The top. And he had not required pitons or hammer.

A faint sound reached him. Cheering?

He walked back to the edge and looked down, waving to them. Yes, they were cheering. Turning back, he strode to the centre of the roadway, letting elation still the trembling of his muscles, soothe the aching of his shoulders. Slowly, he turned full circle, examining the top while he let his memories at last estimate the height of that climb.

Nine hundred metres… at least that.

The Royal Roadway interested him. It was not like what he had seen on the way to Onn. It was wide, wide… at least five hundred metres. The roadbed was a smooth, unbroken grey with its edge some one hundred metres from each lip of the wall. Rock pillars at man height marked the road’s edge, stretching away like sentinels along the path Leto would use.

Idaho walked to the far side of the wall opposite the Sareer and peered down. Far away in the depths, a hurtling green flow of river battered itself into foam against buttress rocks. He looked to the right. Leto would come from there. Road and wall curved gently to the right, the curve beginning about three hundred metres from the place where Idaho stood. Idaho returned to the road and walked along its edge, following the curve until it made a returning “S” and narrowed, sloping gently downward. He stopped and looked at what was revealed for him, seeing the new pattern take shape.

About three kilometres away down the gentle slope, the roadway narrowed and crossed the river gorge on a bridge whose faery trusses appeared insubstantial and toylike at this distance. Idaho remembered a similar bridge on the road to Onn, the substantial feel of it beneath his feet. He trusted his memory, thinking about bridges as a military leader was forced to think about them—passages or traps.

Moving out to his left, he looked down and outward to another high wall at the far anchor of the faery bridge. The road continued there, turning gently until it was a line running straight northward. There were two walls along there and the river between them. The river glided in a man-made chasm, its moisture confined and channelled into a northward wind-drift while the water itself flowed southward.

Idaho ignored the river then. It was there and it would be there tomorrow. He fixed his attention on the bridge, letting his military training examine it. He nodded once to himself before turning back the way he had come, lifting the light rope from his shoulders as he walked.

It was only when she saw the rope come snaking down that Nayla had her orgasm.

CHAPTER LI

What am I eliminating? The bourgeois infatuation with peaceful conservation of the past. This is a binding force, a thing which holds humankind into one vulnerable unit in spite of illusionary separations across parsecs of space. If I can find the scattered bits, others can find them. When you are together you can share a common catastrophe. You can be exterminated together. Thus, I demonstrate the terrible danger of a gliding, passionless mediocrity, a movement without ambitions or aims. I show you that entire civilizations can do this thing. I give you eons of life which slips gently toward death without fuss or stirring, without even asking why? I show you the false happiness and the shadow-catastrophe called Leto, the God Emperor. Now, will you learn the real happiness?