The Dune Encyclopedia

by Willis E McNelly

  It was decided to send out a squadron of Death Commandos. These berserkers — errant Fish Speakers who had in some way failed in serving the God Emperor — would descend on the rebels in Daelk like a horde of avenging Furies, unstoppable except by welcome death, which would earn the salvation forfeited by their earlier behavior. The Commandos were used only in last-ditch situations and no group they were sent against had yet survived the battle.

  In addition to maintaining the shock value of the Death Commandos, there was another reason for Fish Speaker Command's reluctance to put their errant sisters into action. The Commandos had to be led by someone lacking their overpowering urge to kill and destroy — someone capable of directing the operation coolly and effectively. The Fish Speaker who volunteered for such an assignment (the job had to be taken on voluntarily, because it was considered unthinkable to order anyone to take it) seldom returned from her mission.

  Her commanding officer was not surprised when Nayla volunteered to lead the attack. Daelk was taken and Nayla — her left arm so badly burned by a lasgun near-miss that it required six hours of reconstructive surgery — returned to her garrison with news of the victory. She received a special citation from the Lord Leto, delivered by a member of his elite Citadel Guard, and was promoted to captain.

  Nayla remained on Seprek for eleven years, continuing her record of outstanding service and earning further promotion. She was a sub-bashar by her tenth year in the garrison and seemed destined for its eventual command until a summons arrived in 13720. Nayla was on her way to Arrakis the next day, knowing only that she was to be met upon landing. In unexplained secrecy, a messenger guided Nayla to the God Emperor's audience chamber atop the Citadel's south tower and left her to meet Leto on her own.

  A passage from Leto's Journals describes this first encounter: "She seemed ill at ease at first, but that could hardly have been otherwise. How else could a mortal react when faced with her living God? Fear and awe quickly gave way to the sense of duty which comes as naturally to one of my Fish Speakers as breathing, and Nayla listened attentively as I told her what her function was to be."

  Further details were not given in this account, but it was made clear in later Journal entries what Nayla's "function" was. The God Emperor believed that in Siona, the daughter of his majordomo Moneo, he had achieved the end result of his breeding program. He had already discovered Siona's ability to fade from his prescient vision — the characteristic which encouraged his belief in his success — and needed a means of keeping informed about the young rebel's actions. He had often considered assigning a Fish Speaker to spy on Siona for him, but knew that the very loyalty that bound his female soldiers to him might lead to the undoing of his scheme: the average Fish Speaker, on discovering that Siona was capable of posing a real threat to the God Emperor, could be depended upon to disregard previous orders and accept the consequences of eliminating Siona herself. Leto needed a fanatic, then, who would be capable of carrying out any duty if told that her God demanded it. Leto found what he needed in Nayla.

  He bound her still closer to him with the gift of a crysknife, an antique which had once belonged to Misra, one of Stilgar's wives in the Dune days. Nayla was as impressed by the gesture as Leto had expected, accepting the blade from his hands in the old Fremen ritual and swearing to its use in his service.

  Nayla's loyalty to him thus insured, the God Emperor commanded that she obey Siona in all things, no matter how heretical the young woman's activities might become. Nayla was to keep her master informed of all of Siona's plans and actions, but under no circumstances was she to attempt to interfere with them.

  Nayla was not assigned to duty in any of the Arrakis garrisons. She was instead furnished with money and a place to live near the Fish Speaker's school in Onn. If any question concerning her means of making a living were raised, she was simply to explain that she was a personal bodyguard (her physique would confirm such a story) currently between employers and enjoying a short vacation. Her real task, of course, was to make contact with Siona's rebels and, through them, to gain entry to Siona's confidence.

  The process took several months. During that same time, Nayla was often summoned to the Citadel, and it was in the course of one such visit that a receiver/transmitter was planted inside her skull. The God Emperor performed the surgery himself, preferring the difficulties involved in the procedure to those he might face in employing an outside physician. Nayla was not told of the reasons for Leto's doing as he did; it was enough for her to know that her Lord now had the means to speak directly to her, inside her head, and to receive her answers as directly.

