Because I revile slash fic in all its forms...
If you're like me, and you're a Dune fan, you probably feel revolted at the very least by the continuation of Frank's six classics in favor of...what's out there now.
I'm a writer myself and one of my guiding lights, inspirationally, has been Dune. Recently, purely for the exercise, I tried to tap out a sort of "lost chapter" to God Emperor of Dune. I'm pleased with the results and I thought I'd leave it here for your consumption.
--------------------------------------------------
Leto II knew that Duncan planned violence the moment he entered his chamber. The stiffness to one leg, the stillness of his neck, the fixed position of his eyes, the expressionless face that alone told the story of what was to come. The way his fingertips brushed absently against his right leg.
So, it comes to this already, Leto thought. This one has become intolerant much faster than the others. Doubtless a Tleilaxu experiment in and of itself. Can they catch the God Emperor off guard if one of their little time bombs triggers ahead of schedule?
Leto relaxed himself with a slow, heaving sigh and leaned against the edge of his cart.
The two stared at each other for a moment, Leto calm and omniscient, Duncan still and quiet.
The moment of formality passed and became awkwardness. Awkwardness passed into a moment of genuine threat when the formal exchanges were not observed.
“Well?” Leto asked. “What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know what you mean, M’Lord…”
Leto smashed a gray fist against the cart. It shattered the rim with a crushing echo. “I will warn you this once, Duncan.”
He need say nothing else. Almost timidly, like a child forced to hand over money from an overturned piggy bank, Duncan’s fingertips grasped the hilt of the weapon and pulled it up, level to Leto.
“Tleilaxu needler,” Leto observed. He smirked. “Doubtless filled with some neurotoxin that could drop a herd of sandworms, eh, Duncan?”
“You are an evil I cannot permit to endure.”
“Oh, how operatic of you. You rehearsed that little squirt of melodrama all the way down the steps, didn’t you? I suppose this is part in the play where I shudder in recognition of what my own baleful deeds has bought me?”
Leto held out a hand and shook his fingertips, only for an instant.
“I’ve never had much love for melodramas. Of course, you’d know this from the way I treat certain historians.”
This steeled Duncan. His muscles tensed. He raised the weapon a little higher, but his body remained stiff.
“Look at that Idaho resolve. As resolute as ever. Convinced that I’m the worst evil in history, a betrayal of all the Atreides ever stood for in your proud and noble mind, and yet you still hesitate to pull that trigger. Because you would still be firing at an Atreides.”
“I have no love for this, you’re right. But it’s necessity. You can’t be allowed to live. You’re an…abomination on all things.”
“Such is the point of my existence, good Duncan. But what comes of the careful system of order and belayed chaos when you pull that trigger? I am a control system that holds many power hungry, violent individuals in check. I should know, I put them there. If a power vacuum at my level were to occur, can you imagine the war, death, pestilence and destruction that would result? All these petty egos and their dreams of absolute power thrusting them onto battlefield after battlefield, sending men noble enough to be your brothers to their deaths?”
The pistol wavered.
“The universe would fall into instant chaos and it would not be briefly resolved. Billions would die across countless star systems as conflict upon conflict erupted between would be emperors. Leto’s Peace would become the sweetest of dreams then; my name not so much uttered as a curse, so much as with the weight of memory that says, ‘Those were the good old days!’”
“There’s no other solution. At least humanity would have a fighting chance to control its own destiny.”
“There’s that Swordmaster view of meritocracy again. I never get tired of hearing it. You realize that cultural constructs exist as nothing more than a sequence of acceptable behaviors, don’t you? Culture is simply the game of what is permissible. What is permissible is generated by conflicting ideologies that are inbred into every cultural construct; young ideas war with the old until the stronger idea wins out. Ah, but here’s the catch: Does the strongest idea immediately qualify it for being the best idea?”
Leto let the question hang in the air. He raised his head slightly.
“You could kill me only to end up with something every bit as bad, or worse. I have one comfort to the people; I cannot be considered human, so my atrocities can be draped in that escape. What greater horror is there than seeing atrocities of my scale committed by another human?”
“What you’ve done to the universe is wrong!” shouted Duncan.
Leto let the echo fade away and hung the silence between them a few moments before answering. “Hardly. What I’ve done to the universe is give it a second breath. Don’t you understand the ultimate failing of the Old Empire, my dear Duncan? It was a system that became overlarge and undersupported. A an ancient saying goes, ‘Too many chiefs, not enough Indians.’ Violent power struggles were not generating a sense of evolution in human nature - far from it. It arrested progress in favor of the achievements of the now.”
