Her voice was faint: “Thank you, Lord.”

“My godhood began when I told my Fremen I no longer could give the death water to the tribes. You know about the death water?”

“In the Dune days, the water recovered from the bodies of the dead,” she said.

“Ahhh, you have read Noah Arkwright.”

She managed a faint smile.

“I told my Fremen the water would be consecrated to a supreme deity, left nameless. Fremen were still allowed to control this water through my largesse.”

“Water must have been very precious in those days.”

“Very! And I, as delegate of this nameless deity, held loose control of that precious water for almost three hundred years.”

She chewed at her lower lip.

“It still sounds calculating?” he asked.

She nodded.

“It was. When it came time to consecrate my sister’s water, I performed a miracle. The voices of all the Atreides spoke from Ghani’s urn. Thus, my Fremen discovered that I was their Supreme Deity.”

Hwi spoke fearfully, her voice full of puzzled uncertainties at this revelation. “Lord, are you telling me that you are not really a god?”

“I am telling you that I do not play hide-and-seek with death.”

She stared at him for several minutes before responding in a way which assured him that she understood his deeper meaning. It was a reaction which only intensified her endearment to him.

“Your death will not be like other deaths,” she said.

“Precious Hwi,” he murmured.

“I wonder that you do not fear the judgment of a true Supreme Deity,” she said.

“Do you judge me, Hwi?”

“No, but I fear for you.”

“Think on the price I pay,” he said. “Every descendant part of me will carry some of my awareness locked away within it, lost and helpless.”

She put both hands over her mouth and stared at him.

“This is the horror which my father could not face and which he tried to prevent: the infinite division and subdivision of a blind identity.”

She lowered her hands and whispered: “You will be conscious?”

“In a way… but mute. A little pearl of my awareness will go with every sandworm and every sandtrout—knowing yet unable to move a single cell, aware in an endless dream.”

She shuddered.

Leto watched her try to understand such an existence. Could she imagine the final clamour when the subdivided bits of his identity grappled for a fading control of the Ixian machine which recorded his journals? Could she sense the wrenching silence which would follow that awful fragmentation?

“Lord, they would use this knowledge against you were I to reveal it.”

“Will you tell?”

“Of course not!” She shook her head slowly from side to side. Why had he accepted this terrible transformation? Was there no escape?

Presently, she said: “The machine which writes your thoughts, could it not be attuned to…”

“To a million of me? To a billion? To more? My dear Hwi, none of those knowing-pearls will be truly me.”

Her eyes filmed with tears. She blinked and inhaled a deep breath. Leto recognized the Bene Gesserit training in this, the way she accepted a flow of calmness.