Dune 2 - Dune Messiah

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Dune Messiah

Frank Herbert

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 your 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 Shaddam 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 Tleilex 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.

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摘要：

DuneMessiahFrankHerbertCopyright1969ExcerptsfromtheDeathCellInterviewwithBronsoofIXQ:WhatledyoutotakeyourparticularapproachtoahistoryofMuad'dib?A:WhyshouldIansweryourquestions?Q:BecauseIwillpreserveyourwords.A:Ahhh!Theultimateappealtoahistorian!Q:Willyoucooperatethen?A:Whynot?Butyou'llneverunderstan...

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Dune 2 - Dune Messiah

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