Dune (81 page)

Now came the crucial test: date palms, cotton, melons, coffee, medicinals —
more than 200 selected food plant types to test and adapt.

“The thing the ecologically illiterate don’t realize about an ecosystem,”
Kynes said, “is that it’s a system. A system! A system maintains a certain fluid
stability that can be destroyed by a misstep in just one niche. A system has
order, a flowing from point to point. If something dams that flow, order
collapses. The untrained might miss that collapse until it was too late. That’s
why the highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”

Had they achieved a system?

Kynes and his people watched and waited. The Fremen now knew what he meant
by an open-?end prediction to five hundred years.

A report came up from the palmaries:

At the desert edge of the plantings, the sand plankton is being poisoned
through interaction with the new forms of life. The reason: protein
incompatibility. Poisonous water was forming there which the Arrakis life would
not touch. A barren zone surrounded the plantings and even shai-?hulud would not
invade it.

Kynes went down to the palmaries himself — a twenty-?thumper trip (in a
palanquin like a wounded man or Reverend Mother because he never became a
sandrider). He tested the barren zone (it stank to heaven) and came up with a
bonus, a gift from Arrakis.

The addition of sulfur and fixed nitrogen converted the barren zone to a
rich plant bed for terraform life. The plantings could be advanced at will!

“Does this change the timing?” the Fremen asked.

Kynes went back to his planetary formulae. Windtrap figures were fairly
secure by then. He was generous with his allowances, knowing he couldn’t draw
neat lines around ecological problems. A certain amount of plant cover had to be
set aside to hold dunes in place; a certain amount for foodstuffs (both human
and animal); a certain amount to lock moisture in root systems and to feed water
out into surrounding parched areas. They’d mapped the roving cold spots on the
open bled by this time. These had to be figured into the formulae. Even shai-
hulud had a place in the charts. He must never be destroyed, else spice wealth
would end. But his inner digestive “factory,” with its enormous concentrations
of aldehydes and acids, was a giant source of oxygen. A medium worm (about 200
meters long) discharged into the atmosphere as much oxygen as ten square
kilometers of green growing photosynthesis surface.

He had the Guild to consider. The spice bribe to the Guild for preventing
weather satellites and other watchers in the skies of Arrakis already had
reached major proportions.

Nor could the Fremen be ignored. Especially the Fremen, with their windtraps
and irregular landholdings organized around water supply; the Fremen with their
new ecological literacy and their dream of cycling vast areas of Arrakis through
a prairie phase into forest cover.

From the charts emerged a figure. Kynes reported it. Three per cent. If they
could get three per cent of the green plant element on Arrakis involved in
forming carbon compounds, they’d have their self-?sustaining cycle.

“But how long?” the Fremen demanded.

“Oh, that: about three hundred and fifty years.”

So it was true as this umma had said in the beginning: the thing would not
come in the lifetime of any man now living, nor in the lifetime of their
grandchildren eight times removed, but it would come.

The work continued: building, planting, digging, training the children.

Then Kynes-?the-?Umma was killed in the cave-?in at Plaster Basin.

By this time his son, Liet-?Kynes, was nineteen, a full Fremen and sandrider
who had killed more than a hundred Harkonnens. The Imperial appointment for
which the elder Kynes already had applied in the name of his son was delivered
as a matter of course. The rigid class structure of the faufreluches had its
well-?ordered purpose here. The son had been trained to follow the father.

The course had been set by this time, the Ecological-?Fremen were aimed along
their way. Liet-?Kynes had only to watch and nudge and spy upon the Harkonnens .
. . until the day his planet was afflicted by a Hero.

= = = = = =

Appendix II: The Religion of Dune

Before the coming of Muad’Dib, the Fremen of Arrakis practiced a religion
whose roots in the Maometh Saari are there for any scholar to see. Many have
traced the extensive borrowings from other religions. The most common example is
the Hymn to Water, a direct copy from the Orange Catholic Liturgical Manual,
calling for rain clouds which Arrakis had never seen. But there are more
profound points of accord between the Kitab al-?Ibar of the Fremen and the
teachings of Bible, Ilm, and Fiqh.

