Dune: House Harkonnen

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  — PARDOT KYNES, The People of Arrakis

  Luxury is for the noble-born, Liet,” Pardot Kynes said as the groundcar trundled across the uneven ground. Here, in privacy, he could use his son’s secret sietch name, rather than Weichih, the name reserved for outsiders. “On this planet you must instantly become aware of your own surroundings, and remain alert at all times. If you fail to learn this lesson, you won’t live long.”

  As Kynes operated the simple controls, he gestured toward the buttery morning light that melted across the stark dunes. “There are rewards here, too. I grew up on Salusa Secundus, and even that broken and wounded place had its beauty . . . though nothing to match the purity of Dune.” Kynes exhaled a long breath between his hard, chapped lips.

  Liet continued to stare out the scratched windowplaz. Unlike his father, who reeled off whatever random thoughts occurred to him, making pronouncements that the Fremen heeded as if they were weighty spiritual matters, Liet preferred silence. He narrowed his eyes to study the landscape, searching for any small thing out of its place. Always alert.

  On such a harsh planet, one had to develop stored perceptions, each of them linked to every moment of survival. Though his father was much older, Liet wasn’t certain the Planetologist understood as much as he himself did. The mind of Pardot Kynes contained powerful concepts, but the older man experienced them only as esoteric data. He didn’t understand the desert in his heart or in his soul. . . .

  For years, Kynes had lived among the Fremen. It was said that Emperor Shaddam IV had little interest in his activities, and since Kynes asked for no funding and few supplies, they left him alone. With each passing year he slipped farther from attention. Shaddam and his advisors had stopped expecting any grand revelations from the Planetologist’s periodic reports.

  This suited Pardot Kynes, and his son as well.

  In his wanderings, Kynes often made trips to outlying villages where the people of the pan and graben scratched out squalid lives. True Fremen rarely mixed with the townspeople, and viewed them with veiled contempt for being too soft, too civilized. Liet would never have lived in those pathetic settlements for all the solaris in the Imperium. But still, Pardot visited them.

  Eschewing roads and commonly traveled paths, they rode in the groundcar, checking meteorological stations and collecting data, though Pardot’s troops of devoted Fremen would gladly have done this menial work for their “Umma.”

  Liet-Kynes’s features echoed many of his father’s, though with a leaner face and the closely set eyes of his Fremen mother. He had pale hair, and his chin was still smooth, though later he would likely grow a beard similar to the great Planetologist’s. Liet’s eyes had the deep blue of spice addiction, since every meal and breath of sietch air was laced with melange.

  Liet heard a sharp intake of breath from his father as they passed the jagged elbow of a canyon where camouflaged catchtraps directed moisture to plantings of rabbitbush and poverty grasses. “See? It’s taking on a life of its own. We’ll ‘cycle’ the planet through prairie phase into forest over several generations. The sand has a high salt content, indicating old oceans, and the spice itself is alkaline.” He chuckled. “People in the Imperium would be horrified that we’d use spice by-products for something as menial as fertilizer.” He smiled at his son. “But we know the value of such things, eh? If we break down the spice, we can set up protein digestion. Even now, if we flew high enough, we could spot patches of green where matted plant growth holds the dune faces in place.”

  The young man sighed. His father was a great man with magnificent dreams for Dune— and yet Kynes was so focused on one thing that he failed to see the universe around him. Liet knew that if any Harkonnen patrols found the plantings, they would destroy them and punish the Fremen.

  Though only twelve, Liet went out on razzia raids with his Fremen brothers and had already killed Harkonnens. For more than a year, he and his friends— led by the brash Stilgar— had struck targets that others refused to consider. Only a week before, Liet’s companions had blown up a dozen patrol ’thopters at a supply post. Unfortunately, the Harkonnen troops had taken their revenge against poor villagers, seeing no difference between settled folk and the will-o’-the-sand Fremen.

  He hadn’t told his father about his guerrilla activities, since the elder Kynes wouldn’t understand the necessity. Premeditated violence, for whatever reason, was a foreign concept to the Planetologist. But Liet would do what needed to be done.

