Dune (80 page)

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Appendix I: The Ecology of Dune

Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers
increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem
as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many
can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible
for those who do survive.
-Pardot Kynes, First Planetologist of Arrakis

The effect of Arrakis on the mind of the newcomer usually is that of
overpowering barren land. The stranger might think nothing could live or grow in
the open here, that this was the true wasteland that had never been fertile and
never would be.

To Pardot Kynes, the planet was merely an expression of energy, a machine
being driven by its sun. What it needed was reshaping to fit it to man’s needs.
His mind went directly to the free-?moving human population, the Fremen. What a
challenge! What a tool they could be! Fremen: an ecological and geological force
of almost unlimited potential.

A direct and simple man in many ways, Pardot Kynes. One must evade Harkonnen
restrictions? Excellent. Then one marries a Fremen woman. When she gives you a
Fremen son, you begin with him, with Liet-?Kynes, and the other children,
teaching them ecological literacy, creating a new language with symbols that arm
the mind to manipulate an entire landscape, its climate, seasonal limits, and
finally to break through all ideas of force into the dazzling awareness of
order.
“There’s an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man-
healthy planet,” Kynes said. “You see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing
effect essential to all life. Its aim is simple; to maintain and produce
coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity. Life improves the closed
system’s capacity to sustain life. Life — all life — is in the service of
life. Necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and
greater richness as the diversity of life increases. The entire landscape comes
alive, filled with relationships and relationships within relationships.”

This was Pardot Kynes lecturing to a sietch warren class.

Before the lectures, though, he had to convince the Fremen. To understand
how this came about, you must first understand the enormous single-?mindedness,
the innocence with which he approached any problem. He was not naive, he merely
permitted himself no distractions.

He was exploring the Arrakis landscape in a one-?man groundcar one hot
afternoon when he stumbled onto a deplorably common scene. Six Harkonnen bravos,
shielded and fully armed, had trapped three Fremen youths in the open behind the
Shield Wall near the village of Windsack. To Kynes, it was a ding-?dong battle,
more slapstick then real, until he focused on the fact that the Harkonnens
intended to kill the Fremen. By this time, one of the youths was down with a
severed artery, two of the bravos were down as well, but it was still four armed
men against two striplings.

Kynes wasn’t brave; he merely had that single-?mindedness and caution. The
Harkonnens were killing Fremen. They were destroying the tools with which he
intended to remake a planet! He triggered his own shield, waded in and had two
of the Harkonnens dead with a slip-?tip before they knew anyone was behind them.
He dodged a sword thrust from one of the others, slit the man’s throat with a
neat entrisseur, and left the lone remaining bravo to the two Fremen youths,
turning his full attention to saving the lad on the ground. And save the lad he
did . . . while the sixth Harkonnen was being dispatched.

Now here was a pretty kettle of sandtrout! The Fremen didn’t know what to
make of Kynes. They knew who he was, of course. No man arrived on Arrakis
without a full dossier finding its way into the Fremen strongholds. They knew
him: he was an Imperial servant.

But he killed Harkonnens!

Adults might have shrugged and, with some regret, sent his shade to join
those of the six dead men on the ground. But these Fremen were inexperienced
youths and all they could see was that they owed this Imperial servant a mortal
obligation.

Kynes wound up two days later in a sietch that looked down on Wind Pass. To
him, it was all very natural. He talked to the Fremen about water, about dunes
anchored by grass, about palmaries filled with date palms, about open qanats
flowing across the desert. He talked and talked and talked.

All around him raged a debate that Kynes never saw. What to do with this
madman? He knew the location of a major sietch. What to do? What of his words,
this mad talk about a paradise on Arrakis? Just talk. He knows too much. But he
killed Harkonnens! What of the water burden? When did we owe the Imperium
anything? He killed Harkonnens. Anyone can kill Harkonnens. I have done it
myself.

But what of this talk about the flowering of Arrakis?

Very simple: Where is the water for this?

He says it is here! And he did save three of ours.

