Children of Dune

Muad’Dib’s teachings have become the playground of scholastics, of the superstitious and the corrupt. He taught a balanced way of life, a philosophy with which a human can meet problems arising from an ever-changing universe. He said humankind is still evolving, in a process which will never end. He said this evolution moves on changing principles which are known only to eternity. How can corrupted reasoning play with such an essence?

—WORDS OF THE MENTAT DUNCAN IDAHO

How simple things were when our Messiah was only a dream, he thought. By finding our Mahdi we loosed upon the universe countless messianic dreams. Every people subjugated by the jihad now dreams of a leader to come.

Stilgar glanced into the darkened bedchamber.

If my knife liberated all of those people, would they make a messiah of me?

Water and green.

The new symbols of Arrakis: water and green.

A diamond-shaped oasis of planted dunes spread beneath his high perch, focusing his attention into sharp Fremen awareness. The bell call of a nightbird came from the cliff below him, and it amplified the sensation that he lived this moment out of a wild past.

Nous avons changé tout cela, he thought, falling easily into one of the ancient tongues which he and Ghanima employed in private. “We have altered all of that.” He sighed. Oublier je ne puis. “I cannot forget.”

The Universe is God’s. It is one thing, a wholeness against which all separations may be identified. Transient life, even that self-aware and reasoning life which we call sentient, holds only fragile trusteeship on any portion of the wholeness.

—COMMENTARIES FROM THE C.E.T.

(COMMISSION OF ECUMENICAL TRANSLATORS)

“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.”

“Values, my dear grandchild, depend for their acceptance upon their success.”

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

Farad’n shrugged. Assassination remained a fact of royal life. The language was filled with the subtle permutations of ways to eliminate important personages. By a single word, one could distinguish between poison in drink or poison in food. He presumed the elimination of the Atreides twins would be accomplished by a poison. It was not a pleasant thought. By all accounts the twins were a most interesting pair.

“Now I will preach to you,” The Preacher said. “This is a sermon of the desert. I direct it to the ears of Muad’Dib’s priesthood, those who practice the ecumenism of the sword. Ohhh, you believers in manifest destiny! Know you not that manifest destiny has its demoniac side? You cry out that you find yourselves exalted merely to have lived in the blessed generations of Muad’Dib. I say to you that you have abandoned Muad’Dib. Holiness has replaced love in your religion! You court the vengeance of the desert!”

“Have you noticed, Stil, how beautiful the young women are this year?”

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

—STILGAR, THE COMMENTARIES

Javid, the master of Alia’s appointments, stood at the great door, being very official this morning. He was a robed genie with a cynical smile on his round face. Javid struck Jessica as a paradox: a well-fed Fremen. Noting her attention upon him, Javid smiled knowingly, shrugged. His attendance in Jessica’s entourage had been short, as he’d known it would be. He hated Atreides, but he was Alia’s man in more ways than one, if the rumors were to be believed.

Jessica saw the shrug, thought: This is the age of the shrug. He knows I’ve heard all the stories about him and he doesn’t care. Our civilization could well die of indifference within it before succumbing to external attack.

Ghanima steeled herself then for what she had to do. Leto must be dead to her. She had to make herself believe it. […] From this point onward she could not think of Leto as alive. She must condition herself to react out of a total belief that her brother was dead, killed here by Laza tigers. Not many humans could fool a Truthsayer, but she knew that she could do it […] The multi-lives she and Leto shared had taught them the way: a hypnotic process old in Sheba’s time, although she might be the only human alive who could recall Sheba as a reality. The deep compulsions had been designed with care and, for a long time after Leto had gone, Ghanima reworked her self-awareness, building the lonely sister, the surviving twin, until it was a believable totality.

In this context Ghanima felt herself to be the pure Fremen, a carefully prepared extension of tribal brutality. She needed only a target—and that, obviously, was House Corrino. She longed to see Farad’n’s blood spilled on the ground at her feet.

But Stilgar’s voice could be filled with many valuable things.

