le future was powerful enough to constrict the matrix, for him to deny accident was enough to insure that there would be no accidents This improbable restriction was one of the possible sequences within the Accidental Universe, what the Kwisatz Haderach could not have known (having limited his pre- ATRHDES PAUL 96 ATREIDES PAUL MUAD DIB science by narrowing and sharpening its focus) was that the chosen branch led to a dead end The Kwisatz Haderach did not know the infinity calculus, if he had, he would not have tried to deny it If he had not tried to deny it, however, we might never have learned it As the Kwisatz Haderach, Paul Muad'Dib Atreides made choices They sometimes turned out to be the wrong choices, but they were nevertheless good choices Combining good and wrong this way is not really paradoxical His choices were good because they were freely made based on his best understanding of what would happen as a consequence of his choosing They were moral But they turned out, m retrospect, to have been wrong Or so we say, with hindsight, because Leto II said so and because we are inheritors of Leto's tradition and are locked into that heritage Paul chose well, but Paul was wrong Deductive logic presses these questions How could Paul have been wrong7 He "saw the future as now " Didn't he know all there was to know'' The answers to these questions are context-bound Yes, he knew all there was for him to know, but mere were some matters that coutd not have been known until after he had made his great effort He stepped beyond die limited "now ' of most mortals, through a door and into a comdor that he knew to be "the ' future (although it was actually just "a' future) because it was the only future he could see He could look ahead and back from any position along that single corridor He committed himself aad the Empire to mat comdor, that single path from that single point m that single dimension And he was trapped on that path In spite of his trait scendent vision he could not see outside of bis cage There were other corridors, infinitely more corridors, paralleling and diverging from the one he knew Although he could sense other oracles and other futures even as he chose to bind his universe, his choice of one certainty blinded him to the other contingencies Because he saw so much he could not realize how blind he was So the paradox disappears Paul chose That was good He chose a single comdor, believing that it was the only corridor that led where he wished humanity to go That was wrong He did not know, could not have known, that he was wrong when he made the choice Now thanks to his boldness, we possess the wisdom of Leto II, the infinity calculus and our abhorrence of prophecy Without his error we might not have any of them, or be here to appreciate our good fortune The career of the Kwisatz Haderach makes a bittersweet story The Bene Gessent sought him for generations He reconciled funda mental contraries He went many-places at once and shortened the way and controlled the future But prophesying became addictive his free choice prevented freedom of choice, knowing the now almost eliminated the future of humanity As survivors we can be pleased that the Kwisatz Haderach experimented with prescience and everlastingly thankful that his experiments were failures Essentially, our reconstruction of Paul Atreides' story is a cautionary tale Its immediate consequence, in the time of Leto II and thereafter, was abhorrence of prescience Long hidden and now revealed the story helps us respect the challenges of the unpredictable E J Further references ATREIDES LETO 11 IDAHO DUNCAN ATREIDES PAUL ATREIDES.