“Except for the Fremen.”

“Yes. But they knew where they belonged—on this side of a particular escarpment… or beyond where the pan turns white against the sand.”

“They could go wherever they wanted!”

“With some limits.”

“Some of us long for the desert,” she said.

“You have the Sareer.”

She lifted her head to glare at him. “That little thing!”

“Fifteen hundred kilometres by five hundred—not so little.”

Siona got to her feet. “Have you asked the Worm why he confines us this way?”

“Leto’s Peace, the Golden Path to insure our survival. That’s what he says.”

“Do you know what he told my father? I spied on them when I was a child. I heard him.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he denies us most crises, to limit our forming forces. He said: ‘People can be sustained by affliction, but I am the affliction now. Gods can become afflictions.’ Those were his words, Duncan. The Worm is a sickness!”

Idaho did not doubt the accuracy of her recital, but the words failed to stir him. He thought instead of the Corrino he had been ordered to kill. Affliction. The Corrino, descendant of a Family which once had ruled this Empire, had been revealed as a softly fat middle-aged man who hungered after power and conspired for spice. Idaho had ordered a Fish Speaker to kill him, an act which had aroused Moneo to a fit of intense questioning.

“Why didn’t you kill him yourself?”

“I wanted to see how the Fish Speakers performed.”

“And your judgment of their performance?”

“Efficient.”

But the death of the Corrino had inflicted Idaho with a sense of unreality. A fat little man lying in a pool of his own blood, an undistinguished shadow among the night shadows of a plastone street. It was unreal. Idaho could remember Muad’Dib saying: “The mind imposes this framework which it calls ‘reality’. That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report.” What reality moved the Lord Leto?

Idaho looked at Siona standing against the orchard background and the green hills of Goygoa. “Let’s go down to the village and find our quarters. I’d like to be alone.”

“The Fish Speakers will put us in the same quarters.”

“With them?”

“No, just the two of us together. The reason’s simple enough. The Worm wants me to breed with the great Duncan Idaho.”

“I pick my own partners,” Idaho growled.

“I’m sure one of our Fish Speakers would be delighted,” Siona said. She whirled away from him and set off down the hill.

Idaho watched her for a moment, the lithe young body swaying like the limbs of the orchard trees in the wind.

“I’m not his stud,” Idaho muttered. “That’s one thing he’ll have to understand.”

CHAPTER XXVI

As each day passes, you become increasingly unreal, more alien and remote from what I find myself to be on that new day. I am the only reality and, as you differ from me, you lose reality. The more curious I become the less curious are those who worship me. Religion suppresses curiosity. What I do subtracts from the worshipper. Thus it is that eventually I will do nothing, giving it all back to frightened people who will find themselves on that day alone and forced to act for themselves.