Dune: House Atreides (14 page)

"Is this Ix?" Leto inquired, reaching for his suspensor-buoyed suitcases. They followed him as he moved.

"We are in the Alkaurops system," she said. Her eyes couldn't be seen because of her dark glasses. "Ix is the ninth planet. You get off here. We've already jettisoned the dump boxes."

Leto did as he was instructed, making his way toward the indicated shuttle, though he wished he had been given more warning and more information. He didn't know exactly what he was supposed to do once he arrived on the high-tech industrial world, but he assumed Earl Vernius would greet him or at least send some sort of welcoming party.

He took a deep breath and tried not to let his anxiety grow too intense.

The robo-piloted shuttle plummeted out of the Heighliner hold toward the surface of a planet traced with mountains, clouds, and ice. The automated shuttle functioned according to a limited set of instructions, and conversation wasn't in its repertoire of skills. Leto was the only passenger aboard, apparently the only traveler bound for Ix. The machine planet welcomed few visitors.

As he looked out the porthole, though, Leto had a sinking feeling that something had gone wrong. The Wayku shuttle approached a high mountain plateau with Alpine forests in sheltered valleys. He saw no buildings, none of the grand structures or manufacturing facilities he had expected. No smoke in the air, no cities, no sign of civilization at all.

This couldn't possibly be the heavily industrialized world of Ix. He looked around, tensing up, ready to defend himself. Had he been betrayed? Lured here and stranded?

The shuttle came to a stop on a stark plain strewn with flecked granite boulders and small clumps of white flowers. "This is where you get out, sir," the robo-pilot announced in a synthesized voice.

"Where are we?" Leto demanded. "I'm supposed to be going to the capital of Ix."

"This is where you get out, sir."

"Answer me!" His father would have used a booming voice to wrench a reply from this stupid machine. "This can't be the capital city of Ix. Just look around you!"

"You have ten seconds to exit the craft, sir, or you will be forcibly ejected.

The Guild operates on a tight schedule. The Heighliner is already prepared to depart for the next system."

Cursing under his breath, Leto nudged his drifting luggage and stepped onto the rubble-strewn surface. Within seconds the white, bullet-shaped craft rose and dwindled to a pinpoint of orange light in the sky, before it disappeared from view entirely.

His pair of suitcases hovered beside him, and a clean-smelling wind ruffled his hair. Leto was alone. "Hello?" he shouted, but no one answered.

He shivered as he stared at rugged mountain ridges dusted with snow and glacial ice. Caladan, mostly an ocean world, had very few mountains approaching this grandeur. But he had not come to see mountains. "Hello! I'm Leto Atreides, from Caladan!" he called out. "Is anyone here?"

A sick feeling clenched his chest. He was far from home on an unknown world, with no way to find out where in the vast universe he was. Is this even Ix?

The brisk wind was cold and sharp, but the open plain remained eerily quiet.

Oppressive silence hung in the thin air.

He had spent his life hearing the lullaby of the ocean, the songs of gulls, and the bustle of villagers. Here he saw nothing, no welcoming party, no signs of habitation. The world looked untouched . . . empty.

If I've been stranded here, will anyone be able to find me?

Thickening clouds concealed the sky, though he saw a distant blue sun through a break in the cover. He shivered again and wondered what he should do, where he should go. If he was going to be a Duke, he had to learn to make decisions.

A drizzle of sleet began to fall.

The paintbrush of history has depicted Abulurd Harkonnen in a most unfavorable light. Judged by the standards of his older half brother, Baron Vladimir, and his own children Glossu Rabban and Feyd-Rautha Rabban, Abulurd was a different sort of man entirely. We must, however, assess the frequent descriptions of his weakness, incompetence, and foolhardy decisions in light of the ultimate failure of House Harkonnen. Though exiled to Lankiveil and stripped of any real power, Abulurd secured a victory unmatched by anyone else in his extended family: He learned how to be happy with his life.

-Landsraad Encyclopedia of Great Houses, post-Jihad edition Though the Harkonnens were formidable foes in the arena of manipulations, subterfuge, and disinformation, the Bene Gesserit were undisputed masters.

In order to achieve the next step in their grand breeding scheme, a plan that had been in place since ten generations before the downfall of thinking machines, the Sisterhood needed to find a fulcrum that would make the Baron bend to their will.

