Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [51]
At the craggy pinnacle—about twelve hundred meters high, according to his altimeter—he stopped at a natural shelter formed by a broken tooth of hard stone. There, he set up his portable weather station. Its analytical devices would record wind speeds and directions, temperatures, barometric pressures, and fluctuations in relative humidity.
Around the globe, centuries-old biological testing stations had been erected in the days long before the properties of melange had been discovered. Back then, Arrakis had been no more than an unremarkable, dry planet with little in the way of desirable resources—of no interest to any but the most desperate of colonists. Many of those testing stations had fallen into disrepair, unattended, some even forgotten.
Kynes doubted the information gleaned from those stations would be very reliable. For now, he wanted his own data from his own instruments. With the whir of a tiny fan, an air-sampler gulped an atmospheric specimen and spilled out the composition readings: 23 percent oxygen, 75.4 percent nitrogen, 0.023 percent carbon dioxide, along with other trace gases.
Kynes found the numbers most peculiar. Perfectly breathable, of course, and exactly what one might expect from a normal planet with a thriving ecosystem. But in this scorched realm, those partial pressures raised enormous questions. With no seas or rainstorms, no plankton masses, no vegetative covering . . . where did all the oxygen come from? It made absolutely no sense.
The only large indigenous life-forms he knew of were the sandworms. Could there be so many of the beasts that their metabolisms actually had a measurable effect on the composition of the atmosphere? Did some odd form of plankton teem within the sands themselves? Melange deposits were known to have an organic component, but Kynes had no idea what its source could be. Is there a connection between the voracious worms and the spice?
Arrakis was one ecological mystery built upon another.
With his preparations complete, Kynes turned from the perfect spot for his meteorological station. Then he realized with startling abruptness that parts of the seemingly natural alcove atop this isolated peak had been intentionally fashioned.
He bent down, amazed, and ran his fingers over rough notches. Steps cut into the rock! Human hands had done this not long ago, chopping out easy access to this place. An outpost? A lookout? A Fremen observation station?
A chill shot down his spine, borne on a trickle of sweat that the stillsuit greedily drank. At the same time, he felt a thrill of excitement, because the Fremen themselves might become allies, a hardened people who had the same agenda as he did, the same need to understand and improve. . . .
As Kynes turned around in the open air, searching, he felt exposed. “Hello?” he called out, but only the desert silence answered him.
How is all of this connected? he wondered. And what, if anything, do the Fremen know about it?
Who can know whether Ix has gone too far? They hide their facilities, keep their workers enslaved, and claim the right of secrecy. Under such circumstances, how can they not be tempted to step beyond the restrictions of the Butlerian Jihad?
—COUNT ILBAN RICHESE,
third appeal to the Landsraad
Use your resources and use your wits,” the Old Duke had always told him. Now, as he stood alone and shivering, Leto took stock of both.
He contemplated his grim and unexpected solitude on the wilderness surface of Ix—or wherever this place was. Had he been stranded here by accident or treachery? What was the worst case? The Guild should have kept a record of where he’d been unceremoniously discharged. His father and House Atreides troops