Moneo stood unmoving, looking down at him. There was an odd look of sadness on the majordomo’s face.

“If you’re going to kill me, Duncan, you’d best do it in the back by stealth,” Moneo said. “You might succeed that way.”

Idaho levered himself to one knee, put a foot flat on the floor, but remained there still clutching his knife. Moneo had moved so quickly and with such grace—so… so casually! Idaho cleared his throat. “How did you…”

“He has been breeding us for a long time, Duncan, strengthening many things in us. He has bred us for speed, for intelligence, for self-restraint, for sensitivity. You’re… you’re just an older model.”

CHAPTER XLI

Do you know what guerrillas often say? They claim that their rebellions are invulnerable to economic warfare because they have no economy, that they are parasitic on those they would overthrow. The fools merely fail to assess the coin in which they must inevitably pay. The pattern is inexorable in its degenerative failures. You see it repeated in the systems of slavery, of welfare states, of caste-ridden religions, of socializing bureaucracies—in any system which creates and maintains dependencies. Too long a parasite and you cannot exist without a host.

—The Stolen Journals

Leto and Siona lay all day in the dune shadows, moving only as the sun moved. He taught her how to protect herself under a blanket of sand in the noontime heat, but it never grew too warm at the rock level between the dunes.

In the afternoon, Siona crept close to Leto for warmth, a warmth he knew he had in excess these days.

They talked sporadically. He told her about the Fremen graces which once had dominated this landscape. She probed for secret knowledge of him.

Once, he said: “You may find it odd, but out here is where I can be most human.”

His words failed to make her fully conscious of her human vulnerability and the fact that she might die out here. Even when she was not talking she did not restore the face flap of her stillsuit.

Leto recognized the unconscious motivation behind this failure, but knew the futility of addressing that directly.

In the late afternoon, night’s chill already starting to creep over the land, he began regaling her with songs of the Long Trek which had not been saved in the Oral History. He enjoyed the fact that she liked one of his favourites, “Liet’s March”.

“The tune is really ancient,” he said, “a prespace thing of Old Terra.”

“Would you sing it again?”

He chose one of his best baritones, a long-dead artist who had filled many a concert hall.

“The wall of past-beyond-recall

Hides me from an ancient fall

Where all the waters tumble!

And plays of sprays

Carve caves in clays

Beneath a torrent’s rumble.”

When he had finished, she was silent for a moment, then: “That’s an odd song for marching.”

“They liked it because they could dissect it,” he said.

“Dissect?”