It didn't take them long to figure out the weak point in House Harkonnen.

Presenting herself as a new domestic servant on cold and blustery Lankiveil, the young Bene Gesserit Sister Margot Rashino-Zea infiltrated the household of Abulurd Harkonnen, the Baron's younger half brother. Beautiful Margot, hand-selected by Kwisatz Mother Anirul, had been trained in the ways of spying and ferreting out information, of connecting mismatched tidbits of data to construct a broader picture.

She also knew sixty-three ways to kill a human being using nothing but her fingers. The Sisterhood worked hard to maintain their appearance as brooding intellectuals, but they also had their commandos. Sister Margot was counted among their best.

The lodge house of Abulurd Harkonnen sat on a rugged spit of land that extended into deep water bordered by narrow Tula Fjord. A fishing village surrounded the wooden mansion; farms pushed inland into the thin and rocky valleys, but most of the planet's food supply came from the frigid sea. Lankiveil's economy was based on the rich whalefur industry.

Abulurd lived at the base of dripping mountains, whose tops were rarely seen through the looming steel-gray clouds and lingering mist. The main house and surrounding village was the closest thing to a capital center this frontier world had to offer.

Since strangers were rare, Margot took precautions not to be noticed. She stood taller than many of the stocky and muscular natives, so she disguised herself with a slight stoop. She dyed her honey-blonde hair dark and cut it thick and shaggy, a style favored by many of the villagers. With chemicals, she treated her smooth, pale skin to make it weathered and lend it a darker cast. She blended in, and everyone accepted her without a second glance. For a woman trained by the Sisterhood, maintaining the sham was easy.

Margot was only one of numerous Bene Gesserit spies dispatched to the widespread Harkonnen holdings, where they would surreptitiously scour any and all business records. The Baron had no reason to suspect such scrutiny at this time -- he'd had very few dealings with the Sisterhood -- but if any of their female spies were discovered, the lean and vicious man would have no compunctions against torturing them for explanations. Luckily, Margot thought, any well-trained Bene Gesserit could stop her own heart long before inflicted pain could force her to reveal secrets.

Traditionally, the Harkonnens were adept at manipulation and concealment, but Margot knew she would find the necessary incriminating evidence. Though other Sisters had argued for digging closer to the heart of Harkonnen operations, Margot had concluded that Abulurd would make the perfect patsy. The younger Harkonnen demibrother had, after all, run the spice operations on Arrakis for seven years: He must have some information. If anything needed to be hidden, the Baron would likely do it here, unexpectedly, right under Abulurd's nose.

Once the Bene Gesserit uncovered a few of the Harkonnens' mistakes and held proof of the Baron's financial indiscretions, they would have the blackmail weapon so desperately needed to advance their breeding program.

Dressed as an indigenous villager in dyed wools and furs, Margot slipped into the rustic great house at the docks. The structure stood tall and was composed of massive wood, stained dark. Fireplaces in every room filled the air with resinous smoke, and glowglobes tuned to yellow-orange did their best to approximate sunlight.

Margot cleaned, she dusted, she helped with the cooking . . . she searched for financial records. Two days in a row, the Baron's amiable half brother greeted her, smiling, welcoming; he noticed nothing whatsoever amiss. A trusting sort, he seemed unconcerned for his own safety, and allowed locals and strangers to wander into the main rooms and guest quarters of his mansion, even close to his person. He had gray-blond hair, long to his shoulders, and a seamed, ruddy face that was disarmed by a perpetual half smile. It was said that he'd been a favorite of his father Dmitri, who had encouraged Abulurd to take over the Harkonnen holdings . . . but Abulurd had made so many bad choices, so many decisions based on people rather than business necessities. It had been his downfall.

Wearing warm and prickly Lankiveil clothing, Margot kept her gray-green eyes downcast and concealed behind lenses that made them appear brown. She could have made herself into a golden-haired beauty and had, in fact, considered seducing Abulurd and simply taking the information she needed, but she had decided against that plan. The man seemed unshakably devoted to his squat and wholesome native wife, Emmi Rabban, the mother of Glossu Rabban. He had fallen in love with her long ago on Lankiveil, married her to the dismay of his father, and carried her with him from world to world during his chaotic career. Abulurd seemed impervious to any feminine temptations but hers.

