Suffering is the great teacher of men,” the chorus of old actors said as they stood on the stage, their voices in perfect unison. Though the performers were simple villagers from the town below Castle Caladan, they had rehearsed well for the annual performance of the official House Play. Their costumes were colorful, if not entirely authentic. The props— the facade of Agamemnon’s palace, the flagstoned courtyard— showed a realism based only on enthusiasm and a few filmbook snapshots of ancient Greece.

The long play by Aeschylus had already gone on for some time, and the gathered audience in the theatre was warm and the air was close. Glowglobes lit the stage and rows of seating, but the torches and braziers around the performers added aromatic smoke to the building.

Though the background noises were loud enough, the Old Duke’s snores threatened to carry all the way forward to the performers.

“Father, wake up!” Leto Atreides whispered, nudging Duke Paulus in the ribs. “The play isn’t even half-over.”

In the chair of his private box, Paulus stirred and straightened, brushing imaginary crumbs from his broad chest. Shadows played across the creased, narrow face and the voluminous salt-and-pepper beard. He wore a black Atreides uniform with a red hawk crest on the left breast. “It’s all just talking and standing anyway, lad.” He blinked toward the stage, where the old men still hadn’t moved much. “And we’ve seen it every year.”

“That is not the point, Paulus, dear. People are watching.” It was Leto’s mother, sitting on the other side of the Duke. The dark-skinned Lady Helena, dressed in her fine gown, took seriously the ponderous words of the Greek chorus. “Pay attention to the context. It’s your family history, after all. Not mine.” Leto looked from one parent to the other, knowing that the family history of his mother’s House Richese carried just as much grandeur and loss as that of Atreides. Richese had sunk from a highly profitable “golden age” to its current economic weakness.

House Atreides claimed to trace its roots more than twelve thousand years, back to the ancient sons of Atreus on Old Terra. Now the family embraced its long history, despite the numerous tragic and dishonorable incidents it contained. The Dukes had made an annual tradition of performing the classic tragedy of Agamemnon, the most famous son of Atreus and one of the generals who had conquered Troy.

With black-black hair and a narrow face, Leto Atreides strongly resembled his mother, though he had his father’s aquiline nose and hawkish profile. The young man watched, dressed in uncomfortable finery, vaguely aware of the off-world background of the story. The author of the ancient play had counted on his audience understanding the esoteric references. General Agamemnon had been a great military commander in one of human history’s legendary wars, long before the creation of thinking machines that had enslaved mankind, long before the Butlerian Jihad had freed humanity.

For the first time in his fourteen years, Leto felt the weight of legends on his shoulders; he sensed a connection with the faces and personalities of his star-crossed family’s past. One day he would succeed his father, and would become a part of Atreides history as well. Events were chipping away at his childhood, transforming him into a man. He saw it clearly.

“The unenvied fortune is best,” the old men chimed together to say their lines. “Preferable to sacking cities, better than following the commands of others.”

Before sailing to Troy, Agamemnon had sacrificed his own daughter to guarantee favorable winds from the gods. His distraught wife, Clytemnestra, had spent the ten years of her husband’s absence plotting revenge. Now, after the final battle of the Trojan War, a chain of signal fires had been lit along the coast, sending back home word of the victory.

“All of the action occurs offstage,” Paulus muttered, though he had never been much of a reader or literary critic. He lived life for the moment, squeezing every drop of experience and accomplishment. He preferred spending time with his son, or his soldiers. “Everybody just stands in front of the sets, waiting for Agamemnon to arrive.”

Paulus abhorred inaction, always telling his son that even the wrong decision was better than no decision at all. In the play, Leto thought the Old Duke sympathized most with the great general, a man after his own heart.

The chorus of old men droned on, Clytemnestra stepped out of the palace to deliver a speech, and the chorus continued again. A herald, pretending to have disembarked from a ship, came onto the stage, kissed the ground, and recited a long soliloquy.

“Agamemnon, glorious king! How you deserve our joyous welcome, for annihilating Troy and the Trojan homeland. Our enemy’s shrines lie in ruins, nevermore comforting their gods, and their soils are barren.”

Warfare and mayhem— it made Leto think of his father’s younger days, when he had charged out to fight battles for the Emperor, crushing a bloody rebellion on Ecaz, adventuring with his friend Dominic, who was now the Earl of House Vernius on Ix. In private times with Leto, the Old Duke often talked about those days with great fondness.