Any comparison of the religious beliefs dominant in the Imperium up to the
time of Muad’Dib must start with the major forces which shaped those beliefs:

1. The followers of the Fourteen Sages, whose Book was the Orange Catholic
Bible, and whose views are expressed in the Commentaries and other literature
produced by the Commission of Ecumenical Translators. (C.E.T.);

2. The Bene Gesserit, who privately denied they were a religious order, but
who operated behind an almost impenetrable screen of ritual mysticism, and whose
training, whose symbolism, organization, and internal teaching methods were
almost wholly religious;

3. The agnostic ruling class (including the Guild) for whom religion was a
kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep it docile, and who believed
essentially that all phenomena — even religious phenomena — could be reduced
to mechanical explanations;

4. The so-?called Ancient Teachings — including those preserved by the
Zensunni Wanderers from the first, second, and third Islamic movements; the
Navachristianity of Chusuk, the Buddislamic Variants of the types dominant at
Lankiveil and Sikun, the Blend Books of the Mahayana Lankavatara, the Zen
Hekiganshu of III Delta Pavonis, the Tawrah and Talmudic Zabur surviving on
Salusa Secundus, the pervasive Obeah Ritual, the Muadh Quran with its pure Ilm
and Fiqh preserved among the pundi rice farmers of Caladan, the Hindu
outcroppings found all through the universe in little pockets of insulated
pyons, and finally, the Butlerian Jihad.

There is a fifth force which shaped religious belief, but its effect is so
universal and profound that it deserves to stand alone.
This is, of course, space travel — and in any discussion of religion, it
deserves to be written thus:

SPACE TRAVEL!

Mankind’s movement through deep space placed a unique stamp on religion
during the one hundred and ten centuries that preceded the Butlerian Jihad. To
begin with, early space travel, although widespread, was largely unregulated,
slow, and uncertain, and, before the Guild monopoly, was accomplished by a
hodgepodge of methods. The first space experiences, poorly communicated and
subject to extreme distortion, were a wild inducement to mystical speculation.

Immediately, space gave a different flavor and sense to ideas of Creation.
That difference is seen even in the highest religious achievements of the
period. All through religion, the feeling of the sacred was touched by anarchy
from the outer dark.

It was as though Jupiter in all his descendant forms retreated into the
maternal darkness to be superseded by a female immanence filled with ambiguity
and with a face of many terrors.

The ancient formulae intertwined, tangled together as they were fitted to
the needs of new conquests and new heraldic symbols. It was a time of struggle
between beast-?demons on the one side and the old prayers and invocations on the
other.

There was never a clear decision.

During this period, it was said that Genesis was reinterpreted, permitting
God to say:

“Increase and multiply, and fill the universe, and subdue it, and rule over
all manner of strange beasts and living creatures in the infinite airs, on the
infinite earths and beneath them.”

It was a time of sorceresses whose powers were real. The measure of them is
seen in the fact they never boasted how they grasped the firebrand.

Then came the Butlerian Jihad — two generations of chaos. The god of
machine-?logic was overthrown among the masses and a new concept was raised:

“Man may not be replaced.”

Those two generations of violence were a thalamic pause for all humankind.
Men looked at their gods and their rituals and saw that both were filled with
that most terrible of all equations: fear over ambition.

Hesitantly, the leaders of religions whose followers had spilled the blood
of billions began meeting to exchange views. It was a move encouraged by the
Spacing Guild, which was beginning to build its monopoly over all interstellar
travel, and by the Bene Gesserit who were banding the sorceresses.

Out of those first ecumenical meetings came two major developments:

1. The realization that all religions had at least one common commandment:
“Thou shall not disfigure the soul.”

2. The Commission of Ecumenical Translators.

C.E.T. convened on a neutral island of Old Earth, spawning ground of the
mother religions. They met “in the common belief that there exists a Divine
Essence in the universe.” Every faith with more than a million followers was
represented, and they reached a surprisingly immediate agreement on the
statement of their common goal:

“We are here to remove a primary weapon from the hands of disputant
religions. That weapon — the claim to possession of the one and only
revelation.”

