God Emperor of Dune (Dune #4)

by Frank Herbert

“You read us by our emotions, don’t you?” “The igniters of thought,” he said. “I can recognize the slightest behavioral nuance for its emotional origins.” He saw her accept her own nakedness the way Moneo had accepted it, with fear and hate. It was of little matter.

“What do you know of rivers?” “In my youth, I traveled for him. I have even trusted my life to a floating shell of a vessel on a river and then on a sea whose shores were lost in the crossing.” As he spoke, Moneo felt that he had brushed against a clue to some deep truth in the Lord Leto.

His lungs had ached with repressed fear. The lunging of the ship and the sea trying to put them down—wild explosions of solid water, hour after hour, white blisters of water spilling off the decks, then another sea and another . . . All of this was a clue to the God Emperor. He is both the storm and the ship.

It required almost a thousand years before the dust of Dune’s old planet-wide desert left the atmosphere to be bound up in soil and water. The wind called sandblaster has not been seen on Arrakis for some twenty-five hundred years. Twenty billion tons of dust could be carried suspended in the wind of just one of those storms. The sky often had a silvery look to it then. Fremen said: “The desert is a surgeon cutting away the skin to expose what’s underneath.” The planet and the people had layers. You could see them. My Sareer is but a weak echo of what was. I must be the sandblaster today. —THE STOLEN JOURNALS

Small souls who seek power over others first destroy the faith those others might have in themselves.”

Most civilization is based on cowardice. It’s so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame. —THE STOLEN JOURNALS

For a time during the march across the morning-lighted dunes, Idaho had tried to imagine that he was back in the old days. Sand was visible in the plantings and, in the valleys between dunes, there was parched ground, yellow grass, the sticklike shrubs. Three vultures, their gap-tipped wings spread wide, circled in the vault of sky—“the soaring search,” Fremen had called it. Idaho had tried to explain this to Siona walking beside him. You worried about the carrion-eaters only when they began to descend.

the one with the green headband stepped forward and bowed. He moved like an old man but Idaho saw that he was not old, barely into his middle years, the cheeks smooth and unwrinkled, a stubby nose with no scars from breath-filter tubes, and the eyes! The eyes revealed definite pupils, not the all-blue of spice addiction. They were brown eyes. Brown eyes in a Fremen!

Are these the meek who will outwait us all and inherit the universe?

“You and I, Moneo, whatever else we do, we provide good theater.” Moneo peered at Leto’s face. “Lord?” “The rites of the religious festival of Bacchus were the seeds of Greek theater, Moneo. Religion often leads to theater. They will have fine theater out of us.”

“The clouds,” he whispered. “I would take a cup of moonlight once more, an ancient sea barge at my feet, thin clouds clinging to my darkling sky, the blue-gray cloak around my shoulders and horses neighing nearby.” “My Lord is troubled,” Moneo said. The compassion in his voice wrenched at Leto. “The bright shadows of my pasts,” Leto said. “They never leave me in peace. I listened for a soothing sound, the bell of a country town at nightfall, and it told me only that I am the sound and soul of this place.”

What a long drop that would be out there—just roll off the landing-lip. He doubted that even his body would survive it. But there was no water in the sand beneath his tower and he could feel the Golden Path winking in and out of existence merely because he allowed himself to think of such an end.

Moneo will have to bury the body in the sand, Leto thought. There is as yet no worm to come and devour the evidence. Leto turned then and looked across the chamber. Moneo stood leaning over the railing, peering down . . . down . . . down . . . I cannot pray for you, Malky, nor for you, Moneo, Leto thought. I may be the only religious consciousness in the Empire because I am truly alone . . . so I cannot pray.

“No, love. I share your concern for Moneo, but no explanation of mine will help him now. Moneo is trapped. He has learned that it is difficult to live in the present, pointless to live in the future and impossible to live in the past.”

“Most believe that a satisfactory future requires a return to an idealized past, a past which never in fact existed.”

“Yes. I am beginning to understand something of you,” she said. “I can sense some of your fears. And I think I already know where it is that you live.” He turned a startled glance on her and found himself locked in her gaze. It was astonishing. He could not move his eyes away from her. A profound fear coursed through and he felt his hands begin to twitch. “You live where the fear of being and the love of being are combined, all in one person,” she said. He could not blink. “You are a mystic,” she said, “gentle to yourself only because you are in the middle of that universe looking outward, looking in ways that others cannot. You fear to share this, yet you want to share it more than anything else.” “What have you seen?” he whispered. “I have no inner eye, no inner voices,” she said. “But I have seen my Lord Leto, whose soul I love, and I know the only thing that you truly understand.” He broke from her gaze, fearful of what she might say. The trembling of his hands could be felt all through his front segment. “Love, that is what you understand,” she said. “Love, and that is all of it.” His hands stopped trembling. A tear rolled down each of his cheeks. When the tears touched his cowl, wisps of blue smoke erupted. He sensed the burning and was thankful for the pain. “You have faith in life,” Hwi said. “I know that the courage of love can reside only in this faith.” She reached out with her left hand and brushed the tears from his cheeks. It surprised him that the cowl did n...

