Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune

How the World Thinks - global philosophy

The Power Of Now - enlightenment

Dune

For the others, we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust in himself that he could learn. It is shocking to think how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad’Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.

The old woman studied Paul in one gestalten flicker: face oval like Jessica’s, but string bones… hair: the Duke’s black black but with bowline of the maternal grandfather who cannot be named, and that thin, disdainful nose; shape of directly staring green eyes; like the old Duke, the paternal grandfather who is now dead.

Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. You must climb a mountain just a little bit, enough to test that it’s a mountain. From the lop of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain. And what is beyond is the same as what is here. Let your senses tell you only reality.

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover that your father is a man-with human flesh.

A thing; many laymen never realize about an ecological system is that it is a system. A system, by definition, maintains a certain fluid stability which can be destroyed by the removal of any element from its niche within the system. There is, also, a certain point-to-point flowing of a system. Any unexplained gap in this flow tells you there’s an unknown occupant of a niche within the system.

“What is money?” Kynes asked, “if it will not buy the services you need?”

This Duke was concerned much more over his men than he was over the spice. He had passed off the loss of a crawler with a gesture. The threat to men’s lives had him in a rage. A man such as that could command fanatic loyalty. He would be difficult to defeat.

A great man doesn’t seek to lead, he’s called to it. And he answers. Leadership and project management

“It is a rule of ecology,” Kynes said, “that the struggle between life forms is the struggle for the free energy of a system. Blood is an efficient source of energy.”

Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in least amount. And where a number of conditions are necessary to a process, its rate is controlled by the least favorable of these conditions.

conscious by choice… blood enriched and swift-flooding the overload regions… one does not obtain food, safety or freedom by instinct… animal consciousness does not extend beyond the given moment nor into the idea that its victims may become extinct… the animal destroys and does not produce… animal pleasures remain close to sensation levels and avoid the perceptual… true-human requires a background grid through which to see his universe… focused consciousness-by-choice forms that grid… bodily integrity comes through nerve/blood flow according to deep awareness of cell needs… all things/cells/beings are impermanent… strive for the flow-permanence within…

The human can assess his circumstances and judge his limitations of the moment by a process of mental programming, never risking flesh until the optimum course is computed. The human does this within a compression of real time so short that it may be called instantaneous.

Now, there was a man who appreciated the power of bravura-even in death.

“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.”

“You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? That’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, enduring the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”

Hope clouds observation.

‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’

“A human is still the finest computer,” she said, “the smallest for its variability, portable and self-propelled, self-programming, capable of performing more tasks simultaneously, cheapest to maintain because it maintains itself… I could go on at much greater length.”

“The Great Revolt took away a crutch, forced human minds to develop. Almost immediately afterward, schools were started to train these human talents.”

“Yes, politics. The original Bene Gesserit school was directed by a human who saw the need for a thread of continuity in human affairs. She saw there could be no such continuity without separating human stock from animal stock… for breeding purposes.”

The Reverend Mother must combine the seductive wiles of a courtesan with the untouchable majesty of a virgin goddess, holding these attributes in tension so long as the powers of her youth endure. For when youth and beauty have gone, she will find that the place-between, once occupied by tension, has become a wellspring of cunning and resourcefulness.

You well know the weakness there! Shield your son too much, Jessica, and he’ll not grow strong enough to fulfill any destiny.

That which submits rules.

The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows-a wall against the wind. Animal-humans and the animal nature in true humans blunders along like the wild wind. You must bend to this, but keep your roots firmly planted. You must learn to use the wind, to gain strength from it, use it for your own purposes.

“I enjoin you to grave this into your memory: A world is supported by four things”

She held up four big-knuckled fingers - “the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing” - she closed her fingers into a fist - “without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!”

“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”

She said the mystery of life isn’t a problem to be solved, it’s a reality to be experienced. She said I’d have to… woo my world… seduce it and not fight it.

What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises-no matter your mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or for making love or playing the baliset.

Behavior is that over which we have control.

Polish comes from the cities; Wisdom from the desert.

What is a son but an extension of the father?

”The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.” Yes, she thought, I am meeting more resistance lately. I could use a quiet retreat by myself.

Natural human is an animal without logic. It’s an unnatural development, this projection of logic onto all our affairs, and it’s suffered to continue because of its supreme usefulness. You, now. You are the embodiment of logic-a Mentat. Yet, you must know, Thufir, that your solutions for problems are conceptions which, in a very real sense, are projected outside yourself-there to be rolled around, studied, examined from all sides.”

When something goes wrong, you’re extremely capable of seeing it and fixing it just as long as it’s outside yourself,” she said. “This is the natural human ability with logic. But when we encounter personal problem-that which is most deeply personal is the most difficult to bring out for external examination-we tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated matter really chewing on us.”

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

“Did you know what you were doing when you trained me?” he asked. There’s no more childhood in his voice, she thought. And she said: “I hoped the thing any parent hopes-that you’d be… superior… different.”

Now is the time to carry out my fathers wish, he thought. I must give her his message now while she has time for grief. The grief would inconvenience us later. And he found himself shocked by the precise logic of the decision.

Like the litany, she thought. We faced, that force and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It is gone, but we remain.

“What have you done to me?” he demanded. In a burst of clarity, she sensed some of the roots in the question, said: “I gave birth to you.” It was, from instinct as much as from her own subtle knowledge, the precisely correct answer to calm him. He felt her hands holding him, focused on the dim outline of her face. (Certain gene traces in her facial structure were noted in a new way by his onflowing-mind, the clues added to other new data, and a second-approximation answer put forward.)

Her body had known the fact long before the mind awakened to it.

It’s the look of terrible awareness, she thought, of someone who has been forced to the knowledge of his own mortality. He was, indeed, no longer a child.

My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. “Something cannot emerge from nothing he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable “the truth” can be.

Then he looked squarely at Paul, seeing the boy who had taken on the mantle of manhood, masking grief, suppressing all except the position that must be assumed now-the Dukedom. And Kynes realized in that moment the Dukedom did still exist, in spite of the Padishah Emperor’s treachery, in spite of the Harkonnens. It existed solely because of this youth and his training-and this was not a thing to be taken lightly.

And again he cautioned himself to rely on the lessons learned from the infinite experiences of the future and not to put his confidence in the visions themselves.

“If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken,” went the Bene Gesserit axiom.

What do you despise? By this are you truly known.

At the age fifteen, he already had learned silence.

Prophecy and prescience-How can they be put to the test? Consider: How much is actual prediction and how much is the prophet shaping the future to fit his prophecy? What of the harmonic disruptions inherent in the act of prophecy? Does the prophet see the future or does he see a line of weakness, a fault of crystallization that he may shatter with words or decisions as a diamond cutter shatters his gem with a blow on a knife?

“payment in spice to keep our skies clear of satellites and such that none may spy what we do to the face of Arrakis.” She weighed out her words, remembering that Paul once had said this must be the reason Arrakeen skies were clear of satellites. “And what is it you do to the face of Arrakis that must not be seen?” “We change it… slowly but with certainty… to make it fit for human life. Our generation will not see it, nor our children or our children’s children or the grandchildren of their children… but it will come.” He stared with veiled eyes out over the basin. “Open water and tall green plants and people walking freely without stillsuits.” So that’s the dream of this Liet-Kynes, she thought. And she said: “Bribes are dangerous; they have a way of growing larger and larger.”

A man who weighs his decisions, who thinks of consequences, she thought. “There are those among my young men who have reached the age of wild spirits,” he said. “They must be eased through this period. I must leave no great reasons around for them to challenge me. Because I would have to maim and kill among them. This is not the proper course for a leader if it can be avoided with honor. A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a People. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals and a People reverts to a mob.” His words, the depth of their awareness, the fact that he spoke as much to her as to those who secretly listened, forced her to re-evaluate him.

Think of it as a spectrum with unconsciousness at the negative extreme and hyperconsciousness at the positive extreme. The way the mind leans under stress is influenced by training.

Paul pressed the fight now, circling but not attacking. He had seen the fear in his opponent. Memory of Duncan Idaho’s voice flowed through Paul’s awareness: “When your opponent fears you, then’s the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them.”

Now is the terrible moment, she thought. He has killed a man in clear superiority of mind and muscle. He must not grow to enjoy such a victory.

At her place across the circle from Paul, Jessica nodded, recognizing the ancient source of the rite. And she thought: The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture, begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead. She stared at Paul, wondering: Will he see it? Will he know what to do?

“It has been calculated with precision,” Stilgar whispered. “We know to within a million decaliters how much we need. When we have it, we shall change the face of Arrakis.”

A hushed whisper of response lifted from the troop: “Bi-lal kaifa.”

“We will trap the dunes beneath grass plantings,” Stilgar said, his voice growing stronger. “We will tie the water into the soil with trees and undergrowth.”

