As was the case in the nearly two-Christianities-ago day of Leto\u2019s father, control of the spice resources of the planet Arakis amounts to de facto control of the universe; it\u2019s the unobtainium does-everything-you-need resource the dune universe runs off. The book likens this to Hydraulic Despotism, where control of an all-important resource (generally water) allows for control of everything downstream of and reliant on that resource.
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And designed she was, for one purpose and one purpose only: Being attractive to Leto. The book describes her as \u201Cthe epitome of good\u201D, but \u201Cgood\u201D in this sense seems to be being from the start completely and unjustifiably committed to Leto; from her first day on the job as the Ixian ambassador to the god-emperor, she ruthlessly sells out her bosses and tells Leto everything he wants to know in just the subservient way he likes to hear it.
Duncan\u2019s recently bruised ego makes him easy to recruit to her cause, and between her prescience and his rock-climbing skills (read the book, it\u2019s weird) they manage to do the impossible, assassinating the god-emperor and shattering his 3500-year-rule. He passes over control of his spice-hoard to them, and they proceed to have a thousand children to seed the universe with a strain of human immune to prescient search.
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With his dying breaths, Leto reveals a secret portion of the Golden Path: the production of a human who is invisible to prescient vision. Having begun millennia before with the union of Leto's twin sister Ghanima and Farad'n of House Corrino, Siona is the finished result, and she and her descendants will retain this ability. He explains that humanity is now free from the domination of oracles, free to scatter throughout the universe, never again to face complete domination or complete destruction. After revealing the location of his secret spice hoard, Leto dies, leaving Duncan and Siona to face the task of managing the empire.
He knew so little of the place to which he had come that when thespinsters spoke of driving to another island it seemed to him that theyspoke as wildly as when they told of the pranks of the Evil One. Helearned soon that these islands were connected by long sand ridges, andthat when the tide was down it was possible to drive upon the damp beachfrom one to another; but this was not possible, they told him, in awestern gale, for the wind beat up the tide so that one could not tellhow far it would descend or how soon it would return. There was risk ofbeing caught by the waves under the hills of the dune, which a horsecould not climb, and, they added, he had already been told who it waswho lived in the sand hollows.
Caius walked, with the merry wind for a playfellow, down through longrows of fish-sheds, and heard what the men had to say with regard to hisjourney. He heard exactly what the women had told him, for no one wouldventure upon the dune that day.
Proceeding thus, they soon came to what was actually[Pg 100] the end of theisland, and were on the narrow ridge of sand-dunes which extended adistance of some twenty miles to the next island. The sand-hills risingsheer from the shore, fifty, sixty, or a hundred feet in height,bordered their road on the right. To avoid the soft dry sand of theirbase the pony often trotted in the shallow flow of the foam, which evenyet now and then crept over all the damp beach to the high-water mark.The wind was like spur and lash; the horse fled before it. Eyes and earsgrew accustomed even to the threatening of the sea-monsters. The sun ofthe November afternoon sank nearer and nearer the level of sand andfoam; they could not see the ocean beyond the foam. When it grew largeand ruddy in the level atmosphere, and some flakes of red, red goldappeared round it, lying where the edge of the sea must be, like theIslands of the Blessed, when the crests of the breakers near and farbegan to be touched with a fiery glow, when the soft dun brown of thesand-hills turned to gold, Caius, overcome with having walked and eatenmuch, and drunk deeply of the wine of the wild salt wind, fell into aheavy dreamless slumber, lying outstretched upon his bed of straw.
He sat up and strove to pierce the darkness by sight. They had come tono end of their journey. The long beach, with its walls of foam and ofdune, stretched on without change. But upon this beach they were nolonger travelling; the horse was headed, as it were, to the dune, andnow began to climb its almost upright side.
"What is the matter? What are you turning off the road for?" Caiusshouted again, half dazed by his sleep and sudden awakening, and whollyangry at the disagreeable situation. He was cold, his limbs almost numb,and to his sleepy brain came the sudden remembrance of the round valleysin the dune of which he had heard, and the person who lived in them.
