“The Harkonnens believe it. Where such things are concerned, I incline to trust the Harkonnens.” A grim smile touched Tuek’s mouth. “But it’s about the only trust I give them.”
“Then it must be,” Halleck repeated. He held out his right hand, palm up and thumb folded flat against it in the traditional gesture. “I give you my sword.”
“Accepted.”
“Do you wish me to persuade my men?”
“You’d let them make their own decision?”
“They’ve followed me this far, but most are Caladan-born. Arrakis isn’t what they thought it’d be. Here, they’ve lost everything except their lives. I’d prefer they decided for themselves now.”
“Now is no time for you to falter,” Tuek said. “They’ve followed you this far.”
“You need them, is that it?”
“We can always use experienced fighting men . . . in these times more than ever.”
“You’ve accepted my sword. Do you wish me to persuade them?”
“I think they’ll follow you, Gurney Halleck.”
” ‘Tis to be hoped.”
“Indeed.”
“I may make my own decision in this, then?”
“Your own decision.”
Halleck pushed himself up from the bucket seat, feeling how much of his reserve strength even that small effort required. “For now, I’ll see to their quarters and well-being,” he said.
“Consult my quartermaster,” Tuek said. “Drisq is his name. Tell him it’s my wish that you receive every courtesy. I’ll join you myself presently. I’ve some off-shipments of spice to see to first.”
“Fortune passes everywhere,” Halleck said.
“Everywhere,” Tuek said. “A time of upset is a rare opportunity for our business.”
Halleck nodded, heard the faint sussuration and felt the air shift as a lockport swung open beside him. He turned, ducked through it and out of the office.
He found himself in the assembly hall through which he and his men had been led by Tuek’s aides. It was a long, fairly narrow area chewed out of the native rock, its smooth surface betraying the use of cutteray burners for the job. The ceiling stretched away high enough to continue the natural supporting curve of the rock and to permit internal air-convection currents. Weapons racks and lockers lined the walls.
Halleck noted with a touch of pride that those of his men still able to stand were standing – no relaxation in weariness and defeat for them. Smuggler medics were moving among them tending the wounded. Litter cases were assembled in one area down to the left, each wounded man with an Atreides companion.
The Atreides training – “We care for our own! ” – it held like a core of native rock in them, Halleck noted.
One of his lieutenants stepped forward carrying Halleck’s nine-string baliset out of its case. The man snapped a salute, said: “Sir, the medics here say there’s no hope for Mattai. They have no bone and organ banks here – only outpost medicine. Mattai can’t last, they say, and he has a request of you.”
“What is it?”
The lieutenant thrust the baliset forward. “Mattai wants a song to ease his going, sir. He says you’ll know the one . . . he’s asked it of you often enough.” The lieutenant swallowed. “It’s the one called ‘My Woman,’ sir. If you – ”
“I know.” Halleck took the baliset, flicked the multipick out of its catch on the fingerboard. He drew a soft chord from the instrument, found that someone had already tuned it. There was a burning in his eyes, but he drove that out of his thoughts as he strolled forward, strumming the tune, forcing himself to smile casually.
Several of his men and a smuggler medic were bent over one of the litters. One of the men began singing softly as Halleck approached, catching the counter-beat with the ease of long familiarity:
“My woman stands at her window,
Curved lines ‘gainst square glass.
Uprais’d arms . . . bent . . . downfolded.
‘Gainst sunset red and golded –
Come to me . . .
Come to me, warm arms of my lass.
For me . . .
For me, the warm arms of my lass.”
The singer stopped, reached out a bandaged arm and closed the eyelids of the man on the litter.
Halleck drew a final soft chord from the baliset, thinking: Now we are seventy-three .
