The Bene Gesserit records are not entirely clear about just how this was to be achieved. The assumptions appear to have been so basic and to have evolved so gradually that they were never laid out in explicit, declarative form. From the events in the histories, however, and by interpolation and inference from records in the Rakis Hoard, we have pieced together a plausible rationale. Put simplistically, the Bene Gesserit came to believe that perfect memory would provide total predictability. Because the Bene Gesserit preserved the belief in a single creator of the universe, and believed that only this Being knew the temporal design of events all the way to their "end," they thought that to be able to predict the future was to possess the power of the creator.
The connection between memory and prediction can be sketched just as briefly. Since certain "laws" of "cause and effect" were "known" to be universal and unchanging, and since such laws could be generalized from analysis of all previous events (or a large enough subset of "all" events), a mind whose memory included enough events and could subject them to rigorous analysis could extrapolate accurate predictions. The names "Laplace" and "Asimov," as well as data about them, appear often enough in the Bene Gesserit records to suggest the importance of their ideas within the Bene Gesserit program. Laplace asserted that complete knowledge of exact position and direction of all "atoms" would let a large-enough analyzing engine generate absolutely accurate predictions. Asimov at one time made the "design" of future events, by the conscious manipulation of "laws" of mass behavior, seem plausible. Enough testimony about the land of prognosticators called "econometricians" has survived to suggest that extrapolative prediction was once virtually worshiped by supposedly sophisticated people. The Bene Gesserit truthsayers themselves apparently used a microscalar version of such extrapolation from ambiguous information in the practice of their specialty.
In brief, people once acted as if the past controlled the future, while believing — at the same time — that a "designed" future controlled the past. The Bene Gesserit absorbed this contradiction and sought a "Shortening of the Way" who would know the future and thus provide them with control over human events. The extent of their delusion became clear only after a Kwisatz Haderach had placed humankind on an undeviating and potentially fatal course.
The Bene Gesserit breeding program did not reach its exact goal. Jessica Harkonnen was to have borne a daughter by Duke Leto Atreides. That offspring was to have borne a (possible) Kwisatz Haderach by Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. What actually happened was variously called a mistake, a miscalculation, a coincidence, or a "miracle." Paul Atreides was the consequence of Jessica's acting (or not acting) to adjust either the chromosome match or the pH balance of her uterus. The male-child's genes carried information that approximated what the Bene Gesserit sought.
Paul was trained secretly in both "weirding" and Mentat skills. He was habituated, in other words, to extrapolating the probable behavior of individuals from minute revelations. At short range and on a small scale he could interpret the complex signals of embarrassment, confidence and deceit, and could guess accurately at the difference between declared and actual motives. Furthermore, because of his Mentat training, he could calculate probabilities involving large quanta of interdependent variables. At long range and on a large scale he could quantify fuzzy factors, like ideologies, as well as so-called hard data, like demographic histories, to arrive at the probable consequences of choices affecting a single decision. In both heredity and environment, then, Paul Atreides was suited to be a Kwisatz Haderach. But there was no reason that he had to be. If he had stayed on Caladan, for instance, he probably would not have encountered the spice drug that triggered full awareness of his latent prescience.
The Kwisatz Haderach's career began in obscurity. He dreamed, we are told. He withstood the Bene Gesserit test of the gom jabbar, proving himself able to exert willful control over reflexes that try to avoid pain. He appeared to fulfill Missionaria Protectiva prophecies for Arrakis. He was surrounded by spice and began to feel the tendrils of prescience, but denied that he was the Kwisatz Haderach. After tasting the Water of Life transformed by Jessica, he swirled in the ambiguities of foreknowledge. The peak of his career came when he risked annihilation by transforming the Water himself; animus and anima merged, he became both giver and taker, he was indeed a Shortener of the Way, the Reconciler of Opposites.
