This is the last one, I swear to gods below 😂

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

Leto’s Worm Trip, Dude

Experiencing Fear and Loathing in Jacurutu, Leto's drugged mind is threatened with possession by his preborn memories. With Ghost Paul's help, he's able to select the most manageable of his malignant identities – a distant ancestor named Harum – to consume the other aggressive ones and receive Leto's coveted Most Tolerable Jackass award; this prevents some other evil ancestors like the Baron Harkonnen from taking over. Harum is heavily implied to be an ancient king of Egypt, and the nature of his cruelty is that in life, he saw himself as a shepherd who needed to steer the flock and occasionally “cull the herd” amongst his subjects. Because of spoilery God Emperor reasons, this actually fits with Leto's long-term Plans For Humanity perfectly, so Leto elevates Harum to be the leader of the “Congress” of identities which now collectively all share Leto's conscience together.

>And we must not suppress the past entirely. We must use it, make an amalgam of it. Finally we will mix them all into ourselves. We will no longer be our original selves—but we will not be possessed.

>I’m a community dominated by one who was ancient and surpassingly powerful.

But as Leto continues to be drugged to near-death, even this “consciousness power-sharing arrangement” is threatened when the other identities jostle for control of his body to keep Leto from getting himself – and by extension all of them – killed by spice overdose and desert exposure. An unnamed ancestor comes to the rescue by explaining to Leto that the future is fixed and immutable, and that everything which happens between now and then is simply the collection of events that have to happen in order to connect the two moments in time together:

>“It is not the present which influences the future, thou fool, but the future which forms the present. You have it all backward. Since the future is set, an unfolding of events which will assure that future is fixed and inevitable.”

Leto realizes that if this is true, there's no sense worrying about a finished past or an unalterable future: the only thing that matters is to exist experiencing the present moment. (Leto will then go on to start a mindfulness podcast called Namaste, Imperium.)

>“There’s no mystery about a human life. It’s not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

Armed with this knowledge, Leto confronts his inner identities by showing them that their lives only have meaning within the context of the raw sense data that they each receive from his awareness of the present – a sense of “Ever-Present Now” they'll all discard if they keep insisting on the primacy of the past (“I know better than you because I'm older and have more life experiences to draw upon”) or the desire to change the future (“give me control of your body so we can escape this desert already, I've got stuff I want to do”).

>Ahhhh, my memories, he thought. I have seen your illusion. You no longer invent the next moment for me. You merely show me how to create new moments. I’ll not lock myself on the old tracks.

>The multitude of inner lives fell into alignment, nothing tangled or mixed. They became very quiet in duplication of his own inner silence, each memory-life discrete, an entity incorporeal and undivided. Leto spoke to them then: “I am your spirit. I am the only life you can realize. I am the house of your spirit in the land which is nowhere, the land which is your only remaining home. Without me, the intelligible universe reverts to chaos. Creative and abysmal are inextricably linked in me; only I can mediate between them.”

Incidentally, Leto's inner revelations mirror his outer view of the universe: that reality only has meaning when humans live in the present, rather than being trapped by ancient ancestral perspectives of the past (i.e. the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mothers) or else enslaved by the tyranny of some future-predicting monster.

>“Without me, mankind will sink into the mire and vanity of knowing. Through me, you and they will find the only way out of chaos: understanding by living.”

Because all of the identities within him can see and share Leto's thoughts real-time, they're able to experience this same revelatory Capital-T Truth for themselves and finally settle down:

>With this he let go of himself and became himself, his own person compassing the entirety of his past. It was not victory, not defeat, but a new thing to be shared with any inner life he chose.

Focusing On The Present

Having solved all of human philosophy and cosmology with a two-day acid bender in the desert, Leto still has to escape the insurmountable difficulty of a middle-aged man with a knife. The irony which Leto is only just now appreciating is that while he can see millions of years into the past and thousands of years into the future, he still has no idea what's going on right now because he's neglected focusing on the present for the entire book. He ignored how nervous his lies-by-omission made Ghanima at the time, so he was completely blindsided by the ambush which eventually captured him:

>As he spoke, Leto’s mind flung itself against the unknown as against a cage, questing wildly for answers. A baited trap? But who had known except Ghanima? Impossible! Ghanima wouldn’t betray her own brother. Then did someone know him well enough to predict his actions? Who? His grandmother? How could she?

Leto is currently dying because, as Ghanima quoted, “most deadly errors arise from obsolete assumptions.” To highlight how badly behind Leto is on current events, we see his internal monologue when he first meets Sabiha drugging him at Jacurutu:

>He looked to the open doorway of his cell and saw Sabiha sitting there. […] And she was a living signal to him that the Bene Gesserit plan was known—or suspected—here in Jacurutu. So they hoped to revive Pharaonic Imperialism through him, did they? Then what was their design to force him into marrying his sister? Surely Sabiha could not prevent that. His captors knew the plan, though. And how had they learned it? They’d not shared its vision. […] The reflexive and circular subjectivity of the visions which revealed Sabiha were his and his alone.

Leto is so badly out-of-touch with the present that he still believes his captor Gurney is working for Jessica (no), Jessica’s working for the Bene Gesserit (nope), the Bene Gesserit want to breed Leto with his sister (not even close), but that some Jacurutu Fremen anticipated all of that and are trying to avoid it by setting Leto up with Sabiha (LOL no).

(To clarify: Gurney thinks he’s getting his orders from Jessica but they’re secretly from Alia; the sisterhood thinks Jessica is working for them but she’s secretly sabotaging them on behalf of House Atreides; the Bene Gesserit wanted people to think their plan was to abduct and incest-breed the twins but their real plan was precipitating an Atreides-Corrino war so they could eventually control a Ghanima-Farad’n lineage; and the Jacurutu Fremen didn’t plan to use Sabiha as bait to lure Leto away from the throne: Paul did, while the Jacurutu only tasked Sabiha with drugging Leto because they assume she's an expert on getting high.)

Trying to learn more from the present, Leto calls Gurney and Namri into the room to fish for information and learns that they're expecting some kind of password from him, with Namri willing to kill him if he answers wrong. Leto has no way to know that this situation is just Alia testing him for prescience by prompting him with: “Please enter your password (case-sensitive). You have one (1) attempt remaining before Namri stabs you,” especially because that's not even how prescience works: Alia had assumed there would only be one right answer that didn't result in instant death for Leto, but the boy can see a whole forest of branching dialog options that could postpone his death, aid in his escape, turn his captors against each other, prey off their doubts, etc. He tries to explain as much to Gurney and Namri:

>“Universal prescience is an empty myth. […] You still wait to pass judgment on me,” Leto said. “And there’s no way to exchange information, I’ll admit, without making judgments. You can’t ask the universe to be exact, though. […]Every judgment teeters on the brink of error,” Leto explained. “To claim absolute knowledge is to become monstrous. […] Every question, every problem doesn’t have a single correct answer. One must permit diversity. A monolith is unstable. Then why do you demand a single correct statement from me? Is that to be the measure of your monstrous judgment?”

As an example, Leto reveals to Namri that he knows some of Jacurutu sietch's secret friendship rituals. Namri is caught off-guard: the response implies either that someone in Namri's tribe made Leto a Friend of the Sietch (in which case Namri can't kill him), or else that Leto saw the ritual in a prescient vision (in which case it proves that Leto is prescient and Namri shouldn't kill him until he can get a “Save The Worms” vision out of the kid); either way, the statement proves useful as one of the infinitely many responses that can postpone Leto's death. Gurney's getting impatient, though, so Leto bluffs and insists that he knows the correct lone answer that Gurney's looking for… but will only tell it to Jessica in person, which buys him time and further spreads doubt for his captors.

Alia’s Desperation

While Alia is still impersonating Jessica, Gurney contacts her to say that Leto wants to deliver his password-response to “Jessica” in-person. Alia panics: does this mean that Leto has seen through her deceit?

Ghanima soon makes Alia even more suspicious of the twins: Farad'n contacted Arrakis to say that he now agrees to the marriage proposal, but Ghani insists she'll kill the prince the moment she sees him as revenge for House Corrino's role in “assassinating” her brother. This suits Alia just fine since she was planning on murdering Farad'n anyway, and Ghani could be a useful instrument to pull it off: who's going to suspect a nine-year-old will come to her own wedding armed? And if Ghanima is then immediately murdered by Farad'n's Sardaukar guards in retaliation, that just removes one more rival Atreides member waiting to grow up and push Alia aside for the throne. But the girl then startles Alia by suggesting that Ghanima knows Alia is possessed and doesn't care:

>“I’ve chosen a way of life which suits me,” Alia said, turning back to stare at Ghanima sitting cross-legged on the cot. Was it possible she’d made that terrible inner compromise? Alia tried to see the signs of it in Ghanima, but was unable to read a single betrayal. Alia wondered then: Has she seen it in me? But how could she?

>“You feared to be the window for a multitude,” Ghanima accused. “But we’re the pre-born and we know. You’ll be their window, conscious or unconscious. You cannot deny them.” And she thought: Yes, I know you—Abomination. And perhaps I’ll go as you have gone, but for now I can only pity you and despise you.

This causes Alia to rapidly recalculate: how does Ghani know that Alia's possessed? Has Ghanima herself been brain-hijacked? The girl doesn't show any signs of it, but maybe the twins have each become host to a malignant ancestor who's just better at hiding their presence than the Baron Harkonnen is?

>And the past presented him with an ultimate ancestor—one who was called Harum and without whom the distant future would not be. [...] That, of course, was why Gurney had been taught to fear him; why Namri’s knife waited. They could not be allowed to see this power within him. No one could ever see it in its fullness—not even Ghanima.

This thought is absolutely terrifying to Alia, who has spent this whole time drugging Leto towards prescience while operating under the assumption that if the boy ever became possessed as an unintended side-effect, Namri and Gurney would simply kill him. But if the twins can conceal their possessions in a way that Alia can't, Gurney and Namri would never notice if Leto's possessed or not: this means that Alia might have just awakened a horrifying ancestor even craftier and crueler than the Baron and whom she's just armed with the superpower of prescience. Is that why Leto is suddenly demanded to speak with “Jessica” in-person?

Irulan, meanwhile, misses all of the subtext because Alia has programmed her sister-in-law to ignore anything insinuating that Alia's brain is as haunted as the Winchester Mansion:

>Silence hung between Ghanima and Alia, an almost palpable thing which alerted the Bene Gesserit training in Irulan. She glanced from one to the other, then: “Why’re you so quiet suddenly?”
“I’ve just had a thought which requires considerable reflection,” Alia said.

The “considerable reflection” being “oh god oh god oh god this was such a mistake WHAT HAVE I DONE.” Alia contacts Namri and gives him updated instructions: kill Leto no matter what password he gives:

>“Why did you run away?”
“Namri had orders to kill me no matter what I did. His orders were from Alia.”

The Rise of TROUTMAN!

Unfortunately for Alia, it's too late for that: with his newfound powers of *gestures vaguely at the tapestry of reality*, Leto Vulcan-Neck-Pinches his deputy-warden Sabiha and sneaks out of Jacurutu into the desert. Namri sabotaged Leto's stillsuit and there's a huge sandstorm coming, but Leto sleeps in an underground pokeball so he's fine. He arrives at Shuloch and forces Muriz to drink his blood to grant Leto the tribe's protection, but Muriz still tries to feed Leto spice-seasoned Quaker Oats to get a “Save the Worms” vision out of him.

Sabiha was sent here as punishment for letting Leto escape, and Leto is tempted one last time with the prospect of a normal family life with her. (It's also here that Frank Herbert afflicts the English language with the invention of the damnable word "beefswelling" to describe a prepubescent erection, a term so cursed it made me stare directly into a stoneburner's J-rays to melt my eyeballs.)

Ultimately, though, Leto chooses Strife over Wife and walks into the Shuloch basin to become god. He lures the nearby sandtrout to fuse with his body, something that's only possible because 1. he's basically a walking Koolaid Man full of drugs right now and 2. he can use advanced Bene Gesserit techniques to move the spice around in his bloodstream to induce the sandtrout to keep fusing with him. Now Leto understands why his dream visions told him to come here to start a new religion: it's only the absurd amount of spice in his body that fully unlocked his prescience, refined his philosophy on the nature of time and human experience, melded his identity with his ancestral memories, and gave him bulletproof armor that lets him jog at twice the sound barrier. (So when you think about it, it's actually a good thing we force-fed a minor all those drugs, Your Honor!)

Anticipating his father's return from Arrakeen, Leto intercepts Paul's worm en-route across the desert. Paul's guide Assan Tariq tries to prevent the meeting between father and son by crying “demon!” and killing the two Atreides as instructed, but Leto snaps him like a celery stalk and ragdolls Tariq's body across the desert. Now Paul is truly blind: Leto has derailed his father's visions and killed Paul's guide. Paul is distraught at Leto's transformation and objects to The Golden Path for being consciously cruel, forcing stagnation upon society, and demanding a horrible surrender of Leto's humanity. Leto doesn't bother denying any of this, but flatly asserts that Paul didn't watch the vision for long enough or else he'd realize that without The Big Fat Stinking Golden Path, humanity will go extinct. That's enough to finally convince Paul to agree, so now both father and son can work together to create a new religious mythos to topple Alia and save humanity.

Meanwhile, Gurney finally figures out that Alia's been impersonating Jessica this whole time and that Namri was part of the scheme, so in classic Atreides fashion, Gurney baits the naib like a toreador summoning a bull: the cape goes up, Namri goes down. Toro! Leto finally realizes the same thing - that his captivity wasn't Jessica's fault after all - and communicates this to Paul, who had been suffering from the same problem Leto had been prior to his ascendancy to TROUTMAN: too much reliance on visions of the future, not enough focus on the present.

>“I’ll take you to Gurney Halleck now.”
“Gurney! He serves the Sisterhood through my mother.”
And now Leto understood the extent of his father’s vision. “No, father. Gurney no longer serves anyone. I know the place to find him and I can take you there. It’s time for the new legend to be created.”

>But Leto intruded now. “Look at the fabric, father.”
“Yes... yes...” Paul held his head high as though sniffing the air. [...]
“How easy it is to follow our thoughts instead of our senses,” Leto said.

Leto assigns Gurney to look after Paul now, and Gurney is shocked that Paul is still alive, though Paul insists his only role from here on is to pave the way for the coming of the new religion. To build-up belief in the new “Shai’Hulud Incarnate” and weaken the public's faith in Alia, Leto goes on a public property destruction world tour. He smashes qanats to slow Alia's terraforming, postpone the death of the sandworms, make Alia appear inept because she can't stop the attacks, weaken her military by spreading it too thin in trying (and failing) to protect the remaining irrigation works, encouraging more Fremen tribes to defect and join the growing rebellion against her, and generally convert the public away from Alia's Mahdi'ism and towards TROUTMANIA.

The growing rebellion has forced Alia to make concessions to the rebels and relinquish custody of Ghanima to Stilgar (his sietch Tabr is considered neutral ground), though it's only a matter of time before Alia/Brain Baron tries to attack the sietch and recapture Ghanima by force:

>She debated moving against Stilgar, but the inner voice cautioned against this.
“Not yet.”

If that happens, the wedding will go forward and Ghanima and Farad'n will both be killed. Leto will lose a sister, an ally, and any hope of controlling the Bene Gesserit breeding program. House Atreides will get sucked into an unwinnable war against House Corrino and all the other Great Houses and factions Alia betrays into siding against her, The Golden Path will go swirling down The Porcelain Drain, and humanity will be doomed to eventual extinction. No pressure, kid.

But it'll take months to build a legend/religion/armed rebellion big enough to overthrow Alia's priesthood and seize control over Arrakis, the wider Imperium, and the beliefs and loyalties of its billions of subjects, and it's here that Leto foresees Duncan coming to the rescue one last time:

>“Have you ever killed a friend?” […]
“What’s this of killing a friend?”
“He’ll die anyway,” Leto said. “I don’t have to do it, but I could prevent it. If I don’t prevent it, is that not killing him?”
“Who is this… who will die?”
“The alternative keeps me silent,” he said. “I might have to give my sister to a monster.”

Get Duncan’ed!

Duncan returns to Arrakis, painfully visits “Alia” again, then quickly hops on a solo flight to sietch Tabr while avoiding another of his wife's attempts to kill him. At Tabr, Duncan receives a message from Gurney informing him of everything that Gurney, Leto, and Paul have learned while Duncan was away, information which Duncan patiently and repeatedly tries to relay to Stilgar to convince Stilgar of Alia's treachery. Duncan explains that Alia's been possessed by an evil ancestor to betray her family and has been cheating on Duncan with a skeevy "advisor" named Javid who, along with his Jacurutu contacts, was involved in the assassination plot on the twins, the scheme to drug Leto, corrupting the priesthood with money Javid received from the sandtrout smuggling operations, and about every other sinister plot in the book.

