“No, but this will be our excuse for investigating the place where you were born.”

She opened her mouth and gradually formed a smile, then: “My Lord is devious. I will speak to the Reverend Mother immediately.” Hwi started to rise, but he stopped her with a gesture.

“We must not give the appearance of haste,” he said.

She sank back on to the cushion.

“Each of us is different in the way of Moneo’s observation,” he said. “Genesis does not stop. Your god continues creating you.”

“What will Anteac find? You know, don’t you?”

“Let us say that I have a strong conviction. Now, you have not once mentioned the subject which I broached earlier. Have you no questions?”

“You will provide the answers as I require them.” It was a statement full of such trust that it stopped Leto’s voice. He could only look at her, realizing how extraordinary was this accomplishment of the Ixians—this human. Hwi remained precisely true to the dictates of her personally-chosen morality. She was comely, warm and honest and possessed of an empathic sense which forced her to share every anguish in those with whom she identified. He could imagine the dismay of her Bene Gesserit teachers when confronted by this immovable core of self-honesty. The teachers obviously had been reduced to adding a touch here, an ability there, everything strengthening that power which prevented her from becoming a Bene Gesserit. How that must have rankled!

“Lord,” she said, “I would know the motives which forced you to choose your life.”

“First, you must understand what it is like to see our future.”

“With your help, I will try.”

“Nothing is ever separated from its source,” he said. “Seeing futures is a vision of a continuum in which all things take shape like bubbles forming beneath a waterfall. You see them and then they vanish into the stream. If the stream ends, it is as though the bubbles never were. That stream is my Golden Path and I saw it end.”

“Your choice…” she gestured at his body, “… changed that?”

“It is changing. The change comes not only from the manner of my life but from the manner of my death.”

“You know how you will die?”

“Not how. I know only the Golden Path in which it will occur.”

“Lord, I do not…”

“It is difficult to understand, I know. I will die four deaths—the death of the flesh, the death of the soul, the death of the myth and the death of reason. And all of these deaths contain the seed of resurrection.”

“You will return from…”

“The seeds will return.”

“When you are gone, what will happen to your religion?”

“All religions are a single communion. The spectrum remains unbroken within the Golden Path. It is only that humans see first one part and then another. Delusions can be called accidents of the senses.”

“People will still worship you,” she said.

“Yes.”

“But when forever ends there will be anger,” she said. “There will be denial. Some will say you were just an ordinary tyrant.”