The Dune Encyclopedia

by Willis E McNelly

  The IUSC was a concept of convenience to a relative handful of worlds. Some scores of planets use it still, but even on those few its development would dismay Shesrab. Language change has so altered the names that little remains in common with the Imperial terminology. Planet "B" in the example above is Topaz, whose sidereal year in standard units is 270 days, 3 minutes, 18.02 seconds. Topaz still employs the IUSC terminology, but compare the names of the months on Topaz with those of Kaitain:

  Kaitain: Topaz:

  neSheustim Gwasheu

  naSaudrim Tausau

  naFrekim Freefre

  nAvlardim Fonav

  naShadraim Fiisha

  noCornim Sicor

  nElroodim Scunel

  niMiklim Aimik

  nEzhrim Niinezh

  nIstaivim Gwasheu

  nAlmanim Tausau

  nAudrim Freefre

  Note that the people of Topaz, over the millennia, came to think of the first month of the year as named not "Gwan + the emperor's name in its cycle of twelve" but simply as the whole word "Gwasheu." Thus, the names of the months on Topaz coincide with those on Kaitain only one year out of every three, and this is on one of the best of all possible worlds.

  Offering neither tradition nor convenience, the IUSC was bound to fail: the Spacing Guild never used it; the Bene Gesserit never used it; its adoption among the Landsraad seemed toadying. Only for House Corrino and its bureaucracy did it find employment, and with the ascension to power of House Atreides, who brought along the native Fremen calendar, it ended its official life.

  W.E.M.

  Further references: Mgonpo Shesrab, Memorandum: to His Imperial Majesty Lord Corrin on the Occasion of Five Thousand fears of the Blessings of His House, Rakis Ref. Cat. 185-D221; Burzhis Elsprin, The Stars in Their Courses: The Calendar in History (Kaitain: Linthrin UP).

  CANTO-RESPONDU

  A part of an ancient rite first developed by the Bene Gesserit Missionaria Protectiva. According to the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in her detailed notes on the history of the Bene Gesserit breeding program, it was the function of the Missionaria Protectiva to develop on those planets upon which members of the Sisterhood might have dealings local mythologies which afforded them protection if the need arose. These mythologies often took the form of popular religions that sanctified the persons of the Bene Gesserit as prophets of some long-awaited mahdi (or messiah).

  Such mythologies were manifested and kept fresh in the minds of the superstitious natives by rites known as the panoplia propheticus, which seems to imply that they were so designed to serve whatever needs a Bene Gesserit could have in a time of emergency.

  One example of the panoplia propheticus is recorded in the ridulian crystals discovered on Rakis. The significant passage is part of a manuscript concerning the early life of Paul Muad'Dib and was recorded by Leto II. Since Leto II claimed to have within him the personalities and memories of all his ancestors, his description of the rite in which his grandmother, the Lady Jessica, participated has at least some claim to accuracy:

  Pressed on every side to justify to the Fremen her right to their protection, Lady Jessica put into practice her long-held belief that the Fremen had been visited by the Missionaria Protectiva and ventured to lead the sietch in the panoplia propheticus. Allowing the trance of deepest memory to take her consciousness, she began: "Ibn qirtaiba, as far as where the dust ends." And then went on to recite a verse which began "Mine enemies are like green blades eaten down/That did stand in the path of the tempest." The verse created an immediate response among the Fremen, and with the Lady Jessica clearly controlling the rite it continued:

  "The Fire of God mount over thy heart," she said.

  "The Fire of God set alight," came the response.

  "Thine enemies shall fall," she said.

  "Bi-la kaifa," they answered.

  What seems to be described here is the invocation part of the rite which scholars believe to be the Canto-Respondu section. In effect it establishes the right of the leader to partake of the panoplia propheticus, and when that right is recognized by the congregation, the speaker also wins a mystical standing with the community.