Instead, Margot used simple charm and quiet innocence to gain access to written financial records, dusty ledgers, and inventory rooms. No one questioned her.

In time, taking advantage of every surreptitious opportunity, she found what she needed. Using flash-memorization techniques learned on Wallach IX, Margot scanned through stacks of etched ridulian crystals and absorbed columns of numbers, cargo manifests, lists of equipment decommissioned or placed into service, suspicious losses, storm damage.

In nearby rooms, groups of women skinned and gutted fish, chopped herbs, peeled roots and sour fruits for steaming cauldrons of fish stew, which Abulurd and his wife served for the entire household. They insisted on eating the same meals, at the same tables, as all of their workers. Margot finished her surreptitious scanning well before the meal call sounded throughout the rooms of the great house ....

Later, in private while listening to a blustery storm outside, she reviewed the data in her mind and studied spice-production records from Abulurd's tenure on Arrakis and the Baron's current filings with CHOAM, along with the amounts of melange spirited away from Arrakis by various smuggler organizations.

Normally, she would have set aside the data until entire teams of Sisters had a chance to analyze it. But Margot wanted to discover the answer herself.

Pretending to sleep, she dived into the problem behind her eyelids with abandon, falling into a deep trance.

The numbers had been masterfully manipulated, but after Margot stripped away the masks and thin screens, she found her answer. A Bene Gesserit could see it, but she doubted even the Emperor's financial advisors or CHOAM accountants would detect the deception.

Unless it was pointed out to them.

Her discovery suggested serious underreporting of spice production to CHOAM and the Emperor. Either the Harkonnens were selling melange illicitly -- doubtful, because that could easily be tracked -- or accumulating secret stockpiles of their own.

Interesting, Margot thought, raising her eyebrows. She opened her eyes, went over to a reinforced window casement, and stared out at the liquid metal seas, the choppy waves trapped within the bottleneck fjords, the murky black clouds hovering above the rugged bulwarks of rock. In the bleak distance, fur-whales set up an eerie, humming song.

The following day she booked passage on the next Guild Heighliner. Then, shucking her disguise, she rode up in a cargo hauler filled with processed whale-fur. She doubted that anyone on Lankiveil had noticed her arrival or her departure.

Four things cannot be hidden -- Love, smoke, a pillar of fire, and a man striding across the open bled.

-Fremen Wisdom

Alone in the quiet, stark desert -- exactly as it should be. Pardot Kynes found that he worked best with nothing but his own thoughts and plenty of time to think them. Other people provided too many distractions, and few others had the same focus or the same drive.

As Imperial Planetologist to Arrakis, he needed to absorb the huge landscape into every pore of his being. Once he got into the right mind-set he could actually feel the pulse of a world. Now, standing atop a rugged formation of black-and-red rock that had been uplifted from the surrounding basin, the lean, weathered man stared in both directions at the vastness. Desert, desert everywhere.

His map screen named the mountainous line Rimwall West. His altimeter proclaimed the tallest peaks to be substantially higher than six thousand meters

. . . yet he saw no snow, glaciers, or ice, no signs of precipitation whatsoever. Even the most rugged and atomic-blasted mountaintops on Salusa Secundus had been covered with snow. But the air here was so desperately dry that exposed water could not survive in any form.

Kynes stared southward across the ocean of sand to the world-girdling desert known as the Funeral Plain. No doubt geographers could have found ample distinctions to categorize the landscape into further labeled subsections -- but few humans who ventured out there ever returned. This was the domain of the worms. No one really needed maps.

Bemused, Kynes remembered ancient sailing charts from the earliest days of Old Terra, their mysterious unexplored areas marked simply, "Here Be Monsters."

Yes, he thought as he recalled Rabban's hunt of the incredible sandworm. Here be monsters indeed.

Exposed atop the serrated ridge of the Rimwall, he removed the stillsuit's nostril plugs and rubbed a sore spot where the filter constantly brushed against his nose. Then he pulled away the covering on his mouth so he could take a deep breath of the scorched, brittle air. According to his desert-prep instructions, he knew he should not expose himself unnecessarily to such water loss, but Kynes needed to draw in the aromas and vibrations of Arrakis, needed to sense the heartbeat of the planet.