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. When he could stand it no longer, he drew a lukewarm sip through the catchtube near his throat, then continued to trudge upward on the rough surface. The best place to conserve water is in your own body, said conventional Fremen wisdom, according to the vendor who had sold him his equipment. He was accustomed to the slick stillsuit by now; it had become a second skin to him.
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 could rally out and find him when he didn’t show up at his intended destination— but how long would that take? How long could he survive here? If Vernius was behind this treachery, would the Earl even report him missing?
Leto tried to be optimistic, but he knew it might be a long time before help could come. He had no food, no warm clothing, not even a portable shelter. He had to take care of this problem himself.
“Hello!” he shouted again. The vast emptiness snatched his words and drained them to nothing, without even bothering to echo them back.
He considered venturing forth in search of some landmark or settlement, but decided to stay put for the time being. Next, he mentally assessed the possessions he’d brought in his suitcases, trying to think of what he might use to send a message.
Then, from beside him, in a bl
ue-green thicket of spiny plants struggling to survive in the tundra, came a rustling sound. Startled, Leto jumped back, then looked closer. Assassins? A group intending to take him captive? The ransom of a ducal heir might bring a mountain of solaris . . . as well as the wrath of Paulus Atreides.
He drew the curve-bladed fishing knife from its sheath at his back and made ready to fight. His heart pounded as he tried to guess his peril, to prepare in some way. An Atreides had no qualms about shedding necessary blood.
The branches and pointed leaves moved, then opened to reveal a round plaz pad on the ground. With a hum of machinery, a transparent lift tube emerged from beneath the surface, looking totally incongruous on the rugged landscape.
A stocky young man stood inside the transparent tube, grinning a warm welcome. He had blond, unruly hair that looked tousled despite careful combing; he wore loose military-style trousers and a color-shifting camouflage shirt. His pale, open face had soft edges from outgrown baby fat. A small pack hung on the stranger’s left shoulder, similar to the one he carried in his hand. He appeared to be about Leto’s age.
The transparent lift came to a stop, and a curved door rotated open. A breath of warm air brushed Leto’s hands and face. He crouched, ready to attack with his fishing knife, though he could not imagine this innocuous-looking stranger to be a killer.
“You must be Leto Atreides, right?” the young man said. He spoke in Galach, the common language of the Imperium. “So should we start out with a day hike?”
Leto’s gray eyes narrowed and fixed on the purple-and-copper Ixian helix adorning the boy’s collar. Trying to hide his immense relief and maintain a professional, even suspicious facade, Leto nodded and lowered the tip of the knife, which the stranger had pretended not to notice.
“I’m Rhombur Vernius. I, uh, thought you’d want to stretch a bit before we settle in down below. I heard you like being outdoors, though I prefer to be underground myself. Maybe after you spend a little time with us, you’ll feel at home in our cavern cities. Ix is really quite nice.”
He looked up at the clouds and high-altitude sleet. “Oh, why is it raining? Vermilion hells, I hate being in unpredictable environments.” Rhombur shook his head in disgust. “I told weather control to give you a warm, sunny day. My apologies, Prince Leto— but this is just too dreary for me. How about we go down to the Grand Palais?”
Catching himself rambling, Rhombur dropped both day packs inside the lift tube and nudged Leto’s floating luggage inside as well. “It’s good to meet you at last. My father’s been talking about Atreides this and Atreides that for so long. We’ll be studying together for some time, probably family trees and Landsraad politics. I’m eighty-seventh in line to the Golden Lion Throne, but I think you rank even higher than I do.”
Golden Lion Throne. The Great Houses were ranked according to an elaborate CHOAM-Landsraad system, and within each House was a sub-hierarchy based upon primogeniture. Leto’s ranking was indeed substantially higher than the Ixian Prince’s— through his mother he was actually a great-grandson of Elrood IX, through one of his three daughters by his second wife, Yvette. But the difference was meaningless; the Emperor had many great-grandchildren. Neither he nor Rhombur would ever get to be Emperor. Serving as Duke of House Atreides would offer enough of a challenge, Leto thought.
The young men exchanged the half handshake of the Imperium, interlocking fingertips. The Ixian Prince wore a fire-jewel ring on his right hand, and Leto felt no rough calluses.
“I thought I was in the wrong place after I’d landed,” Leto said, finally letting his uneasiness and confusion show through. “I believed I was stranded on some uninhabited rock. Is this really . . . Ix? The machine planet?” He pointed toward the spectacular peaks, the snow and rocks, the dark forests.
Remembering what his father had told him about the Ixian penchant for security, Leto noted Rhombur’s hesitation. “Oh, uh, you’ll see. We try not to make ourselves too obvious.”
The Prince gestured him into the tube, and the plaz door rotated shut. They plunged through what seemed to be a kilometer of rock. Rhombur continued to speak calmly even as they plummeted. “Because of the nature of our technical operations, Ix has countless secrets and many enemies who’d like to destroy us. We try to keep our dealings and our resources hidden from prying eyes.”
