Heretics of Dune – Entry #7

     The end of Heretics of Dune is dramatic and lays the foundation for the end of the saga.  First, the Honored Matres attacked Rakis (Dune).  They killed Mother Superior Taraza but Odrade and Sheeana escaped to the desert.

     Meanwhile, on Gammu, the Honored Matres frantically search to capture Teg, Lucilla, and Duncan who get separated in trying to escape.  Duncan and Teg both end up in the hands of Honored Matres and something dramatic happens to each of them.  Teg is transformed into a hyper-aware being that can move with incredible speed.  Duncan meets Honored Matre Murbella.  It is here that we discover the attack is all about capturing and killing Duncan because the Honored Matres found out “there was a ghola armed with forbidden knowledge by the Tleilaxu” (Heretics of Dune, p. 428).  The Tleilaxu knew the Bene Gesserit would sexually imprint their ghola so they had “programmed” him to turn the tables and then kill the Imprinter.  But it didn’t turn out that way.  The sexual encounter with Murbella, whose goal was to imprint the captured young man, resulted in a mutual imprinting of sorts.  Murbella realized late who she had captured for she was incapable of doing anything about it.

     Without providing details other than Teg stating he was going to capture a no-ship, we find that Teg somehow had gotten the no-ship and collected Lucilla, Murbella, and Duncan on it.  His next step: go to Rakis and get Odrade and Sheeana even though he realized that the Honored Matres were already there also, searching for Duncan.  Teg landed the no-ship somehow knowing that Sheeana and Odrade would arrive shortly on the back of a worm.

     Once he got them on the ship he told them to take it to the Bene Gesserit home planet, Chapterhouse, but without him and his men who would stay to create a diversion.  Lucilla, Duncan, Murbella, Sheeana, Odrade, and a worm from Arrakis all escaped in the no-ship while the Honored Matres attacked and obliterated the planet Dune with all its inhabitants … and worms.

     Odrade, now Mother Superior, finally understood Taraza’s design with the help of Taraza within.  She had a lot to deal with.  Sheeana was allowed to leave the no-ship as her cell samples proved she had Siona in her ancestry “that shielded her from prescience” (Heretics of Dune, p. 467).  Duncan was another story and although they knew “he was a mixture of many Idaho gholas – some descendent of Siona” (Heretics of Dune, p. 467), they couldn’t risk him being seen by “prescient searchers … such as Guild navigators” (Heretics of Dune, p. 462).  So he had to stay on the no-ship, along with the captured Honored Matre Murbella.  And then there was the worm.

     The design of Taraza’s was explained in this exchange between Odrade and Duncan at the end of the book.

     “I thought you deserved an explanation of the Mother Superior’s design.  It was aimed at the destruction of Rakis, you see.  What she really wanted was the elimination of almost all of the worms.”

     “Great Gods below! Why?”

     “They were an oracular force holding us in bondage.  Those pearls of the Tyrant’s awareness magnified that hold.  He didn’t predict events, he created them.”

     Duncan pointed toward the rear of the ship.  “But what about …”

     “That one?  It’s just one now.  By the time it reaches sufficient numbers to be an influence once more, humankind will have gone its own way beyond him.  We’ll be too numerous by then, doing too many different things on our own.  No single force will rule all of our futures completely, never again.”

(Heretics of Dune, p. 470)

Heretics of Dune – Entry #6

     Inevitably, the Bene Gesserit would learn without any doubts what the axlotl tanks really were.  The closest anyone had really come to identify the true nature of the tanks was C’tair during the Tleilaxu/Corrino occupation of Ix which began when the first Leto was just a teenager.  This secret had died on Ix and the Bene Tleilax had kept it a carefully guarded secret.

     “What if the axlotl tanks are not … tanks?”

     “What do you mean?”

     “Waff reveals the kinds of behavior you see when a family tries to conceal a deformed child or a mad uncle.  I swear to you, he is embarrassed when we begin to touch on the tanks.”

     “But what could they possibly …”

     “Surrogate mothers.”

     “But they would have to be …” Taraza fell silent, shocked by the possibilities this question opened.

     “Who has ever seen a Tleilaxu female?” Odrade said.

(Heretics of Dune, p. 361)

Heretics of Dune – Entry #5

     So who are the Heretics of Dune?  At this time, heresy on Dune is to speak or act against the “Divided God”; Leto II or the Tyrant.  Even calling him “Tyrant” was reflective of heresy.  Therefore, the Bene Gessert were certainly heretics.