“The same chaos you say will erupt if I kill you.”
“Not the same. Not at all. Ideas stopped flowing in the Old Empire. There was no challenge of the old by the new. Only a set sequence of acceptable behaviors: Imperium. CHOAM. Landsraad. Jihad. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.”
“Mua’Dib threw down the Emperor. He destroyed the status quo.”
“And injected the wrong ideas, merit-bankrupt ideas, directly into the bloodstream of humanity. He was poisoning it.”
“How do you suggest you’ve done better?”
“I made the sacrifice my father could not.”
“Paul would have challenged the Gods Below if he thought he was right!”
“True. Except he didn’t learn he was wrong until it was too late. I tore down his myth for a reason. The evidence of why is in the histories.”
“Tell me why. Yourself.”
“Certainly. You are the one with the very deadly gun. Fanaticism arrests the ability to generate creative thought. It’s an arresting system of behaviors, a rigid form of culture designed to block out any distracting influences. Within that set parameter of behavior, anything can be justified because nothing is questioned. We ended up with another version of the Butlerian Jihad, but this time, targeting humans rather than thinking machines. Whereas the Imperium created by Serena Butler’s adventures still existed, there was a jihad in the foreground now that sought to erase creative cultures in favor of static culture. The fremen culture. Fanatic culture.”
Leto’s head lolled to the side. “Think back, ghola. You know what I mean. You went among the Fremen for some time as I recall. I have the Red Duke’s memories, you remember.”
Duncan gave a start when the long dead Duke Leto’s voice told him: “Five battalions. That’s what I asked for, Duncan. I needed five battalions of those people ready before the Harkonnens descended upon us. You said they were an independent bunch.”
Leto’s voice returned to normal. “I’ve not known you to be so wrong about people, Duncan.”
“They were slaves to their religion,” Duncan muttered, nodding slightly to himself.
“And therefore slaves to each other. All that was outsider was profane. All that defied the ‘peace of Mua’Dib’ were executed. Stilgar was as much a wild animal as he became a civilized man. My grandmother told Gurney once that there was a very thin layer of civilized behavior over Stilgar’s original nature. She told him how to remove it. What happened after that?”
Duncan soured. “According to the histories…he killed me. Didn’t he?”
“Two deaths for the Atreides. The second for no better reason than the first.”
Duncan stayed still.
“A people paralyzed by cultural norms and persisting ideology can be easily controlled or subverted by those who understand the pressure points in those systems. My father did it. I did it. You did it to Stilgar. You goaded him into killing you. Forcing him to take sides when he refused to do so. The ultimate problem with that mindset is that it’s wide open for others to control with only a certain amount of maneuvering.”
“As much as you decry it, what’s outside these walls? Leto’s religion. The ultimate fanaticism.”
“It’s a bitter pill for humanity to swallow but it’ll put them on the right track.”
“How?”
“Strange murderer you are, Duncan. Asking questions to a corpse. What I do here will destroy the Old Empire once and for all and tear out the underpinnings that made it acceptable to function. What arises in its place will be far more chaotic and variable. That will generate opportunity for evolution and creativity. I’m remaking the universe into its ultimate adaptable form, but I’m also injecting my own surprise into the future.”
“What surprise?”
“Surprises aren’t surprises if I describe them.”
“Clearly we won’t live to see it, either of us.”
“There’s that chance. I think you might live a bit longer than I. You may open those ghola eyes of yours to the very universe I’ve labored to describe.”
“What possible good comes of this? Why such a dramatic recreation of the universe? In your image, no doubt.”
“Is it hard to imagine my empire as a worm? This vast, synchronized organism that will melt apart and shuffle into a thousand different directions, seeking its own fortunes but still part of a greater cycle of being? The king is the land and the land is the king. And you, Duncan, will be my Excalibur.”
Duncan frowned. The gun remained steady but lowered a few inches.
“I wonder which hands will pull you from your stone?”
“You’ve created countless descendants of me. You’ve made other…Duncans…breed with those damnable Fish Speakers.”
“My own breeding program, yes.”
“To what end?”
“Must there be an end? Perhaps I’m the ultimate voyeur.”
“You never do anything without some calculated purpose.”
“I emulate thinking machines well in that sense, don’t you think? I trust humanity to have the appropriate response.”
“But my genetic legacy. Why?”
