Time stretched out around them. The rock face ahead seemed to grow no nearer. The one behind still towered high.
“Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!”
It was a drumming from the cliff behind.
“The thumper,” Paul hissed.
Its pounding continued and the found difficulty avoiding the rhythm of it in their stride.
“Lump ... lump ... lump ... lump....”
They moved in a moonlit bowl punctured by that hollowed thumping. Down and up through spilling dunes: step ... drag ... wait ... step.... Across pea sand that rolled under their feet: drag ... wait ... step....
And all the while their ears searched for a special hissing.
The sound, when it came, started so low that their own dragging passage masked it. But it grew ... louder and louder ... out of the west.
“Lump ... lump ... lump ... lump....” drummed the thumper.
The hissing approach spread across the night behind them. They turned their heads as they walked, saw the mound of the coursing worm.
“Keep moving,” Paul whispered. “Don’t look back.”
A grating sound of fury exploded from the rock shadows they had left. It was a flailing avalanche of noise.
“Keep moving,” Paul repeating.
He saw that they had reached an unmarked point where the two rock faces—the one ahead and the one behind—appeared equally remote.
And still behind them, that whipping, frenzied tearing of rocks dominated the night.
They moved on and on and on.... Muscles reached a stage of mechanical aching that seemed to stretch out indefinitely, but Paul saw that the beckoning escarpment ahead of them had climbed higher.
Jessica moved in a void of concentration, aware that the pressure of her will alone kept her walking. Dryness ached in her mouth, but the sounds behind drove away all hope of stopping for a sip from her stillsuit’s catchpockets.
“Lump ... lump....”
Renewed frenzy erupted from the distant cliff, drowning out the thumper.
Silence!
“Faster,” Paul whispered.
She nodded, knowing he did not see the gesture, but needing the action to tell herself that it was necessary to demand even more from muscles that already were being taxed to their limits—the unnatural movement....
The rock face of safety ahead of them climbed into the stars, and Paul saw a plane of flat sand stretching out at the base. He stepped onto it, stumbled in his fatigue, righted himself with an involuntary out-thrusting of a foot.
Resonant booming shook the sand around them.
Paul lurched sideways two steps.
“Boom! Boom!”
“Drum sand!” Jessica hissed.
Paul recovered his balance. A sweeping glance took in the sand around them, the rock escarpment perhaps two hundred meters away.
Behind them, he heard a hissing—like the wind, like a riptide where there was no water.
“Run!” Jessica screamed. “Paul, run!”
They ran.
Drum sound boomed beneath their feet. Then they were out of it and into pea gravel. For a time, the running was a relief to muscles that ached from unfamiliar, rhythmless use. Here was action that could be understood. Here was rhythm. But sand and gravel dragged at their feet. And the hissing approach of the worm was storm sound that grew around them.
Jessica stumbled to her knees. All she could think of was the fatigue and the sound and the terror.
Paul dragged her up.
They ran on, hand in hand.
A thin pole jutted from the sand ahead of them. They passed it, saw another.
Jessica’s mind failed to register on the poles until they were past.
There was another-wind-etched surface thrust up from a crack in rock.
Another.
Rock!
She felt it through her feet, the shock of unresisting surface, gained new strength from the firmer footing.
A deep crack stretched its vertical shadow upward into the cliff ahead of them. They sprinted for it, crowded into the narrow hole.
Behind them, the sound of the worm’s passage stopped.
Jessica and Paul turned, peered out onto the desert.
Where the dunes began, perhaps fifty meters away at the foot of a rock beach, a silver-gray curve broached from the desert, sending rivers of sand and dust cascading all around. It lifted higher, resolved into a giant, questing mouth. It was a round, black hole with edges glistening in the moonlight.
The mouth snaked toward the narrow crack where Paul and Jessica huddled. Cinnamon yelled in their nostrils. Moonlight flashed from crystal teeth.
Back and forth the great mouth wove.
Paul stilled his breathing.
Jessica crouched staring.
It took intense concentration of her Bene Gesserit training to put down the primal terrors, subduing a race-memory fear that threatened to fill her mind.
Paul felt a kind of elation. In some recent instant, he had crossed a time barrier into more unknown territory. He could sense the darkness ahead, nothing revealed to his inner eye. It was as though some step he had taken had plunged him into a well ... or into the trough of a wave where the future was invisible. The landscape had undergone a profound shifting.
Instead of frightening him, the sensation of time-darkness forced a hyper-acceleration of his other senses. He found himself registering every available aspect of the thing that lifted from the sand there seeking him. Its mouth was some eighty meters in diameter ... crystal teeth with the curved shape of crysknives glinting around the rim ... the bellows breath of cinnamon, subtle aldehydes ... acids....
The worm blotted out the moonlight as it brushed the rocks above them. A shower of small stones and sand cascaded into the narrow hiding place.
Paul crowded his mother farther back.
Cinnamon!
The smell of it flooded across him.
What has the worm to do with the spice, melange? he asked himself. And he remembered Liet-Kynes betraying a veiled reference to some association between worm and spice.
“Barrrroooom!”
It was like a peal of dry thunder coming from far off to their right.
