More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
All rebellions are ordinary and an ultimate bore. They are copied out of the same pattern, one much like another. The driving force is adrenalin addiction and the desire to gain personal power. All rebels are closet aristocrats.
HWI NOREE: The Lord Leto lacks all innocence and naiveté. He is to be feared only when he pretends these traits.
“The Lord Leto delights in the surprising genius and diversity of humankind.
All of the Fish Speaker guards knew the God Emperor’s aversion to moisture, but none of them made Moneo’s distinction. It is the Worm who hates water, Moneo thought. Shai-Hulud hungers for Dune.
“For what do you hunger, Lord?” Moneo ventured. “For a humankind which can make truly long-term decisions. Do you know the key to that ability, Moneo?” “You have said it many times, Lord. It is the ability to change your mind.”
Your Lord knows very well what is in your heart. Your soul suffices this day as a reckoner against you. I need no witnesses. You do not listen to your soul, but listen instead to your anger and your rage.
RM Syaksa proposes that the Lord Leto is building the Empire toward an even greater dependence upon melange. It is worth noting that the aging process can be called a disease for which melange is the specific treatment, although not a cure. RM Syaksa proposes that the Lord Leto may even go so far as introducing a new disease which can only be suppressed by melange.
Odd as it may seem, great struggles such as the one you can see emerging from my journals are not always visible to the participants. Much depends on what people dream in the secrecy of their hearts. I have always been as concerned with the shaping of dreams as with the shaping of actions. Between the lines of my journals is the struggle with humankind’s view of itself—a sweaty contest on a field where motives from our darkest past can well up out of an unconscious reservoir and become events with which we not only must live but contend. It is the hydra-headed monster which always attacks from
...more
The influence of geography on history went mostly unrecognized, Leto thought. Humans tended to look more at the influence of history on geography. Who owns this river passage? This verdant valley? This peninsula? This planet? None of us.
He is clumsy. He says things which others will repeat, thus exposing his hand in the matter. Within seconds after Kobat began to speak, she had confirmation that Topri was a spy.”
“Forcing the issue is the surest way of losing what I treasure most in her,”
Her right hand went to the crysknife concealed beneath her robe. How sure it is, Leto thought, that a weapon can lock a person into a predictable pattern of behavior.
But Nayla had told him what he needed to know. Nayla had renewed her faith and revealed with accuracy the thing which Leto could not find in Siona’s fading image. Nayla’s instincts were to be trusted. Siona has reached that explosive moment which I require.
The Duncans always think it odd that I choose women for combat forces, but my Fish Speakers are a temporary army in every sense. While they can be violent and vicious, women are profoundly different from men in their dedication to battle. The cradle of genesis ultimately predisposes them to behavior more protective of life. They have proved to be the best keepers of the Golden Path. I reinforce this in my design for their training. They are set aside for a time from ordinary routines. I give them special sharings which they can look back upon with pleasure for the rest of their lives. They
...more
The presence of a Duncan pleases the Paul Atreides in me.
“The Duncans must come to me with much more than Tleilaxu preparation. You must see to it that my houris gentle the Duncans and that the women answer some of his questions.” “Which questions may they answer, Lord?” “They know.”
Leto knew what the ghola saw—only shadows among shadows and blackness where not even the source of a voice could be fixed. As usual, Leto brought the Paul Muad’Dib voice into play. “It pleases me to see you again, Duncan.” “I can’t see you!” Idaho was a warrior, and the warrior attacks.
“In the wrong hands,” Leto said, “monolithic centralized power is a dangerous and volatile instrument.”
“Yes. He says that the all-male army was too dangerous to its civilian support base.”
“I know the argument. But he says that the male army was a survival of the screening function delegated to the nonbreeding males in the prehistoric pack. He says it was a curiously consistent fact that it was always the older males who sent the younger males into battle.” “What does that mean, screening function?” “The ones who were always out on the dangerous perimeter protecting the core of breeding males, females and the young. The ones who first encountered the predator.”
