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Stilgar knew his thoughts and emotions were like the light. He could not still a restless inner projection. Some greater power controlled that movement. It projected him into this moment where he sensed the accumulated peril. Here lay the magnet for dreams of grandeur throughout the known universe. Here lay temporal riches, secular authority and that most powerful of all mystic talismans: the divine authenticity of Muad’Dib’s religious bequest. In these twins—Leto and his sister Ghanima—an awesome power focused. While they lived, Muad’Dib, though dead, lived in them.
The mythic paradise of spreading greenery filled him with dismay. It was not like the dream. And as his planet changed, he knew he had changed. He had become a far more subtle person than the one-time sietch chieftain. He was aware now of many things—of statecraft and profound consequences in the smallest decisions. Yet he felt this knowledge and subtlety as a thin veneer covering an iron core of simpler, more deterministic awareness. And that older core called out to him, pleaded with him for a return to cleaner values.
Failure to make a decision was in itself a decision—he
Were Muad’Dib’s twins responsible for the reality which obliterated the dreams of others? No. They were merely the lens through which light poured to reveal new shapes in the universe.
Confusion washed through his mind and he wished he knew how to obliterate it,
He had reached a decision. Better to retain that one old virtue which he still cherished: loyalty. Better the complexities one thought he knew than the complexities which defied understanding. Better the now than the future of a dream. The bitter taste in his mouth told Stilgar how empty and revolting some dreams could be. No! No more dreams!
“It is with reason and terrible experience that we call the pre-born Abomination. For who knows what lost and damned persona out of our evil past may take over the living flesh?”
Abomination referring to one of the past lives taking over. This is a result of overdosing on spice aka the spice trance.
Why does Alia not see what we suspect? Is she too far gone?
They are acknowledging that they are seeing the signs of Abomination in their aunt.
“Too much knowledge never makes for simple decisions.”
For a few pulsing seconds, she had felt herself near compulsion to stay with them and beg their help. What a foolish weakness!
Why cannot I see the future? Alia wondered. Much as I try, why does it elude me? The twins must be made to try, she told herself. They could be lured into it. They had the curiosity of children and it was linked to memories which traversed millennia.
Leto must be lured into the spice trance. She recalled asking the boy how he would deal with Gurney Halleck. And Leto, sensing undercurrents in her question, had said Halleck was loyal “to a fault,” adding: “He adored . . . my father.” She’d noted the small hesitation. Leto had almost said “me” instead of “my father.” Yes, it was hard at times to separate the genetic memory from the chord of living flesh. Gurney Halleck would not make that separation easier for Leto.
“Among the responsibilities of command is the necessity to punish . . . but only when the victim demands it.”
The Fremen must return to his original faith, to his genius in forming human communities; he must return to the past, where that lesson of survival was learned in the struggle with Arrakis. The only business of the Fremen should be that of opening his soul to the inner teachings. The worlds of the Imperium, the Landsraad and the CHOAM Confederacy have no message to give him. They will only rob him of his soul. —THE PREACHER AT ARRAKEEN
“The haughty do but build castle walls behind which they try to hide their doubts and fears.”
“Tell me, Javid,” she said, “whence come you?” “I am but a simple Fremen of the desert,” he said, every syllable giving the lie to the statement. Zebataleph intruded with an offensive deference, almost mocking: “We have much to discuss of the old days, My Lady. I was one of the first, you know, to recognize the holy nature of your son’s mission.” “But you weren’t one of his Fedaykin,” she said. “No, My Lady. I possessed a more philosophic bent; I studied for the priesthood.” And insured the preservation of your skin, she thought.
When we try to conceal our innermost drives, the entire being screams betrayal.
Within his head were wars, uncounted lives parceling out their ancient memories: violent accidents, love’s languor, the colors of many places and many faces . . . the buried sorrows and leaping joys of multitudes. He heard elegies to springs on planets which no longer existed, green dances and firelight, wails and halloos, a harvest of conversations without number.
Someday the rock beneath him would be cut down to such a shape and Sietch Tabr would be no more, except in the memories of someone like himself. He did not doubt that there would be someone like himself.
“The sandtrout . . .” He fell silent and she wondered why he kept referring to the haploid phase of the planet’s giant sandworm, but she dared not prod him. “The sandtrout,” he repeated, “was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then. They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them. Sandtrout encysted the available free water, made this a desert planet . . . and they did it to survive. In a planet sufficiently dry, they could move to their sandworm phase.”
