Dune: House Atreides (56 page)

One day, when Jessica was of age, she would be commanded to bear a daughter, and that child must be introduced to the son of Abulurd Harkonnen, the Baron's youngest demibrother. At the moment Abulurd and his wife had only one son, Rabban-but Anirul had set in motion a means of suggesting that they have more.

This would improve the odds of one male surviving to maturity; it would also improve the gene selection, and improve the odds of good sexual timing.

A vast jigsaw puzzle remained apparent to Anirul, each of its pieces a separate event in the incredible Bene Gesserit breeding program. Only a few more components needed to slip into place now, and the Kwisatz Haderach would become a reality in flesh and blood -- the all-powerful male who could bridge space and time, the ultimate tool to be wielded by the Bene Gesserit.

Anirul wondered now, as she often had without daring to speak of it, if such a man could cause the Bene Gesserit to once again find genuine religious fervor, like the fanaticism of the crusading Butler family. What if he made others revere him as a god?

Imagine that, she thought. The Bene Gesserit -- who used religion only to manipulate others -- ensnared by their own messianic leader. She doubted that could ever happen.

Reverend Mother Anirul went out to celebrate with her Sisters.

The surest way to keep a secret is to make people believe they already know the answer.

-Ancient Fremen Wisdom

Umma Kynes, you have accomplished much," said one-eyed Heinar as the two men sat on a rocky promontory above their sietch. The Naib treated him as an equal now, even with overblown respect. Kynes had stopped bothering to argue with the desert people every time they called him "Umma," their word for "prophet."

He and Heinar watched the coppery sunset spill across the sweeping dunefield of the Great Erg. Far in the distance, a fuzzy haze hung on the horizon, the last remnants of a sandstorm that had passed the previous day.

Powerful winds had washed the dunes clean, scrubbed their surfaces, recontoured the landscape. Kynes relaxed against the rough rock, sipping from a pungent cup of spice coffee.

Seeing her husband about to go above ground, outside the sietch, a pregnant Frieth had hurried after the two men as they waited to bid the sun farewell for another day. An elaborate brass coffee service sat between them on a flat stone. Frieth had brought it, along with a selection of the crunchy sesame cakes Kynes loved so well. By the time he remembered to thank her for her kind attentiveness, Frieth had already vanished like a shadow back into the caves.

After a long moment, Kynes nodded distractedly at the Naib's comment. "Yes, I've accomplished much, but I still have plenty to do." He thought of the remarkably complex plans required to complete his dream of a reborn Dune, a planetary name little known in the Imperium.

Imperium. He rarely thought of the old Emperor now -- his own priorities, the emphasis of his life, had changed so greatly. Kynes could never go back to being a mere Imperial Planetologist, not after all he'd been through with these desert people.

Heinar clasped his friend's wrist. "It is said that sunset is a time for reflection and assessment, my friend. Let us look to what we have done, rather than permit the empty gulf of the future to overwhelm us. You have been on this planet for only a little more than a year, yet already you have found a new tribe, a new wife." Heinar smiled. "And soon you will have a new child, a son perhaps."

Kynes returned the smile wistfully. Frieth was nearly through her gestation period. He was somewhat surprised that the pregnancy had happened at all, since he was gone so frequently. He still wasn't certain how to react to his impending role as a first-time father. He had never thought about it before.

However, the birth would fit in neatly with the overall plan he had for this astounding planet. His child, growing up to lead the Fremen long after Kynes himself was gone, could help continue their efforts. The master plan was designed to take centuries.

As a Planetologist, he had to think in the long term, something the Fremen were not in the habit of doing -- though, given their long, troubled past, they should have been accustomed to it. The desert people had an oral history going back thousands of years, tales told in the sietch describing their endless wanderings from planet to planet, a people enslaved and persecuted, until finally they had made a home here where no one else could bear to live.

The Fremen way was a conservative one, little changed from generation to generation, and these people were not used to considering the broad scope of progress. Assuming their environment could not be adapted, they remained its prisoners, rather than its masters.

