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Frank Herbert |
Featured Excerpt
From Dune (1965)
I’ve sat across from many rulers of Great Houses, but never seen a more gross and dangerous pig than this one, Thufir Hawat told himself.
“You may speak plainly with me, Hawat,” the Baron rumbled. He leaned back in his suspensor chair, the eyes in their folds of fat boring into Hawat.
The old Mentat looked down at the table between him and the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, noting the opulence of its grain. Even this was a factor to consider in assessing the Baron, as were the red walls of this private conference room and the faint sweet herb scent that hung on the air, masking a deeper musk.
“You didn’t have me send that warning to Rabban as an idle whim,” the Baron said.
Hawat’s leathery old face remained impassive, betraying none of the loathing he felt. “I suspect many things, my Lord,” he said.
“Yes. Well, I wish to know how Arrakis figures in your suspicions about Salusa Secundus. It is not enough that you say to me the Emperor is in a ferment about some association between Arrakis and his mysterious prison planet. Now, I rushed the warning out to Rabban only because the courier had to leave on that Heighliner. You said there could be no delay. Well and good. But now I will have an explanation.”
He babbles too much, Hawat thought. He’s not like Leto who could tell me a thing with the lift of an eyebrow or the wave of a hand. Nor like the Old Duke who could express an entire sentence in the way he accented a single word. This is a clod! Destroying him will be a service to mankind.
“You will not leave here until I’ve had a full and complete explanation,” the Baron said.
“You speak too casually of Salusa Secundus,” Hawat said.
“It’s a penal colony,” the Baron said. “The worst riff-raff in the galaxy are sent to Salusa Secundus. What else do we need to know?”
“That conditions on the prison planet are more oppressive than anywhere else,” Hawat said. “You hear that the mortality rate among new prisoners is higher than sixty percent. You hear that the Emperor practices every form of oppression there. You hear all this and do not ask questions?”
“The Emperor doesn’t permit the Great Houses to inspect his prison,” the Baron growled. “But he hasn’t seen into my dungeons, either.”
“And curiosity about Salusa Secundus is… ah…” Hawat put a bony finger to his lips. “…discouraged.”
“So he’s not proud of some of the things he must do there!”
Hawat allowed the faintest of smiles to touch his dark lips. His eyes glinted in the glowtube light as he stared at the Baron. “And you’ve never wondered where the Emperor gets his Sardaukar?”
The Baron pursed his fat lips. This gave his features the look of a pouting baby, and his voice carried a tone of petulance as he said: “Why… he recruits… that is to say, there are the levies and he enlists from—”
“Faaa!” Hawat snapped. “The stories you hear about the exploits of the Sardaukar, they’re not rumors, are they? Those are first-hand accounts from the limited number of survivors who’ve fought against the Sardaukar, eh?”
“The Sardaukar are excellent fighting men, no doubt of it,” the Baron said. “But I think my own legions—”
“A pack of holiday excursionists by comparison!” Hawat snarled. “You think I don’t know why the Emperor turned against the House Atreides?”
“This is not a realm open to your speculation,” the Baron warned.
Is it possible that even he doesn’t know what motivated the Emperor in this? Hawat asked himself.
“Any area is open to my speculation if it does what you’ve hired me to do,” Hawat said. “I am a Mentat. You do not withhold information or computation lines from a Mentat.”
For a long minute, the Baron stared at him, then: “Say what you must say, Mentat.”
“The Padishah Emperor turned against House Atreides because the Duke’s Warmasters Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho had trained a fighting force—a small fighting force—to within a hair as good as the Sardaukar. Some of them were even better. And the Duke was in a position to enlarge his force, to make it every bit as strong as the Emperor’s.”
The Baron weighed this disclosure, then: “What has Arrakis to do with this?”
“It provides a pool of recruits already conditioned to the bitterest survival training.”
The Baron shook his head. “You cannot mean the Fremen?”
“I mean the Fremen.”
“Hah! Then why warn Rabban? There cannot be more than a handful of Fremen left after the Sardaukar pogrom and Rabban’s oppression.”
Hawat continued to stare at him silently.
“Not more than a handful!” the Baron repeated. “Rabban killed six thousand of them last year alone!”
Still, Hawat stared at him.
“And the year before it was nine thousand,” the Baron said. “And before they left, the Sardaukar must’ve accounted for at least twenty thousand.”
“What are Rabban’s troop losses for the past two years?” Hawat asked.
The Baron rubbed his jowls. “Well, he has been recruiting rather heavily, to be sure. His agents make rather extravagant promises and—”
“Shall we say thirty thousand in round numbers?” Hawat asked.
“That would seem a little high,” the Baron said.
“Quite the contrary,” Hawat said. “I can read between the lines of Rabban’s reports as well as you can. And you certainly must’ve understood my reports from our agents.”
“Arrakis is a fierce planet,” the Baron said. “Storm losses can—”
“We both know the figure for storm accretion,” Hawat said.
“What if he has lost thirty thousand?” the Baron demanded, and blood darkened his face.
“By your own count,” Hawat said, “he killed fifteen thousand over two years while losing twice that number. You say the Sardaukar accounted for another twenty thousand, possibly a few more. And I’ve seen the transportation manifests for their return from Arrakis. If they killed twenty thousand, they lost almost five for one. Why won’t you face these figures, Baron, and understand what they mean?”
