold-air walls girdling it. This tended to create ice at the edges and required even more climatic adjustments.
It was not easy and Leto forgave the occasional mistakes for that reason.
As he moved once more out onto dunes, he lost that sense of delicate balance, put aside memories of the pebbly wastelands outside the central sands, and gave himself up to enjoyment of his "petrified ocean" with its frozen and apparently immovable waves. He turned southward, parallel to the remnant hills.
He knew that most people were offended by his infatuation with desert. They were uneasy and turned away. Siona, however, could not turn away. Everywhere she looked, the desert demanded recognition. She rode silently on his back, but he knew her eyes were full. And the old-old memories were beginning to churn.
He came within three hours to a region of cylindrical whaleback dunes, some of them more than one hundred and fifty kilometers long at an angle to the prevailing wind. Beyond them lay a rocky corridor between dunes and into a region of star dunes almost four hundred meters high. Finally, they entered the braided dunes of the central erg where the general high pressure and electrically charged air gave his spirits a lift. He knew the same magic would be working on Siona.
"Here is where the songs of the Long Trek originated," he said. "They are perfectly preserved in the Oral History."
She did not answer, but he knew she heard.
Leto slowed his pace and began to speak to Siona, telling her about their Fremen past. He sensed the quickening of her interest. She even asked questions occasionally, but he could also feel her fears building. Even the base of his Little Citadel was no longer visible here. She could recognize nothing manmade. And she would think he engaged now in small talk, unimportant things to put off something portentous.
"Equality between our men and women originated here," he said.
"Your Fish Speakers deny that men and women are equal," she said.
Her voice, full of questioning disbelief, was a better locator than the sensation of her crouched on his back. Leto stopped at the intersection of two braided dunes and let the venting of his heat-generated oxygen subside.
"Things are not the same today," he said. "But men and women do have different evolutionary demands upon them. With the Fremen, though, there was an interdependence. That fostered equality out here where questions of survival can become immediate."
"Why did you bring me here?" she demanded.
"Look behind us," he said.
He felt her turn. Presently, she said: "What am I supposed to see?"
"Have we left any tracks? Can you tell where we've been?"
"There's a little wind now."
"It has covered our tracks?"
"I guess so... yes."
"This desert made us what we were and are," he said. "It's the real museum of all our traditions. Not one of those traditions has really been lost."