Kynes hoped to change all that. He had mapped out his great plan, including rough timetables for plantings and the accumulation of water, milestones for each successive achievement. Hectare by hectare, Dune would be rescued from the wasteland.

His Fremen teams were scouring the surface, taking core samples from the Great Bled, geological specimens from the Minor Erg and the Funeral Plain -- but many terraforming factors still remained unknown variables.

Pieces fell into place daily. When he expressed a desire for better maps of the planet's surface, he was astonished to learn that the Fremen already had detailed topographical charts, even climatic surveys. "Why is it that I couldn't get these before?" Kynes said. "I was the Imperial Planetologist, and the maps I received from satellite cartography were woefully inaccurate."

Old Heinar had smiled at him, squinting his one eye. "We pay a substantial bribe to the Spacing Guild to keep them from watching us too closely. The cost is high, but the Fremen are free -- and the Harkonnens remain in the dark, along with the rest of the Imperium."

Kynes was astonished at first, then simply pleased, to have much of the geographical information he needed. Immediately he dispatched traders to deal with smugglers and obtain genetically engineered seeds of vigorous desert plants. He had to design and build an entire ecosystem from scratch.

In large council meetings, the Fremen asked their new "prophet" what the next step might be, how long each process would take, when Dune would become green and lush. Kynes had tallied up his estimates and calmly looked down at the number. In the manner of a teacher answering a child who has asked an absurdly simple question, Kynes shrugged and told them, "It will take anywhere from three hundred to five hundred years. Maybe a little more."

Some of the Fremen bit back groans of despair, while the rest listened stoically to the Umma, and then set about doing what he asked. Three hundred to five hundred years. Long-term thinking, beyond their personal lifetimes. The Fremen had to alter their ways.

Seeing a vision from God, the would-be assassin Uliet had sacrificed himself for this man. From that moment on, the Fremen had been fully convinced of Kynes's divine inspiration. He had only to point, and any Fremen in the sietch would do as he bid.

The feeling of power might have been abused by any other person. But Pardot Kynes simply took it in stride and continued his work. He envisioned the future in terms of eons and worlds, not in terms of individuals or small plots of land.

Now, as the sun vanished below the sands in a brassy symphony of color, Kynes drained the last drops of his spice coffee, then wiped a forearm across his sandy beard. Despite what Heinar had said, he found it difficult to reflect patiently on the past year . . . the demands of the labors for centuries to come seemed so much more significant, so much more demanding of his attention.

"Heinar, how many Fremen are there?" he asked, staring across the serene open desert. He'd heard tales of many other sietches, had seen isolated Fremen in the Harkonnen towns and villages . . . but they seemed like the ghosts of an endangered species. "How many in the whole world?"

"Do you wish us to count our numbers, Umma Kynes?" Heinar asked, not in disbelief, simply clarifying an order.

"I need to know your population if I'm to project our terraforming activities.

I must understand just how many workers we have available."

Heinar stood up. "It shall be done. We shall number our sietches, and rally the people in them. I will send sandriders and distrans bats to all the communities, and we shall have an accounting for you soon."

"Thank you." Kynes picked up his cup, but before he could gather the dishes himself, Frieth rushed out of the cave shadows -- she must have been waiting there for them to finish -- and gathered up the pieces of the coffee service.

Her pregnancy hadn't slowed her down at all.

The first Fremen census, Kynes thought. A momentous occasion.

BRIGHT-EYED AND EAGER, Stilgar came to Kynes's cavern quarters the next morning.

"We are packing for your long journey, Umma Kynes. Far to the south. We have important things to show you."

Since his recovery from the Harkonnen knife wound, Stilgar had become one of Kynes's most devoted followers. He seemed to draw status from his relationship with the Planetologist, his brother-in-law. Stilgar served not for himself, though, but for the greater good of the Fremen.

"How long will the journey be?" Kynes inquired. "And where are we going?"

The young man's grin sparkled, a broad display of white. "A surprise! This is something you must see, or you may not believe. Think of it as a gift from us to you."

Curious, Kynes looked over at his work alcove. He would bring along his notes to document this journey. "But how long will it take?"

