“Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history” -Bene Gesserit Coda
After previously jumping 3,500 years into the future in God Emperor of Dune and then another 1,500 years forward in Heretics of Dune, the final book written by Frank Herbert Chapterhouse: Dune is a return to chronological form (in the vein of Dune, Dune: Messiah, and Children of Dune). It is as an immediate sequel to its predecessor Heretics of Dune. Chapterhouse: Dune begins with the Bene Gesserit on the defensive. After the Honored Matres had managed to destroy Rakis at the end of Heretics of Dune (formerly known as “Dune” or “Arrakis”) the Honored Matres are now hunting down the Bene Gesserit planet by planet, obliterating them one by one. All the while, they are searching for the secret Bene Gesserit homeworld known as “Chapterhouse.” Why are the Honored Matres attacking the Bene Gesserit? For one thing, they are threatened by Miles Teg’s superhuman abilities displayed at the end of Heretics of Dune shortly before he died. Now, under the leadership of Darwi Odrade, the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood is in a very precarious spot –they are wildly outnumbered and are being hunted down, thus they have retreated to their hidden homeworld which is being artificially terraformed into a desert planet to mirror Dune. As depicted at the end of Heretics of Dune, Odrade managed to smuggle a sandworm off Rakis aboard a no-ship and now the worm-speaker Sheeana Brugh has been tasked with caring for the worm. The hope is that Chapterhouse can serve as a new breeding ground for sandworms to bolster the Bene Gesserit with a burgeoning spice industry. But Odrade is plagued by dark dreams of an ax wielding enemy and memories of her youth as a “Sea Child,” along with fears about the impending destruction of the Sisterhood forever. Her succession is very much in question – will she be succeeded by Murbella or Sheeana?
Things are further complicated when the Honored Matres obliterate the Bene Gesserit planet Lampadas, a world known for its renowned Sisterhood education facilities including an impressive multi-thousand-year-old library. The Sisterhood fears all their memories on Lampadas will be lost, however the Reverend Mother Lucilla, who contains all the Sisterhood’s memories in her “Other Memory,” has narrowly managed to escape the destruction of Lampadas and she arrives on the planet Gammu (once the Harkonnen stronghold known as “Giedi Prime,” currently occupied by the Honored Matres). Here Lucilla links up with a Rabbi affiliated with a secret sect of Jews serving as spies for the Bene Gesserit. Unfortunately, the Rabbi nforms Lucilla that it will be nearly impossible for her to leave Gammu without being caught by the Honored Matres. Lucilla fears the loss of all the Bene Gesserit institutional knowledge she carries within herself, however the Rabbi reveals a shocking secret previously unbeknownst to anyone. He and his sect have been concealing a “Wild Reverend Mother” within their midst. Her name is Rebecca and she has independently survived the Agony without the aid of the Sisterhood (her eyes are the color blue within blue). Lucilla then transfers all her memories and the wisdom of Lampadas to Rebecca before being captured.
Lucilla is then taken prisoner to the planet Junction and interrogated by the Honored Matres. She is placed inside a shigawaire cage-like-tube to prevent any risk of Bene Gesserit using the Voice. Lucilla witnesses the Honored Matres in their blind fits of rage under the leadership of the Great Honored Matre, Dama the “Spider Queen.” We are reminded of the Honored Matres’ mercurial ways and their orange-colored eyes (resulting from spice substitute they consumed during the “Scattering”). Where did they come from? Who are the Honored Matres? What do they want? We are led to believe that the Honored Matres might be some form of renegade Bene Gesserit combined with Leto II’s once-fearsome female warriors known as the Fishspeakers. They joined together during The Scattering. Perhaps this union of the two groups is what led to the Honored Matres’ unusual sexual enslavement techniques. At any rate, Lucilla is horrified by many other features of the Honored Matres, particularly that their chambers are filled with strange hybrid catlike humanoid creatures called Futars. The Futars were once weapons used against the Honored Matres during the Scattering, but the Honored Matres somehow managed to tame them and render their own bodies as poisonous to a Futar bite. The Futars possess a hideous scream that can stop Honored Matres dead in their tracks however Futar shrieks curiously do not seem to affect the Bene Gesserit. This fascinates the Honored Matres. Indeed, during The Scattering many unusual and horrifying things were bred out of the darkness in deep space, many of which are only now coming to light. The Bene Gesserit soon come to realize that the Honored Matres have actually been fleeing something in the outer bounds of the old empire, something more powerful and terrifying than they previously knew. During The Scattering, the Honored Matres were locked in a furious war with a mysterious, unexplained, terrifying race simply known as the “Ones of Many Faces.” Who are these Ones of Many Faces? Are these related to the Face Dancers from many thousands of years prior? Chapterhouse: Dune remains maddeningly silent on this question, but apparently the Honored Matres are fleeing the Ones of Many Faces hence why they are now returning to the Old Imperium. This subtext remains an important and persistent mystery in the series.
“What if Honored Matres are fleeing something…” (166).
