Heretics of Dune (Dune, #5)

by Frank Herbert

Leto II had employed this ghola-type through uncounted lifetimes—some thirty-five hundred years of them, one after another. And the God Emperor Leto II had been no ordinary force of nature.

Leto II had called it “The Golden Path” and this Duncan Idaho–type ghola below her now had figured prominently in that awesome passage.

And fifteen hundred years since the Tyrant’s death, the Sisterhood remained powerless to unlock the central knot of that fearsome accomplishment.

All of that had been far away on Gammu, the planet that the people of Dan had rebuilt after the Famine Times and the Scattering. The people of Dan—Caladan in those days.

The Bene Gesserit had always seen themselves as permanent revolutionaries. It was a revolution that had been dampened only in the time of the Tyrant, Leto II. Dampened, but not diverted or stopped, Odrade reminded herself.

Gammu, the planet was called now. Once, it had been known as Giedi Prime but someone named Gurney Halleck had changed that. It was all ancient history.

Here, he encountered the fact that descendants of Duncan Idaho and Siona, those ancients who had served the Tyrant God Emperor, also were invisible to prophets and prescients. Not even a Guild Steersman deep in melange trance could detect such people.

Humans live best when each has his place to stand, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things and what he may achieve. Destroy the place and you destroy the person.

Every one of them here had been wakened time after time in ghola flesh. There was a fleshly continuity in this Council that no other people had ever achieved. Mirlat himself had seen the Prophet with his own eyes. Scytale had spoken to Muad’Dib! Learning how the flesh could be renewed and the memories restored, they had condensed this power into a single government whose potency was confined lest it be demanded everywhere.

“Forces that we cannot understand permeate our universe. We see the shadows of those forces when they are projected upon a screen available to our senses, but understand them we do not.”

She thought of the worms mainly as “they who spared me,” or as Shaitan.

She knew about this ride. The priests of the Divided God forbade it but the histories, both written and oral, said Fremen rode thus in the ancient days.

Ten thousand years since Leto II began his metamorphosis from human into the sandworm of Rakis and historians still argue over his motives.

He could glimpse the probable history of these Honored Matres. One of the natural Reverend Mothers from the Fremen of Rakis had gone out in the Scattering. Diverse people had fled on the no-ships during and immediately after the Famine Times. A no-ship had seeded the wild witch and her concepts somewhere. That seed had returned in the form of this orange-eyed huntress.

Curiosity unsatisfied tended to create its own answers. Guesses were often more dangerous than facts.

He waited with downcast eyes while Sheeana, speaking with heavy patience as one telling an old fable to a child, explained to him that either god or devil or both could inhabit the worm of the desert. Humans had only to accept this. It was not left to humans to decide such things.

If we cannot adjust our differences peacefully we are less than human.

They had decanted Duncan Idaho gholas from their axlotl tanks for millennia, even after the death of the Tyrant. The Tleilaxu had sold this ghola to the Sisterhood twelve times and the Sisterhood had paid in the hardest currency: melange from their own precious stores.

Hydraulic despotism: central control of an essential energy such as water, electricity, fuel, medicines, melange . . . Obey the central controlling power or the energy is shut off and you die!

Key log: a truly ancient concept from the days before suspensors when lumbermen sent their fallen timber rushing down rivers to central mill sites. Sometimes the logs jammed up in the river and an expert was brought in to find the one log, the key log, which would free the jam when removed.

Teg spoke without hesitation: “They can only survive if they continue to increase the dependency of those who support them. It’s an addict’s dead-end street.” “Precisely. And the danger?” “They could take much of humankind down with them.” “That was the Tyrant’s problem, Miles. I’m sure he knew it.

“Just as the universe is created by the participation of consciousness, the prescient human carries that creative faculty to its ultimate extreme. This was the profoundly misunderstood power of the Atreides bastard, the power that he transmitted to his son, the Tyrant.”

When the Harkonnens were forced to abandon it, colonists left behind by the Scattering came from the Danian group, calling it by the Halleck name given to it in the great remapping. The colonists had been known as Caladanian in those days but millennia tended to shorten some labels.

“I think you no longer really feel human. There’s a gap in you, something missing, something you’ve removed. You no longer are one of us.”

“God works through our latter-day Siona,” Tuek had told Stiros, noting the confusion on the old councillor’s face. “Sheeana is the living reminder of Siona, that human instrument who translated Him into His present Divisions.”

“She tests us. Do we give Them Their proper places? The Reverend Mother Jessica to her son, Muad’Dib, to his son, Leto II—the Holy Triumvirate of Heaven.” “Leto III,” Stiros muttered. “What of the other Leto who died at Sardaukar hands? What of him?”

The Metamorphosis of Leto II had given birth to uncounted sandtrout, each carrying a Bit of Himself. Sandtrout to Divided God: The sequence was known and worshiped. To question this denied God.