In the shadows of their box, Paulus heaved a too-loud sigh, not concealing his boredom. Lady Helena shot him a daggered glare, then returned her attention to the play, reconstructing her face to form a more placid smile in case anyone should look at her. Leto gave his father a crooked and sympathetic grin, and Paulus winked back at him. The Duke and his wife played their parts and fit their own comfortable roles.

Finally, on the stage below, the victorious Agamemnon arrived in a chariot, accompanied by his spoils-of-war mistress, the half-insane prophetess Cassandra. Meanwhile, Clytemnestra made preparations for her hated husband’s appearance, feigning devotion and love.

Old Paulus started to loosen the collar of his uniform, but Helena reached over quickly to pull his hand away. Her smile didn’t waver.

Seeing this ritual his parents often went through, Leto smiled to himself. His mother constantly struggled to maintain what she called “a sense of decorum,” while the old man behaved with far less formality. Though his father had taught him much about statecraft and leadership, Lady Helena had taught her son protocol and religious studies.

A daughter of Richese, Lady Helena Atreides had been born into a House Major that had lost most of its power and prestige through failed economic competitions and political intrigues. After being ousted from the planetary governorship of Arrakis, Helena’s family had salvaged some of its respectability through an arranged marital alliance with the Atreides; several of her sisters had been married off to other Houses.

Despite their obvious differences, the Old Duke had once told Leto he had truly loved Helena in the first years of their union. Over time, that had eroded, and he’d dabbled with many mistresses, possibly producing illegitimate children, though Leto was his sole official heir. As decades passed, an enmity built up between husband and wife, causing a deep rift. Now their marriage was strictly political.

“I married for politics in the first place, lad,” he had said. “Never should have tried to make it otherwise. At our station, marriage is a tool. Don’t muck everything up by trying to throw love into the mix.”

Leto sometimes wondered if Helena herself had ever loved his father, or if it had only been his title and station that she loved. Of late, she seemed to have assumed the role of Paulus’s royal caretaker; she constantly strove to keep him groomed and presentable. It bore as much on her own reputation as on his.

On the stage, Clytemnestra greeted her husband, strewing purple tapestries on the ground so he could walk on them rather than on the dirt. Amidst great pomp and fanfare, Agamemnon marched into his palace, while the oracle Cassandra, speechless in terror, refused to enter. She foretold her own death and the murder of the general; of course, no one listened to her.

Through carefully cultivated political channels, Leto’s mother maintained contacts with other powerful Houses, while Duke Paulus developed strong bonds with the common people of Caladan. The Atreides Dukes led their subjects by serving them and by paying themselves only what was fair from family business enterprises. This was a family of wealth, but not to excess— not at the expense of its citizens.

In the play, when the returning general went to his bath, his treacherous wife tangled him in purple robes and stabbed both him and his oracular mistress to death. “My gods! A deadly blow has befallen me!” Agamemnon wailed from offstage, out of sight.

Old Paulus smirked and bent over to his son. “I’ve killed many a man on the battlefield, and I have yet to hear one say that as he died!”

Helena hushed him.

“Gods protect me, another blow! I shall die!” cried the voice of Agamemnon.

While the audience was engrossed in the tragedy, Leto tried to sort through his thoughts of the situation, how it related to his own life. This was supposedly his family’s heritage, after all.

Clytemnestra admitted the murder, claiming vengeance against her husband for his bloody sacrifice of their daughter, for his whoring in Troy, and for blatantly bringing his mistress Cassandra into her own home.

“Glorious king,” wailed the chorus, “our affection is boundless, our tears unending. The spider has ensnared you in its ghostly web of death.”

Leto’s stomach churned. House Atreides had committed horrible deeds in the distant past. But the family had changed, perhaps driven by the ghosts of history. The Old Duke was an honorable man, well respected by the Landsraad and beloved by his people. Leto hoped he could do as well when it came his turn to rule House Atreides.

The final lines of the play were spoken, and the company of actors marched across the stage, bowing to the assembled political and business leaders, all of whom were dressed in finery befitting their stations.

“Well, I’m glad that’s over,” Paulus sighed as the main glowglobes went on in the performance hall. The Old Duke rose to his feet and kissed his wife’s hand as they filed out of the royal box. “On your way now, my dear. I have something to say to Leto. Wait for us in the reception room.”

Helena glanced once at her son and went down the corridor of the ancient stone-and-wood theatre. Her look said she knew exactly what Paulus intended to say, but she bowed to his archaic tradition of having the men speak of “important matters” while the women busied themselves elsewhere.