At any rate, Lucilla is killed during her interrogation with the Honored Matres. Meanwhile back on the planet Chapterhouse, we meet a cast of memorable characters. The great Bene Gesserit bashar Miles Teg has been reawakened as a young boy (technically he is a clone and not a ghola) thanks to Odrade capturing and imprisoning the last remaining Tleilaxu Master named Scytale (the rest of the Tleilaxu have been destroyed by the Honored Matres). Scytale has reluctantly taught the Bene Gesserit in the secret Tleilaxu techniques for axolotl tanks and creating gholas (using female flesh and cells from deceased people). Scytale has knowledge of how to create several gholas as well as a new kind of Face Dancer that can be invisible even to Bene Gesserit prescience. Odrade has also imprisoned the special ghola Duncan Idaho who escaped Rakis at the end of Heretics of Dune along with his lover, the former Honored Matre, Murbella, who tried to sexually imprint Duncan Idaho but he miraculously reversed the process and now the two are sexually bonded and they have several children together. They are imprisoned aboard a grounded no-ship on Chapterhouse (the ship has been booby-trapped with explosives if anyone attempts to reactivate it). This Duncan Idaho ghola is highly controversial among the Sisterhood, some fear he might even be another Kwisatz Haderach, since he is a mentat and can also see all prior memories of past Duncan Idaho gholas. With these strange new abilities (thanks to many generations of the Bene Gesserit altering genetic bloodlines), Duncan Idaho also begins having unusual visions. In particular, he starts seeing an odd recurring vision through what looks like a “net” (“a shimmering net undulating like an infinite borealis”) that shows an older couple intimately watching him from their flower garden. It puzzles him.
Anyway, the novel drags on for many chapters (mired in endless rounds of dialogue), with the introduction of new concepts like Cyborgs in the form of the revived Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother named Clairby, and also a shocking scene in which the young reincarnated boy Miles Teg has his memories awakened in a sexual imprinting ritual initiated by Sheeana, until the final few chapters when Odrade finally arranges to meet with Dara, the “Spider Queen,” ostensibly to negotiate a truce. However, during the meeting Odrade has a trick up her sleeve. Her plan is for Miles Teg to lead an attack on the Honored Matre conquered planets of Gammu and then Junction. At the same time, during the negotiations, something surprising happens. Dara’s chief assistant named Logno suddenly kills Dara and declares herself the new Great Honored Matre. The Honored Matres then unleash a mysterious new “bloodless” weapon that simply destroys the entire Bene Gesserit army by hardly lifting a finger, meanwhile Odrade is left mortally wounded and, with her succession in question, Murbella travels down to the planet (she has already received the bulk of Odrade’s memories), claiming she has escaped from the Bene Gesserit to return to the Honored Maters. However, she quickly assassinates Logno with an extraordinary speed and strength not previously seen before and receives the last of Odrade’s dying memories on the floor before announcing herself as the uniting leader of both the Bene Gesserit and the Honored Matres who will now come under one common purpose together.
“It’ll be a bloody union, this joining of Bene Gesserit and Honored Matre” (589).
The book ends as Duncan Idaho flees Chapterhouse aboard the reactivated no-ship along with Sheeana, her young sandworms, the young bashar clone Miles Teg, the Tleilaxu Master Scytale, and the remainder of the Jewish sect (they escape shortly before Murbella can respond). But they are spotted by mysterious figures who have been haunting Duncan Idaho’s visions throughout the novel… an elderly couple named Marty and Daniel enjoying time in a garden as they banter with each other, lamenting the escape of Duncan Idaho. They seem to be distant observers, almost as if they have been watching the whole Dune saga from afar, maybe in another dimension, although they are explicitly not gods. So who are they? We are led to believe that Marty and Daniel are some sort of Face Dancer, perhaps they are the Ones of Many Faces who have been chasing the Honored Matres (it is suggested that the Ones of Many Faces are actually Face Dancers who broke free from their Tleilaxu enslavement during the Scattering). At the end of the novel, Marty and Daniel seem to have been setting a trap for Duncan Idaho but it had failed. Why? What does this mean? Dune fans have endlessly debated the existence of Marty and Daniel as Chapterhouse: Dune ends in a jarring conclusion. Perhaps it is fitting that the Dune series culminates in a befuddling mystery since Frank Herbert initially began his career writing mystery stories. And as Frank’s son Brian Herbert speculates, Marty and Daniel were actually an effort to immortalize the marriage of Frank and Beverly in a place they loved to spend time together: their garden.
Who are Marty and Daniel? Are they independent Face Dancers? Or maybe some other strange being we have never encountered before in the Dune universe? Or, alternatively, are they simply metatextual stand-ins for Frank and Beverly Herbert themselves? Debates only continue to surround these mysterious figures. And, unfortunately answers are never really provided since Frank Herbert died before he could write another Dune installment (his original intent was to write another trilogy after God Emperor of Dune beginning with Heretics of Dune, Chapterhouse: Dune, and a third book that was never completed). This leaves many open questions with the series: Who were the Ones of Many Faces chasing the Honored Matres? What are we to make of the new Ixian blending of humans and machines using Ixian technology? To what extent are Cyborgs considered violations of the Butlerian Jihad? What will become of the newly unified Bene Gesserit and Honored Matres? And who are Marty and Daniel? What do they want? Frank Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert, claimed to have recovered some notes on Dune left behind by his late father. He then proceeded to write some twenty Dune books with the help of fellow author Kevin J. Anderson, continuing the saga with both prequels and sequels. However, fans have met these books with a degree of suspicion and criticism, with many lamenting the cartoonish elements in the books and tossing them aside as mere cash-grabs by the author’s son. With this in mind, I am not eager to jump into the expanded Dune universe, but perhaps I will give it a shot further down the road.
Chapterhouse: Dune is another gripping and slightly bewildering installment in the Dune series. It introduces readers to all manner of new concepts in the universe from clones and Futars, to Cyborgs, foldspace travel, and independent Face Dancers, but for me unfortunately this is likely the weakest in the series. Chapterhouse: Dune took me several abortive efforts to complete, it was a challenge for me to keep track of all the different characters, and the only real action occurs rapidly at the very end of the book. Still this is another extraordinary achievement in the history of science fiction and it marks my completion of Frank Herbert’s original six novels in the Dune series.
Herbert, Frank. Chapterhouse: Dune. ACE, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, NY, NY (2008, originally published in 1985).