>His mentat faculties had begun to work sluggishly in the early hours of the morning, all of his computations confronted at last by the inescapable datum supplied in the message from Gurney Halleck. Alia had known about Leto! She’d known. And Javid had to be a part of that knowing.

>Idaho shook his head sadly. “Everything I’ve told you can be verified. The communication with Jacurutu was always through Alia’s Temple. The plot against the twins had accomplices there. Money for the sale of worms off-planet goes there. All of the strings lead to Alia’s office, to the Regency.”

Duncan tries to convince Stilgar to flee sietch Tabr with Ghanima and join the rebellion before Alia can attack them, but Stilgar is stubborn, and Duncan is forced to peel-back each of the excuses until he arrives at the real reason Stilgar refuses to acknowledge Alia's possession: if she's possessed, she'll have to stand trial. The Fremen Trial of Possession usually ends in the execution of the accused, and the entire Fremen community collectively bears the moral responsibility of such a judgment – one of the few times the Fremen can genuinely feel guilt. The Fremen are apparently still wincing from the last time they had to do this, and Stilgar is trying to avoid burdening the Fremen forever with the knowledge and trauma that they’ve condemned their own Regent and Living God to death.

>Alia had agreed to submit herself to a test called “the Trial of Possession,” the purpose of which had not been fully explained. However, no date had been set for this trial and two Corrino spies believed it might never take place.

>She thought about the Trial—that ancient Fremen examination whose ending most often brought hideous death.

>Idaho recalled Jessica’s words, said: “But you’ve ways of proving it.”
“A way, yes,” Stilgar said. Again he shook his head. “Painful, irrevocable. That is why I remind you about our attitude toward guilt. We can free ourselves from guilts which might destroy us in everything except the Trial of Possession. For that, the tribunal, which is all of the people, accepts complete responsibility.”
“You’ve done it before, haven’t you?”
“I’m sure the Reverend Mother didn’t omit our history in her recital,” Stilgar said. “You well know we’ve done it before.”
Idaho responded to the irritation in Stilgar’s voice.

It isn’t that Stilgar doesn’t believe that Alia is possessed: it’s that he cannot allow himself to believe it. (Once again, the running theme of people refusing to confront an uncomfortable reality.) Duncan recalls what Gurney told him about how to "persuade" the naib as a last resort:

>“There’s a very thin layer of civilized behavior over Stilgar’s original nature. And here’s how you take that layer off him…”

Once Duncan realizes that words alone can never convince Stilgar to come down off the fence and pick a side, with a jolt of desperate conviction, the heroic mentat proceeds to commit the most unintentionally funny act of the entire book: as Stilgar sits sipping coffee, Javid takes two steps into the room and Duncan proceeds to unceremoniously stab the traitor in the chest, not even pausing as he steps over Javid’s twitching body out into the hallway to get a burrito. There’s no dramatic confrontation, no cackling monologue, no ferocious duel-to-the-death: having teased us with the prospect of his eventual comeuppance for hundreds of pages, the last thing Javid McTraitorpants experiences before meeting his Little Maker is strolling into a cozy breakfast nook, Stilgar quietly enjoying a piping hot cup of Folgers in the corner, as Master Strategist Duncan Idaho calmly saunters over and delivers a knife to Javid’s aorta with about as much attention as he'd spend on folding socks. *chef’s kiss*

Stilgar is outraged that Duncan has violated the neutrality of sietch Tabr, but Duncan continues to provoke the naib with the most unforgivable Fremen insult (“Your Beard Is A Soulpatch”), goading Stilgar to kill Duncan in retaliation. Pour one out for our boy Idaho 2.0, the best Duncan to have ever Duncan’ed: calmly analytical, steadfastly loyal, heart-tuggingly noble>!, and never once betraying a random and inexplicable bias of homophobia!<.

Stilgar realizes too late that this is exactly what Duncan had planned: even if privately Alia wanted Duncan dead, publicly she can use his murder as a pretext to attack sietch Tabr. Stilgar is forced to flee with Ghanima and Irulan to cast their lot with the rebels, a move which ends up buying the rebellion months as Leto continues to erode the public’s worship of Alia both on Arrakis and across the universe.

>As qanats were shattered, Fremen pulled back to the northern and southern lines which once had marked the extent of their holdings. This movement could only signal what must be happening to the Empire. One condition was the mirror of the other.

Alia eventually decides attack a peaceful parley with Stilgar so she can kidnap Ghani (“Shame? Never heard of it”), but only after her power has ebbed to a critically low level. It's easy to miss because of the abrupt timeskip, but Duncan's sacrifice delayed the wedding for about a year – critical time which Leto needed to build-up his religion and undermine Alia, rebel movements needed to grow and arm their soldiers, Jessica needed to train Farad’n, and Ghanima needed to develop her own possession-suppressing mind exercises:

>Reports covering the past three months lay before her on the red coverlet. […] These attacks had to be the work of rebels. Obviously. More and more of them turned against Muad’Dib’s religion.

>In the months since their flight from Tabr the fugitives had sampled the protection of several such places made uninhabitable by the Desert Demon. […]This djedida had been given back to the desert after its qanat had been shattered a fifth time in eleven months.

>“It doesn’t matter whether she trusts me,” Agarves said. “To be candid about it, I don’t believe she does. I’ve been too long searching for you without finding you.”

>It was a new Farad’n she saw: more slender, more sinewy. The months of training had worked their inevitable magic on him. His eyes glittered when he stared at her.

>She possessed a gate through which she could peer when she needed that past. The months of self-hypnotic suppression had built for her a safe place from which to manage her own flesh.

One More Heroic Sacrifice

Once Ghanima is recaptured, Alia accelerates plans for the wedding date, and Leto realizes that he and Paul can't delay the confrontation much longer. They both grimly decide that Paul should accompany Leto to Arrakeen for the showdown, even though they both suspect Paul won't survive the encounter. There are a few reasons for this: first, Paul has been supernaturally aged by spice doses and desert exposure and he probably doesn't have many years left anyway:

>How old his voice sounds, Leto thought, and the thought was a wrenching pain.

>The Preacher was old before his time, old not despite the spice but because of it.

>“But you’re alive,” Halleck whispered, overcome now by his realization, turning at last to stare at this man, younger than himself, but so aged by the desert that he appeared to carry twice Halleck’s years.

Second, Leto knows that if he has to fight his way through Arrakeen, the commotion could alert Alia and give her enough time to escape, kidnap Ghanima and Farad'n, or else outright murder them both. To maintain the element of surprise, it would be helpful if Leto could masquerade as The Preacher's “guide” on their way through the city: all eyes will be on Paul instead of Leto as the two march right up to the Temple steps, allowing Leto to get close enough to breach the Temple before Alia can react. (This plan works so well that even Alia herself doesn't notice Leto even while staring right at him:)

>“You need my help?” The Preacher asked.
“Yes. I’m returning to Arrakeen and I wish to go as your guide.”

>Alia stared at that oncoming wave. She heard words now, and one above all others: “Preacher! Preacher!” Then she saw him, striding with the first spread of the wave, one hand on the shoulder of his young guide.

Another reason for Paul's sacrficie is that there are still people who worship Alia as a living god, and people tend to fight fanatically for their gods – something Leto understands firsthand, having used it himself to create a rebellion. The more he and Paul can discredit Alia before she falls, the fewer diehard fanatics they'll need to subdue across the Imperium once she's gone (and the same goes for her priesthood, which is still deeply-entrenched throughout the empire too). If “The Preacher” uses his final sermon to accuse Alia herself of being a living blasphemy, it'll help to undermine the public's remaining faith in her. And if such an accusation provokes the priesthood to outrage and they murder a popular mystic in retaliation, people will assume that Alia ordered the priests to do a hitjob and it will incense the public against both.

>Then a voice screeched from the mob: “Muad’Dib! They’ve killed Muad’Dib!”
“Gods below,” Alia quavered. “Gods below. […] That was Paul they killed!” Alia screamed. “That was your son! When they confirm it, do you know what’ll happen?”

(Yeah, dude: they'll hate you even more.)

Finally, there’s a royal custom where the new emperor buries the previous emperor. If Leto can be the one to lay Paul’s body to rest, it helps reinforce the legitimacy of Leto as the new emperor by implying that Paul's royal authority has now devolved onto Leto:

>“And you would have my body!”
“True.” […] The enshrining of Muad’Dib’s body by his son could be contrived as a form of cement for Leto’s vision.

The Showdown

Paul and Leto rock-up to Arrakeen and everything goes pretty much how they’re expecting: Alia hoped that her Temple staff would escort Paul up to her chambers once his sermon was over so that she could force Paul to watch as Ghanima murder-suicide’d Farad’n and ruined all of Paul’s plans, at which point Alia would probably just kill or imprison Paul:

>It was all working out according to plan. Ghani would kill him and, in the shattering aftermath, only one person would be prepared to pick up the pieces.

>Alia turned away to peer out the window. In just a few minutes the plan would bear its bloody fruit. And Paul would be here when his daughter delivered the coup de grâce to his holy pretensions.

>The Preacher’s voice boomed out over the plaza, and the mob waited upon his words with rapt attention. Let them listen! Soon his words would be made to mean things other than he intended. And there’d be no Preacher around to protest.

But her plans all backfire spectacularly when Paul denounces Alia in his sermon and martyrs himself, then Leto kicks the doors down to Alia’s room and unlocks Ghanima’s memory with the password they’d pre-arranged. Ghanima realizes that spending months walling-off some of her own memories taught her how to do the same to any of her ancestral memories to avoid possession. She tries to explain all this to Alia in the hopes that her aunt can still be rescued, but Alia is like 180-proof Baron Harkonnen Vodka by this point, and the real Alia is only able to regain enough control to remove herself from the narrative via a conveniently-placed window :-(

Aftermath

Leto is coronated as the new emperor and explains that the sandtrout are a living part of his body now and will continue transforming him until for thousands of years until he's eventually 100% sandworm. He's lured Farad'n into becoming his “court scribe,” which agonizes Jessica: she'd trained Farad'n to rule, not become Leto's footstool. But because she conditioned Farad'n to be loyal to Team: Screw Prescience and therefore to House Atreides, there's not much Farad'n can do to resist except take-up a pen name and author some screeds against tyranny – something which delights Leto, whose ultimate goals involve training humanity to resist despotism anyway (for God Emperor reasons).

Leto formally marries his own sister Ghanima to prevent any more political schemes meant to divide or control the family, but to everyone's profound relief, he's not planning to father an incest dynasty (and can't anyway, because sandtrout ate his junk). Instead, he plans to get Farad'n and Ghanima to sire the next umpteen generations of Atreides for him to begin his long-term project of usurping control of the Bene Gesserit breeding program (again for God Emperor reasons).

Like Leto predicted, the priesthood and Alia's loyalists are still putting-up a fight, with battles breaking out both on Arrakis and across the Imperium. The Fremen legions will be shorthanded trying to restore order, so Leto simply co-opts Farad'n's Sardaukar to help-out, musing that he could probably integrate both armies together at some point. (Farad'n weakly tries to protest, until Ghanima convinces him to go along with it: she knows the Atreides can always use Farad'n's Bene Gesserit training to mind-control him and force-override his objections if he's being too stubborn, and Ghanima is hoping it won't come to that.)

Jessica watches the ceremony from a distance in heartbreak: her plans for her “adopted son” got end-run'ed by a grandson who might prove to be even more morally clouded than the original Paul, both of her children just died on the same day right in front of her, and in awful hindsight, Alia's death was probably avoidable: the twins discovered not just one but two ways to avoid Lone Hostile Ancestor Possession, something Jessica didn't even know was possible until it was too late. And Alia, sharing the memories of both Jessica and all the generations of Bene Gesserit sisters fueling Jessica's beliefs, would have likewise believed there was no rescue from “Abomination” after a certain point and considered her own cause hopeless: the mother's bias proved contagious.

This means that to varying extents, the entire cast have collectively failed Alia: the twins didn’t realize they could save her until it was too late, Alia’s husband and Council leader both ignored the warning signs because they didn’t want to confront an ugly truth, her mother abandoned and pre-condemned her, and her brother outright sabotaged her into self-doubt and spiraling paranoia… all of which caused Alia to give up on herself, too. Alia’s real tragedy wasn’t possession: it was a lack of support. (If You Or Someone You Know Is Struggling With Running A Lonely Empire, Please Dial The Number On Your Screen.)

A long procession of naibs swear fealty to Leto, with Stilgar last in the place of honor. Sietch Tabr has fallen on hard times after most of its people were forced to flee Alia’s wrath for a year, so all Stilgar can offer as a coronation gift is a headband Ghanima wore while she was traveling with Stilgar in exile – a reminder that Stilgar’s “gift” to Leto was saving the life of the emperor’s sister. Leto responds by giving Stilgar a piece of Ghanima’s clothes from when Stilgar and Ghanima were both captured, which Stilgar thinks is meant to be an insult until Leto elaborates that it’s a reminder that Stilgar shouldn’t be so hard on himself: all leaders are human and all humans make mistakes. (By insisting that all leaders are human, Leto might be hinting here that he himself is still human beneath all the sandtrout, in which case this might be not so much a haughty “Don’t beat yourself up, bro, we can’t all be god - just me LOL” and more of a gesture of shared humility between two people who mutually understand the impossibilities of leadership and decision-making in an uncertain universe.)

Now that the real Paul Atreides is dead, only Memory Paul is left. This means that Leto can speak on Paul's behalf and make use of his legacy when needed, something that's caused Leto to break Fremen traditions and keep Paul's remains in a suspiciously Harum-themed canopic jar in his throne room as a visual symbol of his own power. Jessica finds the symbolism and messaging of this extremely distasteful:

>That jar and the boasting had firmed her resolve not to participate in this ritual. As long as she lived, she knew she could never accept Paul speaking through Leto’s mouth. She rejoiced that House Atreides had survived, but the things-that-might-have-been were beyond bearing.

With the processions over, Leto reveals the details of his possession to Farad'n along with some of his “lesser of two evils” plans for humanity. This is alarming considering that Ghanima just finished telling Farad'n that Leto has been running himself to exhaustion with desert ultra-marathons, a part of the boy quietly whimpering for the sweet embrace of death to escape from all the things Leto knows he'll have to do, endure, and become over the next few millennia. But it's too late to kill him now: his power is absolute, his body near-indestructible, and humanity now seems to be set irrevocably on The Golden Path. YAAAAAAY, GOOD ENDING :-D

I tried to keep these post sizes manageable but understand they've run pretty long. The motivation for writing them was that after reading Children of Dune a bunch of times and still not really understanding it, I went to this subreddit looking for answers and realized that everybody else seemed as confused by the same things I was 😂 I've always felt that of the original hexology, Children of Dune was by far the most complicated and hardest to understand plot-wise, so hopefully this guide will help anybody else who finished the book and struggled to make sense of it.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 4

Continuing to explain the plot (and plots within plots) for people who were confused by Children of Dune. Read the book first if you don't want to get spoiled 😂

The “Get Jessica to Train Farad’n” Plot

Leto has foreseen that having been foiled once already, Alia will keep trying to have Jessica killed until she succeeds. He predicts that ironically, the safest place for Jessica to hide is the one place Alia can't reach her: Salusa Secundus, amongst the rival House Corrino. Leto was alerted to this possibility either by his prescient dreams, or else by the ancestral memory he and Ghanima share which lets them anticipate their father Paul's actions in a way that Paul can't anticipate theirs:

>Jessica found herself silenced by this further example of how Ghanima’s mind worked in concert with what must be an inner awareness of others. Of me! How truly strange it was, Jessica thought, that this young flesh could carry all of Paul’s memories […] It was an invasion of privacy against which something primal in Jessica rebelled.

From this, Leto anticipates that Jessica is “going to confront a very interesting student” once she arrives on Salusa, and hints that while Paul may have started the whole “Jessica Training Farad’n” arc, it’s only the twins who know how it’s going to end:

>“Some actions have an end but no beginning; some begin but do not end. It all depends upon where the observer is standing.”

The siblings aren't quite opposed to Paul's idea: if Jessica trains Farad'n to sap the prince's military ambitions, it would remove a potential rival of theirs. But Paul would have allowed Jessica to train Farad'n in the classic Bene Gesserit way, apparently unaware that this would give the sisterhood mind-control access to Farad'n in the process. The twins want Jessica to train Farad'n to be loyal to House Atreides instead, though it will require some convincing to persuade Jessica to oppose the sisterhood's designs.

Leto meets with Jessica one-on-one to carefully explain to her all the ways the sisterhood has been manipulating her without her realizing it: guilt-tripping her to return to Dune, blackmailing her with family secrets while disguising the extortion in civil-sounding language, and using her Bene Gesserit training to control her like a puppet – something Jessica didn't even realize was possible until Leto demonstrates it on her himself. He reminds Jessica that it was the sisterhood who fought to unlock prescience, but it was prescience that drove her son to the jihad, heartbreak, and exile; maybe the sisterhood was wrong to want a predictable future?