  Leto II also seems to imply in this passage that the Bene Gesserit planted some very powerful words within the Canto-Respondu which had a hypnotic effect upon those who responded. These words, combined with the superstitious awe of the respondents, appeared to produce a trance in which the leader of the rite achieved almost godlike status in the congregation. Thus, in the hands of a Bene Gesserit who would also have the power of Voice at her command, the Canto-Respondu must have been irresistible. The noted scholar Pyer Briizvair has noted that ancient religions often used forms like the Canto-Respondu to knit a congregation together in its faith. Given, however, the power of the Bene Gesserit and the heightened sense of community held by the Fremen, such ancient rites could have only been pale copies of what went on between the Lady Jessica and the sietch which finally adopted her as their Reverend Mother.

  Further references: MISSIONARIA PROTECTIVA; PANOPLIA PROPHETICUS; Pyer Briizvair, ed., Summa of Ancient Beliefs and Practice (Bolchef: Collegium Tarno); R.M. Gaius Helen Mohiam, Prolegemena to the Sacred History of the Council of Nine, Lib. Con; Temp. Series; Leto Atreides II, Journal, Rakis Ref. Cat. 55-A89.

  CASTLE CALADAN

  This impressively crafted manse was the home of House Atreides throughout their tenure as Siridar-Dukes of Caladan (third planet of Delta Pavonis) and for six generations earlier. The Castle was ordered built for Wesle Atreides, younger brother of ruling Duke Philippos of Gallatin in 8711. The younger Atreides, no longer wishing to live in the shadow of his sibling, had obtained permission to relocate himself and his family to that pleasant world.

  Istaivan Hiivaladan, one of the most illustrious architects of the era, was commissioned to design the Castle; it has been described as his finest work. Certainly it was his longest-lasting, as portions of the central keep and much of the perimeter wall are standing to this day.

  The estate surrounding the Castle included approximately five hundred hectares of arable land enclosed by a wall two meters thick and fifty meters in height built of varicolored Caladanian granite and strengthened by flying buttresses.

  Within the wall lay fields of pundi rice, both for home consumption and export; wheat and other grains; all manner of vegetables and fruits; and a complete array of livestock, both native and imported. The Castle was, in short, capable of total self-sufficiency in keeping with the desires of its original owner (Wesle was a lifelong student of history and wished to pattern Castle Caladan after the manor of a feudal lord of Old Terra).

  Various dwellings, comfortable if not grand, were provided on the estate for the retainers who tended all of its flora and fauna. A military barracks housed the detachment of Atreides soldiers Wesle had been granted by his brother.

  The Castle proper was centered on this tract of land and was constructed of the same beautifully tinted stone that made up the boundary wall. In its heyday the building was a marvel: it contained twenty fully outfitted bedroom suites, a kitchen capable of feeding four thousand if completely utilized, conservatories with plants from a hundred worlds, and a library which had been favorably compared to that of the Court on Kaitain. More than two hundred servitors were employed in its maintenance. When the Castle was completed in 8722, the Siridar-Duke, now Paulos XVI, moved his household to occupy the new residence.

  From 8721 to 9350, the Atreides' lived quietly if splendidly on Caladan. Many of Paulos's descendants followed his example and became noteworthy scholars (in particular, Orestes II [r. 9222-9249], whose theories on the origins of novae remained unchallenged for six centuries). Others followed artistic or even religious vocations; but whatever their pursuit, each generation held one characteristic in common: a marked disinterest in recapturing the Imperial throne. Nowhere in their history is it indicated that any of the Caladanian Atreides felt the urge to rule. Castle Caladan, with its emphasis on comfort,
its priceless art collection, and its persistent lack of any military touch aside from that token garrison — reflected this serenity.

  In 9355, following the assumption of the Dukedom of Philippos XIV1, all of this was changed. The Castle underwent a series of alterations: walls were removed and rearranged to provide room for the extra servitors needed by a ruling House; the military barracks increased tenfold; and the already sturdy defenses were strengthened to full capacity, at which any but an all-out planetary attack could be rebuffed.

  The quarters which Philippos and his heirs occupied slowly evolved from their luxurious state to more utilitarian — occasionally Spartan — forms. Drawing rooms and studies became military headquarters and training rooms for the younger family members, who were now born into the family of a politically ambitious Duke and destined to face all of the dangers such a birthright made unavoidable.

