Golden Path

The Golden Path, known in an ancient tongue as Secher Nbiw, was an expansive prescient interpretation visible only to the Kwisatz Haderach and the Bene Gesserit. It foretold the fluid events of the future, great and small, but more than that it revealed an optimum path through the countless threads of cause and effect encountered by humanity. Both Paul Atreides and his son Leto II perceived it, and it was Leto who chose to walk it to its end.

The danger to humanity#

Through prescience, Paul Atreides and Leto II foresaw that humanity would end if it stagnated and remained confined within the known universe and the rigid class structure of the Imperium. Though the Imperium held many trillions of people, Leto II's rule proved that the species still lay within a space that could be controlled by a single interest. This lack of exploration and growth left humanity vulnerable to a single threat that could lead to its eventual destruction. Leto II's stated goal was to teach humanity a lesson it would remember in its bones, that sheltered safety was tantamount to death however long it might be delayed.

Objectives#

The Golden Path entailed two main objectives. The first was Leto's Peace, a restriction in spice production combined with spice stockpiling and the terraforming of Arrakis. The terraforming killed off the sandworms while the scarcity of melange restricted space travel. After centuries of careful and deliberate oppression, Leto II was destined to die and release new sandtrout to begin a new worm and spice cycle anew, which in turn would drive the expansion and diversification of human population, territory, and culture far beyond the old boundaries.

The second objective was the breeding program. Its purpose was to free humanity from prescient vision by introducing a gene, first realized in Siona Atreides, that made its bearers invisible to prescient hunters and seekers. Those who possessed the gene could not be tracked or manipulated by future tyrants, by Guild Navigators, or by the creations of the Bene Gesserit.

Origin#

Though the Bene Gesserit had long anticipated the existence of the Golden Path, the term was first vocalized by Paul Atreides after the defeat of House Harkonnen and House Corrino on Arrakis. Its inherent dilemmas became apparent to him only after he ingested the Water of Life. Even with his considerable powers, Paul struggled to determine the best path through the maze of decisions before him. This was possibly because he was not the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach, having been born a generation sooner than the Bene Gesserit had planned, but more likely because of his own emotions. Like his father Leto I, Paul was forever tempted by a simpler life away from the intrigues of prescience and Imperial politics, and was haunted by the betrayal and death of his House.

Leto II and the long rule#

From the moment of their birth, Paul's children Leto and Ghanima knew of the Golden Path through the ancestral memories that gave them access to all of their father's memories up to the moment of their conception, including his vision of the path. Unlike their father, the twins chose to begin it. Leto's ability to see the threads of causality allowed him to adopt a sandtrout skin and craft a future in which he became a human and sandworm hybrid, the long lived God Emperor, with the time and power needed to guide humanity as a whole.

For some 3,500 years Leto II enforced domestic tranquility through theocratic tyranny, breeding programs, and other genetic manipulation. He maintained an all female universal military force, the Fish Speakers, deathly loyal to his apparent godhead, and steered humanity away from the traits that lead to war. He held a complete economic monopoly on melange by eradicating the worms' habitat through terraforming, hoarding the remaining spice, and seizing the stores of inhabited worlds, leveraging the resulting scarcity for total political and transport control. His final stroke was to use his own death to carry the Golden Path further, first through the chaos of the power vacuum and the Scattering that followed, and then through his surviving pearls of awareness dreaming among the newly forming worms.

Ramifications#

Despite the deaths of the two men who had enforced it, the effects of the Golden Path were still felt long afterward. It saw humanity explode across the universe in the Scattering, carrying its knowledge outward and returning with technology never before encountered in the Old Imperium. It also changed humanity's physical attributes, so that reflexes, nervous responses, and movements became significantly faster than in the time of the Faufreluches. As a lesson in unintended consequences, threats such as the Honored Matres formed in the Scattering, an aggressive group whose ambition to supplant the Bene Gesserit led to highly destructive conflicts.

The great enemy#

The great enemy that threatened humanity in Leto's visions was never discussed in detail. In glimpses of future time strands, humans were seen fleeing machines, possibly of Ixian manufacture, designed solely to seek out and destroy human life and equipped with prescient abilities that would let them hunt all of humanity without fail. A future containing that fate was the kind that would compel a prescient Leto II to accept his own return to the sand. The return of machines would have echoed the Butlerian Jihad, implying that humanity was caught in a cycle of repeating its mistakes, and that the Golden Path was a way of breaking that cycle by correcting the errors in humanity that led to them.