One of the gholas had accused Leto: “You’ve put things in my body, things I know nothing about! These things in my body tell you everything I’m doing! You spy on me everywhere!”

Another had charged him with possessing a “manipulative machine which makes us want to do whatever you want”.

Once it started, the Since Syndrome could never be entirely eliminated. It could be checked, even diverted, but the dormant seed might sprout at the slightest provocation.

Idaho stopped where Moneo had stood and there was a veiled look of non-specific suspicions in his eyes, in the set of his shoulders. Leto allowed the situation to simmer, bringing the condition to a head. Idaho locked gazes with him, then broke away to dart his glances around the room. Leto recognized the manner behind that gaze.

The Duncans never forget!

As he studied the room, using the sightful ways he had been taught centuries before by the Lady Jessica and the Mentat Thufir Hawat, Idaho began to feel a giddy sense of dislocation. He thought the room rejected him, each thing—the soft cushions: big bulbous things in gold, green and a red that was almost purple; the Fremen rugs, each a museum piece, lapping over each other in thick piles around Leto’s pit; the false sunlight of Ixian glowglobes, light which enveloped the emperor’s face in dry warmth, making the shadows around it deeper and more mysterious; the smell of spice tea somewhere nearby and that rich melange odour which radiated from the worm body.

Idaho felt that too much had happened to him too fast since the Tleilaxu had abandoned him to the mercies of Luli and Friend in that featureless prison-cell room.

Too much… too much…

Am I really here? he wondered. Is this me? What are these thoughts that I think?

He stared at Leto’s quiescent body, the shadowy and enormous mass which lay so silently there on its cart within the pit. The very quietness of that fleshy mass only suggested mysterious energies, terrible energies which might be unleashed in ways nobody could anticipate.

Idaho had heard the stories about the fight at the Ixian Embassy, but the Fish Speaker accounts had an aura of miraculous visitation about them which obscured the physical data.

“He flew down from above them and executed a terrible slaughter among the sinners.”

“How did he do that?” Idaho had asked.

“He was an angry God,” his informant had said.

Angry, Idaho thought. Was it because of the threat to Hwi? The stories he had heard! None were believable. Hwi wedded to this gross… It was not possible! Not the lovely Hwi, the Hwi of gentle delicacy. He is playing some terrible game, testing us… testing us… There was no honest reality in these times, no peace except in the presence of Hwi. All else was insanity.

As he returned his attention to Leto’s face—that silently waiting Atreides face—the sense of dislocation grew stronger in Idaho. He began to wonder if, by a slight increase in mental effort along some strange new pathway, he might break through ghostly barriers to remember all of the experiences of the other ghola Idahos.