Family life of the Royal Creche is difficult for many people to understand, but I shall try to give you a capsule view of it. My father had only one real friend, I think. That was Count Hasimir Fenring, the genetic-eunuch and one of the deadliest fighters in the Imperium. The Count, a dapper and ugly little man, brought a new slave-concubine to my father one day and I was dispatched by my mother to spy on the proceedings. All of us spied on my father as a matter of self-protection. One of the slave-concubines permitted my father under the Bene Gesserit-Guild agreement could not, of course, bear a Royal Successor, but the intrigues were constant and oppressive in their similarity. We became adept, my mother and sisters and I, at avoiding subtle instruments of death. It may seem a dreadful thing to say, but I’m not at all sure my father was innocent in all these attempts. A Royal Family is not like other families. Here was a new slave-concubine, then, red-haired like my father, willowy and graceful. She had a dancer’s muscles, and her training obviously had included neuro-enticement. My father looked at her for a long time as she postured unclothed before him. Finally he said: “She is too beautiful. We will save her as a gift. ” You have no idea how much consternation this restraint created in the Royal Creche. Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly threats to us all.
– “In My Father’s House” by the Princess Irulan
Paul stood outside the stilltent in the late afternoon. The crevasse where he had pitched their camp lay in deep shadow. He stared out across the open sand at the distant cliff, wondering if he should waken his mother, who lay asleep in the tent.
Folds upon folds of dunes spread beyond their shelter. Away from the setting sun, the dunes exposed greased shadows so black they were like bits of night.
And the flatness.
His mind searched for something tall in that landscape. But there was no persuading tallness out of heat-addled air and that horizon – no bloom or gently shaken thing to mark the passage of a breeze . . . only dunes and that distant cliff beneath a sky of burnished silver-blue.
What if there isn’t one of the abandoned testing stations across there? he wondered. What if there are no Fremen, either, and the plants we see are only an accident?
Within the tent, Jessica awakened, turned onto her back and peered sidelong out the transparent end at Paul. He stood with his back to her and something about his stance reminded her of his father. She sensed the well of grief rising within her and turned away.
Presently she adjusted her stillsuit, refreshed herself with water from the tent’s catchpocket, and slipped out to stand and stretch the sleep from her muscles.
Paul spoke without turning: “I find myself enjoying the quiet here.”
How the mind gears itself for its environment , she thought. And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: “The mind can go either direction under stress – toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training .”
“It could be a good life here,” Paul said.
She tried to see the desert through his eyes, seeking to encompass all the rigors this planet accepted as commonplace, wondering at the possible futures Paul had glimpsed. One could be alone out here , she thought, without fear of someone behind you, without fear of the hunter .
She stepped past Paul, lifted her binoculars, adjusted the oil lenses and studied the escarpment across from them. Yes, saguaro in the arroyos and other spiny growth . . . and a matting of low grasses, yellow-green in the shadows.
“I’ll strike camp,” Paul said.
Jessica nodded, walked to the fissure’s mouth where she could get a sweep of the desert, and swung her binoculars to the left. A salt pan glared white there with a blending of dirty tan at its edges – a field of white out here where white was death. But the pan said another thing: water . At some time water had flowed across that glaring white. She lowered her binoculars, adjusted her burnoose, listened for a moment to the sound of Paul’s movements.
The sun dipped lower. Shadows stretched across the salt pan. Lines of wild color spread over the sunset horizon. Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand. Coal-colored shadows spread, and the thick collapse of night blotted the desert.
Stars!
She stared up at them, sensing Paul’s movements as he came up beside her. The desert night focused upward with a feeling of lift toward the stars. The weight of the day receded. There came a brief flurry of breeze across her face.
“The first moon will be up soon,” Paul said. “The pack’s ready. I’ve planted the thumper.”
We could be lost forever in this hellplace , she thought. And no one to know .
The night wind spread sand runnels that grated across her face, bringing the smell of cinnamon: a shower of odors in the dark.
“Smell that,” Paul said.
“I can smell it even through the filter,” she said. “Riches. But will it buy water?” She pointed across the basin. “There are no artificial lights across there.”
“Fremen would be hidden in a sietch behind those rocks,” he said.
A sill of silver pushed above the horizon to their right: the first moon. It lifted into view, the hand pattern plain on its face. Jessica studied the white-silver of sand exposed in the light.
“I planted the thumper in the deepest part of the crevasse,” Paul said. “Whenever I light its candle it’ll give us about thirty minutes.”
“Thirty minutes?”
“Before it starts calling . . . a . . . worm.”
“Oh. I’m ready to go.”
He slipped away from her side and she heard his progress back up their fissure.
The night is a tunnel , she thought, a hole into tomorrow . . . if we’re to have a tomorrow . She shook her head. Why must I be so morbid? I was trained better than that!
