One thing that Wensicia did respect, and even fear, was the process of aging. She constantly complained that Irulan, using the Bene Gesserit rejuvenation techniques, was becoming the "younger" sister to Wensicia. Harq al-Ada remembers his mother's fury when she learned that Irulan had lied significantly about her age:
Mother had just received a letter from the Lady Mobly [a member of the Atreides household in Arrakeen] describing her introduction to the Princess Irulan. Mother was livid. She ranted on and on that Irulan had lied about her age. We reckoned, Mother and I, that Irulan had managed to rid herself of twenty years since we last saw her. Mother was upset because with Bene Gesserit tricks Irulan now looked young enough to be Mother's daughter rather than her older sister. Occasionally it would have been more pleasant if Mother had had a sense of humor!
From the ego-likeness included with al-Ada's memoirs, Wensicia was a rather small-boned woman, blonde like Irulan but shorter. Her heart-shaped face contains sharp gray eyes and a small, set mouth, a combination visually harmonious but not immediately appealing. As she grew older, al-Ada commented that her wardrobe changed from the diaphanous white gowns of her youth to sweeping loose dresses of white sateen and gold trim, all in an effort to hide her thickening body.
Wensicia's life changed drastically when her son allied himself with Leto and Ghanima Atreides. She was then banished to Giedi Prime, where she took refuge with the family of Dalak Fenring. The refuge was given reluctantly, entirely as a favor to her daughter Jeunne. From her third year on, Jeunne had lived with her father and his family. An incident involving her mother's trained cobras in Jeunne's nursery made Dalak decide that his daughter's only chance of survival was away from her mother. When she was six, the Bene Gesserit order offered to educate her at the Chapter House school on Giedi Prime, and she eventually became a well-known poet. From his memoirs, al-Ada seems to have had a warm relationship with his sister, but he also says that Wensicia's arrival on Giedi Prime did little to bring her close to her daughter.
The final fifteen years of Wensicia's life were spent in plotting ways to regain the empire for her son (an activity al-Ada found increasingly uncomfortable in his position in the Atreides household). The only time that he or Irulan seems to have really been upset with her plots, though, was when she engineered an abortive Sardaukar uprising in 10225. At that time, the Fenring family was asked by al-Ada to keep his mother in isolation, with the company of only one female servant at a time. These companions were assigned three-month shifts — most women, though, quitting or dying before their service was completed. When al-Ada saw his mother for the last time, three months before her death of self-inflicted wounds, he was distressed to find her grossly overweight and severely depressed:
I would never have recognized Mother. Her hair has turned gray and she has gained over forty kg. The eyes which peered at me from that doughy face had little resemblance to the steely gray piercing stare I had to face as a child. Her conversation made little sense, going on and on about how Irulan had betrayed her. She seemed to think that Irulan had been part of the Atreides assassination attempt — something I doubt could be true. She kept telling me not to trust my aunt, that Irulan had her own motives unknown to the rest of us — that Irulan was more of a Bene Gesserit than we supposed. And all she could do was to make long lists of the details which seemed to flood her mind. The room was littered with scraps of minimic film which were the bits and pieces of her declining sanity. She reclined on her couch, playing with the film which covered her tentlike white satin gown and stuck to the gold braid trim.
I had to look away, because I could see the ghost of the slender, driving force my mother had been. Now all she has left are her illusions of strength and her memories of pride. Me she seems to regard as a "kept" man. I was her hope for the future, and now all she says is that I remind her of my father, a "literary stud." I wish I could feel love or compassion for this woman, but I grew up feeling fear and, at the end, could only feel pity.
Wensicia died alone, unloved and forgotten, the last active member of House Corrino.
Further references: ATREIDES-CORRINO, IRULAN; CORRINO, FARAD'N; CORRINO, SHADDAM IV; CORRINO, ANURIL.
CROMPTON RUINS
The story of the Crompton Ruins is one of the most melancholy of recent years, as stories of failed hopes always are. Unlike most subjects touched on by the discovery of the Rakis crystals, this one did not expand our horizons but diminished them.
