Dune (40th Anniversary Edition)

by Frank Herbert

“It’s all clear then, Nephew?”

  “Except for one thing, Uncle: the planetologist, Kynes.”

  “Ah, yes, Kynes.”

  “He’s the Emperor’s man, m’Lord. He can come and go as he pleases. And he’s very close to the Fremen ... married one.”

  “Kynes will be dead by tomorrow’s nightfall.”

  “That’s dangerous work, Uncle, killing an Imperial servant.”

  “How do you think I’ve come this far this quickly?” the Baron demanded. His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives. “Besides, you need never have feared Kynes would leave Arrakis. You’re forgetting that he’s addicted to the spice.”

  “Of course!”

  “Those who know will do nothing to endanger their supply,” the Baron said. “Kynes certainly must know.”

  “I forgot,” Rabban said.

  They stared at each other in silence.

  Presently, the Baron said: “Incidentally, you will make my own supply one of your first concerns. I’ve quite a stockpile of private stuff, but that suicide raid by the Duke’s men got most of what we’d stored for sale.”

  Rabban nodded. “Yes, m’Lord.”

  The Baron brightened. “Now, tomorrow morning, you will assemble what remains of organization here and you’ll say to them: ‘Our Sublime Padishah Emperor has charged me to take possession of this planet and end all dispute.’ ”

  “I understand, m’Lord.”

  “This time, I’m sure you do. We will discuss it in more detail tomorrow. Now, leave me to finish my sleep.”

  The Baron deactivated his doorfield, watched his nephew out of sight.

  A tank-brain, the Baron thought. Muscle-minded tank-brain. They will be bloody pulp here when he’s through with them. Then, when I send in Feyd-Rautha to take the load off them, they’ll cheer their rescuer. Beloved Feyd-Rautha. Benign Feyd-Rautha, the compassionate one who saves them from a beast. Feyd-Rautha, a man to follow and die for. The boy will know by that time how to oppress with impunity. I’m sure he’s the one we need. He’ll learn. And such a lovely body. Really a lovely boy.

  At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.

  —from “A Child’s History of Muad‘Dib” by the Princess Irulan

  As PAUL fought the ‘thopter’s controls, he grew aware that he was sorting out the interwoven storm forces, his more than Mentat awareness computing on the basis of fractional minutiae. He felt dust fronts, billowings, mixings of turbulence, an occasional vortex.

  The cabin interior was an angry box lighted by the green radiance of instrument dials. The tan flow of dust outside appeared featureless, but his inner sense began to see through the curtain.

  I must find the right vortex, he thought.

  For a long time now he had sensed the storm’s power diminishing, but still it shook them. He waited out another turbulence.

  The vortex began as an abrupt billowing that rattled the entire ship. Paul defied all fear to bank the ’thopter left.

  Jessica saw the maneuver on the attitude globe.

  “Paul!” she screamed.

  The vortex turned them, twisting, tipping. It lifted the ’thopter like a chip on a geyser, spewed them up and out—a winged speck within a core of winding dust lighted by the second moon.

  Paul looked down, saw the dust-defined pillar of hot wind that had disgorged them, saw the dying storm trailing away like a dry river into the desert-moon-gray motion growing smaller and smaller below as they rode the updraft.

  “We’re out of it,” Jessica whispered.

  Paul turned their craft away from the dust in swooping rhythm while he scanned the night sky.

  “We’ve given them the slip,” he said.

  Jessica felt her heart pounding. She forced herself to calmness, looked at the diminishing storm. Her time sense said they had ridden within that compounding of elemental forces almost four hours, but part of her mind computed the passage as a lifetime. She felt reborn.

  It was like the litany, she thought. We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It’s gone, but we remain.

  “I don’t like the sound of our wing motion,” Paul said. “We suffered some damage in there.”

  He felt the grating, injured flight through his hands on the controls. They were out of the storm, but still not out into the full view of his prescient vision. Yet, they had escaped, and Paul sensed himself trembling on the verge of a revelation.