Jubilation at this “sign of profound accord” proved premature. For more than
a standard year, that statement was the only announcement from C.E.T. Men spoke
bitterly of the delay. Troubadours composed witty, biting songs about the one
hundred and twenty-?one “Old Cranks” as the C.E.T. delegates came to be called.
(The name arose from a ribald joke which played on the C.E.T. initials and
called the delegates “Cranks-?Effing-?Turners.”) One of the songs, “Brown Repose,”
has undergone periodic revival and is popular even today:

“Consider leis.
Brown repose — and
The tragedy
In all of those
Cranks! All those Cranks!
So laze — so laze
Through all your days.
Time has toll’d for
M’Lord Sandwich!”

Occasional rumors leaked out of the C.E.T. sessions. It was said they were
comparing texts and, irresponsibly, the texts were named. Such rumors inevitably
provoked anti-?ecumenism riots and, of course, inspired new witticisms.

Two years passed . . . three years.

The Commissioners, nine of their original number having died and been
replaced, paused to observe formal installation of the replacements and
announced they were laboring to produce one book, weeding out “all the
pathological symptoms” of the religious past.

“We are producing an instrument of Love to be played in all ways,” they
said.

Many consider it odd that this statement provoked the worst outbreaks of
violence against ecumenism. Twenty delegates were recalled by their
congregations. One committed suicide by stealing a space frigate and diving it
into the sun.

Historians estimate the riots took eighty million lives. That works out to
about six thousand for each world then in the Landsraad League. Considering the
unrest of the time, this may not be an excessive estimate, although any pretense
to real accuracy in the figure must be just that — pretense. Communication
between worlds was at one of its lowest ebbs.

The troubadours, quite naturally, had a field day. A popular musical comedy
of the period had one of the C.E.T. delegates sitting on a white sand beach
beneath a palm tree singing:

“For God, woman and the splendor of love
We dally here sans fears or cares.
Troubadour! Troubadour, sing another melody
For God, Woman and the splendor of love!”

Riots and comedy are but symptoms of the times, profoundly revealing. They
betray the psychological tone, the deep uncertainties . . . and the striving for
something better, plus the fear that nothing would come of it all.

The major dams against anarchy in these times were the embryo Guild, the
Bene Gesserit and the Landsraad, which continued its 2,000-year record of
meeting in spite of the severest obstacles. The Guild’s part appears clear: they
gave free transport for all Landsraad and C.E.T. business. The Bene Gesserit
role is more obscure. Certainly, this is the time in which they consolidated
their hold upon the sorceresses, explored the subtle narcotics, developed prana-
bindu training and conceived the Missionaria Protectiva, that black arm of
superstition. But it is also the period that saw the composing of the Litany
against Fear and the assembly of the Azhar Book, that bibliographic marvel that
preserves the great secrets of the most ancient faiths.

Ingsley’s comment is perhaps the only one possible:

“Those were times of deep paradox.”
For almost seven years, then, C.E.T. labored. And as their seventh
anniversary approached, they prepared the human universe for a momentous
announcement. On that seventh anniversary, they unveiled the Orange Catholic
Bible.

“Here is a work with dignity and meaning,” they said. “Here is a way to make
humanity aware of itself as a total creation of God.”

The men of C.E.T. were likened to archeologists of ideas, inspired by God in
the grandeur of rediscovery. It was said they had brought to light “the vitality
of great ideals overlaid by the deposits of centuries,” that they had “sharpened
the moral imperatives that come out of a religious conscience.”

With the O.C. Bible, C.E.T. presented the Liturgical Manual and the
Commentaries — in many respects a more remarkable work, not only because of its
brevity (less than half the size of the O.C. Bible), but also because of its
candor and blend of self-?pity and self-?righteousness.

The beginning is an obvious appeal to the agnostic rulers.