The two young men passed through a luminescent honeycomb of artificial material, then into a vast expanse of air that revealed a huge grotto-world, a fairyland protected deep within the crust of the planet.
Massive crowns of graceful support girders came into view, connected to diamond lattice columns so tall that the bottoms were not visible below. The plaz-walled capsule continued to descend, floating free on an Ixian suspensor mechanism. The capsule’s transparent floor gave Leto the unsettling illusion of dropping feetfirst through thin air. He held on to the side railing while his floating suitcases bobbed around him.
Overhead, he saw what looked like the cloudy Ixian sky and the blue-white sun peeking through. Projectors concealed on the surface of the planet transmitted actual weather images onto high-resolution screens that covered the rock ceilings.
This enormous underworld made the inside of even a Guild Heighliner look minuscule. Hanging down from the roof of the stone vault, Leto saw geometric inverted buildings, like inhabited crystal stalactites connected to each other by walkways and tubes. Teardrop-shaped aircraft sped noiselessly through the subterranean realm, flitting between structures and supports. Hang gliders carrying people flashed by in streaks of brilliant color.
Far down on the floor of the rough cavern he spotted a lake and rivers— all deep underground and protected from outsiders’ eyes.
“Vernii,” Rhombur said. “Our capital city.”
As the capsule slid between the hanging stalactite buildings, Leto could make out groundcars, buses, and an aerial tube-transport system. He felt as if he were inside a magical snowflake. “Your buildings are incredibly beautiful,” he said, his gray eyes drinking in all the details. “I always thought of Ix as a noisy industrial world.”
“We, uh, foster that impression for outsiders. We’ve discovered structural materials that are not only aesthetically pleasing but extremely light and strong. Living here underground, we’re both protected and hidden.”
“And it lets you keep the surface of the world in pristine condition,” Leto pointed out. The Prince of Ix looked as if he hadn’t even considered that advantage.
“The nobles and administrators live in the upper stalactite buildings,” Rhombur continued. “Workers, shift supervisors, and all the suboid crews live below in warrens. Everyone works together for the prosperity of Ix.”
“More levels beneath this city? People live even deeper down there?”
“Well, not really people. They’re suboids,” Rhombur said, with a dismissive wave of one hand. “We’ve specifically bred them to perform drudgery without complaint. Quite a triumph of genetic engineering. I don’t know what we’d do without them.”
Their floating compartment skirted a tube-transport path and continued to follow the upside-down skyline. As they approached the most spectacular of the inverted ceiling palaces— a huge, angled structure hanging suspended like an archaic cathedral— Leto said, “I assume your Inquisitors await me?” He raised his chin and prepared himself for the ordeal. “I’ve never had a deep mental scan before.”
Rhombur laughed at him. “I can, uh, arrange a mind probe if you really wish to undergo the rigors. . . .” The Ixian Prince studied Leto intently. “Leto, Leto, if we didn’t trust you in the first place, you never would have been allowed on Ix. Security has, um, changed a lot here since your father’s day. Don’t listen to all those dark, sinister stories we spread about ourselves. They’re just to scare away the curious.”
The capsule finally settled onto a sprawling balcony constructed of interlocking tiles, and Leto felt a holding apparatus engage underneath them. The chamber began to move laterally toward an armor-plaz bui
lding.
Leto tried not to let his relief show. “All right. I’ll defer to your judgment.”
“And I’ll do the same when we’re on your planet. Water and fish and open skies. Caladan sounds . . . uh, wonderful.” His tone said the exact opposite.
Household personnel clad in black-and-white livery streamed out of the armor-plaz building. Forming a neat line on each side of the tube path, the uniformed men and women stood rigidly at attention.
“This is the Grand Palais,” Rhombur said, “where our staff will see to your every wish. Since you’re the only current visitor, you might be in for some pampering.”
“All these people just to serve . . . me?” Leto remembered the times when he’d had to scale and fillet the fish he caught, if he wanted to eat.
“You are an important dignitary, Leto. The son of a Duke, the friend of our family, an ally in the Landsraad. Do you expect anything less?”
“In truth, I’m from a House with no substantial wealth, on a planet where the only glamour comes from fishermen, harvesters of floating paradan melons, and pundi rice farmers.”
Rhombur laughed, a friendly peal. “Oh, and you’re modest, too!”
Followed by the suspensor-borne luggage, the young men walked side by side up three wide, elegant stairs into the Grand Palais.
Looking around the central lobby, Leto identified Ixian crystal chandeliers, the finest in all the Imperium. Crystal goblets and vases adorned marbleplaz tables, and on each side of a blackite reception desk were full-size lapisjade statuaries of Earl Dominic Vernius and his Lady Shando Vernius. Leto recognized the royal couple from triphotos he had seen.
The uniformed household staff filtered back into the building and took up positions where they would be available for instructions from superiors. Across the lobby, double doors opened and big-shouldered, bald Dominic Vernius himself approached, looking like some djinn out of a bottle. He wore a silver-and-gold sleeveless tunic trimmed in white at the collar. A purple-and-copper Ixian helix adorned his breast.
Dune: House Atreides Page 12
