Children of Dune (Dune #3)

by Frank Herbert

Liet-Kynes had been Chani’s father.

The countless generations of selective breeding directed by the Bene Gesserits had achieved Muad’Dib, but nowhere in the Sisterhood’s plans had they allowed for melange. Oh, they knew about this possibility, but they feared it and called it Abomination. That was the most dismaying fact. Abomination. They must possess reasons for such a judgment. And if they said Alia was an Abomination, then that must apply equally to the twins, because Chani, too, had been addicted, her body saturated with spice, and her genes had somehow complemented those of Muad’Dib.

Abominations, the holy witches of the Bene Gesserit said. Yet the Sisterhood coveted the genophase of these children. The witches wanted sperm and ovum without the disturbing flesh which carried them. Was that why the Lady Jessica returned at this time? She had broken with the Sisterhood

to support her Ducal mate, but rumor said she had returned to the Bene Gesserit ways.

They were merely the lens through which light poured to reveal new shapes in the universe.

the universe would not turn backward. It was a great engine projected upon the grey void of nonexistence.

Shai-Hulud [sandworm deified]

Harah, who was one of Stilgar’s wives,

Ghanima nodded to her aunt as Alia stopped in front of them, said: “A spoil of war greets her illustrious relative.” Using the same Chakobsa language, Ghanima emphasized the meaning of her own name—Spoil of War.

think it unwise for you to provoke dangerous thoughts in my mother. Irulan agrees with me. Who knows what role the Lady Jessica will choose? She is, after all, Bene Gesserit.”

melange (me’-lange also ma,lanj) n-s, origin uncertain (thought to derive from ancient Terran Franzh): a. mixture of spices; b. spice of Arrakis (Dune) with geriatric properties first noted by Yanshuph Ashkoko, royal chemist in reign of Shakkad the Wise; Arrakeen melange, found only in deepest desert sands of Arrakis, linked to prophetic visions of Paul Muad’Dib (Atreides), first Fremen Mahdi; also employed by Spacing Guild Navigators and the Bene Gesserit.

“I stand between fish and worm,”

Memories which fastened him to places his flesh had never known presented him with answers to questions he had not asked.

The sandworm of Dune would not cross water; water poisoned it. Yet water had been known here in prehistoric times. White gypsum pans attested to bygone lakes and seas. Wells, deep-drilled, found water which sandtrout sealed off. As clearly as if he’d witnessed the events, he saw what had happened on this planet and it filled him with foreboding for the cataclysmic changes which human intervention was bringing.

“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.”

Fremen had always known to plant predator fish in their water cisterns. The haploid sandtrout actively resisted great accumulations of water near the planet’s surface; predators swam in that qanat below him. Their sandworm vector could handle small amounts of water—the amounts held in cellular bondage by human flesh, for example. But confronted by large bodies of water, their chemical factories went wild, exploded in the death-transformation which produced the dangerous melange concentrate, the ultimate awareness drug employed in a diluted fraction for the sietch orgy. That pure concentrate had taken Paul Muad’Dib through the walls of Time, deep into the well of dissolution which no other male had ever dared.

“Fewer sandtrout—the ecological transformation of the planet . . .”

“When the sandtrout go, so do all the worms,”

“No more spice,”

It was a different place now, changed by just a few moments of awareness. Human interplay with that environment had never been more apparent to them. They felt themselves as integral parts of a dynamic system held in delicately balanced order. The new outlook involved a real change of consciousness which flooded them with observations. As Liet-Kynes had said, the universe was a place of constant conversation between animal populations.

“The tribes would understand a threat to water,”

Water was the ultimate power symbol on Arrakis. At their roots Fremen remained special-application animals, desert survivors, governance experts under conditions of stress. And as water became plentiful, a strange symbol transfer came over them even while they understood the old necessities.

“You mean a threat to power,” she corrected him. “Of course.”

“Balance,” she said, and repeated her father’s words from long ago: “It’s what distinguishes a people from a mob.” Her words called up their father in him and he said: “Economics versus beauty—a story older than Sheba.”

Jacurutu.”

Sandworms would not cross open water; it poisoned them.

How odd it was, this sandworm, to grow from a flat and leathery sandtrout,

The sandtrout, when linked edge to edge against the planet’s bedrock, formed living cisterns; they held back the water that their sandworm vector might live.

possession. Those found possessed were rightfully killed and their water cast upon the sand lest it contaminate the tribal cistern. The dead should remain dead. It was correct to find one’s immortality in children, but children had no right to assume too exact a shape from their past.

“My problem is that my father left so many things undone,” Leto said. “Especially the focus of our lives. The Empire cannot go on this way, Stil, without a proper focus for human life. I am speaking of life, you understand? Life, not death.”

“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.”

It requires good government. That does not depend upon laws or precedent, but upon the personal qualities of whoever governs.”

“I am expected to be Emperor, but I must be the servant,”

A Fremen dies when he is too long from the desert; this we call “the water sickness.”

Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.

“If the worms go, the spice goes. If the spice goes, what coin do we have to buy our way?”

Alia lied because she was possessed by one who would destroy the Atreides. She was, in herself, the first destruction. Then al-Fali spoke the truth: the sandworms are doomed unless the course of the ecological transformation is modified.

One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.”

Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class—whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.

“Alia expects you to kill us quietly and conceal the evidence of it,” Idaho said. “Having rid her of the Lady Jessica, I’m no longer useful. And the Lady Jessica, having served her Sisterhood’s purposes, is no longer useful to them. Alia will be calling the Bene Gesserit to account, but they will win.”

Pain is a function of nerves, Idaho reminded himself. Pain comes as light comes to the eyes. Effort comes from the muscles, not from nerves.

“When it’s overexploited, even loyalty wears out finally,”

To rule required accurate and incisive judgments about those who wielded your power.

The Water of Conception.” The amniotic fluid of the newborn was saved at birth, distilled into the first water fed to that child. The traditional form required a godmother to serve the water, saying: “Here is the water of thy conception.”

Above all else, the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in his universe. He must remain capable of saying: “There’s no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we’ll correct that when we come to it.” The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: “Now what is this thing doing?” —THE MENTAT HANDBOOK

It was the day of the Kwisatz Haderach, the first Holy Day of those who followed Muad’Dib. It recognized the deified Paul Atreides as that person who was everywhere simultaneously, the male Bene Gesserit who mingled both male and female ancestry in an inseparable power to become the One-with-All. The faithful called this day Ayil, the Sacrifice, to commemorate the death which made his presence “real in all places.”

government’s growth and its death are apparent in the growth and death of its citizens.”

The Preacher said endings instead of deaths. Was he saying that one or both were not truly dead?

humans cannot bear very much reality,” he said. “Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your heads into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die.