Road to Dune (43 page)

Just below the crest, he lay flat, crept up Fremen fashion, peered all around. Abruptly, he froze and lay motionless as the sand geysered beneath a dune downwind. A hooded man climbed out onto a dune there. Others followed—more than twenty figures. They concentrated their attention briefly on the sky to the northeast, then began spreading out across the dune in a familiar pattern. They were going to call a worm, he saw. Occasionally, they paused, glanced to the northeast.

Paul studied the horizon in that direction, saw the glistening sunset, underlighted pinpoints which had caught the troop’s attention:’thopters. Paul counted four of them spread out in a search pattern and headed toward the Fremen atop the dunes. The’thopters drew near and the troop waited, heads down.

A single’thopter detached itself, climbed over the Fremen, banked above Paul. The thunder of its wings stirred the melange into a miniature storm. It curved around downwind, banked for a landing.

Abruptly, the Fremen band whirled. Maula pistols were jerked from beneath their robes; the muzzles tracked the landing’thopter. Its pilot apparently saw the menace. He spread his wings, jetted away in a steep climb.

All four ships took up a stacked formation, circled once more over the troop, went dipping and gliding back to the northeast.

They saw me,
Paul thought,
but they thought I was a member of this troop.
He studied the Fremen. They were spreading out now in a familiar wide-armed deployment. No doubt who they were or what they were doing: these were wild Fremen, renegades who refused to fit into the ecological pattern which was transforming their planet. And now they were preparing to summon a worm for a ride into the deep desert.

One member of the troop, an obvious leader, called out to his companions from a dunetop. A man detached himself from the band, sped across the dunes with a thumper. His feet kicked up tiny spurts of dust and sand. The whole desert passed into night while he ran, leaving the first moon with its sharply outlined handprint pattern dominating the sky.

The thumper began to beat out its summons: “Lump-lump-lump-lump.” It was a sound as much felt through the sand as heard. If a worm lay within range of that sound, it would come raging and hissing through the sand to be trapped as a steed for the Fremen troop.

Could he join them? Paul wondered. A Fremen could abandon sietch, friends and family only for special reasons of honor. Another tribe was bound to consider those reasons and, finding them sufficient, accept the renegade … provided they had no urgent need for his water. The water burden took precedent over all else.

But these were renegades who opposed the actions of Muad’Dib. These were men who’d gone back to the blood sacrifice and the old rites. They’d be sure to recognize him. What Fremen didn’t know the features of Muad’Dib? Here were men who’d sworn on Fremen honor to fight the changes being wrought on Arrakis. They might slay Muad’Dib out of hand, offer his life as sacrifice in their rite.

He heard the faint sand-hiss then, first warning that a worm answered the thumper summons. The clapper-driven device still sounded from the dunes out there beneath the moonlight. There was no sign of the troop, though. They had blended themselves into the desert to wait.

The worm came from the southwest past the island of rocks. It was a good-sized one riding partly out of the sand—about a hundred meters long. Its crystal teeth flashed in the moonlight as it curved toward the irritant thumper. Paul could see the rippling of its driving segments.

A shape rose from the dunes as the worm passed. Maker hooks glistened as they drove into a segment of the worm. In the same instant, the creature swallowed the thumper, silenced it. The troop went up on its hooks then, turning the worm with a casual grace as they opened its segments. Goaders darted back along the high back as the worm rose farther from the sand. The beat of the goads drummed out in a frenetic rhythm. The worm picked up speed.

Paul turned to watch them go.

The worm was headed back on its own track. The robes of the riders strung out along its back whipped in the wind of its passage. Their voices wafted back to Paul, growing fainter as the rock outcropping hid them: “Hyah! Hyah! Hyah! Hyah! …”

Paul waited against the duneface until the sounds faded away, blended with the natural sounds of the night. He had never before experienced such a profound sense of loneliness. The troop of wild Fremen had taken the last of human civilization away with them. Only the desert remained.

