The Dune Encyclopedia

by Willis E McNelly

  When Scytale was brought before Paul shortly after Chani died in childbirth, Scytale acted with lightning resolve. In the space of a few moments he learned both that Chani was dead and that the trigger had restored Idaho's memory. In an act of daring or desperation, he repeated the offer while the twins' lives hung in the balance.

  After the failure of his mission, Scytale's body rapidly disintegrated. Failure of a face dancer's central nervous system released powerful enzymes that broke down the cell walls in order to prevent his body structure from being revealed by dissection. When the Tleilaxu embassy claimed the remains, they were given a container of water — from Scytale's tissues, after the Fremen custom — but water with chemicals added that caused it to continually change color. The effect of this grim jest was not lost on the Tleilaxu: Scytale's mother, Shrufka ir Kaarla, committed suicide, one of the few such instances known among that callous people, and his father, Dr. Garik L. Nouh, retired from public life.

  For many years afterward, part of the initiation ritual of the face dancer involved an oath sworn on the container holding Scytale's water, and in the eleventh quadrant the term scytale (Galach skaileel) was long used as the generic for face dancer.

  W.E.M.

  SEMI-SHELD

  A person-sized defensive shield that protected only one side of the body. Most could be adjusted to cover either the right or the left side. The gap between the body and shield narrowed, but did not close entirely, at the backbone, navel, and Adam's apple. One leg was entirely enclosed. The semi-shield was used principally in gladiatorial contests; the chosen champion was fully shielded, and the drugged slave was given a semi-shield. The generator for the semi-shield was carried on a belt harness; it was somewhat bulkier than that of a full shield. The semi-shield was also more complex than the regular defensive shield, more expensive, and fairly rare.

  Further references: HOLTZMAN EFFECT; PSEUDO-SHIELD; PENTASHIELD.

  SEMUTA

  or "Starsong." A highly addictive narcotic derived, by crystal extraction, from elacca drug (the residue produced by burning the blood-grained elacca wood of Ecaz). While there is evidence that elacca drug was in relatively common use as early as 9751, the extractive process that produced semuta was not discovered until 10092.

  Credit for this development is awarded to Pavon Harle, a Caladan physician/pharmacist. Harle, who specialized in battlefield medicine, was well acquainted with the effects produced by elacca drug; because it weakened the will to survive, it was often employed as a chemical weapon, planted in an opposing camp's water supply. Faced, as any military doctor so often was, with the large number of wounded for whom there was simply no hope of help, Harle began to experiment with various elacca derivatives, hoping to find one that could be used to ease the passing of the dying troops. His search eventually led him to semuta.

  The drug was everything he could have wished; the crystals, either taken in capsule form or dissolved in wine, produced a feeling of "timeless ecstasy," of separation from all pain and trouble. Accentuating this overpowering sense of well-being was the "semuta music" — rhythmic, atonal vibrations set up in the sympathetic nervous system — which accompanied the drug experience. (It was this aspect that brought semuta its more poetic name.) "No semuta-drugged soldier," noted Harle in his memoirs, "ever showed dismay at dying; it is, indeed, doubtful that most of them realized that death had touched them at all."

  An unfortunate facet of semuta was its addictive qualities; most often, a single dose sufficed to cause severe physiological addiction. In the case of the mortally wounded, of course, this was not a consideration; in the case of its discoverer, however, it was an unending regret. Harle had tested a dose of semuta crystals on himself, and he continued to use the drug for the remainder of his steadily less-productive life.

  Once the methods used to manufacture semuta became known, massive use of the narcotic sprang up in the various militaries throughout the Imperium. In services commanded by the kindlier Houses, use or possession of semuta was generally grounds for discharge. For those in more stringent services, the consequences ranged from blackmail through enforced withdrawal (there was a notable percentage of fatalities in such cases) to immediate execution.

  That semuta addicts made poor fighters was unarguable. In addition to their uselesness during their ecstasies, addicts were prone to such fits of depression between doses that there were instances of soldiers walking into enemy fire rather than facing the agonies of withdrawal.

