Dune полностью

Moneo knows the price of his privileges, Leto thought. It is another kind of marriage—the marriage of privilege and duty. It is the aristocrat’s explanation and his excuse.

Moneo finished his note taking.

“A few details, Lord,” Moneo said. “Will there be some special garb for Hwi?”

“The stillsuit and robe of a Fremen bride, real ones.”

“Jewelry or other baubles?”

Leto’s gaze locked on Moneo’s fingers scrabbling over the tiny recorder, seeing there a dissolution.

Leadership, courage, a sense of knowledge and order—Moneo has these in abundance. They surround him like a holy aura, but they conceal from all eyes except mine the rot which eats from within. It is inevitable. Were I gone, it would be visible to everyone.

“Lord?” Moneo pressed. “Are you woolgathering?”

Ahhh! He likes that word!

“That is all,” Leto said. “Only the robe, the stillsuit and the water rings.”

Moneo bowed and turned away.

He is looking ahead now, Leto thought, but even this new thing will pass. He will turn toward the past once more. And I had such high hopes for him once. Well . . . perhaps Siona . . .

“Make no heroes,” my father said.

—THE VOICE OF GHANIMA, FROM THE ORAL HISTORY

Just by the way Idaho strode across the small chamber, his loud demands for audience now gratified, Leto could see an important transformation in the ghola. It was a thing repeated so many times that it had become deeply familiar to Leto. The Duncan had not even exchanged words of greeting with the departing Moneo. It all fitted into the pattern. How boring that pattern had become!

Leto had a name for this transformation of the Duncans. He called it “The Since Syndrome.”

The gholas often nurtured suspicions about the secret things which might have been developed across the centuries of oblivion since they last knew awareness. What had people been doing all that time? Why could they possibly want me, this relic from their past? No ego could overcome such doubts forever—especially in a doubting man.

One of the gholas had accused Leto: “You’ve put things in my body, things I know nothing about! These things in my body tell you everything I’m doing! You spy on me everywhere!”

Another had charged him with possessing a “manipulative machine which makes us want to do whatever you want.”

Once it started, the Since Syndrome could never be entirely eliminated. It could be checked, even diverted, but the dormant seed might sprout at the slightest provocation.

Idaho stopped where Moneo had stood and there was a veiled look of nonspecific suspicions in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders. Leto allowed the situation to simmer, bringing the condition to a head. Idaho locked gazes with him, then broke away to dart his glances around the room. Leto recognized the manner behind the gaze.

The Duncans never forget!

As he studied the room, using the sightful ways he had been taught centuries before by the Lady Jessica and the Mentat Thufir Hawat, Idaho began to feel a giddy sense of dislocation. He thought the room rejected him, each thing—the soft cushions: big bulbous things in gold, green and a red that was almost purple; the Fremen rugs, each a museum piece, lapping over each other in thick piles around Leto’s pit; the false sunlight of Ixian glowglobes, light which enveloped the Emperor’s face in dry warmth, making the shadows around it deeper and more mysterious; the smell of spice-tea somewhere nearby; and that rich melange odor which radiated from the worm-body.

Idaho felt that too much had happened to him too fast since the Tleilaxu had abandoned him to the mercies of Luli and Friend in that featureless prison-cell room.

Too much . . . too much . . .

Am I really here? he wondered. Is this me? What are these thoughts that I think?

He stared at Leto’s quiescent body, the shadowy and enormous mass which lay so silently there on its cart within the pit. The very quietness of that fleshly mass only suggested mysterious energies, terrible energies which might be unleashed in ways nobody could anticipate.

Idaho had heard the stories about the fight at the Ixian Embassy, but the Fish Speaker accounts had an aura of miraculous visitation about them which obscured the physical data.