He came curiously to the realization that he no longer cared where he was in the universe. He felt that he had lived a preassigned role and come to the end of it without an audience. There should be applause, he thought, but there’s no audience. Well-remembered stars occupied their positions in the sky, but they no longer represented directions to him nor could he think of them as signposts. There was merely space all around him laid out against an enormous background of Time. The stars peered past him and through him like the empty eyes of his subject peoples. They were the sealed eyes of ignorance, always seeking to avoid their responsive status as human senses. They were the eyes from which nothing escaped.

For a few minutes, he listened to and identified the night sounds around him. This desert teemed with life which had adapted to it. He had not adapted. His body was mostly water. That water was a poison which could sicken a worm. If a worm devoured too many men, it died.

Presently, he pushed himself away from the dune, climbed up to the siff crest, struck out along the track of the worm. He knew why he had chosen this path and inwardly he laughed at himself for it. Life had passed here. Men had passed here. Outside this track lay a dreadful isolation where no passage was recorded.

Sometime during the night, he came to the realization that Chani had been the moon of his premonition. She had been the one to fall from the sky with that terrifying sense of loss. He stopped, still unable to shed tears. There was only the ache of tears without their release. He drew a libation of water from his catchpockets, poured the water on the sand as an offering to Chani and the moon.

The gesture helped and he went on along the worm track, not bothering to mask his passage in a stride of broken rhythm. At a point in the depressed early hours, he realized he had left the fremkit somewhere behind. It didn’t matter. Paul-Muad’Dib was an Atreides, a man of honor and principle. He could not become the monster-of-possibility the vision of the future had revealed. That could not be permitted.

Slowing as weariness crept over him, Paul followed the worm track into the wasteland. Prana bindu training kept his feet moving long after another would have fallen. Even when dawn came, he marched onward. All through the day, he marched. And into the next night.

On the second day there was no marcher.

Only the wind blowing sand across barren rocks of the basement complex. Rivulets of sand ran around the tiniest extrusions, twisting, changing … ever changing.

SHORT STORIES

INTRODUCTION

C
onsidering the immensity of the Dune universe, we often have trouble keeping each novel from getting too big. There are so many potential story lines and intriguing ideas to explore. This wealth of material leaves many side stories that can be told, hors d’oeuvres to accompany the exotic main course.

When we published “A Whisper of Caladan Seas” in 1999, it was the first new piece of Dune fiction published since Frank Herbert’s death thirteen years earlier. It appeared in
Amazing Stories
magazine, and the issue promptly sold out; even back issues are no longer available. This story takes place concurrent with the Harkonnen attack on the desert city of Arrakeen in Frank Herbert’s original novel
Dune.
Afterward, we wrote the three Dune prequel novels,
House Atreides, House Harkonnen,
and
House Corrino.

By the time we turned to the
Legends of Dune
trilogy that chronicles the epic Butlerian Jihad, we were introducing Dune fans to history ten thousand years prior to the events in
Dune
itself. We felt this warranted an appetizer to ease readers into a whole new epoch that would span 115 years.

“Hunting Harkonnens” is our short-story introduction to the world of the Butlerian Jihad. During one of our book-signing tours, we found ourselves waiting for several hours in the Los Angeles train station. There, while sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench larger than a church pew, we brainstormed “Hunting Harkonnens.” In this preliminary tale, which lays the foundation of the holy war between humans and thinking machines, we introduced readers to the ancestors of the Atreides and the Harkonnens, and to the evil machines with human minds that Frank Herbert mentioned in
Dune.

Passing a laptop computer back and forth, the two of us blocked out the story in detail, scene by scene. Then, like team managers picking baseball players during a draft, we each chose the scenes that most interested us. Shortly after returning home from the tour, we wrote our parts of the story, swapped computer disks, and rewrote each other’s work, sending the changes to each other by mail and fax until we were satisfied with the end result.

Our second Jihad short story, “Whipping Mek,” is a bridging work between the first and second novels in the trilogy,
The Butlerian Jihad
and
The Machine Crusade.
The story is set at a vital point in the nearly quarter-century gap between the events in these two novels, and fleshes out a pair of key tragic figures from later parts of the story.