Paul returned, took up the pack, led the way down to the first spreading dune where he stopped and listened as his mother came up behind him. He heard her soft progress and the cold single-grain dribbles of sound – the desert’s own code spelling out its measure of safety.
“We must walk without rhythm,” Paul said and he called up memory of men walking the sand . . . both prescient memory and real memory.
“Watch how I do it,” he said. “This is how Fremen walk the sand.”
He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of it, moved with a dragging pace.
Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand . . . like the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step . . . drag . . . drag . . . step . . . step . . . wait . . . drag . . . step . . .
Time stretched out around them. The rock face ahead seemed to grow no nearer. The one behind still towered high.
“Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!”
It was a drumming from the cliff behind.
“The thumper,” Paul hissed.
Its pounding continued and they found difficulty avoiding the rhythm of it in their stride.
“Lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . lump . . .”
They moved in a moonlit bowl punctured by that hollowed thumping. Down and up through spilling dunes: step . . .drag . . . wait . . . step . . . Across pea sand that rolled under their feet: drag . . . wait . . . step . . .
And all the while their ears searched for a special hissing.
The sound, when it came, started so low that their own dragging passage masked it. But it grew . . . louder and louder . . . out of the west.
“Lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . ” drummed the thumper.
The hissing approach spread across the night behind them. They turned their heads as they walked, saw the mound of the coursing worm.
“Keep moving,” Paul whispered. “Don’t look back.”
A grating sound of fury exploded from the rock shadows they had left. It was a flailing avalanche of noise.
“Keep moving,” Paul repeating.
He saw that they had reached an unmarked point where the two rock faces – the one ahead and the one behind – appeared equally remote.
And still behind them, that whipping, frenzied tearing of rocks dominated the night.
They moved on and on and on . . . Muscles reached a stage of mechanical aching that seemed to stretch out indefinitely, but Paul saw that the beckoning, escarpment ahead of them had climbed higher.
Jessica moved in a void of concentration, aware that the pressure of her will alone kept her walking. Dryness ached in her mouth, but the sounds behind drove away all hope of stopping for a sip from her stillsuit’s catchpockets.
“Lump . . . lump . . . ”
Renewed frenzy erupted from the distant cliff, drowning out the thumper.
Silence!
“Faster,” Paul whispered.
She nodded, knowing he did not see the gesture, but needing the action to tell herself that it was necessary to demand even more from muscles that already were being taxed to their limits – the unnatural movement . . .
The rock face of safety ahead of them climbed into the stars, and Paul saw a plane of flat sand stretching out at the base. He stepped onto it, stumbled in his fatigue, righted himself with an involuntary out-thrusting of a foot.
Resonant booming shook the sand around them.
Paul lurched sideways two steps.
“Boom! Boom!”
“Drum sand!” Jessica hissed.
Paul recovered his balance. A sweeping glance took in the sand around them, the rock escarpment perhaps two hundred meters away.
Behind them, he heard a hissing – like the wind, like a riptide where there was no water.
“Run!” Jessica screamed. “Paul, run!”
They ran.
Drum sound boomed beneath their feet. Then they were out of it and into pea gravel. For a time, the running was a relief to muscles that ached from unfamiliar, rhythmless use. Here was action that could be understood. Here was rhythm. But sand and gravel dragged at their feet. And the hissing approach of the worm was storm sound that grew around them.
Jessica stumbled to her knees. All she could think of was the fatigue and the sound and the terror.
Paul dragged her up.
They ran on, hand in hand.
A thin pole jutted from the sand ahead of them. They passed it, saw another.
Jessica’s mind failed to register on the poles until they were past.
There was another – wind-etched surface thrust up from a crack in rock.
Another.
Rock!
She felt it through her feet, the shock of unresisting surface, gained new strength from the firmer footing.
A deep crack stretched its vertical shadow upward into the cliff ahead of them. They sprinted for it, crowded into the narrow hole.
Behind them, the sound of the worm’s passage stopped.
Jessica and Paul turned, peered out onto the desert.
Where the dunes began, perhaps fifty meters away at the foot of a rock beach, a silver-gray curve broached from the desert, sending rivers of sand and dust cascading all around. It lifted higher, resolved into a giant, questing mouth. It was a round, black hole with edges glistening in the moonlight.
