"I stand between fish and worm," he murmured.
"What?"
He repeated it louder.
She put a hand to her mouth, beginning to suspect the thing which moved him. Her father had acted thus; she had but to peer inward and compare.
Leto shuddered. Memories which fastened him to places his flesh had never known presented him with answers to questions he had not asked. He saw relationships and unfolding events against a gigantic inner screen. The sandworm of Dune would not cross water; water poisoned it. Yet water had been known here in prehistoric times. White gypsum pans attested to bygone lakes and seas. Wells, deep-drilled, found water which sandtrout sealed off. As clearly as if he'd witnessed the events, he saw what had happened on this planet and it filled him with foreboding for the cataclysmic changes which human intervention was bringing.
His voice barely above a whisper, he said: "I know what happened, Ghanima."
She bent close to him. "Yes?"
"The sandtrout..."
He fell silent and she wondered why he kept referring to the haploid phase of the planet's giant sandworm, but she dared not prod him.
"The sandtrout," he repeated, "was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet... and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase."
"The sandtrout?" She shook her head, not doubting him, but unwilling to search those depths where he gathered such information. And she thought: Sandtrout? Many times in this flesh and other had she played the childhood game, poling for sandtrout, teasing them into a thin glove membrane before taking them to the deathstill for their water. It was difficult to think of this mindless little creature as a shaper of enormous events.
Leto nodded to himself. Fremen had always known to plant predator fish in their water cisterns. The haploid sandtrout actively resisted great accumulations of water near the planet's surface; predators swam in that qanat below him. Their sandworm vector could handle small amounts of water - the amounts held in cellular bondage by human flesh, for example. But confronted by large bodies of water, their chemical factories went wild, exploded in the death-transformation which produced the dangerous melange concentrate, the ultimate awareness drug employed in a diluted fraction for the sietch orgy. That pure concentrate had taken Paul Muad'Dib through the walls of Time, deep into the well of dissolution which no other male had ever dared.
Ghanima sensed her brother trembling where he sat in front of her. "What have you done?" she demanded.
But he would not leave his own train of revelation. "Fewer sandtrout - the ecological transformation of the planet..."
"They resist it, of course," she said, and now she began to understand the fear in his voice, drawn into this thing against her will.
"When the sandtrout go, so do all the worms," he said. "The tribes must be warned."
"No more spice," she said.
Words merely touched high points of the system danger which they both saw hanging over human intrusion into Dune's ancient relationships.
"It's the thing Alia knows," he said. "It's why she gloats."
"How can you be sure of that?"
"I'm sure."
Now she knew for certain what disturbed him, and she felt the knowledge chill her.
"The tribes won't believe us if she denies it," he said.
His statement went to the primary problem of their existence: What Fremen expected wisdom from a nine-year-old? Alia, growing farther and farther from her own inner sharing each day, played upon this.
"We must convince Stilgar," Ghanima said.
As one, their heads turned and they stared out over the moonlit desert. It was a different place now, changed by just a few moments of awareness. Human interplay with that environment had never been more apparent to them. They felt themselves as integral parts of a dynamic system held in delicately balanced order. The new outlook involved a real change of consciousness which flooded them with observations. As Liet-Kynes had said, the universe was a place of constant conversation between animal populations. The haploid sandtrout had spoken to them as human animals.
"The tribes would understand a threat to water," Leto said.
"But it's a threat to more than water. It's a -" She fell silent, understanding the deeper meaning of his words. Water was the ultimate power symbol on Arrakis. At their roots Fremen remained special-application animals, desert survivors, governance experts under conditions of stress. And as water became plentiful, a strange symbol transfer came over them even while they understood the old necessities.
"You mean a threat to power," she corrected him.
"Of course."
"But will they believe us?"
"If they see it happening, if they see the imbalance."
"Balance," she said, and repeated her father's words from long ago: "It's what distinguishes a people from a mob."
Her words called up their father in him and he said: "Economics versus beauty - a story older than Sheba." He sighed, looked over his shoulder at her. "I'm beginning to have prescient dreams, Ghani."
A sharp gasp escaped her.
He said: "When Stilgar told us our grandmother was delayed - I already knew that moment. Now my other dreams are suspect."
"Leto..." She shook her head, eyes damp. "It came later for our father. Don't you think it might be -"
"I've dreamed myself enclosed in armor and racing across the dunes," he said. "And I've been to Jacurutu."