“Fewer sandtrout—the ecological transformation of the planet . . .” “They resist it, of course,” she said, and now she began to understand the fear in his voice, drawn into this thing against her will. “When the sandtrout go, so do all the worms,” he said. “The tribes must be warned.” “No more spice,” she said.
“I’m beginning to have prescient dreams, Ghani.” A sharp gasp escaped her. He said: “When Stilgar told us our grandmother was delayed—I already knew that moment. Now my other dreams are suspect.”
Like Muad’Dib, The Preacher was blind, his eye sockets black and scarred in a way that could have been done by a stone burner. And his voice conveyed that crackling penetration, that same compelling force which demanded a response from deep within you. Many remarked this. He was lean, this Preacher, his leathery face seamed, his hair grizzled. But the deep desert did that to many people.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” She did this silently and took a deep, calming breath. “It helps at times,” Ghanima said. “The Litany, I mean.” Jessica closed her eyes to hide the shock of this insight. It had been a long time since anyone had been able to read her that intimately. The realization was disconcerting,
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On impulse, Jessica put aside her ingrained emotional masks, knowing them to be of little use here, barriers to communication. Not since those loving moments with her Duke had she lowered these barriers, and she found the action both relief and pain.
“You at least are human,” Jessica blurted. “I trust my instinct on this.” Ghanima saw the truth in this, said: “But you’re not sure of Leto.” “I’m not.” “Abomination?” Jessica could only nod. Ghanima said: “Not yet, at least. We both know the danger of it, though. We can see the way of it in Alia.” Jessica cupped her hands over her eyes, thought: Even love can’t protect us from unwanted facts. And she knew then that she still loved her daughter, crying out silently against fate: Alia! Oh, Alia! I am sorry for my part in your destruction.
Ghanima explained the theory upon which she and Leto had settled, that their avoiding of the spice trance while Alia entered it often made the difference.
I hear the wind blowing across the desert and I see the moons of a winter night rising like great ships in the void. To them I make my vow: I will be resolute and make an art of government; I will balance my inherited past and become a perfect storehouse of my relic memories. And I will be known for kindliness more than for knowledge. My face will shine down the corridors of time for as long as humans exist. —LETO’S VOW AFTER HARQ AL-ADA
When she had been quite young, Alia Atreides had practiced for hours in the prana-bindu trance, trying to strengthen her own private personality against the onslaught of all those others.
Fighting off becoming an Abomination.
Before birth, Alia had contained every bit of the knowledge required in a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother—plus much, much more from all those others. In that knowledge lay recognition of a terrible reality—Abomination. The totality of that knowledge weakened her. The pre-born did not escape. Still she’d fought against the more terrifying of her ancestors, winning for a time a Pyrrhic victory which had lasted through childhood. She’d known a private personality, but it had no immunity against casual intrusions from those who lived their reflected lives through her.
New lives began to clamor for their moment of consciousness. Alia felt that she had opened a bottomless pit, and faces arose out of it like a swarm of locusts, until she came at last to focus on one who was like a beast: the old Baron Harkonnen. In terrified outrage she had screamed out against all of that inner clamor, winning a temporary silence.
The climate of these northern latitudes was growing warmer; atmospheric carbon dioxide was on the increase. She reminded herself how many new hectares would be put under green plants in the coming year—and it required thirty-seven thousand cubic feet of water to irrigate just one hectare. Despite every attempt at mundane thoughts, she could not drive away the sharklike circling of all those others within her.
Alia is always at war with the past lives of her ancestors.
These are illusions of popular history which a successful religion must promote: Evil men never prosper; only the brave deserve the fair; honesty is the best policy; actions speak louder than words; virtue always triumphs; a good deed is its own reward; any bad human can be reformed; religious talismans protect one from demon possession; only females understand the ancient mysteries; the rich are doomed to unhappiness . . . —FROM THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL: MISSIONARIA PROTECTIVA
“I know your vision,” Leto said. “Rather than let him have me, I’ll become you.” “Not that!” Leto nodded to himself, sensing the enormous will-force his father had required to withdraw, recognizing the consequences of failure. Any possession reduced the possessed to Abomination.
Those who sought the future hoped to gain the winning gamble on tomorrow’s race. Instead they found themselves trapped into a lifetime whose every heartbeat and anguished wail was known.
“The joy of living, its beauty is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you,” he said.
“Most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions,”
Ghanima knew this with a certainty reinforced by the data garnered from those other memory-lives, but now she feared the strength which she gave those other psyches by using the data of their experiences. They lurked like harpies within her, shadow demons waiting in ambush.