The mouth snaked toward the narrow crack where Paul and Jessica huddled. Cinnamon yelled in their nostrils. Moonlight flashed from crystal teeth.
Back and forth the great mouth wove.
Paul stilled his breathing.
Jessica crouched staring.
It took intense concentration of her Bene Gesserit training to put down the primal terrors, subduing a race-memory fear that threatened to fill her mind.
Paul felt a kind of elation. In some recent instant, he had crossed a time barrier into more unknown territory. He could sense the darkness ahead, nothing revealed to his inner eye. It was as though some step he had taken had plunged him into a well . . . or into the trough of a wave where the future was invisible. The landscape had undergone a profound shifting.
Instead of frightening him, the sensation of time-darkness forced a hyper-acceleration of his other senses. He found himself registering every available aspect of the thing that lifted from the sand there seeking him. Its mouth was some eighty meters in diameter . . . crystal teeth with the curved shape of crysknives glinting around the rim . . . the bellows breath of cinnamon, subtle aldehydes . . . acids . . .
The worm blotted out the moonlight as it brushed the rocks above them. A shower of small stones and sand cascaded into the narrow hiding place.
Paul crowded his mother farther back.
Cinnamon!
The smell of it flooded across him.
What has the worm to do with the spice, melange? he asked himself. And he remembered Liet-Kynes betraying a veiled reference to some association between worm and spice.
“Barrrroooom!”
It was like a peal of dry thunder coming from far off to their right.
Again: “Barrrroooom!”
The worm drew back onto the sand, lay there momentarily, its crystal teeth weaving moonflashes.
“Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!”
Another thumper! Paul thought.
Again it sounded off to their right.
A shudder passed through the worm. It drew farther away into the sand. Only a mounded upper curve remained like half a bell mouth, the curve of a tunnel rearing above the dunes.
Sand rasped.
The creature sank farther, retreating, turning. It became a mound of cresting sand that curved away through a saddle in the dunes.
Paul stepped out of the crack, watched the sand wave recede across the waste toward the new thumper summons.
Jessica followed, listening: “Lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . lump . . .”
Presently the sound stopped.
Paul found the tube into his stillsuit, sipped at the reclaimed water.
Jessica focused on his action, but her mind felt blank with fatigue and the aftermath of terror. “Has it gone for sure?” she whispered.
“Somebody called it,” Paul said. “Fremen.”
She felt herself recovering. “It was so big!”
“Not as big as the one that got our ‘thopter.”
“Are you sure it was Fremen?”
“They used a thumper.”
“Why would they help us?”
“Maybe they weren’t helping us. Maybe they were just calling a worm.”
“Why?”
An answer lay poised at the edge of his awareness, but refused to come. He had a vision in his mind of something to do with the telescoping barbed sticks in their packs – the “maker hooks.”
“Why would they call a worm?” Jessica asked.
A breath of fear touched his mind, and he forced himself to turn away from his mother, to look up the cliff. “We’d better find a way up there before daylight.” He pointed. “Those poles we passed – there are more of them.”
She looked, following the line of his hand, saw the poles – wind-scratched markers – made out the shadow of a narrow ledge that twisted into a crevasse high above them.
“They mark a way up the cliff,” Paul said. He settled his shoulders into the pack, crossed to the foot of the ledge and began the climb upward.
Jessica waited a moment, resting, restoring her strength; then she followed.
Up they climbed, following the guide poles until the ledge dwindled to a narrow lip at the mouth of a dark crevasse.
Paul tipped his head to peer into the shadowed place. He could feel the precarious hold his feet had on the slender ledge, but forced himself to slow caution. He saw only darkness within the crevasse. It stretched away upward, open to the stars at the top. His ears searched, found only sounds he could expect – a tiny spill of sand, an insect brrr , the patter of a small running creature. He tested the darkness in the crevasse with one foot, found rock beneath a gritting surface. Slowly, he inched around the corner, signaled for his mother to follow. He grasped a loose edge of her robe, helped her around.
They looked upward at starlight framed by two rock lips. Paul saw his mother beside him as a cloudy gray movement. “If we could only risk a light,” he whispered.