“Bi-lal kaifa,” intoned the troop.

“Each year the polar ice retreats,” Stilgar said.

“Bi-lal kaifa,” they chanted.

“We shall make a homeworld of Arrakis-with melting lenses at the poles, with lakes in the temperate zones, and only the deep desert for the Maker and His spice.”

“Bi-lal kaifa.”

“And no man ever again shall want for water. It shall be his for dipping from well or pond or lake or canal. It shall be there for any man to take. It shall be his for holding out his hand.”

“Bi-lal kaifa.”

Jessica felt the religious ritual in the words, noted her own instinctively awed response. They’re in league with the future, she thought. They have their mountain to climb. This is the scientist’s dream… and these simple people, these peasants, are filled with it.

Her thoughts turned to Liet-Kynes, the Emperor’s planetary ecologist, the man who had gone native-and she wondered at him. This was a dream to capture men’s souls, and she could sense the hand of the ecologist in it. This was a dream for which men would die willingly. It was another of the essential ingredients that she felt her son needed: people with a goal. Such people would be easy to imbue with fervor and fanaticism. They could be wielded like a sword to win back Paul’s place for him.

And the memory-mind encapsulated within her opened itself to Jessica, permitting a view down a wide corridor to other Reverend Mothers within other Reverend Mothers within other Reverend Mothers until there seemed no end to them.

Jessica recoiled, fearing she would become lost in an ocean of oneness. Still, the corridor remained, revealing to Jessica that the Fremen culture was far older than she had suspected.

But Jessica’s attention was focused on the revelation of the Water of Life, seeing its sources: the liquid exhalation of a dying sandworm, a Maker. And as she saw the killing of it in her new memory, she suppressed a gasp.

The creature was drowned!

“Don’t be so sure you know precisely where to draw the line across the spectrum,” he said. “Above this point, human; below this point, animal. We carry our past with us. And, mother mine, there’s a thing you do not know and should-we are Harkonnens.” Her mind did a terrifying thing: it blanked out as though it needed to shut off all experience.

“The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-hulud, Old Father Eternity,” Paul said. “They say: ‘You cannot clap with only one hand’. When next you find a mirror, study your face-study mine now. The traces are there if you do not blind yourself. Look at my hands, the set of my bones. And if none of this convinces you-then take only my word for it: I have walked in the future, I have looked at a record, I have seen a place, I have all the data needed to be certain.”

“A… renegade branch of the family,” she said. “That’s it, isn’t it? Some Harkonnen cousin who…”

“You’re the Baron’s own daughter,” he said. “In his youth, the Baron sampled many pleasures, and once permitted himself to be seduced. But it was for the genetic purposes of the Bene Gesserit, by one of you.’

“Toy! Don’t be stupid. I know what I have in Hawat and how to control it. Hawat has deep emotions, Feyd. The man without emotions is the one to fear. But deep emotions… ah, now, those can be bent to your needs.”

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

Still, there was about him a feeling of abandonment. He wondered if it might be possible that his ruh-spirit had slipped over somehow into the world where the Fremen believed he had his true existence-into the A lam al-mithal, the world of similitudes, that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations were removed. And he knew fear at the thought of such a place, because removal of all limitations meant removal of all points of reference. In the landscape of a myth he could not orient himself and say: “I am I because I am here.”

His mother had said once: “The people are divided, some of them, in how they think of you.”

Jessica was fearful of the religious relationship between himself and the Fremen, Paul knew. She didn’t like the fact that people of both sietch and graben referred to Muad’Dib as Him. And she went questioning among the tribes, sending out her sayyadina spies, collecting their answers and brooding on them.

She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong-faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.”

You cannot avoid the interplay of politics within an orthodox religion. This power struggle permeates the training, educating and disciplining of the orthodox community. Because of this pressure, the leaders of such a community inevitably must face that ultimate internal question: to succumb to complete opportunism as the price of maintaining their rule, or risk sacrificing themselves for the sake of the orthodox ethic.

How often the angry man rages denial of what his inner self tries to tell him.

“One of the most terrible moments in a boy’s life,” Paul said, “is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It’s a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can’t evade it. I heard my father when he spoke of my mother. She’s not the betrayer, Gurney.”

“I wish we were in the south,” Jessica said. “The oases were so beautiful when we left. Do you not long for the day when the whole land may blossom thus?”

“The land is beautiful, true,” Chani said. “But there is much grief in it.”

“Grief is the price of victory,” Jessica said.

Is she preparing me for grief? Chani asked herself. She said: “There are so many women without men. There was jealousy when it was learned that I’d been summoned north.”

Paul said: “There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed.”

“These things are so ancient within us,” Paul said, “that they’re ground into each separate cell of our bodies. We’re shaped by such forces. You can say to yourself, ‘Yes, I see how such a thing may be.’ But when you look inward and confront the raw force of your own life unshielded, you see your peril. You see that this could overwhelm you. The greatest peril to the Giver is the force which takes. The greatest peril to the Taker is the force which gives. It’s as easy to be overwhelmed by giving as by taking.”

“And you, my son,” Jessica asked “are you one who gives or one who takes?”

“I’m at the fulcrum,” he said. “I cannot give without taking and I cannot take without-” He broke off, looking to the wall at his right.

“An old trick, My Duke. They thought to burden us with refugees.”

“It’s been so long since guerrillas were effective that the mighty have forgotten how to fight them,” Paul said. “The Sardaukar have played into our hands. They grabbed some city women for their sport, decorated their battle standards with the heads of the men who objected. And they’ve built up a fever of hate among people who otherwise would’ve looked on the coming battle as no more than a great inconvenience… and the possibility of exchanging one set of masters for another. The Sardaukar recruit for us, Stilgar.”

“The city people do seem eager,” Stilgar said.

“Their hate is fresh and clear,” Paul said. “That’s why we use them as shock troops.”

“The slaughter among them will be fearful,” Gurney said.

“What’s the extent of the storm damage? Nothing money won’t repair, I presume,” Paul said.

“Except for the lives, sir” Gurney said, and there was a tone of reproach in his voice as though to say: “When did an Atreides worry first about things when people were at stake.”

He seemed too submissive to Paul, but then the Sardaukar had never been prepared for such happenings as this day. They’d never known anything but victory which, Paul realized, could be a weakness in itself. He put that thought aside for later consideration in his own training program.

In that instant, Paul saw how Stilgar had been transformed from the Fremen Naib to a creature of the Lisan al-Gaib, a receptacle for awe and obedience. It was a lessening of the man, and Paul felt the ghost wind of the jihad brush him.

I have seen a friend become a worshiper, he thought.

In a rush of loneliness, Paul glanced around the room, seeing how proper and on-review his guards had become in his presence. He sensed the subtle, prideful competition among them-each hoping for notice from Muad’Dib.

Muad’Dib, from whom all blessings flow, he thought, and it was the bitterest thought of all his life.

“How would you like to live a billion billion lives in just a few years?” Paul asked. “There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the possibilities, and the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what’s ruthless unless you’ve been both cruel and kind? I am the Kwisatz Haderach, Mother. You should fear me.”

The shorter of the pair said: “You would blind yourself, too, and condemn us all to slow death. Have you any idea what it means to be deprived of the spice liquor once you’re addicted?”

“The eye that looks ahead to the safe course is closed forever,” Paul said. “The Guild is crippled. Humans become little isolated clusters on their isolated planets. You know, I might do this thing out of pure spite… or out of ennui.”

“Stop playing the fool,” Paul barked. “The Guild is like a village beside a river. They need the water, but can only dip out what they require. They cannot dam the river and control it, because that focuses attention on what they take, it brings down eventual destruction, attack. The spice flow, that’s their river, and I have built a dam. But my dam is such that you cannot destroy it without destroying the river.”

Paul raised his voice: “Observe her, comrades! This is a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, patient in a patient cause. She could wait with her sisters-ninety generations for the proper combination of parents and environment to produce a single person their scheming required. Observe her! She believes now that the ninety generations have culminated in success, but I will not do her bidding!”

“Jessica!” the old woman screamed. “Silence him!”

“Silence him yourself,” Jessica said.

“For your part in all this I could gladly have you strangled,” Paul said. “You couldn’t evade it!” he snapped as the old woman stiffened in rage. “But I think it better punishment that you live out your years never able to touch me or bend me to a single thing that your scheming desires.”

“Jessica, what have you done?” the old woman demanded.

Dune Messiah

There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other.

To have built this place especially for Edric, though - what a sharp finger that pointed at his weakness. What here, Scytale wondered, was aimed at me?

A creature who has spent His life creating one particular representation of his selfdom will die rather than become the antithesis of that representation

They’re not mad. They’re trained to believe, not to know. Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.

To use raw power is to make yourself infinitely vulnerable to greater powers.