  He shivered.

  The sensation was magnetic and terrifying, and he found himself caught on the question of what caused this trembling awareness. Part of it, he felt, was the spice-saturated diet of Arrakis. But he thought part of it could be the litany, as though the words had a power of their own.

  “Ishallnotfear...

  Cause and effect: he was alive despite malignant forces, and he felt himself poised on a brink of self-awareness that could not have been without the litany’s magic.

  Words from the Orange Catholic Bible rang through his memory: “What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”

  “There’s rock all around,” Jessica said.

  Paul focused on the ’thopter’s launching, shook his head to clear it. He looked where his mother pointed, saw uplifting rock shapes black on the sand ahead and to the right. He felt wind around his ankles, a stirring of dust in the cabin. There was a hole somewhere, more of the storm’s doing.

  “Better set us down on sand,” Jessica said. “The wings might not take full brake.”

  He nodded toward a place ahead where sandblasted ridges lifted into moonlight above the dunes. “I’ll set us down near those rocks. Check your safety harness.”

  She obeyed, thinking: We’ve water and stillsuits. If we can find food, we can survive a long time on this desert. Fremen live here. What they can do we can do.

  “Run for those rocks the instant we’re stopped,” Paul said. “I’ll take the pack.”

  “Run for....” She fell silent, nodded. “Worms.”

  “Our friends, the worms,” he corrected her. “They’ll get this ’thopter. There’ll be no evidence of where we landed.”

  How direct his thinking, she thought.

  They glided lower... lower ...

  There came a rushing sense of motion to their passage—blurred shadows of dunes, rocks lifting like islands. The ’thopter touched a dune top with a soft lurch, skipped a sand valley, touched another dune.

  He’s killing our speed against the sand, Jessica thought, and permitted herself to admire his competence.

  “Brace yourself!” Paul warned.

  He pulled back on the wing brakes, gently at first, then harder and harder. He felt them cup the air, their aspect ratio dropping faster and faster. Wind screamed through the lapped coverts and primaries of the wings’ leaves.

  Abruptly, with only the faintest lurch of warning, the left wing, weakened by the storm, twisted upward and in, slamming across the side of the ’thopter. The craft skidded across a dune top, twisting to the left. It tumbled down the opposite face to bury its nose in the next dune amid a cascade of sand. They lay stopped on the broken wing side, the right wing pointing toward the stars.

  Paul jerked off his safety harness, hurled himself upward across his mother, wrenching the door open. Sand poured around them into the cabin, bringing a dry smell of burned flint. He grabbed the pack from the rear, saw that his mother was free of her harness. She stepped up onto the side of the right-hand seat and out onto the ’thopter’s metal skin. Paul followed, dragging the pack by its straps.

  “Run!” he ordered.

  He pointed up the dune face and beyond it where they could see a rock tower undercut by sandblast winds.

  Jessica leaped off the ’thopter and ran, scrambling and sliding up the dune. She heard Paul’s panting progress behind. They came out onto a sand ridge that curved away toward the rocks.

  “Follow the ridge,” Paul ordered. “It’ll be faster.”


  They slogged toward the rocks, sand gripping their feet.

  A new sound began to impress itself on them: a muted whisper, a hissing, an abrasive slithering.

  “Worm,” Paul said.

  It grew louder.

  “Faster!” Paul gasped.

  The first rock shingle, like a beach slanting from the sand, lay no more than ten meters ahead when they heard metal crunch and shatter behind them.

  Paul shifted his pack to his right arm, holding it by the straps. It slapped his side as he ran. He took his mother’s arm with his other hand. They scrambled onto the lifting rock, up a pebble-littered surface through a twisted, wind-carved channel. Breath came dry and gasping in their throats.

  “I can’t run any farther,” Jessica panted.