Merchants, important businessmen, and other well-respected locals began filling the corridor, sipping Caladanian wine and munching hors d’oeuvres. “This way, lad,” the Old Duke said, taking a backstage passage. He and Leto strode past two Atreides guards, who saluted. Then they took a lift tube up four levels to a gilded dressing room. Balut crystal glowglobes floated in the air, flickering a warm orange. Formerly the living quarters of a legendary Caladanian actor, this chamber was now used exclusively by the Atreides and their closest advisors for times requiring privacy.

Leto wondered why his father had taken him here.

After closing the door behind him, Paulus slipped into a green-and-black suspensor chair and motioned for Leto to take one opposite him. The young man did so and adjusted the controls to lift the floating chair higher in the air, so that his eye level was equal to that of his father. Leto only did this in private, not even in the presence of his mother, who would consider such behavior unseemly and disrespectful. By contrast, the Old Duke found his son’s brashness and high spirits to be an amusing reflection of the way he himself had been as a young man.

“You are of age now, Leto,” Paulus began, removing an ornate wooden pipe from a compartment in the arm of his chair. He did not waste time with chitchat. “And you must learn more than your own backyard. So I’m sending you to Ix to study.” He examined the black-haired youth who looked so similar to his mother, but with lighter, more olive-toned skin than hers. He had a narrow face with sharp angles and deep gray eyes.

Ix! Leto’s pulse accelerated. The machine planet. A strange and alien place. Everyone in the Imperium knew of that mysterious world’s incredible technology and innovations, but few outsiders had ever been there. Leto felt disoriented, as if on the deck of a boat in a storm. His father loved to pull surprises like this, to see how well Leto could react to a changed situation.

Ixians maintained a strict veil of secrecy around their industrial operations. They were rumored to skirt the fringes of legality, manufacturing devices that came close to violating Jihad prohibitions against thinking machines. Why then is my father sending me to such a place, and how has it been arranged? Why hasn’t anyone asked me?

A robo-table emerged from the floor beside Leto and produced a cold glass of cidrit juice. The young man’s tastes were known, just as it was known that the Old Duke would want nothing but the pipe. Leto took a sip of the tart drink, puckering his lips.

“You’ll study there for a year,” Paulus said, “according to the tradition of the allied Great Houses. Living on Ix will be quite a contrast with our bucolic planet. Learn from it.” He stared at the pipe in his hand. Carved from Elaccan jacaranda wood, it was deep brown, with swirls that glinted in the light cast by the glowglobes.

“You’ve been there, sir?” Leto smiled as he remembered. “To see your comrade Dominic Vernius, right?”

Paulus touched the combustion pad on the side of his pipe, lighting the tobacco, which was actually a golden seaweed rich in nicotine. He took a long drag and exhaled smoke. “On many occasions. The Ixians are an insular society and don’t trust outsiders. So you’ll have to go through plenty of security precautions, interrogations, and scans. They know that dropping their guard for the briefest instant can be fatal. Great and Minor Houses alike covet what Ix has and would like to take it for themselves.”

“Richese for one,” Leto said.

“Don’t say that to your mother. Richese is now only a shadow of what it was because Ix trounced them in all-out economic warfare.” He leaned forward and took a puff from his pipe. “The Ixians are masters of industrial sabotage and patent appropriation. Nowadays Richesians are only good for making cheap copies, without any innovations.”

Leto considered these comments, which were new to him. The Old Duke blew smoke, puffing his cheeks and making his beard bristle.

“In deference to your mother, lad, we’ve filtered the information you’ve learned. House Richese was a most tragic loss. Your grandfather, Count Ilban Richese, had a large family and spent more time with his offspring than watching his business interests. Not surprisingly, his children grew up pampered, and his fortunes fizzled away.”

Leto nodded, attentive as always to his father’s talk. But he already knew more than Paulus imagined; he’d listened privately to holorecords and filmbooks inadvertently left accessible to him by his proctors. It occurred to him now, however, that perhaps all of that was by design, part of a plan to open his mother’s family history to him like a flower, one petal at a time.

In conjunction with his familial interest in Richese, Leto had always found Ix to be equally intriguing. Once an industrial competitor of Richese, House Vernius of Ix had survived as a technological powerhouse. The royal family of Ix was one of the wealthiest in the Imperium— and he was going to study there.

His father’s words broke through his thoughts. “Your training partner will be Prince Rhombur, heir to the noble title of Vernius. I hope you two get along. You’re about the same age.”

