Heretics of Dune

The boy in the keep does not know what he is. He is twelve, his name is Duncan Idaho, and the women who run the place will not tell him why he is not allowed outside the walls. He has guessed some of it already. He knows there was a man with that name once, a Swordmaster who died serving the Atreides, and he knows the Bene Tleilax can grow a body from a few cells and sell it back to the people who lost it. What he does not know is that he is the twelfth attempt, and that the first eleven were murdered as they came of age.

That is where Frank Herbert starts his fifth Dune novel, published by Putnam in 1984, 480 pages, the second-to-last of the six he completed. It is set about 1,500 years after God Emperor of Dune. Leto II is long dead. The sandworms came back to Arrakis, which people now call Rakis, and the spice flows again. The old empire is gone, replaced by three competing powers: Ix, which builds ships that cannot be seen; the Bene Tleilax, which grows spice in tanks and sells gholas; and the Bene Gesserit, which has spent ten thousand years turning religion into a tool and has started to believe its own press. Out in the dark, the descendants of the Scattering are coming home. The worst of them are the Honored Matres.

The keep on Gammu

Gammu used to be Giedi Prime, the Harkonnen homeworld, and Herbert has fun with that. The keep sits on a planet with a nasty history, and the Bene Gesserit have been using it as a nursery. Mother Superior Taraza runs the Sisterhood, and she is playing a long game she does not fully explain to anyone. She has brought Miles Teg out of retirement to guard the boy. Teg is 296 years old, a Mentat and a former Supreme Bashar, a direct Atreides descendant who looks enough like Duke Leto that the resemblance is a tool. He is also the closest thing the book has to a decent man. He farms. He dislikes chairdogs. He agrees to take the job but refuses his old title so his successor can keep the promotion.

Reverend Mother Lucilla arrives to do the other half of the job. She is an Imprinter, trained to bind a man to the Sisterhood through love, first maternal and then sexual. She looks like Darwi Odrade because she was bred from a parallel Atreides line, and that resemblance is not an accident. The plan is for Lucilla to make Duncan loyal, then for Teg to break open the ghola's original memories when the boy is old enough, and then for Duncan to be paired with a girl on Rakis who can ride the worms. Nobody tells Duncan any of this.

Reverend Mother Schwangyu runs the keep day to day, and she hates the project. She thinks the Tleilaxu have tampered with the ghola and that the Sisterhood is building another Tyrant it cannot control. She may be right about both. Herbert makes her a sour, plausible opponent rather than a villain.

The girl who calls them Shaitan

Meanwhile, on Rakis, a child has done something no one has managed in fifteen hundred years. Sheeana Brugh was eight when a worm destroyed her village and killed her family. She chased the thing. It stopped for her. She climbed on its back and rode it to Keen, the old Arrakeen, and the priests of the Divided God took her in and called her holy.

By the time the novel picks her up she is a teenager with too much power and no one willing to say no. She insists on calling the worms Shaitan, which upsets the priesthood, and she has banned the practice of feeding people to them. She is spoiled and sharp, and occasionally cruel in the way bored children are cruel. The Bene Gesserit send Odrade to take charge of her training. Odrade is Teg's biological daughter, though neither of them has much of a family feeling about it at first. She is also the Sisterhood's resident heretic, a woman who cries at a Van Gogh painting and refuses to pretend that love is just a weakness to be trained out of.

There is an ugly scene in Keen where Odrade watches a ritual dance from a window. Five naked dancers move through the crowd, and the crowd turns on them and beats them, and Sheeana comes in laughing. It is the book's clearest picture of what religion has become on Rakis: a machine for whipping people into a mood, with no memory of why.

Sheeana takes Odrade and Waff, the Tleilaxu Master of Masters, out into the desert on a worm. The worm carries them to Sietch Tabr, the old Fremen stronghold where Paul and Jessica once hid. In a chamber below, Odrade finds a hoard of spice worth half a year's harvest and a message Leto II scratched into the rock for whichever Reverend Mother eventually found it. The message is not kind. It says the Sisterhood has gone stagnant, that memory without a noble purpose is just a library, and that they let him carry the Golden Path alone. Odrade comes out of that chamber changed. It is the hinge of the whole novel, and Herbert knows it.

