Memories and lies are painful. But my memories are not lies.

—BRONSO OF IX, transcript of death-cell interview

Inside the Heighliner’s layered decks of public areas and service corridors, the Wayku always provided a place for Bronso to hide. Feeling an affinity for him, the gypsylike people who served as Guildship stewards had secretly helped Bronso since he started his strange quest to destroy the myth surrounding Paul Atreides.

Bronso switched his location from day to day and port to port, taking up temporary residence in unclaimed staterooms or tiny cabins. Always alert and wary, he kept his power usage to a minimum so that Guild watchdogs would find nothing amiss. He had been on the run for seven years, ever since he began distributing his writings.

Sometimes he took advantage of well-appointed suites that reminded him of his days in the Grand Palais of Ix, as the heir of House Vernius. Even so, Bronso did not for a moment regret losing his comforts and riches. He had rejected them voluntarily, in order to follow a more important calling. The Technocrat Council had corrupted everything that was good and noble on his home world. Now Bronso was performing vital work . . . history-making work.

In the turmoil that continued to ripple across the uncertain worlds following the death of Muad’Dib, most Guildships were overbooked, and wealthy noble family members fought over the available cabins. On this particular passage, Ennzyn—one of Bronso’s Wayku allies—had relegated him to a tiny crew cabin that was not listed in any brochure.

He didn’t complain, since his requirements were few: He needed only a light and a private place to sit while writing his latest condemnations. His struggle against the fanaticism that muddied Paul’s legacy always seemed impossible, but he had accepted the task. He was the only man brave enough to criticize Muad’Dib so openly. Bronso might have been reckless, but he had never been a coward.

His Wayku friends sheltered, protected, and aided him. As an itinerant class of workers, solicitous, unnoticed and unassuming, they possessed no real identity as far as the Imperium was concerned. When he and young Paul Atreides had first met these wayfarers nineteen years ago, Bronso had not expected to enlist them as such dedicated allies. Now, they quietly secreted his “heretical” tracts among the belongings of random travelers, so that the publications appeared on other planets, seemingly without any point of origin.

People needed to know the truth, needed skepticism to counterbalance the nonsense that Irulan had put forth as The Life of Muad’Dib. To him had fallen the task of swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction. To accomplish that, he had to commit the words to paper. His statements needed to be infuriating, irrefutable, and compelling.

Throughout the bloody Jihad and Alia’s recent crackdowns, the people accepted repression in the name of orthodoxy because Paul had allowed—allowed!—his Fremen bureaucracy to become a ravenous cancer. Bronso recognized that Paul had, at times, made attempts to rein in the excesses, but the warfare and fanaticism, like the mythology that deified him, had taken on a life of its own.

Exhausted, frightened people forgot the truth so easily. Paul’s apologists rewrote history and expunged the direst events from the official record: the horrific battles, the sterilization of entire planets, the mass murder of monks in the Lankiveil monastery. With so much privation and such a scattering of peoples, who would question histories kept by the “official” purveyors of truth? Who would gainsay a source as unimpeachable as the Princess Irulan herself, wife of Muad’Dib? Surely, her accounts must be the true version, the way history had actually occurred.

But it was not so, and Bronso had to continue the attempt to correct the record. It was a matter of honor, and he had given his word.

His Wayku companion had brought him food, but Bronso was not hungry. In his cramped cabin, he sat on an uncomfortable metal bench, leveled the writing surface, and sank into his memories. By the light of a low-power glowglobe, he laid crime after crime at Muad’Dib’s feet. Each damning line was like the crack of a flagellant’s whip.

Only by stripping away the softening untruths, only by laying bare the callous acts committed in the name of Muad’Dib, only by making the human race aware of the appalling crimes that Paul had unleashed, could Bronso accomplish what was necessary to preserve the future of mankind.

May God save us from a messiah of our own making!

As he wrote, the images of those events screamed behind his eyes. “Oh, Paul, my friend . . .” He continued to write, and tears streamed down his face.