  Paul stopped, pressed her into a gut of rock, turned and looked down onto the desert. A mound-in-motion ran parallel to their rock island—moonlit ripples, sand waves, a cresting burrow almost level with Paul’s eyes at a distance of about a kilometer. The flattened dunes of its track curved once—a short loop crossing the patch of desert where they had abandoned their wrecked ornithopter.

  Where the worm had been there was no sign of the aircraft.

  The burrow mound moved outward into the desert, coursed back across its own path, questing.

  “It’s bigger than a Guild spaceship,” Paul whispered. “I was told worms grew large in the deep desert, but I didn’t realize ... how big.”

  “Nor I,” Jessica breathed.

  Again, the thing turned out away from the rocks, sped now with a curbing track toward the horizon. They listened until the sound of its passage was lost in gentle sand stirrings around them.

  Paul took a deep breath, looked up at the moon-frosted escarpment, and quoted from the Kitab al-Ibar: “Travel by night and rest in black shade through the day.” He looked at his mother. “We still have a few hours of night. Can you go on?”

  “In a moment.”

  Paul stepped out onto the rock shingle, shouldered the pack and adjusted its straps. He stood a moment with a paracompass in his hands.

  “Whenever you’re ready,” he said.

  She pushed herself away from the rock, feeling her strength return. “Which direction?”

  “Where this ridge leads.” He pointed.

  “Deep into the desert,” she said.

  “The Fremen desert,” Paul whispered.

  And he paused, shaken by the remembered high relief imagery of a prescient vision he had experienced on Caladan. He had seen this desert. But the set of the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had disappeared into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect registry when projected onto the real scene. The vision appeared to have shifted and approached him from a different angle while he remained motionless.

  Idaho was with us in the vision, he remembered. But now Idaho is dead.

  “Do you see a way to go?” Jessica asked, mistaking his hesitation.

  “No,” he said, “But we’ll go anyway.”

  He settled his shoulders more firmly in the pack, struck out up a sand-carved channel in the rock. The channel opened onto a moonlit floor of rock with benched ledges climbing away to the south.

  Paul headed for the first ledge, clambered onto it. Jessica followed.

  She noted presently how their passage became a matter of the immediate and particular—the sand pockets between rocks where their steps were slowed, the wind-carved ridge that cut their hands, the obstruction that forced a choice: Go over or go around? The terrain enforced its own rhythms. They spoke only when necessary and then with the hoarse voices of their exertion.

  “Careful here—this ledge is slippery with sand.”

  “Watch you don’t hit your head against this overhang.”

  “Stay below this ridge; the moon’s at our backs and it’d show our movement to anyone out there.”

  Paul stopped in a bight of rock, leaned the pack against a narrow ledge.

  Jessica leaned beside him, thankful for the moment of rest. She heard Paul pulling at his stillsuit tube, sipped her own reclaimed water. It tasted brackish, and she remembered the waters of Caladan—a tall fountain enclosing a curve of sky, such a richness of moisture that it hadn’t been noticed for itself ... only for its shape, or its reflection, or its sound as she stopped beside it.

  To stop, she thought. To rest... truly rest.

  It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.

  Paul pushed away from the rock ledge, turned, and climbed over a sloping surface. Jessica followed with a sigh.

  They slid down onto a wide shelf that led around a sheer rock face. Again, they fell into the disjointed rhythm of movement across this broken land.

  Jessica felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in substances beneath their feet and hands—boulders or pea gravel or flaked rock or pea sand or sand itself or grit or dust or gossamer powder.

  The powder clogged nose filters and had to be blown out. Pea sand and pea gravel rolled on a hard surface and could spill the unwary. Rock flakes cut.

  And the omnipresent sand patches dragged against their feet.

  Paul stopped abruptly on a rock shelf, steadied his mother as she stumbled into him.

  He was pointing left and she looked along his arm to see that they stood atop a cliff with the desert stretched out like a static ocean some two hundred meters below. It lay there full of moon-silvered waves—shadows of angles that lapsed into curves and, in the distance, lifted to the misted gray blur of another escarpment.

