Some more questions

[clooster]

Hi everyone. so what's supposedly the facedancers' capabilities extent? could they use Voice (when replacing a bene gesserit)? if not then you could detect them.

If anyone knows the original Don Juan story (a play), don Juan is dragged into hell, by an angel for all he has done. kind of like omnius?

[SandChigger]

Maybe not. On the detection bit, that is. I mean, it's probably not like the BG went around using Voice ALL the time, you know? And it would be right odd coming up to someone unexpectedly and asking, "Oll royght then, show us yer Voice, lassie!" No?

As for the second bit ... how silly! First off, to steal the idea KJA would have to be familiar with the opera or story ... although I guess he could have watched <i>Amadeus</i> and pinched it that way ... he does seem to watch a lot of movies. (Particularly when proofreading galleys of McDune books ... Hmmm.)

Nevertheless, Omnius wasn't much of a "Don Juan", now was he? He always just seemed to be male by default, to me. Now Erosmos on the otherhand, he was the sexual one of the two. But if that shower scene where he perves Gilbertus shapely and mathematically/aesthetically perfect bum is any indication, I should say his preferences ran to otherwise. ;)

[MrFlibble]

I think it's rather this Futurama episode or the ending of Starcraft that served as "inspiration" for Omnius' demise. (Kevin once wrote a Starcraft book, remember? I believe it has influenced him big time, alongside Star Wars :P)

BTW, take a look at the screw-ups he made in his book. He can't even follow a computer game's storyline accurately.

[Dante]

Face dancers in the original Dune were masterful mimics, but they couldn't do something that they hadn't been trained to do. Since the Voice was a BG trick, the Tleilaxu masters couldn't teach it to their creations. Likewise, while they could be very dangerous, they probably weren't martial experts at the level of the swordmasters.

If you follow the Encyclopaedia (and given the alternative, who wouldn't?), face dancers were not 'morphing' humans per se, but humans with surgically altered bodies containing various tricks, crevices, pumps and bags for duplication of other people. These face dancers, we are told, used constant muscular tension to retain their disguises. While capable of maintaining this disguise for extended periods of time, they needed brief periods of rest as well. Catching a face dancer at rest would surely unmask them. Also, they could not duplicate fat. Instead, they copied the appearence of fat by inflating pouches under their skin to various degrees. While this looked accurate, put one on a set of scales and you would find them to be much lighter than they should be.

A face dancer would never imitate a BG anyway though, since another BG would be more than capable of spotting them.

And finally, a note on the improved face dancers. By the time of Heretics and Chapterhouse, the Tleilaxu have perfected their face dancer techniques to such an extent that the dancer becomes a perfect copy of the individual. This is not as useful as might be imagined, as Waff found out when he discovered that the face dancer was no longer aware that it was a dancer at all. As the phrase goes, "A complete deception is not a deception." In this case, the latter face dancers are such perfect mimics that they presumably cannot be unmasked, though again they would still not be able to duplicate facets in which they had not been trained, such as Voice, prescience, or salsa.

[nemafakei]

"if not then you could detect them."

Well, only if you were forcing them to do that. And the Voice is a closely-guarded secret, even Thufir doesn't know about it until it is used on him in the first book. And since we know that BG are able to spot facedancers anyway, this is a non-issue.

"A face dancer would never imitate a BG anyway though, since another BG would be more than capable of spotting them."

Not necessarily. A face dancer would never imitate a BG likely to be in BG company. But many BG would have been operating with no contact with other BG apart from possibly correspondence, as they would be installed in noble households or sent out as part of the Missionaria Protectiva.

[MrFlibble]

I wonder if the FDs from the time of Heretics could learn special BG skills by using the "mind-scanning" technique of theirs (I know this is the wrong term, but I forgot how it was actually called) they used to better imitate a person they were mimicking. The other thing is that a RM would have never allowed herself to get overpowered by FDs in the first place :)

[clooster]

Ok. so, in B and K Dune, how far away is all the tleilaxu, race from extinction? i

[SandChigger]

Well, according to BoBo & The Mighty Kjan, the Tleilaxu are circling pretty close to the drain. The Masters suffer from pious obsolescence, because even though they speak the Genetic Language of GAWD fluently (like natives!), they consider it the height of hubris to fix little errors in their own DNA that cause their gholas to start to degrade and break down almost from the moment they are decanted. (Never mind the fact that they have no qualms about tweaking the cellular innards of any other of GAWD's many critters, or that they made themselves look like dwarves in bad Perseid drag ... it all make perfect sense if you turn your brain off before you begin reading!)