It was the moment for which Siona had waited. She scrambled up to him and pulled the useless lasgun from Idaho’s hands. He whirled toward her and she poised herself to subdue him, but all the rage was gone.

“Why?” he whispered.

“It’s done,” she said.

They turned and looked into the cave shadows at Leto.

Leto could not even imagine what they saw. The sandtrout skin was gone, he knew. There would be some kind of surface pocked with cilia holes from the departed skin. As for the rest, he could only look back at the two figures from a universe furrowed by sorrow. Through the vision flames he saw Siona as a female demon. The demon name came unbidden to his mind and he spoke it aloud, amplified by the cave and much louder than he had expected:

“Hanmya!”

“What?” She moved a step closer to him.

Idaho put both hands over his face.

“Look at what you’ve done to poor Duncan,” Leto said.

“He’ll find other loves.” How callous she sounded, an echo of his own angry youth.

“You don’t know what it is to love,” he said. “What have you ever given?” He could only wring his hands then, those travesties which once had been his hands. “Gods below! What I’ve given!”

She scrambled closer and reached toward him, then drew back.

“I am reality, Siona. Look upon me. I exist. You can touch me if you dare. Reach out your hand. Do it!”

Slowly, she reached toward what had been his front segment, the place where she had slept in the Sareer. Her hand was touched with blue when she withdrew it.

“You have touched me and felt my body,” he said. “Is that not strange beyond any other thing in this universe?”

She started to turn away.

“No! Don’t turn away from me! Look at what you have wrought, Siona. How is it that you can touch me but you cannot touch yourself?”

She whirled away from him.

“There is the difference between us,” he said. “You are God embodied. You walk around within the greatest miracle of this universe, yet you refuse to touch or see or feel or believe in it.”

Leto’s awareness went wandering then into a night-encircled place, a place where he thought he could hear the metal insect song of his hidden printers clacking away in their lightless room. There was a complete absence of radiation in this place, an Ixian no-thing which made it a place of anxiety and spiritual alienation because it had not connection with the rest of the universe.

But it will have a connection.

He sensed then that his Ixian printers had been set in motion, that they were recording his thoughts without any special command.

Remember what I did! Remember me! I will be innocent again!

The flame of his vision parted to reveal Idaho standing where Siona had stood. There was gesturing motion somewhere out of focus behind Idaho… ah, yes: Siona waving instructions to someone atop the barrier wall.