He saved three fools who had put themselves in the way of the Harkonnen
fist! And he has seen crysknives!

The necessary decision was known for hours before it was voiced. The tau of
a sietch tells its members what they must do; even the most brutal necessity is
known. An experienced fighter was sent with a consecrated knife to do the job.
Two watermen followed him to get the water from the body. Brutal necessity.
It’s doubtful that Kynes even focused on his would-?be executioner. He was
talking to a group that spread around him at a cautious distance. He walked as
he talked: a short circle, gesturing. Open water, Kynes said. Walk in the open
without stillsuits. Water for dipping it out of a pond! Portyguls!

The knifeman confronted him.

“Remove yourself,” Kynes said, and went on talking about secret windtraps.
He brushed past the man. Kynes’ back stood open for the ceremonial blow.

What went on in that would-?be executioner’s mind cannot be known now. Did he
finally listen to Kynes and believe? Who knows? But what he did is a matter of
record. Uliet was his name, Older Liet. Uliet walked three paces and
deliberately fell on his own knife, thus “removing” himself. Suicide? Some say
Shai-?hulud moved him.

Talk about omens!

From that instant, Kynes had but to point, saying “Go there.” Entire Fremen
tribes went. Men died, women died, children died. But they went.

Kynes returned to his Imperial chores, directing the Biological Testing
Stations. And now, Fremen began to appear among the Station personnel. The
Fremen looked at each other. They were infiltrating the “system,” a possibility
they’d never considered. Station tools began finding their way into the sietch
warrens — especially cutterays which were used to dig underground catchbasins
and hidden windtraps.

Water began collecting in the basins.

It became apparent to the Fremen that Kynes was not a madman totally, just
mad enough to be holy. He was one of the umma, the brotherhood of prophets. The
shade of Uliet was advanced to the sadus, the throne of heavenly judges.

Kynes — direct, savagely intent Kynes — knew that highly organized
research is guaranteed to produce nothing new. He set up small-?unit experiments
with regular interchange of data for a swift Tansley effect, let each group find
its own path. They must accumulate millions of tiny facts. He organized only
isolated and rough run-?through tests to put their difficulties into perspective.

Core samplings were made throughout the bled. Charts were developed on the
long drifts of weather that are called climate. He found that in the wide belt
contained by the 70-degree lines, north and south, temperatures for thousands of
years hadn’t gone outside the 254-332 degrees (absolute) range, and that this
belt had long growing seasons where temperatures ranged, from 284 to 302 degrees
absolute: the “bonanza” range for terraform life . . . once they solved the
water problem.

When will we solve it? the Fremen asked. When will we see Arrakis as a
paradise?

In the manner of a teacher answering a child who has asked the sum of 2 plus
2, Kynes told them: “From three hundred to five hundred years.”

A lesser folk might have howled in dismay. But the Fremen had learned
patience from men with whips. It was a bit longer than they had anticipated, but
they all could see that the blessed day was coming. They tightened their sashes
and went back to work. Somehow, the disappointment made the prospect of paradise
more real.

The concern on Arrakis was not with water, but with moisture. Pets were
almost unknown, stock animals rare. Some smugglers employed the domesticated
desert ass, the kulon, but the water price was high even when the beasts were
fitted with modified stillsuits.

Kynes thought of installing reduction plants to recover water from the
hydrogen and oxygen locked in native rock, but the energy-?cost factor was far
too high. The polar caps (disregarding the false sense of water security they
gave the pyons) held far too small an amount for his project . . . and he
already suspected where the water had to be. There was that consistent increase
of moisture at median altitudes, and in certain winds. There was that primary
clue in the air balance — 23 per cent oxygen, 75.4 per cent nitrogen and .023
per cent carbon dioxide — with the trace gases taking up the rest.

There was a rare native root plant that grew above the 2,500 meter level in
the northern temperate zone. A tuber two meters long yielded half a liter of
water. And there were the terraform desert plants: the tougher ones showed signs
of thriving if planted in depressions lined with dew precipitators.

Then Kynes saw the salt pan.

