Jᴀᴄᴜʀᴜᴛᴜ - Tʜᴇ Cᴀsᴛ Oᴜᴛ

I give you the desert chameleon, whose ability to blend itself into the background tells you all you need to know about the roots of ecology and the foundations of a personal identity.
-Book of Diatribes from the Hayt Chronicle

Leto and Ghanima sit outside Sietch Tabr. Leto is playing a baliset sent to him on his fifth birthday by Gurney Halleck. Leto comments that the children seldom find sandtrout around there anymore and that the ecological transformation is accelerating. His inner personas are begining to become restless in his head, especially at night. He also has his father's prescient memories superimposed over everything. Leto tells Ghanima that the sandtrout were brought from somewhere else, that once Dune was a wet planet. More importantly, the sandtrout are dissappearing now that Dune is being transformed back into a wet planet and once the sandtrout go, so do the worms, and the spice. The twins want to warn the Fremen but they fear Alia will deny it and no one will believe them. Their only hope is to convince Stilgar. Leto tells Ghanima that he's been having prescient dreams. He'd dreamed that Jessica would be delayed at Arrakeen and about himself being encased in armor and going to Jacurutu. Leto says he much confront the man called The Preacher, who they think is Paul. Leto doesn't like the things he'll do in the future and for the first time he understands Paul. Danger and The Preacher come from Jacurutu, a place who's inhabitants had been killed by the Fremen and made taboo. They both fear abomination.

Just past thru this chapter in COD reread, really grabbed me this time around. SO much floating around in this chapter.. Prescience, the Memory's, sandtrout.. wow.

I dont know why but I sat and pondered for a long while how it might be so incredibly addictive to listen and get lost in all those memories and ancient knowledge. The treasures( languages, visuals, places, people, events) revealed would seem to leave you lost and never want to return to your own time and place.

You could just wander and wander and wander thru it. Really stirring.

Wondered what language is this from the statement in chapter:
Nous avons change tout cela " we have altered all of that"

And

Oublier je ne puis, " I cannot forget"

Isn't it French?

Yes it is.

I asked to be sure because in the middle of the paragraph it says "easily falling into one of the ancient tongues he and Ghanima employ in private." Didn't know if it was some combo of languages.

Yup, I'm cool with that.

Leto says he knows what happened to Dune:

The sandtrout was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then.

Is this purely from OM? If so, does this mean his fremen ancestors arrived on Arrakis before it became a desert planet?

just to mention it,

Oublier je ne puis

is an old French turn of phrase, one reminiscent of the Chanson de Geste, sort of a troubadour song(ha I can hear a journeyman gloating with Jongleurs galore )

dunaddict wrote:Leto says he knows what happened to Dune:

The sandtrout was introduced here from some other place. This was a wet planet then.

Is this purely from OM? If so, does this mean his fremen ancestors arrived on Arrakis before it became a desert planet?

It could be from archaeological evidence rather than direct observation, and even if it was observed it does not require that it was a Freman who seen it. You got it, I have nothing but uncertainty to add here.

inhuien wrote:and even if it was observed it does not require that it was a Freman who seen it

Agree; there's nothing says the Fremen never intermarried with earlier arrivals on the planet.

It couldn't have been after the Fremen arrived, because they have all that history memorized (their wanderings before getting to Dune) and this has the vibe of something lost to history.

It could have been a prescient vision of the past or oM of a non-Fremen ancestor.

Explain to me how that "prescient vision of the past" stuff works again. (Wouldn't that be "postscience"? )

SandChigger wrote:Explain to me how that "prescient vision of the past" stuff works again. (Wouldn't that be "postscience"? )

According to FH, there is no separation between past, present and future for the oracle.

Maybe prescient was a poor choice of words.

However, I'd lean towards OM since Leto hadn't yet taken the spice trance and didn't have his full range of prescience.

Revised, cleaned.

What is important about Leto's sandtrout comments is not that they come from elsewhere but that that Arrakis was once a wet planet and the sandtrout encase the water to protect the sandworms. The ecological transformation will kill the worms and there will be no more spice.