>He fell silent, stared questioningly at the Lady Jessica. He’d spoken his piece as he and Ghanima had agreed. Now what would be their grandmother’s response?

>Leto shook his head. “Ignorance has its advantages. A universe of surprises is what I pray for!”
It was a long speech and, as she listened, Jessica marveled at how his mannerisms, his intonations, echoed his father—her lost son. Even the ideas: these were things Paul might have said.
“You remind me of your father,” she said.
“Is that hurtful to you?”
“In a way, but it’s reassuring to know he lives on in you.”
“How little you understand of how he lives on in me.”
Jessica found his tone flat but dripping bitterness.

(Translation: Leto knows Paul’s mind so well that he can predict Paul’s plan to transfer Jessica to Salusa Secundus and train Farad'n; it’s why the two are even having this conversation.)

He encourages Jessica to let herself get captured when the time comes. Between chapters, Ghanima reinforces this by encouraging Jessica to train her next Bene Gesserit disciple to be loyal to House Atreides and its goal of creating an unpredictable future, not to the sisterhood and their goal of creating a preordained one.

>“Why are you here?” she asked.
“For the same reason you’re here, My Lady.”
No outward sign betrayed the shocking power of those simple words, but she reflected at a furious pace: Does he really know why I’m here? How could he? Only Ghanima knew.

To clarify, everyone now has different motives for getting Jessica to train Farad'n: for Jessica, it's redemption and family safety: “Farad'n is my second chance to train a 'son' to be a good leader, and House Atreides will be safer converting a rival to an ally.” For Paul, it's idealism: “I'll rest easy knowing my successor is a better leader and person than I ever was.” But for the twins, the reasons range from the pragmatic (“Farad'n's family resources and soldiers will help us restore order after Alia's ouster causes unrest to spread across the Imperium”) to the cosmic (“Farad'n's lineage is the next-strongest contender for Kwisatz Haderach, and we need to steal control of the Bene Gesserit breeding program for spoilery God Emperor reasons”), to the downright petty (“How funny would it be if we could use him as a human tape recorder so I don't have to listen to pen-scratching noises while issuing dictation?”)

>Leto spoke to Farad’n. “Did you get all of that, Scribe?”
“Yes, My Lord.”
“My grandmother tells me she trained you well in the mnemonic processes of the Bene Gesserit. That’s good. I don’t want you scribbling beside me.”
“As you command, My Lord.”

(Paul used a different Bene Gesserit Corrino for the same demeaning purpose in Messiah; like father, like son.) The icing on the cake is that Farad’n’s Bene Gesserit training will give the twins a backdoor to force-override Farad’n’s stubbornness if necessary (but Farad’n will probably be bright enough that it won’t come to that):

>“Come, cousin, don’t be obtuse. My mother taught you well. Give me your Sardaukar.”
“Give them,” Ghanima echoed. “He’ll have them one way or another.”

The “Abduction” plot

Alia's annoyed that she couldn't kill Jessica at the spaceport, so she and her Evil Guidance Counselor move on to plan B: abduct Jessica, blame that on the Corrino to start a war with them, and have Jessica quietly assassinated later.

>Yes, the Baron’s plan was a good one. We eliminate the threat of the Lady Jessica and, at the same time, we discredit House Corrino. Yes.

The guards are unreliable and the Jacurutu screwed-up the last attempt, so Alia delegates the task to Duncan thinking she can at least trust her husband to stay quiet.

>“Well, Duncan, will you do it, or won’t you? She must be taken and it must be made to look like the work of House Corrino. […]You’re the only one I can trust for this,” Alia said.

She knows Duncan is fiercely loyal to House Atreides and wouldn't risk endangering an Atreides family member, so Alia frames this as a “fake abduction” done to keep Jessica safe. Duncan's not fooled: he deduces that Alia would prefer to have Jessica murdered, which forces him to calculate a conclusion he's been avoiding: Alia's been possessed by an evil ghost driving her to destroy her own family.

Duncan realizes the best thing he can do is play dumb and work from the inside to sabotage Alia and keep the rest of the family safe from her; he flies to sietch Tabr and sends a message to Jessica alerting her of the very real plot against her life (and if Alia asks, Duncan can always say the message was just a pretext to get Jessica alone so he could kidnap her as-ordered), but no sooner does he arrive than Alia instantly recalls him back to the palace.

It turns out that as soon as Duncan had left to abduct Jessica, Alia received a petition from the Fremen naibs unanimously demanding she instate Jessica to her Regency Council. The timing is suspicious: did someone leak? Irulan, spying for House Corrino? Duncan himself betraying his wife? Alia summons both but quickly concludes that neither was involved.

Nevertheless, her paranoia drives Alia to see the petition as part of a broader plot against her: many of the signatories became the heads of Minor Houses during Paul's jihad, and it seems some of them are on their way to Major House status since there's been a recent spike in market demand for the professionals that every Major House is expected to employ in its court. But a family needs a monstrous amount of wealth to upgrade to Major House status, so Alia suspects that somebody behind-the-scenes – CHOAM? The Bene Gesserit? – have been bribing the naibs with House Status Upgrades in exchange for their support on a petition that strengthens Jessica and weakens Alia.

Duncan thinks this is a stretch: the simpler explanation is that the Major Houses all want to get rich setting their own tax and trade policies without Alia's interference, so they intend to pass a bill asserting that because Alia's only a Regent and not an Empress, she can't dictate financial policy to them. This bill would require significant support to pass in the Landsraad, though Major Houses have more voting power than Minor ones. Duncan's interpretation: some existing Major Houses agreed to "sponsor" some Minor Houses, giving them enough money to upgrade their House status in exchange for their support on the bill. This would allow the existing Major Houses to effectively double their own voting power, pass the bill, and then set their own trade policies to make more money in the long-run.

Alia dismisses this by arguing that if the Great Houses try to dictate fiscal policy to her, she'll just sic the legions on them, but Duncan warns this would poison the whole Landsraad against her. Alia's unfazed – she still holds a gun to the head of spice production – though Duncan cautions this might not always be the case.

Despite Irulan and Duncan's feedback, Alia's adamant that the petition is part of a larger conspiracy to empower Jessica at Alia's expense. She decides to accelerate her plans to kill Jessica, apparently completely forgetting about the existing abduction plan in favor of Plan “Kill my mom during a public event and make it look like it was a botched assassination attempt against myself.”

To make this “Plot To Kill Me” story seem more believable, Alia starts using Irulan as a sounding board to invent the most credible-sounding narrative, Irulan having been so warped by Alia's repeated manipulations that Irulan's unaware she's currently being used to workshop a false-flag operation. Duncan also doesn't spot the sinister subtext because he's too distracted from all this "assassination" talk leading to the sudden realization that the twins are in danger, and he'll now have to rescue both Jessica and the kids.

Between chapters, Duncan seeks-out the smugglers of Fondak to request a guild heighliner pickup for later (after all, that's why the smuggler camps “were allowed to exist. The ruling family of a planet must always have a back door for escape in extremis”), and is surprised to see some deep-desert Fremen living there who loudly curse the Atreides family name, causing Duncan to realize just how badly Alia and her family are hated in some areas.

But the real shocker is that “The Preacher” is waiting here to meet him. Could he be Paul? He's blind like Paul and can anticipate the future like Paul, but the real selling-point is that he knows certain Atreides codewords only Paul could have known: in an earlier visit to Arrakeen, The Preacher had implored Duncan to use his “horns”:

>“Duncan! Take your horns and do what you know best how to do.”
Alia chewed the back of her right hand. Horns! 

>Was it possible she’d heard about the message sent to him by The Preacher? This thought filled his breast with turmoil. How could that mendicant mystic know the secret signal by which Paul Atreides had always summoned his swordmaster? Idaho longed to leave this pointless meeting and return to the search for an answer to that question.

In the first Dune, Jessica used the word “garment” whenever she wanted to alert Paul to danger; likewise, Paul seem to use the word “horns” when he wants to signal to Duncan that he needs help. (Paul's paternal grandfather was a bullfighter who died getting gored in the arena, so the word is either synecdoche for “danger to an Atreides family member,” or else Paul is “summoning” Duncan to charge towards him like the elder Atreides summoning a bull. Jessica, the twins, and Alia all make oblique references to the codeword throughout the story.)

Duncan's sufficiently convinced that The Preacher is Paul (though possibly avoids calculating it in case he has to avoid a truthsayer's scrutiny later) and asks how he can help, and Paul, who's been orchestrating this moment for ages, instructs Duncan to take Jessica to Salusa Secundus.

>Farad’n looked at Idaho with a puzzled frown. “Mentat, I need to know what this Preacher is to you.”
“He arranged the passage here. I…We did not exchange ten words. Others acted for him. He could be… He could be Paul Atreides, but I don’t have enough data for certainty. All I know for certain is that it was time for me to leave and he had the means.”

This fulfills Paul’s end of the bargain when he promised the Corrino that he could summon Duncan to them, and also moves Jessica closer towards Farad’n’s court.

>The Preacher held out his right hand. “If I but beckon with this hand, Duncan Idaho will come to me and he will obey me.”

Meanwhile, Alia invites Jessica to one of her formal audiences and tries to suss-out whether the rumors are true that Jessica and Gurney are an item (“Are audacious bards my mother’s type? Results Inconclusive”), probably to help with Alia's ongoing efforts of impersonating her mother when talking to Gurney. Then Alia very clumsily tries to have Jessica murdered exactly like she'd gone over with Irulan (in a crowded place, with a maula pistol, while attention is elsewhere), misses, fumbles the coverup, and reveals the Baron Harkonnen's extremely specific nervous tic of tapping the entire goddamned Konami Code onto his armrest whenever he's annoyed.

Jessica now realizes her daughter's not just possessed, but possessed by a hated rival angling to destroy the whole Atreides family. With the help of some friendly veterans of Paul’s old campaigns scattered in the audience, Jessica finally decides to publicly expose Alia’s possession, reveals her daughter’s plans to destroy the spice cycle on Arrakis, then escapes from the audience chamber to go on the lam.

This triggers a brief planetwide civil war (Farad’n’s predictions were right), and Duncan races to get to Jessica before any of Alia's other agents can. Jessica recalls Leto's instructions to let herself get captured, and the two head offworld to Salusa Secundus together.

The twins, meanwhile, take the chaos as their cue to leave: they lure-out and kill both the tigers and their handler, then Leto heads for Jacurutu while Ghanima partitions-off all of her memories of the twins' plans so she can convincingly report on Leto's “death” to others.

Jessica and Duncan on Salusa Secundus

Duncan's decision to fly Jessica straight to Salusa Secundus catches everyone (except the twins and Paul) by total surprise: the Corrino suspect a trap, while Alia scrambles to still find a way to kill Jessica. She secretly offers to marry Farad'n if he'll kill his two guests – Jessica for being a rival and Duncan for being unreliable and an obstacle to the wedding – but Farad'n knows that's a trap: even if Alia privately wants Farad'n to kill two Atreides, publicly she'll condemn the murders and use it as an excuse to start a war with the Corrino to wipe them out.

>And she thought: Duncan! Duncan! You weren’t supposed to do it this way.

>“We’ve had reasons to believe that Alia might offer herself as my bride.” […]
“Her price was two inconsequential deaths—the two of us.”
“We suspected treachery,” Farad’n said. “Wasn’t it your son who said ‘treachery breeds treachery?’ […] I’m well aware that Alia would destroy me. Not even the Bene Gesserit could expect me to accept her.”

The Bene Gesserits are also fumbling to recover the situation: their initial plan was to let Alia kill Jessica and frame the Corrino, allow the two sides of the ensuing Atredies-Corrino war exhaust each other, then broker a peace to control a Ghanima-Farad'n lineage. But since Jessica's annoyingly resisted like four separate murder plots, that plan's on-hold.

Luckily Wensicia gave the sisterhood a new line of attack: Leto's "death-by-tiger" was absurdly easy to trace back to House Corrino, and now the whole universe knows who's responsible. The BG's are pissed that Wensicia's killed one of the last links to their Kwisatz Haderach program and issue a formal complaint through the Landsraad, which sounds procedural and boring until you remember that this can act as the prelude to punitive measures, revocation of House status, or even duels to the death. Meanwhile, the Spacing Guild is livid that Wensicia transported the tigers on a Guild heighliner: the Guild depends on spice to operate, Alia controls the spice, and now it looks like the Guild was involved in murdering Alia's niece and nephew. To distance themselves from the appearance of conspiracy, the Guild also sanctions House Corrino: no Guild ships means Salusa Secundus's trade resources and armies can't move, so now they're isolated politically and physically.

>Tigers! Their training had been an atrocity and their use had been stupidity. How easy they were to trace!

>Farad’n saw the smile, whirled to confront Idaho. “I amuse you?”
“This whole situation amuses me. Someone in your family has compromised the Spacing Guild by using them to carry instruments of assassination to Arrakis, instruments whose intent could not be concealed. You’ve offended the Bene Gesserit by killing a male they wanted for their breeding pro[gram.]”

The sisterhood may not be able to leverage Alia for killing Jessica, but now they can instead leverage the Corrino for killing Leto: House Corrino will have to make concessions to get the pressure off its back, such as banishing chaos-gremlin Wensicia, putting Farad'n in charge, and making him accept Bene Gesserit training, all of which would advance the sisterhood's end goals of positioning Farad'n and Ghanima to run their respective factions, marrying them, and giving the Order control over their kids.

>“But the Sisterhood accuses—”
“That’d require a decisive action from you,” Jessica said.
“Don’t trust her!” Wensicia said.

The BG's send Jessica a secret message translating to “Hey gurl, we see you’re in captivity and we’ll help free you if you train Farad’n for us.” Jessica seems poised to except, until Duncan deduces and exposes the Bene Gesserit's duplicity: he reveals that the sisterhood has been trying to get Jessica killed, and having failed at that, now they've got the nerve to ask Jessica to help them turn Farad'n into their loyal puppet.

Thinking fast, Jessica realizes the Bene Gesserit don't know that she's aware of their treachery: she could play dumb and pretend to train Farad'n “on the sisterhood's behalf,” but then follow Ghanima's suggestion and secretly train the prince to be an ally of the Atreides instead.

That just leaves the question of what to do with Duncan. When Farad'n mentions Alia, Duncan reflexively strains against his restraints:

>“We’ve had reasons to believe that Alia might offer herself as my bride.”
Idaho gave an involuntary start, controlled himself. Blood began dripping from his left wrist where the shigawire had cut.

Underneath the cool exterior, Duncan is under enormous inner turmoil: he knows Alia is possessed but couldn't bring himself to kill her when he had the chance, and now he knows that an even worse fate probably awaits her:

>He lifted himself from the divan in an adrenaline surge of anger, thinking: If only Alia were the target! If only assassins could get to her! For an instant, he rested his hand on his own knife, but it was not in him to do this. Far better, though, that she die a martyr than live to be discredited and hounded into a sandy grave.

The two fundamental parts of Duncan's identity are 1. an unshakeable loyalty to House Atreides, and 2. being hopelessly in love with anything remotely Jessica-shaped, which includes her daughter Alia:

>Whatever his motive, he had done it for the Atreides, for his ruling House. The Atreides were the star of his orbit.

>She saw now that his jaw muscles were trembling.
“It was easy to listen to the arguments which led us astray,” Jessica said. “I wanted to leave this place… You… you wanted a girl you saw as a younger version of me.”
He accepted this silently.

But now Alia's possessed and trying to kill her family, and Duncan is mortified at the thought of being sent back to Arrakis again: either he stabs Alia and kills whatever's left of the woman he loves so he can keep the rest of her family safe, or else he continues to let Alia live, in which case he's endangering the rest of House Atreides. No matter which he chooses, Duncan can't avoid betraying a core part of his identity. And as Duncan 2.0's creator Scytale told us in Messiah:

>When a creature has developed into one thing, he will choose death rather than change into his opposite.

Like Paul, Duncan “was a creature who had developed firmly into one pattern. He’d destroy himself before changing into the opposite of that pattern.” So when Farad'n sarcastically comments that he intends to return Duncan to “his loving wife” – the wife who just asked Farad'n to murder him – Duncan's grief overtakes him and he tries to sever an artery in his wrist. Farad'ns medics stabilize Duncan, and Duncan finally has to admit his utter emotional exhaustion:

>“I’m tired,” Idaho said. “You’ve no idea how tired I am.”