His ‘thopter, flying between stations far out on the bled, was blown off
course by a storm. When the storm passed, there was the pan — a giant oval
depression some three hundred kilometers on the long axis — a glaring white
surprise in the open desert. Kynes landed, tasted the pan’s storm-?cleaned
surface.

Salt.

Now, he was certain.

There’d been open water on Arrakis — once. He began reexamining the
evidence of the dry wells where trickles of water had appeared and vanished,
never to return.

Kynes set his newly trained Fremen limnologists to work: their chief clue,
leathery scraps of matter sometimes found with the spice-?mass after a blow. This
had been ascribed to a fictional “sandtrout” in Fremen folk stories. As facts
grew into evidence, a creature emerged to explain these leathery scraps — a
sandswimmer that blocked off water into fertile pockets within the porous lower
strata below the 280° (absolute) line.

This “water-?stealer” died by the millions in each spice-?blow. A five-?degree
change in temperature could kill it. The few survivors entered a semidormant
cyst-?hibernation to emerge in six years as small (about three meters long)
sandworms. Of these, only a few avoided their larger brothers and pre-?spice
water pockets to emerge into maturity as the giant shai-?hulud. (Water is
poisonous to shai-?hulud as the Fremen had long known from drowning the rare
“stunted worm” of the Minor Erg to produce the awareness-?spectrum narcotic they
call Water of Life. The “stunted worm” is a primitive form of shai-?hulud that
reaches a length of only about nine meters.)

Now they had the circular relationship: little maker to pre-?spice mass;
little maker to shai-?hulud; shai-?hulud to scatter the spice upon which fed
microscopic creatures called sand plankton; the sand plankton, food for shai-
hulud, growing, burrowing, becoming little makers.

Kynes and his people turned their attention from these great relationships
and focused now on micro-?ecology. First, the climate: the sand surface often
reached temperatures of 344° to 350° (absolute). A foot below ground it might be
55° cooler; a foot above ground, 25° cooler. Leaves or black shade could provide
another 18° of cooling. Next, the nutrients: sand of Arrakis is mostly a product
of worm digestion; dust (the truly omnipresent problem there) is produced by the
constant surface creep, the “saltation” movement of sand. Coarse grains are
found on the downwind sides of dunes. The windward side is packed smooth and
hard. Old dunes are yellow (oxidized), young dunes are the color of the parent
rock — usually gray.

Downwind sides of old dunes provided the first plantation areas. The Fremen
aimed first for a cycle of poverty grass with peatlike hair cilia to intertwine,
mat and fix the dunes by depriving the wind of its big weapon: movable grains.

Adaptive zones were laid out in the deep south far from Harkonnen watchers.
The mutated poverty grasses were planted first along the downwind (slipface) of
the chosen dunes that stood across the path of the prevailing westerlies. With
the downwind face anchored, the windward face grew higher and higher and the
grass was moved to keep pace. Giant sifs (long dunes with sinuous crest) of more
than 1,500 meters height were produced this way.
When barrier dunes reached sufficient height, the windward faces were
planted with tougher sword grasses. Each structure on a base about six times as
thick as its height was anchored — “fixed.”

Now, they came in with deeper plantings — ephemerals (chenopods, pigweeds,
and amaranth to begin), then scotch broom, low lupine, vine eucalyptus (the type
adapted for Caladan’s northern reaches), dwarf tamarisk, shore pine — then the
true desert growths: candelilla, saguaro, and bis-?naga, the barrel cactus. Where
it would grow, they introduced camel sage, onion grass, gobi feather grass, wild
alfalfa, burrow bush, sand verbena, evening primrose, incense bush, smoke tree,
creosote bush.

They turned then to the necessary animal life — burrowing creatures to open
the soil and aerate it: kit fox, kangaroo mouse, desert hare, sand terrapin . .
. and the predators to keep them in check: desert hawk, dwarf owl, eagle and
desert owl; and insects to fill the niches these couldn’t reach: scorpion,
centipede, trapdoor spider, the biting wasp and the wormfly . . . and the desert
bat to keep watch on these.