to view the extreme future as well He also feared mat time would distort his reputation Many references show his anxiety to explain himself and his reign, as we read in a soliloquy from Rakis Reference Catalog 1 A42 You, encountering my chronicles after ihou sands of years beware Do not feel honored in reading the revelations of my Ixian storehouse You will find much pain in it I am not sure what the events in my journals may signify to your times I only know that my journals have suffered oblivion and that the events which I recount have undoubted!} been subjected to historical distortion for eons Much of the material making up the Journals was composed in the same intro spectwe mode, and by studying samples tak en at random from the collection we can observe a trend in the Lord Leto s wntmgs While the earliest wntmgs noted even the most trivial events-minor rebellions quelled for example, in cities whose names became meaningless within the God Emperor s lifetime-later volumes contained more autobiographical matenal and anecdotes concerning the "inner voices ' or ancestral memories with whom Leto often shared consciousness Another shift can be observed when such excerpts are carefully read For several centuries after his acceptance of the sandtrout skin which changed his form, the God Emperor avoided writing much about the transforma tion itself or about his own reaction to it Self descriptions become more frequent in those wntmgs covenng the second and third millennia of his rule, and remain clinical until well into the third Not until the volumes written during the last two hundred years of Leto's reign does the reader discover the God Emperor's own feelings about his changed body One of the best examples also comes from RRC 1 A42 I have ordered all mirrors removed from the Citadel My servitors wonder at this but say nothing they know the foolishness of question ing God How much greater their wonder would be if I had followed my initial impulse after catching a glimpse of myself in the great entry hall mir rors yesterday, and smashed them to slivers with a single blow from this many-segmented body which traps me' But this grotesquerv has its purpose as surely as do the centimes I have spent this way They prevent a greater smashing an irreparable smashing 3 must remember that ATREIDES LETO II 73 ATREIDES MINOTAUROS As more evidence of the God Emperor's slipping humanity comes to light, his reference to his Journals causing pain far their reader may well be proven right It is diffi cult to avoid sympathizing with one who could fear his own reflection although he controlled the known universe Information concerning other members of House Atreides-in particular, the God Emperor'8 father, Paul Muad'Dib, and his aunt, the Lady Alia-has also surfaced dur ing the Journals' translation Leto reveals, for example, that he was not the first to be shown the Golden Path or to be offered the transformation he ac