  By the end of 13721, Nayla had been taken so far into the rebel network that she was allowed to stay in the secret quarters hidden in the catacombs under Onn. Siona had evaluated her as an unimaginative but dependable aide, capable of quelling troublemakers both inside and outside their group, and had come to depend on her strength and obedience. Once Nayla was so accepted, she arranged for a hidden keyboard and screen to be installed in her room, on which she could compose and encode her messages prior to their transmission to the God Emperor. This device awed and frightened her almost as much as that of the implant, but she accepted it as another part of her service that she did not entirely understand.

  Such messages passed more and more rapidly from Nayla to her master as Siona's rebellion gained momentum. By 13723, when Siona and her companions succeeded in taking the Stolen Journals from Leto's Citadel, Nayla was sending daily transmissions; after the pilfered volumes were sent for translation to the Bene Gesserit, the Guild, and the Ixians, the messages contained frequent requests for Nayla's release from her vow of obedience to Siona. The ugly Fish Speaker finally saw Siona as a threat to her master, and the contradiction involved in obeying a rebel was taking its toll on her.

  The God Emperor decided that a freshening of Nayla's faith was in order. He summoned her once again to his audience chamber, quizzed her about Siona's latest move and emphasized the importance of Nayla's continuing obedience to her oath. Having made certain that Nayla saw this latest reminder as the beginning of her faith's ultimate test, Leto permitted her to leave the Royal Presence, satisfied that she would continue to do his bidding.

  Occasionally, Nayla was given duties to perform as a Fish Speaker so that her contact with her sisters would not be totally severed. On one such assignment, she was sent as "Friend," in the company of another Fish Speaker, to assess the new Duncan Idaho whom Leto had ordered; on another, she meted out the punishment Leto had ordained for Duro Nunepi, the Tleilaxu Ambassador responsible for the Face Dancer attack against the God Emperor in 13723. Nayla was masked on both occasions, primarily to keep her identity as a Fish Speaker a secret from Siona, and it had been impressed upon her fellows that she was not to be discussed outside of ranks.

  In 13724, following the attack on the Ixian embassy by the Tleilaxu and a splinter group of rebels, Leto ordered Nayla to reveal herself to Siona and to ask for her silence regarding her true identity. (She was to explain the need for secrecy by saying that she alone, of all the Fish Speakers, recognized the rightness of Siona's cause, and that the rest of the Fish Speakers would cheerfully dismember her if her defection was known.) Nayla was made even more intimate a member of Siona's group after this revelation — just as Leto had expected.

  Later in that same year, she accompanied Siona and Duncan Idaho to Tuono Village. Nayla suffered from mixed feelings concerning both of her companions: Siona she admired, even while she feared her actions toward the God Emperor; the ghola was mysterious to her, but she was interested in bearing his child, the Lord Leto permitting, because she felt that a mix of their genes would result in a strong, resourceful offspring. Her emotional muddle was stirred further by her part in their plan to attack the Lord Leto on his way to Tuono Village. Only her vow to obey Siona, and her underlying certainty that the God Emperor could not truly be hurt by any action taken by mortals, sustained her through the days of planning and the actual execution
of the lasgun attack.

  Nayla had been trained, and trained well, in using a lasgun. When the Royal Cart reached the bridge spanning the Idaho River, she cleanly shot out the bridge support and the suspensors beneath the Royal Cart, certain that she was about to witness a miracle. The God Emperor would survive, and her loyalty would be rewarded at last.

  Her reward, as well as the outcome of the attack, differed greatly from what Nayla had expected. The God Emperor and his entourage plunged into the river, all but he dying immediately. His sandtrout skin gone, Leto crawled onto the shore. Nayla climbed down to him, pushing Duncan Idaho aside, to reassure herself that he lived. Before her master could answer, Nayla felt her lasgun being seized from its holster, and whirled in time to see the ghola aim at her head and pull the trigger. In seconds, the gun's charge was exhausted and only a few smoking bits were left of the God Emperor's most faithful servant. Ironically, the ghola had not killed her for her action against Leto — the seeming treachery that would lead to her being despised for thousands of years — but for her killing of Hwi Noree, the God Emperor's bride.