The Baron spoke in a coldly measured cadence: “This is your job, Mentat. What do they mean?”
“I gave you Duncan Idaho’s head count on the sietch he visited,” Hawat said. “It all fits. If they had just two hundred and fifty such sietch communities, their population would be about five million. My best estimate is that they had at least twice that many communities. You scatter your population on such a planet.”
“Ten million?”
The Baron’s jowls quivered with amazement.
“At least.”
The Baron pursed his fat lips. The beady eyes stared without wavering at Hawat. Is this true Mentat computation? he wondered. How could this be and no one suspect?
“We haven’t even cut heavily into their birth-rate-growth figure,” Hawat said. “We’ve just weeded out some of their less successful specimens, leaving the strong to grow stronger—just like on Salusa Secundus.”
“Salusa Secundus!” the Baron barked. “What has this to do with the Emperor’s prison planet?”
“A man who survives Salusa Secundus starts out being tougher than most others,” Hawat said. “When you add the very best of military training—”
“Nonsense! By your argument, I could recruit from among the Fremen after the way they’ve been oppressed by my nephew.”
Hawat spoke in a mild voice: “Don’t you oppress any of your troops?”
“Well… I… but—”
“Oppression is a relative thing,” Hawat said. “Your fighting men are much better off than those around them, heh? They see unpleasant alternatives to being soldiers of the Baron, heh?”
The Baron fell silent, eyes unfocused. The possibilities—had Rabban unwittingly given House Harkonnen its ultimate weapon?
Presently he said: “How could you be sure of the loyalty of such recruits?”
“I would take them in small groups, not larger than platoon strength,” Hawat said. “I’d remove them from their oppressive situation and isolate them with a training cadre of people who understood their background, preferably people who had preceded them from the same oppressive situation. Then I’d fill them with the mystique that their planet had really been a secret training ground to produce just such superior beings as themselves. And all the while, I’d show them what such superior beings could earn: rich living, beautiful women, fine mansions… whatever they desired.”
The Baron began to nod. “The way the Sardaukar live at home.”
“The recruits come to believe in time that such a place a Salusa Secundus is justified because it produced them—the elite. The commonist Sardaukar trooper lives a life, in many respects, as exalted as that of any member of a Great House.
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Additional Excerpts
From Dune (1965)
« 02 »
There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society, seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death.
—From “Collected Sayings of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
« 03 »
“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.”
He felt calmness return, said: “Get on with it, old woman.”
“Old woman!” she snapped. “You’ve courage, and that can’t be denied. Well, we shall see, sirra.” She bent close, lowered her voice almost to a whisper. “You will feel pain in this hand within the box. Pain. But! Withdraw the hand and I’ll touch your neck with my gom jabbar—the death so swift it’s like the fall of the headsman’s axe. Withdraw your hand and the gom jabbar takes you. Understand?”
“What’s in the box?”
“Pain.”
He felt increased tingling in his hand, pressed his lips tightly together. How could this be a test? he wondered. The tingling became an itch.
The old woman said: “You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”
The itch became the faintest burning. “Why are you doing this?” he demanded.
“To determine if you’re human. Be silent.”
« 04 »
“Why do you test for humans?” he asked.
“To set you free.”
“Free?”
“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”
“‘Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man’s mind,'” Paul quoted.
“Right out of the Butlerian Jihad and the Orange Catholic Bible,” she said. “But what the O.C. Bible should’ve said is: ‘Thou shalt not make a machine to counterfeit a human mind.’ Have you studied the Mentat in your service?”
“I’ve sudied with Thufir Hawat.”
“The Great Revolt took away a crutch,” she said. “It forced human minds to develop. Schools were started to train human talents.”
« 05 »
Paul put a hand on his mother’s arm, found that she was trembling.
“It’s over, Mother,” he said.
Without turning her head, she looked up at him from the corner of her eyes. “Over?”
“Of course. Gurney’s….”
“Gurney? Oh… yes.” She lowered her gaze.
The hangings rustled as Gurney returned with his baliset. He began tuning it, avoiding their eyes. The hangings on the walls dulled the echoes, making the instrument sound small and intimate.
Paul led his mother to a cushion, seated her there with her back to the thick draperies of the wall. He was suddenly struck by how old she seemed to him with the beginnings of desert-dried lines in her face, the stretching at the corners of her blue-veiled eyes.
She’s tired, he thought. We must find some way to ease her burdens.
Gurney strummed a chord.
Paul glanced at him, said: “I’ve… things that need my attention. Wait here for me.”
Gurney nodded. His mind seemed far away, as though he dwelled for this moment beneath the open skies of Caladan with cloud fleece on the horizon promising rain.
Paul force himself to turn away, let himself out through the heavy hangings over the side passage. He heard Gurney take up a tune behind him, and paused a moment outside the room to listen to the muted music.
“Orchards and vineyards,
And full-breasted houris,
And a cup overflowing before me.
Why do I babble of battles,
And mountains reduced to dust?
Why do I feel these tears?Heavens stand open
And scatter their riches;
My hands need but gather their wealth.
Why do I think of an ambush,
And poison in molten cup?
Why do I feel my years?Love’s arms beckon
With their naked delights,
And Eden’s promise of ecstacies.
Why do I remember the scars,
Dream of old transgressions…
And why do I sleep with fears?
« 06 »
“Feints within feints within feints.”