ATREIDES, LETO II, le memorie

Leto would have taken extreme pleasure in the idea of future generations attempting to write encyclopedia articles concerning him. Certainly he held such writers in contempt during his lifetime, boasting to many that he had burned alive many a historian upon pyres made of their own works. No historian could dare to claim equal knowledge of the past with Leto, for, after all, Leto was directly responsible for over 3,500 years of the past. Moreover given his claim that he had within him the memories of every single one of his ancestors, one could reasonably suggest that the words Leto and history are one and the same.

Leto's contempt for history and historians supplies a clue to the nature of this ultimately unknowable man and god. Leto in The Stolen Journals wrote of history:

You cannot understand history unless you understand its flowings, its currents and the ways leaders move within such forces. A leader tries to perpetuate the conditions which demand his leadership. Thus, the leader requires the outsider. I caution you to examine my career with care. I am both leader and outsider. Do not make the mistake of assuming that I only created the Church which was the State. That was my function as leader and I had many historical models to use as pattern. For a clue to my role as outsider, look at the arts of my time. The arts are barbaric. The favorite poetry? The Epic. The popular dramatic ideal? Heroism. Dances? Wildly abandoned. From Moneo's viewpoint, he is correct in describing this as dangerous. It stimulates the imagination. It makes people feel the lack of that which I have taken from them. What did I take from them? The right to participate in history.

Leto damned the one thing that he believed was essential to the freedom of his subjects. He usurped their right to create their own past by living in a free present. The worlds ran strictly according to the whims of the God Emperor, and he made clear to all thinking creatures that to live apart from him was unthinkable. Leto was God and, as God, all was created in his image. With such a view of the universe, he would not allow anyone to interpret the past or even to describe it. Only Leto knew the one and only path, the Golden Path, and his sole ownership of the path demanded that he possess all the maps as well. The past, or beginning of the Golden Path, had to remain in his hands because it was a key to what he intended for the future.

Thus, Leto's attitude toward historians was a mixture of ironic jest and tyrannic policy. On the one hand, Leto knew that those who worshiped the past could understand so little of it that they were laughable in what they took for truth. On the other, he had no wish that anyone, even by accident, appear to so interpret the past that the key to the future be even briefly touched by another. As the above quotation indicates, his answer to the necessity of historical movement was to usurp all the roles. By becoming the historical dialectic, he became history itself, and, therefore, the future as well.

What kind of a being would have such an ego that he would even dare conceive of such a plan? What kind of a being would have such power that he could actually carry that plan out? The answer is clear: only the true Kwisatz Haderach, the Bene Gesserit male whose organic power could bridge space and time. Leto Atreides was the true God Emperor of Dune because he had been bred to the role.

By calling Leto II the true Kwisatz Haderach, it should not be understood that the Bene Gesserit intended to create Leto or that they had a hand in guiding him to the path he took. While his grandmother, the Reverend Mother Lady Jessica Harkonnen, the concubine of Leto Atreides I, must have played some role in Leto's early life, she did so against the desires of the Sisterhood. To the Bene Gesserit, Leto and his twin sister, Ghanima, were both Abominations. Both were fully conscious in the womb of their mother, Chani Liet-Kynes, the Fremen concubine of Paul Atreides, Muad'Dib, and both awoke to consciousness filled with the personalities and memories of all their ancestors. The Bene Gesserit would have preferred Leto dead and were responsible for a large number of the plots against his life during the more than 3,500 years he lived.

However, Leto was not Abomination. Unlike Alia Atreides, accurately called Abomination, Leto learned to control all of the personalities living within him and to make use of them. As a boy he overthrew Alia and then created an empire that cast that of his father, Muad'Dib, into shadow.

As incredible as any of these facts might appear even to those who have every reason to believe their truth, they pale when compared to the biological transformation that Leto allowed himself to undergo. Immediately before his overthrow of Alia, he took a child's game of the Fremen to the extreme. Fremen children once amused themselves by placing sandtrout on their hands and watching them mold themselves to the shape; they would then shake the trout off and admire the "gloves" thus formed. Leto, however, placed sandtrout over his entire body allowing open space only for his mouth and nose. The result was strength beyond imagining and a life that lasted inconceivable centuries. With the transformation of Arrakis, moreover, Leto became the last Shai-Hulud or, at least, the last potential Shai-Hulud.

Consider then the combination that Leto represented: he contained within himself the complete history of the worlds, his father's memories and knowledge, and the strength of Shai-Hulud, the great sandworm of Arrakis. How it is possible to believe that Leto was anything but a god?

And what a god Leto must have been, because within him was both Atreides and

Harkonnen blood that had been reared in one of the last of the Fremen sietches of Arrakis. Indeed, many of the personalities that inhabited Leto's body were Fremen personalities received from his mother, Chani. Thus, it is worth raising once again an earlier question: What kind of being would possess such an ego that he would even dare to conceive of becoming all of history? One such being might be an Atreides who shared with his ancestors an unquenched blood-lust, even if individual Atreides were not as cruel or as violent as the general type. Leto's father was one of the gentler Atreides. He was never comfortable with the actions performed in his name. Some scholars have even suggested that it was this gentle aspect that determined Muad'Dib's course when he walked as a blind man into the Arrakeen desert. He was sick of his life as the leader of the Second Jihad. But Leto was not of the same nature as his father. He could take on the skin of the sandtrout, and history has ample records to prove that Leto did not shy away from the exercise of raw, bloody power.

