Chapter 40


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Freakzilla
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Chapter 40

Post by Freakzilla »

There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry,
elegance, and grace -- those qualities you find always in that which the true
artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand
trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the pattern
of its leaves. We try to copy these patterns in our lives and our society,
seeking the rhythms, the dances, the forms that comfort. Yet, it is possible to
see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate
pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward
death.

-from "The Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

Paul-Muad'dib is in the throws of the spice trance from the Fremen meal he had eaten earlier feeling lost in time and overcome by his race consciousness. He can't determine if his son, Leto II or his sister Alia had been born yet and tries not to think about riding the worm and finding his father's skull. The children have been sent South and Chani has killed someone who wanted to challenge him to single combat, that was real. He thinks of his mother's fear at how the Fremen call him "Him", she accuses him of cultivating this, but he reminds her that she taught him to do this and tells her it unifies them. She has come to accept Chani now that she has produced an Atreides heir. He starts to come out of the dream and realizes he is in a hiereg, a desert camp, with Chani. He hears Chatt the Leaper, one of his Fedaykin, playing a baliset and thinks of Gurney whom he'd seen in a smugglers band but had not revealed himself to lest he lead the Harkonnens to him. He remembers that he is here to summon a worm and ride the sand. They have turned their sleeping time around and slept through the night, he must ride the sand in the light of day so that Shai-Hulud can see him and knows he does not fear. Chani reasures him but reminds them that she is here to make sure the rites are obeyed. Paul leaves the tent and can smell a pre-spice mass and knows there will be a maker nearby. He must do this today to become a full Fremen, even the smallest Fremen had done this and this difference is hurting his leadership. He knows that if he survives this, he will become a living legend and nothing will stop the jihad.

Stilgar brings Paul's banner, hands him a thumper and reminds him that the Fremen do this at twelve and he is eighteen, don't do anything fancy. Shishakli, a Fedaykin squad leader, presents him with two maker hooks. He plants the thumper and waits for the worm. When it comes, it is larger than any he has ever heard of, over half a league long, is sandwave crests like a mountain. He reminds himself that this is nothing he has seen in a vision or in life and rushes forward to meet the worm.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by orald »

Freakzilla wrote:When it comes, it is larger than any he has ever heard of, over half a league long, is sandwave crests like a mountain.
Just noticed that...I'm sure reading it in Hebrew it got translated to kilometers, but still, this means the worm is at least a mile long! :shock:

From the Appendix:
Sandworms grow to enormous size (specimens longer than 400 meters have been seen in the deep desert)
We always hear about them being about that, maybe 600-800 meters long(800 is half a mile already), but now 4 times that much; 1600 meters?!
I wonder if Frank Herbert didn't mean a mile instead of league. This seems way too big.
In memory of Perach, who suffered and died needlessly.

I wish I could have been with you that one last time.
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Post by inhuien »

IIRC a league is 3 miles so that would make it at least 1.5 miles long.

Gods what a monster!! :)
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Post by Freakzilla »

Paul says it's bigger than any he's ever even heard about.
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Post by orald »

I have to wonder though, consideing it's about 2.5 km long(if it's 1.5 miles long), and an earlier, smaller(but not tiny, just "very big" or there would've probably been more shock&awe, perhaps even from Kynes) sandworm that ate the sandcrawler back in the spice-production trip with Leto had a mouth twice as wide as the length of a spice-harvester(making it 240 meters, showing us this beast is probably much wider)*, you have to wonder how a man armed with 2 metal rods can possiblly force them between armor plates the size of small buildings.
He's not even a mosquito on a man, and that "man" has tight-fitting plate-mail armor.


*
A wide hole emerged from the sand. Sunlight flashed from glistening white spokes within it. The hole's diameter was at least twice the length of the crawler, Paul estimated.
In memory of Perach, who suffered and died needlessly.

I wish I could have been with you that one last time.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by trang »

I was thinking about this while finishing up my reread.. the timing factor is Very distorted.

A creature that size, putting off an enormous side wake of sand, would make a time consuming climb to get over and back down to get to the clear side of the worm. Your talking about a wake that is hundreds of yards long, and 10's of feet high. Another problem is if there even is a clear side, assuming the worm is gliding along the top of the sand, which seems unlikely, that would give an additional obstacle.

