Road to Dune (37 page)

Kynes indicated a chair. She sat down.

“There are no windows,” she said.

“Up here this close to the shield wall we get some of the high winds,” he said. “They run 700 kilometers an hour and even higher. Some of them spill over into this little pocket. We call it the rain of sand. It doesn’t take long under that kind of sandblasting for a window to become opaque. We depend on scanner eyes which can be shielded.”

“I see.” She adjusted her chair to lower resistance. “I brought my son up here, Doctor, because someday he’ll rule Arrakis. He must learn about it. We were told this place had been judged safe for the Duke’s visit. I therefore considered it safe for my son and me.”

“You are perfectly safe here, My Lady,” Kynes said.

She spoke with a dry bitterness: “No one is
perfectly
safe anywhere.”

Kynes lowered his eyes.

“I understand you’ve been on Arrakis quite a number of years,” she said.

“Forty-one years, My Lady.”

“As long as that?”

He met her eyes, looked past her. “I was educated at Center, and came here as my first assignment, My Lady. It was a family tradition. My father was here before me. He was Chief of Laboratories when Arrakis was still His Imperial Majesty’s Desert Botanical Testing Station.”

She liked the way he said “My father.”

“Did your father discover the spice?”

“He did not discover the spice, but the discovery was made by men working under him,” Kynes said. He looked down at the desk. “This was his desk.”

There was such a sense of pride and devotion in his voice, that Jessica felt the pulse of it with her special awareness.

“Please sit down, Dr. Kynes,” she said.

Kynes’ throat worked. He looked around the room, obviously embarrassed. “But, My Lady …”

“It’s quite all right,” she said. “I’m only the Duke’s bound concubine, the mother of his heir, but it’d still be all right were I Noble Born. You’re a loyal man, Dr. Kynes, and honorable. My Duke respects such as you, and we relax the usual ceremony among those we trust.” She pointed to the chair across from her. “Please sit down.”

Kynes took the chair, adjusting it to its highest resistance so that it supported him stiffly on its edge.

“You’re still operating under an Imperial grant?” she asked.

“His Majesty very kindly supports our work.”

“Which is?” She smiled. “For the record, that is.”

He returned her smile, and she saw the beginning of relaxation in his attitude. “It’s mostly dry land biology and botany, My Lady. And we do some geological work—core drilling and testing, things like that. You never really exhaust the possibilities of an entire planet.”

“Does His Majesty know the
other
work you do?”

“I don’t know quite how to say this, My Lady.”

“Try,” she said.

“We don’t actually conceal anything from the Imperium,” he said. “The records are all kept. We make regular reports as required. And we have quite proper authorization for all our projects. We …”

She began to laugh. “Kynes … Kynes,” she said. “You are marvelous. The system is marvelous. And the Imperial Court is so far away.”

Kynes spoke stiffly: “We are loyal subjects of the Imperium, My Lady. Please don’t try to twist what I …”

“Twist? You disappoint me, Kynes.”

“What we discover is for the good of the Imperial Regate,” Kynes said. “It’s not as though …”

“I want you to keep one thing foremost in your mind, Dr. Kynes.” She permitted a sharpness to creep into her voice. “You are now a subject of the Atreides Duchy. My Duke gives the orders here. He, too, is a loyal subject of the Imperium. And he knows how records may be kept, and the required reports made, and the proper authorizations obtained for
his
projects.”

Now,
she thought,
let’s see if there’s any steel in him.

A sour expression turned down the corners of Kynes’ mouth. “And the Court
is
so far away. A minor planetologist could be dead and buried, all properly authorized, by the time the Court discovered it.”

“You’ve been too long under the Harkonnens,” she said. “Didn’t you learn anything except fear and suspicion?”

“Oh, the pattern’s clear enough,” he said. “My Lady.”

“What pattern?”

“The army of tame killers, the subtle pressures and the not so subtle ones.” Kynes gripped the arms of his chair until his fingers were white. “I had hoped that this time …” He shook his head. “This planet could be a paradise! But all you and the Harkonnens ever think about is grubbing money out of the spice!”

