If this hypothesis is correct, then Jessica had the condition too, and passed it on to her children. But she never spent more than a few years in a row on Arrakis. For some reason, the disease progresses more slowly in women, and melange also retards its effects. Nevertheless, a Jessica who would return to the B.G. doesn't sound like my Jessica. Could that have been a symptom?
But poor Paul! Twenty years on Arrakis, and all the time his brain cells dying! How else could he have launched a jihad killing hundreds of millions? Emperor of the universe, yet all his writings so helpless, so passive. Seer of the future, yet he walks first into the Qizarate trap then into the desert. And when he returns, that's not Paul Atreides. Rabban's twisted will led his mania to appear as monstrosities of vice; just so Paul's guilt brought his to the surface as an enormity of religious zeal.
Alia should have been able to resist: heavy spice diet from before birth; her sex; the mitigating heredity of Duke Leto. But the struggle with the Voices must have been continuous; maybe just the loss of a slight edge in her mental capacity was enough to tip the balance in favor of the devils inside.
Ghanima may have been free of the disease, but it hardly matters now. What does matter is Leto — he's the one that must be advised.
The next day Duncan Idaho-13015 was killed. He believed that Leto's voices and visions were the phantoms of a deteriorating mind, that the more frequent approaches of "the Worm" were signs of the progress of the disease, and the disclosure cost him his life. Given what we know now from his journal entries, and given what remained for him to clear up in the puzzle he worked at so tirelessly, the question that enraged Leto may well Have been: "Was the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam the mother of Hasimir Fenring?" Perhaps Leto could have answered it; we cannot.
W.E.M.
Further reference: Leto II, Journal (entries by Duncan Idaho-13015), Rakis Ref. Cat. 3, 6, 7, 9-A83.
IDAHO. DUNCAN-13381
Delivered with a melange addiction. The Bene Tleilax and the Space Guild hoped that Leto II's affection for his Duncan would force the God Emperor into revealing the location of his enormous spice hoard to Duncan-13381. This stratagem appeared to work. Responding to a post-hypnotic command, Duncan led the Spacing Guild ambassador to the hoard. They were allowed a brief moment of triumph and then slain by the waiting Fish Speakers.
IDAHO, DUNCAN-13663
(d. 13723). Best known for his lasgun attack on Leto II, in which one of the God Emperor's vestigial legs was harmed; and for his sixty-year span. He is, with the exception of Duncan-the-Last, the longest lived of all the Duncans — something of a major achievement. The "Welbeck Fragment" indicates that prior to 13663 nine Duncans had suffered violent deaths and nineteen had died of natural causes. These figures are now known to be highly inaccurate. Leto II's diaries in the Dar-es-Balat hoard have already indicated that over twenty Duncan gholas failed to survive the first-contact interview with the Fish Speakers, and the initial survey of the diaries reveals that there were well over seventy Duncans delivered by the Bene Tleilax.
While the Duncans were often subverted either by psychological elements introduced by the Bene Tleilax or physical abnormalities, Duncan-13663 appeared for most of his life to be a return to the original prototype. This "throwback" may have been an attempt to lull the God Emperor prior to the delivery of the seriously modified Duncan-the-Last. However, he manifested the fanatical loyalty and affection toward the Atreides associated with most of the gholas and the original.
He was distinctive, however, in one major characteristic. He was the only Duncan who was monogamous, a factor that surely contributed to his stability. Early in his career, he married the Museum Fremen Irte, who lived in Goygoa (originally Jacurutu) on Arrakis, and who strongly resembled Lady Jessica Atreides. Together they had two sons and a daughter. The psychological implications here are fascinating. While there was considerable conjecture but little evidence that the woman was a ghola of the original, planted in Goygoa by the Bene Tleilax, Leto II tolerated the situation and did not interfere. His motives for this are unclear: perhaps he did it out of curiosity, perhaps out of reverence for his grandmother's memory. However, the time Duncan-13663 spent with the Museum Fremen and his family aggravated his own sense of uselessness and heightened the bitterness that seemed always to precede the Duncans' deaths.
