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Idaho and Siona heard only a gasping hiss.
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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
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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."
"My father was seldom mistaken about such things," she said. "You will have to
look into that."
Idaho experienced a sudden memory of the silvery shapes of sandtrout darting
away from Leto's body in the river.
"I heard the Worm," Siona said. "The Fish Speakers will follow you, not me."
Again, Idaho sensed the temptation from the ritual of Siaynoq. "We will see,"
he said. He turned and looked at Siona. "What did he mean when he said the
lxians cannot create arafel?"
"You haven't read all the journals," she said. "I'll show you when we return
to Tuono."
"But what does it mean-arafel?"
"That's the cloud-darkness of holy judgment. It's from an old story. You'll
find it all in my journals."
===
Excerpt from the Hadi Benotto secret summation on the discoveries at
Dar-es-Balat:
Herewith THE minority report. We will, of course, comply with the majority
decision to apply a careful screening, editing and censorship to the journals
from Dar-es-Balat, but our arguments must be heard. We recognize the interest
of Holy Church in these matters and the political dangers have not escaped our
notice. We share a desire with the Church that Rakis and the Holy Reservation
of the Divided God not become "an attraction for gawking tourists."
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However, now that all of the journals are in our hands, authenticated and
translated, the clear shape of the Atreides Design emerges. As a woman trained
by the Bene Gesserit to understand the ways of our ancestors, I have a natural
desire to share the pattern we have exposed which is so much more than Dune to
Arrakis to Dune, thence to Rakis.
The interests of history and science must be served. The journals throw a
valuable new light onto that accumulation of personal recollections and
biographies from the Duncan Days, the Guard Bible.
We cannot be unmindful of those familiar oaths: "By the Thousand Sons of
Idaho!" and "By the Nine
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Daughters of Siona!" The persistent Cult of Sister Chenoeh assumes new
significance because of the journals' disclosures. Certainly, the Church's
characterization of Judas/Nayla deserves careful reevaluation.
We of the Minority must remind the political censors that the poor sandworms
in their Rakian
Reservation cannot provide us with an alternative to Ixian Navigation
Machines, nor are the tiny amounts of Church-controlled melange any real
commercial threat to the products of the Tleilaxu vats. No! We argue that the
myths, the Oral History, the Guard Bible, and even the Holy Books of the
Divided God must be compared with the journals from Dar-es-Balat. Every
historical reference
to the Scattering and the Famine Times has to be taken out and reexamined!
What have we to fear?
No Ixian machine can do what we, the descendants of Duncan Idaho and Siona,
have done. How many universes have we populated? None can guess. No one person
will ever know. Does the Church fear the occasional prophet? We know that the
visionaries cannot see us nor predict our decisions. No death can find all of
humankind. Must we of the Minority join our fellows of the Scattering before
we can be heard? Must we leave the original core of humankind ignorant and
uninformed? If the
Majority drives us out, you know we never again can be found!
We do not want to leave. We are held here by those pearls in the sand. We are
fascinated by the
Church's use of the pearl as "the sun of understanding." Surely, no reasoning
human can escape the journals' revelations in this regard. The admittedly
fugitive but vital uses of archeology must have their day! Just as the
primitive machine with which Leto I concealed his journals can only teach us
about the evolution of our machines, just so, that ancient awareness must be
allowed to speak to us. It would be a crime against both historical accuracy
and science for us to abandon our attempts at communication with those "pearls
of awareness" which the journals have located. Is
Leto II lost in his endless dream or could he be reawakened to our times,
brought to full consciousness as a storehouse of historical accuracy? How can
Holy Church fear this truth?
For the Minority, we have no doubt that historians must listen to that voice
from our beginnings.
If it is only the journals, we must listen. We must listen across at least as
many years into our future as those journals lay hidden in our past. We will
not try to predict the discoveries yet to be made within those pages. We say
only that they must be made. How can we turn our backs on our most important
inheritance? As the poet, Lon Bramlis, has said: "We are the fountain of
surprises!"
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