"Only if we fail," old Var said. "I choose to believe we still have a chance, no matter how naive that sounds." He closed the ship's hatch and strapped himself into the creaking pilot seat. "So, if that doesn't sound pleasant to you, then we'd better stop the desert from gaining more of a foothold."
The flyer lifted from the dry camp and swung out over the ghost forests and hummocks of fresh dunes that were swallowing the remnants of grasslands. The engine sputtered periodically as they flew southeast to a region where sandworms had been sighted. The craft seemed like a sluggish bumblebee, its tanks overloaded and heavy.
"We will stop the moving sands," one young commando said.
"Next you will try to stop the wind." Stilgar grabbed a dangling strap as a thermal updraft shook the craft. "In a few short years, your planet will be sand and rock. Do you expect a miracle to turn the desert back?"
"We'll create that miracle for ourselves," Var answered, and his team murmured in agreement.
They flew across the wilderness of dunes, far past the point where they could see anything but buttery tan from horizon to horizon. Stilgar tapped a finger against the scratched windowplaz and shouted against the engine noise. "See the desert for what it is--not a place to fear and loathe, but a great engine to power an empire."
Liet added, "Already, small worms in the desert belt have created priceless amounts of melange just waiting to be mined. How have you survived for so long without spice?"
"We haven't needed spice for fifteen hundred years, not since we came to Qelso," Var called from the cockpit. "When you do not have a thing, you learn to live without it, or you don't live."
"We don't give a damn about spice," one of the commandos said. "I'd rather give a damn about trees and crops and fat herds."
Var continued, "Our first settlers brought a great deal of spice from far away, and three generations fought addiction until the supplies were gone. Then what? We were forced to survive without it--and we have. Why should we open ourselves to that monstrous dependency again? My people are better off without it."
"If used carefully, melange has important qualities," Liet said. "Health, life extension, the possibility of prescience. And it's a valuable commodity to sell, should you ever reconnect with CHOAM and the rest of mankind. As Qelso dries up, you may need offworld supplies for your basic needs."
If anyone survives the outside Enemy, Stilgar thought to himself, recalling the ever-present threat of capture by the shimmering net. But these people were much more concerned with their own local enemies, fighting the desert, trying to stop the unstoppable.
He remembered the great dreams of Pardot Kynes, Liet's father. Pardot had done the calculations and determined that the Fremen could turn Dune into a garden, but only after generations of intense effort. According to the histories, Arrakis had indeed become green and verdant for a time, before the new worms reclaimed it, and brought the desert back. The planet seemed unable to achieve a balance.
The battered craft flew low, its engines droning. Stilgar wondered if the noise of their passage would attract worms, but as he stared down at the hypnotic, oceanic dunes, he saw only a couple of patches of rust-colored sand that indicated fresh spice blows.
"Dropping signal vibrators," Var called, while throbbing canisters--the equivalent of ancient thumpers--tumbled out of the small bays below the cockpit. "That should bring at least one of them."
With a puff of sand and dust the thumpers plunged into the dunes and sent out droning signals. After circling back to make certain the devices were operating properly, Var selected two more spots within a radius of five kilometers. Stilgar could not determine why the craft still felt overloaded.
As they cruised in search of a worm, Stilgar described his legendary days on Dune, how he and Paul Muad'Dib had led a ragtag Fremen army to victory against far superior forces. "We used desert power. That is what you can learn from us. Once you see we are not your enemies, we can learn much from each other."
Under Stilgar's firm hand, these people could come to understand their possibilities. With the awakening of the populace would come the awakening of the planet, with plantings and green zones to keep the desert under control. Perhaps they could succeed, if they could just find--and maintain--an equilibrium.
Stilgar remembered something Liet's father had said to him once. Extremes invariably lead to disaster. Only through balance can we fully harvest the fruits of nature. He leaned closer to the craft's observation windows and saw a familiar wrinkling of the sand, ripples of deep movement disturbing the smooth dunes. "Wormsign!"