Duncan-13663 learned of his impending termination from the Ixian ambassador. He was being replaced because of his advanced age (most of the Duncans refused melange and so did not benefit from its geriatric properties) and because the God Emperor felt the need to have the Duncan genes more widely available in his breeding program. Like Duncan Prime and Duncan-the-Last, Duncan-13663 could not tolerate the realization that he was useless or antiquated. Uncommonly, his attack on the God Emperor was not impulsive. He planned the assassination after the Ixians made the lasgun accessible. He was survived by his wife and children, who were later the cause for a particularly poignant moment in the lives of Duncan-the-Last and Siona Atreides.
IDAHO, DUNCAN-13724
(d. 13791) or Duncan-the-Last, as he is popularly known, was along with Duncan-10208 the most noteworthy of all the gholas of the famed Atreides' right hand. Retaining many of the characteristics of Duncan Prime, he also embodied all the adjustments the Bene Tleilax had made in the gholas over more than thirty-seven hundred years of production. There is also evidence that Duncan-10208 was the template for Duncan-13724. While this conclusion involves considerable reliance on secondary evidence, one supporting fact is that Duncan-the-Last had DI-10208's invisibility of prescience. However, there were traits in the final Duncan that also reflected other predecessors. For example, he preferred the monogamy of Duncan-13663 and had the especially astute military instincts of DI-1181. "the General." Most significantly, there are additional indications that Duncan-the-Last had been conditioned to resist the persuasions and compulsions of the God Emperor Leto II to a far more thoughtful and reflective degree than even the typically recalcitrant Duncans usually had. In addition, and to a far lesser degree of certainty, it is suspected that he was conditioned in much the same manner as Hayt, although more successfully, and that his rebellion against the God Emperor was stimulated by Hwi Noree's presence and, specifically, by her statement, "I was designed to please an Atreides. Leto says his Duncan is more an Atreides than many more born to that name." Her attraction to him can be partially explained by his historical attractiveness to women, and his embodiment of the Atreides character. In fact, the reactions of the Fish Speakers to the later Duncans indicate that he had, in some manner, begun to function as a human aphrodisiac, a condition revealed in Leto's diaries by the observation that Duncan-13724 frequently excited the Fish Speakers to excessive and dangerous displays of their abilities. However, his attraction to Hwi is more enigmatic and may have resulted (as could have hers) from pre-awareness appetites and patterns "built-in" by the Tleilaxu and the Ixians. Perhaps Duncan-13724 was programmed-resistant to Siona Atreides, an aversion that would have disappeared with the God Emperor's death.
To better understand the nature of Duncan-the-Last and his unique role in the fall of the God Emperor, it is important to consider why Leto II always desired the company of a Duncan Idaho. One reason was pragmatic: Leto needed the Duncans' genes for his program of breeding individuals who were invisible to the prescience power and to the racial memories. Only in this way, he believed, could sentient beings finally achieve harmony with the universe's randomness. Even though the Bene Gesserit and the other Atreides never suspected, Leto II had known since the time of Hayt that some of the Duncan gholas were among those extraordinary individuals who were presciently unobservable and moved, outside of ijaz and the alam al-mithal in the deepest shadows of the cloud-darkness of arafel. Leto II's commitment to sustaining this Y-chromosome-linked trait and developing it in the Atreides X-chromosome accounts for his permitting the abrupt termination of sports like the female Duncan-12122, the homosexual DI-12212, the Face Dancer DI-13164, and the misogyn
ist DI-13237. In a variety of ways, each prevented the transference of the trait or suffered from genetic manipulation that destroyed or distorted it. The God Emperor also used the Duncan genes to introduce hybrid vigor and mongrel strength into the dangerously inbred Atreides line. The Duncans' physical abilities may have been antique compared to those of the Fish Speakers and the later Atreides, a point made pathetically clear by the clear superiority of even the aging Moneo Atreides over Duncan-13724. However, the Duncans' genetic dispositions were valuable for other reasons.
