Dune: House Atreides (15 page)

He smelled hot dust, the subtle saltiness of minerals, the distinct tastes of sand, weathered lava, and basalt. This was a world entirely without the moist scents of either growing or rotting vegetation, without any odor that might betray the cycles of life and death. Only sand and rock and more sand.

Upon closer inspection, though, even the harshest desert teemed with life, with specialized plants, with animals and insects adapted to hostile ecological niches. He knelt to scrutinize shadowy pockets in the rock, tiny hollows where the barest breath of morning dew might collect. There, lichens gripped the rough stone surface.

A few hard pellets marked the droppings of a small rodent, perhaps a kangaroo rat. Insects might make their homes here at high altitude, along with a bit of windblown grass or hardy and solitary weeds. On the vertical cliffs, even bats took shelter and surged out at dusk to hunt night moths and gnats. Occasionally in the enamel-blue sky he spotted a dark fleck that must have been a hawk or a carrion bird. For such larger animals, survival must be particularly hard.

How, then, do the Fremen survive?

He'd seen their dusty forms walking the village streets, but the desert people kept to themselves, went about their business, then vanished. Kynes noticed that the "civilized" villagers treated them differently, but it wasn't clear whether this came from awe or disdain. Polish comes from the cities, went an old Fremen saying, wisdom from the desert.

According to a few sparse anthropological notes he had found, the Fremen were the remnants of an ancient wandering people, the Zensunni, who had been slaves dragged from world to world. After being freed, or perhaps escaping, from their captivity they had tried to find a home for centuries, but were persecuted everywhere they went. Finally, they'd gone to ground here on Arrakis-and somehow they had thrived.

Once, when he'd tried to speak to a Fremen woman as she walked past, the woman had fixed him with the gaze of her shockingly blue-within-blue eyes, the whites completely swallowed in the indigo of pure spice addiction. The sight had jolted all questions from his mind, and before Kynes could say anything else to her, the Fremen woman had hurried on her way, hugging her tattered brown jubba cloak over her stillsuit.

Kynes had heard rumors that entire Fremen population centers were hidden out in the basins and the rocky buttresses of the Shield Wall. Living off the land, when the land itself provided so little life . . . how did they do it?

Kynes still had much to learn about Arrakis, and he thought the Fremen could teach him a great deal. If he could ever find them.

IN DIRTY, ROUGH-EDGED Carthag, the Harkonnens had been reluctant to outfit the unwanted Planetologist with extravagant equipment. Scowling at the Padishah Emperor's seal on Kynes's requisition, the supply master had authorized him to take clothes, a stilltent, a survival kit, four literjons of water, some preserved rations, and a battered one-man ornithopter with an extended fuel supply. Those items were enough for a person like Kynes, who was a stranger to luxury. He didn't care about formal trappings and useless niceties. He was much more focused on the problem of understanding Arrakis.

After checking the predicted storm patterns and prevailing winds, Kynes lit off in the ornithopter toward the northeast, heading deeper into the mountainous terrain surrounding the polar regions. Because the mid-latitudes were broiling wastelands, most human habitation clustered around the highlands.

He piloted the old surplus 'thopter, listening to the loud hum of its engines and the flutter of movable wings. From the air, and all alone: This was the best way to see the vistas below, to get a broad perspective on the geological blemishes and patterns, the colors of rock, the canyons.

Through the sand-scratched front windows he could see dry rills and gorges, the diverging brooms of alluvial fans from ancient floods. Some of the steep canyon walls appeared to have been cut by water abrasion, like a shigawire strand sawing through strata. Once, in the distance shimmering with the ripples of a heat mirage, he thought he saw a sparkling salt-encrusted playa that could easily have been a dried sea bottom. But when he flew in that direction, he couldn't find it.

Kynes became convinced that this planet had once held water. A lot of it. The evidence was there for any Planetologist to see. But where had it all gone?

The amount of ice in the polar caps was insignificant, mined by water merchants and hauled down to the cities, where it was sold at a premium. The caps certainly did not hold enough to explain vanished oceans or dried rivers. Had the native water somehow been destroyed or removed from the planet . . . or was it just hiding?