     When Sheeana was orphaned out in the desert by a worm attack on her village, she had committed several acts of heresy although no one had been there to witness most of it.  She yelled at the worms, called it Shaitan (Satan … the devil).  And then she rode the worm, from instinct, to civilization.  This last part was viewed by the religious bureaucracy and they had even considered executing her for it.  Thank goodness they didn’t as she would turn out to be one of the most important people in securing the future for humans.

     Mother Superior Taraza had chosen a course of action that was considered highly questionable by many of her sisters.  She formed an alliance with the Bene Tleilax so they could get the secret of how to make an axlotl tank and use it to make Spice.  They did so by convincing the Tleilaxu that they were true believers in the Tyrant as God.  In fact, Taraza had gained insight into the Golden Path and had become a believer.  She knew that path may lead to the end of the sisterhood but met the goal of preserving human kind.  This, however, was not the kind of believer the Tleilaxu were.

     OK, back to important and relevant nuggets from the book.  Taraza had sent her close friend, Reverend Mother Odrade, daughter of Miles Teg and thus an Atreides, to Dune to be Sheeana’s teacher.  It was also Odrade’s job to hook the Bene Tleilax.  As part of demonstrating Sheeana’s power in order to establish and hold the power she had over the true believers, Odrade arranged a worm ride into the dessert with Tleilaxu Master Waff and Sheeana to command the worm.  They left from Dar-es-Balat where Leto II kept his records.  The worm that came to Sheeana’s call ended up taking them to the long lost Sietch Tabr!  And there Odrade discovered the fabled super-cache of Spice.  Again, such a masterful weaving of the story from the long past to the present and then to the future.  For on the walls of the cavern, Leto II had left a message meant specifically for Bene Gesserit to find.

     “MY WORDS ARE YOUR PAST,

     “MY QUESTIONS ARE SIMPLE.

     “WITH WHOM DO YOU ALLY?

     “WITH THE SELF-IDOLATORS OF TLEILAX?

     “WITH MY FISH SPEAKER BUREAUCRACY?

     “WITH THE COSMOS-WONDERING GUILD?

     “WITH HARKONNEN BLOOD SACRIFICERS?

     “WITH A DOGMATIC SINK OF YOUR OWN CREATION?

     “HOW WILL YOU MEET YOUR END?

     “AS NO MORE THAN A SECRET SOCIETY?”

(Heretics of Dune, p. 301-302)

Heretics of Dune – Entry #4

The pain needed to be inflicted to reawaken a ghola’s memories disturbs Teg.  He asks himself if what he has been instructed to do is truly “good” for Duncan.  The no-chamber certainly accelerated the process.  The painful memories of Duncan’s first childhood are touched upon after Duncan regains his memories and sees the Harkonnen world around him.

With Duncan’s pre-ghola memory as guide his own modern knowledge of the planet, Teg had tried to bring the map up to date.

     “Forest Guard Station” became “Bene Gesserit Keep”.

     “Part of it was a hunting lodge,” Duncan said.  “They hunted human game raised and conditioned specifically for that purpose.”

     Towns vanished under Teg’s updating.  Some cities remained but received new labels.  “Ysai”, the nearest metropolis, had been marked “Barony” on the original map.

     Duncan’s eyes went hard in memory.  “That’s where they tortured me.”

(Heretics of Dune, p. 285-286)

The story of Duncan’s torture as a child at the hands of Beast Rabban is told in the prequel book House Atreides.

Heretics of Dune – Entry #3

Many pages of the book pass before another quote I needed to include.  Not that these aren’t interesting pages, because they are!  Duncan’s training on Gammu and, equally as important, the discovery of the girl who can command the worms of Dune, Sheeana.

These pages also include the first clues to “sexual imprinting”.  The Bene Gesserit Lucilla arrives on Gammu to imprint Duncan so that he would be in their control.  But Teg does not agree with this plan.

The Honored Matres, called whores by the Bene Gesserit because they use sexual imprinting dangerous ways, are searching to capture the Duncan Idaho ghola.  Duncan, Teg, and Lucilla escape capture on Gammu because Teg’s assistant commander had found an ancient Harkonnen no-chamber during explorations in the forest during his childhood on Gammu.  I love when Brian Herbert takes a key nugget of information from his father’s books and expands on it.  The description of certain aspects of the no-chamber in Heretics of Dune, expanded on in one of the prequels is one such example:

Twenty-one skeletons preserved in transparent plaz along a wall near the core! Macabre observers of everyone who passed through there to the machinery chambers and the nullentropy bins.

(Heretics of Dune, p. 224)

I love these connections across such long time periods, this one from five thousand years prior.