They replied as one voice: “Lord, we obey!”

“In me you live without end!” Leto said.

“We are the infinite!” they shouted.

“I love you as I love no others!” Leto said.

“Love!” they screamed.

Idaho shuddered.

“I give you my beloved Duncan!” Leto said.

“Love!” they screamed.

Idaho felt his whole body trembling. He felt that he might collapse from the weight of this adulation. He wanted to run away and he wanted to stay and accept this. There was power in this room. Power!

In a lower voice, Leto said: “Change the Guard.”

The women bowed their heads, a single movement, unhesitating. From off to Idaho’s right a line of women in white gowns appeared. They marched into the open space below the ledge and Idaho noted that some of them carried babies and small children, none more than a year or two old.

From the outline explanation provided for him earlier, Idaho recognized these women as the ones leaving the immediate service of the Fish Speakers. Some would become priestesses and some would spend full time as mothers… but none would truly leave Leto’s service.

As he looked down on the children, Idaho thought how the buried memory of this experience must be impressed on any of the male children. They would carry the mystery of it throughout their lives, a memory lost to consciousness but always present, shading responses from this moment onward.

The last of the newcomers came to a stop below Leto and looked up at him. The other women in the hall now lifted their faces and focused on Leto.

Idaho glanced left and right. The whiteclad women filled the space below the ledge for at least five hundred metres in both directions. Some of them lifted their children toward Leto. The awe and submission was something absolute. If Leto ordered it, Idaho sensed, these women would smash their babies to death against the ledge. They would do anything!

Leto lowered his front segments on to the cart, a gentle rippling motion. He peered down benignly and his voice came as a soft caress. “I give you the reward which your faith and service have earned. Ask and it shall be given.”

The entire hall reverberated to the response: “It shall be given!”

“What is mine is thine,” Leto said.

“What is mine is thine,” the women shouted.

“Share with me now,” Leto said, “the silent prayer for my intercession in all things—that humankind may never end.”

As one, every head in the hall bowed. The whiteclad women cradled their children close, looking down at them. Idaho felt the silent unity, a force which sought to enter him and take him over. He opened his mouth wide and breathed deeply, fighting against something which he sensed as a physical invasion. His mind searched frantically for something to which he could cling, something to shield him.

These women were an army whose force and union Idaho had not suspected. He knew he did not understand this force. He could only observe it, recognize that it existed.