Kynes flew on, keeping his eyes open and searching, constantly searching.

Diligently compiling his journals, he took notes of every interesting thing he spotted. It would take years to gather enough information for a well-founded treatise, but in the past month he had already transmitted two regular progress reports back to the Emperor, just to show he was doing his appointed job. He'd handed these reports to an Imperial Courier and a Guild representative, one in Arrakeen, the other in Carthag. But he had no idea if Elrood or his advisors even read them.

Kynes found himself lost most of the time. His maps and charts were deplorably incomplete or absolutely wrong, which puzzled him. If Arrakis was the sole source of melange -- which, therefore, made this planet one of the most important in the Imperium -- then why was the landscape so poorly charted? If the Spacing Guild would just install a few more high-resolution satellites, much of the problem could be solved. No one seemed to know the answer.

For a Planetologist's purposes, though, being lost caused little concern. He was an explorer, after all, which required him to wander about with no plan and no destination. Even when his ornithopter began to rattle, he pressed on. The ion-propulsion engine was strong and the battered craft handled reasonably well, even in powerful gusts and updrafts of hot air. He had enough fuel to last him for weeks.

Kynes remembered all too well the years he had spent on harsh Salusa, trying to comprehend the catastrophe that had ruined it centuries before. He had seen ancient pictures, knew how beautiful the former capital world had once been.

But in his heart it would always remain the hellish place it was now.

Something epochal had happened here on Arrakis, too, but no witnesses or records had survived that ancient disaster. He didn't think it could have been atomic, though that solution might be easy to postulate. The ancient wars before and during the Butlerian Jihad had been devastating, had turned entire solar systems into rubble and dust.

No . . . something different had happened here.

MORE DAYS, MORE WANDERING.

On a barren, silent ridge halfway around the world, Kynes climbed to the top of another rocky peak. He had landed his 'thopter on a flat, boulder-strewn saddle, then walked up the slope, picking his way hand over hand with jangling equipment on his back.

In the unimaginative fashion of early cartographers, this curving arm of rock that formed a barrier between the Habanya Erg to the east and the great sink of the Cielago Depression to the west had been forever named False Wall West. He determined this would be a good spot to establish a data-collection outpost.

Feeling the exertion in his thighs and hearing the click-ticking of his overworked stillsuit, Kynes knew he must be perspiring heavily. Even so, his suit absorbed and recycled all of his bodily moisture, and he was in good shape.

When he could stand it no longer, he drew a lukewarm sip through the catchtube near his throat, then continued to trudge upward on the rough surface. The best place to conserve water is in your own body, said conventional Fremen wisdom, according to the vendor who had sold him his equipment. He was accustomed to the slick stillsuit by now; it had become a second skin to him.

At the craggy pinnacle -- about twelve hundred meters high, according to his altimeter -- he stopped at a natural shelter formed by a broken tooth of hard stone. There, he set up his portable weather station. Its analytical devices would record wind speeds and directions, temperatures, barometric pressures, and fluctuations in relative humidity.

Around the globe, centuries-old biological testing stations had been erected in the days long before the properties of melange had been discovered. Back then, Arrakis had been no more than an unremarkable, dry planet with little in the way of desirable resources -- of no interest to any but the most desperate of colonists. Many of those testing stations had fallen into disrepair, unattended, some even forgotten.

Kynes doubted the information gleaned from those stations would be very reliable. For now, he wanted his own data from his own instruments. With the whir of a tiny fan, an air-sampler gulped an atmospheric specimen and spilled out the composition readings: 23 percent oxygen, 75.4 percent nitrogen, 0.023

percent carbon dioxide, along with other trace gases.

Kynes found the numbers most peculiar. Perfectly breathable, of course, and exactly what one might expect from a normal planet with a thriving ecosystem.

But in this scorched realm, those partial pressures raised enormous questions.

With no seas or rainstorms, no plankton masses, no vegetative covering . . .

where did all the oxygen come from? It made absolutely no sense.