The dis-trans defied political cryptology because it relied on subtle distortions of natural sound patterns which could be scrambled with enormous intricacy.

More than one government has fallen because people discovered the real extent of official wealth.

They think of the Jihad the way I thought of it - most of them. It is a source of strange experiences, adventure, wealth

“You don’t back people into a corner,” Alia said. “Not if you want them to remain peaceful.”

“The uninitiated try to conceive of prescience as obeying a Natural Law,” Paul said. He steepled his Hands in front of Him. “But it’d be just as correct to say it’s heaven speaking to us, that being able to read the future is a Harmonious act of man’s being. In other words, prediction is a natural consequence in the wave of the present. It wears the guise of nature, you see. But such powers cannot be used from an attitude that pre-states aims and purposes. Does a chip caught in the wave say where it’s going? There is no cause and effect in the oracle. Causes become occasions or convections and confluences, places where the currents meet. Accepting prescience, you fill your being with concepts repugnant to the intellect. Your intellectual consciousness, therefore, rejects them. In rejecting, intellect becomes a part of the processes, and is subjugated.

“And why do the damned things have that many lights if we’re not supposed to try for them?” “A Bene Gesserit should ask the reasoning behind an open-ended system?” Paul asked.

To whom was Edric speaking? Damnably clever words, that were heavy with manipulation leverages - that subtle undertone of comfortable humor, the unspoken air of shared secrets; his manner said he and Paul were two sophisticates, men of a wider universe who understood things not granted common folk. With a feeling of shock, Paul realized that he had not been the main target for all this rhetoric. This affliction visited upon the court had been speaking for the benefit of others - speaking to Stilgar, to the household guards…perhaps even to the hulking aide.

When a creature has developed into one thing, he will choose death rather than change into his opposite.

The pitfall of Bene Gesserit training, she reminded herself, lay in the powers granted; such powers predisposed one to vanity and pride. But power deluded those who used it. One tended to believe power could overcome any barrier…including one’s own ignorance.

by every action that he preferred machines to men, statistics to individuals, the far away general view to the intimate personal touch requiring imagination and initiative.

It occurred to Paul then that all creatures must carry some kind of destiny stamped out by purposes of varying strengths, by the fixatives of training and disposition. From the moment the Jihad had chosen him, he’d felt himself hemmed in by the forces of a multitude. Their fixed purposes demanded and controlled his course. Any delusions of Free Will he harbored now must be merely the prisoner rattling his cage. His curse lay in the fact that he saw the cage.

“I told him that to endure oneself may be the hardest task in the universe.”

Not collecting, that is the ultimate gathering.’ What can you gather without gathering yourself?”

“Magnificent!” Bijaz chortled. “You attack - therefore you have will power and exercise self-determination.”

our masters, the Tleilaxu. The Guild and Bene Gesserit believe we produce artifacts. In Reality, we produce tools and services. Anything can be a tool - poverty, war. War is useful because it is effective in so many areas. It stimulates the metabolism. It enforces government. It diffuses genetic strains. It possesses a vitality such as nothing else in the universe. Only those who recognize the value of war and exercise it have any degree of self-determination.

“Did you really see me go into the Tleilaxu tanks?” Hayt asked, fighting an odd reluctance to ask that question. “Did I not say it?” Bijaz demanded. The dwarf bounced to his feet. “We had a terrific struggle with you. The flesh did not want to come back.”

Once…long ago he’d thought of himself as an inventor of government. But the invention had fallen into old patterns. It was like some hideous contrivance with plastic memory. Shape it any way you wanted, but relax for a moment, and it snapped into the ancient forms. Forces at work beyond his reach in human breasts eluded and defied him.

“You can’t build politics on love,” he said. “People aren’t concerned with love; it’s too disordered. They prefer despotism. Too much freedom breeds chaos. We can’t have that, can we? And how do you make despotism lovable?”

Don’t look too closely at the law. Do, and you’ll find the rationalized interpretations, the legal casuistry, the precedents of convenience. You’ll find the serenity, which is just another word for death.

The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour of his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: “I feed on your energy.”

Government cannot be religious and self-assertive at the same time. Religious experience needs a spontaneity which laws inevitably suppress. And you cannot govern without laws. Your laws eventually must replace morality, replace conscience, replace even the religion by which you think to govern. Sacred ritual must spring from praise and holy yearnings which hammer out a significant morality. Government, on. the other hand, is a cultural organism particularly attractive to doubts, questions and contentions. I see the day coming when ceremony must take the place of faith and symbolism replace morality.

Possession of second sight has a tendency to make one a dangerous fatalist, she thought. Unfortunately, there existed no abstract leverage, no calculus of prescience. Visions of the future could not be manipulated as formulae. One had to enter them, risking life and sanity.

“I wanted to be able to laugh,” she whispered. Tears slid down her cheeks. “But I’m sister to an emperor who’s worshipped as a god. People fear me. I never wanted to be feared.” HE wiped the tears from her face. “I don’t want to be part of history,” she whispered. “I just want to be loved…and to love.”

“I must…I must. He’s the bait in his own trap. He’s the servant of power and terror. Violence…deification is a prison enclosing him. He’ll lose…everything. It’ll tear him apart.” “You speak of Paul?” “They drive him to destroy himself,” she gasped, arching her back. “Too much weight, too much grief. They seduce him away from love.” She sank back to the bed. “They’re creating a universe where he won’t permit himself to live.”

There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. One cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences.

But my hands are blue with time. I think…I think I tried to invent life, not realizing it had already been invented.

“The Zensunni approach to birth,” he said, urging her along faster, “is to wait without purpose in the state of highest tension. Do not compete with what is happening. To compete is to prepare for failure. Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything.”

Children of Dune

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.

Ghanima, watching the play of emotions across her grandmother’s face, marveled that Jessica had let down her controls.

With catching movements of their heads remarkably synchronized, both turned, eyes met, and they stared deeply, probingly at each other. Thoughts without spoken words passed between them.

Jessica: I wish you to see my fear.

Ghanima: Now I know you love me.

It was a swift moment of utter trust.

“It would be stupid to repeat such a test on you or your brother,” Jessica said. “You already know the way it went. I must assume you are human, that you will not misuse your inherited powers.”

“But you don’t make that assumption at all,” Ghanima said.

Jessica blinked, realized that the barriers had been creeping back in place, dropped them once more. She asked: “Will you believe my love for you?”

“Yes.” Ghanima raised a hand as Jessica started to speak. “But that love wouldn’t stop you from destroying us. Oh, I know the reasoning: ‘Better the animal-human die than it re-create itself.’ And that’s especially true if the animal-human bears the name Atreides.”

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…

“The joy of living, its beauty is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you”

Was nothing in this world dependable?

Alia resisted. That gave the powers within her their strength. By her own strength she was overcome. We’ve dared to search within, to seek out the old languages and the old knowledge. We’re already amalgams of those lives within us. We don’t resist; we ride with them. This was what I learned from our father last night. It’s what I had to learn.

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.

This Preacher had been summoned - most likely by a dream. Of what importance were dreams?

There are things which words cannot explain. You must experience them without words. But you are not prepared for such a venture, just as when you look at me you do not see me.

“You see, grandmother, I have a difficult decision to make,” he said. “Do I follow the Atreides mystique? Do I live for my subjects … and die for them? Or do I choose another course - one which would permit me to live thousands of years?” Jessica recoiled involuntarily. These words spoken so easily touched on a subject the Bene Gesserits made almost unthinkable. Many Reverend Mothers could choose that course … or try it. The manipulation of internal chemistry was available to initiates of the Sisterhood. But if one did it, sooner or later all would try it. There could be no concealing such an accumulation of ageless women. They knew for a certainty that this course would lead them to destruction. Short-lived humanity would turn upon them. No - it was unthinkable.

First, as to Time: there is no difference between ten thousand years and one year; no difference between one hundred thousand years and a heartbeat. No difference. That is the first fact about Time. And the second fact: the entire universe with all of its Time is within me.

“How little you understand of how he lives on in me.” Jessica found his tone flat but dripping bitterness. She lifted her chin to look directly at him. “Or how your Duke lives in me,” Leto said. “Grandmother, Ghanima is you! She’s you to such an extent that your life holds not a single secret from her up to the instant you bore our father. And me! What a catalogue of fleshly recordings am I. There are moments when it is too much to bear. You come here to judge us? You come here to judge Alia? Better that we judge you!”

He nodded. “If one delays old age or death by the use of melange or by that learned adjustment of fleshly balance which you Bene Gesserits so rightly fear, such a delay invokes only an illusion of control. Whether one walks rapidly through the sietch or slowly, one traverses the sietch. And that passage of time is experienced internally.”

You needn’t inquire whether I’ve made the mistake my father made. I’ve not looked outside our garden of time - at least not by seeking it out. Leave absolute knowledge of the future to those moments of déjà vu which any human may experience. I know the trap of prescience. My father’s life tells me what I need to know about it. No, grandmother: to know the future absolutely is to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future. I require more freedom than that.