"Prepare for our first encounter of the day." A grin wrinkled Var's grizzled face as he turned away from the cockpit. "The shipment that came in last night brought us enough water for two targets--but we need to find them."
Water! The heavy ship was carrying water.
The men shifted position, heading toward gunnery hatches and hoses mounted on the sides of the stripped-down flyer. The pilot banked back toward the first cluster of thumpers.
As the commandos prepared to strike, Stilgar mused about the strange turnabout. Pardot Kynes had spoken of the need to understand ecological consequences, that humans were stewards of the land, and never owners. We must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet. We must use man as a constructive ecological force--inserting adapted terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place--to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape.
The battle today was the opposite. Stilgar and Liet would help fight to prevent the desert from swallowing all of Qelso.
Through the nearest window Stilgar saw a mound in motion, a bucking sandworm drawn toward the thumper. Liet crowded close beside him, and said, "I estimate it at forty meters. Larger than Sheeana's worms in our hold."
"These have grown in the open desert," Stilgar said. "Shai-Hulud wants this planet."
"Not if I can help it," Var said. But as if to defy him, directly below the flyer an immense head surfaced and quested around, trying to track the conflicting sources of vibrations.
Long tubes protruded from the front and rear of the flyer. The commandos gripped their gun mountings, nozzles that could be turned and aimed. The flyer swooped low. "Fire when ready, but conserve what you can. The water's deadly enough."
The fighters shot high-pressure streams from their hoses, blasting the sandworm below. The drenching bursts were more effective than artillery shells.
Taken by surprise, the creature writhed and twisted its round head back and forth, convulsing. Hard ring segments split apart to reveal softer pink flesh between, and water burned like acid into the vulnerable parts. The worm rolled on the wet sand, in obvious agony.
"They are killing Shai-Hulud," Stilgar said, sickened.
Liet was also stunned, but said, "These people have to defend themselves."
"That's enough! It is dead--or soon will be," Var shouted. The small force reluctantly shut off their hoses, looking with hatred upon the dying worm. Unable to dig deep enough to escape the poisonous moisture, the mortally wounded creature continued to squirm as the flyer circled over its death throes. Finally the beast gave a great final shudder and stopped moving.
Stilgar nodded, his expression still grim. "There are necessities to life in the desert, hard decisions to be made." He had to accept the clear fact that this worm did not belong here on Qelso. No sandworm did. On the way back to the settlement, they encountered a second worm, drawn by the vibrations of their flyer's engines. The commandos emptied their water reservoirs, and the second worm perished even more quickly.
Liet and Stilgar sat together in uncomfortable silence, wrapped up in what they had seen and the fight they had agreed to join. "Even though she doesn't have her memories back yet," Liet said, "I'm glad my daughter Chani did not see this."
Though the mood of the fighters was upbeat aboard the flyer, the two young men, remembering Arrakis, murmured Fremen prayers. Stilgar was still contemplating what they had seen and
done when Var yelled a strangled-sounding alarm.
Suddenly strange ships swarmed around them.
You see only harshness, devastation, and ugliness. That is because you have no faith. Around me I see a potential paradise, for Rakis is the birthplace of my beloved Prophet.
--WAFF of the Tleilaxu
When he first glimpsed Rakis, the bleak ruins brought dismay to Waff's heart. But when Edrik's Heighliner deposited him and his small team of Guild assistants there, he experienced the joy of setting foot on the desert planet again. He could feel the holy calling deep inside his bones.
In his previous lifetime he had stood on these sands, face to face with the Prophet. With Sheeana and Reverend Mother Odrade, he had ridden a great worm out to the ruins of Sietch Tabr. His ghola memories were corrupted and uncertain, riddled with annoying gaps. Waff could not recall his final moments as the whores closed in around the desert planet, deploying their awful Obliterators. Had he run for hopeless shelter, looking behind him like Lot's wife for a last glimpse of the doomed city? Had he seen explosions and walls of flame searing the sky, sweeping toward him?