The story is well-documented at every step, beginning with the voyage of exploration of Guild Ship Tharondelai, captained by Levas Crompton, in 14701. On the farthest borders of human space they investigated a G-type star, Sutterer 4041, the fourth planet of which was comfortably within the star's ecosphere. Members of the crew descended to the planet's surface, and found the chief variation from human-optimal conditions to be relatively high percentage of water vapor in the atmosphere; otherwise, the planet seemed ideal for colonization. Tharondelai returned to Spacing Guild headquarters, where Captain Crompton registered the planet and received his discovery bonus.
In 14702 the usual follow-up expedition was sent to the planet for confirmation of the first findings and for a more thorough scientific investigation of its value as a habitat. The planet had now been named Crompton. A normal part of the procedure was the launching of a low-altitude satellite, for photomapping in detail. While ground teams began studying climate, mineralogy, and biology, the orbital survey team combined the photomaps and began searching for anything of interest to which to direct the scientists on the surface.
Within days they discovered the presence of something that looked like an artificial structure, nearly a kilometer across, on the shore of the largest lake on the central continent. Acting under long-standing regulations governing possible alien contact, the captain, Reola senShek, directed the satellite to a closer and continuous reconnaissance while she ordered the ground crews to return to the ship. The new photos revealed that the structure was considerably damaged, with no sign of activity of any kind in the area.
The ground teams returned to the surface, this time to the site of the structure and started carefully investigations. No trace of intelligent life was found near the structure, nor anywhere on the surface of Crompton. After completing their original mission, the crew of the ship returned to headquarters with their news. Search of the comprehensive Guild records showed previous investigation neither of Sutterer 4041 nor indeed of anything in that quadrant. As far as the Guild could determine (and they were certainly in a position to be definite) no human being had ever set foot on Crompton.
The second expedition of 14702, consisting of five heighliners carrying a host of personnel and a mass of equipment, returned to Crompton while the news of alien contact spread through the inhabited worlds. Teams of archaeologists, architects, xenobiologists, and the like, combed every centimeter of the structure and performed the most intensive survey of an uninhabited planet ever undertaken. Their results were straightforward and have never been challenged: the structure, now being called the Crompton Ruins, was between three thousand and five thousand years old. It was entirely empty, except for debris where sections had collapsed. No other structure or indication of intelligent life was found anywhere on the planet, although small patches of ground near the structure showed high concentrations of ferric oxides. It was speculated that these patches could have been the positions of heavy construction equipment that had entirely decomposed. Crompton hosts many microorganisms that efficiently break down metals, vegetable and animal fibers, and tissues. A high degree of synthetics in the structure had greatly retarded but not entirely halted this process of decomposition. The stellar neighborhood of Sutterer 4041 was explored, but nothing was found to shed light on the mystery of the huge old structure.
There the matter rested. Theories of all degrees of respectability were proposed to account for the Crompton Ruins, but as the decades mounted into centuries, the Ruins were forgotten except for an occasional reference n
ow and then. Nevertheless, the consensus was that the Ruins represented the one solid evidence of the existence of intelligent alien life. And it was not hard to maintain this belief: the universe is a vast region, and some argued that it was not unlikely that chance occurrence put humanity on the scene some thousands of years after the aliens had been on Crompton. Still, they argued, while we might not encounter the aliens tomorrow or next year or even in the next hundred years, we know from the Ruins that they are out there, and we need to think about what to do when contact does take place.
Then came the Rakis Finds. Several years after the initial discovery on Rakis, when the results from that planet had been widely publicized, the archaeologist Joona Kritapar pointed out that if Leto II's no-room were a free-standing structure instead of an excavation, and if the heights of the different floors varied instead of being constant, the no-room would be only a slightly smaller duplicate of the Crompton Ruins. With the exception of the omission of the no-room's eighth floor, from an overhead perspective the Crompton structure is identical in form and proportion to the no-room.