  That undeserved onus, in light of the newfound facts, can now be ended. Nayla Nycalliste was no Judas, but a loyal soldier caught up in plots beyond her understanding; she was more obedient to her God than many whose names and memories have been treated with honor.

  C.W.

  Further references: ATREIDES, LETO II; ATREIDES, SIONA IBN FUAD AL-SEYEFA; Leto Atreides II, Journals, Rakis Ref. Cat. 1-A170.

  O

  OFFICIAL HISTORY, THE

  An authorized annual Imperial report, published 8954-10201 in Irstendal on Kaitain and 10202-13724 in Arrakeen on Arrakis; its official title was The Imperial Annual Sourcebook and Statistical Record.

  The annual volumes known informally as the Official History are among the most comprehensive, authoritative, yet often unreliable sources of information on the Atreides dynasty. The Official History, like many institutions in the long reign of Leto II, was an inheritance from his predecessors, adapted to his own purposes. Originally, the annual compilers intended to report as much reliable information about the preceding year in the Imperium as could be conveniently presented in a single volume.

  But the Official History did not reach this form immediately. The Corrino emperors understood that no government can survive without accurate and timely news, and they gathered data regularly. Each year, the so-called "Planetary Reports" came to Kaitain from all quarters of the realm. These reports were themselves condensations: because of the sheer weight of material if the records were in full form, the Planetary Reports were summaries pared down to their essentials. From 3540 on, the Imperial Department of Records trained bureaucrats (modeling the instruction openly on the initial steps of mentat training) in the preparation of summaries.

  When the Planetary Reports reached Kaitain, they were again abstracted for presentation to the emperor, who studied or ignored them as his whim, taste, or mood prompted. Beginning with the reign of Corrin XX (8923), these summaries were collected into an annual volume. The Statistical Record, as it was named, was an invaluable bibliographic tool for researchers in every field. It directed those with both permission and desire to the fuller reports containing the details they needed; it gave an overview of Imperial affairs that no other work could match.

  The chamberlain of Avelard XVIII, Venoshi Myuurak, saw the Record as an opportunity to present Imperial activities in a favorable light, and instituted the first of many perversions wrought on the hapless reference work. He ordered its expansion to two volumes, the second being the Statistical Record in its current format, but the first — the Sourcebook — being a prose description of undertakings that the government wanted to publicize. Since the work had wide distribution in a durable form, its propaganda value, though not immediate, was considerable over the long run. It appeared for the first time in two volumes with its official title in 9175, a year too late for Myuurak to see his handiwork.

  Such was the situation of the Official History when Paul Atreides came to power. Over the next century (roughly 10200-10300), as the bureaucrats of the Corrinos retired or died and their places were taken by Fremen, the character of the second volume came more and more to resemble the first's. The Sourcebook had never been much more than a chronicle of governmental actions across the Imperium, and Leto continued its use to proclaim his triumphs, minimize his defeats, and justify his innovations. For example, after the Fish Speakers were formed, over the next decade so much attention was devoted to the organization in the Official History that the disgruntled covertly referred to the Sourcebook as the Amazon Forcebook. But the second volume had had legitimate uses and had always maintained a discreet difference from its more politicized companion. Leto changed that. He scorned its statistical nature — that is clear from the recent evidence; but even the materials from Rakis have not yet confirmed his apocryphal remark, "Who cares how many schlags there are on Tupali?"

  After about 10700, the information in both volumes should be suspected of being fabricated, and should not be accepted without independent confirmation. Up to now, only the Oral History could provide that needed check, but the library at Dar-es-Balat now gives us a third source, a history more candid than the Official and more comprehensive than the Oral. The comparing of statements in the Official History to the records at Dar-es-Balat will take years — perhaps decades — but the day is now in sight when the researchers of a thousand worlds can replace the Official with the True History of Leto's reign.

