Chapter I
Many have talked of new beginnings. But the beginning of what? New for whom? Mere phrases, witty sayings, enslave us to our own vision of the "world of the future" just as Shaddam enslaved us to the dream of control over the Spice. The spice signified that a certain thing was controlled by force. But we have proved our supreme power over the Spice, over the bloodlines, and over the future of the Imperium. The fact that this Imperium is Atreides, rather than Corrino, signifies something in the universe of force also: that I, the Duke of Arrakis, have displaced my good cousin who I could have had killed for his illegal rebellion against the will of God and the armies of the Fremen. But nothing will have been done until all is done; and this empire is Corrino still, until I send six thousand elite corps to Kaitain, and connect the throne of Arrakis with that of all Houses and all sects.
- Emperor Paul-Muad'Dib, Throne Speech of the Year 10,197
So this is it, opined Gurney Halleck, commander of the Smuggler Garrison of the armies of Holy Muad'Dib, the struggle of the cold dirt, and of nothing more.
It was an impossible, almost dangerous thought, in the midst, he was sure, of the finest struggle in history, that His Highness Shaddam was in Arrakeen, speaking more uncompromisingly than the Baron ever had of wiping out the Fremen: sending a special expedition to the south in order that no quarter of Arrakis, the old wretched sore in the Achilles heel of the Empire, the Spice, which was also its diseased lung, should be left untouched in the name of imperial dignity, and having Muad'Dib unmasked and enchained to an eternal repentance as a servant of the Empire, the Prometheus of Corrin whose fire was handled and spread by mindless paths of dirt. But these paths were mindless only to the dirt itself, to Gurney, who had sand in his inner eye, and the broad masses of his troop company, among whom he knew through direct contact knaves who knew quite literally only the word Muad'Dib. To the man himself, who spoke without direct mystification of his prescience of providence and his terrible purpose in history, but who spoke in phrases as unintelligible to Gurney as to the olive merchants who squatted at the army bases, they were, as the scribes of the Orange Catholic Bible had alredy seen, "verily history itself". The Emperor sat speaking equally radically with innumerable legions of the invincible Sardaukar, the support of every nuclear-armed Great House in an intergalactic Imperium, and the inevitable bastion of protecting its laws, which could be taken up by the most violent and illegal partisans of Muad'Dib as soon as power lay in their hands rather than his. And indeed, this day of "history itself" would be either that, or the death of them all.
Shouts rang out in the distance. Muad'Dib's men were advancing. Sardaukar eviscerated Fedaykin recruits in ambush. Here, men would die over a question. Men could die over nothing else. Every question was power; all power posed a question, as soon as it could be envisaged in pure relation to exterior forces. It was both the most mundane question that could have been posed by any power - was Arrakeen, this semi-industrial city built entirely for melange, a productive intersection of the arms of Kaitain, the industry of Giedi Prime and the necessities of the entire Imperium, both absolute good and absolute evil, Shaddam Corrino or Paul Muad'Dib? - and the most profound which followed from it: Who has the Spice? This ran, with the most cursory glance at all the irons and chains set up over millenia of the questions of men for squeezing Arrakis even more so than with a glance at the law of the Corrino Imperium: Who has the Empire? And if the answer was the fanatics of Muad'Dib - fanatics, though he led them, and he was the centre of the universe and could be neither fanatic nor moderate in relation to it - a storm would destroy the Throne and make the mutilated bodies which had flooded the sewers of Corrin upon the siege and massacre which had once seen the Corrinos set themselves up as masters of the galaxy, at which time the Emperor had turned to his ministers and cried out "Corrin, there is the universe!" - though that universe was his universe only in the sense of a historic connection which became barren and sterile outside the eternal reverence of the dictates and future of this world - seem as a skirmish over bread. It was fine bread a great man killed for, or a poor man who died for stale bread.
Here, the series of facts which had delivered Gurney to this position of command here and now, atop a rotten, uncleaned carriage, ran for once directly and without the mist of time, from Giedi Prime to Caladan to Arrakeen, to the southern desert, Sietch Tabr, back to Arrakeen armed and with purpose. Was this a taste of the famed prescience of the spice melange, which informed the man who was now his military commander, his moral master, his Duke and his prophet in singular and invariant flesh? Three years on Arrakis did not leave a man of Caladan a man of Caladan - and to all who thought him a rogue, Gurney was not even Caladanian, but a scab picked off by the Harkonnens some three decades earlier. What now? Back to Caladan ... then back to Giedi Prime. Giedi Prime - dear gods - and he winced, against his most pliant instincts. But what was he thinking? He was still standing in Arrakeen, and the Sardaukar were not yet even outnumbered. Wasn't that also prescience? Defeat, and the gallows? The face of the Beast Rabban flashed before his consciousness and this brought him back to his feet. Arrakeen. Paul. Harkonnens and Sardaukar.
"Commander Halleck," a young army majordomo, ten months past a smuggler who would have killed any man of Muad'Dib who opposed his industrious trade, "only two squadrons of Sardaukar remain of Shaddam's five elite legions."
So the men would live to see another fight after all. Gurney was sure as he lived that there was no trap in this thing; the Sardaukar, for all their Salusan brutalism, were conditioned not for the niceties of working with a siege or the subtleties of guerilla warfare, but for a clean sweep with the bronze cannon, and their hitherto infallible force had never needed anything else. In a real situation of defeat such as this, any sophisticated murmur of outperforming the enemy by trickery would be nothing but un-Sardaukar, precisely because defeat as such was un-Sardaukar. Fate, real and imagined, would command those troops to this fatal resignation. Command them-
"One of the two commanders is trapped inside the castle walls; the other is being encircled as we speak. A real embarressment for those imperial oppressors who defied the Fremen people and the cultivators of melange, and scorned our prophecy."
Even as the battle was over just as it had begun, new and intrusive thoughts emerged. Imperial oppressors...Fremen people...cultivators of melange...the prophecy. But the true cultivators of melange were not the Fremen, but the great worm and the sand creatures. The tribes had appointed Shai-Hulud as a god, yet every god was also a human self-deification: that which allows us to live is holy. Were the sandmen better theologians than anyone by riding the worm, or did they but turn away from the matter with a philistine sensibility? And not every Fremen person cultivated melange nor fought for this Fremen people; who kept the Harkonnen spice harvesters operating even now? Fremen. The Fremen people took no stand and fought no battles; only ever a segment of it, and never an overwhelming majority. And if these producers of spice fought imperial oppressors, wherein the Atreides? Would they not erect the imperium of the Fremen? But the prophecy guaranteed precisely that self-interest, even if it recquired a brief moral concept to do so: we may be no better than them, but God is on our side, so we are better after all. God emerged inexorably once more as the self-saving self-conception. The Atreides may also have been oppressors, but they were instruments of God and the prophecy. The bitter end of the thought was this: there was nothing outside of the plan. And Paul did really see the plan, did not pretend to see the future.
But did Gurney?
These doubts would surely bring him down into the dust, his body and his mind; the latter first, the former later. But this battle had to be won nevertheless; the first battle of a new path. Or-