“What greater way to control the universe than prescience? I can certainly make my case for that. If, say, another prescient source were to appear, think of the grand advantage of a strain of human that can’t be detected through prescience at all? Blank spots in the mind of the observer, beings of infinite potential whom culture itself could not properly restrain. Endless lines of probability exploding out of them so blindly that no prescient source could ever detect their next move. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate weapon against something like me?”
“You’re breeding a weapon against yourself?”
Leto sighed and lowered his head slightly. “Now you’re getting clumsy. They’re a weapon I point at something else.”
“What?”
“The Bene Gesserit. Errant branches of my family tree perhaps. Future kwisatz haderachs that have no morality to them at all. Or perhaps against advanced computations so far in excess of your understanding that they create a pattern of acceptable human behavior. Mechanical prophecies?” He shook his cowled head. “There are reasons for it. It could be that one day, these ultimate men and women will be the best hope for the future of the universe. Cyphers that promote the final change humanity must endure to adapt itself past the crisis point. After all, obeying the forms of culture will not enable it to survive.”
Leto flicked his eyes to the ghola. “So, enough of an old worm’s rambling. You’re here to kill me. Wouldn’t you like to?”
Duncan’s hand wavered. He chewed his bottom lip. Sweat broke out on his skin.
“You came back to my father in your original ghola life in a crisis like this, where your agony over the Tleilaxu programming forced you back to the surface of Hayt’s consciousness. Ironic you should take the murderer’s role in this drama. Will you come back to me in this moment, Duncan?”
Duncan’s façade cracked. He blinked several times, mopped his forehead with his sleeve. His lip trembled.
He strained as if under a great weight, then pointed the pistol under his chin and fired.
His fell backward stiff and hit the ground.
A telepathic summons brought his majordomo, the young and untested Moneo.
“This one broke ahead of schedule. Remove it and send for another one.”
Leto turned away from the corpse and retreated to the confines of his cart. He curled in against himself and let his chest heave a few times mournfully.
The neurotoxin wouldn’t have the effect on his worm flesh that the conspirators obviously desired. The spice saturation in his bloodstream alone would have faded the effect of any toxin lucky enough to pierce his hide, but in his accelerated form the poison would do little more than leave him a headache at best.
This Duncan, however, had tested the boundaries of his heart. Unable to choose between his morality and Leto’s Golden Path, he had simply died to remove himself from betraying himself or his lord.
My heart is still human. Some small corner of it, at least. If this is ever discovered, the Tleilaxu may well have me.
I'm a writer myself and one of my guiding lights, inspirationally, has been Dune. Recently, purely for the exercise, I tried to tap out a sort of "lost chapter" to God Emperor of Dune. I'm pleased with the results and I thought I'd leave it here for your consumption.
--------------------------------------------------
Leto II knew that Duncan planned violence the moment he entered his chamber. The stiffness to one leg, the stillness of his neck, the fixed position of his eyes, the expressionless face that alone told the story of what was to come. The way his fingertips brushed absently against his right leg.
So, it comes to this already, Leto thought. This one has become intolerant much faster than the others. Doubtless a Tleilaxu experiment in and of itself. Can they catch the God Emperor off guard if one of their little time bombs triggers ahead of schedule?
Leto relaxed himself with a slow, heaving sigh and leaned against the edge of his cart.
The two stared at each other for a moment, Leto calm and omniscient, Duncan still and quiet.
The moment of formality passed and became awkwardness. Awkwardness passed into a moment of genuine threat when the formal exchanges were not observed.
“Well?” Leto asked. “What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know what you mean, M’Lord…”
Leto smashed a gray fist against the cart. It shattered the rim with a crushing echo. “I will warn you this once, Duncan.”
He need say nothing else. Almost timidly, like a child forced to hand over money from an overturned piggy bank, Duncan’s fingertips grasped the hilt of the weapon and pulled it up, level to Leto.
“Tleilaxu needler,” Leto observed. He smirked. “Doubtless filled with some neurotoxin that could drop a herd of sandworms, eh, Duncan?”
“You are an evil I cannot permit to endure.”
“Oh, how operatic of you. You rehearsed that little squirt of melodrama all the way down the steps, didn’t you? I suppose this is part in the play where I shudder in recognition of what my own baleful deeds has bought me?”
Leto held out a hand and shook his fingertips, only for an instant.
“I’ve never had much love for melodramas. Of course, you’d know this from the way I treat certain historians.”
This steeled Duncan. His muscles tensed. He raised the weapon a little higher, but his body remained stiff.
“Look at that Idaho resolve. As resolute as ever. Convinced that I’m the worst evil in history, a betrayal of all the Atreides ever stood for in your proud and noble mind, and yet you still hesitate to pull that trigger. Because you would still be firing at an Atreides.”
