Report on Alia Atreides: the Sisterhood's verdict of Abomination

The Report on Alia Atreides was a formal document of the Bene Gesserit, assembled from accounts sent to the Sisterhood's hierarchy by spies established to watch Alia Atreides and to judge her possible nature as an Abomination, a preborn awareness invaded and possessed by the lives within it. The file that resulted ended in the harshest verdict the order could pronounce. The Bene Gesserit Judiciary Council condemned Alia as an "Abomination to be Abhorred" in 10211 AG, and her mother, the Lady Jessica, fought in vain to soften the condemning tone of the final reports. That failed effort marked the last act of Jessica's involvement with the Sisterhood.

A file built by spies#

The Report was not the work of a single observer. It was assembled from a stream of reports sent to the Bene Gesserit hierarchy by spies the Sisterhood had established for one purpose: to look upon Alia Atreides and weigh her possible nature as an Abomination. The order had feared such a creature for millennia. Alia, awakened in the womb when the Lady Jessica took the Water of Life while carrying her, was in the Sisterhood's eyes the very thing its breeding discipline existed to prevent, an infant consciousness thrown open to the crowding lives of Other Memory before any self existed to master them.

The verdict came formally from the Bene Gesserit Judiciary Council, which condemned Alia as an "Abomination to be Abhorred" in 10211 AG. The compilation of the Report was credited to two Reverend Mothers of the order, Lucius Ellen Callen and Hallus Deborah Seales. Jessica, who had borne Alia and who had herself once been among the Sisterhood's most valued adepts, made vigorous attempts to change the condemning tone of the final reports. She failed, and that failure closed her long and troubled relationship with the order that had trained her.

The case against Alia#

The Report opened its argument at the point the Sisterhood considered the root of the whole disaster, the disobedience of the Lady Jessica herself. Ordered to bear daughters to Duke Leto, Jessica had chosen instead to give him a son. The document put the charge plainly: "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."

From that foundation the Report turned to Alia's own conduct, and here its compilers pressed a point against the common sympathy for her. Much had been made of the effect that Alia's isolated position had on her fate. The Report insisted the isolation was her own doing: "It cannot be too strongly emphasized that it was her pattern to choose isolation." Even the Lady Jessica recalled times from her daughter's childhood in Sietch Tabr when Alia took herself off into the desert, away from her companions, in order to listen to the voices within her. Such episodes grew more frequent as she aged. Princess Irulan reported that Alia absented herself from her brother and from the rest of the Court whenever her presence was not commanded, and after her elevation to the Regency the public record showed her unavailable except for official duties such as greeting pilgrims and sitting in judgment of cases brought before her.

Through those same years Alia indulged in massive doses of melange, ostensibly to broaden her prescient vision. The Report treated that explanation as false. The Sisterhood held reliable accounts of Alia's own confession that she lacked her brother's prescient ability and that the spice-trance most often failed her, and so it reasoned that her true purpose in entering the trance so regularly lay elsewhere. The same drug that had first keyed her sensitivity to her ancestral voices could be depended upon to keep those voices from blurring or falling silent. In the Report's judgment, "Alia's heavy melange consumption was just another means of maintaining contact with her internal advisors."

The compilers then extended the indictment beyond Alia's own ruin. "Not content with having destroyed herself, she set about to lead her niece and nephew into similarly destructive ways." Since the most direct route to that end ran through the children becoming enmeshed in their own ancestral memories, Alia continually tried to interest Ghanima and her brother in the spice trance.

Conclusions on the Regent's death#

The concluding section of the document was written after Alia's fall, when her nephew had already taken the throne. Of the new ruler it admitted open uncertainty: "The kind of ruler Leto II will become cannot at present be known." Leto II had undergone a strange transformation the Sisterhood did not fully understand, and the danger that he might follow his aunt's path remained in the order's estimation a live one, whatever assurances he gave to the contrary.

Yet the Report set that question aside as unimportant beside the fact it valued most, the freeing of the Imperium from the control of the Lady Alia. Witnesses on the scene of her death described it as an obvious suicide, and the Report allowed that the act may itself have marked a final takeover by her inner voices. Had she not died, the compilers judged, Alia could have continued to rule for several centuries by regenerating her cellular structure, an Abomination entrenched at the head of the Imperium beyond any removal. The document closed on the Sisterhood's cold and settled doctrine: "As with all Abominations, the only cure is death."

The appendix and its warning#

The Report did not end with Alia. An appendix indicated that the Sisterhood had already begun investigations of two other possible Abominations, Leto II and Ghanima Atreides. Both children of Paul Muad'Dib had been preborn exactly as their aunt had been, wakened to ancestral awareness before birth on Arrakis, and the order that had condemned Alia saw no reason to presume her brother's heirs immune to her fate. The file on Alia Atreides was closed by her death. The watch on House Atreides, the appendix made clear, was not.