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 and …” Leto shook his head. “Ignorance has its advantages. A universe of surprises is what I pray for!”

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!”

Paul had always said that stasis was the most dangerous of those things which were not natural. The only permanence was fluid. Change was all that mattered.

Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and perpetrator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself - a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.

“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.”

“If I always behave with propriety, no matter what it costs me to suppress my own desires, then that is the measure of me.”

Change is dangerous! Stilgar told himself. Sameness and stability were the proper goals of government. But the young men and women were beautiful.

Change was dangerous. Invention must be suppressed. Individual willpower must be denied. What other function did the priesthood serve than to deny individual will?

When I was trained as a mentat … It is very difficult, Alia, to learn how to work your own mind. You learn first that the mind must be allowed to work itself. That’s very strange. You can work your own muscles, exercise them, strengthen them, but the mind acts of itself. Sometimes, when you have learned this about the mind, it shows you things you do not want to see.

That’s what makes him a Naib. To be a leader of men, he controls and limits his reactions. He does what is expected of him. Once you know this, you know Stilgar and you can measure the length of his teeth.

When you try the hardest, just then, you most often fail.

To suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror; to learn irrefutably that you are mortal is to know the end of terror.

They were children of Abraham, learning more from a hawk stooping over the desert than from any book yet written.

Societies move to the goading of ancient, reactive impulses. They demand permanence. Any attempt to display the universe of impermanence arouses rejection patterns, fear, anger, and despair. Then how do we explain the acceptance of prescience? Simply: the giver of prescient visions, because he speaks of an absolute (permanent) realization, may be greeted with joy by humankind even while predicting the most dire events.

“Mentats share the fallibilities of those who use them,” she said. “The human mind, as is the case with the mind of any animal, is a resonator. It responds to resonances in the environment. The mentat has learned to extend his awareness across many parallel loops of causality and to proceed along those loops for long chains of consequences.”

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.

One of the first lessons of the Sisterhood had been to reserve an attitude of questioning distrust for anything which came in the guise of logic.

But Jessica raged on: “This Ghadhean al-Fali, an honest Fremen, comes here to tell me what others should have revealed to me. Let no one deny this! The ecological transformation has become a tempest out of control!” Wordless confirmations could be seen throughout the room. “And my daughter delights in this!”

This is the fallacy of power: ultimately it is effective only in an absolute, a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power. Paul Muad’Dib taught this lesson to the Sardaukar on the Plains of Arrakeen. His descendants have yet to learn the lesson for themselves.

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

If you focus your awareness only upon your own rightness, then you invite the forces of opposition to overwhelm you.

You Bene Gesserit call your activity of the Panoplia Prophetica a “Science of Religion.” Very well. I, a seeker after another kind of scientist, find this an appropriate definition. You do, indeed, build your own myths, but so do all societies. You I must warn, however. You are behaving as so many other misguided scientists have behaved. Your actions reveal that you wish to take something out of [away from] life. It is time you were reminded of that which you so often profess: One cannot have a single thing without its opposite.

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

The universe is just there; that’s the only way a Fedaykin can view it and remain the master of his senses. The universe neither threatens nor promises. It holds things beyond our sway: the fall of a meteor, the eruption of a spiceblow, growing old and dying. These are the realities of this universe and they must be faced regardless of how you feel about them. You cannot fend off such realities with words. They will come at you in their own wordless way and then, then you will understand what is meant by “life and death.” Understanding this, you will be filled with joy.

how garments which appear to be stillsuits, but really aren’t, have become high fashion throughout the Empire. It’s such a dominant characteristic for humans to copy the conqueror!

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.

He was a mind-slaver and his enslaving process could be understood with extreme simplicity: he transferred technical knowledge without a transfer of values.

Secher Nbiw. If she heard those words: Golden Path … only then would she remember him. Until then, he was dead. Now Leto felt truly alone.

The traditional Fremen says: “Look to the Massif,” meaning that the master science is the Law. But the new social structure is loosening those old legal restrictions; discipline grows lax. The new Fremen leaders know only their Low Catechism of ancestry plus the history which is camouflaged in the myth structure of their songs. People of the new communities are more volatile, more open; they quarrel more often and are less responsive to authority. The old sietch folk are more disciplined, more inclined to group actions and they tend to work harder; they are more careful of their resources. The old folk still believe that the orderly society is the fulfillment of the individual. The young grow away from this belief. Those remnants of the older culture which remain look at the young and say: “The death wind has etched away their past.”

Careful study of the Atreides revealed a superb talent in choosing servants. They’d known how to maintain loyalty, how to keep a fine edge on the ardor of their warriors. Idaho was not acting in character. Why?

He stepped off blindly from his position on this world. He showed us that men must do this always, choosing the uncertain instead of the certain.

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?”

Abandon certainty! That’s life’s deepest command. That’s what life’s all about. We’re a probe into the unknown, into the uncertain. Why can’t you hear Muad’Dib? If certainty is knowing absolutely an absolute future, then that’s only death disguised! Such a future becomes now! He showed you this!

Irony often masks the inability to think beyond one’s assumptions.

Fortune passes everywhere

In human affairs, nothing remains enduring; all human affairs revolve in a helix, moving around and out.

You think yourself educated, but all you are is a repository of dead lives. You don’t yet have a life of your own.

Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning.

Because of the one-pointed Time awareness in which the conventional mind remains immersed, humans tend to think of everything in a sequential, word-oriented framework. This mental trap produces very short-term concepts of effectiveness and consequences, a condition of constant, unplanned response to crises.

It’s not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

Peace has only one meaning in this Imperium. It’s the maintenance of a single way of life. You are commanded to be contented. Life must be uniform on all planets as it is in the Imperial Government. The major object of priestly study is to find the correct forms of human behavior. For this they go to the words of Muad’Dib! Tell me, Namri, are you content?” “No.” The word came out flat, spontaneous rejection. “Then do you blaspheme?” “Of course not!” “But you aren’t contented. You see, Gurney? Namri proves it to us. Every question, every problem doesn’t have a single correct answer. One must permit diversity. A monolith is unstable. Then why do you demand a single correct statement from me? Is that to be the measure of your monstrous judgment?”

“To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

Without me, mankind will sink into the mire and vanity of knowing. Through me, you and they will find the only way out of chaos: understanding by living.

There’d be plenty of work for the ecological transformation teams. It was as though the planet fought them with a conscious fury out here, the fury increasing as the transformation took in more land

Men must want to do things out of their own innermost drives. People, not commercial organizations or chains of command, are what make great civilizations work. Every civilization depends upon the quality of the individuals it produces. If you over-organize humans, over-legalize them, suppress their urge to greatness - they cannot work and their civilization collapses.

Fremen speech implies great concision, a precise sense of expression. It is immersed in the illusion of absolutes. Its assumptions are a fertile ground for absolutist religions. Furthermore, Fremen are fond of moralizing. They confront the terrifying instability of all things with institutionalized statements.

Languages build up to reflect specializations in a way of life. Each specialization may be recognized by its words, by its assumptions and sentence structures. Look for stoppages. Specializations represent places where life is being stopped, where the movement is dammed up and frozen.

Sabiha fed him prescient visions with a casual callousness, yet within her words he saw the illuminated signals: she depended upon absolutes, sought finite limits, and all because she couldn’t handle the rigors of terrible decisions which touched her own flesh. She clung to her one-eyed vision of the universe, englobing and time-freezing as it might be, because the alternatives terrified her. In contrast, Leto felt the pure movement of himself. He was a membrane collecting infinite dimensions and, because he saw those dimensions, he could make the terrible decisions.

It had no head, no extremities, no eyes, yet it could find water unerringly. With its fellows it could join body to body, locking one on another by the coarse interlacings of extruded cilia until the whole became one large sack-organism enclosing the water, walling off the “poison” from the giant which the sandtrout would become: Shai-Hulud.

“J’y suis, j’y reste!”

And his father was right: trying for some ultimate control of the universe, you only built weapons with which the universe eventually defeated you.

Good subjects must feel guilty. The guilt begins as a feeling of failure. The good autocrat provides many opportunities for failure in the populace.

Halleck looked at him then. “You’re another Truthsayer?” “Anyone can be a Truthsayer, even you,” The Preacher said. “It’s a matter of self-honesty about the nature of your own feelings. It requires that you have an inner agreement with truth which allows ready recognition.”

He had achieved harmony simply by accepting it.

My mother never had to learn my lesson.” It was Paul’s voice! “To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There’d be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.

