Garun: Naib of the Museum Fremen

Garun, called Garun of Tuono, was a Museum Fremen and the Naib of the village of Tuono on Arrakis during the final years of the reign of the God Emperor Leto Atreides II. He led a small community that tried to preserve the customs of the Fremen long after the desert people themselves had vanished, and he served as host to Duncan Idaho and Siona Atreides when they came to Tuono in the days before the God Emperor's death. His Fremen aide was Teishar. Though Idaho exposed his stillsuit, his crysknife, and his whole society as imitations, Garun's answer to that humiliation was not anger but longing, for he wanted nothing more than to become a true Fremen.

The Naib of Tuono#

Garun held the title of Naib in Tuono, a village that stood on the margins of an Arrakis transformed. From the time of the God Emperor onward the cultural weight of the Fremen had ebbed, in no small part because the terraforming of the planet had destroyed the desert that made them. What remained were the Museum Fremen, communities that kept the outward forms of a people who had died out many millennia before any of their imitators were born. In Tuono the Museum Fremen tended date palms, wore stillsuits as garments of custom rather than survival, and carried crysknives that were merely decorative, with real blades preserved in display cases as relics.

Garun presided over this community with earnest conviction. He attempted to emulate the culture of the old Fremen as he understood it, and because he believed the Fremen had been noted for their hospitality, he took the duties of a host seriously. He was assisted by Teishar, a Museum Fremen of Tuono who served as his aide, and whose trade in imitation relics reached beyond the village. Teishar sold a replica of a crysknife to Siona Atreides and Topri on the outskirts of the city of Onn, for use in the Fremen rituals her rebels performed at their meetings.

The village itself lived in a kind of enclosure. A great wall rose above Tuono, cutting it off from the Royal Road along which the God Emperor traveled on his peregrinations. Garun had never seen the road in his life, though he had been told it was extremely wide. When asked why he had never looked upon it, he could only gesture toward the wall.

Receiving the God Emperor's guests#

When Duncan Idaho, Siona Atreides, and Nayla arrived at Tuono, Garun greeted them as the leader of the village and, in keeping with his ideas of Fremen hospitality, had prepared their quarters ahead of their arrival. He then took his visitors on a tour of the village, an act of pride that became his undoing. Idaho, who had lived among the true Fremen of the old desert, gradually recognized how far Tuono had fallen from the culture it claimed to preserve. He heard Garun mispronounce words of the Fremen language. He saw Garun's stillsuit worn openly in the sunlight, an exposure that would have been a fatal mistake in the time of the true Fremen. The society Leto had created disgusted him: a small group living on the margins, imitating a dead people it could never understand.

The confrontation came when Idaho parted Garun's robes and discovered that the stillsuit itself was a fake. Garun was outraged and told Idaho that he was not to touch a Fremen like himself. The claim provoked Idaho into a deeper rage. He had lived and died alongside the true Fremen, he told Garun, and Garun was nothing like them. He told the Naib to draw his crysknife or keep his hand away from it. Garun admitted that the knives of Tuono were merely decorative, and in an effort to impress his guest he added that real crysknives were kept in display cases. Idaho burst into laughter, and Garun's ego was crushed. Yet the moment turned on Garun's visible sadness. Seeing it, Idaho told him that he would teach him everything he knew about the true Fremen, and then withdrew with Siona and their Fish Speaker entourage to their quarters.

A saying of the old Fremen#

Idaho came to understand that beneath the costume and the mispronounced words, Garun wanted nothing more than to become a true Fremen. He sought the Naib out to talk with him, and he offered him an old Fremen saying: 'You should never be in the company of anyone with whom you would not want to die'. Garun's reply gave the measure of his lonely position in the world the God Emperor had built. He told Duncan that he was the only such person he had ever met.

The wall and the Royal Road#

In the days that followed, Garun, Nayla, and the Fish Speaker entourage watched as Duncan practiced climbing to the top of the wall that overlooked the Royal Road. Garun proved unexpectedly useful to his guests. He told Idaho of the suspensors built into Leto's Royal Cart, and he recalled that the God Emperor had visited Tuono once before, descending into the village on those suspensors to affirm that he had not forgotten the Fremen. When Garun asked why Idaho wished to climb the wall, Duncan answered only that he intended to provide a 'suitable greeting for the God Emperor'.

Garun took no part in what came next. Idaho and Siona left Tuono to enact their plan against Leto II, whose Royal Cart was attacked on its way to the village, and Garun stayed behind in Tuono. The Naib who had never seen the Royal Road remained beneath his wall, the keeper of a borrowed culture, remembered less for anything he did than for what he revealed: that in the Imperium of the God Emperor, the last people called Fremen kept their sharpest truths in display cases.