Summary
Chapter 1
Paul wakes up just before nightfall with the thought: “Now Harkonnen shall kill Harkonnen.” Their stilltent has been sanded in, but Paul digs them out. Jessica notes that she now lives in her son’s orbit. They see a beautiful sunset punctuated by pillars of fire—jetflares and lasguns—in the distant battle, plus Harkonnen ships killing everything that moves nearby. As they prepare to leave, ornithopters appear above them.
Chapter 2
Just before dawn, Thufir Hawat meets with a mysterious Fremen after he’s received news of House Atreides' fall. He’s amazed by the size and cost of the attack—more than 2,000 ships, 100+ brigades, over 50 years of spice income for all of Arrakis. Hawat tries to negotiate for help with the Fremen, but there’s a communication disconnect. He learns that the Fremen defeated a Sardaukar legion, captured an artillery gun, and took three Sardaukar captive—all while losing only two Fremen. When an Atreides man dies, Hawat gives the Fremen the corpse so they can take his water. This joins their tribes with a water bond, though the Atreides men don’t like it. The Fremen uses a strange bat companion to send a message to other Fremen, who competently capture a ’thopter from Sardaukar, then use it in a suicidal dive to take out 300+ other Sardaukar in a carrier. However, Sardaukar attack Hawat and his companions, and Hawat is hit by a stunner.
Chapter 3
The ’thopters over Paul and Jessica contain Idaho, Kynes, and other Fremen. Idaho left a shield on high power, and the Harkonnen lasguns hit it, causing an enormous subatomic fusion explosion—the Harkonnens will start thinking twice about using lasguns so casually in the desert. Kynes takes them to one of the secret Imperial Ecological Testing Stations, and the Fremen call him Liet (the one Hawat thought was the Fremen god). Paul plans to blackmail the Emperor, threatening to tell the Great Houses what happened on Arrakis, which would result in universal warfare—chaos. He pledges his loyalty to Kynes in exchange for Kynes’s, and then they’re attacked by Sardaukar (in Harkonnen uniform) who kill Idaho. Kynes gives them instructions on how to escape through a storm, then leaves alone. Paul pilots them through the sandstorm, and both Jessica and Paul use the Bene Gesserit litany to stay calm.
Chapter 4
Iakin Nefud reports to the Baron that Jessica and Paul are presumed dead in a sandstorm, and Sardaukar captured Thufir Hawat. The Baron develops a plan to woo Hawat into serving the Harkonnens (including poisoning him). The Baron gives his nephew, a giant man called Beast Rabban, complete control over Arrakis, with the secret agenda of making everyone on Arrakis hate Rabban so they’ll welcome the Baron’s real choice to lead: his other nephew, Feyd-Rautha.
Chapter 5
Paul lands the ’thopter and feels himself on the verge of a revelation, largely thanks to spice, a near-death experience, and the litany. He and Jessica sprint toward the rock formations, narrowly avoiding a worm that arrives to eat the ’thopter.
They cross the desert, and when Jessica is caught in a sandslide, Paul saves her but loses their Fremkit, the pack of supplies required to survive. He alters the paracompass, using spice and some of his stillsuit’s water to create foam, which holds the sand long enough for them to retrieve the Fremkit. They watch a sandworm cross the desert, then enter the stilltent, and Jessica tells Paul they’ll resume his lessons, starting with a review of the musculature of the hand.
Chapter 6
Gurney Halleck meets the smuggler Tuek’s son, Staban Tuek, who saved all 74 of Gurney's crew—but Staban won’t make a move against the Harkonnens. Gurney decides to stay on Arrakis for as long as Rabban is here (he has a personal grudge against Rabban, who killed his family and gave him a facial scar), and he pledges his sword to Staban. Gurney goes to his men, and he performs a song on his baliset to comfort one of them as he dies. Now there are only 73 of them.
Chapter 7
Paul and Jessica wake up as the sun sets over the desert, strike camp, set off a thumper, and leave. Paul, with “both prescient memory and real memory,” understands how Fremen cross the desert, and he teaches Jessica to walk without rhythm to avoid worms. They’re successful until they hit drum sand, and they have to sprint to avoid a sandworm. Paul observes the worm with hyper-acute senses until it’s drawn away by someone else’s thumper. They follow man-made markers up carved steps into the mountain, where they find a beautiful sanctuary of desert plants—and are surrounded by Fremen. Paul prepares to fight, but he is currently in “blind time, no future he had seen”—and he feels the edge of fear.
Chapter 8
Without a stillsuit or water, covered in dry blood, Liet-Kynes walks across the desert where he was abandoned by Harkonnens to die. He knows he’s semi-delirious, but he can’t stop here—he can smell the almost-exploded pre-spice beneath the sand, something not even Fremen understand. His dead father (Pardot Kynes, planetologist of Arrakis before him) speaks to Kynes, lecturing him on ecology and his plans for Arrakis. Flesh-eating birds surround Kynes as his father talks about a connection between the worms and the spice. The pre-spice beneath Kynes explodes, and as Arrakis kills him, Kynes knows that his father and all the other scientists were wrong: the most persistent principles in the universe are accident and error, which even hawks can appreciate.