She spoke dryly: “And how is our planet to become a paradise without money?”

Kynes blinked at her.

“As with most visionaries,” she said, “you see very little outside your vision.”

Kynes chewed his lower lip. “My Lady, I know I’ve spoken bluntly, but …”

“Let’s understand each other,” she said. “My Duke is not in the habit of destroying valuable men. Your … ah … sharp words merely show your value. They prove there’s steel in you that the Harkonnens didn’t take the temper out of. My Duke has need of steel.”

Kynes drew a deep breath, hunted the corners of the room with his eyes.

“How can you be sure I speak the truth?” she asked. A wry smile touched her mouth. “You can’t be, of course, until it’s too late, until after you’re committed to an irrevocable decision. But the Harkonnen way offered you no hope at all, did it?”

He shook his head, staring at her.

“I, too, can speak bluntly,” she said. “My Duke has his back to the wall. This fief is his last hope. If he can build Arrakis to a strong and secure Duchy, there will be a future for the Atreides line. He comes from Caladan, a planet that was a natural paradise. Too soft, perhaps. Men lost their edge quite easily there.”

“My Lady, there was talk of Harkonnen agents left behind.” The words were wrenched from him as though he were trying to say more and could not.

“Of course there were agents left behind!”
And now we find out about him,
she thought. “Do you know any of those agents?”

Kynes glanced at the door, wet his lips with his tongue. “No, My Lady. Of course not. I have very little contact with the world outside my work.”

He’s lying,
she thought. And the thought pained her more than it should have. She sighed. Another time, perhaps. And Tuek would have to be told of this man’s knowledge, of course. Again, she sighed.

“What does your Duke really want of me?” Kynes asked.

Well, why not change the subject?
she thought. “Can the spice grow artificially?” she asked.

Kynes pursed his lips. “Mélange is not an ordinary … that is, it’s possible … unless … you see,
I
suspect there’s a symbiotic relationship between the worms and whatever produces the spice.”

“Oh?” She found herself surprised by the idea.
But why not?
she asked herself.
We know of stranger relationships.
“What evidence of such symbiosis do you have?”

“It’s very tenuous, My Lady, I agree. But each worm defends its own sector of spice sands. Each seems to have a territory that … well … you see, we have only one preserved specimen … it’s in another … location. The capture of that specimen was quite a project, you may …”

“You have a live worm?”

“Oh, no! It’s quite dead. Preserved. We stunned it with a chemical explosion, dug down and killed each ring with repeated applications of high-voltage electricity. Each ring had to be killed separately.”

She noted the increased alertness in Kynes, the animation as he warmed to his subject. “Is it a large one?” she asked.

“Quite small, really. It’s only about eighty meters long and some fifteen meters in diameter. They grow much larger in the deep desert—ten times that size. We caught this one in the high latitudes where the sand cover on the basic rock is rather thin. They’re rare in that region, of course, and, I might add, so is the spice rare there. You never find the worms this far north.” He gestured around him. “Too much rock and there are the mountains between us and the desert.
And
there’s no evidence of spice in these latitudes.”

“Just because there’s no spice where there are no worms,” she said, “that doesn’t …”

“But there’s other evidence,” he said. “My examination of our specimen suggests a complicated relationship. It is very difficult to find true knowledge about the deep desert. Factory crawlers, aircraft, anything that’s forced down in the deep desert and unable to get away stands little chance of survival. Your only hope is rescue … and that as fast as possible unless you can hold out on one of the rather rare outcroppings of substratum. There are a predictable number of personnel disappearances every year.”

“Ah, the uses of statistics,” she murmured.

“What, My Lady?”

“The ubiquitous sand,” she said. “And you spoke of making it a paradise.”

“Well, My Lady, with sufficient water and …”

The door behind Kynes slammed open onto reeling violence, shouting, the clash of steel, and wax-image faces grimacing. Jessica found herself on her feet, staring at Idaho’s blood-pitted eyes, claw hands around him, arcs of blurred steel chopping. She saw Paul crawling past Idaho … the orange fire-mouth of a stunner. Paul had his small knife, the poison one, in his hand, flicking it, flicking it … at the people who clawed at Idaho and himself.