Jessica observes that “there was always a bit of foolishness in Duncan,” but the only time she saw Duncan acting foolish was in the first book: Thufir Hawat suspected Jessica was a spy and told Duncan to investigate her, but Duncan couldn't reconcile his love for Jessica with his loyalty for House Atreides and got riotously drunk instead, something Jessica soon noticed and chastised him for. In other words, Duncan only acts foolish when his love and his loyalty are at cross-purposes. (The present situation later reminds Jessica of this exact anecdote.)

As for Farad’n, he initially guesses pretty close to the mark:

>“When it’s overexploited, even loyalty wears out finally.”

But later, the prince insists on confusing himself: he's so accustomed to galactic politics being a game of eleven-dimensional chess that he has to attribute some far-reaching plan or complicated motive to every decision, especially for mentats. But what Farad'n doesn't understand is that beneath the mentat is a man, and the man was acting not out of strategy but out of heartbreak and desperation.

The Wedding Plot(s)

Alia has spent half the book trying and failing to kill her mom and blame the Corrino to start a war, only for Wensicia Corrino to randomly “murder” Alia's nephew and give her all the excuse she needs. But before Alia can act, the Corrino prince Farad'n makes the annoyingly savvy decision to claim leadership, banish his mother, denounce the assassination, and accept Bene Gesserit training. He's already placated the sisterhood and the Spacing Guild into easing their restrictions, so while Alia could still attack, Salusa Secundus isn’t as isolated or vulnerable as it was even twenty minutes ago.

>Every movement by which the Regency countered potential attack required delicate timing to keep the opposition off balance.
Have I lost my sense of timing?

But there might be an easier way to eliminate the Corrinos: from Alia's perspective, it looks like Jessica's on Salusa Secundus doing the sisterhood's bidding, training Farad'n as a Bene Gesserit hoping to marry the prince to Ghanima and regain control of the bloodline. The Buddy Baron has a helpful suggestion: let the wedding happen.

“You can use Ghanima as bait in the trap, then when Farad'n arrives, you Red Wedding his ass!”
“Won’t that completely destroy Atreides credibility?”
“(heh yeah it will) OF COURSE NOT, it’ll show people who’s boss!”
“I feel like Farad’n would expect violence when he arrives.”
“Not if he’s reassured by the presence of a whole deputation of Great House members who come as witnesses to vouch for the ceremony's legitimacy.”
“And we deal with them by…?”
“More murder 😄”
“Wouldn’t that start a war with a whole bunch of other Great Houses?”
“PSSSSSSSSH, It’ll start a war with the disloyal ones you’d want to wipe-out anyway. Kill thirty or forty birds with one stone! Trust me, your legions are strong and your willpower is absolute: you can totally pick a fight with half the known universe right now. What’s the worst that could happen?”

Alia's convinced, and sends a second message to Farad'n proposing a wedding between him and Ghanima this time. Farad'n is characteristically suspicious:

>“My response was that I’d prefer to await the outcome of recent events on Arrakis. There’s no need for a hasty decision.”

But Jessica and Duncan both understand that Alia is possessed by an enemy who's out to destroy the whole Atreides family: with Jessica out-of-reach and Leto presumed dead, that means it's only a matter of time before the Baron finds an excuse to put his/Alia's crosshairs on Ghanima next. Jessica and Duncan independently realize that they need to get Farad'n to agree to the wedding, if only to buy Ghanima some time while they work-out a rescue plan:

>“Alia plays her own game, Abomination’s game. My granddaughter is in danger unless Alia can contrive a way to use her.” [...]
Ghanima was right to pity her. But who was left to pity Ghanima?

Unfortunately, there's no way Jessica and Duncan can coordinate on this plan: Castle Corrino is crawling with surveillance devices, and even the Atreides hand gestures won't be of much use: Farad'n already taught himself those.

>He signaled the mute against the wall with a complex flickering of fingers. […] Her mind returned to Farad’n’s hand signals. He had an Atreides-style battle language! It spoke of careful analysis. Someone here was consciously copying the Atreides.

Knowing that he and Jessica will inevitably be overheard, Duncan plans to take advantage of this and arranges a “private” meeting between them where he gives a speech loud enough to be heard by every hidden microphone in the room as he tries to convince Farad'n to accept the wedding proposal:

Duncan: “SO, BENE GESSERIT WITCH, YOU’RE HERE TO PERSUADE FARAD’N TO MARRY GHANIMA, ARE YOU??”
Farad’n, eavesdropping from a surveillance room: wait what
Duncan: “I CAN SEE WHY: HALF THE FREMEN ON ARRAKIS DESPISE HOUSE ATREIDES RIGHT NOW, SO YOU NEED THE SUPPORT OF ANOTHER GREAT HOUSE TO HOLD ON TO POWER. ONCE FARAD'N FIGURES THAT OUT, HE COULD PROBABLY EXTRACT ANY CONCESSIONS OUT OF HOUSE ATREIDES HE WANTS TO MAKE THIS WEDDING HAPPEN.”
Farad’n: sweet
Duncan: “THE FREMEN WOULD COMPLETELY DISOWN GHANIMA IF SHE MARRIED A TAX-PAYING OFFWORLDER. SHE'D BE SOCIALLY ISOLATED AND HAVE NO ALLIES OR BASE OF SUPPORT TO PLOT AND SCHEME AGAINST HER FUTURE HUSBAND.”
Farad’n: cool cool cool
Duncan: “FARAD'N WOULD BRING HIS SARDAUKAR WITH HIM TO ARRAKIS, BUT THE FREMEN WOULD NEVER AGREE TO SHARE A PLANET WITH CORRINO SOLDIERS. WE'D HAVE TO MOVE ALL THE LEGIONS OFF-WORLD AND LEAVE FARAD'N'S MILITARY IN TOTAL CONTROL OF DUNE. IT WOULD BE LIKE IF THE CORRINO CAPTURED OUR CAPITAL PLANET WITHOUT EVEN FIRING A SHOT. THE SHAME! THE INDIGNITY!! THE ONION LAYERS!!!”
Farad’n: okay I’m sold

Unfortunately, Jessica has no goddamned clue what's going on: she does realize that Duncan's speech will help her goal of getting Farad'n to agree to the wedding, but Duncan's method-acting is so convincing (in part because he's airing many of his legitimate grievances) that Jessica wrongly concludes that Duncan is actually switching sides to serve Farad'n.

>Ahhh, he sets the stage for a formal withdrawal with honor from Atreides service, she thought. But these other matters of which he spoke, could he possibly know how well they did her work for her?

>Was it really possible that he’d gone over to Farad’n? […] If Idaho had really left the Atreides fold, that would explain his present behavior. He was moving around and out. She had to consider this as a possibility. But why had he emphasized that he did The Preacher’s bidding?

(Narrator: because he’s hinting that he’s still working for your son and therefore House Atreides, you dingleberry!)

Thinking so fast she drives right off the road and into a ditch, Jessica's thought process goes: “I'm secretly training Farad'n to be loyal to House Atreides. But Duncan might have figured that out on his own, and if he really is switching sides, he might try to warn Farad'n about it. Guess now I have to kill Duncan to keep him quiet!”

She tries to distract him with a non-sequitur while she gets within stabbing distance, but Duncan is disappointed both at how easily he can read Jessica and how much she’s utterly failed to read him. He avoids the attack, formally “removes himself” from Atreides service, and manages to convince Farad’n to send him back to Arrakis to cause problems for Alia.

>Idaho must be sent back because that would certainly stir up troubles on Arrakis.

Duncan dreads having to return to Arrakis, but he knows the wedding proposal will only buy Ghanima time: he needs to return to Dune and try to save her in-person, even if it means having to confront Alia again.

Jessica’s Plot Against the Bene Gesserit

Jessica spends the next few months training Farad'n to become a Bene Gesserit, and thanks to Paul's earlier goading, the boy doesn't need much convincing:

>“Of course,” Jessica said, “you’ll want me to teach you as the Bene Gesserit are taught.”
Farad’n beamed at her. “The one offer I cannot resist,” he said.

Farad'n even suspects Jessica may be up to something but doesn't care: the Bene Gesserit have absurdly-heightened memorization powers, and in some cases like the Reverend Mothers, the ability to directly access the memories of their ancestors. These are both huge selling points for a prince who's an amateur historian:

>Farad’n knew his own talents and held few illusions about them. He was a historian-archaeologist and judge of men.

These powers would also give Farad'n more direct control over his mind and body, plus the ability to use The Voice on stubborn subordinates – powers that Farad'n always envied Paul Atreides for having.

>A renegade Bene Gesserit of my own! It’s the one thing her son had that I don’t have.

After several months of staring at his hands and wiggling his pinkie toe, Farad'n now has supernatural mindpowers that transcend space and time (same). The Bene Gesserit sisterhood is hoping that Jessica will put the "capstone" on Farad'n's education by mindlessly repeating to him the same spell that was used to formally induct her into the Order. This would make Jessica the unwitting instrument of the sisterhood, installing the Order's secret "backdoor" for controlling Farad'n's mind without either of them realizing it.

Initially, she recites the same words that were used for her own ceremony:

>I stand in the sacred human presence. As I do now, so should you stand someday. I pray to your presence that this be so.

The secret programming hidden in these words seems to be: “I'm going to program the following set of values into you, and I want you to program these same values into any Bene Gesserits you train, and they'll program it into any they train, and so on, so that these values will propagate and spread throughout the growing generations of our Order like a virus.” So far so good.

Next, Jessica is supposed to program Farad'n with the sisterhood's values of wanting to create a prescient superhuman who can predict the future and keep humanity on a straight and narrow path – and in the process, bind Farad'n to the people furthering that goal, i.e. the sisterhood. But recalling her conversations with Leto about the need to stop the spread of prescience, her conversations with Ghanima about making Farad'n loyal to House Atreides, and her conversations with Duncan about how the sisterhood has royally screwed her over, it's here that Jessica sabotages the Bene Gesserit by installing the wrong set of values into Farad'n:

>The future remains uncertain and so it should, for it is the canvas upon which we paint our desires. Thus always the human condition faces a beautifully empty canvas.

Jessica is telling Farad'n: “Your new top priority is to stop prescience and keep the future messy and uncertain at all costs.” The final line reiterates it:

>We possess only this moment in which to dedicate ourselves continuously to the sacred presence which we share and create.

Translation: “The present rules, this is your new top priority for the rest of your life, now go and spread it to everybody you train.”

Jessica had tied this ceremony to a lecture about her son Paul's goal of ending the power of prescience over the future of humanity (Farad'n still admires and emulates Paul), which reinforces that Farad'n will be loyal to anybody trying to break the powers of prescience – that is, to House Atreides. Listening through the surveillance devices, Tyekanik suspects that Jessica is attempting witchcraft, but intrudes too late to prevent it. Besides which, Farad’n seemed like he wanted this outcome to happen anyway:

>As Jessica finished speaking, Tyekanik came through the door on her left, moving with a false casualness which the scowl on his face belied. “My Lord,” he said. But it already was too late. Jessica’s words and all of the preparation which had gone before had done their work. Farad’n no longer was Corrino. He was now Bene Gesserit.

But a new type of Bene Gesserit, one who will not only resist the sisterhood’s influences, but hopefully start the long, slow process of gradually supplanting their entire philosophy through infiltration and ideological self-replication. (Chapterhouse spoilers: >!It’s a long road, but Jessica’s heretical “inverted” credo will actually become the dominant belief of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood in the distant future.!<) Thus, for the second time, Jessica has ruined thousands of years of Bene Gesserit planning :-D
Sisterhood: WTF JESSICA JUST PULLED ANOTHER JESSICA ON US >:-(((((((((((
(Leto: Haha sweet now I can give my pet Corrino another "very responsible task")

Leto’s Capture

Speaking of Leto, he just found Jacurutu… but instantly got captured by Gurney Halleck, who injected the boy with spice essence as-ordered. Namri's on standby ready to kill Leto if he looks “possessed,” but privately Namri is confused: “Isn't this the kid we just tried to Tiger? Apparently he anticipated it, survived, and found our secret base in the middle of the desert, so the boy must be guided by something… but if he's prescient, how was Gurney able to dunk a butterfly net over his head and capture him?”

He contacts Alia to let her know they're proceeding with Plan: Drug Leto, but Alia is equally confused: didn't Ghani tell a truthsayer that her brother was killed?

>Alia felt the coldness of the shigawire under her hand. Where was Leto, then? Ghanima refused to believe him other than dead. A Truthsayer had confirmed her story: Leto slain by a Laza tiger. Then who was the child reported by Namri and Muriz?

Alia gives an uncertain thumbs-up, and Namri deputizes his niece Sabiha with figuring out the right dosages to administer on the grounds that 1. Sabiha's nearly prescient herself and might have greater insights about trance-visions, and 2. adults think every teenager is an expert on getting high.

>One of the voices was Halleck’s. “Perhaps we gave him too much of it.”
Namri answered. “We gave him exactly what she told us to give him.”
“Perhaps we should go back out there and have another look at him.” Halleck.
“Sabiha is good at such things; she’ll call us if anything starts to go wrong.” Namri.
“I don’t like this business of Sabiha.” Halleck.
“She’s a necessary ingredient.” Namri.

>“The spice will only give you visions,” Sabiha said. The long silences made her uneasy. “I’ve had visions in the orgy many times."

>He saw Sabiha then as a vision-maker in her own right, and every other human carried the same power. [...] Her visions stir within her. But she would not listen to those visions. [...] “How could I mount a worm without hooks?” he asked, wondering if she still could salvage some bit of her visions.

Off-page, Namri contacts Muriz via distrans, their bat-encoded voicemail. (They can't use radios since Muriz needs to keep the location of the spice/sandtrout smuggling operation safe from eavesdroppers, which often means long delays in communication between Jacurutu and Shuloch despite the short distance separating them.)

Namri: “So now we’re drugging another Atreides into becoming prescient.”
Muriz: “Good, we can ask the boy to give us a vision for how to save the worms.”
Namri: “We’ve been asking Paul that same thing for years now and so far nothing’s changed: the worms are still dying, and the spice cycle hasn’t taken off on any other worlds yet.”
Muriz: “But Paul's not prescient; he's just guessing how to save Shai'Hulud, same as us.” Namri: “So he says…”
Muriz: “Should I tell Paul that we have his kid in our custody?”
Namri: “NO. If Junior can see the future, we’ll want to get a 'how to save the worms' vision straight from the boy’s own mouth, without his dad coaching him on which story to tell us. Think you can keep Paul away from his kid?”
Muriz: “No problem: my own son is following Paul around like a terrier with a hand grenade in its mouth. If Paul and Leto try to make contact with each other, we’ll just send them both straight to kingdom come.”
Namri: “We are a Good And Noble People.”
Muriz: “The best.”

Muriz later insinuates that most of the above exchange took place through a damning cascade of ellipses when talking with Leto. Translating the lacunae:

>“Will my father not identify me?” Leto asked.
“Ahhhh,” Muriz said. “There’s how you learned, eh? But [Paul couldn’t have told you how to find us.]” He broke off, shook his head. “My own son guides him. He says you two have never [met, or else we’d have already blown you both up.] How could [you know where to find us unless at least one of you is prescient?]”
“So you don’t believe Muad’Dib reads the future,” Leto said.
“Of course we believe! But he says of himself that [he can’t see the future anymore… except we’re not sure if we believe that.]” Again Muriz broke off.
“And you thought him unaware of your distrust,” Leto said.

>Leto spoke swiftly: “You need me, Muriz. Without me, the worms and their spice will vanish from Dune. […] Lost forever. It has gone too far here on Dune. My father has almost run out of vision, and you can only turn to me.”
“That blind [old geezer doesn’t have any visions left to ‘run out of’! …Except if Paul has been lying about that like we suspect, then we’re fools, and his ‘blindness’ is probably also just an act.]” Muriz stopped, swallowed.
“He’ll return soon from Arrakeen,” Leto said, “and then we shall see how blind he is.”

>Of course,” Leto said. “Holding pens. You sell sandtrout and worms off-planet.”
“It was Muad’Dib’s suggestion!”
“I know. But none of your worms or sandtrout survive for long away from Dune.”
“Not yet,” Muriz said. “But someday [the sandworms will survive on other worlds. If they don’t, then we’ve been killing our own gods even faster and then BOY would we feel guilty. Good thing this will all pay off soon!]”
“Not in ten thousand years,” Leto said. And he turned to watch the turmoil on Muriz’s face. Questions flowed there like the water in the qanat. Could this son of Muad’Dib really read the future? Some still believed Muad’Dib had done it, but . . . How could a thing such as this be judged?

Part 4 (last one!)

Part 1 here. These posts are for people who read the book and were still lost by the plot, so obviously don't read below if you don't want to get spoiled 😂

Alia’s Plot

Back on Arrakis, it’s nine years into Alia’s Regency and she struggles to hold the Imperium together because unlike Paul, Alia can't see the future (anymore ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). She desperately wants prescience to help her rule, even though she knows Paul felt trapped by it:

>Without a vision of the future, I could fail. Oh, what magic I could perform if only I could see as Paul saw! Not for me the bitterness which prescient visions brought.