The fastest humans now in 100 yards are around 10 seconds. Time for a single person, to run up, over, and down, the side wakesand.. get up close to the worms, hit it with the maker hooks, then rolling over to get up top. many many minutes...

Then after reaching the top... at full clip run would take minutes to run to the front of the worm to guide it. Since you cant just undo the hooks... working forward on the rings to open and keep atop would again be time consuming.

So after tens of minutes to achieve frontal riding position and control of the worm.. it has traveled a considerable distance. Even if the Fremen were running alongside at a jog to keep pace it would seem the would tire out.

Since they wouldnt be using the hooks to open more areas to climb the worm, as open areas would cause a conflict and maybe the worm rolls again and crushes the driver?
how are they climbing the sides?

Another distorted portion.. Stilgar is riding at Pauls side.. discussing they're direction.. they mention the Fremen at the near end of the worm that "drive" it to moving faster. One, how the heck do they do that? and wouldnt you need some kind of communications device for that distance? didnt seem to mention that either.

Im not complaining, just seems the whole experience is taken in a way way way distorted method. Granted the Mechanics of riding are not Franks intent, but the SHOCK, AWE, and EXPERIENCE of it.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by A Thing of Eternity »

Well, as far as the others getting up, I believe the first person to mount the worm tosses down rope.

You are totally right though, the wake would take a long time to climb (if it was even possible period - a static hill that size made of sand would take a while to get up, but one that was constantly moving (more sand being pushed up and out) would be damned difficult).
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by SadisticCynic »

You made a point about the hooks getting through the armour; another point is on the sheer size of these creatures why would a tiny fraction of exposed tissue worry them so much. I suppose it is possible, it's just another thing that seems unlikely.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by inhuien »

SadisticCynic wrote:You made a point about the hooks getting through the armour; another point is on the sheer size of these creatures why would a tiny fraction of exposed tissue worry them so much. I suppose it is possible, it's just another thing that seems unlikely.
It may not worry the sand worm however assuming it is a irritant why would it needlessly endure it. One grain of sand in your eye it an analogy.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by SadisticCynic »

Maybe, but on this scale its something more like flecks of dust in your eye, which you get all the time and don't notice. You do have a point though. :)
Ah English, the language where pretty much any word can have any meaning! - A Thing of Eternity
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by Freakzilla »

Revised, clean.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by Freakzilla »

A Thing of Eternity wrote:Well, as far as the others getting up, I believe the first person to mount the worm tosses down rope.
This is covered in Chapter 42. They don't use ropes.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by Cpt. Aramsham »

In this chapter, Chani again asks Paul to tell her about the waters of Caladan, as he once dreamed she would:
"Tell me again about the waters of thy birthworld, Usul," she said.
He saw that she was trying to distract him, ease his mind of tensions before the deadly test. It was growing lighter, and he noted that some of his Fedaykin were already striking their tents.
Chapter 34 seems to be a better match for Paul's prescient dream (among other things, Paul says he saw that moment in a dream on Caladan; also, here it's daybreak, while in the dream it was nightfall), but Chani's nervousness here seems to fit better with his observation in the dream that "she's frightened but trying to hide it from me." On the other hand, neither of the scenes fit all that well with his description that: "We're . . . waiting for something . . . for me to go meet some people." Unless it's with Stilgar and the other observers of the initiation test?

Anyway, I wonder if FH conflated the two events as he was writing?
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by Freakzilla »

I can't comment more on this without spoilers. You're comparing "reality" to Paul's prescient "pre-spice" dreams on Caladan.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by Cpt. Aramsham »

Not sure what this could be a spoiler for, since the other matching event occurs in an earlier chapter.

My point is simply this: the dream Paul has at the beginning of the book is echoed by two separate passages describing completely separate events later on. While the one in Chapter 34 matches the dream better and apparently seems to be the incident he was dreaming about, the dream also seems to incorporate a couple of details from the passage in this chapter.

This could either be deliberate, in which case it's interesting to ask what FH's purpose was (there would have to be more to it than just "prescience doesn't match the future exactly"), or it could be some sort of mistake or unintentional duplication. Maybe FH hadn't quite decided where to put the "real version" of the dream, and ended up with two copies of it somehow. Or maybe he misremembered which details went with which event.

