Dune Messiah (2 page)

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Authors: Frank Herbert

Tags: #Dune (Imaginary place), #Fantasy, #General, #Science Fiction, #Fiction

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As you read
Dune Messiah
, enjoy the adventure story, the suspense, the marvelous characterizations and exotic settings. Then go back and read it again. You’ll discover something new on each pass through the pages. And you’ll get to know Frank Herbert better as a human being.
 
 
Brian Herbert
Seattle, Washington
October 16, 2007
EXCERPTS FROM THE DEATH CELL INTERVIEW WITH BRONSO OF IX—
Q: What led you to take your particular approach to a history of Muad’dib?
A: Why should I answer your questions?
Q: Because I will preserve your words.
A: Ahhh! The ultimate appeal to a historian!
Q: Will you cooperate then?
A: Why not? But you’ll never understand what inspired my Analysis of History. Never. You Priests have too much at stake to …
Q: Try me.
A: Try you? Well, again … why not? I was caught by the shallowness of the common view of this planet which arises from its popular name: Dune. Not Arrakis, notice, but Dune. History is obsessed by Dune as desert, as birthplace of the Fremen. Such history concentrates on the customs which grew out of water scarcity and the fact that Fremen led semi-nomadic lives in stillsuits which recovered most of their body’s moisture.
Q: Are these things not true, then?
A: They are surface truth. As well ignore what lies beneath that surface as … as try to understand my birthplanet, Ix, without exploring how we derived our name from the fact that we are the ninth planet of our sun. No … no. It is not enough to see Dune as a place of savage storms. It is not enough to talk about the threat posed by the gigantic sandworms.
Q: But such things are crucial to the Arrakeen character!
A: Crucial? Of course. But they produce a one-view planet in the same way that Dune is a one-crop planet because it is the sole and exclusive source of the spice, melange.
Q: Yes. Let us hear you expand on the sacred spice.
A: Sacred! As with all things sacred, it gives with one hand and takes with the other. It extends life and allows the adept to foresee his future, but it ties him to a cruel addiction and marks his eyes as yours are marked: total blue without any white. Your eyes, your organs of
sight
, become one thing without contrast, a single view. Q: Such heresy brought you to this cell!
A: I was brought to this cell by your Priests. As with all priests, you learned early to call the truth heresy.
Q: You are here because you dared to say that Paul Atreides lost something essential to his humanity before he could become Muad’dib.
A: Not to speak of his losing his father here in the Harkonnen war.
Nor the death of Duncan Idaho, who sacrificed himself that Paul and the Lady Jessica could escape.
Q: Your cynicism is duly noted.
A: Cynicism! That, no doubt is a greater crime than heresy. But, you see, I’m not really a cynic. I’m just an observer and commentator. I saw true nobility in Paul as he fled into the desert with his pregnant mother. Of course, she was a great asset as well as a burden. Q: The flaw in you historians is that you’ll never leave well enough alone. You see true nobility in the Holy Muad’dib, but you must append a cynical footnote. It’s no wonder that the Bene Gesserit also denounce you.
A: You Priests do well to make common cause with the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. They, too, survive by concealing what they do. But they cannot conceal the fact that the Lady Jessica was a Bene Gesserit-trained adept. You know she trained her son in the sisterhood’s ways. My
crime
was to discuss this as a phenomenon, to expound upon their mental arts and their genetic program. You don’t want attention called to the fact that Muad’dib was the Sisterhood’s hoped for captive messiah, that he was their
kwisatz haderach
before he was your prophet.
Q: If I had any doubts about your death sentence, you have dispelled them.
A: I can only die once.
Q: There are deaths and there are deaths.
A: Beware lest you make a martyr of
me.
I do not think Muad’dib … Tell me, does Muad’dib know what you do in these dungeons?
Q: We do not trouble the Holy Family with trivia.
A: (Laughter) And for this Paul Atreides fought his way to a niche among the Fremen! For this he learned to control and ride the sandworm! It was a mistake to answer your questions.
Q: But I will keep my promise to preserve your words.
A: Will you really? Then listen to me carefully, you Fremen degenerate, you Priest with no god except yourself! You have much to answer for. It was a Fremen ritual which gave Paul his first massive dose of melange, thereby opening him to visions of his futures. It was a Fremen ritual by which that same melange awakened the unborn Alia in the Lady Jessica’s womb. Have you considered what it meant for Alia to be born into this universe fully cognitive, possessed of all her mother’s memories and knowledge? No rape could be more terrifying.
Q: Without the sacred melange Muad’dib would not have become leader of all Fremen. Without her holy experience Alia would not be Alia.
A: Without your blind Fremen cruelty you would not be a priest. Ahhh, I know you Fremen. You think Muad’dib is yours because he mated with Chani, because he adopted Fremen customs. But he was an Atreides first and he was trained by a Bene Gesserit adept. He possessed disciplines totally unknown to you. You thought he brought you new organization and a new mission. He promised to transform your desert planet into a water-rich paradise. And while he dazzled you with such visions, he took your virginity!
Q: Such heresy does not change the fact that the Ecological Transformation of Dune proceeds apace.
A: And I committed the heresy of tracing the roots of that transformation, of exploring the consequences. That battle out there on the Plains of Arrakeen may have taught the universe that Fremen could defeat Imperial Sardaukar, but what else did it teach? When the stellar empire of the Corrino Family became a Fremen empire under Muad’dib, what else did the Empire become? Your Jihad only took twelve years, but what a lesson it taught. Now, the Empire understands the sham of Muad’dib’s marriage to the Princess Irulan!
Q: You dare accuse Muad’dib of sham!
A: Though you kill me for it, it’s not heresy. The Princess became his consort, not his mate. Chani, his little Fremen darling—she’s his mate. Everyone knows this. Irulan was the key to a throne, nothing more.
Q: It’s easy to see why those who conspire against Muad’dib use your Analysis of History as their rallying argument!
A: I’ll not persuade you; I know that. But the argument of the conspiracy came before my Analysis. Twelve years of Muad’dib’s Jihad created the argument. That’s what united the ancient power groups and ignited the conspiracy against Muad’dib.
Such a rich store of myths enfolds Paul Muad’dib, the Mentat Emperor, and his sister, Alia, it is difficult to see the real persons behind these veils. But there were, after all, a man born Paul Atreides and a woman born Alia. Their flesh was subject to space and time. And even though their oracular powers placed them beyond the usual limits of time and space, they came from human stock. They experienced real events which left real traces upon a real universe. To understand them, it must be seen that their catastrophe was the catastrophe of all mankind. This work is dedicated, then, not to Muad’dib or his sister, but to their heirs—to all of us.
 