Her Regency Council's not much help: Irulan jumps to conclusions “with an abruptness which did no credit to her training,” Stilgar’s Fremen traditions don't gel well with galactic politics, and even Duncan’s machine-like mentat analyses, while accurate, feel cold and alienating:

>Alia had decided long ago that it was dangerous to think of him as Duncan in the privacy of her thoughts. Better to think of him by his ghola name, Hayt.

Her priesthood and officials are useless since they: A. leak her secret commands; B. go rogue “over-interpreting” her orders; and C. sometimes actively conspire against her:

>She’d thought her order to take The Preacher captive would remain secret, but that, too, came back to her now as a rumor. Even among her guards, someone could not remain silent.

>“So my orders mean nothing to you?” she demanded. […] The man was obviously outraged at her attack. “He speaks blasphemy! We know your orders, but we heard him with our own ears!”

>“Javid assures me that his people can take care of Alia quite easily.”

(Also her brother is now secretly a blind preacher who drops-in from time to time to remind her how bad a job she’s doing while inciting crowds into hostility against her government. Thanks, Bro.)

Jessica fled back to Caladan abandoning her, and even the Jessica in Alia’s preborn memory is unhelpful: GhostMom resents the deification of her children and only suggests: “Oh, you’re trying to run a theocracy? Have you tried running a secular government instead??”

>More and more these past few weeks she’d been denying the inner voice of her mother, who tended to sneer at preparation for the coming Holy Days to be centered on the Temple. The inner-awareness of Jessica faded, faded... sinking away at last with a faceless demand that Alia would be better occupied working on the Atreides Law.

NO MOM, I CAN’T “JUST RUN A SECULAR GOVERNMENT”: my brother blew-up all the tools a secular government would have needed to survive, remember?? He said a bureaucracy would just be a magnet to the venal and corrupt (then his government became corrupt anyway), and insisted on No Constitutions because constitutions amass power always but constrain power only when leaders choose to uphold their constraints:

>“Religious government is something else. Muad’Dib has crowded his Qizarate in everywhere, displaced the old functions of government. But he has no permanent civil service, no interlocking embassies. He has bishoprics, islands of authority.”

>“Constitutions become the ultimate tyranny,” Paul said. "They’re organized power on such a scale as to be overwhelming. [...] It has an unstable balance point and no limitations. I, however, have limitations. In my desire to provide an ultimate protection for my people, I forbid a constitution.”

>Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery.

Alia has been left to inherit an ungovernable mess of corruption, personal ambition, and intrigue, there’s no customary mechanisms in-place for her to actually run the government, and the only thing that holds it all together is the cult-of-personality belief that Alia is an infallible god… an illusion which will instantly shatter the moment she makes a mistake.

Yeah, prescience would have been really handy right about now.

Increasingly desperate either to awaken her prescience or else find any reliable ancestor-advisor, Alia starts taking bigger and bigger spice doses while lowering her guardrails:

>Pressures of responsibility had driven the old fears away and she had been wide open to the inner lives, demanding their advice, plunging into spice trance in search of guiding visions.

But the only changes this brings about within her are 1. spice addiction, and 2. the voices in her head growing unnervingly louder:

>An overdose would have to be pretty large,” Ghanima said.
“Our tolerance is probably high,” he agreed. “Look how much Alia requires.”
“I pity her,” Ghanima said. “The lure of it must’ve been subtle and insidious, creeping up on her until...”

>You’re sure that your brother is free of this curse? [...] How is it you’ve escaped?”
Ghanima explained the theory upon which she and Leto had settled, that their avoiding of the spice trance while Alia entered it often made the difference.

While Alia's “friendly” identities cooperate and share space in her brain, the malignant ones cannibalize each other until there's only one really powerful evil voice:

>“Abomination,” the Lady Jessica had said, “our term for the pre-born, has a long history of bitter experiences behind it. The way of it seems to be that the inner lives divide. They split into the benign and the malignant. The benign remain tractable, useful. The malignant appear to unite in one powerful psyche, trying to take over the living flesh and its consciousness. The process is known to take considerable time, but its signs are well known.”

>“And… those of us… those of us who loved power… and gathered it at… any price… those can be… more precise.”
“Stronger?” Leto whispered.
“Stronger.”

In Alia’s case, the chief Evil Ghost is her grandfather, the late Baron Harkonnen (the guy Alia murdered. Whoops). While Alia doesn’t initially trust Ghost Grandpa, he can reduce the Deafeningly Loud, Perpetually Screaming Chorus of Angry Voices in Alia’s head down into just one voice, that of his own:

>Alia did not hear her guard. Her awareness was caught by shrieks of singing: “Merry old birds are we, hurrah!” the voices echoed against the inside of her skull and she thought: I’m going insane, I’m losing my mind.

>Again the other lives within her lifted their clamor. The tide once more threatened to engulf her [...] “Shut up!” the Baron commanded. Alia felt her own desires reinforcing that command, making it felt throughout her awareness. Inner silence washed through her like a cool bath and she felt her hammering heart begin slowing to its normal pace.

This makes Alia’s life manageable again, but gives the Baron increasing control over her brain, body, and decision-making - a trade Alia accepts because she's under enormous pressure not just to govern but to even function.

Emboldened by Jolly Floating Murder Grandpa’s encouragements, Alia accelerates the terraforming process of Dune. Publicly, she insists that a few worms on a reservation will survive the planet's new humidity, but she knows this is a lie.

>“When the sandtrout go, so do all the worms,” he said. “The tribes must be warned.”
“No more spice,” she said.
Words merely touched high points of the system danger which they both saw hanging over human intrusion into Dune’s ancient relationships.
“It’s the thing Alia knows,” he said. “It’s why she gloats.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“I’m sure.”

>Why now, when her plans were not completed?
The dust mists drifted, lifting, and she could see the bright sunlight upon the changing landscape of the planet: broad reaches of green vegetation where parched earth had once dominated.
Without a vision of the future, I could fail.

Why destroy the spice cycle? Alia's Helpful Life Coach convinced her that if she can dangle the last grams of spice in the universe over her subject's heads, she can get them to do whatever she wants: no more dissent, plots, or rebellions against her.

>Leto’s personal estimate was that spice production would fall soon to a stabilized one-tenth of its peak in the Harkonnen years. Stockpiles throughout the empire doubled in value at every new posting. Three hundred and twenty-one liters were said to have bought half of Novebruns Planet from the Metulli Family.

>Jessica pointed at Alia. “She laughs alone at night in contemplation of her own evil! Spice production will fall to nothing, or at best a fraction of its former level! And when word of that gets out—”
“We’ll have a corner on the most priceless product in the universe!” Alia shouted.
“We’ll have a corner on hell!” Jessica raged.

But Barry the Friendly Ghost is secretly sabotaging Alia (gasp!), knowing that other factions (Landsraadm CHOAM, etc.) will panic over the shrinking spice supply and, once desperate enough, will eventually support anybody willing to overthrow Alia and get the spice flowing again:

>“Landsraad and CHOAM will go where the profit goes.”

>“And what of the worms and the spice?” Jessica asked.
“There’ll always be some desert,” Alia said. “The worms will survive.”
She’s lying, Jessica thought. Why does she lie? […] Alia lied because she was possessed by one who would destroy the Atreides. She was, in herself, the first destruction. Then al-Fali spoke the truth: the sandworms are doomed unless the course of the ecological transformation is modified.

Alia's not sure she can pull-off this plan – too many other factions might try to intervene – but she could end-run them all if she just had prescience. This leads The Buddy Baron to steer Alia towards another bad decision: kidnap Leto, drug him with spice essence until he's prescient, and use his foresight to out-maneuver her rivals.

>Why cannot I see the future? Alia wondered. Much as I try, why does it elude me? The twins must be made to try, she told herself. They could be lured into it. […] Leto must be lured into the spice trance.

Alia's been quietly manipulating Leto to become her future Prescient Little Helper:

>“She works a strange attraction on Leto,” Ghanima said. “That’s why I helped you meet alone with me. He agrees that she is beyond hope, but still he finds ways to be with her and… study her. […] He has this odd empathy for her.”

But Leto's avoiding the spice trance since he knows it puts the preborn at-risk for possession, so Alia will have to forcibly drug the boy. If this becomes public knowledge, it could end her: Alia's legitimacy as Regent comes from acting as the "children of god's" caretaker. She can't entrust her loose-tongued staff with such a sensitive job, so she'll need to recruit outside help from a third party both evil enough to waterboard a child with spice essence and discreet enough to stay quiet about it.

She realizes her religious official Javid is: 1. scheming against her and 2. has a weird accent and old vocabulary from some insulated subculture. Putting the two together, Alia deduces that Javid is a spy from Jacurutu sent to undermine her. Jacurutu's location has been forgotten by most Fremen, would be tabu (off-limits) to those who do remember it, and the Jacurutu hate other Fremen and have a history of murdering trespassers to keep their sietch a secret. This would make Jacurutu the ideal place to drug Leto:

>But he was still valuable—very valuable. He was her key to Jacurutu and with that place, well…

The Helpful Harkonnen persuades Alia to seduce Javid, so Alia confidently believes Javid is now on her side (nope. Jacurutu Fremen take whichever side puts you at the best stabbing angle). She then uses Javid's contacts at Jacurutu to arrange for drugging her nephew.

>“I sometimes fear Alia wants Leto to seek out Jacurutu,” Ghanima said.

But her plans are postponed when her mother Jessica announces she's returning to Arrakis soon. The timing feels suspicious to Alia: why now? Could Jessica know about Alia's possession (or about her plans to drug Leto and destroy the spice cycle) and is trying to intervene? The Baron has a calm and measured suggestion for handling Jessica:

Murder her 😄

Alia figures she can seed the spaceport with Jacurutu assassins and kill Jessica on-arrival. To shift suspicion from herself, she'd then pin the blame on House Corrino: "All of the Atreides are on the same planet at the same time, so of course a rival Great House would try to kill us." She could then use this as a pretext to move against Salusa Secundus and rid herself of two rivals at once: Jessica and the Corrino.

>“I have only to know that the Atreides are all here together on Arrakis. All of the water in one cistern.” He gestured to encompass the planet.
“House Corrino wouldn’t dare attack us here!”
“Alia would profit if they did.” A sneer in his voice provoked her.

>Yes, the Baron’s plan was a good one. We eliminate the threat of the Lady Jessica and, at the same time, we discredit House Corrino. Yes.

Since the Jacurutu are eager to join any plan that hurts the Atreides, Javid eagerly agrees. This means Javid is working both with the Corrino to kill the twins – something he hasn’t told Alia about – while also working against the Corrino to help frame them for Jessica’s impending murder – something he hasn’t told Wensicia about. Farad’n later notices the double-cross:

>“All of those stories about Alia and that Priest, whatever his name is…”
“Javid,” Farad’n said. “But the man’s obviously—”
“He’s been a valuable source of information for us,” Wensicia said.
“I was about to say that he’s obviously a double agent,” Farad’n said. “How could he indict himself in this? He’s not to be trusted. There are too many signs…”

In case you were keeping score, this means that the Jacurutu Fremen are simultaneously working both for and against every major faction mentioned so far. Their plan – if the constantly growing, shambolic pile of double-crosses and knee-jerk betrayals can even be called a coherent plan – seems to be: “Secretly help Wensicia to kill the twins, but in the meantime, pretend we’re still planning to drug Leto into achieving prescience so we can continue to buy Alia’s cooperation in assassinating Jessica, and keep Paul in the dark about both plots so we can continue to get his cooperation in saving the worms and undermining Alia. If Paul is left as Last-Atreides-Standing by the end of all that, then we’ll just cry ‘demons!’ and have him executed on an invented pretext.” With such steadfast loyalty and honorable conduct, it’s a mystery why every Fremen tribe on the planet decided ages ago to collaboratively murder these guys.

The Bene Gesserit Plot

As ever, the Bene Gesserit’s motive is still to Git Them Kwisatz Haderach Genes. They've sent their former member Jessica to Arrakis to investigate the rumors of Alia's possession and, if necessary, move the twins to Bene Gesserit custody to "protect them from possession." (If, in the process, the Order brainwashes the twins or selectively breeds them with near-prescient people/each other, that's purely coincidental.)

Jessica's aware of the sisterhood's intentions but genuinely does feel guilt at abandoning Alia, fears for her family's safety, and worries that if the public learns that Alia is possessed (possibly by Jessica's father the Baron Harkonnen), it could call the whole family's mental credibility into question (like Alia, the twins are also preborn and share most of the same ancestors: they'd face the same risk of possession by the same people). It galls her to think her late husband's name could be associated with Harkonnens or possession:

>Jessica nodded. “Alia is an Atreides, though, and that poses enormous problems.”
Ghanima fell silent before the sudden realization that Jessica still mourned her Duke as though his death had been but yesterday, that she would guard his name and memory against all threats.

Jessica agrees to return to Dune for a family check-in, but doesn't realize that her choice isn't entirely of her own free will: while Bene Gesserit sisters have considerable control over their minds and bodies, they gain these powers with a very specific conditioning which installs a secret "back door" into their minds, allowing senior members of the Order some degree of mind control over their trainees. Leto later brings this to Jessica’s attention by demonstrating it on her:

>Leto lowered his head, looked upward to study her. Yes, she could be maneuvered after all.

>“Look inward, I say!” His voice was imperious.
Again, his voice enthralled her. She found her senses stilled, felt a quickening of breath. Just beyond awareness lurked a pounding heart, the panting of… Abruptly she realized that the quickened breath, the pounding heart, were not latent, not held at bay by her Bene Gesserit control. Eyes widening in shocked awareness, she felt her own flesh obeying other commands. Slowly she recovered her poise, but the realization remained. This unchild had been playing her like a fine instrument throughout their interview.
“Now you know how profoundly you were conditioned by your precious Bene Gesserits,” he said.

>“And the Lady Jessica, having served her Sisterhood’s purposes, is no longer useful to them.” […] Jessica closed her eyes in concentration. He was right! […] “Say no more, Duncan,” Jessica said, and she thought mournfully of how Leto had warned her against Bene Gesserit conditioning.

>They possessed this planet the way a man might possess a captive mistress, or the way the Bene Gesserits possessed their Sisters.

(It’s heavily implied that Alia uses this same “backdoor” technique to warp her sister-in-law Irulan’s mind, Irulan herself having been Bene Gesserit-trained at one point:)

>And how do you know she’s still Atreides? Ghanima thought, wondering at this blindness in Irulan. This was a Bene Gesserit, and who knew better than they the history of Abomination? She would not let herself even think about it, let alone believe it. Alia must have worked some witchery on this poor woman.

The sisterhood wants people to believe that their plan is abduction-incest'ing the twins because it distracts from their real plan: to send Jessica to Dune as a sacrificial lamb. They've predicted Alia will kill Jessica and blame House Corrino, but the Order thinks they'd actually benefit from that scenario. For one thing, it would eliminate Jessica, somebody the BG's still hate for ruining their breeding program:

>It had been a classic delaying action in the Sisterhood’s traditional pattern—a reasonable story, easily accepted because it squared with what one might believe of their motives. But they wanted Jessica out of the way—a flawed sister who’d failed them once.

As for an Atreides-Corrino war, the BG's think Alia would overplay her hand: her legions have gotten soft from having twenty years of no enemies, while the Sardaukar – while small in numbers – have been training heavily since their defeat:

>He thought of his Sardaukar once more growing tough and resilient through the rigorous training and the denial of luxury which he commanded. His Sardaukar legions remained small, but once more they were a man-to-man match for the Fremen. That served little purpose as long as the limits imposed by the Treaty of Arrakeen governed the relative size of the forces. Fremen could overwhelm him by their numbers—unless they were tied up and weakened by civil war.

A civil war in the Imperium is more likely than Alia thinks: on Arrakis itself, many deep-desert Fremen resent Alia for killing the sandworms, weakening Fremen traditions, and turning Dune into a tourist stop, while outside of Dune, many of the Imperium's subjects quietly loathe their new government:

>Unceasing warfare of the Fremen Jihad left its mark everywhere. Wherever “the ecumenism of the sword” had touched, people retained the attitude of a subject population: defensive, concealing, evasive. All manifestations of authority—and this meant essentially religious authority—became subject to resentment.

House Corrino might not be able to beat Alia's legions, but they could bloody the Atreides badly enough that other factions – Fremen rebels, planetary independence movements, rival Great Houses – could pile-onto the fray and threaten to topple the regime:

>Farad’n’s face darkened. “Beware my claws, cousin. I well know my Sardaukar would fall in time before your Fremen. But we’d wound you sorely, and there are jackals waiting to pick off the weak.”