Sheeana reflected upon this. Atreides. That was the family that had brought Shaitan into being. Before the Atreides there had been only the Fremen and Shai-hulud. The Oral History, which her people preserved against all priestly prohibition, chanted the begats of the most important people on Rakis. Sheeana had heard these names many nights in her village. “Muad’Dib begat the Tyrant.” “The Tyrant begat Shaitan.”

Law always chooses sides on the basis of enforcement power. Morality and legal niceties have little to do with it when the real question is: Who has the clout?

Some people never observe anything. Life just happens to them. They get by on little more than a kind of dumb persistence, and they resist with anger and resentment anything that might lift them out of that false serenity.”

Did he predict or did he create? Prescience can be deadly. The people who demand that the oracle predict for them really want to know next year’s price on whalefur or something equally mundane. None of them wants an instant-by-instant prediction of his personal life.”

“You think Muad’Dib’s life was a bore?” “And the Tyrant’s, too. We think their entire lives were devoted to trying to break out of chains they themselves created.”

The mind of the believer stagnates. It fails to grow outward into an unlimited, infinite universe.”

By your belief in granular singularities, you deny all movement—evolutionary or devolutionary. Belief fixes a granular universe and causes that universe to persist. Nothing can be allowed to change because that way your non-moving universe vanishes. But it moves of itself when you do not move. It evolves beyond you and is no longer accessible to you.

The Lost Ones took with them a consciousness confined mostly to manpower and hardware. There was a desperate need for room to expand driven by the myth of Freedom. Most had not learned the deeper lesson of the Tyrant, that violence builds its own limits. The Scattering was wild and random movement interpreted as growth (expansion). It was goaded by a profound fear (often unconscious) of stagnation and death.

We will worship you, God, but don’t bother us. This is our religion, our city. You see, we no longer call this place Arrakeen. Now, it’s Keen. The planet no longer is Dune or Arrakis. Now, it’s Rakis. Keep your distance, God. You are the past and the past is an embarrassment.

The devolution of this ritual had been followed by the Missionaria Protectiva. Rakians called it “Dance Diversion.” They had other names for it, as well, and the most significant was “Siaynoq.” This dance was what had become of the Tyrant’s greatest ritual, his moment of sharing with his Fish Speakers.

This was related to the ancient Fremen way of sandwalking. This curious dance was a fossil with roots in the need to move without signaling your presence to a worm.

Animal-track symbols on a building there said the wide avenue was God’s Way. Historical awareness said the avenue had been Leto II’s route into the city from his high-walled Sareer far off to the south. With a care for details, one could still discern some of the forms and patterns that had been the Tyrant’s city of Onn, the festival center built around the more ancient city of Arrakeen. Onn had obliterated many marks of Arrakeen but some avenues persisted: some buildings were too useful to replace. Buildings inevitably defined streets.

The Tyrant’s own design was apparent here. Sheeana’s approach was a thing laid down by the God Emperor himself.

Shaitan would never eat those dancers!”

It had needed only Sheeana’s words and presence to make the thing clear. A language! Deep within the collective awareness of these people they carried, all unconsciously, a language that could say things to them they did not want to hear. The dancers spoke it. Sheeana spoke it. The thing was composed of voice tones and movements and pheromones, a complex and subtle combination that had evolved the way all languages evolved. Out of necessity.

Liberty and Freedom are complex concepts. They go back to religious ideas of Free Will and are related to the Ruler Mystique implicit in absolute monarchs. Without absolute monarchs patterned after the Old Gods and ruling by the grace of a belief in religious indulgence, Liberty and Freedom would never have gained their present meaning. These ideals owe their very existence to past examples of oppression.

Something other than population had come out of the Danian Sanctuary where the Tyrant’s grandmother, the Lady Jessica, had lived out her days.

Use the instruments only when they are absolutely required to amplify the flesh: that was the Bene Gesserit teaching.

It began with recognition that humans were not created equal, that they possessed different inherited abilities and experienced different events in their lives. This produced people of different accomplishments and different worth.

“Our survival in the face of the storm that is brewing among the Scattered Ones,” she said. “Tleilaxu survival, too. The farthest thing from our desires is an end to those who preserve the Great Belief.”

Bureaucracy destroys initiative. There is little that bureaucrats hate more than innovation, especially innovation that produces better results than the old routines. Improvements always make those at the top of the heap look inept. Who enjoys appearing inept?

Taraza reminded herself that today’s worm was not the original worm of Rakis. Despite Sheeana’s demonstrated command over them, they were unpredictable.

Right at the edge of the track would be observations of Muad’Dib, the Atreides bastard who had shaken the universe twice—once by dominating the Imperium with his Fremen hordes, and then by spawning the Tyrant.