Guriff worked the hold’s controls, but missed the proper button. He slapped his palm on the wall and rekeyed the pad. Finally, the hatch slid open.
The transport’s cargo hold was full of sand.
Ordinary sand.
The CHOAM woman continued to smile. “The faithful seek any sort of artifact from Rakis. Sacred relics. Even in the best of times, only the richest and most dedicated could afford to make a pilgrimage to their sacred Dune. Now that the planet is dead and almost all travel cut off, every scrap—every holy artifact—is worth even more.”
“You’re planning to sell sand?”
“Yes. Beautiful in its simplicity, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never heard of anything so absurd.”
“CHOAM will file for the necessary mining rights and patents to prevent claim jumpers. When word gets out, of course, there will be smugglers and purveyors of fraudulent goods, but those are all problems we can deal with.”
Lokar came up beside them and beamed as he stared into the dusty, sand-filled hold. Stepping forward, he bent down and thrust his hands into the soft grains, pulling up handfuls. “Isn’t it wonderful? Offworld, throughout the Old Empire, even a tiny vial of this sand will sell for many solaris. People will line up for a single grain, to touch the dust to their lips.”
“The sand must flow,” the CHOAM woman said.
“You’re all idiots.” In disgust, Guriff exited the transport and went to meet what was left of his crew. They were pleased at the stacks of fresh supplies. When they asked him about the departing priest and what the CHOAM representative had said, he refused to answer, gruffly telling them to get back to work. They all had risked everything to come here, and they needed to find something worthwhile on Rakis. Something other than sand.
As the heavily laden transport ship lifted off, kicking up a blast of sand around it—worthless sand, in his view—Guriff looked at the barren landscape and imagined the real treasure out there, treasure that he would find.
The End
BONUS MATERIAL
These two stories were originally standalone extracts from Dune: House Harkonnen, published separately.
The Dune universe offers such a complex tapestry that we found plenty of intriguing threads to be explored as separate stories. This piece introduces readers to Abulurd Harkonnen, the Baron’s (much nicer) half-brother and father to the wicked and intelligent Feyd Rautha and the brutish Rabban, who will one day call himself “the Beast.” Abulurd is a very different person from his disgusting half-brother, yet he will find himself trapped in the evil webs of family intrigues. Blood is thicker than water . . . but with ties to House Harkonnen, it is often hardest to be the white sheep of the family.
When writing “Blood and Water,” we were delighted to visit—for the very first time—the Harkonnen holding of Lankiveil, center of the Imperium’s lucrative whale-fur industry. “Fremen Justice” is a spotlight on the Fremen Stilgar and one of his early battles with the Harkonnens on Arrakis.
DUNE: BLOOD AND WATER
Within the ice-choked arctic circle of Lankiveil, commercial whale-fur boats were like cities on the water, enormous processing plants that lumbered across the steel-gray waters for months before returning to spaceport docks to disgorge their cargo.
But Abulurd Harkonnen, the Baron’s younger half-brother, preferred smaller vessels with native crews. To them, whale hunting was a challenge and an art, rather than an industry.
Biting wind blew his ash-blond hair around his ears and shoulders as he squinted pale-eyed into the distance. The sky was a soup of dirty clouds, but he’d grown accustomed to the climate. Despite the glamorous and expensive Harkonnen palaces on other planetary holdings, Abulurd had chosen this frigid, mountainous world to call home.
He had been out on the sea for a week now, cheerfully attempting to assist the swarthy crew, though his appearance was far different from that of the Lankiveil natives. His hands were sore and covered with blisters that sooner or later would turn to calluses. The Buddislamic whalers seemed bemused that their planetary governor wanted to come out and work, but they knew his eccentricities. Abulurd had never been one for pomp and ceremony, for abusing his power, or showing off his riches.
In the deep northern seas, Bjondax fur whales swam in herds like aquatic bison. Golden-furred beasts were common; those with exotic leopard spots were much rarer. Standing next to rattling prayer wheels and streamers, lookouts on observation platforms scanned the ice-thick sea with binoculars, searching for lone whales. Off-shift whalers took turns praying. These native hunters were selective of the beasts they killed, choosing only those with the best coats that would bring in the highest prices.