At that point, the sisterhood could intervene: they'd expose Alia's role in assassinating their "dear emissary Jessica" and demand as penance that the weakened Regent abdicate the throne in favor of her niece Ghanima. Then the Order could broker a peace between the Houses by arranging a marriage between Ghanima and Farad'n, allowing the Corrino to retake power by diplomacy where force would've failed. In exchange, the Bene Gesserit would expect Farad'n's cooperation in letting them train his and Ghanima's children, finally allowing the sisterhood to install backdoor "mind control" access into their new baby Kwisatz Haderach(s).

>“And the Lady Jessica, having served her Sisterhood’s purposes, is no longer useful to them. Alia will be calling the Bene Gesserit to account, but they will win.”

>“The Sisterhood has promised to put you on the throne with Ghanima as your mate,” Jessica said.
Farad’n took a backward step. Did the witch read minds?
“They worked secretly and not through your mother,” Jessica said. “They told you I was not privy to their plan.”

>The Bene Gesserit hadn’t abandoned the Atreides line, of course. But they wanted control of a Kwisatz Haderach and they’d invested too much in the long breeding program. They wanted the open clash between Atreides and Corrino, a situation where they could step in as arbiters. And Duncan was right. They’d emerge with control of both Ghanima and Farad’n. It was the only compromise possible. The wonder was that Alia hadn’t seen it.

To ensure that Jessica is killed on arrival, the BG's have been manipulating her into having extra-credulous judgment and reckless vulnerability: "Nah, I don't believe my daughter is trying to abduct/kill me despite the mounting pile of evidence. No, I don't need a car roof for my Dallas motorcade." Thankfully she has the help of her attendant Gurney Halleck and her old naib Stilgar who work-out a security plan for her.

>“I don’t believe it. Even for her, this would be… monstrous! Too dangerous! How could she do it without… I cannot believe this!”

>Gurney had objected: “Not even a shield on you? Gods below, woman! You’re insane!”

>“It’s already done, My Lady,” Stilgar said. “Gurney’s man and I planned this together.” […]
Jessica spoke mildly: “As you’ve just heard, Gurney didn’t even let me in on the whole plan.”

Jessica's Arrival

Leto's been having weird dreams lately but hopes they aren't prescient visions, given what he can remember of his father's life. The dreams alert him that Alia's become possessed and plans to kill Jessica when she arrives, so to confirm it, the twins pester Alia to accompany her to the spaceport. When Alia insists it's too dangerous, the twins see this as confirmation of Alia's sinister intentions: she doesn't fear danger at the spaceport, she's planning it and doesn't want the twins caught in the crossfire.

When Jessica arrives, she raises her arms in benediction and the faithful sink to their knees. But the Jacurutu assassins in the crowd have literally been living under a rock their whole lives and take a few seconds to pick-up their social cues from the people around them, allowing Gurney and Stilgar to identify the suspicious "laggards" in the crowd and arrest them. Alia's annoyed that Jessica instantly avoided the trap, while Jessica immediately recognizes that Alia is possessed but can't say anything about it: there's no proof of possession yet, and publicly exposing Alia's possession could endanger the twins' lives, too.

Jessica meets Javid in the welcoming committee and instantly flags his accent as suspicious. She invites him to tag along with her, hoping to convert him as a spy against Alia, but abandons that plan when she realizes Javid hates all Atreides, Jessica included.

>Be very careful in this place. Alia is your enemy and most of the priesthood belongs to her.”
“Not Javid,” Jessica’s fingers responded. “He hates the Atreides. I doubt anyone but an adept could detect it, but I’m positive of it. He conspires and Alia doesn’t know of it.”

Gurney interrogates the spaceport assassins who reveal that they work for Alia and come from Jacurutu, but die immediately afterwards as a counter-interrogation measure. Jessica remembers the legends about Jacurutu and deduces that if the Cast Out are still alive, they must be supporting themselves with spice smuggling. Since Gurney spent half of Dune living with a smuggling outfit, Jessica encourages Gurney to contact his old Smuggle Buddies to help him suss-out Jacurutu's location.

Meanwhile, Leto’s forced to confess to Ghanima that he’s been getting nocturnal predictions:

>“I’m beginning to have prescient dreams, Ghani.”
A sharp gasp escaped her.
He said: “When Stilgar told us our grandmother was delayed—I already knew that moment. Now my other dreams are suspect.”

Leto has a whole backlog of "dreams" he's been ignoring for months; now that he realizes they were actually visions, he understands that he's holding a random sampling of half the conspiracies in the book (albeit partial and without context). He sees that Alia is trying to destroy the spice cycle, but what adult is going to overthrow the Regent of the Known Universe™ on the grounds that a fourth-grader had a scary dream and insists his aunt is haunted by brain ghosts into destroying her own family and empire?

>Where was help to be found? Where was there someone to listen when she revealed what she saw happening all around them? […] But Stilgar only laughed at Ghanima’s fears and ordered her to look for sandtrout as though she were one of the children.

>The tribes won’t believe us if she denies it,” he said.
His statement went to the primary problem of their existence: What Fremen expected wisdom from a nine-year-old? Alia, growing farther and farther from her own inner sharing each day, played upon this.
“We must convince Stilgar,” Ghanima said.

But Stilgar won’t have any of it, and the odds of convincing any other Fremen probably won’t go much better:

>“If I die here, Stil,” Leto said, “you must beware of Alia. She is no longer your friend.” […]
“Why must I beware of your aunt?” Anger edged his voice.
“Because she plays upon the old Fremen desire to resist change, yet would bring more terrible change than you can imagine. […] Now you will listen to me,” Leto said. “If I die or disappear in the desert, you are to flee from Sietch Tabr. I command it. You are to take Ghani and—”
“You are not yet my Duke! You’re a… a child! […] I will hear no more,” Stilgar said. He turned and began climbing down the rocks toward the oasis across the sand.

The twins are going to need the endorsement of some other Respectable Adult™ to give their allegations weight, but Jessica refuses to publicly denounce her daughter for fear of damaging the Atreides reputation and endangering the family. In that case, maybe “The Preacher” could help: he already has a reputation for agitating against the regime, and if the rumors are true and he's secretly the twins' father Paul, he might be one of the only adults willing to listen to them. Moreover, Alia is a living god: the whole Fremen religion is currently built around her, and it won't be easy turning the public against her unless there's some alternative, competing religion that gives the Fremen something to believe in greater than Alia; The Preacher's credentials as a mystic might help sell the public on that.

But where to find him? The twins consult the ancestral memories of their parents, a sort of “snap-shot” of Chani and Paul’s brains taken shortly before her death and his disappearance into the desert. The memories confirm that Paul likely didn’t die, and instead sought-out the Fremen of Jacurutu to help unravel his own legacy:

>“Where could you go?”
He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Jacurutu.”
“Beloved!” Tears began flowing down her cheeks.
“Muad’Dib, the hero, must be destroyed utterly,” he said.

Leto doesn't understand why, but his dream visions have also shown glimpses of Jacurutu suggesting that Leto needs to go there to start the new competing religion.

>“Why Jacurutu?” she asked, and the flatness of her tone shattered the mood.
“Why… I don’t know. When Stilgar first told us how they killed the people there and made the place tabu, I thought… what you thought. But danger comes from there now… and The Preacher.”

But Stilgar would never allow the twins to travel to a tabu sietch and recruit an itinerant madman to help them overthrow their aunt's government on the advice of a dream, so the twins will just have to sneak out on their own. This presents a problem, because Leto's dream-visions have shown that the moment he and Ghanima are alone together on the open desert, somebody is going to try to kill them (distant voice: "I'ma tiger them kids). That might actually be useful, though: nobody sends a search party for you if they think you're already dead. Assuming they survive the attack, one twin could seek-out Jacurutu and The Preacher while the other runs interference and insists that the first twin was killed.

That's the twin's plan, then: lure-out and kill their attackers, fake one twin's death, and find Jacurutu and The Preacher to start a new religion and overthrow Alia.

But Leto's dreams have shown him far more than just "This Brain Ghost" or "That Tiger Plot": they've also alerted him to the “Golden Path,” a frightening future in which a prescient person (Paul or Leto) transforms into a hideous monster who lives thousands of years enforcing iron-fisted rule over humanity, imposing cultural stagnation for eons, then allowing all of civilization to utterly collapse. Apparently all of this will help keep human affairs free from the influence of both despotism and prescience in the long-run, but even more importantly, The Golden Path is necessary to follow or else the human race will go extinct.

…Oh.

Leto realizes that Paul, too, saw part of this vision, but turned away from it in disgust before getting to the whole "Or Else Humanity Will Go Extinct" part:

>“I will only ask this one thing: is the Typhoon Struggle necessary?”
“It’s that or humans will be extinguished.”
Paul heard the truth in Leto’s words, spoke in a low voice which acknowledged the greater breadth of his son’s vision. “I did not see that among the choices.”

And that's about all the information on The Golden Path you're going to get in this book. If you're wondering "Why does Leto have to become a millennia-spanning god tyrant to save humanity?" or "How does becoming a prescient despot defeat prescience and despotism in the long run?" or "What does the Bene Gesserit breeding program have to do with any of it?", we can't actually answer any of that without spoiling all of the next book, God Emperor of Dune. I'll do a write-up of that one if people really want, but it's a big digression and this post is already longer than the actual book, so for now, all we can say is "Because Prescience Said So" 😂

The “Drug Leto” Plot

Leto shares as much of his Big Fat Future Vision with Ghanima as she's likely to accept – "We need to go to go to Jacurutu and start a new religion to overthrow Alia and save humanity" – but leaves-out the parts about turning into a horrible monster. Ghanima quickly notices the omissions, worrying that her brother wants to become another deity himself:

>Ghanima studied her brother as they hesitated here in the rock passage. It had grown increasingly obvious to her that he was pleading on two levels: one, for the Golden Path of his vision and their father’s, and two, that she allow him free reign to carry out the extremely dangerous myth-creation which the plan generated. This frightened her. Was there more to his private vision that he had not shared? Could he see himself as the potentially deified figure to lead humankind into a rebirth—like father, like son? The cult of Muad’Dib had turned sour, fermenting in Alia’s mismanagement and the unbridled license of a military priesthood which rode the Fremen power. Leto wanted regeneration.
He’s hiding something from me, she realized.

Ghani threatens tattling to their grandmother in order to dissuade Leto from pursuing this future:

>“Are you counseled to speak to our grandmother of the Golden Path?” […]
“I don’t think I’ll mention the Golden Path.”
“I may.”
“Ghani!”
“We don’t need any more Atreides gods! We need a space for some humanity!”
“Have I ever denied it?”
“No.” She took a deep breath and looked away from him.

Ultimately Ghani doesn't spill all the beans, but she does tell Jessica the twins' plans to fake one of their deaths and go to The Happiest Place On Dune:

>She went on to reveal his dreams and the plans they’d discussed—even Jacurutu.

Jessica betrays this trust and radios-ahead to Gurney (who's infiltrated Jacurutu for its connection with the spaceport attack) to let him know that Leto is going to head there soon:

>And she girded herself to accept the events which she and Gurney Halleck had set in motion. Leto must be separated from his sister, must be trained as the Sisterhood insisted.

Jessica instructs Gurney to inject Leto (once!) with spice essence when he arrives to tempt the boy with possession and see if he can overcome it, a sort of ad-hoc gom jabbar test. If he's possessed, he's to be killed; if not, he's to be sent to the sisterhood for further training.

>Leto had to be tested. He had to be. Without the testing he was doomed as Alia was doomed. And Ghanima… Well, that could be faced later. There was no way to send the pre-born before the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam.

Unfortunately, Alia's been eavesdropping on this plan. Gurney knew he was being surveilled when Jessica first instructed him to find Jacurutu, but thought no one in Alia's priesthood could decode their hand signals:

>Halleck used hand signals to convey the actual message while speaking aloud of other matters. He didn’t like the small anteroom the priests had assigned for this report, knowing it would be crawling with spy devices. Let them try to break the tiny hand signals, though. The Atreides had used this means of communication for centuries without anyone the wiser.

But Gurney and Jessica seem to be forgetting that Alia herself knows those exact hand gestures:

>Jessica, watching the Priest run toward them, caught a movement out of the corners of her eyes, saw Alia’s hand signaling in the old Atreides battle language.

Alia knows Gurney is on his way to Jacurutu, but killing him would be difficult: he's the toughest soldier the Atreides have ever trained, and he's annoyingly good at escaping ambushes (ask the Harkonnens). But Alia recalls a conversation with Leto where the boy explained that Gurney's weakness is his unquestioning loyalty:

>She recalled asking the boy how he would deal with Gurney Halleck. And Leto, sensing undercurrents in her question, had said Halleck was loyal “to a fault” […] Gurney, adding to the confusion of identities, might prove valuable.

So why kill Gurney when you can use him? Alia has access to most of Jessica's memories and realizes she could impersonate her mother pretty easily, plus the cell reception in Jacurutu is helpfully awful: the deep desert produces fierce sandstorms which black-out communications for long stretches, making it more difficult for the real Jessica to re-establish contact later:

>No word yet from the smugglers?” Farad’n interrupted. “Why can’t we—”
“Transmission is always slow in this season,” Tyekanik said.

>“No messages this night,” Namri said. “There’s a storm coming. The tribes have been tracking it for three days now. It’ll be here by midnight. Already communication’s blanked out. The satellites signed off this sector two hours ago.”

When Gurney reaches Jacurutu, Alia gets Javid's father Namri to relay her flawless impostor-message:
“Change of plans: one time isn't enough, we have to keep drugging Leto until he gives us the password.”
“What password?”
“Peaches? I dunno.”

>She’d explained the problem, and he’d come into her plan with the expectation that it, like all plans, would need adjustments later.

>His captors kept sending him back into the spice thralldom, unsatisfied with his responses at every return. Always, treacherous Namri waited there with his knife. Leto knew countless pasts and futures, but he had yet to learn what would satisfy Namri… or Gurney Halleck.

>“I still have not heard what I must hear,” Halleck snarled.

“And if he gets the password wrong?”
“Turn him over to Namri.”

>“I follow your grandmother’s orders. Your education has been planned to the last detail. It was she who approved my selection of Namri.”

“Wouldn't Namri stab Leto if he gives the wrong password?”
“(yup) Nooo, he'll only stab Leto if he's possessed. We're just going to scare Leto into thinking we'll also kill him for failed password attempts."

>Jessica had warned him that Namri might have to kill the lad.

>“You were to kill him only if he showed himself to be… possessed,” Halleck said. “Abomination.”

>A deep sigh shook Halleck. The boy would die out there for sure if the sandblast storm caught him. It would eat the flesh from his bones and sliver the bones to fragments. The contrived false death would become real.

“This sounds like a terrible plan.”
“It's either that or we let him get possessed by Harkonnens.”
“…Harkonnens?”
“Oh did I not mention that? Yeah, Leto has Harkonnen ancestors who will enslave his brain just like they enslaved you, unless we put him through this one specific test.”

>Gurney, adding to the confusion of identities, might prove valuable.
What would he do if he discovered we carry the blood of Harkonnens, the Harkonnens he hates so bitterly?
The smile on Alia’s lips became introspective.

Leto's advice was right: Gurney's brain shuts off when he thinks he's defending Jessica and her family, especially from Harkonnens.

>Maybe it was right not to trust the Bene Gesserit. Immediately, he felt disloyal. […] This wasn’t any Bene Gesserit; this was Jessica of the Atreides who’d never been other than friend and supporter to him. Without her, he knew he’d have been adrift in a universe more dangerous than the one he now inhabited.

As for what Alia is up to here: she figures if Leto is pumped full of spice essence and prompted for a password he doesn't know, there's no way the boy could randomly guess the one right answer out of infinitely many (instantly fatal!) wrong ones on his first and only attempt. If he does, it can mean only one thing: Leto saw the outcomes to every possible response and picked the one answer that wouldn't immediately get him stabbed to death. To Alia, that would be proof-positive that Leto's prescience has awakened, and she can then start using him as a magic eight ball to guide her decisions as Regent.

Of course, if a Gatorade Bucket-sized dose of spice essence and the constant threat of imminent death aren't enough to awaken Leto's prescience and he answers wrong and dies, then he probably never had prescience to begin with and thus wouldn't be of any use to his aunt anyway, so no big loss.

Unfortunately for Alia, prescience doesn’t really work in the “I’m Thinking Of A Number Between One And A Hundred, Tell Me What It Is Or You Die” sort of way, and another realization will later cause her to frantically back-pedal and give Namri new instructions…

Part 3

Part 2 Part 3 Part 4

So I did a post a while back explaining the plot to Dune Messiah, and since then, some people have been asking me to do a similar rundown for Children of Dune. This turned out to be a lot more complicated, in part because all the characters’ schemes are even more messy and heavily inferential in the third Dune book…

>A feint within a feint within a feint within a feint […]

>He spoke of a constant ferment, intrigue within intrigue [...]