Again: “Barrrroooom!”
The worm drew back onto the sand, lay there momentarily, its crystal teeth weaving moonflashes.
“Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!”
Another thumper! Paul thought.
Again it sounded off to their right.
A shudder passed through the worm. It drew farther away into the sand. Only a mounded upper curve remained like half a bell mouth, the curve of a tunnel rearing above the dunes.
Sand rasped.
The creature sank farther, retreating, turning. It became a mound of cresting sand that curved away through a saddle in the dunes.
Paul stepped out of the crack, watched the sand wave recede across the waste toward the new thumper summons.
Jessica followed, listening: “Lump ... lump ... lump ... lump ... lump....”
Presently the sound stopped.
Paul found the tube into his stillsuit, sipped at the reclaimed water.
Jessica focused on his action, but her mind felt blank with fatigue and the aftermath of terror. “Has it gone for sure?” she whispered.
“Somebody called it,” Paul said. “Fremen.”
She felt herself recovering. “It was so big!”
“Not as as big as the one that got our ’thopter.”
“Are you sure it was Fremen?”
“They used a thumper.”
“Why would they help us?”
“Maybe they weren’t helping us. Maybe they were just calling a worm.”
“Why?”
An answer lay poised at the edge of his awareness, but refused to come. He had a vision in his mind of something to do with the telescoping barbed sticks in their packs—the “maker hooks.”
“Why would they call a worm?” Jessica asked.
A breath of fear touched hi
s mind, and he forced himself to turn away from his mother, to look up the cliff. “We’d better find a way up there before daylight.” He pointed. “Those poles we passed—there are more of them.”
She looked, following the line of his hand, saw the poles—wind-scratched markers—made out the shadow of a narrow ledge that twisted into a crevasse high above them.
“They mark a way up the cliff,” Paul said. He settled his shoulders into the pack, crossed to the foot of the ledge and began the climb upward.
Jessica waited a moment, resting, restoring her strength; then she followed.
Up they climbed, following the guide poles until the ledge dwindled to a narrow lip at the mouth of a dark crevasse.
Paul tipped his head to peer into the shadowed place. He could feel the precarious hold his feet had on the slender ledge, but forced himself to slow caution. He saw only darkness within the crevasse. It stretched away upward, open to the stars at the top. His ears searched, found only sounds he could expect—a tiny spill of sand, an insect brrr, the patter of a small running creature. He tested the darkness in the crevasse with one foot, found rock beneath a gritting surface. Slowly, he inched around the corner, signaled for his mother to follow. He grasped a loose edge of her robe, helped her around.
They looked upward at starlight framed by two rock lips. Paul saw his mother beside him as a cloudy gray movement. “If we could only risk a light,” he whispered.
“We have other senses than eyes,” she said.
Paul slid a foot forward, shifted his weight, and probed with the other foot, met an obstruction. He lifted his foot, found a step, pulled himself up onto it. He reached back, felt his mother’s arm, tugged at her robe for her to follow.
Another step.
“It goes on up to the top, I think,” he whispered.
Shallow and even steps, Jessica thought. Man-carved beyond a doubt.
She followed the shadowy movement of Paul’s progress, feeling out the steps. Rock walls narrowed until her shoulders almost brushed them. The steps ended in a slitted defile about twenty meters long, its floor level, and this opened onto a shallow, moonlit basin.
Paul stepped out into the rim of the basin, whispered: “What a beautiful place.”
Jessica could only stare in silent agreement from her position a step behind him.
In spite of weariness, the irritation of recaths and nose plugs and the confinement of the stillsuit, in spite of fear and the aching desire for rest, this basin’s beauty filled her senses, forcing her to stop and admire it.
“Like a fairyland,” Paul whispered.
Jessica nodded.
Spreading away in front of her stretched desert growth—bushes, cacti, tiny clumps of leaves—all trembling in the moonlight. The ringwalls were dark to her left, moonfrosted on her right.
“This must be a Fremen place,” Paul said.
“There would have to be people for this many plants to survive,” she agreed. She uncapped the tube to her stillsuit’s catchpockets, sipped at it. Warm, faintly acrid wetness slipped down her throat. She marked how it refreshed her. The tube’s cap grated against flakes of sand as she replaced it.
Movement caught Paul’s attention—to his right and down on the basin floor curving out beneath them. He stared down through smoke bushes and weeds into a wedged slab sand-surface of moonlight inhabited by an up-hop, jump, pop-hop of tiny motion.
“Mice!” he hissed.
Pop-hop-hop! they went, into shadows and out.
Something fell soundlessly past their eyes into the mice. There came a thin screech, a flapping of wings, and a ghostly gray bird lifted away across the basin with a small, dark shadow in its talons.
We needed that reminder, Jessica thought.
Paul continued to stare across the basin. He inhaled, sensed the softly cutting contralto smell of sage climbing the night. The predatory bird—he thought of it as the way of this desert. It had brought a stillness to the basin so unuttered that the blue-milk moonlight could almost be heard flowing across sentinel saguaro and spiked paintbush. There was a low humming of light here more basic in its harmony than any other music in his universe.