“We have other senses than eyes,” she said.
Paul slid a foot forward, shifted his weight, and probed with the other foot, met an obstruction. He lifted his foot, found a step, pulled himself up onto it. He reached back, felt his mother’s arm, tugged at her robe for her to follow.
Another step.
“It goes on up to the top, I think,” he whispered.
Shallow and even steps , Jessica thought. Man-carved beyond a doubt .
She followed the shadowy movement of Paul’s progress, feeling out the steps. Rock walls narrowed until her shoulders almost brushed them. The steps ended in a slitted defile about twenty meters long, its floor level, and this opened onto a shallow, moonlit basin.
Paul stepped out into the rim of the basin, whispered: “What a beautiful place.”
Jessica could only stare in silent agreement from her position a step behind him.
In spite of weariness, the irritation of recaths and nose plugs and the confinement of the stillsuit, in spite of fear and the aching desire for rest, this basin’s beauty filled her senses, forcing her to stop and admire it.
“Like a fairyland,” Paul whispered.
Jessica nodded.
Spreading away in front of her stretched desert growth – bushes, cacti, tiny clumps of leaves – all trembling in the moonlight. The ringwalls were dark to her left, moonfrosted on her right.
“This must be a Fremen place,” Paul said.
“There would have to be people for this many plants to survive,” she agreed. She uncapped the tube to her stillsuit’s catchpockets, sipped at it. Warm, faintly acrid wetness slipped down her throat. She marked how it refreshed her. The tube’s cap grated against flakes of sand as she replaced it.
Movement caught Paul’s attention – to his right and down on the basin floor curving out beneath them. He stared down through smoke bushes and weeds into a wedged slab sand-surface of moonlight inhabited by an up-hop, jump, pop-hop of tiny motion.
“Mice!” he hissed.
Pop-hop-hop! they went, into shadows and out.
Something fell soundlessly past their eyes into the mice. There came a thin screech, a flapping of wings, and a ghostly gray bird lifted away across the basin with a small, dark shadow in its talons.
We needed that reminder , Jessica thought.
Paul continued to stare across the basin. He inhaled, sensed the softly cutting contralto smell of sage climbing the night. The predatory bird – he thought of it as the way of this desert. It had brought a stillness to the basin so unuttered that the blue-milk moonlight could almost be heard flowing across sentinel saguaro and spiked paintbrush. There was a low humming of light here more basic in its harmony than any other music in his universe.
“We’d better find a place to pitch the tent,” he said. “Tomorrow we can try to find the Fremen who – ”
“Most intruders here regret finding the Fremen!”
It was a heavy masculine voice chopping across his words, shattering the moment. The voice came from above them and to their right.
“Please do not run, intruders,” the voice said as Paul made to withdraw into the defile. “If you run you’ll only waste your body’s water.”
They want us for the water of our flesh! Jessica thought. Her muscles overrode all fatigue, flowed into maximum readiness without external betrayal. She pinpointed the location of the voice, thinking: Such stealth! I didn’t hear him . And she realized that the owner of that voice had permitted himself only the small sounds, the natural sounds of the desert.
Another voice called from the basin’s rim to their left. “Make it quick, Stil. Get their water and let’s be on our way. We’ve little enough time before dawn.”
Paul, less conditioned to emergency response than his mother, felt chagrin that he had stiffened and tried to withdraw, that he had clouded his abilities by a momentary panic. He forced himself now to obey her teachings: relax, than fall into the semblance of relaxation, then into the arrested whipsnap of muscles that can slash in any direction.
Still, he felt the edge of fear within him and knew its source. This was blind time, no future he had seen . . . and they were caught between wild Fremen whose only interest was the water carried in the flesh of two unshielded bodies.
This Fremen religious adaptation, then, is the source of what we now recognize as “The Pillars of the Universe,” whose Qizara Tafwid are among us all with signs and proofs and prophecy. They bring us the Arrakeen mystical fusion whose profound beauty is typified by the stirring music built on the old forms, but stamped with the new awakening. Who has not heard and been deeply moved by “The Old Man’s Hymn”?
I drove my feet through a desert
Whose mirage fluttered like a host.