Abulurd smelled the salt air and the omnipresent tang of impending sleet. He waited for the action to begin, for a fast hunt when the captain and his first mate would bellow orders, treating Abulurd as just another crewman. For now, he had nothing to do but wait and think about home. . . .
At night, when the whaling boat rocked and swayed, accompanied by the patter and thump of ice chunks bumping against the reinforced hull, Abulurd would sing or play a local betting game that involved stacked beads. He would recite required sutras with the gruff, deeply religious crew.
Glowing heaters inside the boat cabins could not match the roaring fireplaces in his bustling main lodge on Tula Fjord or his romantic private dacha at the mouth of the fjord. Although he enjoyed the whale hunt, Abulurd already missed his quiet and strong wife. He and Emmi Rabban-Harkonnen had been married for decades, and the separation of days would only make their reunion sweeter.
Emmi had noble blood, but from a diminished Minor House. Four generations ago, before the alliance with House Harkonnen, Lankiveil had been the fief of an unimportant family, House Rabban, which had devoted itself to religious pursuits. They built monasteries and seminary retreats in the rugged mountains, instead of exploiting the resources of their world.
Long ago, after the death of his father Dmitri, Abulurd had taken Emmi with him to spend seven unpleasant years on Arrakis. His elder half-brother Vladimir had consolidated all the power of House Harkonnen in his iron fist, but their father's will had given control of spice operations to Abulurd, the kind and bookish son. Abulurd understood the importance of the position, how much wealth melange brought to his family, though he never grasped the nuances and political complexities of the desert world.
Abulurd had been forced to leave Arrakis in supposed disgrace. But no matter what they said, he preferred to live on Lankiveil with manageable responsibilities, among people he understood. He felt sorry for those being trampled by the Baron’s overzealous efforts on the desert planet, but Abulurd vowed to do his best here, though he had not yet bothered to reclaim his rightful title of subdistrict governor. The tedious politics seemed like such a waste of human effort.
He and Emmi had only one son, 34-year-old Glossu Rabban, who, according to Lankiveil tradition, was given the distaff name from his mother’s bloodline. Unfortunately, their son had a coarse personality and took after his uncle more than his own parents. Although Abulurd and Emmi had always wanted more children, the Harkonnen bloodline had never been particularly fecund.
But Rabban was coming back to Lankiveil, soon. The Baron would send him back here, and Abulurd hoped to strengthen his paternal ties to the young man. Baron Vladimir Harkonnen was getting to be a bad influence on him, Abulurd thought. . . .
“Albino!” shouted the lookout, a sharp-eyed boy whose dark hair hung in a thick braid kinked over his warm parka. “White fur swimming alone—twenty degrees to port.”
The vessel became a hive of activity. Neuro-harpooners grabbed their weapons while the captain increased the engine speed. Men scrambled up deck ladders, shading their eyes and staring into water laden with icebergs that looked like buoyant white molars. It had been a full day since the last chase, so the decks were clean, the processing bins open and prepped, the men anxious.
Abulurd waited his turn to peer through a s
et of binoculars, staring across the whitecaps. He saw flashes that might have been an albino whale, but were instead just chunks of drifting ice. Finally he spotted the creature as it breached, a creamy arc of white fur. It was young. Albinos, the rarest of the breed, were ostracized from the pod, cut loose and left without the support of the swimming herd. Rarely did they survive to full adulthood.
The men bent to their weapons as the vessel bore down upon its prey. Prayer continued to spin and clack in the breeze. The captain leaned out from the bridge deck and shouted in a voice resonant enough to break solid ice. “If we get this one undamaged, we’ll have enough shares to go home.”
Abulurd loved to see the sheer joy and exhilaration on their faces. He felt the thrill himself, his heart pounding to keep the blood moving in this intense cold. He never took a share of the whaling profits, since he had no use for additional money, but allowed the men to divide it among themselves.
