Dune: The Butlerian Jihad

Penny Merritt, for helping to manage the literary legacy of her father, Frank Herbert.

Our editors, Pat LoBrutto and Carolyn Caughey, offered detailed and invaluable suggestions through many drafts to fine-tune this story into its final version. Tom Doherty, Linda Quinton, Jennifer Marcus, and Paul Stevens at Tor Books gave this project remarkable support and enthusiasm.

As always, Catherine Sidor, at WordFire, Inc., worked tirelessly to transcribe dozens of microcassettes and type many hundreds of pages to keep up with our manic work pace. Her assistance in all steps of this project has helped to keep us sane, and she even fools other people into thinking we’re organized.

Diane E. Jones and Erwin Bush served as test readers and guinea pigs, giving us their honest reactions, and suggested additional scenes that helped make this a stronger book. Rebecca Moesta contributed her imagination, time, and support in all phases of this book, from start to finish.

The Herbert Limited Partnership, including Jan Herbert, Ron Merritt, David Merritt, Byron Merritt, Julie Herbert, Robert Merritt, Kimberly Herbert, Margaux Herbert, and Theresa Shackelford, gave us their enthusiastic support, entrusting us with the care of Frank Herbert’s magnificent vision.

Beverly Herbert, for almost four decades of support and devotion to her husband, Frank Herbert.

And most of all, thanks to Frank Herbert, whose genius created such a wondrous universe for us to explore.

Princess Irulan writes:

A
ny true student must realize that History has no beginning. Regardless of where a story starts, there are always earlier heroes and earlier tragedies.

Before one can understand Muad’Dib or the current jihad that followed the overthrow of my father, Emperor Shaddam IV, one must understand what we fight against. Therefore, look more than ten thousand years into our past, ten millennia before the birth of Paul Atreides.

It is there that we see the founding of the Imperium, how an emperor rose from the ashes of the Battle of Corrin to unify the bruised remnants of humanity. We will delve into the most ancient records, into the very myths of Dune, into the time of the Great Revolt, more commonly known as the Butlerian Jihad.

The terrible war against thinking machines was the genesis of our political-commercial universe. Hear now, as I tell the story of free humans rebelling against the domination of robots, computers, and cymeks. Observe the basis of the great betrayal that made mortal enemies of House Atreides and House Harkonnen, a violent feud that continues to this day. Learn the roots of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood, the Spacing Guild and their Navigators, the Swordmasters of Ginaz, the Suk Medical School, the Mentats. Witness the lives of oppressed Zensunni Wanderers who fled to the desert world of Arrakis, where they became our greatest soldiers, the Fremen.

Such events led to the birth and life of Muad’Dib.

LONG BEFORE MUAD’DIB, in the last days of the Old Empire, humanity lost its drive. Terran civilization had spread across the stars, but grew stagnant. With few ambitions, most people allowed efficient machines to perform everyday tasks for them. Gradually, humans ceased to think, or dream . . . or truly live.

Then came a man from the distant Thalim system, a visionary who took the name of Tlaloc after an ancient god of rain. He spoke to languid crowds, attempting to revive their human spirit, to no apparent effect. But a few misfits heard Tlaloc’s message.

These new thinkers met in secret and discussed how they would change the Empire, if only they could overthrow the foolish rulers. Discarding their birth names, they assumed appellations associated with great gods and heroes. Foremost among them were General Agamemnon and his lover Juno, a tactical genius. These two recruited the programming expert Barbarossa, who devised a scheme to convert the Empire’s ubiquitous servile machines into fearless aggressors by giving their AI brains certain human characteristics, including the ambition to conquer. Then several more humans joined the ambitious rebels. In all, twenty masterminds formed the core of a revolutionary movement that took over the Old Empire.

Victorious, they called themselves Titans, after the most ancient of Greek gods. Led by the visionary Tlaloc, the twenty allocated the administration of planets and peoples among themselves, enforcing their edicts through Barbarossa’s aggressive thinking machines. They conquered most of the known galaxy.

Some resistance groups rallied their defenses on the fringes of the Old Empire. Forming their own confederation— the League of Nobles— they fought the Twenty Titans and, after many bloody battles, retained their freedom. They stopped the tide of the Titans and drove them back.

Tlaloc vowed to dominate these outsiders one day, but after less than a decade in power, the visionary leader was killed in a tragic accident. General Agamemnon took Tlaloc’s place as leader, but the death of his friend and mentor was a grim reminder of the Titans’ own mortality.

