“Yes.” Sullen. “So why ask me how far?”

“Come down and stand where I can see you.”

“Why?”

Good, he thought. She believes I will abandon her here and speed off faster than she can follow.

“Come down and I’ll explain,” he said.

She slid off his back and came around to where she could look into his face.

“Time passes swiftly when your senses are full,” he said. “We have been out almost four hours. We have come about sixty kilometres.”

“Why is that important?”

“Moneo put dried food in the pouch of your robe,” he said. “Eat a little and I will tell you.”

She found a dried cube of protomor in the pouch and chewed on it while she watched him. It was the authentic old Fremen food even to the slight addition of melange.

“You have felt your past,” he said. “Now, you must be sensitized to your future, to the Golden Path.”

She swallowed. “I don’t believe in your Golden Path.”

“If you are to live, you will believe in it.”

“Is that your test? Have faith in the Great God Leto or die?”

“You need no faith in me whatsoever. I want you to have faith in yourself.”

“Then why is it important how far we’ve come?”

“So you’ll understand how far you still have to go.”

She put a hand to her cheek. “I don’t…”

“Right where you stand,” he said, “you are in the unmistakable midst of infinity. Look around you at the meaning of infinity.”

She glanced left and right at the unbroken desert.

“We are going to walk out of my desert together,” he said. “Just the two of us.”

“You don’t walk,” she sneered.

“A figure of speech. But you will walk. I assure you of that.”

She looked in the direction they had come. “So that’s why you asked me about tracks.”

“Even if there were tracks, you could not go back. There is nothing at my Little Citadel that you could get to and use for survival.”

“No water?”

“Nothing.”

She found the catchpocket tube at her shoulder, sucked at it and restored it. He noted the care with which she sealed the end, but she did not pull the face flap across her mouth, although Leto had heard her father warning her about this. She wanted her mouth free for talking!

“You’re telling me I can’t run away from you,” she said.

“Run away if you want.”

She turned a full circle, examining the wasteland.

“There is a saying about the open land,” he said, “that one direction is as good as another. In some ways, that’s still true, but I would not depend on it.”

“But I’m really free to leave you if I want?”

“Freedom can be a very lonely estate,” he said.

She pointed to the steep side of the dune on which they had stopped “But I could just go down there and…”

“Were I you, Siona, I would not go down where you are pointing.”