Church and State, scientific reason and faith, the individual and his community, even progress and tradition - all of these can be reconciled in the teachings of Muad’Dib. He taught us that there exist no intransigent opposites except in the beliefs of men. Anyone can rip aside the veil of Time. You can discover the future in the past or in your own imagination. Doing this, you win back your consciousness in your inner being. You know then that the universe is a coherent whole and you are indivisible from it.

Let the future happen of itself, he thought. The only rule governing creativity is the act of creation itself.

Once more, The Preacher cleared his throat. It was a betrayal of nervousness which Muad’Dib would never have permitted. This flesh had been too long away from the old regimen of self-discipline, his mind too often betrayed into madness by the Jacurutu.

The child who refuses to travel in the father’s harness, this is the symbol of man’s most unique capability. “I do not have to be what my father was. I do not have to obey my father’s rules or even believe everything he believed. It is my strength as a human that I can make my own choices of what to believe and what not to believe, of what to be and what not to be.”

“Because the memory of being human is so rich in him. Think of all those lives, cousin. No. You can’t imagine what that is because you’ve no experience of it. But I know. I can imagine his pain. He gives more than anyone ever gave before. Our father walked into the desert trying to escape it. Alia became Abomination in fear of it. Our grandmother has only the blurred infancy of this condition, yet must use every Bene Gesserit wile to live with it - which is what Reverend Mother training amounts to anyway. But Leto! He’s all alone, never to be duplicated.”

“Well and good, cousin. She asked me if I were Abomination. I answered in the negative. That was my first treachery. You see, Ghanima escaped this, but I did not. I was forced to balance the inner lives under the pressure of excessive melange. I had to seek the active cooperation of those aroused lives within me. Doing this, I avoided the most malignant and chose a dominant helper thrust upon me by the inner awareness which was my father. I am not, in truth, my father or this helper. Then again, I am not the Second Leto.”

“Mock you? By my name, Stilgar, never would I mock you. I have given you a gift without price. I command you to carry it always next to your heart as a reminder that all humans are prone to error and all leaders are human.” A thin chuckle escaped Stilgar. “What a Naib you would have made!” “What a Naib I am! Naib of Naibs. Never forget that!”

The Bene Gesserit believed they could predict the course of evolution. But they overlooked their own changes in the course of that evolution. They assumed they would stand still while their breeding plan evolved. I have no such reflexive blindness. Look carefully at me, Farad’n, for I am no longer human.

“The body of Muad’Dib is a dry shell like that abandoned by an insect,” Leto said. “He mastered the inner world while holding the outer in contempt, and this led to catastrophe. He mastered the outer world while excluding the inner world, and this delivered his descendants to the demons. The Golden Elixir will vanish from Dune, yet Muad’Dib’s seed goes on, and his water moves our universe.” Stilgar bowed his head. Mystical things always left him in turmoil. “The beginning and the end are one,” Leto said. “You live in air but do not see it. A phase has closed. Out of that closing grows the beginning of its opposite. Thus, we will have Kralizec. Everything returns later in changed form. You have felt thoughts in your head; your descendants will feel thoughts in their bellies. Return to Sietch Tabr, Stilgar.”

“I’m a community dominated by one who was ancient and surpassingly powerful. He fathered a dynasty which endured for three thousand of our years. His name was Harum and, until his line trailed out in the congenital weaknesses and superstitions of a descendant, his subjects lived in a rhythmic sublimity. They moved unconsciously with the changes of the seasons. They bred individuals who tended to be short-lived, superstitious, and easily led by a god-king. Taken as a whole, they were a powerful people. Their survival as a species became habit.” “I don’t like the sound of that,” Farad’n said. “Nor do I, really,” Leto said. “But it’s the universe I’ll create.” “Why?” “It’s a lesson I learned on Dune. We kept the presence of death a dominant specter among the living here. By that presence, the dead changed the living. The people of such a society sink down into their bellies. But when the time comes for the opposite, when they arise, they are great and beautiful.”

“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.”

God Emperor of Dune

Enemies strengthen you. Allies weaken. I tell you this in the hope that it will help you understand why I act as I do in the full knowledge that great forces accumulate in my Empire with but one wish—the wish to destroy me. You who read these words may know full well what actually happened, but I doubt that you understand it.

“You would replace the navigators with a machine?” “It may be possible.” “What message do you carry to your people concerning this machine?” “I am to tell my people that they may continue the project only if they send him daily reports on their progress.”

Everyone in this room believes it. The Oral History does not disagree with the Formal History on important matters.

The Lord Leto lacks all innocence and naiveté. He is to be feared only when he pretends these traits. That was what my uncle said.

Some say I have no conscience. How false they are, even to themselves. I am the only conscience which has ever existed. As wine retains the perfume of its cask, I retain the essence of my most ancient genesis, and that is the seed of conscience. That is what makes me holy. I am God because I am the only one who really knows his heredity!

“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.”

You must remember that I have at my internal demand every expertise known to our history. This is the fund of energy I draw upon when I address the mentality of war. If you have not heard the moaning cries of the wounded and the dying, you do not know about war. I have heard those cries in such numbers that they haunt me. I have cried out myself in the aftermath of battle. I have suffered wounds in every epoch—wounds from fist and club and rock, from shell-studded limb and bronze sword, from the mace and the cannon, from arrows and lasguns and the silent smothering of atomic dust, from biological invasions which blacken the tongue and drown the lungs, from the swift gush of flame and the silent working of slow poisons … and more I will not recount! I have seen and felt them all. To those who dare ask why I behave as I do, I say: With my memories, I can do nothing else. I am not a coward and once I was human.

The Lord Leto said, “There is no outward spiritual freedom in such a landscape. Do you not see it? You have no open universe here with which to share. Everything is closures—doors, latches, locks!” Sister Chenoeh asked, “Has mankind no longer any need for privacy and protection?” The Lord Leto said, “When you return, tell your Sisters that I will restore the outward view. Such a landscape as this one turns you inward in search for whatever freedom your spirits can find within. Most humans are not strong enough to find freedom within.”

It is to be noted that familial conditions grow more and more similar no matter the planet of residence, a circumstance which cannot be attributed to accident. We are seeing here the emergence of a portion of the Lord Leto’s grand design. Even the poorest families are well fed, yes, but the circumstances of daily life grow increasingly static. We remind you of a statement from the Lord Leto which was reported here almost eight generations ago: “I am the only spectacle remaining in the Empire.”

In many ways, she is the most useful assistant I have ever had. I am her God. She worships me quite unquestioningly. Even when I playfully attack her faith, she takes this merely as testing. She knows herself superior to any test.

“Did Topri not inform you about the books which they say contain Your Sacred Words?” Odd how she can capitalize words only with her voice, Leto thought. He spoke curtly.

“They are young and I have not convinced them that my way is better. It’s very difficult convincing the young of anything. They’re born knowing so much.”

“A female army,” Idaho muttered. “The ultimate male-enticing force,” Leto said. “Sex always was a way of subduing the aggressive male.” “Is that what they do?” “They prevent or ameliorate excesses which could lead to more painful violence.”

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 come of age in the company of their sisters in preparation for events more profound. What you share in such companionship always prepares you for greater things. The haze of nostalgia covers their days among their sisters, making those days into something different than they were. That’s the way today changes history. All contemporaries do not inhabit the same time. The past is always changing, but few realize it.

How like a Duncan. They measure all evil against the Harkonnens. How little they know of evil. Leto said: “The Baron ate whole planets, Duncan. What could be worse than that?” “Eating the Empire.” “I am pregnant with my Empire. I’ll die giving birth to it.”

“There’s more?” “Oh, yes. He says that the all-male army has a strong tendency toward homosexual activities.” Idaho glared across the table at Moneo. “I never …” “Of course not. He is speaking about sublimation, about deflected energies and all the rest of it.” “The rest of what?” Idaho was prickly with anger at what he saw as an attack on his male self-image. “Adolescent attitudes, just boys together, jokes designed purely to cause pain, loyalty only to your pack-mates … things of that nature.”

“Ohhh, he says that when it breaks out of the adolescent-homosexual restraints, the male army is essentially rapist. Rape is often murderous and that’s not survival behavior.”

Idaho leaned toward him. “Then tell me, Atreides, how are women better soldiers than men?” “They find it easier to mature.” Idaho shook his head in bewilderment. “They have a compelling physical way of moving from adolescence into maturity,” Moneo said. “As Lord Leto says, ‘Carry a baby in you for nine months and that changes you.’ ”

“No matter how much we ask after the truth, self-awareness is often unpleasant. We do not feel kindly toward the Truthsayer.”

“Yes. He says that the all-male army was too dangerous to its civilian support base.” “That’s crazy! Without the army, there would’ve been no …” “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.” “How is that dangerous to the … civilians?” Idaho took a bite of the melon, found it ripened perfectly. “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.”

It has not occurred to you that your ancestors were survivors and that the survival itself sometimes involved savage decisions, a kind of wanton brutality which civilized humankind works very hard to suppress. What price will you pay for that suppression? Will you accept your own extinction?