  W.E.M.

  Further references: ORAL HISTORY; Lors Karden, Truth and Fancy in the Oral History (Yorba: Rose); Lors Karden, Fact and Fiction in the Official History (Yorba; Rose).

  OIL LENS

  Force-field-enclosed hufuf oil, used principally in telescopes. Oil lenses — so accurate that they have yet to be surpassed, eight millennia after their invention — share with many other enduring pieces of technology an elegant simplicity. Each lens is made up of a layer of hufuf oil (varying in thickness from .5 mm to 1.0 mm) held in static tension by an enclosing force field, and is placed within a viewing tube as part of a magnifying or other light-manipulative system. Because of the extremely responsive nature of the enclosing force field, the oil layer can by adjusted within microns of a desired setting. No other type of lens element approaches such accuracy.

  In 7687, Marcus Vander, an Ixian Field Technician (Class Three) was experimenting with the effects of various force fields on compressed fluids. He had chosen hufuf oil (a derivative of the hufuf plant, a native growth of Ecaz noted chiefly for its oil-filled seedpods) because of its viscosity and near-perfect transparency.

  Vander wished to develop some means of transporting liquids using a force field as a container, an invention which would undoubtedly have had a wide array of useful applications. What he had actually created — as he discovered when the suspended oil focused a beam of white light onto his lab counter and melted its finish — was the first oil lens.

  The new lenses had completely replaced all older, less accurate types within fifteen years of their entry into the marketplace. Their supremacy was threatened only once, in 8176, when a poor harvest of hufuf pods created a shortage of oil. Fortunately, the season following was an exceptionally good one; it was also discovered that the hufuf plant adapted very nicely to cultivation on Yorba. The double cultivation has prevented any further shortages.

  Further references: Marcus Vander, Force Fields and Their Applications, tr. Friinlan Zhauwab (Richese: New Caledonia State tip).

  ONN

  The festival city whose design and construction were commissioned by Leto II in 10592; perhaps the largest single-purpose building project in known history. Onn housed the Fish Speakers' chief school, off-world embassies, trade headquarters, service and maintenance cadres, museums and libraries, but these facilities took up less than ten percent of the city. Onn's chief purpose was to house Leto’s decennial Festival, and its construction was centered about one function: the publ
ic viewing of the God Emperor.

  The city center was a gigantic plaza measuring two kilometers across, ringed by balconies and standing platforms accommodating hundreds of thousands of Leto's subjects; the audience was further enlarged by the Ixian projectors stationed throughout the plaza. The projectors sent the images from the plaza floor into apartments surrounding the area, occupied by those considered unimportant or sufficiently out of favor to deny them a direct look at Leto.

  From a spot in the center of the plaza floor at the time appointed for the Viewing (or Great Sharing as it was sometimes called), Leto ascended from the Sacred Chamber beneath the plaza by way of a special presentation stage. The stage lifted him into the air, providing a clear view to all those watching. No protective devices were used during the Viewing; Leto rested on the stage itself, without even the shielding of his Royal Cart between himself and those in attendance. He remained in this position for two hours, during which time his subjects were free to come and go. At no time during the ceremony were any of them openly checked for weapons or prevented from climbing out to the extreme edges of the balconies for a better look.

  A legend fostered by the God Emperor compared the Viewing to a ritual undergone by an ancient ruler who was required, on one night a year, to walk unprotected among his subjects. The ruler was further required to dress in a luminescent suit, while his subjects (not searched for weapons) dressed in black and thronged in the streets at will. According to the legend, if the ruler survived his walk, it was then obvious that he was a good ruler; by parallel, if the God Emperor survived the Viewing, he did so only because of the love and loyalty of those he ruled.

  The second, less public, ritual for which the Festival City served as location was Siaynoq. This ceremony, reserved for Leto's Fish Speakers, was conducted prior to the Viewing in the Sacred Chamber located beneath the plaza.