I disagree, I think it is important that the sandtrout come from another planet. There's nothing I know of in the rest of the Chronicle that sheds any more light on the origin of the sandworm-cycle, but it does imply that there is (or was) another planet that could produce spice and that the lifeforms were somehow then transplanted to Dune. The implications of that are pretty massive. It would likely have to be a planet outside the Imperium (there were attempts to start a new spice planet and its entirely to be expected that the Empire, all the Houses, and the Guild not least would have scoured every known planet to the maximum of their capabilities to find another source. All of those attempts failed (until post-GeoD anyway) as we are told time and again that Arrakis is the only source for spice).
Then there's the question of how the sandtrout ever got to Dune.
There are plenty of apocryphal solutions that I can think of but I don't know of any other clues that FH gives (I may be missing some- I'm on my first re-read in 4 years so not everything is fresh).
FH most likely didn't think this was a question worth delving into- and to that degree I agree (ugh, terrible word choice) with Freak that it is not important. To the story FH is telling and the message he wants the reader to digest in Children, this is not an important concept. But it is a very interesting one w/ a whole host of implications.

It is very interesting and of course we'd all like to know all about where they came from and how they got there. Unfortunately we'll never know.

As I see it there's only a couple of ways this could have gone down. One is they were transported there accidentally, like rats on a ship. Another is they being trout/sandworms had a foot hold on another planet, some melange would have been produced but the ecosystem was to aggressive for them to flourish. A merchant seen the opportunity for profit and looked for a more placid planet where they could dominate. Dune...Arrakis...Desert Planet.

Leto does say that

They proliferated beyond the capability of existing ecosystems to deal with them.

Based on the general themes throughout the rest of the Chronicles about ecology and balance this seems to imply that the sandtrout/sandworm cycle may have originally come from a planet where they had more natural predators and had not overrun the environment. Perhaps somewhere more akin to GeoD's Arrakis where the worms existed in a small desert area and were not capable of spreading out beyond it, only not enforced by an outside force but by a more natural balance.

Is there anything in the Chronicle about the discovery of Arrakis? ie was it discovered by the Imperium in a desert-ified state? I think there is but I don't recall the passages and don't have all my books handy. If it was, then it would imply that the worms/trout were brought to Arrakis sometime before it was found by the Imperium.

I'm personally a fan of the idea that some humans transported them (possibly accidentally as you mentioned) from their homeworld sometime before the Guild. There would have been a lot of lost ships during that time (I believe there were space-fold capable ships before Navigators and that the losses were just really, really massive). Both the original homeworld of the worms and Arrakis might have been found by pre-Guild humans and any record of these earlier explorations lost at some point. This last paragraph is, of course, pure conjecture. As Freak mentioned, we're never going to know the answer to this.
Honestly though, I'm surprised BH/KJA didn't pick up this thread and provide some nonsensical "answer" for it like the sandtrout are bits of uber-Duncan that traveled backwards in time.

inhuien wrote:As I see it there's only a couple of ways this could have gone down. One is they were transported there accidentally, like rats on a ship. Another is they being trout/sandworms had a foot hold on another planet, some melange would have been produced but the ecosystem was to aggressive for them to flourish. A merchant seen the opportunity for profit and looked for a more placid planet where they could dominate. Dune...Arrakis...Desert Planet.

Yeah - but who was the "merchant"? An Alien?

That's the important question.

Arrakis was once watery - good to point out - and Mars was once watery, too.

But if Humanity only discovered Spice and the Worms on Arrakis when desertification had completely overhauled the ecosystem - then that means when the Worms were transplanted to Dune, it was by an Extraterrestrial species.

(Don't get any ideas, Brian/Kevin! )

Just off the top of my head, I don't think it was ETs, Leto II would have no memory of that.

inhuien wrote:Just off the top of my head, I don't think it was ETs, Leto II would have no memory of that.

Well I actually didn't read your final post when writing my last one, so I didn't see that we had come to similar conclusions, but in retrospect I do think your particular theory about Humans accidentally transplanting them is possible.

If it was ET's though, I don't think Leto would be able to remember them through OM anyway, since they could have dropped the worms off and left, before any Humans ventured there.

It does make one think, though.

They didn't transplant worms, they transplanted sandtrout.

What if, the sandtrout were fish on another planet's ocean and the sand plankton were native in the Arrakeen oceans and they formed a symbiosis...