“You haven’t convinced me that a female army is best.” “They continue the species.” At last, Idaho’s frustration and anger had an object. “Is that what I was doing with them that first night—breeding?” “Possibly. The Fish Speakers take no precautions against pregnancy.”

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?

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.

“I fear the unknown, Lord.” “But I don’t fear it. Tell me why!”

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 apportion the wealth. And they know they must control inheritance or slowly let the power melt away. Now, do you understand Leto’s Peace?

“You see everything that we know … all of it as it once was—unknown! A surprise to you … a surprise must be merely something new for you to know?”

“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.”

“It will have animal awareness and a new cunning. The spice will be more dangerous to seek and far more perilous to keep.” Moneo had looked up at the cavern’s rocky ceiling, his imagination probing through the rock to the surface. “Everything desert again, Lord?” “Watercourses will fill with sand. Crops will be choked and killed. Trees will be covered by great moving dunes. The sand-death will spread until … until a subtle signal is heard in the barren lands.” “What signal, Lord?” “The signal for the next cycle, the coming of the Maker, the coming of Shai-Hulud.”

Although much sought after, truth can be dangerous to the seeker. Myths and reassuring lies are much easier to find and believe. If you find a truth, even a temporary one, it can demand that you make painful changes. Conceal your truths within words. Natural ambiguity will protect you then.

“I speak of a disease of government which was caught by the Greeks who spread it to the Romans who distributed it so far and wide that it never has completely died out.” “Does my Lord speak riddles?” “No riddles. I hate this thing, but it saved us. Ghani and I formed powerful internal alliances with ancestors who followed the pharaonic model. They helped us form a mingled identity within that long-dormant mob.”

I am not a leader nor even a guide. A god. Remember that. I am quite different from leaders and guides. Gods need take no responsibility for anything except genesis. Gods accept everything and thus accept nothing. Gods must be identifiable yet remain anonymous. Gods do not need a spirit world. My spirits dwell within me, answerable to my slightest summons. I share with you, because it pleases me to do so, what I have learned about them and through them. They are my truth.

It was not until the instant of this experience that I understood what he had meant by the wordless truth. It happened, yet I cannot describe it.

They will seek truth. But the truth always carries the ambiguity of the words used to express it.

You see? I share it all with you, even the greatest mystery of all time, the mystery by which I compose my life. I reveal it to you in words: “The only past which endures lies wordlessly within you.”

“There is a delightful myth about the design of Onn. I foster and promote the myth. It is said that once there lived a people whose ruler was required to walk among them once a year in total darkness, without weapons or armor. The mythical ruler wore a luminescent suit while he made his walk through the night-shrouded throng of his subjects. And his subjects—they wore black for the occasion and were never searched for weapons.”

What a marvelous creature, this Hwi Noree, he thought. She appeared the epitome of goodness, obviously bred and conditioned for this quality by her Ixian masters with their careful calculation of the effect this would have on the God Emperor. Out of his thronging ancestral memories, Leto could see her as an idealized nun, kindly and self-sacrificing, all sincerity. It was her most basic nature, the place where she lived. She found it easiest to be truthful and open, capable of shading this only to prevent pain for others. He saw this latter trait as the deepest change the Bene Gesserit had been able to effect in her. Hwi’s real manner remained outgoing, sensitive and naturally sweet. Leto could find little sense of manipulative calculation in her. She appeared immediately responsive and wholesome, excellent at listening (another Bene Gesserit attribute). There was nothing openly seductive about her, yet this very fact made her profoundly seductive to Leto.

“Of course I forgive you. That is your God’s function. Your crime is forgiven. However, your stupidity requires a response.”

“These are strange words, m’Lord. How do I take their meaning?” “Their meaning is whatever speaks to you. Are you incapable of listening?” “I have ears, m’Lord!”

Membership in a conspiracy, as in an army, frees people from the sense of personal responsibility.

That is the beginning of knowledge—the discovery of something we do not understand.

“I have no allies,” he said. “Only servants, students and enemies.”

As you well know, the secret of community lies in suppression of the incompatible.

The machine cannot anticipate every problem of importance to humans. It is the difference between serial bits and an unbroken continuum. We have the one; machines are confined to the other.

“A well-maintained machine can be more reliable than a human servant,” Leto said. “We can trust machines not to indulge in emotional distractions.”

“Specialists are not to be trusted,” Leto said. “Specialists are masters of exclusion, experts in the narrow.”

I point out to you, Marcus Claire Luyseyal, a lesson from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines.

The trance-state of prophecy is like no other visionary experience. It is not a retreat from the raw exposure of the senses (as are many trance-states) but an immersion in a multitude of new movements. Things move. It is an ultimate pragmatism in the midst of Infinity, a demanding consciousness where you come at last into the unbroken awareness that the universe moves of itself, that it changes, that its rules change, that nothing remains permanent or absolute throughout all such movement, that mechanical explanations for anything can work only within precise confinements and, once the walls are broken down, the old explanations shatter and dissolve, blown away by new movements. The things you see in this trance are sobering, often shattering. They demand your utmost effort to remain whole and, even so, you emerge from that state profoundly changed.

I could breed something like her and prepare that one for me … but that would not be my gentle Hwi. And what of the Golden Path while he indulged in such selfish goals? To hell with the Golden Path! Have these folly-bound idiots ever thought once of me? Not once! But that was not true. Hwi thought of him. She shared his torture. These were thoughts of madness and he tried to put them away while his senses reported the soft movement of the guards and the flow of water beneath his chamber.

“You’re not my father,” the child said. Whirling away, he raced back up the street and vanished around a corner. Idaho turned and scowled at Siona, almost afraid to ask the question: Was that a child of my predecessor? He knew the answer without asking—that familiar face, the genotype carried true. Myself as a child. Realization left him with an empty feeling, a sense of frustration. What is my responsibility?

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 escape into chaos. Believe me, the memory of Leto’s Peace shall abide with them forever. They will seek their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation.

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.

“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.”

“My houris tame the males,” Leto said. “It is domestication, a thing that females know from eons of necessity.” Idaho stared wordlessly at Leto’s cowled face. “To tame,” Leto said. “To fit into some orderly survival pattern. Women learned it at the hands of men; now men learn it at the hands of women.” “But you said …” “My houris often submit to a form of rape at first only to convert this into a deep and binding mutual dependence.” “Dammit! You’re …” “Binding, Duncan! Binding.” “I don’t feel bound to …” “Education takes time. You are the ancient norm against which the new can be measured.”

The layered society is an ultimate invitation to violence. It does not fall apart. It explodes.”

You know how violence seeks me out. That is one of my functions. It is unfortunate that those I admire and love must suffer because of this.

“I modify the human desire for war.” “People don’t want war!” “They want chaos. War is the most readily available form of chaos.”

I am the only reality and, as you differ from me, you lose reality. The more curious I become, the less curious are those who worship me. Religion suppresses curiosity. What I do subtracts from the worshipper. Thus it is that eventually I will do nothing, giving it all back to frightened people who will find themselves on that day alone and forced to act for themselves.

“Rape is foreign to women, Duncan. You ask for a sex-rooted behavioral difference? There’s one.”

“Yes, but I’ve also walked about in your city and I’ve watched your people. Your people are aggressive!” “You see, Duncan? Peace encourages aggression.” “And you say that your Golden Path …” “Is not precisely peace. It is tranquility, a fertile ground for the growth of rigid classes and many other forms of aggression.” “You talk riddles!” “I talk accumulated observations which tell me that the peaceful posture is the posture of the defeated. It is the posture of the victim. Victims invite aggression.” “Your damned enforced tranquility! What good does it do?” “If there is no enemy, one must be invented. The military force which is denied an external target always turns against its own people.”

“My brides,” Leto said. “I welcome you to Siaynoq.” Idaho glanced up at Leto, saw the dark eyes glistening, the radiant expression. Leto had said: “This cursed holiness!” But he basked in it.

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.

“It was the Fremen who deified my father, the great Muad’Dib. Although he doesn’t really care to be called great.” “But were the Fremen …” “Were they right? My dearest Hwi, they were sensitive to the uses of power and they were greedy to maintain their ascendancy.” “I find this … disturbing, Lord.” “I can see that. You don’t like the idea that becoming a god could be that simple, as though anyone could do it.”

“But the only people I have considered eliminating are the Bene Gesserit.” Her shock was too great for words. “They are so close to what they should be and yet so far,” he said. She found her voice. “But the Oral History says …” “The religion of the Reverend Mothers, yes. Once they designed specific religions for specific societies. They called it engineering. How does that strike you?”

