Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

You, the first person to encounter my chronicles for at least four thousand
years, beware. Do not feel honored by your primacy in reading the revelations of
my Ixian storehouse. You will find much pain in it. Other than the few glimpses
required to assure me that the Golden Path continued, I never wanted to peer
beyond those four millennia. Therefore, I am not sure what the events in my
journals may signify to your times. I only know that my journals have suffered
oblivion and that the events which I recount have undoubtedly been submitted to
historical distortion for eons. I assure you that the ability to view our
futures can become a bore. Even to be thought of as a god, as I certainly was,
can become ultimately boring. It has occurred to me more than once that holy
boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will.
-Inscription on the storehouse at bar-es-Balat

The new Duncan is brought to Arrakis. He remembers how they had awakened his memories, by forcing him to kill a man so much like Paul. He learns that its been more than thirty five hundred years since he died, and that Leto II, the son of Paul, is ruling as a tyrant and is slowly turning into a sandworm. He doesn't know what to believe other than his name. Duncan meets some women of the Imperial Guard, one of which is wearing a mask and is charged with the task of determining whether he has been tampered with by the Tleilaxu. The other calls him commander, he is to lead Leto's Imperial Guard. He learns from them that Leto has forbidden the training of mentats and that the Great Convention is still enforced. The masked one judges that he has not been tampered with and is to be taken to the Citadel. He asks for a bath and a change of clothes, they tell him they will bathe him themselves.

Duncan can remember the twins, does that mean he's grown from the cells of the first Duncan ghola? If this is true, there's a whole host of questions that follow...

D Pope wrote:Duncan can remember the twins, does that mean he's grown from the cells of the first Duncan ghola? If this is true, there's a whole host of questions that follow...

The most common explanation is... it's a mistake. He is supposed to be a ghola of the original Idaho and should not remember the twins.

I recon you're right, sure was looking forward to finding out why he's not a mentat & when the cells could've been taken. There's a whole story in that mistake.

Ahah, I knew there was something that "proved" this was an FH mistake.

It's much worse than just Duncan remembering the twins though, as I posted in the "The Duncans" thread earlier, the whole book is rife with cases of Duncan remembering Muad'dib (recognises his crysknife and doesn't have to be brought up to speed on that whole series of events) and such that could only be Hayt memories.

Damn, this isn't a one page blooper, this is a mistake that cuts through the entire novel... this is the worst FH fuckup I've encountered... fuck.

I might just have to tell myself that FH was seeing if people would notice.

EDIT: HOLD ON A SECOND! Those quotes don't necessarily mean anything, Hayt would have those memories too, so a clone made from cells taken during his life would explain that.

EDIT MKII: ... but there was a good point above about him not being a mentat... I think it would be a more plausible FH mistake to have made Duncan a clone of Hayt and forgotten to make him a mentat than for him to have intended him to not be Hayt and then proceeded to f-up in pretty much every chapter over and over.

A Thing of Eternity wrote: EDIT MKII: ... but there was a good point above about him not being a mentat... I think it would be a more plausible FH mistake to have made Duncan a clone of Hayt and forgotten to make him a mentat than for him to have intended him to not be Hayt and then proceeded to f-up in pretty much every chapter over and over.

I like it!
For reasons of clarity, I suggest OD, original Duncan- not a ghola & HG, a ghola from Hayt.

For what it's worth, I too think that the GEoD Duncan is a Hayt ghola and anything that suggests otherwise is the FH fuck up. Either way he fucked up, but I think it's less of a fuck up if I look at it that way and I like it better that way, so there.

Excluding the mentat thing, what are the arguements against a Hayt ghola?

Leto didn't allow mentats and this Duncan didn't appear to have those capabilities.

Alright, one more supporter for the Hayt model. Excellent. (I agree, fuckup either way, but less if he meant him to be Hayt).

A Thing of Eternity wrote: EDIT: HOLD ON A SECOND! Those quotes don't necessarily mean anything, Hayt would have those memories too, so a clone made from cells taken during his life would explain that.

Hm, that's true, a Hayt ghola would also remember that death. I need to think this through more, I feel like I'm missing some things.

Wouldn't he need to be trained for his mentat capabilities to function? When Paul found out he had mentat capabilities, he suddenly understood the training in his childhood, right? And then he chose to continue with the training? Does it ever say, explicitly, that GEoD Duncan doesn't have mentat potential? Is it an inconsistency if GEoD Duncan doesn't appear to have mentat capabilities, if mentat training has been outlawed and his potential never would've been realized anyway?

Again, I feel like I'm missing something, and am now bracing myself as I expect to have my head cracked...

GEoD never says he's NOT a mentat, in so many words. I feel he wasn't because of his tendency to be slow on the uptake for things not military, quick to judge, & thinking in absolutes. The potential was there, several of him were mentats.
In the later books, Duncan mentions mentat training ( Bellonda- you had good teachers. Duncan- a lot of good teachers) I don't think he covers when he could function as a mentat after awakening.

edit; as far as mentat training to regain those abilities, I doubt it. There are references to physical abilitiesthat 'the mind knows but the body has to relearn,' I guess one could argue that there are physical aspects of being a mentat. I always thought being a mentat boiled down to a way of thinking.

merkin muffley wrote:Again, I feel like I'm missing something, and am now bracing myself as I expect to have my head cracked...

