Dune (44 page)

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.

The hawk hopped one step closer to Kynes’ outstretched hand, turned its head
first one way and then the other to study the exposed flesh.

“Arrakis is a one-?crop planet,” his father said. “One crop. It supports a
ruling class that lives as ruling classes have lived in all times while, beneath
them, a semihuman mass of semislaves exists on the leavings. It’s the masses and
the leavings that occupy our attention. These are far more valuable than has
ever been suspected.”

“I’m ignoring you, Father,” Kynes whispered. “Go away.”

And he thought: Surely there must be some of my Fremen near. They cannot
help but see the birds over me. They will investigate if only to see if there’s
moisture available.