Dune полностью

Moneo jerked his head up and stared at Leto in terror.

“Civilizations collapse when their powers outrun their religions!” Leto said. “Why can’t you see this? Hwi does.”

“She is Ixian, Lord. Perhaps she . . .”

“She’s a Fish Speaker! She has been from birth, born to serve me. No!” Leto raised one of his tiny hands as Moneo tried to speak. “The Fish Speakers are disturbed because I called them my brides, and now they see a stranger not trained in Siaynoq who knows it better than they.”

“How can that be, Lord, when your Fish . . .”

“What are you saying? Each of us comes into being knowing who he is and what he is supposed to do.”

Moneo opened his mouth but closed it without speaking.

“Small children know,” Leto said. “It’s only after adults have confused them that children hide this knowledge even from themselves. Moneo! Uncover yourself!”

“Lord, I cannot!” The words were torn from Moneo. He trembled with anguish. “I do not have your powers, your knowledge of . . .”

“Enough!”

Moneo fell silent. His body shook.

Leto spoke soothingly to him. “It’s all right, Moneo. I asked too much of you and I can see your fatigue.”

Slowly, Moneo’s trembling subsided. He drew in deep, gulping breaths.

Leto said: “There will be some change in my Fremen wedding. We will not use the water rings of my sister, Ghanima. We will use, instead, the rings of my mother.”

“The Lady Chani, Lord? But where are her rings?”

Leto twisted his bulk on the cart and pointed to the intersection of two cavernous spokes on his left where the dim light revealed the earliest burial niches of the Atreides on Arrakis. “In her tomb, the first niche. You will remove those rings, Moneo, and bring them to the ceremony.”

Moneo stared across the gloomy distance of the crypt. “Lord . . . is it not a desecration to . . .”

“You forget, Moneo, who lives in me.” He spoke then in Chani’s voice: “I can do what I want with my water rings!”

Moneo cowered. “Yes, Lord. I will bring them with me to Tabur Village when . . .”

“Tabur Village?” Leto asked in his usual voice. “But I have changed my mind. We will be wed at Tuono Village!”

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

Idaho stood aghast at his first close glimpse of Tuono Village. That was the home of Fremen?

The Fish Speaker troop had taken them from the Citadel at daybreak, Idaho and Siona bundled into a large ornithopter, accompanied by two smaller guard ships. And the flight had been slow, almost three hours. They had landed at a flat, round plastone hangar almost a kilometer from the village, separated from it by old dunes locked in shape with plantings of poverty grasses and a few scrubby bushes. As they came down, the wall directly behind the village had seemed to grow taller and taller, the village shrinking beneath such immensity.

“The Museum Fremen are kept generally uncontaminated by off-planet technology,” Nayla had explained as the escort sealed the ’thopters into the low hangar. One of the troop already had been sent trotting off toward Tuono with the announcement of their arrival.

Siona had remained mostly silent all during the flight, but she had studied Nayla with covert intensity.

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.

“I have been told about vultures,” she said, her voice cold.

Idaho had noted the perspiration on her upper lip. There was a spicy smell of sweat in the troop pressed close around them.

His imagination was not equal to the task of defocusing the differences between the past and this time. The issue stillsuits they wore were more for show than for efficient collection of the body’s water. No true Fremen would have trusted his life to one of them, not even here, where the air smelled of nearby water. And the Fish Speakers of Nayla’s troop did not walk in Fremen silence. They chattered among themselves like children.

Siona trudged beside him in sullen withdrawal, her attention frequently on the broad muscular back of Nayla, who strode along a few paces ahead of the troop.