Then Paul risked combat with Feyd-Rautha at the blind spot, led the jihad, and became addicted to the future. Choosing safety for others and isolation for himself, he chose to set the Empire on a path of certitude. Blind but knowing, he became the cast-out Preacher and tried to undermine the religion that Muad'Dib's prescience inspired. His son Leto II, incipient worm, showed Paul-the-Preacher that the way the father chose would have led to race extinction, and that the Typhoon Struggle and Golden Path lay along the preferable route. Paul harangued the crowd at Alia's Temple one last time and fell to a priest-thrust knife.
Curtly described like this, the story of the Kwisatz Haderach is merely heroic, one legend among many others now revived to be ground up in the mills of scholars. But as a cautionary tale of prescience-addiction it appears to have been crucial to the way our present civilization works. Paul was trapped by his addiction into choosing One Way for his species. Leto II broke the habit, sidestepped the single track toward extinction. Today we enjoy Leto's legacy of surprise and uncertainty, although until the great hoard on Rakis was uncovered we did not know about either the addiction or how close it had come to cutting off our species. Therefore it is important that we try to understand more than what the Kwisatz Haderach was supposed to do for the Bene Gesserit. We need to grasp what the addiction to prophecy was like.
The Kwisatz Haderach's first recognition of his peculiar relationship with the future came with awareness of "terrible purpose" and of dreams which — when he stopped to ponder them — had sufficient "reality" about them to make their coming true possible. His first waking prediction was Mentatlike, probabilistic. Huddled in the stilltent with Jessica he dealt with "data, evaluating, computing." His adolescent picture of time was spatial: a globe with radiating avenues, a road shadowed by hills, a surface resembling a windblown, undulating dune. In the terminology of the infinity calculus, he perceived n-paths from one point in one dimension. He mentioned "terrain" and "available paths." Probability, uncertainty, choice, multiple paths dominated his sense of seeing the manifold futures that branched before him. At this point Paul knew only existing facts, past events that would only later become known to others: he was Baron Harkonnen's grandson; Jessica would give birth to a daughter. All that Paul possessed of prescience then was a glimpse of the terrain of time, extrapolations from past events, and hints about two possible paths ahead (one of them the gene mingling holy war). Genes, skill, training and the ever-present spice converged to give Paul Muad'Dib the dreamlike vision of a rippling relief-map scanned at eye level.
From this spatial representation he moved, in prescient technique, into the complexities of memory concepts. After guiding the escape ornithopter through a sandstorm and landing it, he recognized the desert landscape as it had occurred in a vision he had had on Caladan. But the sensed image was subtly different from the visionary image: the original had been absorbed by memory, then altered in memory by experiences that had occurred in the meantime; what he saw in the present lay before him as if viewed "from a different angle." When he and Jessica moved toward the first encounter with Stilgar, Paul did not know what was going to happen: his presence in the "now" landscape had altered the memory of the "once-seen" terrain of the future. Such alteration of the former-vision by being a participant in present-fact is one source of the proto-Kwisatz Haderach's fallibility. There is also another difficulty: just the attempt to see the future affects the future. This problem was especially important when Paul tried to see himself in the future: not only was that vision dependent on choices he had not yet made, but also his choices depended on what he saw along the different paths toward his future. T
he feedback cycle, with decision altering decision, was a vortex, a trap.
Paul discovered a way to sidestep the trap. Instead of trying to peer forward and thus see ahead, the visionary imagined himself as being in the future and looking back from there. After he swallowed the Water of Life that Jessica had transformed, he saw that "the true test of prescience was to see the past in the future." To stand at time 10 and look ahead to time 50 was one thing; if he could be at time 10, envision time 50 and, from time 50 look back at time 40, then he would be assured that his over-the-shoulder vision-within-a-vision — seeing the past from the future—was accurate.
