Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

And Muad'Dib stood before them, and he said: "Though we deem the captive dead,
yet does she live. For her seed is my seed and her voice is my voice. And she
sees unto the farthest reaches of possibility. Yea, unto the vale of the
unknowable does she see because of me."
-from "Arrakis Awakening" by the Princess Irulan

The Baron is summoned before the Emperor who berates him for mishandling this affair. He presents him with Alia and informs him that this is the daughter of Duke Leto and sister of Paul-Muad’dib. Alia terrorizes Reverend Mother Mohiam through Other Memory and the Emperor asks her if she can use T-P to tell her brother to surrender on threat of her life. She says she can’t but wouldn’t. The room is rocked by an explosion outside and the shield goes down, through a hole in the wall they can see outside to a battle where Fremen leap from a wall of approaching sandworms. Alia kills the Baron with a Gom Jabbar and runs out into the battle to find a knife and kill the wounded. The Emperor’s Sardaukar charge out into the battle while his personal guard herd him through the door into the ship. He plans to fall back into space and regroup but is informed that they have shot the nose off their ship. The Guild agents tell him they cannot see the outcome but neither can Muad’dib. The Emperor tells Mohiam they must plan treachery and she summons Count Fenring.

But one question that ever haunt me is: Why Alia could read Mohiam thoughts at the Emperor scene (end of Dune)? The Emperor ask her if it's Telepathy, but Mohiam make us believe the answer it's not, that it's another "thing". And for me, that other thing is probably the Ancestral Memories.

I always thought that scene as a affirmative point about the Mohiam being grandmother of Alia.

"That child is an abomination!" the old woman said. "Her mother deserves a punishment greater than anything in history. Death! It cannot come too quickly for that child or for the one who spawned her!" The old woman pointed a finger at Alia. "Get out of my mind!"

"T-P?" the Emperor whispered. He snapped his attention back to Alia. "By the Great Mother!"

"You don't understand. Majesty," the old woman said. "Not telepathy. She's in my mind. She's like the ones before me, the ones who gave me their memories. She stands in my mind! She cannot be there, but she is!"

...

"You babble, old woman," Alia said. "You don't know how it was, yet you rattle on like a purblind fool." Alia closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and held it.

The old Reverend Mother groaned and staggered.

Alia opened her eyes. "That is how it was," she said. "A cosmic accident...and you played your part in it."

The Reverend Mother held out both hands, palms pushing the air toward Alia.

"What is happening here?" the Emperor demanded. "Child, can you truly project your thoughts into the mind of another?"

"That's not how it is at all," Alia said. "Unless I'm born as you, I cannot think as you."

Both Mohiam and Alia deny that it is telepathy, but that's certainly what it seems like.

I think Mohiam's memory reference is ambiguous: she could be talking about Other (Shared) Memory rather than just Ancestral Memories.

Alia chides her because she does not yet know the details of Alia's birth. So Alia "sends" her the knowledge. That's fairly obvious from the part where she closes her eyes and holds her breath (=concentrating), given Mohiam's reaction immediately afterwards.

How about this for an explanation? We know that Alia has weird powers and that she can project her thoughts/words into the future where Paul later sees them. What if she can also project them into the past? That's how she can seem to stand among the others-in-memory in Mohiam's mind. She's not sending her thoughts into Mohiam's mind directly (therefore not T-P), but placing them in the past.

A little potential for paradox (something placed in the past should always have been there in Other Memory), but it kinda works. And it removes the need to posit Mohiam as mother or grandmother. (Which really doesn't explain anything either way: Alia is a descendent and wouldn't be in Mohiam's Ancestral Memory anyway.)

This has a very simple answer.

RM Mohiam was prescient.

Presently, the old woman muttered: "What's done is done."
"I vowed never to regret my decision," Jessica said.
"How noble," the Reverend Mother sneered. "No regrets. We shall see when
you're a fugitive with a price on your head and every man's hand turned against
you to seek your life and the life of your son."
Jessica paled. "Is there no alternative?"
"Alternative? A Bene Gesserit should ask that?"
"I ask only what you see in the future with your superior abilities."
"I see in the future what I've seen in the past. You well know the pattern
of our affairs, Jessica. The race knows its own mortality and fears stagnation
of its heredity. It's in the bloodstream -- the urge to mingle genetic strains
without plan. The Imperium, the CHOAM Company, all the Great Houses, they are
but bits of flotsam in the path of the flood."
"CHOAM," Jessica muttered. "I suppose it's already decided how they'll
redivide the spoils of Arrakis."
"What is CHOAM but the weather vane of our times," the old woman said. "The
Emperor and his friends now command fifty-nine point six-five per cent of the
CHOAM directorship's votes. Certainly they smell profits, and likely as others
smell those same profits his voting strength will increase. This is the pattern
of history, girl."
"That's certainly what I need right now," Jessica said. "A review of
history."
"Don't be facetious, girl! You know as well as I do what forces surround us.
We've a three-point civilization: the Imperial Household balanced against the
Federated Great Houses of the Landsraad, and between them, the Guild with its
damnable monopoly on interstellar transport. In politics, the tripod is the most
unstable of all structures. It'd be bad enough without the complication of a
feudal trade culture which turns its back on most science."
Jessica spoke bitterly: "Chips in the path of the flood -- and this chip
here, this is the Duke Leto, and this one's his son, and this one's --"
"Oh, shut up, girl. You entered this with full knowledge of the delicate
edge you walked."
" 'I am Bene Gesserit: I exist only to serve,' " Jessica quoted.

Um ... not quite following you here.

What is she seeing in the future that makes it seem Alia is in her mind?

D'uh.

But what is there in that passage to suggest that it wasn't some form of telepathy they used? There is no mention of Paul looking into the future as there is with Alia's message. (There is mention of Paul seeing a flood of his male ancestral memory.) And besides, his prescience had failed him at that point, no?

I think there's a description somewhere of how Paul and Alia did it, I'll have to look...

Lisan Al-Gaib wrote:But one question that ever haunt me is: Why Alia could read Mohiam thoughts at the Emperor scene (end of Dune)? The Emperor ask her if it's Telepathy, but Mohiam make us believe the answer it's not, that it's another "thing". And for me, that other thing is probably the Ancestral Memories.

I always thought that scene as a affirmative point about the Mohiam being grandmother of Alia.

As a direct debunking of this, skipping for now all the rest of the discussion, it is most certainly not due to OM even if Mohiam were an ancestor. Mohiam sees Alia like her shared reverend mothers and her ancestors, but knows she can't be there because she is neither shared nor an ancestor. If Alia were descended from Mohiam and reading her OM, then Mohiam herself would have no idea, she wouldn't have Alia in her head. So it is not OM.

My own suggestion: a weird kind of Sharing? Or just telepathy I mean, that's what sharing basically is anyway.

And maybe it belongs in another chapter, but since the discussion about it is here, do we really think Mohiam is prescient? I always thought those abilities referred to her being a reverend mother and having more insight into the world than Jessica.

Re-numbered!