Flames covered his vision. The agony was fading, but he could still sense odors and hear sounds with a terrible acuity. Both Idaho and Siona were breathing in quick, shallow gasps. Odd kinesthetic sensations began to weave their way through Leto-echoes of bones and joints which he knew he no longer possessed.
"Look!" Siona said.
"He's disintegrating." That was Idaho.
"No." Siona. "The outside is falling away. Look! The Worm!"
Leto felt parts of himself settling into warm softness. The agony removed itself.
"What're those holes in him?" Siona.
"I think they were the sandtrout. See the shapes?"
"I am here to prove one of my ancestors wrong," Leto said
(or thought he said, which was the same thing as far as his journals were concerned). "I was born a man but I do not die a man."
"I can't look!" Siona said.
Leto heard her turn away, a rattle of rocks.
"Are you still there, Duncan?"
"Yes."
So I still have a voice.
"Look at me," Leto said. "I was a bloody bit of pulp in a human womb, a bit no larger than a cherry. Look at me, I say!"
"I'm looking." Idaho's voice was faint.
"You expected a giant and you found a gnome," Leto said. "Now, you're beginning to know the responsibilities which come as a result of actions. What will you do with your new power, Duncan?"
There was a long silence, then Siona's voice: "Don't listen to him! He was mad!"
"Of course," Leto said. "Madness in method, that is genius."
"Siona, do you understand this?" Idaho asked. How plaintive, the ghola voice.
"She understands," Leto said. "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."
"I wish he'd hurry up and die!" Siona said.
"I am the divided god and you would make me whole," Leto said. "Duncan? I think of all my Duncans I approve of you the most."
"Approve?" Some of the rage returned to Idaho's voice.
"There's magic in my approval," Leto said. "Anything's possible in a magic universe. Your life has been dominated by the Oracle's fatality, not mine. Now, you see the mysterious caprices and you would ask me to dispel this? I wished only to increase it." 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. He tried to speak and knew the reality of it because Idaho said, "Listen, he's trying to say something."
"Do not fear the lxians," he said, and he heard his own voice as a fading whisper. "They can make the machines, but they no longer can make arafel. I know. I was there."
He fell silent, gathering his strength, but he felt the energy flowing from him even as he tried to hold it. Once more, the clamor arose within him-voices pleading and shouting.
"Stop that foolishness!" he cried, or thought he cried.
Idaho and Siona heard only a gasping hiss.
Presently, Siona said: "I think he's dead."
"And everyone thought he was immortal," Idaho said.
"Do you know what the Oral History says?" Siona asked. "If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal."
"That sounds like him," Idaho accused.
"I think it was," she said.
"What did he mean about your descendants... hiding, not finding them?" Idaho asked.
"He created a new kind of mimesis," she said, "a new biological imitation. He knew he had succeeded. He could not see me in his futures."
"What are you?" Idaho demanded.
"I'm the new Atreides."
"Atreides!" It was a curse in Idaho's voice.
Siona stared down at the disintegrating hulk which once had been Leto Atreides II... and something else. The something else was sloughing away in faint wisps of blue smoke where the smell of melange was strongest. Puddles of blue liquid formed in the rocks beneath his melting bulk. Only faint vague shapes which might once have been human remained-a collapsed foaming pinkness, a bit of red-streaked bone which could have held the forms of cheeks and brow...
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."
She turned and took Idaho's cold hand in hers. Carefully, she led him out of the cave into the light where the rope dangled invitingly from the barrier Wall's top, from the place where the frightened Museum Fremen waited.
Poor material with which to shape a new universe, she thought, but they would have to serve. Idaho would require gentle seduction, a care within which love might appear.
When she looked down the river to where the flow emerged from its man-made chasm to spread across the green lands, she saw a wind from the south driving dark clouds toward her.
Idaho withdrew his hand from hers, but he appeared calmer. "Weather control is increasingly unstable," he said. "Moneo thought it was the Guild's doing."