She grinned up at him. “You know it’s love when you want to give joy and damn the consequences.”

He nodded. “I think only of the danger to you.”

“We are what we are,” she said.

“What will we do?”

“We’ll cherish this for as long as we live.”

“You sound… so final.”

“I am.”

“But we’ll see each other every…”

“Never again like this.”

“Hwi!” He hurled himself across the bed and buried his face in her breast.

She stroked his hair.

His voice muffled against her, he said: “What if I’ve impreg…”

“Shush! If there’s to be a child, there will be a child.”

Idaho lifted his head and looked at her. “But he’ll know for sure!”

“He’ll know anyway.”

“You think he really knows everything?”

“Not everything, but he’ll know this.”

“How?”

“I will tell him.”

Idaho pushed himself away from her and sat up on the bed. Anger warred with confusion in his expression.

“I must,” she said.

“If he turns against you… Hwi, there are stories. You could be in terrible danger!”

“No. I have needs, too. He knows this. He will not harm either of us.”

“But he…”

“He will not destroy me. He will know that if he harms you that would destroy me.”

“How can you marry him?”

“Dear Duncan, have you not seen that he needs me more than you do?”

“But he cannot… I mean, you can’t possibly…”

“The joy that you and I have in each other, I’ll not have that with Leto. It’s impossible for him. He has confessed this to me.”

“Then why can’t… If he loves you…”

“He has larger plans and larger needs.” She reached out and took Idaho’s right hand in both of hers. “I’ve known that since I first began to study about him. Needs larger than either of us have.”

“What plans? What needs?”

“Ask him.”

“Do you know?”

“Yes.”

“You mean you believe those stories about…”

“There is honesty and goodness in him. I know it by my own responses to him. What my Ixian masters made in me was, I think, a reagent which reveals more than they wanted me to know.”

“Then you believe him!” Idaho accused. He tried to pull his hand away from her.

“If you go to him, Duncan, and…”

“He’ll never see me again!”

“He will.”

She pushed his hand to her mouth and kissed his fingers.

“I’m a hostage,” he said. “You’ve made me fearful… the two of you together…”

“I never thought it would be easy to serve God,” she said. “I just didn’t think it would be this hard.”

CHAPTER XXXVIII

Memory has a curious meaning to me, a meaning I have hoped others might share. It continually astonishes me how people hide from their ancestral memories, shielding themselves behind a thick barrier of mythos, Ohhh, I do not expect them to seek the terrible immediacy of every living moment which I must experience. I can understand that they might not want to be submerged in a mush of petty ancestral details. You have reason to fear that your living moments might be taken over by others. Yet, the meaning is there within those memories. We carry all of our ancestry forward like a living wave, all of the hopes and joys and griefs, the agonies and the exultations of our past. Nothing within those memories remains completely without meaning or influence, not as long as there is a humankind somewhere. We have that bright infinity all around us, that Golden Path of forever to which we can continually pledge our puny but inspired allegiance.