Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [48]
In nearby rooms, groups of women skinned and gutted fish, chopped herbs, peeled roots and sour fruits for steaming cauldrons of fish stew, which Abulurd and his wife served for the entire household. They insisted on eating the same meals, at the same tables, as all of their workers. Margot finished her surreptitious scanning well before the meal call sounded throughout the rooms of the great house. . . .
Later, in private while listening to a blustery storm outside, she reviewed the data in her mind and studied spice-production records from Abulurd’s tenure on Arrakis and the Baron’s current filings with CHOAM, along with the amounts of melange spirited away from Arrakis by various smuggler organizations.
Normally, she would have set aside the data until entire teams of Sisters had a chance to analyze it. But Margot wanted to discover the answer herself. Pretending to sleep, she dived into the problem behind her eyelids with abandon, falling into a deep trance.
The numbers had been masterfully manipulated, but after Margot stripped away the masks and thin screens, she found her answer. A Bene Gesserit could see it, but she doubted even the Emperor’s financial advisors or CHOAM accountants would detect the deception.
Unless it was pointed out to them.
Her discovery suggested serious underreporting of spice production to CHOAM and the Emperor. Either the Harkonnens were selling melange illicitly—doubtful, because that could easily be tracked—or accumulating secret stockpiles of their own.
Interesting, Margot thought, raising her eyebrows. She opened her eyes, went over to a reinforced window casement, and stared out at the liquid metal seas, the choppy waves trapped within the bottleneck fjords, the murky black clouds hovering above the rugged bulwarks of rock. In the bleak distance, fur-whales set up an eerie, humming song.
The following day she booked passage on the next Guild Heighliner. Then, shucking her disguise, she rode up in a cargo hauler filled with processed whale-fur. She doubted that anyone on Lankiveil had noticed her arrival or her departure.
Four things cannot be hidden—love, smoke, a pillar of fire, and a man striding across the open bled.
—Fremen Wisdom
Alone in the quiet, stark desert—exactly as it should be. Pardot Kynes found that he worked best with nothing but his own thoughts and plenty of time to think them. Other people provided too many distractions, and few others had the same focus or the same drive.
As Imperial Planetologist to Arrakis, he needed to absorb the huge landscape into every pore of his being. Once he got into the right mind-set he could actually feel the pulse of a world. Now, standing atop a rugged formation of black-and-red rock that had been uplifted from the surrounding basin, the lean, weathered man stared in both directions at the vastness. Desert, desert everywhere.
His map screen named the mountainous line Rimwall West. His altimeter proclaimed the tallest peaks to be substantially higher than six thousand meters . . . yet he saw no snow, glaciers, or ice, no signs of precipitation whatsoever. Even the most rugged and atomic-blasted mountaintops on Salusa Secundus had been covered with snow. But the air here was so desperately dry that exposed water could not survive in any form.
Kynes stared southward across the ocean of sand to the world-girdling desert known as the Funeral Plain. No doubt geographers could have found ample distinctions to categorize the landscape into further labeled subsections—but few humans who ventured out there ever returned. This was the domain of the worms. No one really needed maps.
Bemused, Kynes remembered ancient sailing charts from the earliest days of Old Terra, their mysterious unexplored areas marked simply, “Here Be Monsters.” Yes, he thought as he recalled Rabban’s hunt of the incredible sandworm. Here be monsters indeed.
Exposed atop the serrated ridge of the Rimwall, he removed the stillsuit’s nostril