As Leto II reveals in the Dar-es-Balat diaries, his continued suppression of the incompatible was only a holding action disguising and preparing the way for his ultimate goal, and the Duncans' genes were the deviant variety that richened his breed and created the means for his own necessary destruction. The Duncans were not only a means of preserving beings who craved chaos, but also a gift from the disappearing male portion of the increasingly androgynous God Emperor to the Fish Speakers and posterity. Such an awesome demand by Leto II makes it clear why the Duncans felt their masculinity so deeply threatened at the Siaynoqs, and why the Fish Speakers were so repugnant to all the Duncans except for the homosexual DM2212. This Breeding responsibility was not always accepted by the gholas. Like many of his predecessors, Duncan-13724 was shocked by a female army, and while he was not as moved to action as Duncan-11099 had been, it was enough for him to limit his intercourse with them and to contribute to his reluctance to mate with Siona Atreides, especially after she was presented in a Fish Speaker uniform following her aql in the deserts of Arrakis. The gholas' antiquated morality and hubris, despite Duncan-12143's prolific exception, frequently meant that their genes were rare dowers in the Atreides' family free.
In addition to the genetic reasons, the God Emperor retained Duncans as a reminder of the simpler time, and as a result of the influence and affection of Paul Muad'Dib in his ancestral memories. In his ever-present plain black uniform of the ancient Atreides' House Guard, like the river named for him, the Duncan was a lifeline to the original Atreides' glory and stability. Leto II's ritualistic evocation to the Duncans at the Siaynoqs demonstrates their value as living symbols:
You [Duncan] are the ancient norm against which the new can be measured. You are the rogue mate in the tunes of the passive and emasculated men. You are the fear and the violence that brings chaos, You are the ghafla, preserved for the Golden Road.
Moreover, the Duncans' peculiar stability, loyalty, archaic morality, continual search for justification, and love of chaos were the touchstones that the God Emperor used to test his brave new world of randomness, a new world that he, ironically, came to fear. The Duncans also represented hope for resurrection and cleansing in an Imperium that Leto II had directed into the immorality of situational ethics and expedience. For example, Duncan-13724 was one of the few people in Leto II’s court who could still blush, and in his demands and decisions, he invariably selected the human side, something the ever-increasingly wormlike Leto needed to have recalled. The Duncans' refusal to worship the God Emperor, particularly Duncan-13724's, was another important reminder to Leto II's failing sense of his own humanity and vulnerability. Finally, in a cosmos of shifting tides and false friends, a cosmos in which Leto II had to embrace rebels to produce beings who could walk the Golden Road, Duncan-13724 and many of the other gholas represented the loyalty and duty of the Idaho archetype; and that bond must have seemed ageless and natural even to the ancient God Emperor. In a personal and psychological sense, Leto needed the Duncans' variety to prevent the grave danger of boredom throughout his long reign.
Yet for all the predictability of the Duncan pattern, this last Duncan was something very different. He became Leto II's appointed Judas Iscariot: a destroyer created by his godlike victim as an instrument of the felix culpa, the fortunate fall. Duncan-the-Last was the agent of the change that Leto II knew must come but which he feared too much to implement himself. Also, since the final Duncan was the foundation needed to sustain the Golden Road, he avoided the scapegoat role that usually accompanies Judas figures, in no little part because of the alienness of the metamorphosed God Emperor. However, not all the achievements of Duncan-the-Last were designed by Leto II; in part the last ghola's character resulted from a response to Hwi Noree and Siona Atreides, his actions resulted from his unusual experiences.
Among these critical experiences was the liaison with Hwi Noree that prompted Leto II to say to Moneo Atreides, "The Duncan disobeys me!" This was a startling statement since it had probably never been spoken before by an Atreides Duke. Moneo was terrified by this pronouncement. It put everyone and everything in peril since the loss of Hwi might have destroyed the last vestige of Leto's humanity and turned him irrevocably into the mindless Shai-Hulud, a tendency he had been manifesting to an increasing degree.
A second noteworthy experience of Duncan-the-Last was his disgust with the Museum Fremen at Tuono Village. A third was his unnerving meeting with Duncan-13663's children and wife in Goygoa, a place that by its original name, Jacurutu, was already emotionally charged for him. Both of these moments prompted him to reflect on the failures of the past gholas and to raise the curiosity that helped him avoid the dangerous aspects of the usual Duncan "Since Syndrome." These encounters and others contributed to his successes in areas where other Duncans had failed. Just as he avoided the "Since Syndrome," he also never fell victim to empty sensuality or to the physical and psychological emasculation that his unexpected physical limitations might have caused.