It's worth noting, I think, that there aren't that many Chani-centric chapters (or parts of chapters). That three of the main ones are linked together in this way seems significant to me, from a literary POV.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by Freakzilla »

There are examples I can think of, especially in Dune Messiah, where the reality doesn't match the vision in precise detail and Paul makes note of it.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by Cpt. Aramsham »

Sure, but that's not really the issue here. People seem to have got confused about what I was trying to say because I had to split it up over separate posts and be a bit oblique about it due to the spoiler policy on this board. What I find interesting is the two separate events that could be seen as matching the same prescient dream.
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Re: Chapter 40

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We have a spoiler policy? News to me.
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Re: Chapter 40

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In the reading group I try not to talk about later chapters.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by Naïve mind »

Cpt. Aramsham wrote:Sure, but that's not really the issue here. People seem to have got confused about what I was trying to say because I had to split it up over separate posts and be a bit oblique about it due to the spoiler policy on this board. What I find interesting is the two separate events that could be seen as matching the same prescient dream.
I argued the same in the other thread, but I still think this is indicative of Paul feeling that his struggle against the future he wants to avoid is futile. When his dream seems to happen for the first time, he pushes it away, avoids it. But then the dream imposes itself on him again. He hasn't prevented the future, just postponed it.
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Re: Chapter 40

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Do we know that the dream Paul discribes to RM Mohiam is one dream of one event? I think my point is still valid, these dreams were before Paul took the spice, much less the Water of Life.
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Re: Chapter 40

Post by Cpt. Aramsham »

Naïve mind wrote:I argued the same in the other thread, but I still think this is indicative of Paul feeling that his struggle against the future he wants to avoid is futile. When his dream seems to happen for the first time, he pushes it away, avoids it. But then the dream imposes itself on him again. He hasn't prevented the future, just postponed it.
So you're positing some force of fate that is dedicated to making sure incidental details of Paul's prescient dreams are fulfilled, to the extent that if the event doesn't play out exactly as dreamed, the missing components are going to be provided as part of some other, completely unrelated event?

This strikes me as an eccentric theory. Sure, Paul is aware of a great force of history that is pushing humanity towards jihad and himself into a Messiah role, but as I read it this refers to the combined, blind force of social and historical factors, which doesn't care a desert-mouse's ass about little details like this.

The theory also runs into problems. We know Paul's early visions were not exact – and arguably none of his visions in this book are. Is fate going to patch them all? What about this one?
And he paused, shaken by the remembered high relief imagery of a prescient vision he had experienced on Caladan. He had seen this desert. But the set of the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had disappeared into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect registry when projected onto the real scene. The vision appeared to have shifted and approached him from a different angle while he remained motionless. Idaho was with us in the vision, he remembered. But now Idaho is dead.
Is fate going to somehow contrive that Duncan Idaho is miraculously revived, just so he can stand in the desert with Paul? Preposterous! :mrgreen:
Freakzilla wrote:Do we know that the dream Paul discribes to RM Mohiam is one dream of one event?
That seems quite clear from context, yes. (Paul also tells Mohiam of another dream, separately.) Of course, we could hypothesize that in the same way that normal dreams can mix together separate events from our past, Paul's prescient dreams could mix together separate events from his future. That's speculating pretty far beyond the text, though.
I think my point is still valid, these dreams were before Paul took the spice, much less the Water of Life.
We still seem to be talking at cross purposes. Of course there are ways to explain this within the Dune universe. For example, the simplest explanation is to say that the dream was a vision of the first event (with the normal variation in how it actually played out) and the second was an unrelated incident that just happened to resemble it.

But you have to admit that in that case, it's an odd thing for FH to put into the book. If you're writing a novel that features prophetic dreams as evidence of prescient talent, are you also going to throw in dreams that just happen to come true? So if he did it deliberately, I'm interested in asking WHY he did it. And if it wasn't something he specifically intended, how did it end up this way?
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Re: Chapter 40

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Cpt. Aramsham wrote:So you're positing some force of fate that is dedicated to making sure incidental details of Paul's prescient dreams are fulfilled, to the extent that if the event doesn't play out exactly as dreamed, the missing components are going to be provided as part of some other, completely unrelated event?
You've had so much fun dissecting that theory that I almost feel regret at saying 'no' :) I'm suggesting the author used it as an analogy, a miniature version of the greater worries that plague Paul.

And there's no reason to inject fate here; Chani's question returns because she's interested in Paul, and curious about his origins; the root causes aren't taken away.
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