A deep, rumbling groan came from the God Emperor.

Why doesn’t he activate the suspensors? Moneo wondered. The suspensors will support him.

But the lasgun was still humming and, as Moneo’s hands slipped from the cable’s severed end, he saw lancing flame strike the cart’s suspensor bubbles, piercing one after another in eruptions of golden smoke. Moneo stretched his hands over his head as he fell.

The smoke! The golden smoke!

His robe whipped upward, turning him until his face was directed downward into the abyss. With his gaze on the depths, he recognized a maelstrom of boiling rapids there, the mirror of his life—precipitous currents and plunges, all movements gathering up all substance. Leto’s words wound through his mind on a path of golden smoke: “Caution is the path to mediocrity. Gliding, passionless mediocrity is all that most people think they can achieve.” Moneo fell freely then in the ecstasy of awareness. The universe opened for him like clear glass, everything flowing in a no-time.

The golden smoke!

“Leto!” he screamed. “Siaynoq! I believe!”

The robe tore away from his shoulders then. He turned in the solid wind of the canyon—one last glimpse of the Royal Cart tipping… tipping from the shattered roadbed. The God Emperor slid out of the open end.

Something solid smashed into Moneo’s back—his last sensation.

Leto felt himself sliding from the cart. His awareness held only the image of Hwi striking the river—the distant pearly fountain which marked her plunge into the myths and dreams of termination. Her last words, calm and steady, rolled through all of his memories: “I shall go on ahead, Love.”

As he slipped from the cart, he saw the scimitar arc of the river, a silver-edged thing which shimmered in its mottled shadows, a vicious blade of a river honed through eternity and ready now to receive him into its agony.

I cannot cry, nor even shout, he thought. Tears are no longer possible. They’re water. I’ll have water enough in a moment. I can only moan in my grief. I am alone, more alone than ever before.

His great ridged body flexed as it fell, twisting him about until his amplified vision revealed Siona standing at the broken brink of the bridge.

Now, you will learn! he thought.

The body continued to turn. He watched the river approach. The water was a dream inhabited by glimpses of fish which ignited an ancient memory of a banquet beside a granite pool—pink flesh dazzling his hungers.

I join you, Hwi, in the banquet of the gods!

A bursting flash of bubbles enclosed him in agony. Water, vicious currents of it, buffeted him all around. He felt the gnashing of rocks as he struggled upward to broach in a torrential cascade, his body flexing in a paroxysm of involuntary, writhing splashes. The canyon wall, wet and black, sped past his frantic gaze. Shattered spangles of what had been his skin exploded away from him, a rain of silver all around him darting away into the river, a ring of dazzling movement, brittle sequins—the scale-glitter of sandtrout leaving him to begin their own colony lives.