"Frank Herbert - Dune 2 - Dune Messiah (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

and ignited the conspiracy against Muad'dib.

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Such a rich store of myths enfolds Paul Muad'dib, the Mentat Emperor, and his sister, Alia, it is
difficult to see the real persons behind these veils. But there were, after all, a man born Paul
Atreides and a woman born Alia. Their flesh was subject to space and time. And even though their
oracular powers placed them beyond the usual limits of time and space, they came from human stock.
They experienced real events which left real traces upon a real universe. To understand them, it
must be seen that their catastrophe was the catastrophe of all mankind. This work is dedicated,
then, not to Muad'dib or his sister, but to their heirs -- to all of us.
-Dedication in the Muad'dib Concordance as copied from The Tabla Memorium of the Mahdi Spirit Cult

Muad'dib's Imperial reign generated more historians than any other era in human history. Most
of them argued a particular viewpoint, jealous and sectarian, but it says something about the
peculiar impact of this man that he aroused such passions on so many diverse worlds.
Of course, he contained the ingredients of history, ideal and idealized. This man, born Paul
Atreides in an ancient Great Family, received the deep prana-bindu training from the Lady Jessica,
his Bene Gesserit mother, and had through this a superb control over muscles and nerves. But more
than that, he was a mentat, an intellect whose capacities surpassed those of the religiously
proscribed mechanical computers used by the ancients.
Above all else, Muad'dib was the kwisatz haderach which the Sisterhood's breeding program had
sought across thousands of generations.
The kwisatz haderach, then, the one who could be "many places at once," this prophet, this man
through whom the Bene Gesserit hoped to control human destiny -- this man became Emperor Muad'dib
and executed a marriage of convenience with a daughter of the Padishah Emperor he had defeated.
Think on the paradox, the failure implicit in this moment, for you surely have read other
histories and know the surface facts. Muad'dib's wild Fremen did, indeed, overwhelm the Padishah
Shaddam IV. They toppled the Sardaukar legions, the allied forces of the Great Houses, the
Harkonnen armies and the mercenaries bought with money voted in the Landsraad. He brought the


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Spacing Guild to its knees and placed his own sister, Alia, on the religious throne the Bene
Gesserit had thought their own.
He did all these things and more.
Muad'dib's Qizarate missionaries carried their religious war across space in a Jihad whose
major impetus endured only twelve standard years, but in that time, religious colonialism brought
all but a fraction of the human universe under one rule.
He did this because capture of Arrakis, that planet known more often as Dune, gave him a
monopoly over the ultimate coin of the realm -- the geriatric spice, melange, the poison that gave
life.
Here was another ingredient of ideal history: a material whose psychic chemistry unraveled
Time. Without melange, the Sisterhood's Reverend Mothers could not perform their feats of
observation and human control. Without melange, the Guild's Steersmen could not navigate across
space. Without melange, billions upon billions of Imperial citizens would die of addictive
withdrawal.
Without melange, Paul-Muad'dib could not prophesy.