Read Online God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert - Free Book Online Page B

that he was being watched.

    “Women of the Imperial Guard will come for you,” they had said. Then they had gone away, smiling slyly among themselves.

    Women of the Imperial Guard?

    The Tleilaxu escort had taken sadistic delight in exposing their shape-changing abilities. He had not known from one minute to the next what new form the plastic flow of their flesh would present.

    Damned Face Dancers!

    They had known all about him, of course, had known how much the Shape Changers disgusted him.

    What could he trust if it came from Face Dancers? Very little. Could anything they said be believed?

    My name. I know my name.

    And he had his memories. They had shocked the identity back into him. Gholas were supposed to be incapable of recovering the original identity. But the Tleilaxu had done it and he was forced to believe because he understood how it had been done.

    In the beginning, he knew, there had been the fully formed ghola, adult flesh without name or memories—a palimpsest upon which the Tleilaxu could write almost anything they wished.

    “You are Ghola,” they had said. That had been his only name for a long time. Ghola had been taken like a malleable infant and conditioned to kill a particular man—a man so like the original Paul Muad’Dib he had served and adored that Idaho now suspected it might have been another ghola. But if that were true, where had they obtained the original cells?

    Something in the Idaho cells had rebelled at killing an Atreides. He had found himself standing with a knife in one hand, the bound form of the pseudo-Paul staring up at him in angry terror.

    Memories had gushered into his awareness. He remembered Ghola and he remembered Duncan Idaho.

    I am Duncan Idaho, swordmaster of the Atreides.

    He clung to this memory as he stood in the yellow room.

    I died defending Paul and his mother in a cave-sietch beneath the sands of Dune. I have been returned to that planet, but Dune is no more. Now it is only Arrakis.

    He had read the truncated history which the Tleilaxu provided, but he did not believe it. More than thirty-five hundred years? Who could believe his flesh existed after such a time? Except … with the Tleilaxu it was possible. He had to believe his own senses.

    “There have been many of you,” his instructors had said.

    “How many?”

    “The Lord Leto will provide that information.”

    The Lord Leto?

    The Tleilaxu history said this Lord Leto was Leto II, grandson of the Leto whom Idaho had served with fanatical devotion. But this second Leto (so the history said) had become something … something so strange that Idaho despaired of understanding the transformation.

    How could a human slowly turn into a sandworm? How could any thinking creature live more than three thousand years? Not even the wildest projections of geriatric spice allowed such a lifespan.

    Leto II, the God Emperor?

    The Tleilaxu history was not to be believed!

    Idaho remembered a strange child—twins, really: Leto and Ghanima, Paul’s children, the children of Chani, who had died delivering them. The Tleilaxu history said Ghanima had died after a relatively normal life, but the God Emperor Leto lived on and on and on… .

    “He is a tyrant,” Idaho’s instructors had said. “He has ordered us to produce you from our axlotl tanks and to send you into his service. We do not know what has happened to your predecessor.”

    And here I am.

    Once more, Idaho let his gaze wander around the featureless walls and ceiling.

    The faint sound of voices intruded upon his awareness. He looked at the door. The voices were muted, but at least one of them sounded female.

    Women of the Imperial Guard?

    The door swung inward on noiseless hinges. Two women entered. The first thing to catch his attention was the fact that one of the women wore a mask, a cibus hood of shapeless, light-drinking black. She would see him clearly through the hood, he knew, but her features would never reveal themselves,