The theory of the alien origin of the Crompton Ruins was totally demolished. The few specialists on the Ruins argued rightly that nothing had been solved: only the nature of the problem had been changed. Instead of questioning how and when the aliens reached Crompton and why they built the structure, the mystery was how and when did Leto send construction crews to Crompton and why did he build it. Although these are intriguing problems, they have attracted little attention, no doubt for two reasons. First, the magnitude of the Rakis Hoard has drained the energy and time of scholars who might otherwise have explored the Crompton question; it is simply so much easier to reap bountiful harvests from the Rakis materials that none has wanted to work the sterile soil of Crompton. Second, the psychologically more important, the exploding of the "aliens" of Crompton was met with deep regret that the only evidence of intelligent non-human life yet to appear had been a mistake or worse — perhaps a millennia-old hoax wrought by someone whose motives were often more mysterious than the structure itself.
W.E.M.
Further references: IXIAN NO-ROOMS; RAKIS FINDS: EXPLORATION.
CRYSKNIFE
A knife, whose blade consisted of a single tooth of a giant sand worm, considered most sacred by the Fremen. No off-worlder who saw one of the weapons, could be permitted, by Fremen law, to leave Arrakis without the Fremen's consent. (A number of never-explained deaths on that world may have resulted from the enforcement of that law.) Once the blade was drawn from its sheath, it could not be returned unblooded, even if the blood it drew had to be the user's own; to do otherwise was to insult Shai-Hulud and risk bringing his wrath on all Fremen.
The object of this veneration was a milky-white blade, some twenty centimeters in length, which gave the impression of glowing in dim light — a sandworm's tooth. The teeth were brought into a sietch only infrequently; they were obtainable only when the Fremen found the remains of a dead sandworm. When such a find was made, as many teeth as could safely be carried were removed and taken back to the group's sietch for blessing and manufacture into knives.
Crysknives of two varieties were produced in the sietch factories: fixed and unfixed. A fixed blade, which could be stored for an indefinite period of time, was treated by exposure to a series of electric currents, which "fixed" the blade's electric field and kept it static. An unfixed blade remained stable only so long as it remained in contact with a living human body; deprived of exposure to that body's electric field, it weakened and crumbled within a matter of hours. (This type of blade was most commonly used by Fremen, since it was not wished that anyone should be able to obtain a crysknife by looting Fremen bodies; Fremen who could see that they were either going to be captured, or die in battle without sufficient time elapsing for their blades to disintegrate, shattered them on the nearest hard object.)
The tip, the hollow once occupied by the tooth's nerve, customarily held a small amount of the most deadly poison available, most often a mixed derivative of the native desert plants. Fremen usually attempted to avoid killing a respected enemy with the tip of the blade; poison was considered a weapon more suitable for use against animals than humans.
The mounting of the blade into the handle was patterned on the kindjal, a type of long knife popular throughout the empire, with a blade of almost identical length to that of the crysknife. Where they differed was in the shearing-guard: the kindjal generally boasted a stout guard, while the crysknife had only the raised lips of its round handle, where it joined the blade, to protect its user's hand. Most authorities believe that the earliest crysknives were deliberately constructed to mimic the kindjal, a blade the Fremen were already familiar with from their many generations of service in the empire. The later changes, including the elimination of the shearing-guard, came about when the crysknife became a truly unique weapon rather than a native imitation of an off-world knife.
Considerable mythology surrounded the blades. Fremen cherished their crysknives, giving them names which were held secret from even the other troop members, protecting them from harm with their own lives. Even after the owner's death, the crysknife was treated differently from all other possessions. A crysknife handle was the only thing that was taken to the Funeral Plain for "burial" after its owner's water was returned to the tribe. The one exception to this custom was in the case of a crysknife whose blade shattered during a fight. Fremen superstition held in such cases that the person had somehow offended Shai-Hulud, who had retaliated by withdrawing the strength from the tooth.
A good deal of history surrounds crysknives as well. The initial acceptance of Paul Muad'Dib Atreides among the Fremen, for example, came about when his mother, the Lady Jessica, was tested by the Shadout Mapes and deemed worthy of possessing a crysknife. The original Duncan Idaho, who had proven himself in Stilgar's sietch, was also allowed to keep one of the sacred blades.
