Dune (46 page)

She looked, following the line of his hand, saw the poles—wind-scratched markers—made out the shadow of a narrow ledge that twisted into a crevasse high above them.

“They mark a way up the cliff,” Paul said. He settled his shoulders into the pack, crossed to the foot of the ledge and began the climb upward.

Jessica waited a moment, resting, restoring her strength; then she followed.

Up they climbed, following the guide poles until the ledge dwindled to a narrow lip at the mouth of a dark crevasse.

Paul tipped his head to peer into the shadowed place. He could feel the precarious hold his feet had on the slender ledge, but forced himself to slow caution. He saw only darkness within the crevasse. It stretched away upward, open to the stars at the top. His ears searched, found only sounds he could expect—a tiny spill of sand, an insect brrr, the patter of a small running creature. He tested the darkness in the crevasse with one foot, found rock beneath a gritting surface. Slowly, he inched around the corner, signaled for his mother to follow. He grasped a loose edge of her robe, helped her around.

They looked upward at starlight framed by two rock lips. Paul saw his mother beside him as a cloudy gray movement. “If we could only risk a light,” he whispered.

“We have other senses than eyes,” she said.

Paul slid a foot forward, shifted his weight, and probed with the other foot, met an obstruction. He lifted his foot, found a step, pulled himself up onto it. He reached back, felt his mother's arm, tugged at her robe for her to follow.

Another step.

“It goes on up to the top, I think,” he whispered.

Shallow and even steps,
Jessica thought.
Man-carved beyond a doubt.

She followed the shadowy movement of Paul's progress, feeling out the steps. Rock walls narrowed until her shoulders almost brushed them. The steps ended in a slitted defile about twenty meters long, its floor level, and this opened onto a shallow, moonlit basin.

Paul stepped out into the rim of the basin, whispered: “What a beautiful place.”

Jessica could only stare in silent agreement from her position a step behind him.

In spite of weariness, the irritation of recaths and nose plugs and the confinement of the stillsuit, in spite of fear and the aching desire for rest, this basin's beauty filled her senses, forcing her to stop and admire it.

“Like a fairyland,” Paul whispered.

Jessica nodded.

Spreading away in front of her stretched desert growth—bushes, cacti, tiny clumps of leaves—all trembling in the moonlight. The ringwalls were dark to her left, moonfrosted on her right.

“This must be a Fremen place,” Paul said.

“There would have to be people for this many plants to survive,” she agreed. She uncapped the tube to her stillsuit's catchpockets, sipped at it. Warm, faintly acrid wetness slipped down her throat. She marked how it refreshed her. The tube's cap grated against flakes of sand as she replaced it.

Movement caught Paul's attention—to his right and down on the basin floor curving out beneath them. He stared down through smoke bushes and weeds into a wedged slab sand-surface of moonlight inhabited by an
up-hop, jump, pop-hop
of tiny motion.

“Mice!” he hissed.

Pop-hop-hop!
they went, into shadows and out.

Something fell soundlessly past their eyes into the mice. There came a thin screech, a flapping of wings, and a ghostly gray bird lifted away across the basin with a small, dark shadow in its talons.

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 paintbush. 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.

 

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 esthers 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.

“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.

“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. . . .

He inhaled, smelling the rank sweetness. The odor was much richer around him than it had been.