Wishing to rule for centuries, Agamemnon and his lover Juno undertook a risky course of action. They had their brains surgically removed and implanted in preservation canisters that could be installed into a variety of mechanical bodies. One by one— as the remaining Titans felt the specter of age and vulnerability— all of the others also converted themselves into “cymeks,” machines with human minds.

The Time of Titans lasted for a century. The cymek usurpers ruled their various planets, using increasingly sophisticated computers and robots to maintain order. But one fateful day the hedonistic Titan Xerxes, anxious to have more time for his pleasures, surrendered too much access to his pervasive AI network.

The sentient computer network seized control of an entire planet, followed quickly by others. The breakdown spread like a virulent infestation from world to world, and the computer “evermind” grew in power and scope. Naming itself Omnius, the intelligent and adaptible network conquered all the Titan-controlled planets before the cymeks had time to warn each other of the danger.

Omnius then set out to establish and maintain order in its own highly structured fashion, keeping the humiliated cymeks under its thumb. Once masters of an empire, Agamemnon and his companions became reluctant servants to the widespread evermind.

At the time of the Butlerian Jihad, Omnius and his thinking machines had held all of the “Synchronized Worlds” in an iron grip for a thousand years.

Even so, clusters of free humans remained on the outskirts, bound together for mutual protection, thorns in the sides of the thinking machines. Whenever attacks came, the League of Nobles defended themselves effectively.

But new machine plans were always being developed.

S
alusa Secundus hung like a jeweled pendant in the desert of space, an oasis of resources and fertile fields, peaceful and pleasing to the optic sensors. Unfortunately, it was infested with feral humans.

The robotic fleet approached the capital world of the League of Nobles. Armored warships bristled with weapons, weirdly beautiful with their reflective alloy coatings, their adornments of antennae and sensors. Aft engines blazed pure fire, pushing the vessels to accelerations that would have crushed mere biological passengers. Thinking machines required no life-support or physical comfort. Currently, they were focused on destroying the remnants of age-old human resistance on the wild outer fringes of the Synchronized Worlds.

Inside his pyramid-shaped vessel, the cymek general Agamemnon led the attack. Logical thinking machines did not care about glory or revenge. But Agamemnon certainly did. Fully alert inside his preservation canister, his human brain watched the plans unfold.

Ahead of him, the main fleet of robot warships swept into the human-infested system, overwhelming the crews of surprised sentry vessels like an avalanche out of space. Human picket ships opened fire, defenders swept in to meet the oncoming machine force. Five League sentry vessels fired off heavy salvos, but most of their projectiles were too slow to hit the streaking inbound fleet. A handful of robotic vessels were damaged or destroyed by lucky shots, and just as many human ships exploded in flashes of incandescent vapor— not because they posed a particular threat, but because they were in the way.

Only a few distant scouts managed to transmit a warning toward vulnerable Salusa Secundus. Robot battleships vaporized the diffuse inner perimeter of human defenses, without even slowing on their way to their real goal. Shuddering under extreme deceleration, the thinking-machine fleet would arrive not long after the warning signal reached the capital world.

The humans would never have time enough to prepare.

The robot fleet was ten times the size and power of any force Omnius had ever before sent against the League of Nobles. The humans had grown complacent, having faced no concentrated robotic aggression during the last century of uneasy cold war. But machines could wait a long time, and now Agamemnon and his surviving Titans would finally have their chance.

Revealed by a flurry of tiny machine spy probes, the League had recently installed supposedly invincible defenses against gelcircuitry-based thinking machines. The massive robot fleet would wait at a safe distance while Agamemnon and his small vanguard of cymeks pressed forward on a mission, perhaps a suicidal one, to open the door.

Agamemnon reveled in the anticipation. Already the hapless biologicals would be sounding alarms, preparing defenses . . . cowering in fear. Through flowing electrafluid that kept his disembodied brain alive, he transmitted an order to his cymek shock troops. “Let us destroy the heart of the human resistance.
Forward!
”

For a thousand hellish years, Agamemnon and his Titans had been forced to serve the computer evermind, Omnius. Chafing under their bondage, the ambitious but defeated cymeks now turned their frustration against the League of Nobles. One day the once-defeated general hoped to turn against Omnius himself, but thus far had seen no opportunity.

The League had erected new scrambler shields around Salusa Secundus. Such fields would destroy the sophisticated gelcircuitry of all AI computers— but human minds could survive the passage. And though they had mechanical systems and interchangeable robotic bodies, cymeks still had human brains.

Thus, they could pass through the defensive shields unscathed.