“I have no love for this, you’re right. But it’s necessity. You can’t be allowed to live. You’re an…abomination on all things.”
“Such is the point of my existence, good Duncan. But what comes of the careful system of order and belayed chaos when you pull that trigger? I am a control system that holds many power hungry, violent individuals in check. I should know, I put them there. If a power vacuum at my level were to occur, can you imagine the war, death, pestilence and destruction that would result? All these petty egos and their dreams of absolute power thrusting them onto battlefield after battlefield, sending men noble enough to be your brothers to their deaths?”
The pistol wavered.
“The universe would fall into instant chaos and it would not be briefly resolved. Billions would die across countless star systems as conflict upon conflict erupted between would be emperors. Leto’s Peace would become the sweetest of dreams then; my name not so much uttered as a curse, so much as with the weight of memory that says, ‘Those were the good old days!’”
“There’s no other solution. At least humanity would have a fighting chance to control its own destiny.”
“There’s that Swordmaster view of meritocracy again. I never get tired of hearing it. You realize that cultural constructs exist as nothing more than a sequence of acceptable behaviors, don’t you? Culture is simply the game of what is permissible. What is permissible is generated by conflicting ideologies that are inbred into every cultural construct; young ideas war with the old until the stronger idea wins out. Ah, but here’s the catch: Does the strongest idea immediately qualify it for being the best idea?”
Leto let the question hang in the air. He raised his head slightly.
“You could kill me only to end up with something every bit as bad, or worse. I have one comfort to the people; I cannot be considered human, so my atrocities can be draped in that escape. What greater horror is there than seeing atrocities of my scale committed by another human?”
“What you’ve done to the universe is wrong!” shouted Duncan.
Leto let the echo fade away and hung the silence between them a few moments before answering. “Hardly. What I’ve done to the universe is give it a second breath. Don’t you understand the ultimate failing of the Old Empire, my dear Duncan? It was a system that became overlarge and undersupported. A an ancient saying goes, ‘Too many chiefs, not enough Indians.’ Violent power struggles were not generating a sense of evolution in human nature - far from it. It arrested progress in favor of the achievements of the now.”
“The same chaos you say will erupt if I kill you.”
“Not the same. Not at all. Ideas stopped flowing in the Old Empire. There was no challenge of the old by the new. Only a set sequence of acceptable behaviors: Imperium. CHOAM. Landsraad. Jihad. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.”
“Mua’Dib threw down the Emperor. He destroyed the status quo.”
“And injected the wrong ideas, merit-bankrupt ideas, directly into the bloodstream of humanity. He was poisoning it.”
“How do you suggest you’ve done better?”
“I made the sacrifice my father could not.”
“Paul would have challenged the Gods Below if he thought he was right!”
“True. Except he didn’t learn he was wrong until it was too late. I tore down his myth for a reason. The evidence of why is in the histories.”
“Tell me why. Yourself.”
“Certainly. You are the one with the very deadly gun. Fanaticism arrests the ability to generate creative thought. It’s an arresting system of behaviors, a rigid form of culture designed to block out any distracting influences. Within that set parameter of behavior, anything can be justified because nothing is questioned. We ended up with another version of the Butlerian Jihad, but this time, targeting humans rather than thinking machines. Whereas the Imperium created by Serena Butler’s adventures still existed, there was a jihad in the foreground now that sought to erase creative cultures in favor of static culture. The fremen culture. Fanatic culture.”
Leto’s head lolled to the side. “Think back, ghola. You know what I mean. You went among the Fremen for some time as I recall. I have the Red Duke’s memories, you remember.”
Duncan gave a start when the long dead Duke Leto’s voice told him: “Five battalions. That’s what I asked for, Duncan. I needed five battalions of those people ready before the Harkonnens descended upon us. You said they were an independent bunch.”
Leto’s voice returned to normal. “I’ve not known you to be so wrong about people, Duncan.”
“They were slaves to their religion,” Duncan muttered, nodding slightly to himself.
“And therefore slaves to each other. All that was outsider was profane. All that defied the ‘peace of Mua’Dib’ were executed. Stilgar was as much a wild animal as he became a civilized man. My grandmother told Gurney once that there was a very thin layer of civilized behavior over Stilgar’s original nature. She told him how to remove it. What happened after that?”
Duncan soured. “According to the histories…he killed me. Didn’t he?”
“Two deaths for the Atreides. The second for no better reason than the first.”
