Summary
Chapter 13
The Duke speaks to Hawat alone about a potential raid on Giedi Prime to destroy the Baron Harkonnen’s spice reserves. Hawat suspects that Lady Jessica is the traitor, but the Duke doesn’t believe it, even when Hawat points out that no one knows Jessica’s parentage—her loyalty might be to House Harkonnen; for all they know, she might even be Harkonnen herself. The Duke returns to his son, now asleep in the conference room, and watches a beautiful sunrise…and then the dew harvesters. Arrakis could be beautiful or hideous.
Chapter 14
Duke Leto explains to Paul that he has to pretend to distrust Lady Jessica, even to her face; he’s telling Paul the truth just in case something happens to him. The Duke is melancholy, musing on propaganda and leadership, saying he’ll have Paul trained in guerrilla tactics. Paul hasn’t seen his father so fatalist. They wait for the ecologist.
Chapter 15
Dr. Kynes (who prefers "planetologist," not ecologist) is shaken by his first encounter with the Atreides, whom he's been ordered to betray. Paul fits the prophecy so precisely. The chapter then goes back and recounts the meeting: Kynes meets the Duke and Paul at an ornithopter. Paul put his stillsuit on perfectly, and Kynes is amazed he's even fitted the ankle straps in the manner of the Fremen. Paul privately observes the power of command about Kynes; the Duke privately observes that Kynes has “gone native.” Kynes tells them about various things, at times reluctantly—stillsuits; the Imperial Bases; plant life; spice mining; the sandworms’ relationship to spice. Through it all, Paul’s truthsense tells him that Kynes is telling lies and half-truths. Kynes is troubled by the incisiveness and number of Paul’s questions.
As they near the crawler harvesting spice, the Duke spots wormsign, indicating that a sandworm is on its way to the crawler—worms always come. Their ’thopter alerts the ground crew, who prepare to evacuate the crawler using a carryall. The carryall doesn’t appear, though, so the Duke evacuates the crew personally, abandoning the crawler and a large load of spice, earning Kynes’s grudging admiration. In the evacuation, they watch firsthand as the sandworm swallows the crawler with a mouth over 240 meters wide. Paul sees two men still on the ground and correctly deduces that they’re Fremen.
Chapter 16
Before a lavish meal, the Duke gets rid of a Harkonnen tradition in which water is wasted and then mockingly delivered to the poor as dirty wet rags to fight over. Instead, any beggar who comes during the feast will get a full cup of water. Jessica has already started the party, entertaining a diverse group of powerful people on Arrakis, from a Guild representative to an escort-service owner who is secretly a smuggler. The political discourse is tense at times. Dr. Kynes is amazed by Jessica. He begins to believe in the prophecy, asking if she brings “the shortening of the way” (the literal translation of Kwisatz Haderach). Duke Leto behaves erratically, giving a strange toast, and Jessica and Paul observe the diverse reactions among the crowd, from embarrassment to sly disobedience on Kynes’s part. Internally, Kynes reveals that despite being Justice of the Change, he was ordered to overlook events like the carryall’s disappearance earlier.
Remembering a Bene Gesserit lesson on espionage, Jessica realizes that the Guild Bank representative is a secret Harkonnen agent; Paul, noticing his mother’s attention to the Guild rep, has an ominous conversation with him about birds on Arrakis evolving to drink blood. Jessica realizes that the Guild rep fears Kynes—and that Kynes is a casual killer. She and Paul also learn by “registering” Kynes and reading his truthfulness that there are vast secret reserves of water on Arrakis.
The Duke is called away for a security issue, so Paul runs the rest of dinner, behaving in a forward, confident way that makes Jessica proud, though she wishes he didn’t boast—especially when the Duke sends a coded message that they found Harkonnen agents sneaking in lasguns. Lasguns cause large, unpredictable explosions when they interact with shields, so they’re rarely used nowadays—the Harkonnens must be confident that shields will be down at some point.