  The studios and galleries so central to the lives of the earlier inhabitants became divertissements for the Atreides ladies rather than places in which the lords of the manor would spend their days. Within a century even the great library had fallen into disfavor, its volumes conscientiously dusted but seldom studied:

  As the nerve center of their fief, Castle Caladan served the Atreides for another twenty-two generations. It was left in the hands of numerous caretakers following the assignment of Arrakis as fief entire to Duke Leto Atreides. (Although Count Hasimir Fenring was appointed Siridar-in-Absentia of Caladan after Leto's departure, he did not relocate to Caladan and there is no evidence to indicate that the Count or his Lady ever so much as visited the Castle).

  Upon her return to Caladan in 10196, the Lady Jessica took up residence in Castle Caladan again and remained there — with one interruption, from 10218 to 102202 — until her death in 10256. Following the Lady's burial in the Atreides Family cemetery on Caladan, the Castle was declared an Imperial monument.

  Many generations of Imperial citizens toured the building and grounds which made up the birthplace of Paul Muad'Dib Atreides, treating them as things to be venerated for themselves. In time, the fact that Castle Caladan had once been a stately and gracious dwelling was almost completely forgotten, dwarfed by comparison to its importance in the Atreides legend.

  NOTES

  1In this year, the Siridar-Duke's brother, Count Garrick and all his family were taken hostage when a rebel force attacked Hestia. The invaders wished to bargain with the lives of the Atreides — known loyalists to the Crown — in order to obtain passage to Tupile from Ezhar XI, the ruling Corrino Emperor. The emperor replied with his usual firmness: after sending a rather cryptic message of apology to the captives, he ordered his troops to raze Hestia completely. Nothing on the entire planet was left alive.

  2This was the period in which she trained young Farad'n Corrino in the Bene Gesserit Way.

  Further references: ATREIDES, DUKE LETO; ATREIDES, HOUSE, PROMINENT MEMBERS; ATREIDES, LADY JESSICA; CALADAN; Orestes Atreides, A Life in Transition, Lib. Conf. Temp. Series 166; Princess Irulan Atreides-Corrino Muad'Dib: The Ninety-Nine Wonders of the Universe, tr. G. W. Maur (Grumman: United Worlds).

  CATCHPOCKET

  A compartment to hold distilled water waiting to be consumed or measured. Most catchpockets were used in stillsuits. A series of two and sometimes three were interconnected so that overflow from the primary would not be wasted. The heel pump, besides aiding in the distilling process, moved distilled water to appropriate carrying points where the catchpockets were built into the stillsuit. The wearer sucked on an attached catchtube to drink the water from the primary reservoir.

  Valves were rarely used in catchpocket system of the stillsuit, but a few surviving suits contain a capillary-type, flapped suction valve on the primary pocket. Dating suggests that suits developed by non-Fremen in the villages first used these valves. They served as a back-up precaution, behind the catchtube plug, to prevent accidental spillage. Use of the valve seems to have skipped over the sietches closest to the villages, but to have caught on in the deep desert settlements fairly late in the Dune era.

  The capacity of stillsuit catchpockets varied between .25 and .5 liters (combined capacity). It seems unlikely that a conscientious user ever needed that much storage. Stilltents have been found with total capacities approaching two liters, but most could store only about one liter.

  Variations on the fundamental catchpocket were used as waiting basins on the portable deathstills and, temporarily, in connection with windtraps.

  CEREMONY OF THE SEED

  The Fremen rite of passage for potential Reverend Mothers, involving ingestion of "the Water of Life," (massive doses of a form of melange) the desired racial memory and prescience. The Fremen Ceremony of the Seed has its origins in so many unrelated cultures and among so many scattered peoples that its genesis can only be the result of the pressure of the immense accumulated memories of sentient beings both before and after the Butlerian Jihad. Certainly, the movement to mentat training to handle the vast knowledge of sentient experience and the search for the Alam al-Mithal (a mystical world where there are no physical limitations) by numerous agencies contributed to the increased successes of the Ceremony of the Seed, especially in the cases of the Lady Jessica Atreides and Paul Muad'Dib Atreides. Thus, what may have begun in antiquity as the ineffectual search for racial memory, superstitious ancestor worship, and feeble attempts at fortune telling prior to the Butlerian Jihad became a powerful source of prescience, knowledge, and prophecy.