Duncan stayed still.
“A people paralyzed by cultural norms and persisting ideology can be easily controlled or subverted by those who understand the pressure points in those systems. My father did it. I did it. You did it to Stilgar. You goaded him into killing you. Forcing him to take sides when he refused to do so. The ultimate problem with that mindset is that it’s wide open for others to control with only a certain amount of maneuvering.”
“As much as you decry it, what’s outside these walls? Leto’s religion. The ultimate fanaticism.”
“It’s a bitter pill for humanity to swallow but it’ll put them on the right track.”
“How?”
“Strange murderer you are, Duncan. Asking questions to a corpse. What I do here will destroy the Old Empire once and for all and tear out the underpinnings that made it acceptable to function. What arises in its place will be far more chaotic and variable. That will generate opportunity for evolution and creativity. I’m remaking the universe into its ultimate adaptable form, but I’m also injecting my own surprise into the future.”
“What surprise?”
“Surprises aren’t surprises if I describe them.”
“Clearly we won’t live to see it, either of us.”
“There’s that chance. I think you might live a bit longer than I. You may open those ghola eyes of yours to the very universe I’ve labored to describe.”
“What possible good comes of this? Why such a dramatic recreation of the universe? In your image, no doubt.”
“Is it hard to imagine my empire as a worm? This vast, synchronized organism that will melt apart and shuffle into a thousand different directions, seeking its own fortunes but still part of a greater cycle of being? The king is the land and the land is the king. And you, Duncan, will be my Excalibur.”
Duncan frowned. The gun remained steady but lowered a few inches.
“I wonder which hands will pull you from your stone?”
“You’ve created countless descendants of me. You’ve made other…Duncans…breed with those damnable Fish Speakers.”
“My own breeding program, yes.”
“To what end?”
“Must there be an end? Perhaps I’m the ultimate voyeur.”
“You never do anything without some calculated purpose.”
“I emulate thinking machines well in that sense, don’t you think? I trust humanity to have the appropriate response.”
“But my genetic legacy. Why?”
“What greater way to control the universe than prescience? I can certainly make my case for that. If, say, another prescient source were to appear, think of the grand advantage of a strain of human that can’t be detected through prescience at all? Blank spots in the mind of the observer, beings of infinite potential whom culture itself could not properly restrain. Endless lines of probability exploding out of them so blindly that no prescient source could ever detect their next move. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate weapon against something like me?”
“You’re breeding a weapon against yourself?”
Leto sighed and lowered his head slightly. “Now you’re getting clumsy. They’re a weapon I point at something else.”
“What?”
“The Bene Gesserit. Errant branches of my family tree perhaps. Future kwisatz haderachs that have no morality to them at all. Or perhaps against advanced computations so far in excess of your understanding that they create a pattern of acceptable human behavior. Mechanical prophecies?” He shook his cowled head. “There are reasons for it. It could be that one day, these ultimate men and women will be the best hope for the future of the universe. Cyphers that promote the final change humanity must endure to adapt itself past the crisis point. After all, obeying the forms of culture will not enable it to survive.”
Leto flicked his eyes to the ghola. “So, enough of an old worm’s rambling. You’re here to kill me. Wouldn’t you like to?”
Duncan’s hand wavered. He chewed his bottom lip. Sweat broke out on his skin.
“You came back to my father in your original ghola life in a crisis like this, where your agony over the Tleilaxu programming forced you back to the surface of Hayt’s consciousness. Ironic you should take the murderer’s role in this drama. Will you come back to me in this moment, Duncan?”
Duncan’s façade cracked. He blinked several times, mopped his forehead with his sleeve. His lip trembled.
He strained as if under a great weight, then pointed the pistol under his chin and fired.
His fell backward stiff and hit the ground.
A telepathic summons brought his majordomo, the young and untested Moneo.
“This one broke ahead of schedule. Remove it and send for another one.”
Leto turned away from the corpse and retreated to the confines of his cart. He curled in against himself and let his chest heave a few times mournfully.
The neurotoxin wouldn’t have the effect on his worm flesh that the conspirators obviously desired. The spice saturation in his bloodstream alone would have faded the effect of any toxin lucky enough to pierce his hide, but in his accelerated form the poison would do little more than leave him a headache at best.
This Duncan, however, had tested the boundaries of his heart. Unable to choose between his morality and Leto’s Golden Path, he had simply died to remove himself from betraying himself or his lord.
My heart is still human. Some small corner of it, at least. If this is ever discovered, the Tleilaxu may well have me.