In a different version of the scene:

O
ur first move,” Paul said, “should be to recover our Family Atomics. They’re …”

“What of your father’s … body, his water?” Kynes asked.

Paul sensed hidden meaning in the question, said: “My father died with honor.”

“You know this without knowing the manner of his death?”

“I know it.”

“I think perhaps you do, yet the Harkonnens … still have his water.”

“The Harkonnens will overlook his water,” Paul said. “They don’t follow the Arrakeen Way. My father’s water will escape into the air and soil of Arrakis, become a part of Arrakis, just as I will become a part of Arrakis.”

“Fremen will hesitate to follow a man who has not recovered his father’s water.”

“I see,” Paul said.

“You asked for my counsel, sire.”

“Could you suggest a way of recovering my father’s … water ?”

“A force is being formed now to recover our own bodies from Arrakeen. They could be told to recover your father, also. If they’re successful, a token battle with the leader of this band, you being victorious, would restore the pattern of things.”

“But that’s not the best way,” Paul said.

“No. The best way is for you to do it yourself.”

“Our Family Atomics are in Arrakeen,” Paul said. “They’re shielded and hidden deep underneath our residency there, planted directly in line with the house’s power plant and masked by that plant.”

He does not hesitate to tell this man anything,
Jessica thought.
He knows he has the loyalty. Indeed, what an Emperor my son would make.
She pushed the thought aside, warning herself :
I must not become infected by his scheme!

“On Arrakis,” Kynes said, “the water is more important.”

“In the Imperium, a Family’s atomics are also important,” Paul said. “Without them, you lack an unspoken bargaining point.”

“The suicide threat,” Kynes said, and his voice was bitter.
“I will shatter your planet.”

“Without the atomics,” Paul said, “one is not quite a Great House. But then …” He gestured to the crysknife hilt partly concealed beneath the robe at Kynes’ waist. “ … is a Fremen a Fremen without his knife?”

A smile touched Kynes’ lips, white teeth glistening within his beard.

New Chapter:
THE FLIGHT FROM KYNES’S DESERT BASE

I
n the cave’s blackness, Jessica felt that her life had become sand curling in an hourglass, running faster and faster … There were no more luminous arrows to guide them—only a slit in rock that she felt with her hands. The slit gave out into night with the sound of a sandstorm keening overhead, and the fall of sand on her outstretched hand. Her eyes tried to force light from memory, but found only the empty present.

“What is it?” Paul asked. “Where are we?”

“It’s the end of the tunnel,” she said. She tried to speak calmly, helping preserve his courage. “You saw that last arrow?”

“There was a sign on it,” he said. “What did it mean?”

“Square within a square,” she said. “That means ‘end of path.’ It’s a Bene Gesserit symbol.” And she wondered at the mystery of it. How had Kynes or whoever had made this place known to put a Bene Gesserit symbol there?
The end that is a beginning.

“What do you feel when you put your foot out?” Paul asked.

“There’s a drop-off of some kind,” she said. “I can’t feel the bottom of it. We’ll have to wait for dawn unless we can find some light.”

“I feel sand blowing,” he said. “And there’s dust in my nose.”

“If only we had shields. You know, I blamed Idaho for not offering you his shield,” she said.

“Lump-lump-lump-lump!”

It was a fluttering sound, directionless in the dark.
Somewhere
out there. Jessica held herself motionless except for a hand that reached out and gripped Paul’s shoulder. Fingernails of terror scraped along her nerves.

“What’s that?” Paul whispered.

“Chireeep!” It came from the inky dark.

“Maybe something blowing in the wind,” she said. “Be quiet and listen.”

The waiting moment was packed with a sense of movements. Every sound had its own dimension. They were so tiny, the little movements. Realization flooded through her, squeezing fear into controllable size. The ungainly thumping of her heartbeats evened, shaping out the moments of time. She forced inner calmness.

“It’s little animals, or perhaps birds,” she said. “They were all around us and we frightened them.”

And she realized that this cave must have been a storm sanctuary for creatures from the desert.

“What was that other sound?” Paul asked.