“Then the Oral History is correct.”

“I thought you believed the Oral History without question?”

She was on a single track, though: “What if one of us objects when you order a mating?”

“I allow a wide latitude just as long as there are the children I have ordered.”

“Ordered?” She was outraged.

“That’s what I do.”

“You can’t creep into every bedroom or follow every one of us every minute of our lives! How do you know your orders are obeyed?”

“I know.”

“Then you know I’m not going to obey you!”

“Are you thirsty, Siona?”

She was startled. “What?”

“Thirsty people speak of water, not of sex.”

Still she did not seal her mouth flap, and he thought: Atreides passions always did run strong, even at the expense of reason.

Within two hours they came down out of the dunes on to a wind-scoured flat of pebbles. Leto moved on to it, Siona close to his side. She looked frequently at the Pointers. Both moons were low on the horizon now and their light cast long shadows behind every boulder.

In some ways, Leto found such places more comfortable to traverse than the sand. Solid rock was a better heat conductor than sand. He could flatten himself against the rock and ease the working of his chemical factories. Pebbles and even sizeable rocks did not impede him.

Siona had more trouble here, though, and almost turned an ankle several times.

The flatland could be a very trying place for humans unaccustomed to it, he thought. If they stayed close to the ground, they saw only the great emptiness, an eerie place especially in moonlight—dunes at a distance, a distance which seemed not to change as the traveller moved—nothing anywhere except the seemingly eternal wind, a few rocks and, when they looked upward, stars without mercy. This was the desert of the desert.

“Here’s where Fremen music acquired its eternal loneliness,” he said, “not up on the dunes. Here’s where you really learn to think that heaven must be the sound of running water and relief—any relief—from that endless wind.”

Even this did not remind her of that face flap. Leto began to despair.

Morning found them far out on the flat.

Leto stopped beside three large boulders, all piled against each other, one of them taller even than his back. Siona leaned against him for a moment, a gesture which restored Leto’s hopes somewhat. She pushed herself away presently and clambered up on to the highest boulder. He watched her turn up there, examining the landscape.

Without even looking at it, Leto knew what she saw: blowing sand like fog on the horizon obscured the rising sun. For the rest, there was only the flat and the wind.

The rock was cold beneath him with the chill of a desert morning. The cold made the air much drier and he found it more pleasant. Without Siona, he would have moved on, but she was visibly exhausted. She leaned against him once more when she came down from the rock and it was almost a minute before he realized that she was listening.