Leto II was astonished to find a new characteristic in this last Duncan: the ability to look beyond what he thought he knew. Through this, he began to understand that knowledge was constructed of more than particulars and to learn the value of spannungsbogen (the self-imposed delay between desire and possession) as a valid substitute for sudden action.
In his alteration from what thirty-five hundred years of experience had fed Leto II to expect of the "father" of modern civilization, much is owed to Duncan-the-Last's interaction with Siona Atreides. Like two powerful fighting cocks, they had circled each other, both desiring and fearing the nexus of their inevitable union. Each resisted the other through their common bitterness toward and rebellion against the God Emperor. They were tempered by their antagonism and by the pugnacity of their refusal to breed. Duncan learned to accept Siona's physical superiority as he struggled with the Tleilaxu compulsion to reject her. She gained respect for Duncan's professionalism and evolving mentality, and allowed herself to accept his successful plan for the final destruction of Leto II. It was through her leadership, insight and rebellion that Duncan-13724, like Duncan-10208, went in search of another Atreides to serve instead of the God Emperor. Significantly, what he found was an idea, the first time a Duncan had ever found anything other than a living Duke. Together, Duncan-the-Last and Siona became convinced that if there had to be a God Emperor, it should not be Leto II. They were, of course, wrong, but that was significant in contrast to their resulting actions. Thus, as Duncan-the-Last rose from his frustrated desire for Hwi Noree and as he and Siona circled each other, he climbed the nine-hundred-meter wall to the Royal Road and engineered the assassination of an emperor and his consort.
His pinionless climb mirrored his growing understanding that, unlike Siona and himself, Leto II was no longer a true Atreides; like the long-dead Alia he had become an alien within the family. Duncan realized this first when he considered Leto IIs heinous, selfish crime of resurrecting him and his predecessors without their permission. Duncan finally understood something Paul Muad'Dib had said: "Your liberties vanish when you recognize any absolute leader." Thus, Duncan-13724 ascended to a new ruthlessness and understood that defending his independence justified his impending violence. Ironically, Leto II's most faithful servant, Moneo Atreides, inspired this decision when Duncan saw his old self in Moneo's duty and responsibility.
It was this epiphany that the God Emperor had miscalculated. Just as Lady Jessica Atreides had let her memory o
f Duncan Prime fog her perception of Duncan-10208, the God Emperor's overconfidence had prevented him from seeing the full implications and nature of Duncan-the-Last's growth. What Moneo, Leto II, and the younger Siona saw as archaic in Duncan was actually what made him the savior he became. More of an Atreides than any of them, with roots that went even deeper than the God Emperor's, his otherness within Leto II's contrived universe and his lack of understanding of it protected him against its seductions. The God Emperor's Imperium repressed change, while Duncan's traditional ghafla and irrepressible craving for chaos made him the instrument of mutability that the Double God, Leto II, feared and craved. Duncan-the-Last's disgust for Leto II was created by the God Emperor in many, many ways, but the last ghola made his own special contributions as did Siona, Moneo, and the Tleilaxu. The result even stirred the Museum Fremen Garun to life: Duncan was the only person he had ever met with whom he wanted to die.
In his dying moments, the God Emperor too perceived that he respected this last Duncan more than he had any other, and this perception allowed him to recover the vision of the Golden Road hidden by the promise of a life with Hwi Noree. He revealed to Siona and Duncan the location of his priceless spice hoard in the ruins of Sietch Tabr. Most significantly, he removed the veil from his own plan for the two: they could travel the Golden Road that he could not. Siona, Duncan-the-Last, and we, their descendants, could then and can now walk silently among the ancestral memories without fear of possession or abomination. Further, the Dar-es-Balat diaries reveal that, even in the moment of his human death, Leto II retained something of his blithe youth when he asked Duncan what he would now do with his new power and when he and Siona both realized that this Duncan would need gentle seduction. The answers to both of these queries are now, of course, obvious and seem purposely naive in their posings even though Duncan had little insight then into Siona's deep wisdom and the plenty that the two of them would yield.
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