An even longer time passes between the second and third novels in the series, decades in which remarkable changes take place in the long war against thinking machines. In our final bridging short story “The Faces of a Martyr,” the surviving main characters have altered dramatically and we portray some of the driving events that set up the final battle between humans and their mortal enemies in
The Battle of Corrin.

The last story, “Sea Child,” takes place at the other end of the
Dune
saga, at the chronological grand climax which Frank Herbert laid out in his plan for “Dune 7.” “Sea Child” was written for a charity anthology, and it introduces one of the characters and conflicts in HUNTERS OF DUNE.

A WHISPER OF CALADAN SEAS

Arrakis, in the year 10,191 of the Imperial calendar. Arrakis … forever known as Dune … .

T
he cave in the massive Shield Wall was dark and dry, sealed by an avalanche. The air tasted like rock dust. The surviving Atreides soldiers huddled in blackness to conserve energy, letting their glowglobe powerpacks recycle.

Outside, the Harkonnen shelling hammered against the bolt-hole where they had fled for safety. Artillery? What a surprise to be attacked by such seemingly obsolete technology … and yet, it was effective.
Damned effective.

In pockets of silence that lasted only seconds, the young recruit Elto Vitt lay in pain listening to the wheezing of wounded, terrified men. The stale, oppressive air weighed heavily on him, increasing the broken-glass agony in his lungs. He tasted blood in his mouth, an unwelcome moisture in the absolute dryness.

His uncle, Sergeant Hoh Vitt, had not honestly told him how severe his injuries were, emphasizing Elto’s “youthful resilience and stamina.” Elto suspected he must be dying, and he wasn’t alone in that predicament. These last soldiers were all dying, if not from their injuries, then from hunger or thirst.

Thirst.

A man’s voice cut the darkness, a gunner named Deegan. “I wonder if Duke Leto got away. I hope he’s safe.”

A reassuring grunt. “Thufir Hawat would slit his own throat before he’d let the Baron touch our Duke, or young Paul.” It was the signalman Scovich, fiddling with the flexible hip cages that held two captive distrans bats, creatures whose nervous systems could carry message imprints.

“Bloody Harkonnens!” Then Deegan’s sigh became a sob. “I wish we were back home on Caladan.”

Supply sergeant Vitt was no more than a disembodied voice in the darkness, comfortingly close to his injured young nephew. “Do
you
hear a whisper of Caladan seas, Elto? Do you hear the waves, the tides?”

The boy concentrated hard. Indeed, the relentless artillery shelling sounded like the booming of breakers against the glistening black rocks below the cliff-perch of Castle Caladan.

“Maybe,” he said. But he didn’t, not really. The similarity was only slight, and his uncle, a Master Jongleur … a storyteller extraordinaire … wasn’t up to his capabilities, though here he couldn’t have asked for a more attentive audience. Instead the sergeant seemed stunned by events, and uncharacteristically quiet, not his usual gregarious self.

Elto remembered running barefoot along the beaches on Caladan, the Atreides home planet far, far from this barren repository of dunes, sandworms, and precious spice. As a child, he had tiptoed in the foamy residue of waves, avoiding the tiny pincers of crabfish so numerous that he could net enough for a fine meal in only a few minutes.

Those memories were much more vivid than what had just happened … .

THE ALARMS HAD rung in the middle of the night, ironically during the first deep sleep Elto Vitt had managed in the Atreides barracks at Arrakeen. Only a month earlier, he and other recruits had been assigned to this desolate planet, saying their farewells to lush Caladan. Duke Leto Atreides had received the governorship of Arrakis, the only known source of the spice melange, as a boon from the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV.

To many of the loyal Atreides soldiers, it had seemed a great financial coup—they had known nothing of politics … or of danger. Apparently Duke Leto had not been aware of the peril here either, because he’d brought along his concubine Lady Jessica and their fifteen-year-old son, Paul.