“We’d better find a place to pitch the tent,” he said. “Tomorrow we can try to find the Fremen who—”
“Most intruders here regret finding the Fremen!”
It was a heavy masculine voice chopping across his words, shattering the moment. The voice came from above them and to their right.
“Please do not run, intruders,” the voice said as Paul made to withdraw into the defile. “If you run you’ll only waste your body’s water.”
They want us for the water of our flesh! Jessica thought. Her muscles overrode all fatigue, flowed into maximum readiness without external betrayal. She pinpointed the location of the voice, thinking: Such stealth! I didn’t hear him. And she realized that the owner of that voice had permitted himself only the small sounds, the natural sounds of the desert.
Another voice called from the basin’s rim to their left. “Make it quick, Stil. Get their water and let’s be on our way. We’ve little enough time before dawn.”
Paul, less conditioned to emergency response than his mother, felt chagrin that he had stiffened and tried to withdraw, that he had clouded his abilities by a momentary panic. He forced himself now to obey her teachings: relax, than fall into the semblance of relaxation, then into the arrested whipsnap of muscles that can slash in any direction.
Still, he felt the edge of fear within him and knew its source. This was blind time, no future he had seen ... and they were caught between wild Fremen whose only interest was the water carried in the flesh of two unshielded bodies.
This Fremen religious adaptation, then, is the source of what we now recognize as “The Pillars of the Universe,” whose Qizara Tafwid are among us all with signs and proofs and prophecy. They bring us the Arrakeen mystical fusion whose profound beauty is typified by the stirring music built on the old forms, but stamped with the new awakening. Who has not heard and been deeply moved by “The Old Man’s Hymn”? I drove my feet through a desert Whose mirage fluttered like a host. Voracious for glory, greedy for danger, I roamed the horizons of al-Kulab. Watching time level mountains In its search and its hunger for me. And I saw the sparrows swiftly approach, Bolder than the onrushing wolf. They spread in the tree of my youth. I heard the flock in my branches And was caught on their beaks and claws!
—from “Arrakis Awakening” by the Princess Irulan
THE MAN crawled across a dunetop. He was a mote caught in the glare of the noon sun. He was dressed only in torn remnants of a jubba cloak, his skin bare to the heat through the tatters. The hood had been ripped from the cloak, but the man had fashioned a turban from a torn strip of cloth. Wisps of sandy hair protruded from it, matched by a sparse beard and thick brows. Beneath the blue-within-blue eyes, remains of a dark stain spread down to his cheeks. A matted depression across mustache and beard showed where a stillsuit tube had marked out its path from nose to catchpockets.
The man stopped half across the dunecrest, arms stretched down the slipface. Blood had clotted on his back and on his arms and legs. Patches of yellow-gray sand clung to the wounds. Slowly, he brought his hands under him, pushed himself to his feet, stood there swaying. And even in this almost-random action there remained a trace of once-precise movement.
“I am Liet-Kynes,” he said, addressing himself to the empty horizon, and his voice was a hoarse caricature of the strength it had known. “I am His Imperial Majesty’s Planetologist,” he whispered, “planetary ecologist for Arrakis. I am steward of this land.”
He stumbled, fell sideways along the crusty surface of the windward face. His hands dug feebly into the sand.
I am steward of this sand, he thought.
He realized that he was semi-delirious, that he should dig himself into the sand, find the relatively cool underlayer and cover himself with it. But he could still smell the rank, semisweet esthers of a pre-spice pocket som
ewhere underneath this sand. He knew the peril within this fact more certainly than any other Fremen. If he could smell the pre-spice mass, that meant the gasses deep under the sand were nearing explosive pressure. He had to get away from here.
His hands made weak scrabbling motions along the dune face.
A thought spread across his mind—clear, distinct: The real wealth of a planet is in its landscape, how we take part in that basic source of civilization—agriculture.
And he thought how strange it was that the mind, long fixed on a single track, could not get off that track. The Harkonnen troopers had left him here without water or stillsuit, thinking a worm would get him if the desert didn’t. They had thought it amusing to leave him alive to die by inches at the impersonal hands of his planet.
The Harkonnens always did find it difficult to kill Fremen, he thought. We don’t die easily. I should be dead now ... I will be dead soon ... but I can’t stop being an ecologist.
“The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.”
The voice shocked him because he recognized it and knew the owner of it was dead. It was the voice of his father who had been planetologist here before him—his father long dead, killed in the cave-in at Plaster Basin.
“Got yourself into quite a fix here, Son,” his father said. “You should’ve known the consequences of trying to help the child of that Duke.”
I’m delirious, Kynes thought.
The voice seemed to come from his right. Kynes scraped his face through sand, turning to look in that direction—nothing except a curving stretch of dune dancing with heat devils in the full glare of the sun.
“The more life there is within a system, the more niches there are for life,” his father said. And the voice came now from his left, from behind him.
Why does he keep moving around? Kynes asked himself. Doesn’t he want me to see him?
“Life improves the capacity of the environment to sustain life,” his father said. “Life makes needed nutrients more readily available. It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous chemical interplay from organism to organism.”
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