Voracious for glory, greedy for danger,
I roamed the horizons of al-Kulab,
Watching time level mountains
In its search and its hunger for me.
And I saw the sparrows swiftly approach,
Bolder than the onrushing wolf.
They spread in the tree of my youth.
I heard the flock in my branches
And was caught on their beaks and claws!
– from “Arrakis Awakening” by the Princess Irulan
The man crawled across a dunetop. He was a mote caught in the glare of the noon sun. He was dressed only in torn remnants of a jubba cloak, his skin bare to the heat through the tatters. The hood had been ripped from the cloak, but the man had fashioned a turban from a torn strip of cloth. Wisps of sandy hair protruded from it, matched by a sparse beard and thick brows. Beneath the blue-within-blue eyes, remains of a dark stain spread down to his cheeks. A matted depression across mustache and beard showed where a stillsuit tube had marked out its path from nose to catchpockets.
The man stopped half across the dunecrest, arms stretched down the slipface. Blood had clotted on his back and on his arms and legs. Patches of yellow-gray sand clung to the wounds. Slowly, he brought his hands under him, pushed himself to his feet, stood there swaying. And even in this almost-random action there remained a trace of once-precise movement.
“I am Liet-Kynes,” he said, addressing himself to the empty horizon, and his voice was a hoarse caricature of the strength it had known. “I am His Imperial Majesty’s Planetologist,” he whispered, “planetary ecologist for Arrakis. I am steward of this land.”
He stumbled, fell sideways along the crusty surface of the windward face. His hands dug feebly into the sand.
I am steward of this sand , he thought.
He realized that he was semi-delirious, that he should dig himself into the sand, find the relatively cool underlayer and cover himself with it. But he could still smell the rank, semisweet esters of a pre-spice pocket somewhere underneath this sand. He knew the peril within this fact more certainly than any other Fremen. If he could smell the pre-spice mass, that meant the gasses deep under the sand were nearing explosive pressure. He had to get away from here.
His hands made weak scrabbling motions along the dune face.
A thought spread across his mind – clear, distinct: The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization – agriculture .
And he thought how strange it was that the mind, long fixed on a single track, could not get off that track. The Harkonnen troopers had left him here without water or stillsuit, thinking a worm would get him if the desert didn’t. They had thought it amusing to leave him alive to die by inches at the impersonal hands of his planet.
The Harkonnens always did find it difficult to kill Fremen , he thought. We don’t die easily. I should be dead now . . . I will be dead soon . . . but I can’t stop being an ecologist .
“The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.”
The voice shocked him because he recognized it and knew the owner of it was dead. It was the voice of his father who had been planetologist here before him – his father long dead, killed in the cave-in at Plaster Basin .
“Got yourself into quite a fix here, Son,” his father said. “You should’ve known the consequences of trying to help the child of that Duke.”
I’m delirious , Kynes thought.
The voice seemed to come from his right. Kynes scraped his face through sand, turning to look in that direction – nothing except a curving stretch of dune dancing with heat devils in the full glare of the sun.
“The more life there is within a system, the more niches there are for life,” his father said. And the voice came now from his left, from behind him.
Why does he keep moving around? Kynes asked himself. Doesn’t he want me to see him?
“Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life,” his father said. “Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism.”
Why does he keep harping on the same subject? Kynes asked himself. I knew that before I was ten .
Desert hawks, carrion-eaters in this land as were most wild creatures, began to circle over him. Kynes saw a shadow pass near his hand, forced his head farther around to look upward. The birds were a blurred patch on silver-blue sky – distant flecks of soot floating above him.
“We are generalists,” his father said. “You can’t draw neat lines around planet-wide problems. Planetology is a cut-and-fit science.”
What’s he trying to tell me? Kynes wondered. Is there some consequence I failed to see?
His cheek slumped back against the hot sand, and he smelled the burned rock odor beneath the pre-spice gasses. From some corner of logic in his mind, a thought formed: Those are carrion-eater birds over me. Perhaps some of my Fremen will see them and come to investigate .
“To the working planetologist, his most important tool is human beings,” his father said. “You must cultivate ecological, literacy among the people. That’s why I’ve created this entirely new form of ecological notation.”
He’s repeating things he said to me when I was a child , Kynes thought.