  Now, the groundcar approached a village tucked into the rocky foothills; it was called Bilar Camp on their terrain maps. Pardot continued to talk about melange and its peculiar properties. “They found spice too soon on Arrakis. It deflected scientific inquiry. It was so useful right from the outset that no one bothered to probe its mysteries.”

  Liet turned to look at him. “I thought that was why you were assigned here in the first place— to understand the spice.”

  “Yes . . . but we have more important work to do. I still report back to the Imperium often enough to convince them I’m working at my job . . . though not very successfully.” Talking about the first time he’d been to this region, he drove toward a cluster of dirty buildings the color of sand and dust.

  The groundcar jounced over a rough rock, but Liet ignored it and stared ahead at the village, squinting in the harsh light of the desert morning. The morning air held the fragility of fine crystal. “Something’s wrong,” he said, interrupting his father.

  Kynes continued talking for a few seconds and then brought the vehicle to a stop. “What’s that?”

  “Something is wrong.” Liet pointed ahead at the village.

  Kynes shaded his eyes against the glare. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Still . . . let us proceed with caution.”

  • • •

  In the center of the village, they encountered a festival of horrors.

  The surviving victims wandered about as if insane, shrieking and snarling like animals. The noise was horrific, as was the smell. They had ripped hair out of their heads in bloody clumps. Some used long fingernails to claw the eyes out of their faces, then held the scooped eyeballs in their palms; blind, they staggered against the tan walls of dwellings, leaving wet crimson smears.

  “By Shai-Hulud!” Liet whispered under his breath, while his father let out a louder curse in common Imperial Galach.

  One man with torn eye sockets like bloody extra mouths above his cheekbones collided with a crawling woman; both victims flew into a rage and ripped at each other’s skin with bare hands, biting and spitting and screaming. There were muddy spots on the street, overturned containers of water.

  Many bodies lay sprawled on the ground like squashed insects, arms and legs stiffened at odd angles. Some buildings were locked and shuttered, barricaded against the crazed wretches outside who pounded on the walls, wailing wordlessly to get in. On an upper floor Liet saw a woman’s terrified face at the dust-streaked windowplaz. Others hid, somehow unaffected by the murderous insanity.

  “We must help these people, Father.” Liet leaped out of the sealed groundcar before his father had brought it to a complete stop. “Bring your weapons. We may need to defend ourselves.”

  They carried old maula pistols as well as knives. His father, though a scientist at heart, was also a good fighter— a skill he reserved for defending his vision for Arrakis. The legend was told of how he had slain several Harkonnen bravos who’d been attempting to kill three young Fremen. Those rescued Fremen were now his most loyal lieutenants, Stilgar, Turok, and Ommun. But Pardot Kynes had never fought against anything like this. . . .

  The maddened villagers noticed them and moaned. They began to move forward.

  “Don’t kill them unless you must,” Kynes said, amazed at how quickly his son had armed himself with a crysknife and maula pistol. “Watch yourself.”

  Liet ventured into the street. What struck him first was the terrible stink, as if the foul breath of a dying leper had been capt
ured in a bottle and slowly released.

  Staring in disbelief, Pardot stepped farther from the groundcar. He saw no lasgun burn marks in the village, no chip scars from projectile weapons, nothing that would have indicated an overt Harkonnen attack. Was it a disease? If so, it might be contagious. If a plague or some kind of communicable insanity was at work here, he could not let the Fremen take these bodies for the deathstills.

  Liet moved forward. “Fremen would attribute this to demons.”

  Two of the bloody-faced victims let out demonic shrieks and rushed toward them, their fingers outstretched like eagle claws, their mouths open like bottomless pits. Liet pointed the maula pistol, uttered a quick prayer, then fired twice. The perfect shots hit each of the attackers in the chest, and they fell dead.

  Liet bowed. “Forgive me, Shai-Hulud.”

