Dune [Frank Herbert's Dune Saga Collection: Books 1 - 6]

“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 . . .”

“Sometimes I can feel your thoughts . . . but I . . . we live only through . . . the . . . reflection of . . . your awareness. Your memory creates us. The danger . . . it is a precise memory. And . . . those of us . . . those of us who loved power . . . and gathered it at . . . any price . . . those can be . . . more precise.”

“Stronger?” Leto whispered.

“Stronger.”

“I know your vision,” Leto said. “Rather than let him have me, I’ll become you.”

“Not that!”

Leto nodded to himself, sensing the enormous will-force his father had required to withdraw, recognizing the consequences of failure. Any possession reduced the possessed to Abomination. The recognition gave him a renewed sense of strength, and he felt his own body with abnormal acuteness and a deeply drawn awareness of past mistakes: his own and those of his ancestors. It was the uncertainties which weakened—he saw this now. For an instant, temptation warred with fear within him. This flesh possessed the ability to transform melange into a vision of the future. With the spice, he could breathe the future, shatter Time’s veils. He found the temptation difficult to shed, clasped his hands and sank into the prana-bindu awareness. His flesh negated the temptation. His flesh wore the deep knowledge learned in blood by Paul. Those who sought the future hoped to gain the winning gamble on tomorrow’s race. Instead they found themselves trapped into a lifetime whose every heartbeat and anguished wail was known. Paul’s final vision had shown the precarious way out of that trap, and Leto knew now that he had no other choice but to follow that way.

“The joy of living, its beauty is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you,” he said.

A soft voice whispered in his ear: “I’ve always known that beauty.”

Leto turned his head, stared into Ghanima’s eyes which glistened in the bright moonlight. He saw Chani looking back at him. “Mother,” he said, “you must withdraw.”

“Ahhh, the temptation!” she said, and kissed him.

He pushed her away. “Would you take your daughter’s life?” he demanded.

“It’s so easy . . . so foolishly easy,” she said.

Leto, feeling panic begin to grip him, remembered what an effort of will his father’s persona-within had required to abandon the flesh. Was Ghanima lost in that observer-world where he had watched and listened, learning what he had required from his father?