>“There could be trickery within trickery here […]”

>“There are wheels within wheels here.”

>This whole thing had the smell of a feint within a feint within a feint…

>"So-called, you see, because it is a chicken within a duck within a turkey […]"

…And in part because some of the character motivations won’t quite make sense until the end of the fourth book God Emperor of Dune, which feels slightly unfair 😅. Below is my best attempt (in ten million words or fewer) at untangling all the nouns within nouns within nouns in this story. Mistakes are entirely the result of ghafla and/or malicious ancestors trying to sabotage me.

Paul after Messiah

At the end of Dune Messiah, Paul Atreides wanders out in the desert hoping to die: his prescient visions have only brought him pain, having left him unable to stop a jihad that killed billions in his name, prevent his government from becoming corrupt, or even allow him to save the love of his life. Paul realizes that when you overuse prescience, it becomes a crutch: rather than living in the moment, you become locked-in to the most likely future, blind to all the alternatives, until your visions become a self-fulfilling prophecy that robs you of all free will.

But because the cruel forces of Narrative Irony aren’t finished with him yet, Paul receives a last prescient vision on his way out of Sietch Tabr into the desert, one which lets him glimpse a way to break the powers that both tyranny and prescience itself have on steering the future course of human affairs. The vision is incomplete and Paul doesn’t fully understand it, but this so-called “Golden Path” would require Paul to transform himself into a post-human monster worshiped as a living god who despotically rules the galaxy for thousands of years and inflicts a forced stagnation upon society, followed by a near-total civilizational collapse after his reign that would devastate the known universe and leave countless dead in its wake.

Paul’s horrified by what he sees and can’t understand how turning himself into a prescient tyrant is supposed to weaken both prescience and tyranny in the long-run, but the vision does give him some small measure of hope: if there’s one future where Paul can free humanity from despotism and predetermination, maybe there’s another – hopefully one that doesn’t require him to transform into a Tyrannical Meat Dumpster for eons.

>“Did you walk into the desert to die, beloved? Is that what you did?”
“It may be that I did, but that vision… Would that not be reason enough to stay alive?”

Sadly, this desperate hope coupled with Paul’s commitment to only pursue half-measures sets him up for a fall destined to be as tragic as his family’s legendary Greek namesake:

>“If I’d only died,” Paul whispered. “I truly wanted to die when I went into the desert that night, but I knew I could not leave this world. I had to come back and—”
“Restore the legend,” Leto said. “I know.”

Paul’s 100% commitment to a 50% plan

Paul realizes the empire’s sick, but he can’t simply return to the throne himself to reform his corrupt Imperium from within: even if he succeeds at creating a kinder, better empire, that’ll just reinforce people’s faith in Paul as an infallible prescient god-ruler, which will just create public demand for more prescient god-rulers once he’s gone.

>“Will you take back your hawk ring?” Leto asked.
Paul sat down suddenly on the sand, a dark blotch in the starlight. “No!”
So he knows the futility of that path, Leto thought.

>But Paul could only shake his head, knowing he would have no comfort from this night or any other. Muad’Dib, The Hero, must be destroyed. He’d said it himself. Only The Preacher could go on now.

In hindsight, psychic rulers are a bad idea in general: if Emperor Looksahead thinks he can predict his enemy’s every move in-advance and that he virtually cannot lose a battle, suddenly the prospect of using warfare to solve all his problems starts looking pretty attractive. Paul needs to make sure there’s never another prescient ruler on the throne again since he doesn't want a repeat (or worse!) of his own reign.

So far there are only two (significantly) prescient people in the known universe: Paul, and his infant son Leto. (Paul realized Leto was prescient at the end of Messiah since prescient people are invisible to each other's visions.) The obvious solution here would be for Paul to just murder-suicide himself and his kid, but Paul admits that he could never commit an evil act in advance, especially if it’s against his own baby boy:

>“Your hands did good things and evil.”
“But the evil was known after the event! […] I could never do an evil act which was known before the act.”

So Paul opts for a more humane solution: lure Leto away from the throne by promising him all of the things Paul wanted but could never have for himself, specifically: a quiet life of private anonymity with a hot devoted wife and zero haunting responsibilities of rule hanging over his head. The plan? Find some cute girl about his son’s age (plus or minus about a decade; the dating pool Paul will have to work with is kinda small) and strategically keep the girl single so she can tempt Leto with a life of domestic tranquility. Yeah yeah, the absolute power of Imperium is great and all, but have you tried Sabiha’s coffee yet?

>She was two years past the age when most Fremen women were wed or at least betrothed. Therefore her family was saving her for something… or someone.

>Paul buried his face in his hands. His shoulders shook for a moment, then he lowered his hands and his mouth was set in a harsh line. “There is a curse upon our House. I prayed that you would throw that ring into the sand, that you’d deny me and run away to make… another life. It was there for you.”

Would Leto actually respond to a plot as obvious as “My Dad Is Trying To Honeypot Me Away From Becoming Emperor?” Hard to say: prescient people are invisible to each other’s visions, so Paul can only guess what kinds of things could tempt his son from power.

With Paul presumed dead and Leto confined to permanent Teenage Crush Summer Camp, who would then be left running the empire? Paul’s sister Alia is currently Regent, but like Paul, the Fremen worship Alia as a literal god. Even if Paul manages to convince his sister to step-down from power (a choice she’ll later stubbornly oppose), the legend of Atreides deification would still persist, and the corrupt priesthood left in its wake would continue mismanaging the empire in Paul and Alia’s Holy Names. (Paul just finished executing a power-hungry religious official Korba who tried to usurp control of the empire under the mantle of Atreides deity, so he’s not eager to give “the unbridled license of a military priesthood which rode the Fremen power” another crack at running the show.)

This means that if Paul’s serious about playing healer to a sick empire, he’ll need to dismantle the whole religious edifice built around his family name… which means removing the core of that religious power by un-deifying himself and Alia. He could try disparaging the priesthood in a bunch of public tirades to weaken their influence, but he can’t foment dissent as himself: that would just cause people to flock to “Their Messiah Reborn,” Paul’s impossible return from the desert hailed as yet another miracle to add to the list of his growing legend. That’s exactly the kind of “god savior” narrative that Paul is trying to undermine.

>Let the myth grow, but keep doubts alive, he thought. No one must discover that the mask was merely cloth, not an Ixian artifact at all. His hand must not slip from Assan Tariq’s bony shoulder. Let The Preacher once walk as the sighted despite his eyeless sockets, and all doubts would dissolve. The small hope he nursed would be dead.

So Paul prepares a litany of fiery sermons to agitate the Fremen against the corrupt priesthood and the “padded yoke” of imperial rule, which he intends to deploy in the guise of a mysterious desert ascetic:

>“The religion of Muad’Dib is not Muad’Dib. He spurns it as he spurns you! Sand will cover this place. Sand will cover you. […] I come here to combat the fraud and illusion of your conventional, institutionalized religion. As with all such religions, your institution moves toward cowardice, it moves toward mediocrity, inertia, and self-satisfaction.”

>“Most lives are a flight from selfhood. Most prefer the truths of the stable. You stick your heads into the stanchions and munch contentedly until you die. Others use you for their purposes. Not once do you live outside the stable to lift your head and be your own creature. Muad’Dib came to tell you about that. Without understanding his message, you cannot revere him!”

As the years go by, Alia will become increasingly associated with the priesthood and its abuses of power, putting her under the crosshairs of Paul’s sermons, too. But assuming that Paul eventually succeeds at toppling both Alia and the corrupt Mahdinate under her, who does that leave to actually rule?

It’s possible that Paul’s young daughter Ghanima might, though it’s just as likely that the Corrino prince Farad’n – grandson and heir to the previous emperor Shaddam IV – will either try to usurp Ghanima or else simply marry her to restore his family back to the lion throne. That wouldn’t be a terrible outcome – Farad’n is neither prescient, nor is he worshipped as a god by anyone, thus he’d have considerably less power to abuse than either Paul or Alia – but Shaddam wasn’t prescient or deified and he still wound up being a tyrant.

Farad’n will spend the coming years training-up his Sardaukar armies in preparation to avenge their previous defeat under his grandfather and potentially take back the throne by force; during this process, it will eventually occur to Paul that Farad’n is basically Paul himself in Dune: the teenage heir of a deposed Great House itching to train and unleash a mighty army to avenge his family’s reversals, reclaim his inheritance, and marry the daughter of the previous emperor to consolidate power. But if Farad’n is just a younger version of Paul, then he’s likely to end up repeating all of Paul’s mistakes!

>As titular head of House Corrino, heir of Shaddam IV, what a great achievement it would be to restore his line to the Lion Throne. He wanted that! He wanted it. […] He thought of his Sardaukar once more growing tough and resilient through the rigorous training and the denial of luxury which he commanded. His Sardaukar legions remained small, but once more they were a man-to-man match for the Fremen. […] It was too soon for a battle of Sardaukar against Fremen. […] He needed the time for his Sardaukar to grow stronger and the Fremen to grow weaker.

If Paul could go back to that age and do something different, what would he have changed? It occurs to him that during Dune, his mother Jessica was the sole voice trying to impart some greater morality onto him: she made Paul feel guilt over the death of Jamis to keep her son from growing too comfortable with murder, encouraged him to marry Chani so he’d follow his heart rather than become a cold and calculating ruler using marriage as a political tool, and so on – but Jessica ultimately despaired of influencing her son’s principles when Paul accepted deification from his followers, authorized a jihad that killed billions, and embraced other “harsh calculations” that caused Jessica to “shudder” at the thought of her own child, and she ultimately fled back to Caladan in disgust of Paul as much as anything else.

Now with hindsight Paul can’t help but wonder: if Jessica had actually succeeded in completing Paul’s Bene Gesserit training at the time, could he have become a kinder, more benevolent leader? Could the jihad and the corrupt priesthood have been avoided? He anticipates – correctly, as it turns out – that Jessica, too, would see Farad’n as a “younger Paul,” that she’d jump at the opportunity to correct past mistakes and try again to steer the next emperor away from his dreams of conquest and towards something more benign.

>She studied him a moment. How intent he looked. He reminded her with a heart-tugging abruptness of her own lost son.

This seems to be Paul’s overall plan, then: to rid humanity of prescient leaders by luring Leto away from power, tearing-down the Imperium’s corrupt priesthood and cults-of-personality by incensing the public against them, and using his mother to train Farad’n into becoming a better emperor and person than Paul ever was.

All of this is pretty much a Hail Mary against fate, and Paul doesn’t seem at all confident that his plan will actually work… but the alternative “Golden Path” vision is too horrifying for Paul to contemplate, so he doesn’t feel that there’s much choice. Currently he’s still a blind(ish) man wandering alone in the desert; for his personal vision to have a chance of succeeding, he’ll need help. Paul can’t go to the other Fremen sietches – they still worship Paul as a god, exactly the reputation he’s trying to undermine – so instead, he’ll need to recruit some Fremen who hate the Atreides legacy as much as he does…

Paul and the Jacurutu Fremen

A few generations before the story takes place, there was a band of predatory Fremen from a sietch called Jacurutu who murdered any neighboring Fremen visitors to harvest the corpses for their water. The neighboring tribes retaliated by jointly attacking and destroying Jacurutu, but a few stragglers survived the assault and migrated 15 km south to a rocky butte they named “Shuloch” after a Fremen folktale. The homeless Jacurutu, now calling themselves the “Cast Out,” were forced to live in crude thatched huts that could barely keep the bugs out and the humidity in. These brutal conditions drove them to risk quietly returning to their old sietch, now abandoned and unwatched since the site was declared tabu (off-limits) by the rest of the Fremen tribes.

To finance the reconstruction of their sietch and tribe, the Cast Out turned to spice smuggling to support themselves, making unsavory deals with offworld smugglers in exchange for spice harvesters, ornis, and the smugglers’ access to the black market. Jacurutu’s profound isolation makes the Cast Out one of the most hardcore traditionalist Fremen tribes on the planet, and they resent the intrusion of new technologies and sketchy foreigners into their lives... yet they benefit from the smugglers' decision to construct an operating base/trade post called Fondak which conceals the entrance to Jacurutu sietch and allows the Jacurutu to “operate in plain sight” without arousing suspicion.

Various rulers of Arrakis (Paul’s government included) were aware of the smuggler base but permitted it to exist for the simple reason that if there were ever a civil war or revolution on Dune, the ruling family might require a “back door” to quickly escape the planet: a fat bribe to a disinterested third-party in a secret location could be the ticket to a Guild heighliner express trip to safety.

>He nodded his agreement. Jacurutu/Fondak—they had to be the same place. It was the only way the legendary place could have been hidden. Smugglers had done it, of course. How easy for them to convert one label into another, acting under the cover of the unspoken convention by which they were allowed to exist. The ruling family of a planet must always have a back door for escape in extremis.

But while Paul was willing to turn a blind eye to the smugglers (while possibly even suspecting Fondak’s “Jacurutu” roots as well), the Jacurutu Fremen hate Paul and all Atreides: the Cast Out have old religious beliefs and worship the sandworms as both gods and ancestors. Since Paul started (and Alia accelerated) the terraforming project that has introduced the plant life and humidity to Arrakis that’s been killing off all the sandworms, the Cast Out blame House Atreides for killing their gods and are hungry for revenge.

>“I could kill you, Atreides. I could kill you, Atreides.” It was repeated over and over until it lost meaning, became a wordless thing carried within Leto’s dreaming, a litany of sorts: “I could kill you, Atreides. […] You took away our gods, Atreides. What do we care about your stinking Muad’Dib? Your god’s dead!”

>“Shai-Hulud, the great-grandfather of all Fremen, sealed up that cave.”

>My lady, did you not know that there are Fremen rebels—they call themselves ‘Maquis of the Inner Desert’—who curse House Atreides and even Muad’Dib? […] I’ve heard their curse myself. Here’s the way of it: ‘Burning be on you, Atreides! [..] On no day shall you behold Shai-Hulud, but you shall be bound and fettered in the nethermost abomination and your souls shall never enter into the glorious light for ever and ever.’ That’s the way of the curse, My Lady. Can you imagine such hatred from Fremen? They consign all Atreides to the left hand of the damned, to the Woman-Sun which is full of burning.”

Paul knows that the Jacurutu hate his Imperium as much as he does and would be potent (if inconstant) allies, so he searches for them roughly near Fondak. Normally the Cast Out would kill any visitor who discovered them (especially if that visitor is the Atreides patriarch), but Paul is luckily discovered by a Jacurutu named Muriz before he encounters the rest of the tribe. Muriz is the tribe’s “arifa” or spiritual judge, and also oversees the spice harvesting operations at Shuloch. Muriz hates Paul but believes that Muad’Dib’s prescient visions can show the Jacurutu how to save the sandworms from extinction, so he drinks some of Paul’s blood. This is an ancient Fremen custom that makes Paul “Wadquiyas” – an automatic member of tribe Jacurutu – so now nobody else in the tribe can attack Paul unless he does something to offend the tribe. (Leto will later deduce all of this and take advantage of it himself.)

>“He is Wadquiyas with you. Your people found him alone in the desert and brought him to Shuloch. What a rich discovery he was! Richer than a spice-vein. Wadquiyas! He has lived with you; his water mingled with your tribe’s water. He’s part of your Spirit River.” […] Leto pressed the fleshy part of his own thumb against Muriz’s mouth. “Bite and drink, Muriz. That or die.”
Muriz hesitated, then bit viciously into Leto’s flesh. Leto watched the man’s throat, saw the swallowing convulsion, withdrew the knife and returned it.
“Wadquiyas,” Leto said. “I must offend the tribe before you can take my water.”
Muriz nodded.
“Your pistol is over there.” Leto gestured with his chin.
“You trust me now?” Muriz asked.
“How else can I live with the Cast Out?”

>Muriz had a deep emotional problem, though: the Spirit River. The captive’s water flowed in Muriz’s veins. Muriz sought a sign that would permit him to hold a threat of death over Leto.
Like father, like son, Leto thought.

But in true backstabbing Jacurutu fashion, Muriz has left himself a loophole he can exploit to circumvent the diplomatic immunity he’s just conferred upon Paul: as arifa, Muriz is a certified “demon detector” who is empowered to unilaterally execute any member of the tribe he deems “possessed by demons,” wadquiyas or not. Muriz reasons that he can use Paul to save the sandworms/topple the Atreides government first, then simply accuse Paul of “demonic possession” afterwards and execute him.

>“I remind you that I am a judge who can respond to the taqwa.”
Ah, yes, Leto thought. In the mouth of such a judge, the taqwa carried immediate threat. Taqwa was the fear invoked by the presence of a demon, a very real belief among older Fremen. The arifa knew the ways to slay a demon and was always chosen “because he has the wisdom to be ruthless without being cruel, to know when kindness is in fact the way to greater cruelty.”

