Report on Alia Atreides

The Dune Encyclopedia

This article or section refers to elements that appear exclusively in The Dune Encyclopedia.

This Report was assembled from reports to the Bene Gesserit/DE hierarchy, sent by spies established to look upon Alia Atreides/DE and her possible nature as an Abomination/DE. The Bene Gesserit Judiciary Council condemned Alia as an "Abomination to be Abhorred" in 10211.

Her mother, Lady Jessica Atreides/DE, in vain made vigorous attempts to change the condemning tone of the final reports, which was her last act of involvement with the Sisterhood.

Content

"Had the Lady Jessica arranged the birth order of her child as she was supposed to do, the question of Abomination would never, however innocently, have arisen. The fetus she was carrying in 10191 was to have been male, not female."

―{{{2}}}

"Much has been made of the effect her isolated position had in shaping Alia's destiny. It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it was her pattern to choose isolation. Even Lady Jessica recalls times from her daughter's childhood in Sietch Tabr when Alia took herself off to the desert, away from her companions, in order to listen to her voices within.
Such instances occurred with increasing frequency as Alia grew older until, as reported by Princess Irulan, she absented herself from her brother and the rest of the Court whenever her presence was not commanded. Following her elevation to the Regency, the public record indicates that she was unavailable except for official duties, such as greeting pilgrims and sitting in judgment of cases brought to her for trial.
During the same years in which she held herself aloof from family and friends, Alia indulged in massive doses of melange, ostensibly for the purpose of broadening her prescient vision. Since we have reliable accounts of her confession that she lacked her brother's prescient ability, and that the spice-trance most often failed her, it seems reasonable to assume that her purpose in entering the spice-trance with such regularity was quite different from that stared.
The same drug which had initially keyed her sensitivity to her ancestral voices could be depended upon to keep those same voices from becoming blurred or unavailable. Alia's heavy melange consumption was just another means of maintaining contact with her internal advisors."

―{{{2}}}

"Not content with having destroyed herself, she set about to lead her niece and nephew into similarly destructive ways. Since the most direct way of achieving this goal involved the children's becoming enmeshed in their ancestral memories, Alia continually tried to interest them in the spice trance."

―{{{2}}}

The document concludes as:

"The kind of ruler Leto II will become cannot at present be known. He has undergone a strange transformation that we do not fully understand, and the danger of his following his aunt's path must still be present, regardless of his assurances of the contrary.
That is unimportant at the moment. Of far greater importance was the freeing of the Imperium from the control of the Lady Alia. Had it not been for her death — reported by witnesses on the scene as an obvious suicide, perhaps as a result of a final takeover by her inner voices — she could have continued to rule for several centuries by regenerating her cellular structure. As with all Abominations, the only cure is death."

―{{{2}}}

An appendix indicates that the Sisterhood had already begun investigations of two other possible Abominations: Leto II/DE and Ghanima Atreides/DE.