Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [50]
Through the sand-scratched front windows he could see dry rills and gorges, the diverging brooms of alluvial fans from ancient floods. Some of the steep canyon walls appeared to have been cut by water abrasion, like a shigawire strand sawing through strata. Once, in the distance shimmering with the ripples of a heat mirage, he thought he saw a sparkling salt-encrusted playa that could easily have been a dried sea bottom. But when he flew in that direction, he couldn’t find it.
Kynes became convinced that this planet had once held water. A lot of it. The evidence was there for any Planetologist to see. But where had it all gone?
The amount of ice in the polar caps was insignificant, mined by water merchants and hauled down to the cities, where it was sold at a premium. The caps certainly did not hold enough to explain vanished oceans or dried rivers. Had the native water somehow been destroyed or removed from the planet . . . or was it just hiding?
Kynes flew on, keeping his eyes open and searching, constantly searching. Diligently compiling his journals, he took notes of every interesting thing he spotted. It would take years to gather enough information for a well-founded treatise, but in the past month he had already transmitted two regular progress reports back to the Emperor, just to show he was doing his appointed job. He’d handed these reports to an Imperial Courier and a Guild representative, one in Arrakeen, the other in Carthag. But he had no idea if Elrood or his advisors even read them.
Kynes found himself lost most of the time. His maps and charts were deplorably incomplete or absolutely wrong, which puzzled him. If Arrakis was the sole source of melange—which, therefore, made this planet one of the most important in the Imperium—then why was the landscape so poorly charted? If the Spacing Guild would just install a few more high-resolution satellites, much of the problem could be solved. No one seemed to know the answer.
For a Planetologist’s purposes, though, being lost caused little concern. He was an explorer, after all, which required him to wander about with no plan and no destination. Even when his ornithopter began to rattle, he pressed on. The ion-propulsion engine was strong and the battered craft handled reasonably well, even in powerful gusts and updrafts of hot air. He had enough fuel to last him for weeks.
Kynes remembered all too well the years he had spent on harsh Salusa, trying to comprehend the catastrophe that had ruined it centuries before. He had seen ancient pictures, knew how beautiful the former capital world had once been. But in his heart it would always remain the hellish place it was now.
Something epochal had happened here on Arrakis, too, but no witnesses or records had survived that ancient disaster. He didn’t think it could have been atomic, though that solution might be easy to postulate. The ancient wars before and during the Butlerian Jihad had been devastating, had turned entire solar systems into rubble and dust.
No . . . something different had happened here.
More days, more wandering.
On a barren, silent ridge halfway around the world, Kynes climbed to the top of another rocky peak. He had landed his ’thopter on a flat, boulder-strewn saddle, then walked up the slope, picking his way hand over hand with jangling equipment on his back.
In the unimaginative fashion of early cartographers, this curving arm of rock that formed a barrier between the Habanya Erg to the east and the great sink of the Cielago Depression to the west had been forever named False Wall West. He determined this would be a good spot to establish a data-collection outpost.
Feeling the exertion in his thighs and hearing the click-ticking of his overworked stillsuit, Kynes knew he must be perspiring heavily. Even so, his suit absorbed and recycled all of his bodily moisture, and he was in good shape.