  Central to the Ceremony's successful access to past lives and to Alam al-Mithal was the discovery of melange, the geriatric spice, on Arrakis, the third planet of Canopus. Among the first groups to use melange was the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood in the early days of its Missionaria Protectiva. Some millennia later, Bene Gesserit missionaries struggled their way to the deserts of Dune, as it was then known. They were quick to note the similarity between the Fremen Ceremony of the Seed and their own tentative attempts to produce Reverend Mothers, soothsayers, and the fabled Kwisatz Haderach. The Fremen of Rakis had been using the melange in combination with the Ceremony with increasing sophistication since their arrival on the desert planet as Zensunni Wanderers. Their Ceremony assimilated the lore of the Bene Gesserit Missionaria Protectiva and was functional long before the melange was exploited by House Harkonnen and the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (CHOAM). The Fremen used the Ceremony to produce their own Reverend Mothers, and were thus provided with the ancestoral leadership necessary to endure even the ravages of Harkonnen rule. Of almost equal importance, the Ceremony was used to produce sietch tau orgies, essential psychological outlets for the oppressed Fremen, sources of sociological unity, and occasions for the random couplings that produced the Fremen hybrid vigor. The final impact of the sietch tau orgies and the Ceremony was that they reduced the frustration of the spannungsbogen that was an unavoidable part of Pardot Kynes's reshaping of Arrakis's ecology.

  When the Lady Jessica and Paul Atreides first encountered the Ceremony after their flight from the treacherous overthrow of House Atreides by combined Harkonnen/Sardaukar legions, the Ceremony had fully evolved from its most immediate Maometh Saari origin and was ready for mythic exploitation by the Atreides. Central to the Fremen Ceremony of the Seed was the drowning of a stunted sandworm to produce the Water of Life. This deadly poison was the exhalation of the drowning "little maker." A Reverend Mother changed the water into a harmless and powerful awareness-expanding aphrodisiac by altering its molecular structure through subatomic psychokinetic manipulation. Each sietch kept a number of little makers imprisoned in small caches, restricting their growth to nine meters for the Ceremony. During the military triumphs of Paul Muad'Dib's Fedaykin, sietches were hard pressed to produce the numbers of little makers that were demanded. Much later, during the reign of the God Emperor Leto II, the Ceremony of the Seed and its tau content were sustained, despite the absence of the little makers, in the Siaynoq sharing among the God Emperor, the eternal ghola Duncan Idaho, and the Fis
h Speakers.

  Within the context of the restoration of the House Atreides after its fall at Arrakeen on Rakis, the most important moment in the Ceremony's long history was the initiation of the pregnant Lady Jessica into the league of Fremen Reverend Mothers. Relying on The Dunebuk, the compendium of Fremen folkways, we can assume that Lady Jessica's induction into the Sayyadina and ascension to Reverend Mother status was conducted in the usual manner. In this case, the Ceremony was orchestrated by the Reverend Mother Ramallo, whose career was undistinguishedly diligent with the exception of this one moment. She was undoubtably assisted in the menial portions of the Ceremony by a Sayyadina acolyte. Partial information indicates that Chani (Liet-Kynes Atreides) filled this position in Lady Jessica's Ceremony. The acolyte would serve the Water of Life, forceably if necessary, and recite the litany: "Here is the Water of Life, the water that is greater than water — Kan, the water that frees the soul. If you be a Reverend Mother, it opens the universe to you. Let Shai-Hulud judge now."

  As numerous documents show, the Lady Jessica did emerge from the ritual as a Reverend Mother, thus securing her and Paul's influence among the Fremen. However, the ritual's effect on the fetus that was to become Alia was to shape the Atreides' tormented rule cataclysmically. For, just as the Ceremony gave Jessica access to the lives of all Fremen Reverend Mothers, it also subjected the psychically defenseless fetus to the same awareness. This inadvertent assault on Alia was the cause of her alienation from even the child-cherishing Fremen and her later Abomination via possession by the personality of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen during her tragic regency.