When the Sardaukar descended again in 6049, however, none of that mattered a bit. The Zensunni fought this new invasion, true, and many of them fought valiantly; but they were faced by adversaries raised and trained in an environment too fierce for the Zensunni to imagine it. By the end of the pitifully brief battle, there were two groups of Zensunni left on Bela Tegeuse: those who had submitted, and were being prepared for transport to Rossak and Harmonthep, and those who had resisted and died.
The Imperium, it should be noted, had no particular need of Bela Tegeuse at the time of the Sardaukar raid. But both Rossak and Harmonthep, being young colonies, were in need of extra people, and the Sardaukar had to be used on occasion or risk losing their edge.
The Zensunni, being mere peons (serfs), wound up on the losing ends of both rationales.
ROSSAK. The segment of the Bela Tegeuse Zensunni who were sent to Rossak found a less friendly environment awaiting them than those they had known on either of their last two homes. Rossak was a cold, blustery world, the fifth planet of a star (Alces Minor) that appeared to clutch much of its heat to itself. The growing season was exceptionally short, and many plants that did choose to grow vigorously were, to a greater or lesser degree, poisonous.
Those colonists already scratching out an existence on Rossak had little time for newcomers. This suited the Zensunni, who had had more contact with outsiders than they ever cared to experience again. The new colonists sought out an area they thought might support them and went to work.
The Zensunni settlement barely survived the first winter. They were not a large group to begin with — the bulk of those captured on Bela Tegeuse having been sent to the more congenial Harmonthep — and the unexpectedly bitter winter left many of them with fatal attacks of pneumonia and other diseases not recognizable to them. In addition to the illnesses, they were faced with near-starvation and a wide variety of poisonings.
It was because of one of the poisonings that the Zensunni made their largest religious leap since the original sect's break from the Meometh Saari. One of the Sayyadina, desperate with hunger, ate a portion of a native plant she had discovered and whose safety was questionable. As the Sayyadina put it later, she suddenly found herself "within the minds of all the Sayyadina who had come before her."
This unknown Sayyadina — unknown because all records indicate only that she died as a result of having ingested too large a portion of the poison — was the Zensunni's first Reverend Mother. Her observations, given to one of her fellows before she fell too deeply into delirium, served as the basis for developing the Reverend Mother rite. The rite was no doubt shaped, at least in part, by the Bene Gesserit's panoplia propheticus, which, to insure the safety of its members, had seeded the worlds with its legends, including that of the Reverend Mothers.
The entire Zensunni philosophy was immediately altered. Rather than merely attempting to follow the ways of their ancestors, it was now possible for the tribes to know what those ways were by listening to a Reverend Mother's observations of the past she could view "within". When it was also discovered that the memories of one Reverend Mother could be passed to her successor by means of the poison, the Zensunni were at last certain that their history could be accurately passed from generation to generation. The word-of-mouth records of the Sayyadina would no longer be their only link to their past.
As soon as their survival on Rossak appeared reasonably secure, the Zensunni began to plan for their survival elsewhere. If, they reasoned, the emperor's soldier-fanatics were going to be sent on one mission after another to relocate them, might it not be better to relocate themselves first?
Toward that end, and with great misgivings, the Zensunni made their first, cautious approaches to their neighbors. Young Zensunni men and women hired out to work on the farms of those who were not doing as well as the farmers in their own community. The older women used their medical skills, acquired by bitter experience with their own people, to heal the sick outside their own settlement.
In spite of these outside occupations, each of the Zensunni continued his or her own labors inside the settlement, keeping the community self-reliant while building up, a bit at a time, the passage money their descendants would need to escape.
It was not an easy process nor a quick one, but in 7193 the funds were there; the settlement's leaders had only to decide where those who were leaving would go. There was a type of rejoicing among the Zensunni that they had not known in generations.
And sorrow, as well. This time, the Zensunni themselves would be doing the dividing among their people, for it had been possible to accumulate only enough to buy passage for the young. Guild rates were ruinously expensive.
