Hunters of Dune - Brian Herbert [148]
The desert dragons began to churn the sands again. She looked up to the high plaz window and saw two small figures there, looking down at her.
Dirt is something solid you can hold in your hand. Using our science and our passion, we can mold it, shape it, and bring forth life. Could there be a better task for any person?
—PLANETOLOGIST PARDOT KYNES,
petition to Emperor Elrood IX, ancient records
F
rom the high observation gallery above the cargo hold, two boys peered through a dust-smeared plaz window to watch Sheeana and the sandworms.
“She dances,” said eight-year-old Stilgar with clear awe in his voice. “And Shai-Hulud dances with her.”
“They’re only responding to her movements. We could find a rational explanation for it if we studied her long enough.” Liet-Kynes was a year older than his companion, who showed amazement at the dance. Kynes couldn’t deny that Sheeana did things with the worms that no one else could do. “Don’t try to do that yourself, Stilgar.”
Even when Sheeana was not inside the hold with the great beasts, the two young friends often came to the observation gallery and pressed their faces against the plaz to stare at the uneven sands. This tiny patch of captive desert beckoned to them. Kynes squinted, letting his vision grow blurry to make the walls of the cargo hold disappear, so that he could imagine a much larger landscape.
During their intensive lessons with Proctor Superior Garimi, Kynes had seen historical images of Arrakis. Dune. With penetrating curiosity, young Kynes had delved deep into the records. The mysterious desert planet seemed to call to him, as if it were an integral part of his genetic memories. His quest for knowledge was insatiable, and he wanted to know more than dry facts about his past life. He wanted to live them again. All of his reborn life, the Bene Gesserit had trained him and the other ghola children for that eventuality.
His father Pardot Kynes, the first official Imperial Planetologist sent to Arrakis, had formulated a grand dream of converting the wasteland into a huge garden. Pardot had provided the foundation for a new Eden, recruiting the Fremen to make initial plantings and setting up great sealed caves where plants were grown. Kynes’s father had died in an unexpected cave-in.
Ecology is dangerous.
Thanks to work and resources invested by Muad’Dib and his son Leto II, Dune had eventually become lush and green. But as a cruel consequence of so much poisonous moisture, all the sandworms had died. Spice had dwindled to a trickle of a memory. Then, after thirty-five hundred years of the Tyrant’s rule, the sandworms returned again from Leto’s body, reversing the ecological progress and restoring the vast desert to Arrakis.
The scope of it! No matter how much battering leaders and armies and governments did to Arrakis, the planet would restore itself, given enough time. Dune was stronger than all of them.
Stilgar said, “Just looking at the desert soothes me. I don’t exactly remember, but I do know that I belong here.”
Kynes also felt at peace looking at this swatch of a long-lost planet. Dune was where he belonged, as well. Thanks to the advanced Bene Gesserit training methods, he had already studied as much background as he could get his hands on, learning about ecological processes and the science of planetology. Many of the original and still-classic treatises on the subject had been written by his own father, documented in Imperial archives and preserved for millennia by the Sisterhood.
Stilgar rubbed his palm across the observation window, but the blur of dust was inside the plaz. “I wish we could go in there with Sheeana. A long time ago I knew how to ride the worms.”
“Those were different worms. I’ve compared records. These come from sandtrout spawned by the dissolution of Leto II. They are less territorial, but more dangerous.”
“They are still worms,” Stilgar said with a shrug.
Down on the sand, Sheeana