I felt that when I found out Hayt was the reanimated Duncan original. Hoo Boy!

I apologize if this post gets too far away from Chapter 06, and ask that it be moved somewhere appropriate if it is.

D Pope wrote:as far as mentat training, I doubt it. There are references to physical abilitiesthat 'the mind knows but the body has to relearn,' I guess one could argue that there are physical aspects of being a mentat. I always thought being a mentat boiled down to a way of thinking.

This is what I was referring to, from Paul and the Duke's conversation at the beginning of Dune, regarding Paul's decision to continue mentat training:

"You may have mentat capabilities."
...
"But I thought Mentat training had to start during infancy and the subject couldn't be told because it might inhibit the early..." He broke off, all his past circumstances coming to focus in on flashing computation. "I see," he said.
"A day comes," the Duke said, "when the potential Mentat must learn what's being done. It may no longer be done to him. The Mentat has to share in the choice of whether to continue or abandon the training..."
...
All the special training from Hawat and his mother -- the mnemonics, the focusing of awareness, the muscle control and sharpening of the sensitivities, the study of languages and nuances of voices..."
...
There was no hesitation in his answer. "I'll go on with the training."

Well yes, but no. I mean, when you wake up that old personality- then it's all there, right? For example, Duncan was a swordmaster. Upon reawakening, he was a swordmaster again. There may have been some physical deficiency in the new body, but he knew he was a swordmaster. The only training required was to get some physical aspect up to speed. He'd already had swordmaster training & a lifetime of expirience to boot!

There would be no need for those abilities to be awakened, because he would have memories of being a mentat. Paul had to have them awakened because he A: didn't know he had been trained as one until someone pointed it out, and B: at that time he still needed more training to become one, remember he is asked whether or not he wants to pursue that path and he says yes.

merkin muffley wrote:I apologize if this post gets too far away from Chapter 06, and ask that it be moved somewhere appropriate if it is.

Lets continue this in 'The Duncans' thread. Are you ok with that?

Word up. I knew his swordmaster abilities and training were relevant.

Revised, cleaned.

I think the best solution is to say that this Duncan is a ghola made from Hayt's cells. This more or less has to be true, and in fact there's reason to believe it's true. As I think I've mentioned elsewhere, I think ghola technology changed from the first few books until the present time, and the way gholas were made in Paul's time was quite different.

To recap: Making a ghola, unlike cloning, is the taking of a partially whole person (it could be a body missing a section, missing a head, etc.) that is dead and regrowing the missing parts and bringing that person back to life. It resembles regeneration far more than it does cloning. When Duncan was killed on Arrakis and the Tleilaxu regenerated him, they took his whole body and brought it back to life, not just a cell from it. This is also implied in the text of DM in Hayt's conversation with Bijaz when Bijaz tells him he didn't want to come back to life at first (which would be a nonsensical thing to say of one cell being grown). So when we now learn that this Duncan was made from cells from the 'original' Duncan we should remember that Hayt was the original Duncan, just brought back to life and retrained while he didn't have his memories. I don't think the Tleilaxu had other cells from Duncan other than Hayt; they used all of it in the regrowing process. I believe it was after Hayt died that the Tleilaxu began to use only portions of the body (and finally just cells) to regenerate them fully, rather than taking a mostly intact body and bringing it back. This would have required a far more advanced technique in ghola-making and so it makes sense that it would have taken them a while to refine the technology to this point.

Then again we have this:

Memories had gushered into his awareness. He remembered Ghola and he remembered Duncan Idaho.
I am Duncan Idaho, swordmaster of the Atreides.
He clung to this memory as he stood in the yellow room.
I died defending Paul and his mother in a cave-sietch beneath the sands of Dune. I have been returned to that planet, but Dune is no more. Now it is only Arrakis.

It's not 100% clear that this passage is supposed to be Duncan's last memory, or whether he's just reminiscing on this death and not Hayt's for some reason. That being said, even if we assume that all the Duncans are gholas of Hayt, it's true that we're left with the issue of why all of the Duncans are not mentats and Zensunni philosophers once they regain their memories.

I guess I agree that it's simpler to conclude FH made a mistake than to create an elaborate explanation of how to reconcile how this Duncan fails to ever mention the name Hayt or Hayt's training. It seems what FH wanted was the personality of Duncan from the first book (the simpler and more romantic version) but with the memories of Hayt. We do know that the Tleilaxu do things to their gholas after they're grown, so perhaps the way they raised and trained this Ghola made it not amenable for this Duncan to be a mentat and a philosopher? Maybe they emphasized swordmaster training and other things like loyalty so that when he regained Hayt's memories he found he was not able to function as a mentat any more (conflicting programming?) and so had to embrace the memory of being a swordmaster. It's possible, at least.