In the end, it was a Guildsman who provided the Zensunni with their choice of destination. A representative with whom the Zensunni leaders had been negotiating revealed that the location of the descendants of the Lost Ones — the Zensunni's term for their members who had been abducted to Salusa Secundus so many centuries earlier — was known to the Guild, and that he could arrange passage for their youths to that world.
The bargain was struck. Before the young men and women left the settlement to board the Guildsman's ship, a Sayyadina among their number was admitted to the Reverend Mother rite and entrusted with a supply of the plants which produced the necessary poison. Their memories thus passed safely on, the old Zensunni watched their sons and daughters walk away, knowing they would not see them again.
And knowing, too, that their odds of surviving another winter on Rossak without them were negligible.
HARMONTHEP. Of the lives of the Zensunni transported to Harmonthep (the majority of those taken from Bela Tegeuse), nothing is known. The planet is generally described as having been a satellite of Delta Pavonis and was destroyed, by cause or causes unknown, in the early 6800s.
ISHIA. En route to Ishia, the refugees from Rossak were given a comprehensive explanation of what had happened to the segment of their people who had been out of reach for so long. The Guildsmen spoke as little as possible of the centuries on Salusa Secundus, and the Zensunni, who sensed that there was much here best learned from their own, did not press them for details. What the Guildsmen did describe, at great length, was the planet to which the survivors from those centuries had been sent.
Ishia, they explained, was the opposite of Rossak: hot, arid, it oppressed its life forms with heat as Rossak did with cold. Those crops which survived did so only because of tremendous amounts of time and energy spent in careful irrigation. The system had to be constantly watched, as a single day's deprivation could kill a field.
The Zensunni on Ishia had come from a tougher environment than that which faced them. Even so, adapting was difficult for them. They were not accustomed to the workings of a desert ecology, and becoming accustomed to them cost heavily in the beginning.
Once the period of adjustment was finished, however, the Zensunni had done well. By reverting to many of the ways of their ancestors from the time of the nomadic tribes, the Ishia Zensunni had learned to live with the desert instead of struggling against it, and they throve where it was once believed a colony would barely be able to eke out an existence.
The Rossak Zensunni listened gravely, but were not frightened. What one segment of their people could do, surely another could do, too. One of their number, on being told that the group might have more difficulty than they expected in learning to live on their new world, made so bold as to voice this belief.
"Ah, but you do not understand me yet," one of the Guildsmen is quoted as saying (in Kuuan's Monuments). "You are not going to Ishia, but to the world for which Ishia was your people's training ground.
"A world called Arrakis."
ARRAKIS. In 7193, then, all of the known Zensunni in the Imperium were transported to Arrakis. This last relocation, organized in deep secret by the Spacing Guild, served the purposes of both sides involved. It gave the Zensunni a home, on perhaps the only world in all the Imperium (with the exception of the Guild sanctuary w
orld of Tupile) where they would be too difficult to dig out for the emperor or his Sardaukar to bother trying. And it gave the Spacing Guild a permanent entree to Arrakis.
The Guildsmen wanted such an arrangement because of the spice melange, found only in the Arrakis desert. Similar to, but infinitely more powerful and subtle than the poison drug the Zensunni had discovered on Rossak, melange was essential to the Guild's interstellar travel monopoly. It was in the best interests of the Guild to control a supply of melange through a grateful native population. The Guildsmen made certain that the Zensunni were established deep enough inside the desert to ensure their safety from those settlers already on Arrakis (concentrated chiefly in Arrakeen, the seat of government), then withdrew.
The Zensunni recognized then that they were no longer a religious sect only, but a people. From that day onward, they would call themselves Fremen.
C.W.
