#piter

In Dune, there isn’t quite such a thing as a “twisted” Mentat. It is a hoax perpetuated by the Tleilaxu. The Great Houses hoped to control these Mentats absolutely. Piter was a pretty fucked-up guy — he was a sadist, gaining much pleasure from both inflicting and designing pain, and he only ever really saw people as objects or symbols, such as in his obsessive desire to possess Lady Jessica as an object of beauty and status.

I don’t remember much about him, as it has been a while since I read Dune, but I’ve always wondered about his past. Frank is quite vague about it, but the Baron did acquire Piter from Tleilax, and there the Bene Tleilax possessed a renegade facility where such “twisting” could occur. The Bene Tleilax were known to have experimented on beings of pure energies, both good and evil, which is later echoed, I feel, in characters like Malky and Hwi — two people created, one the female clone of the other; one designed to be a cynical hedonist, and the other to be the epitome of goodness and serenity.

Anyway, I do find it neat that many people assume Piter was the way he was because he was “twisted,” when in reality, he never was. He maintained his dignity until the very end, only ever being himself and refusing to be anything else. The Baron tolerated him, was unnerved by him, and allowed Piter to indulge in his expensive habits because he was quite good at what he did.

While this was removed from the book, Frank apparently did construct a small window into Piter’s past: when Piter was five, he witnessed his own mother fall to her death from the third balcony of the palace he had been living in. He didn’t think much of it at first, but years later he realized something — that once a person starts falling, they are already dead. This relates to how Duke Leto was already falling long before he was actually killed.

The founder of the Mentat Order also sought sanctuary with the Tleilaxu thousands of years ago. Although I question this, since the Tleilax are very superstitious of outsiders. Nevertheless, Piter trained among them in one of their schools.