But the cells of another Waff ghola had been grown in an axlotl tank in Bandalong as part of the usual process. The secret council of the kehl had planned for the serial immortality of all Tleilaxu Masters long before anyone had heard of Honored Matres. The next thing he knew, Waff was awakened to his past life during a grand guignol stage show as the brutal women murdered one of his twins after another until just one of them--him--reached a sufficiently desperate crisis to break through the ghola barrier and reveal his past. Some of it, at least.
But not until now had Waff actually seen the Armageddon that the whores had wrought on this sacred world.
The ecosystem of Rakis had been fundamentally destroyed. Half of the atmosphere was burned away, the ground sterilized, most life forms dead--from the microscopic sandplankton all the way up to the giant sandworms. It made the old Dune seem comfortable by comparison.
The sky was a dark purple, touched with an underburn of orange. As their ship circled, searching for a spot less hellish than others, Waff studied a panel of atmospheric readings. The moisture content was abnormally high. At some point in its geologic history, Arrakis had possessed open water, but sandtrout had sealed it all away. During the bombardment, underground rivers and seas must have been vaporized as they were released from aquifers.
The Honored Matres' horrific weapons had not only turned the soft dunes to a baked moonscape, they had also thrown up great clouds of dust that had not settled entirely out of the atmosphere, even decades later. The Coriolis storms would be worse than ever before.
He and his team would likely have to wear special bodily protection and supplemental breather masks; their small dwelling huts would need to be sealed and pressurized. Waff didn't mind. Was that so different from wearing a stillsuit? By degrees, perhaps, but not fundamentally harder.
His lighter circled over the remains of a sprawling metropolis that had been called Arrakeen in the days of Muad'Dib, then the Festival City of Onn during the reign of the God Emperor, and later--after Leto II's death--the moated city of Keen. No longer concerned about secrecy, now that the seaworms had successfully taken hold on Buzzell, Waff was happy to have four assistants help him with the hard work he was sure to face on this Obliterator-blasted planet.
Studying the surface, he discerned lumpy geometric shapes that had once been angled streets and tall buildings. Surprisingly, in the dimness of seared daylight, he also spotted numerous artificial illumination sources and a few dark structures of recent construction. "There seems to be a camp down there. Who else would come to Rakis? What could they possibly want here?"
"The same as us," said the Guildsman. "Spice."
He shook his head. "Too little here anymore, at least until we bring back the worms. No one else has that skill."
"Pilgrims perhaps? There may still be those who make a hajj," a second assistant said. Waff knew that a dizzying mishmash of religious splinter groups and cults had sprung from Rakis.
"More likely," suggested a third Guildsman, "they are treasure hunters."
Waff quoted quietly from the Cant of the Shariat: " 'When greed and desperation are coupled, men accomplish superhuman feats--though for the wrong reasons.' "
He considered choosing a different place for their base camp, then accepted the idea that joining resources with the strangers might help them all last longer in the harsh environment. No one knew when--or if--Edrik might be coming back for them, or how long the sandworm work would take, or how much longer Waff himself would last. He planned to be here for the remainder of his days.
After the lighter landed unannounced at the edge of the camp, the Guildsmen waited for instructions from Waff. The Tleilaxu man settled goggles over his eyes to protect against the caustic wind, and emerged. For long journeys outside, he might have to wear a supplemental oxygen mask, but the Rakian atmosphere was surprisingly breathable.
Six tall and dirty men faced him from the encampment. They wore rags wrapped around their heads, carried knives and antique maula pistols. Their eyes were red-veined, their skin rough and cracked. The foremost man had shaggy black hair, a square chest, and a rock-hard potbelly. "You are fortunate that I'm curious about why you are here. Otherwise, we would've shot you out of the sky."
Waff held up his hands. "We are no threat to you, whoever you are."
Five men leveled their maula pistols, and the other slashed the air with his knife. "We have claimed Rakis for ourselves. All spice here is ours."
"You've claimed a whole planet?"
