Dune Prelude 01 - Dune: House Atreides by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson

Author:Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson [Herbert, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 0553897829
Published: 1999-10-04T21:00:00+00:00

How simple things were when our Messiah was only a dream.

—STILGAR, Naib of Sietch Tabr

For Pardot Kynes, life would never be the same now that he had been accepted into the sietch.

His wedding day to Frieth approached, requiring that he spend hours on preparation and meditation, learning Fremen marriage rituals, especially the ahal, the ceremony of a woman choosing a mate— and Frieth had certainly been the initiator in this relationship. Many other fascinations distracted him, but he knew he could not make any mistakes in such a delicate matter.

For the sietch leaders, this was a grand occasion, more spectacular than any normal Fremen wedding. Never before had an outsider married one of their women, though Naib Heinar had heard of it happening occasionally in other sietches.

After the would-be assassin Uliet had sacrificed himself, the tale told throughout the sietch (and no doubt spread among other hidden Fremen communities) was that Uliet had received a true vision from God, that he had been directed in his actions. Old one-eyed Heinar, as well as sietch elders Jerath, Aliid, and Garnah, were suitably chagrined for having questioned the impassioned words of the Planetologist in the first place.

Though Heinar gravely offered to step down as Naib, bowing to the man he now believed to be a prophet from beyond the stars, Kynes had no interest in becoming the leader of the sietch. He had too much work to do— challenges on a scale grander than mere local politics. He was perfectly happy to be left alone to concentrate on his terraforming plan and study the data collected from instruments scattered all around the desert. He needed to understand the great sandy expanse and its subtleties before he could know precisely how to change things for the better.

The Fremen worked hard to comply with anything Kynes suggested, no matter how absurd it might seem. They believed everything he said now. So preoccupied was Kynes, however, that he barely noticed their devotion. If the Planetologist said he needed certain measurements, Fremen scrambled across the desert, setting up collection points in remote regions, reopening the botanical testing stations that had been long abandoned by the Imperium. Some devoted assistants even traveled to the forbidden territories in the south, using a mode of transportation they had kept secret from him.

During those frantic first weeks of information gathering, two Fremen men were lost— though Kynes never learned of it. He reveled in the glorious data flooding to him. This was more than he had ever dreamed of accomplishing in years of working alone as the Imperial Planetologist. He was in a scientific paradise.

The day before his wedding, he wrote up his first carefully edited report since joining the sietch, culminating weeks of work. A Fremen messenger delivered it to Arrakeen, where it was then transmitted to the Emperor. Kynes’s work with the Fremen threatened to put him in a conflict of interest as Imperial Planetologist, but he had to keep up appearances. Nowhere in his report did he mention, or even hint at, his newfound relationship with the desert people.

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