This was Muad’Dib’s achievement: He saw the subliminal reservoir of each individual as an unconscious bank of memories going back to the primal cell of our common genesis. Each of us, he said, can measure out his distance from that common origin. Seeing this and telling of it, he made the audacious leap of decision. Muad’Dib set himself the task of integrating genetic memory into ongoing evaluation. Thus did he break through Time’s veils, making a single thing of the future and the past. That was Muad’Dib’s creation embodied in his son and his daughter. —TESTAMENT OF ARRAKIS BY HARQ AL-ADA
Tyekanik, fresh from a savage argument with Farad’n’s mother, glanced sidelong at the Prince, noting how the lad’s flesh was firming as he approached his eighteenth birthday. There was less and less of Wensicia in him with each passing day and more and more of old Shaddam, who had preferred his private pursuits to the responsibilities of royalty. That was what had cost him the throne in the end, of course. He’d grown soft in the ways of command.
The Preacher held his masked face rigidly confronting Farad’n. “Governments may rise and fall for reasons which appear insignificant, Prince. What small events! An argument between two women . . . which way the wind blows on a certain day . . . a sneeze, a cough, the length of a garment or the chance collision of a fleck of sand and a courtier’s eye. It is not always the majestic concerns of Imperial ministers which dictate the course of history, nor is it necessarily the pontifications of priests which move the hands of God.”
Tyekanik, however, had focused on one phrase. Why did this Preacher speak of a garment? Tyekanik’s mind focused on the Imperial costumes dispatched to the Atreides twins, the tigers trained to attack. Was this old man voicing a subtle warning? How much did he know?
And he saw a vision of armor. The armor was not his own skin; it was stronger than plasteel. Nothing penetrated his armor—not knife or poison or sand, not the dust of the desert or its desiccating heat. In his right hand he carried the power to make the Coriolis storm, to shake the earth and erode it into nothing. His eyes were fixed upon the Golden Path and in his left hand he carried the scepter of absolute mastery. And beyond the Golden Path, his eyes looked into eternity which he knew to be the food of his soul and of his everlasting flesh. —HEIGHIA, MY BROTHER’S DREAM FROM THE BOOK OF
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I speak the popular myth of prescience: to know the future absolutely! All of it! What fortunes could be made—and lost—on such absolute knowledge, eh? The rabble believes this. They believe that if a little bit is good, more must be better. How excellent! And if you handed one of them the complete scenario of his life, the unvarying dialogue up to his moment of death—what a hellish gift that’d be. What utter boredom! Every living instant he’d be replaying what he knew absolutely. No deviation. He could anticipate every response, every utterance—over and over and over and over and over
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“Do you believe us to be such utter fools?” Jessica asked. “Indeed I do. Your Sisterhood is nothing but a bunch of damn fool old women who haven’t thought beyond their precious breeding program! Ghani and I know the leverage they have. Do you think us fools?” “Leverage?” “They know you’re a Harkonnen! It’ll be in their breeding records: Jessica out of Tanidia Nerus by the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. That record accidentally made public would pull your teeth to—” “You think the Sisterhood would stoop to blackmail?” “I know they would. Oh, they coated it sweetly. They told you to investigate the
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The Bene Gesserits had codified the problem: “A large populace held in check by a small but powerful force is quite a common situation in our universe. And we know the major conditions wherein this large populace may turn upon its keepers— “One: When they find a leader. This is the most volatile threat to the powerful; they must retain control of leaders. “Two: When the populace recognizes its chains. Keep the populace blind and unquestioning. “Three: When the populace perceives a hope of escape from bondage. They must never even believe that escape is possible!”
“Once your father confided in me that knowing the future too well was to be locked into that future to the exclusion of any freedom to change.”
“The paradox which is our problem,” Leto said. “It’s a subtle and powerful thing, prescience. The future becomes now. To be sighted in the land of the blind carries its own perils. If you try to interpret what you see for the blind, you tend to forget that the blind possess an inherent movement conditioned by their blindness. They are like a monstrous machine moving along its own path. They have their own momentum, their own fixations. I fear the blind, Stil. I fear them. They can so easily crush anything in their path.”
“And if I do what is expected of me, that is the measure of my sincerity, eh?” “It is the Fremen practice.” “Then I cannot have inner feelings to guide my behavior?” “I don’t understand what—” “If I always behave with propriety, no matter what it costs me to suppress my own desires, then that is the measure of me.”
He nodded. How convincing she was. It was a sad thought.
Divan sees through Alia’s veil.