The assassination and the no-globe

Back on Gammu, the attempt finally comes. A Face Dancer wearing Teg's face walks into the keep with a lasgun and tries to kill Duncan. Lucilla throws herself in the way. The real Teg kills the imposter, and in the confusion he realizes Schwangyu's people let the Tleilaxu in. He does not wait for permission. He takes Duncan and Lucilla and runs.

His aide Patrin leads them to a path he prepared as a boy, then stays behind to lay a false trail. Patrin dies doing it, and Teg feels it before he hears it. They end up in an old Harkonnen no-globe hidden in a cave, a place built to be invisible to every kind of detection, stocked by a dead civilization. Herbert loves this kind of thing, and the no-globe is one of the best images in the book: a bunker full of Harkonnen griffins and forgotten machinery, holding three people who are the last chance of an order that has been planning for millennia.

Inside, Teg does what Taraza ordered and what Lucilla was supposed to prevent. He wakes Duncan up. He does it by making Duncan fight him, by being the image of an Atreides and refusing to die, until the boy screams "Leto" and the old memories come flooding back. Duncan remembers dying on Arrakis with Sardaukar all around him. He remembers Paul. He remembers Lucilla's face as Jessica's face, and he understands exactly what she was sent to do to him. It is a brutal scene, and Herbert lets it be painful rather than triumphant. Teg feels dirty afterward. Duncan is not grateful. He is angry, and he has a right to be.

Teg on the table

The escape goes wrong. Face Dancers corner them in the snow outside the no-globe, and Teg stays behind to cover Duncan and Lucilla. A stunner takes him in the face. He wakes up a prisoner of the Honored Matres.

This is where the book becomes something else. The Matres put him on a T-Probe, a device from the Scattering that reads pain the way a machine reads data. It takes over his nerves, moves his body without asking, and tries to pull the location of Duncan out of him. Teg has loaded himself with shere, the drug that blocks memory extraction, so there is nothing to take. The probe keeps going anyway. And in the middle of it, under more pain than a human being should survive, something in his Atreides genetics opens. He starts moving faster than the people around him. He sees the shape of what is about to happen before it happens. He kills his interrogators, wipes the machine, and walks out.

The sequence is ridiculous, and Herbert knows it. Teg is nearly three hundred years old. He should not be able to do any of this. The book gives a hand-wave about Atreides blood and Leto's breeding program, and you either take it or you don't. I took it. After four hundred pages of people talking in rooms, a very old man slaughtering his way out of a torture chamber is a release.

He gathers a handful of old soldiers, steals a no-ship, and goes looking for Duncan. His new vision lets him see the ships everyone else says are invisible, which is convenient, and it makes the Honored Matres obsessed with him. He finds Duncan and Lucilla, and he finds Murbella.

Murbella is the best new character in the novel. She is a young Honored Matre, arrogant and competent, and completely unprepared for Duncan. She captures him. She starts to do to him what her order does to men, which is to break them with pleasure and keep them. But the Tleilaxu built something into this ghola that nobody told the Sisterhood about: the male version of the same power. Duncan turns it around on her. In the process the dam breaks and he gets the memories of every Duncan Idaho who ever lived, hundreds of deaths, hundreds of awakenings, all of them at once. He remembers the axlotl tanks. He remembers being a product. He is, by the end of it, the oldest man in the room and the youngest.

Odrade crosses the line

While Teg is being tortured, Odrade is committing treason in slow motion. Taraza sends her to make an alliance with the Tleilaxu, and Odrade does it, but on terms Taraza never authorized. She offers the Tleilaxu Bene Gesserit breeding mothers, herself included. She offers to turn the Sisterhood into missionaries for the Tleilaxu's secret faith. She does it because she has worked out that the Honored Matres will kill them all otherwise, and because the Tleilaxu are more frightened than they look.

Waff is a strange, memorable creation: a small man with a high voice, a religious fanatic, and a pragmatist in the same body. He tries to kill Odrade and Tuek at a meeting. The dart kills Tuek. Odrade breaks both of Waff's arms and then, calmly, offers him an alliance while he is lying on the floor. She also replaces the dead High Priest with a Face Dancer copy, which is the kind of thing the Sisterhood does and then does not talk about. Waff agrees. The Tleilaxu get access to Atreides blood. The Sisterhood gets a look at what the Tleilaxu have been doing with gholas.

