They replied as one voice: "Lord, we obey!"
"In me you live without end!" Leto said.
"We are the Infinite!" they shouted.
"I love you as I love no others!" Leto said.
"Love!" they screamed.
Idaho shuddered.
" I give you my beloved Duncan!" Leto said.
"Love!" they screamed.
Idaho felt his whole body trembling. He felt that he might collapse from the weight of this adulation. He wanted to run away and he wanted to stay and accept this. There was power in this room. Power!
In a lower voice, Leto said: "Change the Guard."
The women bowed their heads, a single movement, unhesitating. From off to Idaho's right a line of women in white gowns appeared. They marched into the open space below the ledge and Idaho noted that some of them carried babies and small children, none more than a year or two old.
From the outline explanation provided him earlier, Idaho recognized these women as the ones leaving the immediate service of the Fish Speakers. Some would become priestesses and some would spend full time as mothers... but none would truly leave Leto's service.
As he looked down on the children, Idaho thought how the buried memory of this experience must be impressed on any of the male children. They would carry the mystery of it throughout their lives, a memory lost to consciousness but always present, shading responses from this moment onward.
The last of the newcomers came to a stop below Leto and looked up at him. The other women in the hall now lifted their faces and focused on Leto.
Idaho glanced left and right. The white-clad women filled the space below the ledge for at least five hundred meters in both directions. Some of them lifted their children toward Leto. The awe and submission was something absolute. If Leto or- ,red it, Idaho sensed, these women would smash their babies death against the ledge. They would do anything!
Leto lowered his front segments onto the cart, a gentle rippling motion. He peered down benignly and his voice came as a soft caress. "I give you the reward which your faith and service have earned. Ask and it shall be given."
The entire hall reverberated to the response: "It shall be given!"
"What is mine is thine," Leto said.
"What is mine is thine," the women shouted.
"Share with me now," Leto said, "the silent prayer for my intercession in all things-that humankind may never end."
As one, every head in the hall bowed. The white-clad women cradled their children close, looking down at them. Idaho felt the silent unity, a force which sought to enter him and take him over. He opened his mouth wide and breathed deeply, fighting against something which he sensed as a physical invasion. His mind searched frantically for something to which he could cling, something to shield him.
These women were an army whose force and union Idaho had not suspected. He knew he did not understand this force. He could only observe it, recognize that it existed.
This was what Leto had created.
Leto's words from a meeting at the Citadel came back to Idaho: "Loyalty in a male army fastens onto the army itself rather than onto the civilization which fosters the army. Loyalty in a female army fastens onto the leader."
Idaho stared out across the visible evidence of Leto's creation, seeing the penetrating accuracy of those words, fearing that accuracy.
He offers me a share in this, Idaho thought.
His own response to Leto's words struck Idaho now as puerile.
"I don't see the reason," Idaho had said.
"Most people are not creatures of reason."
"No army, male or female, guarantees peace! Your Empire isn't peaceful! You only...
"My Fish Speakers have provided you with our histories?"
"Yes, but I've also walked about in your city and I've watched your people. Your people are aggressive!"
"You see, Duncan? Peace encourages aggression."
"And you say that your Golden Path..."
"Is not precisely peace. It is tranquility, a fertile ground for the growth of rigid classes and many other forms of aggression."
"You talk riddles!"
" I talk accumulated observations which tell me that the peaceful posture is the posture of the defeated. It is the posture of the victim. Victims invite aggression."
"Your damned enforced tranquility! What good does it do?"
"If there is no enemy, one must be invented. The military force which is denied an external target always turns against its own people."
"What's your game?"
"I modify the human desire for war."
"People don't want war!"
"They want chaos. War is the most readily available form of chaos."
" don't believe any of this! You're playing some dangerous game of your own."
"Very dangerous. I address ancient wellsprings of human behavior to redirect them. The danger is that I could suppress the forces of human survival. But I assure you that my Golden Path endures."
"You haven't suppressed antagonism!"
"I dissipate energies in one place and point them toward another place. What you cannot control, you harness."
"What's to keep your female army from taking over?"
"I am their leader."
As he looked out over the massed women in the great hall, Idaho could not deny the focus of leadership. He saw also that part of this adulation was directed at his own person. The temptation in this held him fixated-anything he wanted from them... anything! The latent power in this great hall was explosive. This realization forced him into a deeper questioning of Leto's earlier words.