  The drug quickly made its way to the civilian population as well. At one point during the peak of its popularity, it was hypothesized that as much as fifty percent of the elacca wood Ecaz sold for off-planet export eventually became semuta crystals. By 10185, semuta addiction had come to be considered one of the Imperium's most insidious health problems, the effects of which were felt on every planet. Leaders and officials, from Shaddam IV down, spoke publicly of controls but privately despaired of ever containing the menace.

  All legislation to the contrary, traffic in the drug apparently continued unabated until approximately 10380. Beginning with that year, and continuing until the end of the century, two trends combined to reduce the flow of semuta to a faltering trickle.

  First, in the decade that began with 10380, elacca wood production dropped by nearly ninety percent. Some form of botanical plague, never satisfactorily diagnosed, was believed to be at fault. As all attempts — and there had been many — to coax elacca wood to grow off-planet had been unsuccessful, the amount of base material available for conversion to semuta declined accordingly.

  Second, the mores of the period had changed. Where addicts had before been treated, ignored, or even pitied, those whose dependency on the drug became known more often faced harsh imprisonment, coupled with unaided semuta withdrawal. Such stern dealing with known addicts, combined with the drug's greatly increasing scarcity (and accompanying soaring prices) made experimentation increasingly unattractive.

  By 10410, there was no record of any subject of the Imperium suffering from addiction. While a limited amount of elacca wood is known to grow wild on Ecaz at the present time, there has been no interest shown in reviving semuta manufacture.

  C.W.

  Further references: ECAZ; ELACCA DRUG; Pavon Harle, A Doctor's Notes (partially translated; Work-in-Progress, Arrakis Studies, Temp. Ser. Ill, lib. Conf.).

  SHAI-HULUD

  (Giant Sandworm).

  Geonemolodium arraknis (also Shaihuludata gigantica), a creature unique to the pre-Leto II era of the planet Arrakis. Attempts to establish the worm in other areas of the galaxy have met with only limited success. The completed life cycle has not been observed in any of the off-planet experiments.

  THE ADULT WORM. One of the difficulties of studying the organism was the immense size of the adult. Larger male specimens reached lengths exceeding 400 meters and were close to 100 meters at the widest point. The smaller female measured approximately 100 by 20 meters. The mouth of the male worms has been measured at 80 meters in diameter. A set of 1,000 or more organic carbo-silica crystal teeth surrounded the mouth in a circular pattern. As described below, the teeth were used for defense of territory, rather than for ingestion of nutrients.

  The adult worm was made up of 100 to 400 segments. Each segment possessed its own primitive nervous system. Respiration was accomplished through pores in the tough, silvery-gray outer skin. There was no circulatory system as such, since most of the nutrients were in the form of gases. Each segment had a series of membrane "baffles" to absorb nutrients.

  The "gut" was a hollow tube running the full length of the worm, servicing all of the segments. It did not function for the elimination of waste products nor for ingestion or digestion of food. Each worm had one segment, near the anterior portion, which was a specialized reproductive segment. It is not known what stimulated the differentiation of this reproductive segment.

  THE LARVAL FORM. Sandtrout (Fremen: Little Makers) were the larval form of the sandworm. They were large,
unicellular organisms with a flexible peptidoglycan cell wall. Nutrients were absorbed from water and air through the cell wall. Individual sandtrout were rarely over 20 cm long and 6 cm wide. Their shape tended to be pleiomorphic, adapting to the environment. It was not uncommon to find many sandtrout attached to one another, walling off several liters of water from the surrounding environment.

  LIFE CYCLE. A female worm reached sexual maturity after approximately 1,000 years of maturation, the male worm readied maturity after approximately 1,100 years. Mating began when a gravid female developed an egg sac in her reproductive segment. At that time, she chose a nest site and built a nest by raising herself to half-length height and throwing herself down to "blast" out a nest. This rhythmical thumping and grinding noise called a male worm. The Fremen made use of this fact — one could hardly term it a "mating habit" — to call a worm with "thumpers," devices which imitated the nest-building sounds of a female worm.

