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Leto launched himself off the dunetop, hearing his father scream in protest. But the awful impetus of Leto’s amplified muscles threw his body like a missile. One outflung hand caught the neck of Tariq’s stillsuit, the other slapped around to grip the doomed youth’s robe at the waist. There came a single snap as the neck broke. Leto rolled, lifting his body like a finely balanced instrument which dove directly into the sand where the pseudo-shield had been hidden. Fingers found the thing and he had it out of the sand, throwing it in a looping arc far out to the south of them.

Presently there came a great hissing-thrashing din out on the desert where the pseudo-shield had gone. It subsided, and silence returned.

Leto looked up to the top of the dune where his father stood, still defiant, but defeated. That was Paul Muad’Dib up there, blind, angry, near despair as a consequence of his flight from the vision which Leto had accepted. Paul’s mind would be reflecting now upon the Zensunni Long Koan: “In the one act of predicting an accurate future, Muad’Dib introduced an element of development and growth into the very prescience through which he saw human existence. By this, he brought uncertainty onto himself. Seeking the absolute of orderly prediction, he amplified disorder, distorted prediction.”

Returning to the dunetop in a single leap, Leto said: “Now I’m your guide.”

“Never!”

“Would you go back to Shuloch? Even if they’d welcome you when you arrived without Tariq, where has Shuloch gone now? Do your eyes see it?”

Paul confronted his son then, aiming the eyeless sockets at Leto. “Do you really know the universe you have created here?”

Leto heard the particular emphasis. The vision which both of them knew had been set into terrible motion here had required an act of creation at a certain point in time. For that moment, the entire sentient universe shared a linear view of time which possessed characteristics of orderly progression. They entered this time as they might step onto a moving vehicle, and they could only leave it the same way.

Against this, Leto held the multi-thread reins, balanced in his own vision-lighted view of time as multilinear and multilooped. He was the sighted man in the universe of the blind. Only he could scatter the orderly rationale because his father no longer held the reins. In Leto’s view, a son had altered the past. And a thought as yet undreamed in the farthest future could reflect upon the now and move his hand.

Only his hand.

Paul knew this because he no longer could see how Leto might manipulate the reins, could only recognize the inhuman consequences which Leto had accepted. And he thought: Here is the change for which I prayed. Why do I fear it? Because it’s the Golden Path!

“I’m here to give purpose to evolution and, therefore, to give purpose to our lives,” Leto said.

“Do you wish to live those thousands of years, changing as you now know you will change?”

Leto recognized that his father was not speaking about physical changes. Both of them knew the physical consequences: Leto would adapt and adapt; the skin-which-was-not-his-own would adapt and adapt. The evolutionary thrust of each part would melt into the other and a single transformation would emerge. When metamorphosis came, if it came, a thinking creature of awesome dimensions would emerge upon the universe—and that universe would worship him.

No . . . Paul was referring to the inner changes, the thoughts and decisions which would inflict themselves upon the worshipers.

“Those who think you dead,” Leto said, “you know what they say about your last words.”

“Of course.”

“Now I do what all life must do in the service of life,” Leto said. “You never said that, but a Priest who thought you could never return and call him liar put those words into your mouth.”

“I’d not call him liar.” Paul took in a deep breath. “Those are good last words.”

“Would you stay here or return to that hut in the basin of Shuloch?” Leto asked.

“This is your universe now,” Paul said.

The words filled with defeat cut through Leto. Paul had tried to guide the last strands of a personal vision, a choice he’d made years before in Sietch Tabr. For that, he’d accepted his role as an instrument of revenge for the Cast Out, the remnants of Jacurutu. They had contaminated him, but he’d accepted this rather than his view of this universe which Leto had chosen.