  “Open desert,” she said.

  “A wide place to cross,” Paul said, and his voice was muffled by the filter trap across his face.

  Jessica glanced left and right—nothing but sand below.

  Paul stared straight ahead across the open dunes, watching the movement of shadows in the moon’s passage. “About three or four kilometers across,” he said.

  “Worms,” she said.

  “Sure to be.”

  She focused on her weariness, the muscle ache that dulled her senses. “Shall we rest and eat?”

  Paul slipped out of the pack, sat down and leaned against it. Jessica supported herself by a hand on his shoulder as she sank to the rock beside him. She felt Paul turn as she settled herself, heard him scrabbling in the pack.

  “Here,” he said.

  His hand felt dry against hers as he pressed two energy capsules into her palm.

  She swallowed them with a grudging spit of water from her stillsuit tube.

  “Drink all your water,” Paul said. “Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body. It keeps your energy up. You’re stronger. Trust your stillsuit.”

  She obeyed, drained her catchpockets, feeling energy return. She thought then how peaceful it was here in this moment of their tiredness, and she recalled once hearing the minstrel-warrior Gurney Halleck say, “Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife.”

  Jessica repeated the words to Paul.

  “That was Gurney,” he said.

  She caught the tone of his voice, the way he spoke as of someone dead, thought: And well poor Gurney might be dead. The Atreides forces were either dead or captive or lost like themselves in this waterless void.

  “Gurney always had the right quotation,” Paul said. “I can hear him now: ‘And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked: and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers.’ ”

  Jessica closed her eyes, found herself moved close to tears by the pathos in her son’s voice.

  Presently, Paul said: “How do you ... feel?”

  She recognized that his question was directed at her pregnancy, said: “Your sister won’t be born for many months yet. I still feel ... physically adequate.”

  And she thought: How stiffly formal I speak to my
own son! Then, because it was the Bene Gesserit way to seek within for the answer to such an oddity, she searched and found the source of her formality: I’m afraid of my son; Ifearhis strangeness; I fear what he may see ahead of us, what he may tell me.

  Paul pulled his hood down over his eyes, listened to the bug-hustling sounds of the night. His lungs were charged with his own silence. His nose itched. He rubbed it, removed the filter and grew conscious of the rich smell of cinnamon.

  “There’s melange spice nearby,” he said.

  An eider wind feathered Paul’s cheeks, ruffled the folds of his burnoose. But this wind carried no threat of storm; already he could sense the difference.

  “Dawn soon,” he said.

  Jessica nodded.

  “There’s a way to get safely across that open sand,” Paul said. “The Fremen do it. ”

  “The worms?”

  “If we were to plant a thumper from our Fremkit back in the rocks here,” Paul said. “It’d keep a worm occupied for a time.”

  She glanced at the stretch of moonlighted desert between them and the other escarpment. “Four kilometers worth of time?”

  “Perhaps. And if we crossed there making only natural sounds, the kind that don’t attract the worms....”

  Paul studied the open desert, questing in his prescient memory, probing the mysterious allusions to thumpers and maker hooks in the Fremkit manual that had come with their escape pack. He found it odd that all he sensed was pervasive terror at thought of the worms. He knew as though it lay just at the edge of his awareness that the worms were to be respected and not feared ... if ... if....

  He shook his head.

  “It’d have to be sounds without rhythm,” Jessica said.

  “What? Oh. Yes. If we broke our steps ... the sand itself must shift down at times. Worms can’t investigate every little sound. We should be fully rested before we try it, though.”

  He looked across at that other rock wall, seeing the passage of time in the vertical moonshadows there. “It’ll be dawn within the hour.”

  “Where’ll we spend the day?” she asked.

  Paul turned left, pointed. “The cliff curves back north over there. You can see by the way it’s wind-cut that’s the windward face. There’ll be crevasses there, deep ones.”