Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [198]
Kynes had landed the ’thopter and stepped out in his stillsuit, ducking low and squinting into the blowing dust. He knelt and dug his fingers into the powdery white surface. He tasted his fingertip to confirm what he’d suspected. Bitter salt. Now he could have no doubt that there had once been open water on this world. But for some reason it had all disappeared.
As successive sandworms took them below the equator and into the deep southern portion of the wasteland planet, Kynes saw many other such things to remind him of his discovery: glinting depressions that might have been the remnants of ancient lakes, other open water. He mentioned these things to his Fremen guides, but they could explain them only by myths and legends that made no scientific sense. His fellow travelers seemed more intent on their destination.
Finally, after exhausting and long days, they left the last worm behind. The Fremen pushed on into the rocky landscapes of the deep southern regions of Dune, near the antarctic circle where the great Shai-Hulud refused to travel. Though a few water merchants had explored the northern ice caps, the lower latitudes remained primarily uninhabited, avoided, shrouded in mystery. No one came here—except for these Fremen.
Growing more and more excited, the troop walked for a day over gravelly ground, until finally Kynes saw what they had been so eager to show him. Here, the Fremen had created and tended a vast treasure.
Not far from the diminutive polar ice cap in a region where he had been told the weather was too cold and inhospitable for habitation, the Fremen of various sietches had set up a secret camp. Following the length of a wash, they entered a rugged canyon. The floor was composed of stones rounded from long-ago running water. The air was chilly, but warmer than he had ever expected so deep in the antarctic circle.
From a sheer cliff overhead where ice and cold winds at the top gave way to warmer air in the depths, water actually trickled from cracks in the rock—and ran seasonally along the length of the wash they had followed to get there. The Fremen teams had cleverly installed solar mirrors and magnifiers in the cliff walls to warm the air and melt frost from the ground. And there, in the rocky soil, they had nurtured plants.
Kynes was speechless. It was his dream, before his very eyes!
He wondered if the source could be water from hot springs, but upon touching it he found it to be cool. He tasted, and found it not sulfurous but refreshing—easily the best he had drunk since coming to Dune. Pure water, not recycled a thousand times through filters and stillsuits.
“Behold our secret, Umma Kynes,” Stilgar said. “We have done all this in less than a year.”
Tufts of hardy grass grew in moist patches on the floor of the arroyo, bright desert sunflowers, even the low, creeping vines of a tough gourd plant. But most amazing of all, Kynes saw rows of stunted young date palms, clinging to life, sucking up the moisture that found its way through cracks in the porous rock and seeped up from a water table beneath the canyon floor.
“Palm trees!” he said. “You’ve already begun.”
“Yes, Umma.” Stilgar nodded. “We can see a glimpse of Dune’s future here. As you promised us, it can be done. Fremen from all across the world have already begun your tasks of scattering grasses on the downwind sides of the dunes to anchor them.”
Kynes beamed. So, they had been listening to him after all! Those scattered grasses would spread out their webwork of roots, retaining water, stabilizing the dunes. With equipment stolen from the biological testing stations, the Fremen could continue their work of cutting catchbasins, erecting windstills, and finding other means to grasp every droplet of water borne on the wind. . . .
His group remained in the sheltered canyon for several days, and Kynes felt giddy with what he saw there. As they