“The Lord Leto says that when it was denied an external enemy, the all-male army always turned against its own population. Always.” “Contending for the females?” “Perhaps. He obviously does not believe, however, that it was that simple.”
What is the most profound difference between us, between you and me? You already know it. It’s these ancestral memories. Mine come at me in the full glare of awareness. Yours work from your blind side. Some call it instinct or fate. The memories apply their leverages to each of us—on what we think and what we do. You think you are immune to such influences? I am Galileo. I stand here and tell you: “Yet it moves.” That which moves can exert its force in ways no mortal power ever before dared stem. I am here to dare this.
This necessary exposure to the open air, the long and stately journey with all of its ritual requirements to reassure the Fish Speakers, all of it troubled Leto.
The grain reminded Leto of sand, of sweeping dunes which once had marched across this very ground. And will march once more. The grain was not quite the bright silica amber of his remembered desert.
he felt an ache where his many hearts once more were reforming in their slow transformation toward something profoundly alien. What is it about this morning that makes me think about my lost humanity? Leto wondered.
The female sense of sharing originated as familial sharing—care of the young, the gathering and preparation of food, sharing joys, love and sorrows. Funeral lamentation originated with women. Religion began as a female monopoly, wrested from them only after its social power became too dominant. Women were the first medical researchers and practitioners. There has never been any clear balance between the sexes because power goes with certain roles as it certainly goes with knowledge. —THE STOLEN JOURNALS
Unceasing warfare gives rise to its own social conditions which have been similar in all epochs. People enter a permanent state of alertness to ward off attacks. You see the absolute rule of the autocrat. All new things become dangerous frontier districts—new planets, new economic areas to exploit, new ideas or new devices, visitors—everything suspect. Feudalism takes firm hold, sometimes disguised as a politbureau or similar structure, but always present. Hereditary succession follows the lines of power. The blood of the powerful dominates. The vice regents of heaven or their equivalent
...more
“Religion always leads to rhetorical despotism,” Leto said. “Before the Bene Gesserit, the Jesuits were the best at it.” “Jesuits, Lord?” “Surely you’ve met them in your histories?” “I’m not certain, Lord. When were they?” “No matter. You learn enough about rhetorical despotism from a study of the Bene Gesserit. Of course, they do not begin by deluding themselves with it.”
“It leads to self-fulfilling prophecy and justifications for all manner of obscenities,” Leto said. “This . . . rhetorical despotism, Lord?” “Yes! It shields evil behind walls of self-righteousness which are proof against all arguments against the evil.”
But the truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.
“For posterity after the span of millennia. I personalize those distant readers, Sister Chenoeh. I think of them as distant cousins filled with family curiosities. They are intent on unraveling the dramas which only I can recount. They want to make the personal connections to their own lives. They want the meanings, the truth!”
The man-made chasm through which the Idaho River tumbled was only an extension of the Gap which Paul Muad’Dib had blasted through the towering Shield Wall for the passage of his worm-mounted legions. Where water flowed now, Muad’Dib had led his Fremen out of a Coriolis storm’s dust into history . . . and into this.
“When I order it, and not until then, you will have the Tleilaxu Ambassador publicly flogged and expelled.” “Lord!” “You disagree?” “If we are to keep this secret”—Moneo glanced over his shoulder—“how will you explain the flogging?” “We will not explain.” “We will give no reason at all?” “No reason.” “But, Lord, the rumors and the stories that will . . .” “I am reacting, Moneo! Let them sense the underground part of me which does things without my knowing because it has not the wherewithal of knowing.” “This will cause great fear, Lord.”
Some of the courtiers had fitted themselves with delicate devices to assist their hearing. They had been eavesdropping. And such devices could only come from Ix. I will warn the Duncan and the Guard, Moneo thought. Somehow, he thought of this discovery as a symptom of rot. How could they prohibit such things when most of the courtiers and the Fish Speakers either knew or suspected that the God Emperor traded with Ix for forbidden machines?