“Any religion circles like a planet around a sun which it must use for its energy, upon which it depends for its very existence.” Her voice came barely above a whisper: “What do you see in your sun, Lord?” “A universe of many windows through which I may peer. Whatever the window frames, that is what I see.” “The future?” “The universe is timeless at its roots and contains therefore all times and all futures.” “It’s true then,” she said. “You saw a thing which this—” she gestured at his long, ribbed body—“prevents.”

“I would not ask you to be the bride of a god.” Her eyes went wide with shock.

“This is the horror which my father could not face and which he tried to prevent: the infinite division and subdivision of a blind identity.” She lowered her hands and whispered: “You will be conscious?” “In a way … but mute. A little pearl of my awareness will go with every sandworm and every sandtrout—knowing yet unable to move a single cell, aware in an endless dream.” She shuddered.

You talk of prisons and police and legalities, the perfect illusions behind which a prosperous power structure can operate while observing, quite accurately, that it is above its own laws.

Leto grinned. “All of my most trusted administrators were rebels at one time.”

“I try to dispense with casual laws and prisons wherever possible.” “You have to have some prisons!” “Do I? Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They’re a kind of job insurance.”

Information is frozen in patterns, Duncan. We can use one pattern to solve another pattern. Flow patterns are the hardest to recognize and understand.

Idaho glared at him, then: “I don’t understand your government, your Empire, anything. The more I find out, the more I realize that I don’t know what’s going on.” “How fortunate that you have discovered the way of wisdom,” Leto said. “What?” Idaho’s baffled outrage raised his voice to a battlefield roar which filled the small room.

Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available.

“There is a deep purpose built into the new Ixian Ambassador.” “Certainly there is. Moneo, has it not struck you as odd how much Hwi, the gentle Hwi, represents a mirror of the redoubtable Malky? His opposite in everything, including sex.”

Drug knowledge originated mostly with males because they tend to be more venturesome—an outgrowth of male aggression. You’ve read your Orange Catholic Bible, thus you know the story of Eve and the apple. Here’s an interesting fact about that story: Eve was not the first to pluck and sample the apple. Adam was first and he learned by this to put the blame on Eve. My story tells you something about how our societies find a structural necessity for sub-groups.

“Principles,” he said, “are what you fight for. Most men go through a lifetime unchallenged, except at the final moment. They have so few unfriendly arenas in which to test themselves.” “They have you,” she said. “But I am so powerful,” he said. “I am the equivalent of suicide. Who would seek certain death?” “Madmen … or desperate ones. Rebels?”

The Ixians do not recognize that machine-makers always run the risk of becoming totally machine. This is ultimate sterility. Machines always fail … given time. And when these machines failed there would be nothing left, no life at all.

“This wise man observed that wealth is a tool of freedom. But the pursuit of wealth is the way to slavery.” “The Guild and the Sisterhood enslave themselves!” “And the Ixians and the Tleilaxu and all the others. Oh, they ferret out a bit of hidden melange from time to time and that keeps the attention fixed. A very interesting game, don’t you think?”

“It is the most profound experience of any creature,” he said. “Short of death come the things which risk and mirror it—life-threatening diseases, injuries and accidents … childbirth for a woman … and once it was combat for the males.” “But your Fish Speakers are …” “They teach about survival,” he said. Her eyes went wide with understanding. “The survivors. Of course!”

Each cycle is a reaction to the preceding cycle. If you think about the shape of my Empire, then you know the shape of the next cycle.

“The flesh grows, but the psyche does not grow,” he said. “The psyche?” “That reflexive awareness which tells us how very alive we can become. You know it well, Hwi. It is that sense which tells you how to be true to yourself.” “Your religion is not enough,” she said. “No religion can ever be enough. It is a matter of choice—a single, lonely choice. Do you understand now why your friendship and your company mean so much to me?” She blinked back tears, nodding, then: “Why don’t people know this?” “Because the conditions don’t permit it.” “The conditions which you dictate?” “Precisely. Look throughout my Empire. Do you see the shape?” She closed her eyes, thinking. “One wishes to sit by a river and fish every day?” he asked. “Excellent. That is this life. You desire to sail a small boat across an island sea and visit strangers? Superb! What else is there to do?” “Travel in space?” she asked and there was a defiant note in her voice. She opened her eyes. “You have observed that the Guild and I do not allow this.” “You do not allow it.” “True. If the Guild disobeys me, it gets no spice.” “And holding people planetbound keeps them out of mischief.” “It does something more important than that. It fills them with a longing to travel. It creates a need to make far voyages and see strange things. Eventually, travel comes to mean freedom.” “But the spice dwindles,” she said. “And freedom becomes more precious every day.”

“Anything and anyone can fail,” he said, “but brave good friends help.”

“They usually can be made to work. A bad administrator, on the other hand, hesitates, diddles around, asks for committees, for research and reports. Eventually, he acts in ways which create serious problems.” “But don’t they sometimes need more information to make …” “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.”

“You have to appreciate life before you want to preserve it,” she said. “And it’s the survivors who maintain the most light and poignant hold upon the beauties of living. Women know this more often than men because birth is the reflection of death.”

“Without readily available violence, men have few ways of testing how they will meet that final experience,” he said. “Something is missing. The psyche does not grow. What is it people say about Leto’s Peace?”

“People have to be prepared for saints,” he said. “Otherwise, they simply become followers, supplicants, beggars and weakened sycophants forever in the shadow of the saint. People are destroyed by this because it nurtures only weakness.”

Never attempt to reason with people who know they are right!

“With Hwi? But you surely cannot …” “Memories of emotions are never enough, Moneo.” “Are you telling me that you are indulging yourself in a …” “Indulgence? Certainly not! But the tripod upon which Eternity swings is composed of flesh and thought and emotion. I felt that I had been reduced to flesh and thought.” “She has worked some kind of witchery,” Moneo accused. “Of course she has. And how grateful I am for it. If we deny the need for thought, Moneo, as some do, we lose the powers of reflection;

“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

“There’s a time, Leto, a time when you’re alive. A time when you’re supposed to be alive. It can have a magic, that time, while you’re living it. You know you’re never going to see a time like that again.” Leto blinked, touched by the Duncan’s distress. The words were evocative. Idaho raised both hands, palms up, to chest-height, a beggar asking for something he knew he could not receive. “Then … one day you wake up and you remember dying … and you remember the axlotl tank … and the Tleilaxu nastiness which awakened you … and it’s supposed to start all over again. But it doesn’t. It never does, Leto. That’s a crime!” “I have taken away the magic?” “Yes!”

“Paradox is a pointer telling you to look beyond it. If paradoxes bother you, that betrays your deep desire for absolutes. The relativist treats a paradox merely as interesting, perhaps amusing or even, dreadful thought, educational.”

“Why am I here?” Directly to the point! She would not deviate. Most of the Atreides had been that way, he thought. It was a characteristic which he hoped to maintain in the breeding of them. It spoke of a strong inner sense of identity.

“I never chose you to govern,” she said. “But you strengthen me.” “How?” “By opposing me. I sharpen my claws on the likes of you.”

He addressed her silent scowl: “There has never before been a government exactly like mine. Not in all of our history. I am responsible only to myself, exacting payment in full for what I have sacrificed.” “Sacrificed!” she sneered, but he heard the doubts. “Every despot says something like that. You’re responsible only to yourself!” “Which makes every living thing my responsibility. I watch over you through these times.” “Through what times?” “The times that might have been and then no more.”

“I rule by the right of loneliness, Siona. My loneliness is part-freedom and part-slavery. It says I cannot be bought by any human group. My slavery to you says that I will serve all of you to the best of my lordly abilities.”

“The young generally are incapable of making hard decisions unless those decisions are associated with immediate violence and the consequent sharp flow of adrenalin,” Leto had explained.

She said: “My Uncle Malky used to say that love was a bad bargain because you get no guarantees.” “Your Uncle Malky was a wise man.” “He was stupid! Love needs no guarantees.” A smile twitched at the corners of Idaho’s mouth. She grinned up at him. “You know it’s love when you want to give joy and damn the consequences.”

“Religious institutions perpetuate a mortal master-servant relationship,” Leto said. “They create an arena which attracts prideful human power-seekers with all of their nearsighted prejudices!”

You cannot succeed by taking hostages. That is a form of enslavement. One kind of human cannot own another kind of human. This universe will not permit it.

“The Atreides lived in the service of the people they governed. The measure of their government was found in the lives of the governed. Thus, the Duncans always want to know how the people live.”

“You are servants unto God, not servants unto servants!”

“Ho! You ask after my faith. Well, now—I believe that something cannot emerge from nothing without divine intervention.” His answer puzzled her. “How is that an …” “Natura non facit saltus,” he said. She shook her head, not understanding the ancient allusion which had sprung to his lips. Leto translated: “Nature makes no leaps.”

