“I can imagine your inward travels, Lord.”

“No, you cannot. I have seen peoples and planets in such numbers that they lose meaning even in imagination. Ohhh, the landscapes I have passed. The calligraphy of alien roads glimpsed from space and imprinted upon my innermost sight. The eroded sculpture of canyons and cliffs and galaxies has imprinted upon me the certain knowledge that I am a mote.”

“Not you, Lord. Certainly not you.”

“Less than a mote! I have seen people and their fruitless societies in such repetitive posturings that their nonsense fills me with boredom, do you hear?”

“I did not mean to anger my Lord.” Moneo spoke meekly.

“You don’t anger me. Sometimes you irritate me, that is the extent of it. You cannot imagine what I have seen—caliphs and mjeeds, rakahs, rajas and bashars, kings and emperors, primitos and presidents—I’ve seen them all. Feudal chieftains, every one. Every one a little pharaoh.”

“Forgive my presumption, Lord.”

“Damn the Romans!” Leto cried.

He spoke it inwardly to his ancestors: “Damn the Romans!”

Their laughter drove him from the inward arena.

“I don’t understand, Lord,” Moneo ventured.

“That’s true. You don’t understand. The Romans broadcast the pharaonic disease like grain farmers scattering the seeds of next season’s harvest—Caesars, Kaisers, Tsars, Imperators, Caseris… Palatos… damned pharaohs!”

“My knowledge does not encompass all of those titles, Lord.”

“I may be the last of the lot, Moneo. Pray that this is so.”

“Whatever my Lord commands.”

Leto stared down at the man. “We are myth-killers, you and I, Moneo. That’s the dream we share. I assure you from a God’s Olympian perch that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies the government dies.”

“Thus you have taught me, Lord.”

“That man-machine, the Army, created our present dream, my friend.”

Moneo cleared his throat.

Leto recognized the small signs of the majordomo’s impatience.

Moneo understands about armies. He knows it was a fool’s dream that armies were the basic instrument of governance.

As Leto continued silent, Moneo crossed to the lasgun and retrieved it from the crypt’s cold floor. He began disabling it.

Leto watched him, thinking how this tiny scene encapsulated the essence of the Army myth. The Army fostered technology because the power of machines appeared so obvious to the short-sighted.

That lasgun is no more than a machine. But all machines fail or are superseded. Still, the Army worships at the shrine of such things—both fascinated and fearful. Look at how people fear the Ixians! In its guts, the Army knows it is the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It unleashes technology and never again can the magic be stuffed back into the bottle.

I teach them another magic.

Leto spoke to the hordes within then:

“You see? Moneo has disabled the deadly instrument. A connection broken here, a small capsule crushed there.”

Leto sniffed. He smelled the esters of a preservative oil riding on the stink of Moneo’s perspiration.

Still speaking inwardly, Leto said: “But the genie is not dead. Technology breeds anarchy. It distributes these tools at random. And with them goes the provocation for violence. The ability to make and use savage destroyers falls inevitably into the hands of smaller and smaller groups until at last the group is a single individual.”