This procedure looked sensible, but the discovery occurred within the framework of a prescient vision. Therefore, it should have been treated skeptically. Yet the implication of determined path, the logical deduction that what he saw to have happened must have happened, and therefore will happen, appears to have underlain Paul's binding choice of an inevitable course when he became emperor. It is important to note here the seductiveness of prescience: Paul could extrapolate from existing fact, he could look ahead, he did go ahead to look back; at each stage he sought more accuracy about the future. He explained his increasing success to himself by way of the logic provided by his civilization's conception of time. It is also important to note that the everexpanding discoveries occurred after larger and larger doses of the spice. He needed stronger and stronger triggers as he moved deeper and deeper into prophetic techniques.
Paul Muad'Dib's prescience was not voluntary. He could not see ahead in time by will alone. The drug was necessary. Whether his addiction was to the drug or to his visions is an unresolvable question. Melange is addictive, in the sense that ceasing to ingest it shortens the life it extends. But Paul's need seems to have been for ever-larger doses, which suggests that he had become dependent on knowing as much as he could of what was to come. Frustrated by Gurney Halleck's threat to Jessica's life — no line of the future he had ever seen carried that moment of peril from Gurney Halleck — Paul decided to drown a Maker. His body had become tolerant to the spice, his visions were fewer and dimmer, but more than ever he needed to see ahead. He would see if he could survive the final test for the Kwisatz Haderach. Paul did survive. He believed, at last, that he was the Kwisatz Haderach sought by the Bene Gesserit. Jessica believed, too. He reported that he had been many places, that he was both Taker and Giver, and that he saw the Now, not the future.
Seeing the Now, the limits of the present extended into the future and into the past, was the culmination of the visionary sequence. At first, with the spice in his diet, he knew hidden facts in the past and thus saw a future that differed from the expectations of people who did not know those: secrets. After just drinking the Water of Life he glimpsed the future as history. When he executed the transformation himself, Paul balanced at the assured Now, with the cause-effect paradox suspended. The past has created the present (implying that will and choice have some effect on what has happened and will happen), and the future has created the present (implying that what occurs is predetermined, happens only because of what is destined to eventuate). These mutually exclusive schemes of time coexisted in Paul Muad'Dib Atreides, Lisan al-Gaib and Kwisatz Haderach.
This poise at the knife edge, on the tightrope across a chasm, at the fulcrum, is what made Paul Giver and Taker, anima and animus, Yin and Yang, male and female, Decider and Decided, Reconciler of Opposites. As nearly as we can tell, he was almost what the Bene Gesserit sought: the Hero, the figure whose choices would decide the fate of the Universe. While the Kwisatz Haderach was in his post-transforming trance, the three-week interval while Jessica watched and sent for Chani, he went many places. He Shortened the Way so that he could be everywhere at the same time. And he managed (barely) to avoid becoming lost in the dimensionless Alam al-Mithal. Like a spinning dancer, he avoided ultimate dizziness by focusing, once in each revolution, on a single fixed spot, his Self. In going farthest from his center point and risking eternal absence, Paul took perhaps the ultimate risk. But he returned with what was, for his prophecy-adoring civilization, the ultimate prize: complete knowledge — based on his past and his future—of the Now.
One common misunderstanding about the Kwisatz Haderach — at least about Paul — is dispelled by this figurative depiction of his perilous balance. He was never infallible, nor could he be. His early visions (of Dune landscape and of Chani) were close to correct, but they were fuzzy. He did not foresee the size of the Maker he rode; he did not know that Gurney would threaten Jessica. His broader, more massive premonitions were correct enough: the terrible purpose, the avalanche of the jihad. But he did not know precisely what would happen to him. As noted, his decisions affected events, and he could not see what his decisions would be; trying to glimpse them locked Paul into an unending regressive-reflexive-recursive feedback loop. The extreme example of unknowing is his combat with Feyd-Rautha. His decision not to use the word that would give him the advantage, plus the catching of Feyd-Rautha's needle in the mosaic tile, were at the same time unpredictable and decisive. The relationship between the apparent accuracy of the Kwisatz Haderach's vision, especially just before he walked blindly into the desert, and the incompleteness of his prescience, is important. This discrepancy is at the heart of the good but wrong choices that Paul made after his Fremen Jihad had ended and his empire had begun to stabilize.
