He could only blink.

“You are a mystic,” she said, “gentle to yourself only because you are in the middle of that universe looking outward, looking in ways that others cannot. You fear to share this, yet you want to share it more than anything else.”

“What have you seen?” he whispered.

“I have no inner eye, no inner voices,” she said. “But I have seen my Lord Leto whose soul I love and I know the only thing that you truly understand.”

He broke from her gaze, fearful of what she might say. The trembling of his hands could be felt all through his front segment.

“Love, that is what you understand,” she said. “Love, and that is all of it.”

His hands stopped trembling. A tear rolled down each of his cheeks. When the tears touched his cowl, wisps of blue smoke erupted. He sensed the burning and was thankful for the pain.

“You have faith in life,” Hwi said. “I know that the courage of love can reside only in this faith.”

She reached out with her left hand and brushed the tears from his cheeks. It surprised him that the cowl did not react with its ordinary reflex to prevent the touch.

“Do you know,” he asked, “that since I have become thus, you are the first person to touch my cheeks?”

“But I know what you are and what you were,” she said.

“What I was… ahhh, Hwi. What I was has become only this face, and all the rest is lost in the shadows of memory… hidden… gone.”

“Not hidden from me, Love.”

He looked directly at her, no longer afraid to lock gazes. “Is it possible that the Ixians know what they have created in you?”

“I assure you, Leto, love of my soul, that they do not know. You are the first person, the only person to whom I have ever completely revealed myself.”

“Then I will not mourn for what might have been,” he said. “Yes, my love, I will share my soul with you.”

CHAPTER L

Think of it as plastic memory, this force within you which trends you and your fellows toward tribal forms. This plastic memory seeks to return to its ancient shape, the tribal society. It is all around you—the feudatory, the diocese, the corporation, the platoon, the sports club, the dance troupe, the rebel cell, the planning council, the prayer group… each with its master and servants, its host and parasites. And the swarms of alienating devices (including these very words!) tend eventually to be enlisted in the argument for a return to “those better times”. I despair of teaching you other ways. You have square thoughts which resist circles.

—The Stolen Journals

Idaho found he could manage the climb without thinking about it. This body grown by the Tleilaxu remembered things the Tleilaxu did not even suspect. His original youth might be lost in the eons, but his muscles were Tleilaxu-young and he could bury his childhood in forgetfulness while he climbed. In that childhood he had learned survival by flight into the high rocks of his home planet. It did not matter that these rocks in front of him now had been brought here by men, they also had been shaped by ages of weather.