I am the most ardent people-watcher who ever lived. I watch them inside me and
outside. Past and present can mingle with odd impositions in me. And as the
metamorphosis continues in my flesh wonderful things happen to my senses.
It's as though I sensed everything in close-up. I have extremely acute hearing
and vision, plus a sense of smell extraordinarily discriminating. I can detect
and identify pheromones at three parts per million. I know. I have tested it.
You cannot hide very much from my senses. I think it would horrify you what
I can detect by smell alone. Your pheromones tell me what you are doing or are
prepared to do. And gesture and posture! I stared for half a day once at an old
man sitting on a bench in Arrakeen. He was a fifth-generation descendant of
Stilgar the Naib and did not even know it. I studied the angle of his neck,
the skin flaps below his chin, the cracked lips and moistness about his
nostrils, the pores behind his ears, the wisps of gray hair which crept from
beneath the hood of his antique stillsuit. Not once did he detect that he was
being watched. Hah! Stilgar would have known it in a second or two. But this
old man was just waiting for someone who never came. He got up finally and
tottered off. He was very stiff after all of that sitting. I knew I would
never see him in the flesh again. He was that near death and his water was
sure to be wasted. Well, that no longer mattered.

-- The Stolen Journals
--[god-emperor]--