The Prince of Ix. Leto’s thoughts soured, hoping the young man wasn’t spoiled, like so many other children of powerful Landsraad families. Why couldn’t it at least have been a princess, one with a face and figure like the Guild banker’s daughter he had met last month at the Tidal Solstice Ball?

“So . . . what is this Prince Rhombur like?” Leto asked.

Paulus laughed, a blustery offering that suggested a lifetime of revelry and bawdy stories. “Why, I don’t think I know. It’s been a long time since I visited Dominic at home with his wife Shando.” He smiled with an inner joke. “Ah, Shando— she was an Imperial concubine once, but Dominic stole her right out from under old Elrood’s nose.” He gave a loud, impertinent chuckle. “Now they have a son . . . and a daughter, too. Her name is Kailea.”

Smiling enigmatically, the Old Duke continued, “There is much for you to learn, my boy. A year hence, both of you will come to study on Caladan, an exchange of teaching services. You and Rhombur will be taken to pundi rice farms in the lowland marshes on the southern continent, to live in shacks and work the paddies. You’ll travel beneath the sea in a Nells chamber, and you’ll dive for coral gems.” He smiled and clapped his son on the shoulder. “Some things can’t be taught with filmbooks or in classrooms.”

“Yes, sir.” He smelled the iodine-sweetness of the seaweed tobacco. He frowned, hoping the smoke covered his expression. This drastic and unexpected change in his life wasn’t to his liking, but he respected his father; Leto had learned through many hard lessons that the Old Duke knew exactly what he was talking about, and that Paulus had only the greatest desire to ensure that his son would follow in his footsteps.

The Duke lounged back in his suspensor chair, bobbing in the air. “Lad, I can tell you’re not entirely pleased, but this will be a vital experience for you and for Dominic’s son. Here on Caladan you’ll both learn our greatest secret— how we foster the intense loyalty of our subjects, why we trust our people implicitly in a way the Ixians do not trust theirs.”

Paulus became most serious now, without the slightest glint of humor in his eyes. “My son, this is more essential than anything you will learn on an industrial world: People are more important than machines.”

It was an adage Leto had heard often; the phrase was part of him, almost as important to him as breathing. “That’s why our soldiers fight so well.”

Paulus leaned forward into the curling smoke from his last puff. “One day you will be Duke, lad, patriarch of House Atreides and a respected representative in the Landsraad. Your voice there will be equal to that of any other ruler among the Great Houses. That’s a great responsibility.”

“I’ll handle it.”

“I’m sure you will, Leto . . . but let yourself relax a bit. The people can tell when you’re not happy— and when their Duke is not happy, the population is not happy. Let pressure pass over and through you; that way you can’t be harmed by it.” He extended a scolding finger. “Have more fun.”

Fun. Leto thought again of the Guild banker’s daughter, envisioning the fullness of her breasts and hips, the moist pout of her mouth, the way she had looked at him so enticingly.

Maybe he wasn’t as serious as his father thought he was. . . .

He took another drink of cidrit juice; the tart coolness dissipated in his throat. “Sir, with your proven loyalty, with the known faithfulness of the Atreides to its allies, why do the Ixians still put us through their interrogation procedures? Do you think an Atreides, even with all that has been instilled in him, could ever become a traitor? Could we ever become like . . . like the Harkonnens?”

The Old Duke scowled. “Once, we were not so different from them, but those are not stories you’re ready to hear yet. Remember the play we just watched.” He held up a finger. “Things change in the Imperium. Alliances form and dissolve on whims.”

“Not our alliances.”

Paulus met the boy’s gray-eyed stare, then looked away, into a corner where the smoke from his pipe swirled in thick curtains.

Leto sighed. There was so much he wanted to know, and quickly. But it was being fed to him in little morsels, like petit fours at one of his mother’s fancy parties.

Outside, they heard people moving about, clearing the theatre for the next performance of Agamemnon. The actors would be resting, changing costumes, preparing for another audience.

Sitting in this private room with his father, Leto felt more like a man than ever before. Maybe next time he would light a pipe of his own. Maybe he would drink something stronger than cidrit juice. Paulus looked at him with a proud glow in his eyes.

Leto smiled back and tried to imagine what it would be like to be Duke Atreides— then felt a sudden rush of guilt as he realized his father would have to die first in order for him to slip the ducal signet ring onto his finger. He didn’t want that, and was thankful that it would be a long time yet. Too far in the future to think about.