The albino beast, sensing pursuit, swam faster, heading toward an archipelago of icebergs as if it could hide there. The captain increased the throbbing engines, churning a wake behind them. If the Bjondax whale dove, they would lose it.
Fur whales spent months at a time beneath the heavy ice sheets. There, in dark waters fed by volcanic vents full of nutrients and warmth, the whales devoured swarms of krill, spores, and Lankiveil’s rich plankton that did not require direct sunlight for photosynthesis.
With a loud pop, one of the long-range rifles planted a pulse-tagger on the white whale’s back. In response to the prick, the albino dove. The crewman working the controls sent a jolt of electricity through the pulse-tag, which made the whale breach again.
The boat came about, grinding the starboard side against an iceberg, but the reinforced hull held as the captain closed the gap. Two master harpooners, moving with forced calm and precision, got into separate pursuit boats, sleek craft with narrow prows and ice-cutting keels. The men strapped themselves in, sealed the thermal environment around them, and dropped into the icy water.
The pursuit boats bounced across the choppy water, striking chunks of ice but closing on the target. The main boat circled, approaching from the opposite direction. Each of the master harpooners crossed in front of the albino whale, popping out of their compartments. With perfect balance, they hurled long stun-staves into the whale, delivering a blast of numbing energy.
The whale rolled and came toward the whaling boat. The master harpooners pursued, but by now the main boat was close enough and four other harpooners leaned over the deck. Like a well-practiced Roman legion, they pitched stun-staves with enough force to render the whale unconscious. The two pursuit craft approached the furred hulk and, working as a team, the master harpooners delivered the coup de grâce.
Later, as the pursuit craft were winched up to the boat, furriers and skinners strapped on spiked footwear and rapelled down the vessel sides to the floating carcass.
Abulurd had seen whales taken many times before, but he had an aversion to the actual butchering process, so he crossed to the starboard deck and stared northward at the mountain ranges of icebergs. Their rugged shapes reminded him of steep rocks that formed the fjord walls of near where he lived.
The whaling vessel had reached the far northern limit of even the native hunting waters. CHOAM whaling crews never ventured into these high latitudes, since their enormous vessels could not navigate the treacherous waters.
Alone at the bow, Abulurd enjoyed the prismatic purity of arctic ice, a crystal glow that enhanced the shrouded sunlight. He heard the grind of colliding icebergs and stared, not realizing what his peripheral vision registered. Something gnawed at his subconscious until finally his gaze centered on one of the monoliths of ice, a squarish mountain that appeared fractionally grayer than the others. It reflected less light.
He squinted, then retrieved a pair of binoculars left lying on the deck. Abulurd listened to the wet sounds behind him, the men shouting as they cut their prize into pieces ready to take home. He focused the oil lenses and stared at the floating iceberg.
Glad to have a distraction from the bloody work, Abulurd spent long minutes scrutinizing fragments that had been hacked out of the ice. The shards were too precise, too exact to have broken free from the glacial shelf and drifted about, battering and scraping other icebergs.
Then, at water level, he saw something that looked suspiciously like a door.
He marched up to the bridge deck. “You’ll be at work here for another hour, won’t you, Captain?”
The big-shouldered man nodded. “Aye. Then we go home tonight. Do you want to get down into the wet work?”
Abulurd drew himself up, queasy at the prospect of being smothered in whale blood. “No . . . actually, I’d like to borrow one of the small boats to go explore . . . something I found on an iceberg.” Normally, he would have asked for an escort, but the whalers were all occupied with the butchery. Even in these cold, uncharted seas, Abulurd would be glad to be away from the smell of death.
The captain raised his bushy eyebrows. Abulurd could tell the gruff man wanted to express his skepticism, but he maintained his silence. His broad, flat face carried only respect for the planetary governor.
Abulurd Harkonnen knew how to handle a boat himself, often took one into the fjords and explored the coastline, so he declined the offer of other whalers to accompany him. Alone, he cruised away at a slow speed, watching out for dangerous ice. Behind him, the butchering continued, filling the iron-scented air with a richer, evil smell of blood and entrails.