Chapter 17
Jessica is awoken by a commotion she fears is the Harkonnen attack, but it’s just Duncan Idaho, drunk and rowdy after “walking one of the escorts home.” He accuses Jessica of being a Harkonnen spy, and she understands that Thufir Hawat must be the source of these rumors. She summons Hawat, and they have a tense conversation. Hawat doesn’t trust her at all, and Jessica uses the Voice on him, then explains that the Bene Gesserit hide their powers so they can serve humanity without being hunted and mistrusted. He considers killing her but doesn’t; Jessica expects to see some proper action now.
Chapter 18
Two days after the dinner, the Duke decides he should have just taken Jessica into his confidence from the start, instead of allowing suspicion between her and Hawat. As he walks to see her, he finds the smuggler from dinner, Tuek, recently murdered, then the Shadeout Mapes as she dies. He’s hit by a paralyzing dart and realizes that Yueh is the traitor—his Imperial Conditioning has been overridden by his desire to kill the Baron Harkonnen. Dr. Yueh prepares to replace one of the Duke’s teeth with a duplicate that will release poison gas so the Duke can kill the Baron (and himself), and says that in exchange he’ll save Paul and Jessica. The Duke falls unconscious.
Chapter 19
Jessica awakes tied and gagged in front of the Baron Harkonnen and realizes that Yueh must have betrayed them. The Baron explains that his Mentat, Piter de Vries, thinks that he wants her, but he actually wants power. He offers Piter a choice between Jessica and ruling Arrakis, and Piter chooses Arrakis. Piter commands some guards, including a deaf man immune to Jessica’s Voice, to take Jessica and Paul and abandon them in the desert—a plan recommended by Yueh. The Harkonnen agents take Jessica and Paul out into the desert in a ’thopter, where they prepare to rape Jessica before they abandon them. Paul stops them with the Voice, and he and Jessica get free, with Paul killing a guard in the process. They find supplies secretly left for them by Yueh, then run from pursuing Harkonnens.
Chapter 20
Before Jessica and Paul are put onto the ’thopter, Yueh waits with the Duke’s unconscious body, and he’s found by a Sardaukar warrior in Harkonnen uniform. The Sardaukar takes the Duke, and Yueh goes to prep the ’thopter for Paul, where he hides a Fremkit and the Duke’s signet ring. He sees the date palms have all been burned. Soon he will face the Baron.
Chapter 21
The Baron watches as House Atreides’ last fighters are trapped in caves by explosive artillery. He speaks to Yueh, who can tell from the Baron’s behavior that Wanna is indeed dead. Piter kills Yueh, but Yueh is defiant until the last moment, ruining the Baron’s mood for his long-envisioned meeting with the Duke (who’s still paralyzed). Piter reports that Jessica and Paul seem to have disappeared in the desert, and the Baron is furious that so many things are still unfinished. The Duke slowly awakens as the Baron eats, and he remembers the poison pill Yueh put in his mouth. As the Baron and Piter threaten to torture him, the Duke bites down, and the gas kills him and Piter; the Baron survives thanks to his shield and some lucky reflexes. A Sardaukar representative insists on seeing the scene, and the Baron is annoyed that the Emperor will know about his mistakes. At least the Emperor doesn’t know about the Atreides raid on Giedi Prime—the Harkonnen spice reserves have been destroyed. The Baron orders for food and a diversion (a drugged young boy he bought who looks a lot like Paul Atreides).
Chapter 22
At night, Paul and Jessica wait in a stilltent for Duncan Idaho to return. Paul feels a change in his awareness that began tonight, when Idaho landed a ’thopter to save them: “he saw with sharpened clarity every circumstance and occurrence around him.” He sees that his understanding of events has surpassed Jessica’s by a huge degree. He experiences the feeling of his father's death as just another fact to be computed. This change scares Jessica, especially when Paul explains that they have to leave soon, with or without Idaho, and get to the Fremen, who are paying the Guild to keep their secret: Arrakis has a ton of water. Paul feels like he’s a freak and desperately wishes he could mourn his father. He tells Jessica the Duke’s final message: he never mistrusted her; he loved her; his one regret was that he never married her. Jessica cries.