"Twenty thumpers," Stilgar answered in the terminology of the deep desert, then called over his shoulder as he left, "Far to the south."

Kynes's wife Frieth, now enormously pregnant, nevertheless spent long hours working the looms and the stillsuit-repair benches. This morning Kynes finished his coffee and breakfasted at her side, though they spoke little to each other.

Frieth simply watched him, and he felt he didn't understand a thing.

Fremen women seemed to have their own separate world, their own place in the society of these desert dwellers, with no connection to the interaction Kynes had found elsewhere in the Imperium. It was said, though, that Fremen women were among the most vicious of fighters on the battlefield, and that if an enemy were left wounded and at the mercy of these ferocious women, he would be better served to kill himself outright.

Then, too, there was the unanswered mystery of the Sayyadinas, the holy women of the sietch. Thus far Kynes had seen only one of their number, dressed in a long black robe like that of a Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother -- and no Fremen seemed willing to tell him much about them. Different worlds, different mysteries.

Someday, Kynes thought it might be interesting to compile a sociological study of how different cultures reacted and adapted to extreme environments. He wondered what the harsh realities of a world could do to the natural instincts and traditional roles of the sexes. But he already had too much work to do.

Besides, he was a Planetologist, not a sociologist.

Finishing his meal, Kynes leaned forward and kissed his Fremen wife. Smiling, he patted her rounded belly beneath her robes. "Stilgar says I must accompany him on a journey. I'll be back as soon as I can."

"How long?" she inquired, thinking of the baby's impending birth. Apparently Kynes, obsessed with his long view of events on this planet, had not noted his own child's expected due date and had forgotten to allow for it in his plans.

"Twenty thumpers," he said, though he wasn't exactly certain how much distance that meant.

Frieth raised her eyebrows in quiet surprise, then lowered her gaze and began to clean up their breakfast dishes. "Even the longest journey may pass more quickly when the heart is content." Her tone betrayed only the slightest disappointment. "I shall await your return, my husband." She hesitated, then said, "Choose a good worm."

Kynes didn't know what she meant.

Moments later, Stilgar and eighteen other young Fremen decked out in full desert garb led Kynes through the tortuous passages down and out of the barrier mountain and onto the enormous western sea of sands. Kynes felt a pang of worry. The parched expanse seemed too far and too dangerous. Now he was glad he wasn't alone.

"We're going across the equator and below, Umma Kynes, to where we Fremen have other lands, our own secret projects. You shall see."

Kynes's eyes widened; he had heard only grim and terrible stories about the uninhabitable southern regions. He stared into the forbidding distance as Stilgar rapidly checked over the Planetologist's stillsuit, tightening fastenings and adjusting filters to his own satisfaction. "But how will we travel?" He knew the sietch had its own ornithopter, just a skimmer actually, not nearly large enough to carry so many people.

Stilgar looked at him with an expectant expression. "We shall ride, Umma Kynes." He nodded toward the youth who had long ago taken a wounded Stilgar back to the sietch in Kynes's groundcar. "Ommun will become a sandrider this day. It is a great event among our people."

"I'm sure it is," Kynes said, his curiosity piqued.

In their desert-stained robes the Fremen marched out across the sand, walking single file. Beneath the robes they wore stillsuits, and on their feet temag desert boots. Their indigo-blue eyes gazed out of the far past.

One dark figure raced forward along a dune crest several hundred meters ahead of the rest of his group. There he took a long dark stake and shoved it into the sand, tinkering with controls until finally Kynes could hear the reverberating thump of repetitive pounding.

Kynes had already seen such a thing during Glossu Rabban's ultimately frustrating worm hunt. "He's trying to make a worm come?"

Stilgar nodded. "If God wishes."

Kneeling on the sands, Ommun removed a cloth-wrapped bundle of tools. These he sorted and laid out neatly. Long iron hooks, sharp loads, and coils of rope.

"Now what is he doing?" Kynes asked.

The thumper pounded its rhythm into the sand. The Fremen troop waited, carrying packs and supplies.