Road to Dune

by Herbert, Brian; Anderson, Kevin J. ; Herbert, Frank

  With an abrupt start, he drew back from the ruh-chasm that invited him to plunge into catatonic forgetfulness. So, he thought, the Mentat computation said he should disappear within himself. Reasons? Sufficient. He had seen them in the instant of escape. His life had seemed then to stretch out as long as the existence of the universe. Prescience already had granted him an infinity of experiences. But the real flesh condensed, lay finite and reduced his emerald cavern to a stilltent beginning to drum with the pulse of a wind. Sand chattered like pecking birds against taut surfaces.

  Paul scrambled to the door, unsealed it, slipped out and scanned the desert, saw the obvious stormsign: tan gusts, no birds, the abrasive-dry smell of dust. He sealed his stillsuit and tried to peer through the brown haze concealing the distances. A vortex of winding dust lifted out of the haze far off in the bled. It told Paul what lay beneath. He pictured the storm, a giant worm of sand and dust—two hundred or more kilometers of rolling, hissing violence. It had come a long way without hindrance, building up speed and power. It could cross six hundred or more kilometers of desert in an hour. If he did no more than stand here, that storm would come to him, cut the flesh from his bones, etch his bones down to pale splinters. He would become one with the desert. The desert would fulfill him.

  It occurred to Paul then to wonder about life’s insistent seeking after death. Wonder moved him. He decided that he could not let the planet simply take him. There could be no giving up to destiny for an Atreides, not even in the full awareness of the inevitable.

  There’d be no time to salvage the tent, Paul saw. He reached in, grabbed the fremkit, sealed its cover, carried it dangling from one hand as he scrambled over the rock ridge to the lee side. Survival required a niche sheltered from that storm, but there wasn’t a break in the rocks on this side. Another storm had scoured the surface here into a smooth concavity down which he slid to the encroaching sand. Fremen had other resources, though. He chose the siff curve of a dune, ran toward it. As he reached the crest, the wind gusted. It tumbled him, rolled him, hissing and pouring sand over onto the slipface. The storm pursued him as he fell. In the valley of the dunes, he burrowed into the sand, fighting for inches, his right hand hampered by the straps of the fremkit. A sandfall from the crest slid around him, trapping his feet. Dust had clogged his stillsuit filters. He spat out the mouthpiece, pulled the robe over his head as another sandfall buried him.

  In the abrupt dimming of the stormsound, Paul hunched his shoulders, made himself a small space into which to drag the fremkit. He found the compaction tool in it by feel, built himself a sandwalled nest. Presently, he had room enough to get out the snorkel. The air already was heavy with his exhalations. He drilled the snorkel at a downwind slant upward through the sand, feeling for the surface, for air. When he found it, the filters had to be blown free, and thereafter needed clearing on almost every alternate breath.

  It was a mother of a storm up there. He had been right in its path, dead center. There might be a hundred feet of sand through which to burrow free when it passed. He listened to the distant keening of wind coming through the snorkel. Would a worm come to the sound of his burrowing? he wondered. Was that how it would be?

  Paul sat back against the hard-packed wall of his nest, kept the snorkel mouthpiece between his teeth. Blow to clear it … inhale, exhale, inhale … blow to clear …

  The fremkit glowtabs were green jewels beside him, the only radiance in the darkness which confined him. Was this to be his tomb? Paul wondered. He found the thought vaguely humorous. It was a mouse nest for Muad’Dib, for Muad’Dib the jumping mouse.

  For a while, it amused him to compose epitaphs in his head. He died on Arrakis. He was tested here and found to be human …

  And he thought of how his followers would refer to him when he had gone beyond their reach. They’d insist on speaking of him in terms of seas, he knew. Despite the fact that his life was soaked in dust, water would follow him into the tomb.

  “He foundered,” they’d say.

  Never again to see rain, he thought. Or trees.

  “I’ll never again see an orchard,” he said. His voice sounded thinly resonant within the sand nest.

  Fremen would see rain, he knew. And many orchards finer than the ones at Tabr Sietch.

