Highlights from Children of Dune by Frank Herbert
Highlights from this book
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‘Fewer sandtrout – the ecological transformation of the planet…’ ‘They resist it, of course,’ she said, and now she began to understand the fear in his voice, drawn into this thing against her will. ‘When the sandtrout go, so do all the worms,’ he said. ‘The tribes must be warned.’ ‘No more spice,’ she said. Words merely touched high points of the system danger which they both saw hanging over human intrusion into Dune’s ancient relationships. ‘It’s the thing Alia knows,’ he said. ‘It’s why she gloats.’ ‘How can you be sure of that?’ ‘I’m sure.’ Now she knew for certain what disturbed him, and she felt the knowledge chill her. ‘The tribes won’t believe us if she denies it,’ he said. His statement went to the primary problem of their existence: What Fremen expected wisdom from a nine-year-old? Alia, growing farther and farther from her own inner sharing each day, played upon this. ‘We must convince Stilgar,’ Ghanima said. As one, their heads turned and they stared out over the moonlit desert. It was a different place now, changed by just a few moments of awareness. Human interplay with that environment had never been more apparent to them. They felt themselves as integral parts of a dynamic system held in delicately balanced order. The new outlook involved a real change of consciousness which flooded them with observations.
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For an instant, temptation warred with fear within him. This flesh possessed the ability to transform melange into a vision of the future. With the spice, he could breathe the future, shatter Time’s veils. He found the temptation difficult to shed, clasped his hands and sank into the prana-bindu awareness. His flesh negated the temptation. His flesh wore the deep knowledge learned in blood by Paul. Those who sought the future hoped to gain the winning gamble on tomorrow’s race. Instead they found themselves trapped into a lifetime whose every heartbeat and anguished wail was known. Paul’s final vision had shown the precarious way out of that trap, and Leto knew now that he had no other choice but to follow that way. ‘The joy of living, its beauty is all bound up in the fact that life can surprise you,’ he said.
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‘Alia is possessed,’ she said. ‘That could happen to us. It could already have happened and we might not know it.’ ‘No.’ He shook his head, met her gaze. ‘Alia resisted. That gave the powers within her their strength. By their 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
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‘Ambitions tend to remain undisturbed by realities,’ The Preacher said. ‘I dare such words because you stand at a crossroad. You could become admirable. But now you are surrounded by those who do not seek moral justifications, by advisers who are strategy-oriented. You are young and strong and tough, but you lack a certain advanced training by which your character might evolve.
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‘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.’
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Stilgar turned his back on the desert, stared toward the oasis of his beloved Sietch Tabr. Such talk always disturbed him. Leto sensed the sweaty smell of Stilgar’s movement. It was such a temptation to avoid the purposeful things which had to be said here. They could talk half the day away, moving from the specific to the abstract as though drawn away from real decisions, from those immediate necessities which confronted them.
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men change their faces at her command,’ Leto said. ‘A ruler need not be a prophet, Stil. Nor even godlike. A ruler need only be sensitive.
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They had suppressed creativity and all sense of progress, of evolution. Prosperity had been dangerous to the old Imperium and its holders of power.
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In the old ways and old religions, there’d been no future, only an endless now. Before Muad’Dib, Stilgar saw, the Fremen had been conditioned to believe in failure, never in the possibility of accomplishment. Well… they’d believed Liet-Kynes, but he’d set a forty-generation timescale. That was no accomplishment; that was a dream which, he saw now, had also turned inward. Muad’Dib had changed that!
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Change was dangerous. Invention must be suppressed. Individual willpower must be denied. What other function did the priesthood serve than to deny individual will? Alia kept saying that opportunities for open competition had to be reduced to manageable limits. But that meant the recurrent threat of technology could only be used to confine populations – just as it had served its ancient masters. Any permitted technology had to be rooted in ritual. Otherwise… otherwise…
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‘Just as individuals are born, mature, breed, and die, so do societies and civilizations and governments.’ Dangerous or not, there would be change. The beautiful young Fremen knew this. They could look outward and see it, prepare for it. Stilgar was forced to stop. It was either that or walk right over Leto. The youth peered up at him owlishly, said: ‘You see, Stil? Tradition isn’t the absolute guide you thought it was.’
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‘They sell pieces of etched marble,’ he said, pointing. ‘Did you know that? They set the pieces out in the desert to be etched by stormsands. Sometimes they find interesting patterns in the stone. They call it a new art form, very popular: genuine storm-etched marble from Dune. I bought a piece of it last week – a golden tree with five tassels, lovely but very fragile.’ ‘Don’t change the subject,’ Alia said. ‘I haven’t changed the subject,’ he said. ‘It’s beautiful, but it’s not art. Humans
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You can work your own muscles, exercise them, strengthen them, but the mind acts of itself.