Another such being with ego strong enough might be a Harkonnen. While equally bloody as the Atreides, the Harkonnen also equally gloried in the use of power. It was the Harkonnen talent to gain and exercise power by diplomatic intrigue, with a frequent assassination thrown in. While Leto's great-grand- father, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen is best known for the luxury he surrounded himself with and for his death at the hands of Alia

Atreides, it must be remembered that he was also a diplomatic genius. He was able to manipulate a number of business ventures into a rapid restoration of his family's power after an earlier Harkonnen had seemingly destroyed the family by an act of cowardice. Given the constant power struggles during the rule of the Padishah Shaddam IV, such a feat is remarkable. And, once again, history reveals that Leto knew well how to apply the velvet glove of diplomacy where it was needed.

A third being capable of such an ego might be a Fremen who was convinced that what was at stake was the tau of his sietch. Given what is known of Fremen culture and the Fedaykin, it is not difficult to see the single-mindedness in Leto as an expression of Fremen devotion to oneness. Leto not only invented the Golden Path, he believed in it as well. To him it was the one true way to preserve the worlds from vast, overwhelming destruction. A Fremen, faced with the potential destruction of the sietch, would act to preserve the tau by any means within his grasp. Leto acted to preserve the tau of humanity, but the means within his grasp far exceeded those available to a mere Fremen.

Finally, there is a fourth being capable of such an ego: Shai-Hulud, "The Old Man of the Desert," "Old Father Eternity," and "The Grandfather of the Desert." By Shai-Hulud, it is not meant here any of the sandworms of Arrakis or the stunted ones that now exist on Rakis. No, this is the Shai-Hulud that the Fremen used to personify the very elemental forces of the planet, those forces that were so great, so overpowering that they stood for all time. Shai-Hulud was, to the Fremen, the only true eternal force. So vast, so incredible were the powers of Shai-Hulud that the Fremen believed it to be beyond reason. Shai-Hulud lived only for itself, uninterested in and incapable of understanding the petty creatures that shared its world. And clearly Leto was equally capable of such monumental indifference. Moneo Atreides, the last steward of the God Emperor, frequently saw Leto in such moods. He called them "the stirrings of the worm."

Atreides, Harkonnen, Fremen, Shai-Hulud--any of these might be a being with ego powerful enough to dare become the history and future of the universe. But Leto was all four; he had to dare because it was an essential part, of his nature. Leto had no choice. Because of what he was, he was destined to pick up where his father failed and become the true Kwisatz Haderach. And because he was destined to be the Kwisatz Haderach, he perforce must become the God Emperor, for they are one and the same.

A second quotation from The Stolen Journals will serve well as an illustration of this point:

When I set out to lead humanity along my Golden Path, I promised them a lesson their bones would remember. I know a profound pattern which humans deny with their words even while their actions affirm it. They say they seek security and quiet, the condition they call peace. Even as they speak, they create the seeds of turmoil and violence. If they find their quiet security, they squirm in it. How boring they find it. Look at them now. Look at what they do while I record these words. Hah! I give them enduring eons of enforced tranquility which plods on and on despite their every effort to escape into chaos. Believe me, the memory of Leto's peace shall abide with them forever. They will seek their quiet security thereafter only with extreme caution and steadfast preparation.

Within this passage are all four personages. Here can be seen the cynicism of the Atreides, the delight in gamesmanship of the Harkonnens, the harsh world view of the Fremen, and the laughter of Shai-Hulud. No wonder then that so many scholars propose so many different versions of Leto Atreides II. Some would see him as a blood-thirsty tyrant who loved to toy with his Duncan Idaho gholas through a perverted sense of "the good old days." Others would see him as a corrupted politician whiling away his time in obscene pleasure with Hwi Noree. Yet others would see Leto as the compassionate but harsh teacher of mankind, instructing Siona Atreides to take on his mantle and lead mankind further on to the Golden Path. And still others would see him as God laughing at all his creation simply because he wanted to.

When Leto toppled from the bridge to be dissolved in the water below, who or what is it that died? It is House Atreides that died, and House Harkonnen, and the Fremen, and Shai-Hulud, and that being that was the synthesis of them all, the Kwisatz Haderach. Each died singly and as a unified entity because that is how Leto lived. He was warrior, pleasure-seeker, teacher, and God. No one thing he did was for a single reason, for each action was done to please each personality that lived within him. No human will ever know Leto Atreides II, the God Emperor of Dune. The very best that can be hoped for is that mankind will understand why such knowing is impossible.

S.G.

Further references: ATREIDES, PAUL MUAD'DIB; KWISATZ HADERACH; Leto Atreides II, Journals, RRC 65A-302, RRC 7OA-392; Herk Elanus, The Tree of Atreides 5 v. (Caladan: Apex); Gwenewera Apturos, Home-Life of the God Emperor (Tleilax: Mentat).