Think of it as plastic memory, this force within you which trends you and your fellows toward tribal forms. This plastic memory seeks to return to its ancient shape, the tribal society. It is all around you—the feudatory, the diocese, the corporation, the platoon, the sports club, the dance troupes, the rebel cell, the planning council, the prayer group . . . each with its master and servants, its host and parasites. And the swarms of alienating devices (including these very words!) tend eventually to be enlisted in the argument for a return to “those better times.” I despair of teaching you other ways. You have square thoughts which resist circles. —THE STOLEN JOURNALS

His memory provided the natural line of ascent, but only his body could learn the way by following that line. His left foot found a toehold . . . up . . . up . . . slowly, testing. Left hand up now . . . no crack but a ledge. His eyes, then his chin lifted over the high ledge he had seen from below. He elbowed his way onto it, rolled over and rested, looking only outward, not up or down. It was a sand horizon out there, a breeze with dust in it limiting the view. He had seen many such horizons in the Dune days.

Moneo looked past Leto at the open end of the courtyard which overlooked the river canyon. Dawnlight was frosting the mist which arose from the depths. He thought of how far down that canyon dropped . . . a body twisting, twisting as it fell. Moneo had found himself unable to go to the canyon’s lip last night and peer down into it. The drop was such a . . . such a temptation. With that insightful power which filled Moneo with such awe, Leto said: “There’s a lesson in every temptation, Moneo.” Speechless, Moneo turned to stare directly into Leto’s eyes. “See the lesson in my life, Moneo.” “Lord?” It was only a whisper. “They tempt me first with evil, then with good. Each temptation is fashioned with exquisite attention to my susceptibilities. Tell me, Moneo, if I choose the good, does that make me good?” “Of course it does, Lord.” “Perhaps you will never lose the habit of judgment,” Leto said.

Moneo sighed. “The others will be ready in a few minutes. Hwi was breakfasting when I came out.” Leto did not respond. His thoughts were lost in memories of night—the one just past and the millennial others which crowded his pasts—clouds and stars, the rains and the open blackness pocked with glittering flakes from a shredded cosmos, a universe of nights, extravagant with them as he had been with his heartbeats.

“I don’t like them leaving you unguarded!” The crystal sound of Moneo’s voice rang in Leto’s memories, speaking things not cast in words. Moneo feared a universe where there was no God Emperor. He would rather die than see such a universe. “What will happen today?” Moneo demanded. It was a question directed not to the God Emperior but to the prophet. “A seed blown on the wind could be tomorrow’s willow tree,” Leto said.

In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshly sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary. —THE STOLEN JOURNALS

“These Fremen do not know what is lost from their lives. They think they keep the essence of the old ways. This is a failure of all museums. Something fades; it dries out of the exhibits and is gone. The people who administer the museum and the people who come to bend over the cases and stare—few of them sense this missing thing. It drove the engine of life in earlier times. When the life is gone, it is gone.”

The flames parted to reveal Siona standing beside Idaho. They stood hand-in-hand like two children reassuring each other before venturing into an unknown place.

“Why did you do it?” Idaho whispered. “My gift,” Leto said. “Nobody will find the descendants of Siona. The Oracle cannot see her.” “What?” They spoke in unison, leaning close to hear his fading voice. “I give you a new kind of time without parallels,” he said. “It will always diverge. There will be no concurrent points on its curves. I give you the Golden Path. That is my gift. Never again will you have the kinds of concurrence that once you had.”

“Now, you’re beginning to know the responsibilities which come as a result of actions. What will you do with your new power, Duncan?”

“It is human to have your soul brought to a crisis you did not anticipate. That’s the way it always is with humans. Moneo understood at last.”

The others within Leto began to reassert themselves. Without the solidarity of the colonial group to support his identity, he began to lose his place among them. They started speaking the language of the constant “IF.” “If you had only . . . If we had but . . .” He wanted to shout them into silence. “Only fools prefer the past!” Leto did not know if he truly shouted or only thought it. The response was a momentary inner silence matched to an outer silence and he felt some of the threads of his old identity still intact.

“If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal.”

Siona said: “I am different, but still I am what he was.” Idaho spoke in a hushed whisper: “The ancestors, all of . . .” “The multitude is there but I walk silently among them and no one sees me. The old images are gone and only the essence remains to light his Golden Path.”