  The male moved rapidly to the nest site and devoured the female. Compounds in the outer skin of the female caused the male to become dormant for a period of several weeks during which he remained buried in the nest site. The highly resistant spice-fiber egg case in the female reproductive segment was retained in the male reproductive segment, where fertilization occurred by an unknown process. After fertilization and possibly a period of development and cell division, the male deposited the spice-fiber egg case into the sand nest, presumably by egestion, and left the nest with the egg case buried deeply below the surface of the sand. At this stage of development (schizontal) the zygotes underwent an asexual cell division producing a spongiform merozygospore containing thousands of future larvae. The merozygospore ruptured, releasing the sandtrout. The sandtrout were efficient water scavengers. They traveled hundreds of kilometers through the sand seeking out water, joining their bodies with one another to transport the water back to the nest site. Many of the nutrients required by the sandtrout were breakdown products contributed by the female body. The sandtrout produced exoenzymes which digested the nutrients to fragments absorbable by the larvae. As the sandtrout brought water to the nest site, it mixed with the excretions of the larvae to form the prespice mass. The chemistry of the reactions has not been determined; however, it is known that CO2 was evolved and built tremendous pressures within the mass. When the pressure built sufficiently, there was a powerful explosion, often termed a spice-blow. All of the products of the pre-spice mass were brought to the surface of the sand, where the action of sun and air rapidly changed the pre-spice to melange. Again the bio-chemical process is unknown. During the "blow," many sandtrout in the immediate vicinity were killed. Most scholars agree that the cell walls of these dead larvae were the source of the amino-sugars in melange.

  The chemical reactions during the spice blow triggered changes in the surviving larvae, stimulating them to join their bodies in a premetamorphic stage. At this point, changes in metabolism began, so that the combined larvae became similar to the adult worm. Water gradually became toxic, and rudimentary autotrophy developed.

  The premetamorphic stage consisted of joined sandworms, each capable of metamorphosing into an individual sandworm segment. The metamorphic process took over 1,050 years. One segment differentiated to become the head segment with teeth, and another differentiated into the reproductive segment. Posterior segments were relatively undifferentiated and could reverse the metamorphic process to become sandtrout if environmental conditions were unfavorable to the adult worm. Most commonly this latter occurred in the presence of water.

  The juvenile form of the worm was neither male nor female. This small (20 to 30 meters long) form of the worm was captured by the Fremen for drowning to produce the spice essence for their spice orgy. Most of these juvenile worms became females. The stimulus for development of a male is not known. One theory holds that subtle changes in the environment due to the absence of an adult male triggered the formation of a male, but this is not proven. Each male worm had a territory of 300-400 square kilometers which he defended against intrusion by another male. Fights between two males rarely ended in death. The protagnists used their teeth to hook the ring segments of the opponent, opening the segment to the entrance of sand, causing irritation. One worm eventually became sufficiently uncomfortable to break off the battle and retreat. Although the fight was not directly fatal, occasionally sand caused sufficient irritation to allow entrance of an as yet undetermined virus, eventually resulting in the death of the worm.

  LIFE CYCLE OF G. ARRAKNIS

  METABOLISM OF THE ADULT WORM. The adult G. arraknis was a true autotroph, producing all of its nutritional needs from inorganic compounds on the planet surface. The energy to drive the synthetic reactions was obtained by the travel of the worm through the sand which caused an electrostatic charge differential. The resulting electrons passed to an electron acceptor believed to be a cupri-cyanide compound, the reduced form of which accumulated in the worm body. The electron donor was probably S1O2, although the precise mechanism is unknown. Molecular oxygen was evolved during the reaction. The presence of water caused the electrons to be discharged abnormally because the anions and cations on the worm body dissolved in the water. Thus, water was a poison to the worm.