He began to feel cool, but that corner of logic in his mind told him: The sun is overhead. You have no stillsuit and you’re hot; the sun is burning the moisture out of your body.
His fingers clawed feebly at the sand.
They couldn’t even leave me a stillsuit!
“The presence of moisture in the air helps prevent too-rapid evaporation from living bodies,” his father said.
Why does he keep repeating the obvious? Kynes wondered.
He tried to think of moisture in the air – grass covering this dune . . . open water somewhere beneath him, a long qanat flowing with water open to the sky except in text illustrations. Open water . . . irrigation water . . . it took five thousand cubic meters of water to irrigate one hectare of land per growing season, he remembered.
“Our first goal on Arrakis,” his father said, “is grassland provinces. We will start with these mutated poverty grasses. When we have moisture locked in grasslands, we’ll move on to start upland forests, then a few open bodies of water – small at first – and situated along lines of prevailing winds with windtrap moisture precipitators spaced in the lines to recapture what the wind steals. We must create a true sirocco – a moist wind – but we will never get away from the necessity for windtraps.”
Always lecturing me , Kynes thought. Why doesn’t he shut up? Can’t he see I’m dying?
“You will die, too,” his father said, “if you don’t get off the bubble that’s forming right now deep underneath you. It’s there and you know it. You can smell the pre-spice gasses. You know the little makers are beginning to lose some of their water into the mass.”
The thought of that water beneath him was maddening. He imagined it now – sealed off in strata of porous rock by the leathery half-plant, half-animal little makers – and the thin rupture that was pouring a cool stream of clearest, pure, liquid, soothing water into . . .
A pre-spice mass!
He inhaled, smelling the rank sweetness. The odor was much richer around him than it had been.
Kynes pushed himself to his knees, heard a bird screech, the hurried flapping of wings.
This is spice desert , he thought. There must be Fremen about even in the day sun. Surely they can see the birds and will investigate .
“Movement across the landscape is a necessity for animal life,” his father said. “Nomad peoples follow the same necessity. Lines of movement adjust to physical needs for water, food, minerals. We must control this movement now, align it for our purposes.”
“Shut up, old man,” Kynes muttered.
“We must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet,” his father said. “We must use man as a constructive ecological force – inserting adapted terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place – to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape.”
“Shut up!” Kynes croaked.
“It was lines of movement that gave us the first clue to the relationship between worms and spice,” his father said.
A worm , Kynes thought with a surge of hope. A maker’s sure to come when this bubble bursts. But I have no hooks. How can I mount a big maker without hooks?
He could feel frustration sapping what little strength remained to him. Water so near – only a hundred meters or so beneath him; a worm sure to come, but no way to trap it on the surface and use it.
Kynes pitched forward onto the sand, returning to the shallow depression his movements had defined. He felt sand hot against his left cheek, but the sensation was remote.
“The Arrakeen environment built itself into the evolutionary pattern of native life forms,” his father said. “How strange that so few people ever looked up from the spice long enough to wonder at the near-ideal nitrogen-oxygen-CO2 balance being maintained here in the absence of large areas of plant cover. The energy sphere of the planet is there to see and understand – a relentless process, but a process nonetheless. There is a gap in it? Then something occupies that gap. Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained. I knew the little maker was there, deep in the sand, long before I ever saw it.”
“Please stop lecturing me, Father,” Kynes whispered
A hawk landed on the sand near his outstretched hand. Kynes saw it fold its wings, tip its head to stare at him. He summoned the energy to croak at it. The bird hopped away two steps, but continued to stare at him.
“Men and their works have been a disease on the surface of their planets before now,” his father said. “Nature tends to compensate for diseases, to remove or encapsulate them, to incorporate them into the system in her own way.”
The hawk lowered its head, stretched its wings, refolded them. It transferred its attention to his outstretched hand.
Kynes found that he no longer had the strength to croak at it.
“The historical system of mutual pillage and extortion stops here on Arrakis,” his father said. “You cannot go on forever stealing what you need without regard to those who come after. The physical qualities of a planet are written into its economic and political record. We have the record in front of us and our course is obvious.”
He never could stop lecturing , Kynes thought. Lecturing, lecturing, lecturing – always lecturing .
