“And the Ixians and the Tleilaxu and all the others. Oh, they ferret out a bit of hidden melange from time to time and that keeps the attention fixed. A very interesting game, don’t you think?”

“But when the violence comes…”

“There will be famines and hard thoughts.”

“Here on Arrakis, too?”

“Here, there, everywhere. People will look back on my tyranny as the good old days. I will be the mirror of their future.”

“But it will be terrible!” she objected.

She could have no other reaction, he thought.

He said: “As the land refuses to support the people, the survivors will crowd into smaller and smaller refuges. A terrible selection process will be repeated on many worlds—explosive birthrates and dwindling food.”

“But couldn’t the Guild…”

“The Guild will be largely helpless without sufficient melange to operate available transports.”

“Won’t the rich escape?”

“Some of them.”

“Then you haven’t really changed anything. We will just go on struggling and dying.”

“Until the sandworm reigns once more on Arrakis. We will have tested ourselves by then with a profound experience shared by all. We will have learned that a thing which can happen on one planet can happen on any planet.”

“So much pain and death,” she whispered.

“Don’t you understand about death?” he asked. “You must understand. The species must understand. All life must understand.”

“Help me, Lord,” she whispered.

“It is the most profound experience of any creature,” he said. “Short of death come the things which risk and mirror it—life-threatening diseases, injuries and accidents… childbirth for a woman… and once it was combat for the males.”

“But your Fish Speakers are…”

“They teach about survival,” he said.

Her eyes went wide with understanding. “The survivors. Of course!”

“How precious you are,” he said. “How rare and precious. Bless the Ixians!”

“And curse them?”

“That, too.”

“I did not think I could ever understand about your Fish Speakers,” she said.

“Not even Moneo sees it,” he said. “And I despair of the Duncans.”

“You have to appreciate life before you want to preserve it,” she said.

“And it’s the survivors who maintain the most light and poignant hold upon the beauties of living. Women know this more often than men because birth is the reflection of death.”

“My Uncle Malky always said you had good reasons for denying combat and casual violence to men. What a bitter lesson!”

“Without readily available violence, men have few ways of testing how they will meet that final experience,” he said. “Something is missing. The psyche does not grow. What is it people say about Leto’s Peace?”

“That you make us wallow in pointless decadence like pigs in our own filth.”

“Always recognize the accuracy of folk wisdom,” he said. “Decadence.”

“Most men have no principles,” she said. “The women of Ix complain about it constantly.”

“When I need to identify rebels, I look for men with principles,” he said.

She stared at him silently, and he thought how that simple reaction spoke so deeply of her intelligence.