Further references: ARRAKIS; BELA TEGEUSE; FREMEN; SALUSA SECUNDUS; ZENSUNNI WANDERERS, CULTURE; Daiwid Kuuan, Monuments of the Zensunni Migrations (Salusa Secundus: Morgan and Sharak).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Compiled by Gweleder Miiarz
Cataloging of The Rakis Finds
The first explorers of what we now know to be Leto II's no-room were doubly amazed. The labyrinth of tunnels and rooms enclosed by the two-kilometer diameter of the Holtzman Effect sphere was impressive in its magnitude; but more staggering to the imagination was the realization that almost all the rooms were stacked floor to ceiling with imprinted ridulian crystals. It was clear from the first that whatever the crystals contained, it was information of an extent comparable to the Atreides Imperial Library, Since that library was known to have existed, and no story of its destruction had been handed down, even the earliest conjectures guessed that the library was now recovered, and recovered in what could be its entirety.
It was apparent that scholars faced an archaeological discovery unparalleled in magnitude in the history of mankind. The First Discovery Conference, held on Giedi Prime, met only to establish an agenda for the planning of the investigation of the find. The Second Discovery Conference, held on Rakis itself, spent a full two years just in deciding on procedure and a cataloging system, and, as it turned out, that system was not without flaws.
At the outset the Conference agreed that some classification system was needed immediately, since the time needed for transcribing of the contents of every crystal could not even be estimated. Moreover, since the contents of some were in languages thousands of years old, specialist translators would be needed from the beginning, and they had to be trained in library procedures. It was decided that a sampling procedure would be used to get some indication of the scope of the documents. The translators therefore noted only the first portion of the first work on each crystal, and assigned to the crystal a subject identification letter as follows:
A Imperial House Records: Atreides
BG Bene Gesserit
BL Belles Lettres
C CHOAM
D Diplomatic
E Exploration
F Fine Arts
G Government
H History (post-Butlerian)
I Imperial House Records: Corrino
J History (pre-Butlerian)
K Ixian Affairs and Mentats
L Landsraad
M Military Science
N Natural Sciences
O (For future assignment)
P Applied Sciences
Q (Not now in use)
R Miscellaneous Records
S Spacing Guild
T Theology
TL Tleilaxu Affairs & Artifacts
U Sport and Recreation
V Social Sciences
W Planet-Bound Commerce
X (For future assignment)
Y (For future assignment)
Z Zensunni and Fremen
Thus, the first crystal found to contain material pertaining to the Bene Gesserit was labeled "BG1"; the first work on that crystal was assigned the number "1-BG1," the second work on the same crystal "2-BG1," and so on. For example, a picto-disc of the Great Mother found in the hoard carries the Rakis Reference Catalog Number 435-F23, indicating that it is the 435th item on crystal number 23 in the Fine Arts section of the catalog. Occasionally records are so extensive that they occupy more than one crystal: The Funeral Plain Scrolls, for example, extend through crystals R2345, R2346, R2347, and R2348. Note too that the Funeral Plain Scrolls were misclassified by the original investigators: they should bear "Z" numbers in the "Zensunni and Fremen" sequence. It is anticipated that errors such as this will be corrected only when the investigation is completed; at that time a revised catalog will be issued.
A second far-reaching decision of the Conference was that records would be put into the hands of researchers as soon as possible, even before the complete cataloging and translation was finished. For a work of this magnitude, no single publisher possessed sufficient resources. Hence an entirely new joint venture, the Library Confraternity, was formed; librarians, editors, and the reproduction facilities of over two hundred worlds voluntarily committed their services under its organization. The purpose of the Confraternity was to make materials from the Rakis site available as soon as humanly possible. These works are numbered consecutively in the "Arrakis Studies Temporary Series," which already counts several thousand titles. Some are reproduced almost as taken from the crystal, such as Princess Irulan's Count Fenring: A Profile, while others have undergone a preliminary editing, for instance, Juusepiin Kazagrando's edition of 4-BG1033, Sancti Sermones.