Paul’s awareness expands again, and he’s able to sense the future, but this doesn’t make the empty place inside of him any easier to bear. He yells at Jessica, then tells her about his waking prophetic dream: she will give birth to his sister on Arrakis; they will find a home among the Fremen; Jessica herself is the daughter of the Baron Harkonnen; he isn’t the Kwisatz Haderach, but something unexpected, and the Bene Gesserit won’t learn about him until it’s too late. He sees two futures—one where he confronts his grandfather the Baron, and the other with a warrior religion that spreads across the universe like fire. He will be called Muad’Dib, “The One Who Points the Way,” and now he feels like he can finally mourn his father. He feels tears coursing down his cheeks.
Analysis
Things are coming to a head as far as the plot to destroy House Atreides goes. Spice-collecting equipment on Arrakis is failing, Harkonnen agents are everywhere, and now they're sneaking in lasguns for some kind of final showdown. Baron Harkonnen was right: Thufir Hawat thinks Jessica is the traitor, and even the Duke is pretending to distrust her. As things draw to an end for Duke Leto, Herbert really plays up his goodness. Leto is generous to the poor people of Arrakis, giving each one a full cup of water, and he really loves Paul and Jessica. Some chapters begin with quotes and historical records about him, explaining that even the Emperor admired and respected the Duke, and perhaps wished he didn't have to kill him.
However, this section isn't just about the end of House Atreides—it also serves as an introduction to what will come after House Atreides falls. With the introduction of the planetologist Dr. Kynes, Paul begins to consider ecology, the relationship between environment and organism. He intuitively understands a lot about Arrakis, which makes Dr. Kynes in turn consider that the Fremen prophecy of the Lisan al-Gaib might actually be real. The things Paul understands, though, are thanks to his training and excellent memory—his combination of truthsense and logic makes him seem like the prophesied one to Dr. Kynes, but at this point he's just a clever young man with some prescient dreams.
The mystery of water on Arrakis is partially solved in Chapter 16, when Paul and Jessica both realize Kynes knows about secret reserves of water on Arrakis. Though there isn't really a big "reveal" after this, Paul and Jessica do eventually see the water the Fremen have collected. The Fremen are using water to change the landscape of Dune, and they also use it to drown makers—sandworms—to make the Water of Life from their final breath. Dr. Kynes knows this, because it's actually his plan. By not telling Paul and Jessica about it, he gives them just enough information that they can use their training and instincts to insert themselves among the Fremen as the "prophesied ones."
Paul comes into his powers at the end of Book 1, and his understanding of what's going on surpasses Jessica's. The power dynamic between them shifts; Paul used to be honest and gentle with his mother, but at the end of this section he lashes out at her. His lack of feelings about his father's death can be read as a delayed grief reaction, or it could be some facet of his Mentat training, judging from vocabulary like "computed." Paul will come to realize that this expansion of his awareness is actually thanks to a large intake of spice when he entered the desert. Spice is highly addictive, and Paul knows he and his mother are already dependent on it. Spice also allows some people to gain prescience, which is why it's so valuable to the Guild and Mentats. With Paul's Mentat and Bene Gesserit training, even a moderate amount of spice was enough to make him one of the most hyperaware humans in the universe. (His claim that he isn't the Kwisatz Haderach is debatably true, especially in the context of sequels. Looking strictly at Dune, Paul will come to believe that he is the Kwisatz Haderach, and this will be widely accepted as true.)
One of the most structurally interesting parts of this section is the order of Chapter 19 and Chapter 20. We see Jessica and Paul's complete escape in the 'thopter before Yueh prepares the 'thopter. This allows for a bit of suspense, as the reader discovers Yueh's assistance alongside Paul and Jessica. If the reader was shown exactly what Yueh set up to help them, Paul and Jessica's escape would be less interesting, and the reader would be distanced from Paul and Jessica, instead of discovering alongside them. Most of Dune functions without suspense, as characters discuss what will happen before it happens, so moments like this should be analyzed for what Herbert is trying to set up for the reader.