  The heat from the friction of the travel of the worm through sand drove the synthetic reactions to completion. Most of the nutrients produced were gaseous: methane, ethane, propane and butane, butyric acid, propionic acid, acetic acid, and formic acid. Excess gases not utilized for nutrients were literally ignited by the heat of sand travel. Thus, the worm always had a flame deep within the body cavity. The excess heat also aided in driving the synthetic reactions, keeping the nutrients in gaseous form for adsorption, and vaporizing any stray H2O.

  Our knowledge of the metabolism of the sandworm is necessarily incomplete, not only because of the size of the creature, but also because of the presence of many acidic compounds in the worm body. Besides the organic acids, concentrated hydrochloric and sulfuric acids have also been detected. In some way the living worm buffered itself against these acids, but once the worm died, the body was rapidly digested by them. The most resistant structures were the teeth, which were gathered by the Fremen to become the legendary crysknives.

  One of the mysteries of the metabolism of the sandworm is the source of hydrogen in the organic compounds. Obviously it could not come from water. One theory is that molecular hydrogen was fixed, although the reactions have not been discovered.

  Some research undertaken, before the virtual disappearance of the worm as a result of the ecological transformation of Arrakis, suggests that the complicated internal chemical transformations also produced oxygen as a by-product rather than consuming it in the process of metabolism. Certainly it is well known that much of the oxygen on Arrakis after the original prehistoric catastrophe was derived from the sandworm, despite the apparent violation of the second law of thermodynamics. One authority termed the worm an "oxygen factory."

  With only stunted sandworms or sandtrout to study at the present time, many of the questions concerning the worm may never be solved.

  M.S.

  Further references: MELANGE, SPICE; ARRAKIS; OXYGEN SAGA; B. Gwever, "A Prologemena and Tentative Hypothesis Concerning Apparent Violations of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the Production Rather Than Consumption of Oxygen in the Metabolic Processes of Shaihuludata gigantica," Second Imperial Conference on Chemistry, Caladan.

  SHAI-HULUD AS LEVIATHAN

  Because the Orange Catholic Bible did not command the universal authority expected for it, most sects began immediately to circulate revised versions and compiled special editions to suit local planetary conditions. As the authority of the O.C. Bible grew, the revisionists either circulated their special and more heretical materials clandestinely or, by skillful translation and paraphrase, communicated some of their most private convictions covertly under the guise of an official revised text. Something of this latter effect is observable in the well-known "Hymn to Shai-Hulud."
This hymn had a public circulation in the cities of Arrakis but it is believed to have had a secret ceremonial use among the sietch Fremen. The very name "Shai-Hulud" can be used in three significations: in this form, to denote the worm personified; in the form "shai-hulud" (without capitals) to denote the sandworm as a mere creature; as "Shai-Hulud," with full capitalization, to denote the Fremen tribal god. During the Harkonnen regime and earlier, while it was not known that the Fremen could ride the great sand-worms or that their lives were closely linked through the production of melange and the Water of Life used in the spice orgies, much of the hymn meant different things to the public than to the Fremen. Now it is easy to see in the ninth verse a contemptuous sneer directed against those who do not understand the true value of body moisture.

  The identification of Shai-Hulud with leviathan, believed to have been originally a species of water monster, was not unique. Similar developments occurred on other planets, as we can observe in the grimly humorous "Address to the Furry Whale" of Giedi Prime, or the sinister "Invocation to Hawt the Fish Monster" of the ocean planet Wave (Humidis). All three chants (and others like them) derive more or less closely from chapters of the ancient Book of Job, one of the most persistent survivors of Mosaic testamental lore, although it would be hard indeed now for scholars to work back through the overlays of editorial revision and local paraphrase to the original text. (In the O.C. Bible, the description of Leviathan is in Job XIV). It is, however, apparent that parts of the "Hymn to Shai-Hulud" incorporate fragments of a description of another beast (or some other beasts, perhaps a giant polypus, as the ancient form of the name is apparently plural) in Job, behemoth.