—DEDICATION IN THE MUAD’DIB CONCORDANCE AS COPIED FROM THE TABLA MEMORIUM OF THE MAHDI SPIRIT CULT
 
 
Muad’dib’s Imperial reign generated more historians than any other era in human history. Most of them argued a particular viewpoint, jealous and sectarian, but it says something about the peculiar impact of this man that he aroused such passions on so many diverse worlds.
Of course, he contained the ingredients of history, ideal and idealized. This man, born Paul Atreides in an ancient Great Family, received the deep
prana-bindu
training from the Lady Jessica, his Bene Gesserit mother, and had through this a superb control over muscles and nerves. But more than that, he was a
mentat
, an intellect whose capacities surpassed those of the religiously proscribed mechanical computers used by the ancients.
Above all else, Muad’dib was the
kwisatz haderach
which the Sisterhood’s breeding program had sought across thousands of generations.
The kwisatz haderach, then, the one who could be “many places at once,” this prophet, this man through whom the Bene Gesserit hoped to control human destiny—this man became Emperor Muad’dib and executed a marriage of convenience with a daughter of the Padishah Emperor he had defeated.
Think on the paradox, the failure implicit in this moment, for you surely have read other histories and know the surface facts. Muad’dib’s wild Fremen did, indeed, overwhelm the Padishah Shad-dam IV. They toppled the Sardaukar legions, the allied forces of the Great Houses, the Harkonnen armies and the mercenaries bought with money voted in the Landsraad. He brought the Spacing Guild to its knees and placed his own sister, Alia, on the religious throne the Bene Gesserit had thought their own.
He did all these things and more.
Muad’dib’s Qizarate missionaries carried their religious war across space in a Jihad whose major impetus endured only twelve standard years, but in that time, religious colonialism brought all but a fraction of the human universe under one rule.
He did this because capture of Arrakis, that planet known more often as Dune, gave him a monopoly over the ultimate coin of the realm—the geriatric spice, melange, the poison that gave life.
Here was another ingredient of ideal history: a material whose psychic chemistry unraveled Time. Without melange, the Sisterhood’s Reverend Mothers could not perform their feats of observation and human control. Without melange, the Guild’s Steersmen could not navigate across space. Without melange, billions upon billions of Imperial citizens would die of addictive withdrawal.
Without melange, Paul-Muad’dib could not prophesy.
We know this moment of supreme power contained failure. There can be only one answer, that completely accurate and total prediction is lethal.
Other histories say Muad’dib was defeated by obvious plotters—the Guild, the Sisterhood and the scientific amoralists of the Bene Tleilax with their Face-Dancer disguises. Other histories point out the spies in Muad’dib’s household. They make much of the Dune Tarot which clouded Muad’dib’s powers of prophecy. Some show how Muad’dib was made to accept the services of a
ghola
, the flesh brought back from the dead and trained to destroy him. But certainly they must know this ghola was Duncan Idaho, the Atreides lieutenant who perished saving the life of the young Paul.
Yet, they delineate the Qizarate cabal guided by Korba the Panegyrist. They take us step by step through Korba’s plan to make a martyr of Muad’dib and place the blame on Chani, the Fremen concubine.
How can any of this explain the facts as history has revealed them? They cannot. Only through the lethal nature of prophecy can we understand the failure of such enormous and far-seeing power.
Hopefully, other historians will learn something from this revelation.
 
 
—Analysis of History: Muad’dib
by Bronso of Ix
There exists no separation between gods and men; one blends softly casual into the other.
 
—PROVERBS OF MUAD’DIB
 
 
Despite the murderous nature of the plot he hoped to devise, the thoughts of Scytale, the Tleilaxu Face Dancer, returned again and again to rueful compassion.
I shall regret causing death and misery to Muad’dib,
he told himself. He kept this benignity carefully hidden from his fellow conspirators. Such feelings told him, though, that he found it easier to identify with the victim than with the attackers—a thing characteristic of the Tleilaxu.
Scytale stood in bemused silence somewhat apart from the others. The argument about psychic poison had been going on for some time now. It was energetic and vehement, but polite in that blindly compulsive way adepts of the Great Schools always adopted for matters close to their dogma.
“When you think you have him skewered, right then you’ll find him unwounded!”
That was the old Reverend Mother of the Bene Gesserit, Gaius Helen Mohiam, their hostess here on Wallach IX. She was a black-robed stick figure, a witch crone seated in a floater chair at Scytale’s left. Her aba hood had been thrown back to expose a leathery face beneath silver hair. Deeply pocketed eyes stared out of skull-mask features.
They were using a
mirabhasa
language, honed phalange consonants and joined vowels. It was an instrument for conveying fine emotional subtleties. Edric, the Guild Steersman, replied to the Reverend Mother now with a vocal curtsy contained in a sneer—a lovely touch of disdainful politeness.

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