She turned and strode toward the orchards beyond the river’s mowed border. As she walked she repeated her oath, adding to it aloud the old Fremen formula which terminated in her full name:
“Siona Ibn Fuad al-Seyefa Atreides it is who curses you, Leto. You will pay in full!”
I was born Leto Atreides II more than three thousand standard years ago, measuring from the moment when I cause these words to be printed. My father was Paul Muad’Dib. My mother was his Fremen consort, Chani. My maternal grandmother was Faroula, a noted herbalist among the Fremen. My paternal grandmother was Jessica, a product of the Bene Gesserit breeding scheme in their search for a male who could share the powers of the Sisterhood’s Reverend Mothers. My maternal grandfather was Liet-Kynes, the planetologist who organized the ecological transformation of Arrakis. My paternal grandfather was
Enough of these begats!
My paternal grandfather died as many good Greeks did, attempting to kill his mortal enemy, the old Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Both of them rest uncomfortably now in my ancestral memories. Even my father is not content. I have done what he feared to do and now his shade must share in the consequences.
The Golden Path demands it. And what is the Golden Path? you ask. It is the survival of humankind, nothing more nor less. We who have prescience, we who know the pitfalls in our human futures, this has always been our responsibility.
Survival.
How you feel about this—your petty woes and joys, even your agonies and raptures—seldom concerns us. My father had this power. I have it stronger. We can peer now and again through the veils of Time.
This planet of Arrakis from which I direct my multigalactic Empire is no longer what it was in the days when it was known as Dune. In those days, the entire planet was a desert. Now, there is just this little remnant, my Sareer. No longer does the giant sandworm roam free, producing the spice melange. The spice! Dune was noteworthy only as the source of melange,
Without melange to ignite the linear prescience of Guild Navigators, people cross the parsecs of space only at a snail’s crawl. Without melange, the Bene Gesserit cannot endow Truthsayers or Reverend Mothers. Without the geriatric properties of melange, people live and die according to the ancient measure—no more than a hundred years or so. Now, the only spice is held in Guild and Bene Gesserit storehouses, a few small hoards among the remnants of the Great Houses, and my gigantic hoard which they all covet. How they would like to raid me! But they don’t dare. They know I would destroy it all before surrendering it.
No. They come hat in hand and petition me for melange. I dole it out as a reward and hold it back as punishment. How they hate that.
It is my power, I tell them. It is my gift.
With it, I create Peace. They have had more than three thousand years of Leto’s Peace. It is an enforced tranquility which humankind knew only for the briefest periods before my ascendancy. Lest you have forgotten, study Leto’s Peace once more in these, my journals.
I began this account in the first year of my stewardship, in the first throes of my metamorphosis when I was still mostly human, even visibly so. The sandtrout skin which I accepted (and my father refused) and which gave me greatly amplified strength plus virtual immunity from conventional attack and aging—that skin still covered a form recognizably human: two legs, two arms, a human face framed in the scrolled folds of the sandtrout.
Ahhh, that face! I still have it—the only human skin I expose to the universe. All the rest of my flesh has remained covered by the linked bodies of those tiny deep sand vectors which one day can become giant sandworms.
As they will . . . someday.
I often think about my final metamorphosis, that
I no longer feel the sandtrout cilia probing my flesh, encapsulating the water of my body within their placental barriers. We are virtually one body now, they my skin and I the force which moves the whole . . . most of the time.