“There were in olden times certain tribes which were known to be water hunters. They were called Iduali, which meant ‘water insects,’ because those people wouldn’t hesitate to steal the water of another Fremen. If they caught you alone in the desert they would not even leave you the water of your flesh. There was this place where they lived: Sietch Jacurutu. That’s where the other tribes banded and wiped out the Iduali. That was a long time ago, before Kynes even—in my great-great-grandfather’s days. And from that day to this, no Fremen has gone to Jacurutu. It is tabu.”

“But I realize that 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. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you live outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature. Muad’Dib came to tell you about that. Without understanding his message, you cannot revere him!”

If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.

—THE OPEN- ENDED PROOF

FROM THE PANOPLIA PROPHETICA

Jessica smiled, noting the direction of his gaze, but not revealing that she knew where his attention had wandered. She said: “To learn patience in the Bene Gesserit Way, you must begin by recognizing the essential, raw instability of our universe. We call nature—meaning this totality in all of its manifestations—the Ultimate Non-Absolute. To free your vision and permit you to recognize this conditional nature’s changing ways, you will hold your two hands at arm’s length in front of you. Stare at your extended hands, first the palms and then the backs. Examine the fingers, front and back. Do it.”

This was what his grandmother and the Sisterhood sought! He knew it. His awareness flowed on a new, higher level. He felt the past carried in his cells, in his memories, in the archetypes which haunted his assumptions, in the myths which hemmed him, in his languages and their prehistoric detritus. It was all of the shapes out of his human and nonhuman past, all of the lives which he now commanded, all integrated in him at last. And he felt himself as a thing caught up in the ebb and flow of nucleotides. Against the backdrop of infinity he was a protozoan creature in which birth and death were virtually simultaneous, but he was both infinite and protozoan, a creature of molecular memories.

Irulan paled, put a hand to her mouth, forgetting for a moment all of her training. It was a measure of how much care she had invested in Ghanima, this almost complete abandonment of everything except animal fear. She spoke out of that shattering emotion, allowing it to tremble on her lips. “Ghani, I don’t fear for myself. I’d throw myself into the worm’s mouth for you. Yes, I’m what you call me, the childless wife of your father, but you’re the child I never had. I beg you . . .” Tears glistened at the corners of her eyes.

“My son didn’t really see the future; he saw the process of creation and its relationship to the myths in which men sleep,” Jessica said.

The Mashhad, Leto thought, and it was a sad thought. Here was the great leap onto the Golden Path. He had put on the living, self-repairing stillsuit of a sandtrout membrane, a thing of unmeasurable value on Arrakis . . . until you understood the price. I am no longer human. The legends about this night will grow and magnify it beyond anything recognizable by the participants. But it will become truth, that legend.

Paul’s shoulders sagged. “You cannot,” he whispered. “You cannot.”

“I am a creature of this desert now, father,” Leto said. “Would you speak thus to a Coriolis storm?”

“You think me coward for refusing that path,” Paul said, his voice husky and trembling. “Oh, I understand you well, son. Augury and haruspication have always been their own torments. But I was never lost in the possible futures because this one is unspeakable!”

Then the decision is mine,” Leto said. “And the choice is yours, Alia. Trial of Possession, or . . .” He nodded toward the open window.

“Who’re you to give me a choice?” Alia demanded, and it was still the voice of the Old Baron.

“Demon!” Ghanima screamed. “Let her make her own choice!”

“Mother,” Alia pleaded in her little-girl tones. “Mother, what’re they doing? What do you want me to do? Help me.”

“Help yourself,” Leto ordered and, for just an instant, he saw the shattered presence of his aunt in her eyes, a glaring hopelessness which peered out at him and was gone. But her body moved, a sticklike, thrusting walk. She wavered, stumbled, veered from her path but returned to it, nearer and nearer the open window.

“There’s always a prevailing mystique in any civilization,” Leto said. “It builds itself as a barrier against change, and that always leaves future generations unprepared for the universe’s treachery. All mystiques are the same in building these barriers—the religious mystique, the hero-leader mystique, the messiah mystique, the mystique of science/technology, and the mystique of nature itself. We live in an Imperium which such a mystique has shaped, and now that Imperium is falling apart because most people don’t distinguish between mystique and their universe. You see, the mystique is like demon possession; it tends to take over the consciousness, becoming all things to the observer.”