Chapter 9
Paul realizes the Fremen surrounding him and Jessica are led by Stilgar, leader of the sietch Duncan Idaho partially joined. Stilgar wants to keep Paul safe, and perhaps even Jessica, because of a message (from Liet-Kynes, though Paul doesn't know that) saying they will have value to the Fremen. A different man, Jamis, disagrees, and Jessica attacks the Fremen quickly, subduing Stilgar and allowing Paul to escape. This proves Jessica’s worth, as she knows “the weirding way”—an outworlder who can fight well enough to subdue an armed Fremen. She will teach the Fremen the weirding way, and the Fremen will protect her and Paul. Paul, hiding higher in the mountain, meets Chani, daughter of Liet, the young Fremen woman he has seen in his dreams. The band of 40 Fremen—now 42, with Jessica and Paul—leave for Sietch Tabr, and Jessica is elated to find an entire culture trained to military order, prepared for Paul by the Missionaria Protectiva.
Chapter 10
Paul is led to the Cave of Ridges, where Stilgar talks to Jessica about the organization of Fremen culture. He confirms what Paul deduced: The Fremen bribe the Guild with huge amounts of spice so that there are no satellites collecting data on Arrakis. This is so the Fremen can hide the fact they’ve been slowly changing the surface of Arrakis, in line with the plan Kynes’s hallucinated father explained as Kynes died. Stilgar also discusses whether he and Jessica should enter into a romantic/sexual relationship (“mate”) to relieve the power struggle between them, and he advises against it, instead mentioning that their Reverend Mother is old. Jessica realizes he’s looking for a sign from her, and she uses her Bene Gesserit training to find adab, “the demanding memory that comes upon you of itself.” She recites an appropriate verse, and Stilgar recognizes her as the prophesied one, should Shai-Hulud allow it.
Paul, hearing his mother, has another “terrible purpose” moment of awareness of all things. He sees a “time nexus” within this cave, where the smallest choices determine what will happen across the known universe—and most of these consequence-lines show Paul his own dead body, bleeding from a knife wound.
Analysis
The first chapter of Book 2 has a traditional sci-fi battle with ships and big explosions, the only one in the book (the final battle is portrayed as Fremen fighters breaching the Emperor's stronghold). However, the fight is viewed from a distance and described poetically, so Herbert still distances himself from the "hard tech" style that has come to dominate the science fiction genre. It also includes Paul's prediction: "Now Harkonnen shall kill Harkonnen." This is prescient in a few ways. House Harkonnen does turn on itself. After the Arrakis Affair, Feyd-Rautha begins scheming to kill the Baron, and he almost succeeds in an assassination attempt. The Baron abandons Rabban, leaving him to fail and die on Arrakis. More accurately, though, Paul is acknowledging his Harkonnen heritage, and he's right: by the end of the book, he will kill Feyd-Rautha (his mother's cousin) shortly after his sister, Alia, kills the Baron (their grandfather). Harkonnen shall kill Harkonnen.
The Fremen skill in battle is obvious from the start of Book 2. The Sardaukar killed House Atreides, but Fremen easily kill Sardaukar. The "desert power" Duke Leto was looking for is definitely there, and when Kynes betrays the Harkonnens to help Paul escape to the Fremen, Paul is given full access to that power.
Chapter 3 ends with the full text of the Bene Gesserit litany against fear. Jessica uses it but struggles to remain calm nonetheless; after failing, she hears Paul recite the entire litany:
"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."
Where Jessica now is weak, Paul is strong, using the same training but with better results. The placement of this moment at the end of the chapter implies that Jessica is calmed and quieted by her son's use of the litany, without explicitly telling the reader either way. Herbert likely ends with the litany so that it sticks in the reader's mind, especially since the next chapter makes a large jump straight to (as it turns out, misleading) dialogue: "They are dead."
At the end of Chapter 7, Paul experiences what he'll later call the "real-now" for the first time since expanding his awareness. In life-or-death situations, Paul's understanding of the future sometimes doesn't help him. These "blind time" moments can actually be overwhelming and cause fear themselves, like before Paul's fight with Jamis in the next section. At the end of Chapter 10, Paul has what's essentially the opposite. He sees a "time nexus," which is unlike "blind time" in the sense that he's aware of nearly infinite consequence-lines, but it's like "blind time" in the sense that the most minuscule of choices will vastly change the outcome. He ends on a vision of his body bleeding from a knife wound, but this vision doesn't come to pass in Dune.
Liet-Kynes is killed by a pre-spice explosion, which occurs when a young sandworm's excretions mix with water. This rises to the surface in an explosion, where it becomes spice—water and sandworms are required to make spice, which perhaps no one else in the universe knows at this point. His slow descent into delirium makes for a somewhat convoluted chapter, but Kynes's hallucinations give Herbert the opportunity to explain some of the denser ecological ideas behind changing Arrakis. Kynes's father believed that a Hero would ruin this plan, but as he dies, Kynes actually believes that Paul will help turn Arrakis into paradise.