(Paul seems aware of the deception but it doesn't faze him: so long as the Cast Out help him to dismantle imperial power, he doesn’t care what happens to himself later.)

In the meantime, the Jacurutu Fremen can’t kill Paul, but they can forcibly drug him with repeated spice melange overdoses in the hopes that he’ll regain his prescient visions and tell them how to save the sandworms. Paul’s visions do start returning, and are even so lucid that Paul can effectively “see” again despite his blindness, but Paul keeps this a secret from the Cast Out, insisting that he still receives no visions of the future and that he needs a guide to help walk him around.

>“And the jackals of Jacurutu were waiting for you that night as you knew they would be. They wanted your visions! You knew that.”
“I refused. I never gave them one vision.”
“But they contaminated you. They fed you spice essence and plied you with women and dreams. And you did have visions.”
“Sometimes.” How sly his voice sounded.

>Yes, Muriz commanded it. Superstition conquered everything. Muriz wanted a vision cast for him to read. He was an ancient savage asking the witch doctor to throw the ox bones and interpret their sprawl.

>“You need me, Muriz. Without me, the worms and their spice will vanish from Dune.” He felt the Fremen stiffen. […] “You’ll have nothing but empty sand if you continue playing the fool,” Leto said. “What will you do, Muriz, when all of Dune has become green grass, trees, and open water?”
“It will never happen!”
“It is happening before your eyes.”
Leto heard Muriz’s teeth grinding in rage and frustration. Presently the man grated: “How would you prevent this?”
“I know the entire plan of the transformation,” Leto said. “I know every weakness in it, every strength. Without me, Shai-Hulud will vanish forever.”

The spice overdoses cause Paul to age more rapidly and sometimes confuse and addle his senses:

>This is no longer Muad’Dib, no longer Paul Atreides. The desert had made him what he was. The desert and the jackals of Jacurutu with their overdoses of melange and their constant betrayals. The Preacher was old before his time, old not despite the spice but because of it.

>This flesh had been too long away from the old regimen of self-discipline, his mind too often betrayed into madness by the Jacurutu.

But despite becoming a geriatric spice addict, Paul hasn’t forgotten his plans: 1. honeypot Leto; 2. preach against the priesthood; 3. get Jessica to train Farad’n to be his successor. For goal 1: Muriz may be the arifa or spiritual judge in Jacurutu, but the Cast Out’s naib (tribal leader) is a guy named Namri. Paul tells Namri to set-aside his young niece Sabiha from marriage and refuses to explain why, hoping to eventually use Sabiha as the bait for luring Leto away from the throne. For goal 2: Paul returns to Shuloch as his base-of-operations whenever coming back from his “Screw The Mahdinate” open mic nights at Arrakeen.

>Paul had tried to guide the last strands of a personal vision, a choice he’d made years before in Sietch Tabr. For that, he’d accepted his role as an instrument of revenge for the Cast Out, the remnants of Jacurutu. They had contaminated him, but he’d accepted this rather than his view of this universe which Leto had chosen.

>“So you baited Alia, tempted her and confused her into inaction and the wrong decisions. […] You are Abu Dhur, Father of the Indefinite Roads of Time.”
“I’m no more than bait in a trap,” The Preacher said, and his voice was bitter.
“And Alia already has eaten that bait,” Leto said. “But I don’t like its taste.”

And for goal 3: Paul needs to meet Farad’n face-to-face and tease the young prince into desiring Bene Gesserit training now so that Farad’n will accept it from Jessica later once she offers it to him. He knows that the Corrino family wants to recreate the spice cycle on their own world and break the Atreides spice monopoly, so Paul convinces the Cast Out to start selling sandtrout and sandworms offworld through their smuggler contacts. Just like Paul’s prescience predicts, this puts him on the Corrino's radar: the Corrino matriarch Wensicia (Farad’n’s mother) is curious who this blind preacher is who rails against the Mahdinate and risks his neck selling the Corrino stolen sandtrout, so she agrees to arrange an in-person meeting with “The Preacher,” not quite realizing he’s really Paul in disguise.

>Around them lay a region of Salusa Secundus left sere and barren, a place which harbored a scant few sandtrout smuggled from Arrakis and kept precariously alive in the dream that the melange monopoly might be broken.

>Farad’n chewed his lower lip. Duty held him here, but he felt frustrated. He would far rather have gone to the rock enclave where the sandtrout experiments were being conducted. Now there was a project with enormous potential: wrest the spice monopoly from the Atreides and anything might happen.

The Cast Out are extremely reluctant to kidnap and sell sandworms – their own gods – to foreigners on other worlds, but Paul convinces the Jacurutu that the best way to keep the sandworms from going extinct is to seed them on many different planets where at least some might escape the terraforming of Arrakis. This is a lie: Paul’s prescience has returned and he can see that every last sandworm smuggled offworld will be killed by even the slightest humidity once the creatures reach their foreign destinations. But once they start participating in his plans, the Jacurutu Fremen are wilfully blind to this possibility, because the guilt that they would all experience in knowing that they themselves are now complicit in accelerating the destruction of their own gods would be too much for them to bear. They now believe in following Paul’s advice because they have to believe it, since the alternative would be too terrible and self-damning for them to contemplate.

>Of course,” Leto said. “Holding pens. You sell sandtrout and worms off-planet.”
“It was Muad’Dib’s suggestion!”
“I know. But none of your worms or sandtrout survive for long away from Dune.”
“Not yet,” Muriz said. “But someday…”
“Not in ten thousand years,” Leto said. And he turned to watch the turmoil on Muriz’s face. Questions flowed there like the water in the qanat. Could this son of Muad’Dib really read the future? Some still believed Muad’Dib had done it, but … How could a thing such as this be judged?

>But this worm would not be killed by immersion. This one would go out on a Guild heighliner to some hopeful buyer whose desert probably would be too moist. Few off-worlders realized the basic desiccation which the sandtrout had maintained on Arrakis. Had maintained. Because even here in the Tanzerouft there would be many times more airborne moisture than any worm had ever before known short of its death in a Fremen cistern.

>Her people prayed to Shai-Hulud because the worm dominated many of their visions. […] Yet they […] lured sandtrout to open qanats. Sabiha fed him prescient visions with a casual callousness, yet within her words he saw the illuminated signals: she depended upon absolutes, sought finite limits, and all because she couldn’t handle the rigors of terrible decisions which touched her own flesh.

If the Cast Out ever discover that Paul was prescient this whole time and knew from the outset that the smuggled worms would all die, the tribe would probably rip him to pieces, so Paul has to maintain his masquerade of blindness around the Jacurutu at all times. Because of this, the Cast Out assign Paul a “guide” to help chauffeur the “blind old man” back and forth on his ministrations to Arrakeen. Muriz’s own son Assan Tariq accompanies Paul, but the Jacurutu have secretly instructed the boy to spy on Paul for them and kill him the moment “The Preacher” looks like he’s about to stray from the Cast Out’s agenda.

Normally only Muriz himself would be authorized to kill a member of the tribe by crying “demon possession,” but as luck would have it, a group of witless pilgrims ventured into the deep desert for a spiritual communion and accidentally discovered Shuloch: Muriz instructs his son to execute the trespassers, believing that their spirits will serve Assan Tariq from beyond the grave in helping the boy to “detect demons.” This allows Muriz to deputize his son as a “junior demon-detector” and give Lil Backstabs the excuse he needs to kill Paul if necessary.

>“I have presented Assan Tariq. I am arifa in this place, your only judge. My son, too, will be trained to detect demons. The old ways are best. […] Your father gives you six of them,” Muriz said. “Their water is ours. Their shades are yours, your guardians forevermore. Their shades will warn you of demons. They will be your slaves when you cross over into the alam al-mythal. […] The Preacher must not know of this,” Muriz said.
“I understand, father.”

>“I thought it was only someone alone in the desert!” the youth protested. “But it’s a demon.”
“Spoken like a true son of Jacurutu,” Leto said. […]
“It’s a demon!” the young guide protested. “We must flee this place or our souls— […] It is a demon in child form,” the guide said.

>“And you thought him unaware of your distrust,” Leto said. “I came to this exact place in this exact time to meet you, Muriz. I know all about you because I’ve seen you… and your son. I know how secure you believe yourselves, how you sneer at Muad’Dib, how you plot to save your little patch of desert.

Paul seems aware of the lurking double-cross (“That young Assan Tariq is a dangerous one”) but ignores it, instead focusing on his trip to Salusa Secundus. “The Preacher” offered Wensicia the services of the Atreides swordmaster Duncan Idaho at a later date, and in exchange, asked Wensicia to fly Paul to the Corrino homeworld on the pretext of wanting to meet the young Farad’n and “interpret his dreams.”

(Farad’n seems to be dreaming about the terraforming project on Arrakis pulling all the water up from deep underground where the sandtrout have it sequestered, the snake-like government of Alia’s Regency orchestrating this transformation to destroy the sandworms with the new humidity so she can end the spice cycle. Without spice, interstellar transport will become impossible, and individual human worlds will become isolated again like vibrating atoms in empty space, each forever alone in the dark as their economies and civilizations collapse. Paul could try explaining all of this to the Corrino, but like the Jacurutu Fremen, he knows that people will refuse to think about any outcome too terrible to consider, so spelling-out an impending Universal Catastrophe scenario to the Corrino would be largely pointless.)

But the whole “dream interpretation” schtick was just a pretext, the real purpose of Paul’s visit being to meet Farad’n and exploit his insecurities to make him hungry for Bene Gesserit training and to want to become a kinder ruler than Paul was:

>“I dare such words because you stand at a crossroad. You could become admirable. But now you are surrounded by those who do not seek moral justifications, by advisors who are strategy-oriented. You are young and strong and tough, but you lack a certain advanced training by which your character might evolve. This is sad because you have weaknesses whose dimensions I have described. […] You’ve given no thought to the kind of society you might prefer,” The Preacher said. “You do not consider the hopes of your subjects. Even the form of the Imperium which you seek has little shape in your imaginings.”

The meeting goes as expected – but to Paul’s growing despair, it goes exactly as expected since nothing happened contrary to his visions. That’s problematic because his visions strongly suggest that Paul's Operation: Halfass is doomed to eventual failure – somehow, tyranny and/or prescience will likely make a later resurgence no matter what – but when the alternative is becoming a god-monster, what else can Paul do but stick with his plan and hope for the best?

>Each day he prayed for a change, something different over which he might stumble, but even Salusa Secundus had been a pebble, every aspect known. Nothing changed; nothing could be changed… yet.

Wensicia’s Plot

Compared to Paul “Trying To Steer The Future Course Of Humanity” Atreides, Wensicia “I’ma Tiger Them Kids” Corrino’s schemes are mercifully straightforward: she’s the third daughter to the late Shaddam IV, hates the Atreides for overthrowing her family, and wants to return House Corrino to the throne by discrediting or eliminating every last Atreides in rapid succession.

First, the Lady Jessica: Wensicia’s military strategist Tyekanik does not “count the Lady Jessica as an Atreides” since she never formally married Duke Leto. The Fremen do revere Jessica as the mother of their god, but these opinions could sour once the Fremen hear the rumors that Jessica has spent her years-long absence from Dune once again becoming a puppet of the hated Bene Gesserit order, an organization that Muad’Dib openly despised during his reign and which has made no secret of their desire to regain control of his “Kwisatz Haderach” bloodline.

Jessica is said to be returning to Arrakis soon, possibly to abduct Paul’s children on behalf of the sisterhood. These allegations would be even more damning in light of the fact that the Bene Gesserit order has never encountered a problem they didn’t try to solve with incest (wanting Girl-Paul to get impregnated by cousin Feyd Rautha in Dune, trying to breed Paul with his sister Alia in Messiah, etc.). The Fremen consider incest a capital offense; if the public believes that Jessica is returning to Dune to kidnap Muad’Dib’s children and forcibly breed them together for a cabal of incest-grooming weirdos, that could do irreparable damage to Jessica’s standing with the Fremen.

>“Gods below! How can you, a Bene Gesserit, be this dense? The whole Imperium suspects why you’re here. Wensicia’s propagandists are all prepared to discredit you.” […]
“What does the whole Imperium suspect?” […]
The Lady Jessica plans to breed those twins together!” he rasped. “That’s what the Sisterhood wants. Incest!”
She blinked. “Idle rumor.” She swallowed. “The Bene Gesserits will not let such a rumor run wild in the Imperium. We still have some influence. Remember that.”
“Rumor? What rumor? You’ve certainly held your options open on interbreeding us.” He shook his head as she started to speak. “Don’t deny it. Let us pass puberty still living in the same household and you in that household, and your influence will be no more than a rag waved in the face of a sandworm.”

>“Ghani and I have decided we will not breed.”
“I warn you to hold fast in that decision!” There was death in Stilgar’s voice. By Fremen Law, incest was punishable by death on the hanging tripod. 

Next, Alia: the Corrino’s recent contact with the sandworm smugglers of Jacurutu has put them in-touch with the Cast Out, who are happy to involve themselves in any conspiracy that undermines House Atreides. The Jacurutu leader Namri has sent his own son Javid to infiltrate Alia’s government, financing Javid’s rapid rise through the priesthood with proceeds from their smuggling operations at Shuloch. Javid acts as an informant within the Temple Keep, spilling Atreides government secrets to the Corrino and remaining on-call should the Corrino ever ask him to orchestrate Alia’s ouster or murder:

>“Javid assures me that his people can take care of Alia quite easily.”

>“All of those stories about Alia and that Priest, whatever his name is...”
“Javid,” Farad’n said. “But the man’s obviously—”
“He’s been a valuable source of information for us,” Wensicia said.

That just leaves the twins, Leto and Ghanima, whom Wensicia plans to murder using a pair of remote-controlled genetically modified tigers (the customary weapon for royal assassinations, ill-tempered mutant sea bass, was unavailable at the time). House Corrino will need someone on the inside to help them pull-off the plot, so Javid puts Wensicia in touch with a disaffected Fremen named Palimbasha who will act as the tiger’s handler:

>“You will advise him to employ the utmost caution when he brings those tigers back to us. And of course, when he has delivered our pets to Javid’s people on the transport…”

(It’s worth noting here that the Cast Out are playing multiple sides at once: they obviously haven’t told Paul that they’re helping the Corrino to murder Paul’s kids, something “The Preacher” never would have consented to. This is going to become a recurring theme as the Jacurutu Fremen repeatedly leap to involve themselves in any plot to hurt House Atreides, even when each new scheme jeopardizes all the alliances they just forged in their last scheme.)

Okay, so Wensicia thinks she can tiger the twins, discredit Jessica, and deploy Javid against Alia, all without House Corrino’s involvement ever becoming public knowledge (LOL right okay), thus clearing the throne for her son Farad’n. Would the Fremen accept Farad’n as their new emperor? They might if he converted and became one of the faithful, but Wensicia can’t exactly tell her son: “Hey, I need to you switch religions real fast since we’re planning to put you on the throne soon.” That would implicate Farad’n with foreknowledge of the plot, something Wensicia’s trying to avoid because she wants to keep her son’s hands clean, and besides, he’s “sensitive” i.e. might try to object (Silly boy of mine, always complaining it’s “immoral” to tigerize some little kids).

So instead, Wensicia instructs Farad’n’s military advisor and mentor Tyekanik to convert to Muad’Dib’s religion, hoping the impressionable Farad’n will copy it out of respect or curiosity. (Farad’n sees through this scheme immediately, but doesn’t object.)

>“But to embrace this . . . this Mahdi’s religion!”
“My son respects you,” she said. “I want you to embrace this Muad’Dib religion,” she said. […] I know how distasteful this is to you. But if you set the example...”
“He may not follow, Princess.”
“He’ll follow.”

>“This, ah, religion which you’ve professed...”
“Nothing strange about that, My Prince,” Tyekanik said and hoped his voice remained firm. “This religion speaks to the warrior in me. It’s a fitting religion for a Sardaukar.” That, at least, was true.
“Yesss… But my mother seems so pleased by it.” Damn Wensicia! he thought. She’s made her son suspicious.
“I care not what your mother thinks,” Tyekanik said. “A man’s religion is his own affair. Perhaps she sees something in this that may help to put you on the throne.”
“That was my thought,” Farad’n said.
Ahhh, this is a sharp lad! Tyekanik thought.

There are other organizations who will want some say in who their next emperor will be – CHOAM, the Landsraad, etc. – but Wensicia correctly understands that so long as “Emperor Farad’n” can keep the spice flowing, none of these factions are likely to object to a shakeup in imperial leadership. (If anything, these other elements are starting to get nervous under the Atreides dynasty considering that spice output has plummeted during Paul and Alia’s reigns; what happens if spice production eventually stops altogether?)

(Part 2)