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

How you feel about this-your petty woes and joys, even your agonies and
raptures-seldom concerns us. My father had this power. I have it stronger. We
can peer now and again through the veils of Time.
This planet of Arrakis from which I direct my multigalactic Empire is no longer
what it was in the days when it was known as Dune. In those days, the entire
planet was a desert. Now, there is just this little remnant, my Sareer. No
longer does the giant sandworm roam free, producing the spice mщlange. The
spice! Dune was noteworthy only as the source of melange, the only .source. What
an extraordinary substance. No laboratory has ever been able to duplicate it.
And it is the most valuable substance humankind has ever found.
Without melange to ignite the linear prescience of Guild Navigators, people
cross the parsecs of space only at a snail's crawl. Without melange, the Bene
Gesserit cannot endow Truthsayers or Reverend Mothers. Without the geriatric
properties of melange, people live and die according to the ancient measure-no
more than a hundred years or so. Now, the only spice is held in Guild and Bene
Gesserit storehouses, a few small hoards among the remnants of the Great Houses,
and my gigantic hoard which they all covet. How they would like to raid me! But
they don't dare. They know I would destroy it all before surrendering it.
No They come hat in hand and petition me for melange. I dole it out as a reward
and hold it back as punishment. How they hate that.
It is my power, I tell them. It is my gift.
With it, I create Peace. They have had more than three thousand years of Leto's
Peace. It is an enforced tranquility which humankind knew only for the briefest
periods before my ascendancy. Lest you have forgotten, study Leto's Peace once
more in these, my journals.
I began this account in the first year of my stewardship, in the first throes of
my metamorphosis when I was still mostly human, even visibly so. The sandtrout
skin which I accepted (and my father refused) and which gave me greatly
amplified strength plus virtual immunity from conventional attack and aging-that
skin still covered a form recognizably human: two legs, two arms, a human face
framed in the scrolled folds of the sandtrout.
Ahhh, that face! I still have it-the only human skin I expose to the universe.
All the rest of my flesh has remained covered by the linked bodies of those tiny
deep sand vectors which one day can become giant sandworms.
As they will . . . someday.
I often think about my final metamorphosis, that likeness of death. I know the
way it must come but I do not know the moment or the other players. This is the
one thing I cannot know. I only know whether the Golden Path continues or ends.
As I cause these words to be recorded, the Golden Path continues and for that,
at least, I am content.
I no longer feel the sandtrout cilia probing my flesh, encapsulating the water
of my body within their placental barriers. We are virtually one body now, they
my skin and I the force which moves the whole . . . most of the time.
At this writing, the whole could be considered rather gross. I am what could be
called a pre-worm. My body is about seven meters long and somewhat more than two
meters in diameter, ribbed for most of its length, with my Atreides face
positioned man-height at one end, the arms and hands (still quite recognizable
as human) just below. My legs and feet? Well, they are mostly atrophied. Just
flippers, really, and they have wandered back along my body. The whole of me
weighs approximately five old tons. These items I append because I know they