  The thought of Fremen with muddy feet struck him as a curious thing.

  Water.

  Moisture.

  He remembered the dew market where the water sellers had met in Arrakeen. They were disbanded now, destroyed by the changes which dripped from the hands of Muad’Dib.

  Muad’Dib, the foreigner whom they hated.

  Muad’Dib was a creature from another world. Caladan—where was Caladan? What was Caladan to a man of Arrakis? Muad’Dib carried a subtle, alien chemistry into the cycles of Arrakis. He disturbed the secret life of the desert. Sun and moons of Arrakis imposed their own rhythms onto the desert. But Paul Atreides had come. Arrakis had welcomed him as a savior, called him Mahdi and Muad’Dib … and given him a secret name, Usul, the base of the pillar. None of this changed the fact that he was an interloper, product of other rhythms, poison to Arrakis.

  Interloper.

  Weren’t all men interlopers, though? he asked himself. They put on a mask of words, a persona, and they went out into the wild space, cluttered the universe with their stellar migrations.

  Paul shook his head in the darkness.

  He had uncluttered the universe somewhat. Men would remember Muad’Dib’s Jihad for that, at least.

  He grew aware that the snorkel was silent. Had the storm passed? He blew on the mouthpiece to clear it of dust. No keening of wind came down the tube.

  Let a worm come, he thought. I must at least try to die up there in the open, standing on my planet. He took the compaction tool from the fremkit, began boring a slanting burrow upward. Sand rasped and fell around him while he worked. Sand scraped against the fremkit as he pulled it up behind him with a pack strap caught on one foot—a trick Otheym had taught him.

  But Otheym was dead now, crisped in the searing blast of the stone-burner. One of Otheym’s tricks for survival lived on, though. Otheym had learned it from someone before him. And someone else before that had passed it along. Simple thing, but vital: don’t lose your fremkit, don’t let it slow your digging; carry the thing along by one of its straps hooked over a foot.

  Paul felt that his foot was really another man’s foot far back in the history of Dune. He remembered a day in his beginnings on this planet, before the Fremen had found him and trained him. He had lost a fremkit, the key to survival. He and his mother could have died there in the desert without the tools represented by that kit. Her prana bindu training had saved them then—the training which went into the depths of the mind and to the smallest muscle.

  He realized abruptly that he had been ashamed of his mother for most of his life on Arrakis. She was a Bene Gesserit. She carried the hated blood of the Harkonnens who had killed his father. But before her there had been others—countless humans, each with a figurative foot hooked in the strap of a figurative fremkit.

  While his mind worried over such thoughts, he had burrowed very near the surface, Paul knew. Now, the cautious breaking out onto the surface. A Fremen was virtually helpless in this moment. Anything might await him out there, deadly enemies attracted by the sounds of digging.

  Cautiously, he probed upward to the slope of dune that he knew must be near. Instinct told him of that nearness.

  Daylight came with a burst of tumbling sand.

  Paul waited, listening, probing with every sense.

  No shadows crossed the hole—only grey sky darkening away toward sunset. There was a strong smell of spice, though, a touch of chill air onto his cheeks where the stillsuit hood left his skin exposed. A zephyr hissing of sand granules came to his ears—a background carrier wave of sound. He pressed an ear to the burrow wall—no distant roar of a worm, no thumping, no dislodging of sand from careless feet.

  Paul fitted his no
seplugs into place, sealed his suit carefully, secured his fremkit and slid out of the burrow onto the windward slope of a dune. The sand was firm, compacted hard by the wind here. It felt crusty under his feet. The zephyr picked up fluttering bits of something from the crest above him. Brown flakes fell all around. Paul captured one, held it to the filters, inhaled the powerful, giddy aroma of fresh melange. He swept his gaze over the slope. The desert all around him was thick with spice—a fortune in melange, a real spice pocket up from the deeps. He threw the flake of spice into the air, climbed up the duneface through drifts of melange.

  Near the crest, he listened with ear against the sand. No wormsound came from the desert in spite of the noise he’d made burrowing to the surface.

  Perhaps there are no worms in this region, he thought.