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Planetary feudalism remained in constant danger from a large technical class, but the effects of the Butlerian Jihad continued as a damper on technological excesses. Ixians, Tleilaxu, and a few scattered outer planets were the only possible threat in this regard, and they were planet-vulnerable to the combined wrath of the rest of the Imperium. The Butlerian Jihad would not be undone. Mechanized warfare required a large technical class. The Atreides Imperium had channeled this force into other pursuits. No large technical class existed unwatched. And the Empire remained safely feudalist, naturally, since that was the best social form for spreading over widely dispersed wild frontiers – new planets.
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‘But surely your own mother would not turn against you!’ ‘She was Bene Gesserit long before she was my mother. Duncan, she permitted her own son, my brother, to undergo the test of the gom jabbar! She arranged it! And she knew he might not survive it! Bene Gesserits have always been short on faith and long on pragmatism.
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Not once did Stilgar think of taking his problem to Alia. That ruled out Irulan, who ran to Alia with anything and everything. In coming to his decision, Stilgar realized he had accepted the possibility that Leto judged Alia correctly.
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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.
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‘If you put away those who report accurately, you’ll keep only those who know what you want to hear,’ Jessica said, her voice sweet. ‘I can think of nothing more poisonous than to rot in the stink of your own reflections.’
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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. – Words of an ancient philosopher, (Attributed by Harq al-Ada to One Louis Veuillot)
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then. She turned to look at the rock wall on her left. ‘Alia grasps the power firmly now.’ She looked back at Idaho. ‘You understand? One uses power by grasping it lightly. To grasp too strongly is to be taken over by power, and thus to become its victim.’
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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. – Muad’Dib to his Fedaykin
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‘You see, Tyek, the influence of a planet upon the mass unconscious of its inhabitants has never been fully appreciated. To defeat the Atreides, we must understand not only Caladan but Arrakis: one planet soft and the other a training ground for hard decisions. That was
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In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things, to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding – symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation of those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages. –Lecture to the Arrakeen War College,
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But one learns from books and reels only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things.’
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Farad’n knew his own talents and held few illusions about them. He was a historian-archaeologist and judge of men. Necessity had forced him to become an expert on those who would serve him – necessity and a careful study of the Atreides. He saw it as the price always demanded of aristocracy. To rule required accurate and incisive judgments about those who wielded your power. More than one ruler had fallen through mistakes and excesses of his underlings.
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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.
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‘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.
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The one-eyed view of our universe says you must not look far afield for problems. Such problems may never arrive. Instead, tend to the wolf within your fences. The packs ranging outside may not even exist.
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In the Bene Gesserit Way, he opened his mind to Jacurutu, seeking to know nothing about it. Knowing was a barrier which prevented learning.
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If you believe certain words, you believe their hidden arguments. When you believe something is right or wrong, true or false, you believe the assumptions in the words which express the arguments. Such assumptions are often full of holes, but remain most precious to the convinced.
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‘Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,’ Leto explained. ‘To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. Knowledge
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He knew his previous mistake now: he had sought power in the reality of his trance, choosing that rather than face the fears which he and Ghanima had fed in each other. Fear defeated Alia! But the seeking after power spread another trap, diverting him into fantasy. He saw the illusion.
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‘I am your spirit. I am the only life you can realize. I am the house of your spirit in the land which is nowhere, the land which is your only remaining home. Without me, the intelligible universe reverts to chaos. Creative and abysmal are inextricably linked in me; only I can mediate between them. 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.’
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‘Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: mythology, which is guesswork, the hidden assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is “Thou shalt not question!” But we question. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind’s deepest sense of creativity.’
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Peace demands solutions, but we never reach living solutions; we only work toward them. A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance.
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Jessica held her arms stiffly at her side, said: ‘I am charged to say this to you. “I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand someday. I pray to your presence that this be so. The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas. We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.”
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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.
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Halleck looked once more at Leto, really saw him. He saw the signs of stress around the eyes, the sense of balance in the stance, the passive mouth with its quirking sense of humor. Leto stood out from his background as though at the focus of a blinding light. He had achieved harmony simply by accepting it.
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The child who refuses to travel in the father’s harness, this is rite 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 odes 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.’ – Leto Atreides II,
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‘Each day, each moment brings its changes,’ Ghanima said. ‘One learns by recognizing the moments.’