"Frank Herbert - Dune 4 - God Emporer of Dune" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

SIONA: I know that you are a coward.
MONEO: How little you know, You have-never stood where I have stood and seen it
in his eyes, in the movements of his hands.
SIONA: What do you do when the Worm approaches?
MONEO: I leave.
SIONA: That's prudent. He has killed nine Duncan Idahos that we know about for
sure.
MONEO: I tell you he kills no one!
SIONA: What's the difference? Leto or Worm, they are one body now.
MONEO: But they are two separate beings-Leto the Emperor and The Worm Who Is
God.
SIONA: You're mad!
MONEO: Perhaps. But I do serve God.
===
I am the most ardent people-watcher who ever lived. I watch them inside me and
outside. Past and present can mingle with odd impositions in me. And as the
metamorphosis continues in my flesh wonderful things happen to my senses. It's
as though I sensed everything in close-up. I have extremely acute hearing and
vision, plus a sense of smell extraordinarily discriminating. I can detect and
identify pheromones at three parts per million. I know. I have tested it. You
cannot hide very much from my senses. I think it would horrify you what I can
detect by smell alone. Your pheromones tell me what you are doing or are
prepared to do. And gesture and posture! I stared for half a day once at an old
man sitting on a bench in Arrakeen. He was a fifth-generation descendant of
Stilgar the Naib and did not even know it. I studied the angle of his neck, the
skin flaps below his chin, the cracked lips and moistness about his nostrils,
the pores behind his ears, the wisps of gray hair which crept from beneath the
hood of his antique stillsuit. Not once did he detect that he was being watched.
Hah! Stilgar would have known it in a second or two. But this old man was just
waiting for someone who never came. He got up finally and tottered off. He was
very stiff after all of that sitting. I knew I would never see him in the flesh
again. He was that near death and his water was sure to be wasted. Well, that no
longer mattered.
-The Stolen Journals
LETO THOUGHT it the most interesting place in the universe, this place where he
awaited the arrival of his current Duncan Idaho. By most human standards, it was
a gigantic space, the core of an elaborate series of catacombs beneath his
Citadel. Radiating chambers thirty meters high and twenty meters wide ran like
spokes from the hub where he waited. His cart had been positioned at the center
of the hub in a domed and circular chamber four hundred meters in diameter and
one hundred meters high at its tallest point above him.
He found these dimensions reassuring.
It was early afternoon at the Citadel, but the only light in his chamber came
from the random drifting of a few suspensorborne glowglobes tuned into low
orange. The light did not penetrate far into the spokes, but Leto's memories
told him the exact position of everything there the water, the bones, the dust
of his ancestors and of the Atreides who had lived and died since the Dune
times. All of them were here, plus a few containers of melange to create the
illusion that this was all of his hoard should it ever come to such an extreme.
Leto knew why the Duncan was coming. Idaho had learned that the Tleilaxu were