Piter de Vries - Character

Character

In the service of Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, De Vries is a Mentat — a human specially trained to perform mental functions rivaling computers (which are forbidden universe-wide). De Vries has been "twisted" — made into an amoral sadist by his Tleilaxu creators. This makes him an ideal candidate to be the Baron's Mentat.

De Vries' loyalty to his master is unusual in that he continues to serve the Baron with great enthusiasm even though his Mentat abilities and great intelligence confirm his suspicions that his master plans to eventually kill him. As he says in Dune:

But you see, Baron, I know as a Mentat when you will send the executioner. You will hold back just so long as I am useful. To move sooner would be wasteful and I'm yet of much use.

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