The Second Dune Novel
"We're here now!" she protested, fighting a dry sob. "And... I feel we have so little... time."
"We have eternity, beloved."
"You may have eternity. I have only now." Conversation between Paul and Chani God Emperor of Dune by Frank Herbert
I have been asked many times, and I have no answer for why I love the Dune series so much. Is it that I associate myself somehow with Chani? I do not know why that would be so. Chani had her love from the beginning, almost from the moment she met Paul - indeed he knew before, prescient as he was. I on the other hand, as a little girl, dreamed of a love that was put beyond my reach by the arrangement made by my parents when I was but a child of eight. Or so I believed. Perhaps it is in the depth of the love I found in Shar and the others of our bondmates, restoring to me the dream of love that I could never have found with my First Medjai husband. Enough perhaps to say that I understand the yearning then.
Thinnest by far of the series, God Emperor highlights so well the conflict between duty and love, desire and duty, religion and politics that is at the heart of the series. Perhaps that too is where I indentify with these books so well, since I was also the 'victim' of a political union, for all that we grew to care for each other, that was the truth of my being given to Ardeth. The 'Good Medjai Woman' meant to be a charm for him against the 'evils' of anyone else that his heart might choose. Our Elders are such a foolish and short sighted cabal.
So, In God Emperor, Paul struggles against those who would cast him in the role of Messiah, when all he desires is to live the life of a man with the woman he loves. He fights a future his prescient vision has shown to him, knowing there is no escape... and he lives with the knowledge that the woman who gives him life, through that which she desires so badly, will come to end her life and give her waters back to the desert.
Though never would I call Meiri 'abomination' for she was sweet to me when she had no need to be, I still have lived with the weight of a prescient being who knows, who worries on, who tries to live without influencing the course of things and in the end does just that by all her efforts otherwise. It is not the mother for whom I grieve in this, but the youngest of her children. Sahar lives with the legacy, the stigma of her mother's gift... perhaps not so much now as Meiri has relaxed her lionlike grasp over her and allowed her to be as other children in the household. Luloah tries to be for her sister the sister that Sahar longs for. Suhayl too, to a degree, suffers from his mother's precient gift, though he seems to have a better hold on it - or perhaps a better support system in Meren.
Chani... Fremen woman... concubine only, yet more than a wife. She longs to give her man the son and heir he needs if the Atreides line is to continue, yet nothing she can do will bring her to conceive the child she longs to bring to birth, for she is thwarted by the wife, who is less than concubine, who conspires against her husband with the enemies who wish for his distruction. In this I can also identify with Chani. A product of our upbringing perhaps, but we women of the desert are charged with bringing life, bringing the future to our husbands. When the healers told me, following the birth of Tareef and Luloah that, for me to bear another child would likely be a fatal decision for me... it is like, to me, being told that I should not breathe, or eat, or sleep. So too I believe Chani felt when she could not bring to Paul the child she longed to give to him.
In the end, fate delivered my desire most cruelly, into my life... this creature that has once again, by some trick of time and genetic manipulation, took me from my home, and used me for cruel experiments to create the hybrid children that he did, and then to use me as an incubator for the trueborn child of the bond that has since then become my whole. I say this was cruel, because the pain of it... the fear... still my mind does the best it can to spare me those memories, lest in nightmares, not so frequent now, but still occasional, more so of late. Assharnerethrissa was the first. Azra the second by only two days, though knowledge and logic tells me I must have lived through the months of her gestation in another place outside of my own time... or perhaps that should be in my own past. The mere thought of it all scrambles my brain, yet I wish somehow I could lay it to rest in understanding how it occurred. I could not bear to be with those two, not at the time when everything was fresh and raw, and so gave them up to live with another family. What do they do now? How do they grow? Do then wonder of a mother that would abandon them so? Such questions have haunted me very much of late. I have tried time and again to write a letter, getting only so far before I abandon the attempt and try and bury my feeling for the daughters I do not know. The third of those children, cruelly created, Vrenis, has been recently reunited with me, with the bond that made her. Though none of her genes are mine I still love her as a daughter.
Those acts of violation wrought against me, changed me... made me something less than human, and yet something less than Andorian - some kind of hybrid myself. My DNA 'adapted' to the alien elements forced on me by the process of making those children to the point where I now can of my own desire, and that of my bond, make life between us. While I would not change this for all the universe, for the love of those three most dear to me, I am left with the reality of being less... not quite any 'thing' one or the other - or perhaps it is something more.
To us, then, came Zheusalisra... an accident, yes. Because of Salis we came to understand that I had adapted. And after, the twins; born of our Shelthreth... dear to me as all of my children, but as much as my firstborn twins. So yes... I can identify with Chani's desire to bring life, for it is also in my heart, and has, as yet, not been the cause of my giving up my water to the desert of my birth... In that the healers have been mistaken. Unlike poor Chani.
So with the birth of Leto and Ghanima, and Chani's passing, comes the end of this thin installment, with Alia - St. Alia of the Knife - also called abomination by some due to her 'in the womb' awareness, serving as regent for the Leto after their father, blinded by his enemies, follows the Fremen custom of walking out into the desert to give himself to the great worm... and we must wait to discover what becomes of them all.
And so the book ends, and I must again wait my turn to read the next installment. No doubt I will find other things to speak of then.