Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [49]
He smelled hot dust, the subtle saltiness of minerals, the distinct tastes of sand, weathered lava, and basalt. This was a world entirely without the moist scents of either growing or rotting vegetation, without any odor that might betray the cycles of life and death. Only sand and rock and more sand.
Upon closer inspection, though, even the harshest desert teemed with life, with specialized plants, with animals and insects adapted to hostile ecological niches. He knelt to scrutinize shadowy pockets in the rock, tiny hollows where the barest breath of morning dew might collect. There, lichens gripped the rough stone surface.
A few hard pellets marked the droppings of a small rodent, perhaps a kangaroo rat. Insects might make their homes here at high altitude, along with a bit of windblown grass or hardy and solitary weeds. On the vertical cliffs, even bats took shelter and surged out at dusk to hunt night moths and gnats. Occasionally in the enamel-blue sky he spotted a dark fleck that must have been a hawk or a carrion bird. For such larger animals, survival must be particularly hard.
How, then, do the Fremen survive?
He’d seen their dusty forms walking the village streets, but the desert people kept to themselves, went about their business, then vanished. Kynes noticed that the “civilized” villagers treated them differently, but it wasn’t clear whether this came from awe or disdain. Polish comes from the cities, went an old Fremen saying, wisdom from the desert.
According to a few sparse anthropological notes he had found, the Fremen were the remnants of an ancient wandering people, the Zensunni, who had been slaves dragged from world to world. After being freed, or perhaps escaping, from their captivity they had tried to find a home for centuries, but were persecuted everywhere they went. Finally, they’d gone to ground here on Arrakis—and somehow they had thrived.
Once, when he’d tried to speak to a Fremen woman as she walked past, the woman had fixed him with the gaze of her shockingly blue-within-blue eyes, the whites completely swallowed in the indigo of pure spice addiction. The sight had jolted all questions from his mind, and before Kynes could say anything else to her, the Fremen woman had hurried on her way, hugging her tattered brown jubba cloak over her stillsuit.
Kynes had heard rumors that entire Fremen population centers were hidden out in the basins and the rocky buttresses of the Shield Wall. Living off the land, when the land itself provided so little life . . . how did they do it?
Kynes still had much to learn about Arrakis, and he thought the Fremen could teach him a great deal. If he could ever find them.
In dirty, rough-edged Carthag, the Harkonnens had been reluctant to outfit the unwanted Planetologist with extravagant equipment. Scowling at the Padishah Emperor’s seal on Kynes’s requisition, the supply master had authorized him to take clothes, a stilltent, a survival kit, four literjons of water, some preserved rations, and a battered one-man ornithopter with an extended fuel supply. Those items were enough for a person like Kynes, who was a stranger to luxury. He didn’t care about formal trappings and useless niceties. He was much more focused on the problem of understanding Arrakis.
After checking the predicted storm patterns and prevailing winds, Kynes lit off in the ornithopter toward the northeast, heading deeper into the mountainous terrain surrounding the polar regions. Because the mid-latitudes were broiling wastelands, most human habitation clustered around the highlands.
He piloted the old surplus ’thopter, listening to the loud hum of its engines and the flutter