Twice as he piloted his boat through the maze of floating mountains, Abulurd lost sight of his target, but eventually he found it again. Hidden among the drifting icebergs, this one chunk seemed not to have moved. He wondered if it was anchored in place.
He brought the small boat up against the rugged side, then force-docked it to the ice. A feeling of unreality and displacement shrouded this strange monolith. As he gingerly stepped out of the boat and onto the nearest flat white surface, he realized just how exotic this object was.
The ice was not cold.
Abulurd bent to touch what appeared to be milky shards of ice. He rapped with his knuckles: the substance was some kind of polymer crystal, a translucent solid that had the appearance of ice—almost. He stomped hard, and the iceberg echoed beneath him. Very odd indeed.
He rounded a jagged corner to the place where he’d seen a geometrically even line of cracks, a parallelogram that might have been an access hatch. He stared at it until he found an indentation, an access panel that appeared to have been damaged, perhaps in a collision with a real iceberg. He found an activation button, and the trapezoidal covering slid aside.
He gasped as a strong cinnamon scent wafted out, a pungent odor that he recognized instantly. He had smelled enough of it during his time on Arrakis. Melange.
He breathed deeply just to make sure, then ventured into the eerie corridors. The floors were smooth as if worn down by many feet. A secret base? A command post? A hidden archive?
He discovered room upon room filled with nullentropy containers, sealed bins that bore the pale blue griffin of House Harkonnen. A stockpile of spice put here by his own family—and no one had told him of it. A grid-map showed how far the storehouse extended beneath the water. Here on Lankiveil, under Abulurd’s own nose, the Baron had secreted a huge illegal hoard!
Such an amount of spice could have purchased this entire planetary system four times over. Abulurd’s mind reeled, unable to comprehend the treasure he had stumbled upon. He needed to think. He needed to talk to Emmi. With her quiet wisdom, she would give him the advice he needed. Together they would decide what to do.
Though he considered the whaling crew to be honest, wholesome men, such a stockpile would tempt even the best of them. Abulurd left in a hurry, sealed the door behind him, and scrambled aboard his boat.
Upon returning to the whaling ship, he made sure to mark the coordinates carefully in his mind. When the captain asked if he had found anythi
ng, Abulurd shook his head and retreated into his private cabin. He didn’t trust himself to control his expressions around the other men. It would be a long voyage home until he could get back to his wife. Oh, how he missed her, how he needed her wisdom.
Before leaving the dock at Tula Fjord, the captain presented the fur-whale’s liver to Abulurd as his reward, though it was worth little compared to the share of the albino’s fur he had given to each of the crewmen.
When he and Emmi dined together at the main lodge for the first time in a week, Abulurd was distracted and fidgeting, waiting for the chef to finish her grand workings.
The steaming, savory whale liver came out on two gilded silver platters, surrounded by mounds of salted stringreens with a side dish of smoked oyster nuts. The long formal dining table could accommodate up to thirty guests, but Abulurd and Emmi sat next to each other near one end, serving themselves from the platters.
Emmi had a pleasant, wide Lankiveil face and a squarish chin that was not glamorous or beautiful—but Abulurd adored it anyway. Her hair was the truest color of black and hung straight, cut horizontally just below her shoulders. Her round eyes were the rich brown of polished jasper.
Often, Abulurd and his wife would eat with the others in the communal dining hall, joining in the conversations. But since Abulurd had just returned from a long whaling journey, everyone in the household knew the two wanted to talk quietly. Abulurd had no qualms about telling his wife the great secret he had discovered in the icy sea.
Emmi was silent, but deep. She thought before she spoke, and didn’t talk unless she had something to say. Now she listened to her husband and did not interrupt him. When Abulurd finished his tale, Emmi sat in silence, thinking about what he had said. He waited long enough for her to consider a few possibilities, then said to her, “What shall we do, Emmi?”
Tales of Dune Page 6