They were the children of Paul Atreides, who had become Muad'Dib, the Mahdi of all the Fremen. These were not merely nine-year-old children they were a natural force, objects of veneration and fear. While they lived, Muad'Dib, though dead, lived in them. In these twins - Leto and his sister Ghanima - an awesome power focused. Here lay temporal riches, secular authority and that most powerful of all mystic talismans: the divine authenticity of Muad'Dib's religious bequest. Here lay the magnet for dreams of grandeur throughout the known universe. It projected him into this moment where he sensed the accumulated peril. Some greater power controlled that movement. He could not still a restless inner projection. Stilgar knew his thoughts and emotions were like the light. It had shown only the sleeping children in the royal bedchambers. The thing was a subtle instrument of the Imperium, a device to detect the presence of large living bodies. The projector irritated him even while he depended upon it. He fingered the cold surface of the light projector before restoring it to the loop in his belt sash. Stilgar often made night inspections of the twins' quarters, always going first to the chamber where Ghanima slept and ending here in the adjoining room, where he could reassure himself that Leto was not threatened. Anyone aware of the routine here in Sietch Tabr would have suspected at once that this must be Stilgar, Naib of the Sietch, guardian of the orphaned twins who would one day take up the mantle of their father, Paul Muad'Dib. The hooded figure moved with a betraying swish of fabric, took up a station at one side of the arched doorway. It avoided the sleeping child, paused on the gridded air inlet at an upper corner, probed a bulge in the green and gold wall hangings which softened the enclosing rock. There was a sense of menace in it, a restless dissatisfaction. Once more the light flowed around the chamber, testing, questing. This time there was a suggestion of source and movement to it: a hooded figure filled the arched doorway at the chamber's edge and the light originated there. Now there was only the sound of even breathing and, faint behind it, a reassuring drip-drip-drip of water collecting in a catch basin from the windstill far above the cave.Īgain the light appeared in the chamber - slightly larger, a few lumens brighter. As the light passed across closed eyelids, the small figure stirred. Encountering the deep green side of a bed, it leaped upward, folded itself across the bed's surface.īeneath the green covering lay a child with rusty hair, face still round with baby fat, a generous mouth - a figure lacking the lean sparseness of Fremen tradition, but not as water-fat as an off-worlder. A questing circle about two centimeters in diameter, it moved erratically - now elongated, now an oval. The light glowed without apparent source, having its existence only on the red fabric surface woven of spice fiber. How can corrupted reasoning play with such an essence?Ī spot of light appeared on the deep red rug which covered the raw rock of the cave floor. He said this evolution moves on changing principles which are known only to eternity. He said humankind is still evolving, in a process which will never end. He taught a balanced way of life, a philosophy with which a human can meet problems arising from an ever-changing universe. Muad'Dib's teachings have become the playground of scholastics, of the superstitious and the corrupt.