"Surprise? Who's talking about surprise? Chaos is no surprise. It has predictable characteristics. For one thing, it carries away order and strengthens the forces at the extremes."

"Isn't that what radicals are trying to do? Aren't they trying to shake things up so they can grab control?"

"That's what they think they're doing. Actually, they're creating new extremists, new radicals and they are continuing the old process."

"What about a radical who sees the complexities and comes at you that way?"

"That's no radical. That's a rival for leadership."

"But what do you do?"

"You co-opt them or kill them. That's how the struggle for leadership originated, at the grunt level."

"Yes, but what about messiahs?"

"Like my father?"

The Duncan does not like this question. He knows that in a very special way I am my father. He knows I can speak with my father's voice and persona, that the memories are precise, never edited and inescapable.

Reluctantly, he says: "Well... if you want."

"Duncan, I am all of them and I know. There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites-conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it's all the.same."

That stirs up a small hornet's nest among my ancestral memories. Some of them have never given up the belief that they and they alone held the key to all of humankind's problems. Well, in that, they are like me. I can sympathize even while I tell them that failure is its own demonstration.

I am forced to block them off, though. There's no sense dwelling on them. They now are little more than poignant reminders... as is this Duncan who stands in front of me with his lasgun...

Great Gods below! He has caught me napping. He has the lasgun in his hand and it is pointed at my face.

"You, Duncan'? Have you betrayed me, too?"

Et tu, Brute?

Every fiber of Leto's awareness came to full alert. He could feel his body twitching. The worm-flesh had a will of its own.