  Pardot watched him. I have tried to teach my son many things, but at least he has learned compassion. All other information can be learned from filmbooks . . . but not compassion. This was born into him.

  The young man bent over the two bodies, studied them closely, pushing back his superstitious fear. “I do not think it’s a disease.” He looked back at Pardot. “I’ve assisted the sietch healers, as you know, and . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “What, then?”

  “I believe they’ve been poisoned.”

  One by one, the tortured villagers wandering the dusty streets fell onto their backs in screaming convulsions, until only three remained alive. Liet moved quickly with the crysknife and dispatched the last victims painlessly and efficiently. No tribe or village would ever accept them again, no matter how much they recovered, for fear that they had been corrupted by demons; even their water would be considered tainted.

  Liet found it odd how easily he had taken command in front of his father. He gestured toward two of the sealed buildings. “Convince the people inside those barred dwellings that we mean them no harm. We must discover what happened here.” His voice became low and icy. “And we must learn who is to blame.”

  Pardot Kynes moved to the dusty building. Fingernail scratches and bloody handprints marked the mud-brick walls and pitted metal doors where crazed victims had tried to pound their way in. He swallowed hard and prepared to make his case, to convince the terrified survivors that their ordeal was over. He turned back to his son. “Where will you be, Liet?”

  The young man looked at an overturned water container. He knew of only one way the poison could affect so many people at once. “Checking the water supply.”

  His face etched in concern, Pardot nodded.

  Liet studied the terrain around the village, saw a faint trail leading up the side of the overhanging mesa. Moving with the speed of a sun-warmed lizard, he scurried up the mountain path and reached the cistern. The evidence of its location had been cleverly disguised, though the villagers had made many errors. Even a clumsy Harkonnen patrol could have discovered the illegal reservoir. He studied the area quickly, noting patterns in the sand.

  Smelling a harsh alkaloid bitterness near the upper opening of the cistern, he tried to place the odor. He’d experienced it rarely, and only during great sietch celebrations. The Water of Life! The Fremen consumed such a substance only after a Sayyadina had converted the exhalation of a drowned worm, using her own body chemistry as a catalyst to create a tolerable drug that sent the sietch into an ecstatic frenzy. Unconverted, the substance was a ferocious toxin.

  The villagers in Bilar Camp had drunk pure Water of Life, before it was transformed. Someone had done this intentionally . . . poisoning them.

  Then he saw the marks of ornithopter pads in the soft soil atop the plateau. It had to be a Harkonnen ’thopter. One of the regular patrols . . . a practical joke?

  Frowning grimly, Liet descended to the devastated village, where his father had succeeded in bringing out the survivors who had barricaded themselves within their dwellings. Through luck, these people had not drunk the poisoned water. Now they fell to their knees in the streets, surrounded by the awful carnage. Their keening cries of grief drifted like the thin wails of ghosts along a sheer cliffside.

  Harkonnens did this.

  Pardot Kynes moved about doing what he could to comfort them, but from the quizzical expressions on the villagers’ faces, Liet knew his father was probably saying the wrong things, expressing his sympathy in abstract concepts that they had no ability to understand.

  Liet moved down the slope, and already plans were forming in his mind. As soon as they returned to the sietch, he would meet with Stilgar and his commando squad.

  And they would plan their retaliation against the Harkonnens.

  An empire built on power cannot attract the affections and loyalty that men bestow willingly on a regime of ideas and beauty. Adorn your Grand Empire with beauty, with culture.

  — From a speech by CROWN PRINCE RAPHAEL CORRINO

  L’Institut de Kaitain Archives

  The years had been unkind to Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.

  In a rage, he swiped his wormhead walking stick across the counter in his therapy room. Jars of ointments, salves, pills, and hypo-injectors crashed to the tile floor. “Nothing works!” Each day, he felt worse, looked more revolting. In the mirror he saw a puffy, red-faced caricature of his Adonis-self, hardly recognizable as the person he had once been.

  “I look like a tumor, not a man.”

  With darting movements, Piter de Vries stepped into the room, ready to offer assistance. The Baron struck at him with the heavy cane, but the Mentat sidestepped the blow with the grace of a cobra.