  Just below the crest, he lay flat, crept up Fremen fashion, peered all around. Abruptly, he froze and lay motionless as the sand geysered beneath a dune downwind. A hooded man climbed out onto a dune there. Others followed—more than twenty figures. They concentrated their attention briefly on the sky to the northeast, then began spreading out across the dune in a familiar pattern. They were going to call a worm, he saw. Occasionally, they paused, glanced to the northeast.

  Paul studied the horizon in that direction, saw the glistening sunset, underlighted pinpoints which had caught the troop’s attention:’thopters. Paul counted four of them spread out in a search pattern and headed toward the Fremen atop the dunes. The’thopters drew near and the troop waited, heads down.

  A single’thopter detached itself, climbed over the Fremen, banked above Paul. The thunder of its wings stirred the melange into a miniature storm. It curved around downwind, banked for a landing.

  Abruptly, the Fremen band whirled. Maula pistols were jerked from beneath their robes; the muzzles tracked the landing’thopter. Its pilot apparently saw the menace. He spread his wings, jetted away in a steep climb.

  All four ships took up a stacked formation, circled once more over the troop, went dipping and gliding back to the northeast.

  They saw me, Paul thought, but they thought I was a member of this troop. He studied the Fremen. They were spreading out now in a familiar wide-armed deployment. No doubt who they were or what they were doing: these were wild Fremen, renegades who refused to fit into the ecological pattern which was transforming their planet. And now they were preparing to summon a worm for a ride into the deep desert.

  One member of the troop, an obvious leader, called out to his companions from a dunetop. A man detached himself from the band, sped across the dunes with a thumper. His feet kicked up tiny spurts of dust and sand. The whole desert passed into night while he ran, leaving the first moon with its sharply outlined handprint pattern dominating the sky.

  The thumper began to beat out its summons: “Lump-lump-lump-lump.” It was a sound as much felt through the sand as heard. If a worm lay within range of that sound, it would come raging and hissing through the sand to be trapped as a steed for the Fremen troop.

  Could he join them? Paul wondered. A Fremen could abandon sietch, friends and family only for special reasons of honor. Another tribe was bound to consider those reasons and, finding them sufficient, accept the renegade … provided they had no urgent need for his water. The water burden took precedent over all else.

  But these were renegades who opposed the actions of Muad’Dib. These were men who’d gone back to the blood sacrifice and the old rites. They’d be sure to recognize him. What Fremen didn’t know the features of Muad’Dib? Here were men who’d sworn on Fremen honor to fight the changes being wrought on Arrakis. They might slay Muad’Dib out of hand, offer his life as sacrifice in their rite.

  He heard the faint sand-hiss then, first warning that a worm answered the thumper summons. The clapper-driven device still sounded from the dunes out there beneath the moonlight. There was no sign of the troop, though. They had blended themselves into the desert to wait.

  The worm came from the southwest past the island of rocks. It was a good-sized one riding partly out of the sand—about a hundred meters long. Its crystal teeth flashed in the moonlight as it curved toward the irritant thumper. Paul could see the rippling of its driving segments.

  A shape rose from the dunes as the worm passed. Maker hooks glistened as they drove into a segment of the worm. In the same instant, the creature swallowed the thumper, silenced it. The troop went up on its hooks then, turning the worm with a casual grace as they opened its segments. Goaders darted back along the high back as the worm rose farther from the sand. The beat of the goads drummed out in a frenetic rhythm. The worm picked up speed.

  Paul turned to watch them go.

  The worm was headed back on its own track. The robes of the riders strung out along its back whipped in the wind of its passage. Their voices wafted back to Paul, growing fainter as the rock outcropping hid them: “Hyah! Hyah! Hyah! Hyah! …”

  Paul waited against the duneface until the sounds faded away, blended with the natural sounds of the night. He had never before experienced such a profound sense of loneliness. The troop of wild Fremen had taken the last of human civilization away with them. Only the desert remained.