When the meal was finished, each rested in his own way. O'Shea laidhimself flat upon his back, with a blanket over his feet. The boyslipped away, and was not seen until the waving grass on the tops of thehighest dunes became a fringe of silver. Until then Caius paced thevalley, coming occasionally in contact[Pg 106] with the browsing pony; butneither his walk nor meditation was interrupted by more formidablepresence.
They had travelled about two miles more when, in front of them, a capeof rock was seen jutting across the beach, its rocky headland stretchingfar into the sea. Caius believed that the end of their journey was near;he looked eagerly at the new land, and saw that there were houses uponthe top of the cliff. It seemed unnecessary even to ask if this wastheir destination. Secure in his belief, he willingly got off the cartat the base of the cliff, and trudged behind it, while O'Shea drove up atrack in the sand which had the similitude of a road; rough, soft,precipitous as it was, it still bore tracks of wheels and feet, wheretoo far inland to be washed by the waves. The sight of them was like thesight of shore to one who has been long at sea. They went up to the backof the cliff, and came upon its high[Pg 108] grassy top; the road led throughwhere small houses were thickly clustered on either side. Caius lookedfor candle, or fire, or human being, and saw none, and they had nottravelled far along the street of this lifeless village when he saw thatthe road led on down the other side of the headland, and that the beachand the dune stretched ahead of them exactly as they stretched behind.
The boy seemed to scan the prospect before him now far more eagerly thanbefore; but the wreck, which was, as O'Shea said, deserted, seemed to bethe only external object in all that gleaming waste. They passed on,drawing up for a minute near her at the boy's instigation, and scanningher decks narrowly as they were washed by the waves, but there was nosign of life. Be[Pg 110]fore they had gone further Caius caught sight of thedark outline of another wreck; but this one was evidently of some weeks'standing, for the masts were gone and the hulk half broken through.There was still another further out. The mere repetition of the sadstory had effect to make the scene seem more desolate. It seemed as ifthe sands on which they trod must be strewed with the bleached skeletonsof sailors, and as if they embedded newly-buried corpses in theirbreast. The sandhills here were higher than they had been before, andthere were openings between them as if passages led into the interiorvalleys, so that Caius supposed that here in storms or in flood-tidesthe waves might enter into the heart of the dune.
"Come and see." O'Shea did not offer to touch him, but he began to walktowards the opening in the dune, and dragged Caius after him by mereforce of words. "Come and see for yourself. What are ye afraid of, man?Come! if ye want to look death in the face, come and see what it isye've got to look at."
Caius made no answer. He was looking intently. As soon as the tones ofO'Shea's voice were carried away by the bluster of the wind, as far asthe human[Pg 116] beings there were concerned there was perfect stillness; thesurf and the wind might have been sweeping the dunes alone.
"I lay my loife upon it," said O'Shea, "that if ye'll say on yer honouras a man, and as a gintleman, that ye'll not look behoind ye, ye shallgo scot-free. It's a simple thing enough; what harm's there in it?"
When he got to the front of the house, for the first time in the morninglight, he saw that the establishment was of ample size, but kept with nocare for a tasteful appearance. There was no path of any sort leadingfrom the gate in the light paling to the door; all was a thick carpet ofgrass, covering the unlevelled ground. The grass was waving madly in thewind, which coursed freely over undulating fields that here displayed noshrubs or trees of any sort. Caius wondered if the wind always blew onthese islands; it was blowing now with the same zest as the day before;the sun poured down with brilliancy upon everything, and the sea, seenin glimpses, was blue and tempestuous. Truly, it seemed a land which thesun and the moon and the wind had elected to bless with lavishself-giving.
Heavy as was the material of her cloak and hood, the strong wind toyedwith its outer parts as with muslin, but it could not lift theclosely-tied folds that surrounded her face and heavily draped herfigure. Caius stood with her on the frozen slope. Beneath them theycould see the whole stretch of the shining sand-dune that led to thenext island, the calm lagoon and the rough water in the bay beyond. Itdid not seem a likely place for[Pg 142] outlaws to hide in; the sun poured downon every hill and hollow of the sand.
The ice became strong, and bridged over the bay that lay within thecrescent of islands. All the islands, with their dunes, were coveredwith snow; the gales which had beaten up the surf lessened in force; andon the long snow-covered beaches there was only a fringe of whitebreakers upon the edge of a sea that was almost calm. 2ff7e9595c
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