The blade that has attracted the most historical attention, however, is undoubtedly that mounted in Muad'Dib's crysknife. When the first Atreides emperor — in the guise of The Preacher — was killed, his son took his crysknife for his own. In the centuries that followed, Leto II made frequent ceremonial use of the blade, culminating in its use in Siaynoq. In addition, The God Emperor controlled the tiny supply of the knives which still remained during the last centuries of his rule, while his Museum Fremen carried out the old rituals with them utterly ignorant of the true reasons for their actions. The fact that one of them would copy a crysknife for sale to Siona Atreides illustrates the degeneration of the customs; no true Fremen would have permitted such a thing for any reason, least of all personal gain. Muad'Dib's crysknife, then, could be seen as the last of its kind — a blade carried by one who knew the traditions and myths that held it apart from more common, less holy weapons.
While the old Fremen might have disapproved of the use to which the God Emperor put their leader's crysknife, they would certainly have approved of the level of veneration which surrounded it.
C.W.
Further references: ATREIDES, LETO II; ATREIDES. PAUL MUAD'DIB; SANDWORM; SHADOUT MAPES; DUNCAN IDAHO; Jarret Oslo, Fremen: Lives and Legend (Salusa Secundus; Morgan and Sharak); Daiwid Kuuan, Monuments of the Zensunni Migrations (Salusa Secundus: Morgan and Sharak); Defa 'l-Fanini, Taaj 'l-Fremen, 12v. (Salusa Secundus: Morgan and Sharak).
D
DE VRIES, PITER
(10138-10191.) The man who would in time become Mentat-Assassin for the Siridar-Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, and rival him in evil, was born on Gwandali, a small planet well off the main spaceways. According to fragmentary Tleilaxu records, Piter's mother was Thra, a daughter of the powerful Olman clan. A sickly woman who nevertheless appears to have lived to a considerable old age, Thra doted on her only son and seemingly denied him nothing. Of Piter's father, we know next to nothing. In the only note we have on the senior de Vries, his name is partially obliterated; the only letters legible are "ibb," but whether they constitute the be
ginning or end of his name is difficult to say.
We do know from evidence in the Tleilaxu Records that Piter's father, in some financial difficulty, sold the child to the Tleilaxu for their mentat experiments. In the normal course of his training, Piter learned to absorb sense impressions and data, then work the material — add, extrapolate, calculate, analyze — to come up with second-approximation answers or, ideally, straight-line computations — to become, literally, a "human computer."
Listening to students' tales, Piter chafed at being stranded in, to his mind, the backwater of the universe. He had long since decided to set out, when the wind was right, to raise the fortunes of Piter de Vries. He burned with impatience and ambition. Having no doubt about his capabilities, he saw immediately that the avenue of the mentat, if trod shrewdly, could lead to what he yearned for most: power.
Tleilax, as one of the two or three planets that did not completely adhere to the dictums leveled against technology after the Butlerian Jihad, included a variety of questionable courses of training for mentats. Always sensitive to the demands of the marketplace, the Tleilaxu could produce mentats superbly skilled in any specialty, including the so-called "twisted" Mentat-Assassins who could kill efficiently and without compunction. When the Baron Harkonnen's order for a Mentat-Assassin arrived, the Tleilaxu saw in the clever Piter an ideal candidate for the Baron's requirements.
To produce a "twisted" mentat, the Tleilaxu enhanced and fostered inclinations to evil in their candidates, then systematically destroyed any vestiges of human emotions or responses except those required by the employer. Although most of the Tleilaxu methods of twist conditioning are lost or obscure, one is certain: the systematic destruction of faith or confidence in authorities, in loved ones, or in persons in traditional positions of trust by allowing the subject to witness Face-Dancer counterfeits of such individuals committing atrocities. Thus, Piter was subjected to horror upon horror, including the appalling simulation of his "mother" being raped by a trusted mentor.
The Dune Encyclopedia Page 41