“Perverts don’t perpetuate!” Moneo spoke in a soothing tone, but his words shook Idaho. “I will tell you this only once. Homosexuals have been among the best warriors in our history, the berserkers of last resort. They were among our best priests and priestesses. Celibacy was no accident in religions. It is also no accident that adolescents make the best soldiers.” “That’s perversion!” “Quite right. Military commanders have known about the perverted displacement of sex into pain for thousands upon thousands of centuries.” “Is that what the Great Lord Leto’s doing?” Still mild, Moneo said: “Violence requires that you inflict pain and suffer it. How

Idaho cleared his throat. “How did you …” “He has been breeding us for a long time, Duncan, strengthening many things in us. He has bred us for speed, for intelligence, for self-restraint, for sensitivity. You’re … you’re just an older model.”

“Thrown sand is a profound gesture. It says: ‘We share the same burden. Sand is our only enemy. This is what we drink. The hand that holds sand holds no weapon.’ Do you understand this?”

“And their eye for beauty was limited to that which was useful. I never met a greedy Fremen.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “In the old days, everything you took into the desert was a necessity and that was all you took. Your life is no longer free of possessions, Siona, or you would not have asked about a signal device.”

Lord Leto never responded to prayer. He said the Lord Leto looked on prayer as attempted coercion, a form of violence against the chosen god, telling the immortal what to do: Give me a miracle, God, or I won’t believe in you!

“The Atreides art is the art of ruling without hysteria, the art of being responsible for the uses of power.”

“The three legs of the agreement-tripod are desire, data and doubt. Accuracy and honesty have little to do with it.”

“What do you mean—desire, data and doubt?” “Desire brings the participants together. Data set the limits of their dialogue. Doubt frames the questions.”

“There’s a lesson in that, too. What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there’s the real danger. Look at how long you walked across this desert without thinking about your face mask.”

“The igniters of thought,” he said. “I can recognize the slightest behavioral nuance for its emotional origins.”

“Then what have I always failed to learn?” “How to trust.” Idaho pushed himself back from the table and glared at Moneo. When Idaho’s voice came, it was harsh and rasping: “I’d say I trusted too much.” Moneo was implacable. “But how do you trust?” “What do you mean?” Moneo put his hands in his lap. “You choose male companions for their ability to fight and die on the side of right as you see it. You choose females who can complement this masculine view of yourself. You allow for no differences which can come from good will.”

Most civilization is based on cowardice. It’s so easy to civilize by teaching cowardice. You water down the standards which would lead to bravery. You restrain the will. You regulate the appetites. You fence in the horizons. You make a law for every movement. You deny the existence of chaos. You teach even the children to breathe slowly. You tame.

Moneo put down a surge of anger. He felt excluded from this conversation, an object of amusement by two superior beings. Malky and the God Emperor were almost like two old friends reliving the pleasures of a mutual past.

SIONA: What’s the difference? Leto or Worm, they are one body now. MONEO: But they are two separate beings—Leto the Emperor and The Worm Who Is God.

You cannot understand history unless you understand its flowings, its currents and the ways leaders move within such forces. A leader tries to perpetuate the conditions which demand his leadership. Thus, the leader requires the outsider. I caution you to examine my career with care. I am both leader and outsider. Do not make the mistake of assuming that I only created the Church which was the State. That was my function as leader and I had many historical models to use as pattern. For a clue to my role as outsider, look at the arts of my time. The arts are barbaric. The favorite poetry? The Epic. The popular dramatic ideal? Heroism. Dances? Wildly abandoned. From Moneo’s viewpoint, he is correct in describing this as dangerous. It stimulates the imagination. It makes people feel the lack of that which I have taken from them. What did I take from them? The right to participate in history.

“You live where the fear of being and the love of being are combined, all in one person,” she said. He could not blink. “You are a mystic,” she said, “gentle to yourself only because you are in the middle of that universe looking outward, looking in ways that others cannot. You fear to share this, yet you want to share it more than anything else.” “What have you seen?” he whispered. “I have no inner eye, no inner voices,” she said. “But I have seen my Lord Leto, whose soul I love, and I know the only thing that you truly understand.” He broke from her gaze, fearful of what she might say. The trembling of his hands could be felt all through his front segment. “Love, that is what you understand,” she said. “Love, and that is all of it.”

In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshly sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use it’s proper name: Temporary.

They think they keep the essence of the old ways. This is a failure of all museums. Something fades; it dries out of the exhibits and is gone. The people who administer the museum and the people who come to bend over the cases and stare—few of them sense this missing thing. It drove the engine of life in earlier times. When the life is gone, it is gone.

“Why did you do it?” Idaho whispered. “My gift,” Leto said. “Nobody will find the descendants of Siona. The Oracle cannot see her.” “What?” They spoke in unison, leaning close to hear his fading voice. “I give you a new kind of time without parallels,” he said. “It will always diverge. There will be no concurrent points on its curves. I give you the Golden Path. That is my gift. Never again will you have the kinds of concurrence that once you had.”

If you want immortality, then deny form. Whatever has form has mortality. Beyond form is the formless, the immortal.

“He created a new kind of mimesis,” she said, “a new biological imitation. He knew he had succeeded. He could not see me in his futures.” “What are you?” Idaho demanded. “I’m the new Atreides.” “Atreides!” It was a curse in Idaho’s voice.

Idaho spoke in a hushed whisper: “The ancestors, all of …” “The multitude is there but I walk silently among them and no one sees me. The old images are gone and only the essence remains to light his Golden Path.”

“It’s not an ordinary rebellion,” he says. That brings me back! Fool. 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. That’s why I can convert them so easily.

“No one can deal with every surprise.” “Surprise? Who’s talking about surprise? Chaos is no surprise. It has predictable characteristics. For one thing, it carries away order and strengthens the forces at the extremes.” “Isn’t that what radicals are trying to do? Aren’t they trying to shake things up so they can grab control?” “That’s what they think they’re doing. Actually, they’re creating new extremists, new radicals and they are continuing the old process.” “What about a radical who sees the complexities and comes at you that way?” “That’s no radical. That’s a rival for leadership.” “But what do you do?” “You co-opt them or kill them. That’s how the struggle for leadership originated, at the grunt level.” “Yes, but what about messiahs?” “Like my father?” The Duncan does not like this question. He knows that in a very special way I am my father. He knows I can speak with my father’s voice and persona, that the memories are precise, never edited and inescapable. Reluctantly, he says: “Well … if you want.” “Duncan, I am all of them and I know. There has never been a truly selfless rebel, just hypocrites—conscious hypocrites or unconscious hypocrites, it’s all the same.”

“You will think it strange that I, with my powers, can speak of luck and chance,” Leto had said. The Duncan had been angry. “You leave nothing to chance! I know you!” “How naive. Chance is the nature of our universe.”

He did not even think about whether Leto knew of the lasgun. This Imperium had wandered too far from the old Atreides morality, had become an impersonal juggernaut which crushed the innocent in its path. It had to be ended!

I told him, “Radicals are only to be feared when you try to suppress them. You must demonstrate that you will use the best of what they offer.”

Siona leaned over the table and read: “A strand of Ghanima’s hair with a starflower blossom which she once brought me.” Looking up at Nayla, Siona said: “Our God Emperor is revealed as a sentimentalist. That is a weakness I had not expected.”

“Shut up, Topri,” Siona said. “I am trying to teach you a lesson. You don’t believe in anything, not even in yourself.” “But I …” “Be still, I say! Nayla believes. I believe. This is what holds us together. Belief.” Topri was astonished. “Belief? You believe in …” “Not in the God Emperor, you fool! We believe that a higher power will settle with the tyrant worm. We are that higher power.”

We are myth-killers, you and I, Moneo. That’s the dream we share. I assure you from a God’s Olympian perch that government is a shared myth. When the myth dies, the government dies.

It has occurred to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.

Idaho did not like the sound of fanaticism in this Friend’s voice, but he felt secure in the integrity of the Atreides. They could appear cynical and cruel to outsiders and enemies, but to their own people they were just and they were loyal. Above all else, the Atreides were loyal to their own.

Idaho relaxed slightly. As an old Atreides hand, superbly trained by them, he had found it easy to determine several things from this encounter. These two had been heavily conditioned to a fanatic obedience. If a cibus mask could hide the identity of that woman, there had to be many more whose bodies were very similar. All of this spoke of dangers around Leto which still required the old and subtle services of spies and an imaginative arsenal of weapons.

But Siona is … Siona. That is why I made no move to stop the wolves. It would have been wrong to do that. The D-wolves are but an extension of my purpose and my purpose is to be the greatest predator ever known.

The Golden Path demands it. And what is the Golden Path? you ask. It is the survival of humankind, nothing more nor less. We who have prescience, we who know the pitfalls in our human futures, this has always been our responsibility. Survival. How you feel about this—your petty woes and joys, even your agonies and raptures—seldom concerns us.

As the poet, Lon Bramlis, has said: “We are the fountain of surprises!”