Dune полностью

“You see? Moneo has disabled the deadly instrument. A connection broken here, a small capsule crushed there.”

Leto sniffed. He smelled the esters of a preservative oil riding on the stink of Moneo’s perspiration.

Still speaking inwardly, Leto said: “But the genie is not dead. Technology breeds anarchy. It distributes these tools at random. And with them goes the provocation for violence. The ability to make and use savage destroyers falls inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group is a single individual.”

Moneo returned to a point below Leto, holding the disabled lasgun casually in his right hand. “There is talk on Parella and the planets of Dan about another jihad against such things as this.”

Moneo lifted the lasgun and smiled, signaling that he knew the paradox in such empty dreams.

Leto closed his eyes. The hordes within wanted to argue, but he shut them off, thinking: Jihads create armies. The Butlerian Jihad tried to rid our universe of machines which simulate the mind of man. The Butlerians left armies in their wake and the Ixians still make questionable devices . . . for which I thank them. What is anathema? The motivation to ravage, no matter the instruments.

“It happened,” he muttered.

“Lord?”

Leto opened his eyes. “I will go to my tower,” he said. “I must have more time to mourn my Duncan.”

“The new one is already on his way here,” Moneo said.

You, the first person to encounter my chronicles for at least four thousand years, beware. Do not feel honored by your primacy in reading the revelations of my Ixian storehouse. You will find much pain in it. Other than the few glimpses required to assure me that the Golden Path continued, I never wanted to peer beyond those four millennia. Therefore, I am not sure what the events in my journals may signify to your times. I only know that my journals have suffered oblivion and that the events which I recount have undoubtedly been submitted to historical distortion for eons. I assure you that the ability to view our futures can become a bore. Even to be thought of as a god, as I certainly was, can become ultimately boring. It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

—INSCRIPTION ON THE STOREHOUSE AT DAR-ES-BALAT

I am Duncan Idaho.

That was about all he wanted to know for sure. He did not like the Tleilaxu explanations, their stories. But then the Tleilaxu had always been feared. Disbelieved and feared.

They had brought him down to the planet on a small Guild shuttle, arriving at the dusk line with a green glimmer of sun corona along the horizon as they dipped into the shadow. The spaceport had not looked at all like anything he remembered. It was larger and with a ring of strange buildings.

“Are you sure this is Dune?” he had asked.

“Arrakis,” his Tleilaxu escort had corrected him.

They had sped him in a sealed groundcar to this building somewhere within a city they called Onn, giving the “n” sound a strange rising nasal inflection. The room in which they left him was about three meters square, a cube really. There was no sign of glowglobes, but the place was filled with warm yellow light.

I am a ghola, he told himself.

That had been a shock, but he had to believe it. To find himself living when he knew he had died, that was proof enough. The Tleilaxu had taken cells from his dead flesh and they had grown a bud in one of their axlotl tanks. That bud had become this body in a process which had made him feel at first an alien in his own flesh.

He looked down at the body. It was clothed in dark brown trousers and jacket of a coarse weave which irritated his skin. Sandals protected his feet. Except for the body, that was all they had given him, a parsimony which said something about the real Tleilaxu character.

There was no furniture in the room. They had let him in through a single door which had no handle on the inside. He looked up at the ceiling and around at the walls, at the door. Despite the featureless character of the place, he felt that he was being watched.

“Women of the Imperial Guard will come for you,” they had said. Then they had gone away, smiling slyly among themselves.

Women of the Imperial Guard?