"Yes, the whole damned planet." The first man tossed back his dark hair. "I'm Guriff, and these are my prospectors. There's damned little spice left in the burned crust, and it's ours."
"Then you may have it." Waff performed a perfunctory bow. "We have other interests, as geological investigators and archaeologists. We wish to take readings and run tests to determine the extent of damage to the ecosystem." The four Guild assistants waited beside him in complete silence.
Guriff laughed loudly and heartily. "There isn't much of an ecosystem left here."
"Then where does breathable oxygen come from?" He knew that Liet-Kynes had asked that question in the ancient days, curious because the planet had neither widespread plant life nor volcanoes to generate an atmosphere.
The man just stared. Obviously, he had not thought about this. "Do I look like a planetologist to you? Go ahead and look into it, but don't expect any help from us. Here on Rakis, you are self-sufficient or you die."
The Tleilaxu man raised his eyebrows. "And what if we wish to share some of our spice coffee with you, as a token of friendship? I understand that water is more easily obtainable than in the old days."
Guriff glanced at his prospectors, then said, "We're happy to accept your hospitality, but we have no intention of reciprocating."
"Nonetheless, our offer stands."
INSIDE GURIFF'S DUSTY hut, Waff used his own supplies of melange (left over from his sandworm experiments) to brew coffee. Guriff didn't have a desperate shortage of water in his camp, though his dwelling smelled of long-unwashed bodies and the savory sweetness of a drug smoke that Waff could not identify.
At his command, the four Guildsmen erected the shelters brought down from the Heighliner, setting up armored sleeping tents and laboratory enclosures. Waff saw no reason to assist them. He was a Tleilaxu Master after all, and these were his workers, so he would allow them to perform their tasks.
While they drank a second pot of spice coffee, Guriff grew more relaxed. He didn't trust the diminutive Tleilaxu, but he didn't seem to trust anyone. He took pains to say he harbored no particular hatred toward Waff's race, and that his scavengers held no grudges against others of low social position. Guriff cared only about Rakis.
"All that melted sand and plascrete. By chipping away the upper crust of glass, we were able to get down to the foundations of the sturdier buildings in Keen." Guri
ff produced a hand-drawn chart. "Scraping out buried treasure. We found what we think is the original Bene Gesserit Keep--a few heavily barricaded bomb shelters filled with skeletons." He smiled. "We also uncovered the extravagant temple built by the Priests of the Divided God. It was so huge we couldn't miss it. Full of trinkets, but still not enough to pay for our effort. CHOAM is expecting us to find something much more extraordinary, though they seem happy enough to sell containers of 'genuine Rakian sand' to gullible fools."
Waff didn't reply. Edrik and the Navigators had obtained such Rakian sand for him to use in his original experiments.
"But we've got a lot more digging to do. Keen was a big city."
In his previous life, Waff had seen those structures before they were destroyed. He knew the ostentation that the deluded Priests placed in all the rooms and towers (as if God cared about such gaudiness!). Guriff and his men would indeed find plenty of treasure there. But the wrong kind.
"The Priesthood's temple had collapsed worse than most other large buildings. Maybe it was a direct target of the Honored Matre attack." The prospector smiled with thick lips. "But deep in the sublevels beneath the temple, we did find chests of stored solaris and hoarded melange. A worthwhile haul. More than we expected, but not so much. We're after something bigger. The Tyrant buried a huge spice hoard deep in the southern polar regions--I'm sure of it."
Waff made a skeptical sound as he sipped spice coffee. "No one has been able to find that treasure for fifteen hundred years."
Guriff held up a finger, noticed a hangnail, and chewed on it. "Still, the bombardment may have churned up the crust enough to reveal the mother lode. And, thanks be to the gods--there are no worms left to torment us."
Waff made a noncommittal sound. Not yet.
WITHOUT BOTHERING TO sleep, knowing his time was short, the Tleilaxu man began to make preparations to continue his work. His Guild companions seemed confident that the Navigator would eventually return, though Waff wasn't so sure. He was here on Rakis, and this gave him great pleasure.