Part of the expense borne by the Library Confraternity is being recouped by licensing works in the Temporary Studies to commercial and university publishers. Works made available to the public in this way are then removed from the Temporary Series listing. For example, the large publishing house on Grumman, United Worlds, has already begun its own prestigious series, "Arrakis Studies," which includes both works from the Rakis Finds (e.g., Princess Irulan's Arrakis Awakening, Arrakis Studies 15) and works preliminary to or supportive of the study of the original documents (e.g., 'Abd 'l-Zubai-dii, 'l-Wadiih: An Introduction to Fremen, Arrakis Studies 3).
Specializations among the commercial and university presses have already begun to appear Morgan and Sharak of Salusa Secundus has several titles concerned with Fremen language and history, as does the Carolus University Press of Topaz. The Tevis Company of Diana has a dozen works from the Finds, on the Bene Gesserit now in print and is completing the preparation of several more.
While critics may argue that other systems would have been superior to the one adopted in one way or another, the fact remains that the Rakis Reference Catalog method is a simple, workable system that has aided materially in getting the fruits of this enormous and important archaeological find into the hands of the public.
Notations and Abbreviations
This bibliography lists the works most important to the compilation of the encyclopedia, classified according to the Library Confraternity system. When the date of original publication is significant, it is supplied preceding the name of the reprinting publisher. Works marked with an asterisk are those not found in the Rakis Hoard.
ABBREVIATIONS
AJM Antares Journal of Medicine
AMCE Atreides Memorial Contributions to Embryology
AS Arrakis Studies
BGFS Bene Gesserit Foundation Studies
BNM Bestimmtes Neufilologishe Mitteylunken
comp. compiled by
ed. edited by, editor
IG-FC Institute of Galacto-Fremen Culture
LCTS Library Confraternity Temporary Series
OS Old Series
PD Patrologia Diasporae
RRC Rakis Reference Catalog
SAH Studies in Atreidean History
SIH Studies in Imperial History
tr. translated by, translator
UP University Press
v. volumes
A. IMPERIAL HOUSE RECORDS: ATREIDE
S
al-Ada, Harq, ed., The Atreides Letters, LCTS 763.
___, The Dune Catastrophe, tr. Miigal Reed (Mukan: Lothar).
___, House Atreides: An Historical Overview, tr. Zhaulya Muurazharat (Libermann: Pinetree).
___, The Mother of God, tr. Harq al-Lutag Atreides (Grumman: Tern).
___, The Story of Liet-Kynes, LCTS 109.
___, Testament of Arrakis, LCTS 180.
Anon., The Proverbs of Muad’Dib, tr. J. Promov Oliima (Caladan: Apex).
Apturos, Gwenewera, Home-Life of the God Emperor (Tleilax: Mentat).
Atreides, Alia, Commentary to “The Ghola Speaks” ed. Imlan Atreides-Conino, tr. Kershel, Reeve Shautin (Finally: Mosaic).
Atreides, Ghanima, Elaine, and Leto II, The Book of Ghanima, RRC 13-A700.
Atreides, Lady Jessica, The Years on Arrakis, tr. Zhaivz Aultan (Caladan: Apex).
Atreides, Leto II, Journals, RRC 55-A89. [Reminiscences of his father.]
___, Journals, RRC 1-A42 [His reign.]
___, Journals, RRC 20-A115. [Information on Farad’n Corrino.]
___, Journals, RRC31-A125. [Assur-nasir-apli.]
___, Journals, RRC 1-A170. [About Nayla.]
___, Journals, RRC 2-A213. [Yueh corrupted by Piter de Vries.]
___, Journals, RRC34-A218,10-A311. [Problems of Language.]
___, Journals, RRC 65-A392. [About Moneo Atreides.]
___, Journals, RRC 70-A392. [Conversations with Moneo.]
___, Journals, RRC 80-A1-D557. [About Bene Gesserit.]
___, Stolen Journals, ed. Siona Atreides (Grumman: Tern).
Atreides, Orestes, A Life in Transition, LCTS 166.
Atreides, Ritah al-Jofar Nisri, “Factors in the Yueh Betrayal,” SIH, OS 146:449-70.
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