The only large indigenous life-forms he knew of were the sandworms. Could there be so many of the beasts that their metabolisms actually had a measurable effect on the composition of the atmosphere? Did some odd form of plankton teem within the sands themselves? Melange deposits were known to have an organic component, but Kynes had no idea what its source could be. Is there a connection between the voracious worms and the spice?

Arrakis was one ecological mystery built upon another.

With his preparations complete, Kynes turned from the perfect spot for his meteorological station. Then he realized with startling abruptness that parts of the seemingly natural alcove atop this isolated peak had been intentionally fashioned.

He bent down, amazed, and ran his fingers over rough notches. Steps cut into the rock! Human hands had done this not long ago, chopping out easy access to this place. An outpost? A lookout? A Fremen observation station?

A chill shot down his spine, borne on a trickle of sweat that the stillsuit greedily drank. At the same time, he felt a thrill of excitement, because the Fremen themselves might become allies, a hardened people who had the same agenda as he did, the same need to understand and improve ....

As Kynes turned around in the open air, searching, he felt exposed. "Hello?"

he called out, but only the desert silence answered him.

How is all of this connected? he wondered. And what, if anything, do the Fremen know about it?

Who can know whether Ix has gone too far? They hide their facilities, keep their workers enslaved, and claim the right of secrecy. Under such circumstances, how can they not be tempted to step beyond the restrictions of the Butlerian Jihad?

-COUNT ILBAN RICHESE, third appeal to the Landsraad Use your resources and use your wits," the Old Duke had always told him. Now, as he stood alone and shivering, Leto took stock of both.

He contemplated his grim and unexpected solitude on the wilderness surface of Ix

-- or wherever this place was. Had he been stranded here by accident or treachery? What was the worst case? The Guild should have kept a record of where he'd been unceremoniously discharged. His father and House Atreides troops could rally out and find him when he didn't show up at his intended destination -- but how long would that take? How long could he survive here?

If Vernius was behind this treachery, would the Earl even report him missing?

Leto tried to be optimistic, but he knew it might be a long time before help could come. He had no food, no warm clothing, not even a portable shelter. He had to take care of this problem himself.

"Hello!" he shouted again. The vast emptiness snatched his words and drained them to nothing, without even bothering to echo them back.

He considered venturing forth in search of some land mark or settlement, but decided to stay put for the time being. Next, he mentally assessed the possessions he'd brought in his suitcases, trying to think of what he might use to send a message.

Then, from beside him, in a blue-green thicket of spiny plants struggling to survive in the tundra, came a rustling sound. Startled, Leto jumped back, then looked closer. Assassins? A group intending to take him captive? The ransom of a ducal heir might bring a mountain of solaris . . . as well as the wrath of Paulus Atreides.

He drew the curve-bladed fishing knife from its sheath at his back and made ready to fight. His heart pounded as he tried to guess his peril, to prepare in some way. An Atreides had no qualms about shedding necessary blood.

The branches and pointed leaves moved, then opened to reveal a round plaz pad on the ground. With a hum of machinery, a transparent lift tube emerged from beneath the surface, looking totally incongruous on the rugged landscape.

A stocky young man stood inside the transparent tube, grinning a warm welcome.

He had blond, unruly hair that looked tousled despite careful combing; he wore loose military-style trousers and a color-shifting camouflage shirt. His pale, open face had soft edges from outgrown baby fat. A small pack hung on the stranger's left shoulder, similar to the one he carried in his hand. He appeared to be about Leto's age.

The transparent lift came to a stop, and a curved door rotated open. A breath of warm air brushed Leto's hands and face. He crouched, ready to attack with his fishing knife, though he could not imagine this innocuous-looking stranger to be a killer.

"You must be Leto Atreides, right?" the young man said. He spoke in Galach, the common language of the Imperium. "So should we start out with a day hike?"

Leto's gray eyes narrowed and fixed on the purple-and-copper Ixian helix adorning the boy's collar. Trying to hide his immense relief and maintain a professional, even suspicious facade, Leto nodded and lowered the tip of the knife, which the stranger had pretended not to notice.