automatic and self-repairing machines Without those machines, communication was slow and chancy, and planets were left to their own resources The Great Houses survived the political chaos of the Great Revolt (indeed, some profited from it), and many saw the thousands of divided planets as ripe fruit for plucking Almost as many reached for the fruit and warfare raged for a century as would be emperors scrambled for an imperial crown The Corrmos emerged as victors, but the early members of that house little realized what a debt they owed to the Butienan Jihad even the legendary Sardaukar would BUTLERIAN JIHAD 143 BUTLERIAN JIHAD have been little match for a unified and organized counterattack from a confederacy of hundreds of worlds But the Jihad, smash mg first interstellar communications, razed large and small governments planet by planet, leaving only rubble, ready for reassembly by the nimblest barbarian The Butlerian Jihad, then, prepared the way for the establishment of the Empire, in the same way, the Great Revolt was itself prepared for by centuries of smaller waves nsmg to high tide A shadowy figure of whom we know only a name-Duldert-enters the historical record m 111 B G as the founder of a group called "Humanity First," organized to pro mote less reliance on computers and to advocate appeal from the judgments of the machines Exactly what circumstances pro-voked this group is not known, but for five hundred years thereafter, tensions increased Some few planets-Sarash-Ziltish, for one- had computer pogroms of their own well before the birth of Jehanne Butler When she appeared on the scene, then, independent support for the movement she would create was already m place on thousands of worlds, waiting only for some great unifying cause to unite it After her conquest of Kotnos, bra native world, and its mother plaaet Rictiese (detailed in the entry for BUTLER, JEHAKNE), a frenzy swept over the victorious forces, a frenzy fueled by almost equal parts of hysterical fanaticism and calculating greed When Jehanne died in 182 B G , the cause did not so much lose a leader as it gained a martyr The generals who continued in her name were moved by a zeal she herself could not have matched she knew her own fears and weaknesses, detects that were forgotten by her worshipers Kruwl Sheiwan was the first to discover that the forces of the Jihad had another motive, too wealth Sheivvan found that the greater part of the Jihad forces on any given planet were mercenaries usually recruited on the last planet conquered The most ad venturous and the most dispossessed were easily tempted by the thought of spoils on a planetary scale And Sheivvun made one final discovery, one not fully appreciated until now the Butlerian Jihad was not a monolithic cam paign that swept irresistibly through the human gdUxy On the Lonlrary, it was the composite of thousands upon thousands of separate forces lasting almost a century To conceive of the Jihad, one should not think of the Imperial Army or Paul's Fremen, but rather of pirate fleets, moving when and where their commanders will, with little in common but the name of Jehanne Butler and a hatred for the machines the> could neither understand nor replace Many, many times- on the planet Wencolley, for instance-local resistance was absent, yet the planet was devastated by fighting between two groups of crusaders, each bent on proving the purity of their faith by the magnitude of their cruelty With Jehanne gone, the Jihad had no higher objective than the destruction of the computers It was successful beyond expectation in that aim, and the movement dwindled as it found fewer and fewer targets for its wrath In its wake, or to continue Sheivvun's metaphor, as it ebbed, it left both poverty and opportunity it burned a hatred and fear of thinking machines so deeply into the hu man psyche that one wonders if that wound has, yet completely healed Yet at the same time there is no denying that all the expan sions of individuals and society that followed- the Mentat training, the Spacing GuiJd the Empire itself-was made not just possible but necessary by the Jihad To weigh the gains against the losses, the newfound tal ents and resources against the suffering that preceded them, demands a scale that has not yet been invented FM CALADAN, EDUCATION 144 CALADAN EDUCATION CALADAN, Education on.