From that welter of memories which I can tap at will, patterns emerge. They are like another language which I see so clearly. The social-alarm signals which put societies into the postures of defense/attack are like shouted words to me. As a people, you react against threats to innocence and the peril of the helpless young. Unexplained sounds, visions and smells raise the hackles you have forgotten you possess. When alarmed, you cling to your native language because all the other patterned sounds are strange. You demand acceptable dress because a strange costume is threatening. This is
...more
Safaris through ancestral memories teach me many things. The patterns, ahhh, the patterns. Liberal bigots are the ones who trouble me most. I distrust the extremes. Scratch a conservative and you find someone who prefers the past over any future. Scratch a liberal and find a closet aristocrat. It’s true! Liberal governments always develop into aristocracies. The bureaucracies betray the true intent of people who form such governments. Right from the first, the little people who formed the governments which promised to equalize the social burdens found themselves suddenly in the hands of
...more
alone am a whole population! “Remember your oath!” Indeed. I am the disruptive force unleashed across the centuries. I limit expectations . . . including my own. I dampen the pendulum. “And then release it. Never forget that.” I am tired. Oh, how tired I am. If only I could sleep . . . really sleep. “You’re full of self-pity, too.” Why not? What am I? The ultimate loner forced to look at what might have been. Every day I look at it . . . and now. Hwi!
When I set out to lead humankind along my Golden Path, I promised them a lesson their bones would remember. I know a profound pattern which humans deny with their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak, they create the seeds of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security, they squirm in it. How boring they find it. Look at them now. Look at what they do while I record these words. Hah! I give them enduring eons of enforced tranquility which plods on and on despite their every effort to
...more
Idaho could remember Muad’Dib saying: “The mind imposes this framework which it calls ‘reality.’ That arbitrary framework has a tendency to be quite independent of what your senses report.”
“Loyalty in a male army fastens onto the army itself rather than onto the civilization which fosters the army. Loyalty in a female army fastens onto the leader.”
Idaho nodded to himself. Here was undeniable evidence that Leto had tapped into a monstrous reservoir of power never before unleashed in quite this way. Leto had said it but the words were a meaningless noise compared to the thing seen and felt in this great hall. Leto’s words came back to Idaho, though, as if they had waited for this moment to cloak themselves in their true meaning. Idaho recalled that they had been in the crypt, that dank and shadowy place which Leto seemed to find so attractive but which Idaho found so repellent—the dust of centuries there and the odors of ancient decay.
Rape was always the pay-off in male military conquest. Males did not have to abandon any of their adolescent fantasies while engaging in rape.”
“My houris tame the males,” Leto said. “It is domestication, a thing that females know from eons of necessity.”
“My houris often submit to a form of rape at first only to convert this into a deep and binding mutual dependence.”
“My houris teach maturation,” Leto said. “They know that they must supervise the maturation of males. Through this they find their own maturation. Eventually, houris merge into wives and mothers and we wean the violent drives away from their adolescent fixations.”
“What will Anteac find? You know, don’t you?” “Let us say that I have a strong conviction. Now, you have not once mentioned the subject which I broached earlier. Have you no questions?” “You will provide the answers as I require them.” It was a statement full of such trust that it stopped Leto’s voice. He could only look at her, realizing how extraordinary was this accomplishment of the Ixians—this human.
“This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.”
“A bad administrator is more concerned with reports than with decisions. He wants the hard record which he can display as an excuse for his errors.” “And good administrators?” “Oh, they depend on verbal orders. They never lie about what they’ve done if their verbal orders cause problems, and they surround themselves with people able to act wisely on the basis of verbal orders. Often, the most important piece of information is that something has gone wrong. Bad administrators hide their mistakes until it’s too late to make corrections.”
A Guard captain brought him word as he was emerging from the cleansing room that Hwi Noree, although slightly wounded, was safe and would be brought to him as soon as the local commander thought it prudent. Leto promoted the Guard captain to sub-bashar on the spot.
The attack on the Embassy? That had been by a splinter group called “The Tleilaxu-Contact Element.” Leto allowed himself a mental sigh. Rebels always gave their groups such pretentious labels.