As Muad'Dib consolidated his hold after the Fremen Jihad, he perceived a dilemma: if he used his prescience to control the empire's destiny, the empire would depend on him alone for guidance. His supposed infallibility would rob the people of the need to make choices. For him to keep control and responsibility would not be good for humanity. On the other hand, he could not, as a morally responsible human being, casually walk out from under this burden. Although he wanted desperately to "disengage," quitting would leave a vacuum and bring another chaotic struggle for power.
The way the Kwisatz Haderach chose to get out of this dilemma was as noble as it was wrong. He picked the path that would be, as far as he could foresee, the best route for humanity. He decided to end the cycle of wars and leave humankind in peace. He would remove Muad'Dib from the scene and thus give the people the illusion of free will. Alia and the priests and bureaucrats would believe they were running things. In choosing this path Paul had to accept the loss of Chani, who meant more to him than anything except his moral responsibility. However, this choice let him reject what he saw as the alternative: Kralizec, the Typhoon Struggle, chaos. Who, given the clear knowledge of exact outcomes which the Kwisatz Haderach believed his prescience gave him, would not have made the same choice?
Muad'Dib's error is easy enough to see — after the fact. His addiction forced him to depend on prescience. His leap into the Alam al-Mithal had brought the ability to see himself along the alternative routes ahead; he had transcended the infinite loop of prescience-affecting-decision-affecting-prescience. Now that he had bludgeoned uncertainty into submission, he believed he could pick a route for himself that he knew would work out the way he intended. What he could not have known was the consequence of bringing absolute certainty to human affairs.
Therefore, as Kwisatz Haderach he brought to the empire what the Bene Gesserit had thought they wanted, complete control over human destiny. What neither they nor he could have known, in spite of perfect prescience, was that complete control and its absolute certainty would mean the extinction of the human species. Even the Kwisatz Haderach's prescience could not foresee this: as he narrowed the path of humanity's future, bound himself and humanity to certitude, he cut his prescience off from the larger universe of alternatives. Muad'Dib thought he saw more and saw it better; he really saw less in greater (and thus more convincing) detail.
With hindsight we can see vividly the hints of his error. When he was trying to synchronize actuality and his vision, while he waited at Otheym's house for the stone-burner's J-waves to blind him, he felt for a moment like a prisoner in a cage. He sensed that there were
other oracles seeing other futures, and he was frustrated because events were not moving precisely as he had foreseen them. But he seems to have passed the aberrations off as the product of the Tarot conspirators, not as flaws in his own view. Later on, after Muad'Dib had again and again demonstrated the "perfection" of his vision by knowing where to step and where to put his hand to sign documents, he was surprised to discover that Chani had born twins. The twins had not been in his vision at all.
Muad'Dib gave up Chani and power in order to leave his people free. He chose the path that he believed would ensure peace and security and certitude for his species. But in selecting the single narrow path that he could see vividly, the Kwisatz Haderach wedged out all the other options, removed them from even his peripheral vision. Because this narrowing brought a flood of detail, and because the focus on one corridor of time blurred the existence of other corridors, he became unable — in spite of the fantastic power he did possess — to see the broader context of infinite temporary strands. He thought he had squeezed them together, but he had really just pared, them away.
The Kwisatz Haderach's last years were spent playing out the game his choice had designed. He watched Alia submit to the inner voice of the Baron Harkonnen, watched the Quizarate and empire constrict their subjects in the tentacles of their own survival. He had sought peace; he had tried to "close down the cycle of wars." Only later on did Leto II, in contrast, perceive that to exert purposeful control over Time was to succumb to the Great Temptation to Know All, and by knowing All to possess All Power, Leto chose to deflect civilization from his father's incorrect path. He usurped the future that the Kwisatz Haderach selected, and strove to reestablish Accident as the cornerstone of Universal Time.
The Dune Encyclopedia Page 21