  “Get out of my sight, Piter.” The Baron reeled, trying to catch his balance. “Or this time I really will think of a way to kill you.”

  “Whatever my Baron wishes,” de Vries said in a too-silken voice. He bowed and retreated to the door.

  The Baron held affection for few people, but he appreciated the devious workings of the twisted Mentat’s mind, his convoluted plans, his long-term thinking . . . regardless of his obnoxious familiarity and lack of respect.

  “Wait, Piter. I need your Mentat brain.” He lumbered forward, leaning on the walking stick. “It’s the same old question. Find out why my body is degenerating, or I will dispatch you to the deepest slave pit.”

  The whip-thin man waited for the Baron to catch up with him. “I shall do my best, Baron. I know full well what happened to all of your doctors.”

  “Incompetents,” he growled. “None of them knew anything.”

  Formerly healthy and full of tremendous energy, the Baron suffered from a debilitating disease whose manifestations disgusted and frightened him. He had gained an enormous amount of weight. Exercise did not help, nor did medical scans or even exploratory surgeries. For years he had tried every healing procedure and bizarre experimental treatment— all to no avail.

  For their failures, a score of House doctors had received torturous deaths at the hands of Piter de Vries, often through imaginative application of their own instruments. As a result, no high-level medical practitioners remained on Giedi Prime— or at least none were visible; those who had not been executed had gone into hiding or fled to other worlds.

  More annoyingly, servants had begun disappearing, too— and not always because the Baron had ordered them killed. They had fled outside the Castle Keep into Harko City, vanishing into the ranks of uncounted and unheeded laborers. As he ventured out into the streets accompanied by his guard captain Kryubi, the Baron found himself constantly looking for people who even resembled the servants who had abandoned him. Wherever he went, he left a trail of bodies. The killings brought him little pleasure, though; he would rather have had an answer.

  De Vries accompanied the Baron as he hobbled into the corridor; his walking stick clicked along the floor. Soon, the big man thought, he would have to wear a suspensor mechanism to remove the burden from his aching joints.

  A team of workmen froze as the two approached. The Baron noted that they were repairing wall damage he had caused in a
rage the day before. Each of them bowed as the Baron clicked past and breathed audible sighs of relief when they saw him disappear around a corner.

  When he and de Vries reached a cerulean-curtained drawing room, the Baron lowered himself onto a black sligskin settee. “Sit beside me, Piter.” The Mentat’s inky eyes darted around, like those of a trapped animal, but the Baron snorted with impatience. “I probably won’t kill you today, provided you give me good advice.”

  The Mentat maintained his casual demeanor, revealing none of his private thoughts. “Advising you is the sole purpose of my existence, my Baron.” He remained aloof, even arrogant, because he knew it would be far too costly for House Harkonnen to replace him, though the Bene Tleilax could always grow another Mentat from the same genetic stock. In fact, they probably already had replacements, just waiting.

  The Baron drummed his fingers on the arm of the settee. “True enough, but you don’t always give the advice I need.” Looking closely at de Vries, he added, “You are a very ugly man, Piter. Even with my disease, I’m still prettier than you.”

  The Mentat’s salamander tongue darted over lips stained crimson by sapho juice. “But my sweet Baron, you always liked to look at me.”

  The Baron’s face hardened, and he leaned close to the tall, thin man. “Enough relying on amateurs. I want you to obtain a Suk doctor for me.”

  Surprised, de Vries drew a quick breath. “But you have insisted that we maintain complete secrecy about the nature of your condition. A Suk must report all activities to his Inner Circle— and send them the bulk of his fee.”

  Vladimir Harkonnen had led members of the Landsraad to believe he’d grown corpulent through his own excesses— which was an acceptable reason to him, one that did not imply weakness. And, given the Baron’s tastes, it was a lie easy to believe. He did not wish to become a pitiable laughingstock among the other nobles. A great Baron should not suffer from a simple, embarrassing disease.