“What are you?” Idaho demanded.

“I’m the new Atreides.”

“Atreides!” It was a curse in Idaho’s voice.

Siona stared down at the disintegrating hulk which once had been Leto Atreides II… and something else. The something else was sloughing away in faint wisps of blue smoke where the smell of melange was strongest. Puddles of blue liquid formed in the rocks beneath his melting bulk. Only faint vague shapes which might once have been human remained—a collapsed foaming pinkness, a bit of red-streaked bone which could have held the forms of cheeks and brow…

Siona said: “I am different, but still I am what he was.”

Idaho spoke in a hushed whisper: “The ancestors, all of…”

“The multitude is there but I walk silently among them and no one sees me. The old images are gone and only the essence remains to light his Golden Path.”

She turned and took Idaho’s cold hand in hers. Carefully, she led him out of the cave into the light where the rope dangled invitingly from the barrier wall’s top, from the place where the frightened Museum Fremen waited.

Poor material with which to shape a new universe, she thought, but they would have to serve. Idaho would require gentle seduction, a care within which love might appear.

When she looked down the river to where the flow emerged from its man-made chasm to spread across the green lands, she saw a wind from the south driving dark clouds towards her.

Idaho withdrew his hand from hers, but he appeared calmer. “Weather control is increasingly unstable,” he said. “Moneo thought it was the Guild’s doing.”

“My father was seldom mistaken about such things,” she said. “You will have to look into that.”

Idaho experienced a sudden memory of the silvery shapes of sandtrout darting away from Leto’s body in the river.

“I heard the Worm,” Siona said. “The Fish Speakers will follow you, not me.”

Again, Idaho sensed the temptation from the ritual of Siaynoq. “We will see,” he said. He turned and looked at Siona. “What did he mean when he said the Ixians cannot create arafel?”

“You haven’t read all the journals,” she said. “I’ll show you when we return to Tuono.”

“But what does it mean—arafel?”

“That’s the cloud-darkness of holy judgment. It’s from an old story. You’ll find it all in my journals.”

CHAPTER LIII

Excerpt from the Hadi Benotto secret summation on the discoveries at Dar-es-Balat:

Herewith the minority report. We will, of course, comply with the majority decision to apply a careful screening, editing and censorship to the Journals from Dar-es-Balat, but our arguments must be heard. We recognize the interest of Holy Church in these matters and the political dangers have not escaped our notice. We share a desire with the Church that Rakis and the Holy Reservation of the Divided God do not become “an attraction for gawking tourists”.

However, now that all of the Journals are in our hands, authenticated and translated, the clear shape of the Atreides Design emerges. As a woman trained by the Bene Gesserit to understand the ways of our ancestors, I have a natural desire to share the pattern we have exposed—which is so much more than Dune to Arrakis to Dune, thence to Rakis.