The book is explicit that the Bene Gesserit are not the good guys. They breed people like livestock. They install religions. They have a program called the Missionaria Protectiva whose whole purpose is to make populations easier to steer. Odrade knows this. Her arc is not about learning that her order is flawed. It is about deciding what to do with that knowledge, and whether a useful institution can be worth saving when it has done so much harm.

Rakis burns

Taraza's plan is the thing the whole novel has been building toward, and it is genuinely cold. She has decided that Rakis has to die. Not because the Honored Matres are coming, though they are. Because as long as the worms and the spice and the priesthood exist, humanity stays inside the box Leto built. The Golden Path was supposed to scatter people beyond any single point of failure, and Rakis is the last point of failure. So Taraza leaks word of Duncan to the Honored Matres, lets them believe he is on Rakis with Teg, and waits for them to lose their minds.

They do. The attack on the Bene Gesserit keep kills Taraza. Before she dies she passes her Other Memories to Odrade, which makes Odrade Mother Superior whether she wants it or not. Odrade and Sheeana escape into the desert on a worm. Teg picks them up in his no-ship, takes the worm aboard, and tells Odrade to run for Chapterhouse with Duncan, Lucilla, Sheeana, and the pregnant Murbella. Then he and his soldiers go back out to make a lot of noise.

Teg knows what he is doing. He knows the Matres will think Duncan is with him. He knows they will burn the planet to get him. He does it anyway, and he dies doing it, along with Waff and the Face Dancers and most of the population of Rakis. The Honored Matres burn the surface down to rock and kill every worm they can find. One worm gets away, in the hold of a no-ship, because a girl who talks to Shaitan asked it to come.

The last chapter is quiet. Odrade sits in Taraza's old room on Chapterhouse and goes through her predecessor's memories, and finds the plan she has just executed. She thinks about her father, and about commissioning a bust of him labeled "the Great Heretic." Duncan is living in a grounded no-ship because he lacks the gene that hides people from prescience, and he has refused to become a breeding stud. Murbella is pregnant. The worm is in the hold, and Odrade looks at it and thinks about noble purpose.

What the book is actually about

Heretics is the Dune novel where Herbert stops pretending the Sisterhood is wise. The earlier books treat the Bene Gesserit as background machinery. Here they are the protagonists, and the plan has gone rotten. Taraza is dying of her own strategy. Odrade is a heretic because she loves people. Teg is a heretic because he keeps his promises. Duncan is a heretic because he refuses to be property. The title is not ironic. It is a job description.

It is also, frankly, a middle book. It ends with Rakis destroyed and the Honored Matres still out there, and the story does not finish until Chapterhouse: Dune the following year. If you want a self-contained novel, this is not it. If you have read the first four and want to know what Herbert does with the wreckage, it is essential.

The flaws are real. The middle third is a lot of conversations in rooms, and Herbert's habit of having characters withhold information from each other for hundreds of pages can feel like a technique for generating suspense rather than a choice. The Honored Matres are terrifying in the abstract and a bit cartoonish in person; their entire culture is sex and violence, and Herbert writes about both with a straight face that has not aged well. The women in this book are almost all defined by their reproductive capacity, even the ones who are running the universe. And the ending is abrupt. Kirkus called it slow to start and hastily concluded.

But the good parts are very good. Teg's escape from the T-Probe. The no-globe. The moment Odrade reads Leto's graffiti in the dark. Murbella discovering that she has met someone she cannot break. The last worm in the hold, swimming in spice, while a new Mother Superior watches. Herbert was not a delicate writer, and this is not a delicate book. It is a nasty, talky, ambitious novel about what it costs to get free of a god, and it earns its ending.

If you have never read Dune, do not start here. If you stopped after Children of Dune because God Emperor felt like a lecture, Heretics may bring you back. It has more plot than God Emperor, more new characters, and a genuine sense of threat. It also has a lot of people explaining things to each other in small rooms. That is the bargain Herbert offers at this point in his career, and for about 480 pages, it works.