Dune

Ghanima hitched herself closer to him, circled his waist with her left arm. She drew in two deep breaths, cleared her throat, and began singing in a clear piping voice the words her mother had so often sung for their father:

Here I redeem the pledge thou gavest;

I pour sweet water upon thee.

Life shall prevail in this windless place:

My love, thou shalt live in a palace,

Thy enemies shall fall to emptiness.

We travel this path together

Which love has traced for thee.

Surely well do I show the way

For my love is thy palace . . .

Her voice fell into the desert silence which even a whisper might despoil, and Leto felt himself sinking, sinking—becoming the father whose memories spread like an overlayer in the genes of his immediate past.

For this brief space, I must be Paul, he told himself. This is not Ghani beside me; it is my beloved Chani, whose wise counsel has saved us both many a time.

For her part, Ghanima had slipped into the persona-memory of her mother with frightening ease, as she had known she would. How much easier this was for the female—and how much more dangerous.

In a voice turned suddenly husky, Ghanima said: “Look there, beloved!” First Moon had risen and, against its cold light, they saw an arc of orange fire falling upward into space. The transport which had brought the Lady Jessica, laden now with spice, was returning to its mother-cluster in orbit.

The keenest of remembrances ran through Leto then, bringing memories like bright bell-sounds. For a flickering instant he was another Leto—Jessica’s Duke. Necessity pushed those memories aside, but not before he felt the piercing of the love and the pain.

I must be Paul, he reminded himself.

The transformation came over him with a frightening duality, as though Leto were a dark screen against which his father was projected. He felt both his own flesh and his father’s, and the flickering differences threatened to overcome him.

“Help me, father,” he whispered.

The flickering disturbance passed and now there was another imprint upon his awareness, while his own identity as Leto stood at one side as an observer.

“My last vision has not yet come to pass,” he said, and the voice was Paul’s. He turned to Ghanima. “You know what I saw.”

She touched his cheek with her right hand. “Did you walk into the desert to die, beloved? Is that what you did?”

“It may be that I did, but that vision . . . Would that not be reason enough to stay alive?”

“But blind?” she asked.

“Even so.”

“Where could you go?”

He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Jacurutu.”

“Beloved!” Tears began flowing down her cheeks.

“Muad’Dib, the hero, must be destroyed utterly,” he said. “Otherwise this child cannot bring us back from chaos.”

“The Golden Path,” she said. “It is not a good vision.”

“It’s the only possible vision.”

“Alia has failed, then . . .”

“Utterly. You see the record of it.”

“Your mother has returned too late.” She nodded, and it was Chani’s wise expression on the childish face of Ghanima. “Could there not be another vision? Perhaps if—”

“No, beloved. Not yet. This child cannot peer into the future yet and return safely.”

Again a shuddering breath disturbed his body, and Leto-observer felt the deep longing of his father to live once more in vital flesh, to make living decisions and . . . How desperate the need to unmake past mistakes!

“Father!” Leto called, and it was as though he shouted echoingly within his own skull.

It was a profound act of will which Leto felt then: the slow, clinging withdrawal of his father’s internal presence, the release of senses and muscles.

“Beloved,” Chani’s voice whispered beside him, and the withdrawal slowed. “What is happening?”

“Don’t go yet,” Leto said, and it was his own voice, rasping and uncertain, still his own. Then: “Chani, you must tell us: How do we avoid . . . what has happened to Alia?”

It was Paul-within who answered him, though, with words which fell upon his inner ear, halting and with long pauses: “There is no certainty. You . . . saw . . . what almost . . . happened . . . with . . . me.”

“But Alia . . .”

“The damned Baron has her!”

Leto felt his throat burning with dryness. “Is he . . . have I . . .”

“He’s in you . . . but . . . I . . . we cannot . . . sometimes we sense . . . each other, but you . . .”

“Can you not read my thoughts?” Leto asked. “Would you know then if . . . he . . .”