  He came curiously to the realization that he no longer cared where he was in the universe. He felt that he had lived a preassigned role and come to the end of it without an audience. There should be applause, he thought, but there’s no audience. Well-remembered stars occupied their positions in the sky, but they no longer represented directions to him nor could he think of them as signposts. There was merely space all around him laid out against an enormous background of Time. The stars peered past him and through him like the empty eyes of his subject peoples. They were the sealed eyes of ignorance, always seeking to avoid their responsive status as human senses. They were the eyes from which nothing escaped.

  For a few minutes, he listened to and identified the night sounds around him. This desert teemed with life which had adapted to it. He had not adapted. His body was mostly water. That water was a poison which could sicken a worm. If a worm devoured too many men, it died.

  Presently, he pushed himself away from the dune, climbed up to the siff crest, struck out along the track of the worm. He knew why he had chosen this path and inwardly he laughed at himself for it. Life had passed here. Men had passed here. Outside this track lay a dreadful isolation where no passage was recorded.

  Sometime during the night, he came to the realization that Chani had been the moon of his premonition. She had been the one to fall from the sky with that terrifying sense of loss. He stopped, still unable to shed tears. There was only the ache of tears without their release. He drew a libation of water from his catchpockets, poured the water on the sand as an offering to Chani and the moon.

  The gesture helped and he went on along the worm track, not bothering to mask his passage in a stride of broken rhythm. At a point in the depressed early hours, he realized he had left the fremkit somewhere behind. It didn’t matter. Paul-Muad’Dib was an Atreides, a man of honor and principle. He could not become the monster-of-possibility the vision of the future had revealed. That could not be permitted.

  Slowing as weariness crept over him, Paul followed the worm track into the wasteland. Prana bindu training kept his feet moving long after another would have fallen. Even when dawn came, he marched onward. All through the day, he marched. And into the next night.

  On the second day there was no marcher.

  Only the wind blowing sand across barren rocks of the basement complex. Rivulets of sand ran around the tiniest extrusions, twisting, changing … ever changing.

  SHORT STORIES

  INTRODUCTION

  Considering the immensity of the Dune universe, we often have trouble keeping each novel from getting too big. There are so many potential story lines and intriguing ideas to explore. This wealth of material leaves many side stories that can be told, hors d’oeuvres to accompany the exotic main course.

  When we published “A Whi
sper of Caladan Seas” in 1999, it was the first new piece of Dune fiction published since Frank Herbert’s death thirteen years earlier. It appeared in Amazing Stories magazine, and the issue promptly sold out; even back issues are no longer available. This story takes place concurrent with the Harkonnen attack on the desert city of Arrakeen in Frank Herbert’s original novel Dune. Afterward, we wrote the three Dune prequel novels, House Atreides, House Harkonnen, and House Corrino.

  By the time we turned to the Legends of Dune trilogy that chronicles the epic Butlerian Jihad, we were introducing Dune fans to history ten thousand years prior to the events in Dune itself. We felt this warranted an appetizer to ease readers into a whole new epoch that would span 115 years.

  “Hunting Harkonnens” is our short-story introduction to the world of the Butlerian Jihad. During one of our book-signing tours, we found ourselves waiting for several hours in the Los Angeles train station. There, while sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench larger than a church pew, we brainstormed “Hunting Harkonnens.” In this preliminary tale, which lays the foundation of the holy war between humans and thinking machines, we introduced readers to the ancestors of the Atreides and the Harkonnens, and to the evil machines with human minds that Frank Herbert mentioned in Dune.

  Passing a laptop computer back and forth, the two of us blocked out the story in detail, scene by scene. Then, like team managers picking baseball players during a draft, we each chose the scenes that most interested us. Shortly after returning home from the tour, we wrote our parts of the story, swapped computer disks, and rewrote each other’s work, sending the changes to each other by mail and fax until we were satisfied with the end result.

  Our second Jihad short story, “Whipping Mek,” is a bridging work between the first and second novels in the trilogy, The Butlerian Jihad and The Machine Crusade. The story is set at a vital point in the nearly quarter-century gap between the events in these two novels, and fleshes out a pair of key tragic figures from later parts of the story.