Dune - Nighttime shadows on open sand

VIP免费

2024-11-19 0 0 33.39KB 16 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Dune: Nighttime Shadows on Open Sand

by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson

Nature commits no errors; right and wrong are human categories.

-Pardot Kynes, Arrakis Lectures

Monotonous days. The three-man Harkonnen patrol cruised over the

golden swells of dunes along a thousand-kilometer flight path. In the

unrelenting desert landscape, even a puff of dust caused excitement.

The troopers flew their armored ornithopter in a long circle, skirting

mountains, then curving south over great pans and flatlands. Glossu

Rabban, the Baron's nephew and temporary governor of Arrakis, had

ordered them to fly regularly, to be seen-to show the squalid

settlements that Harkonnens were watching. Always.

Kiel, the sidegunner, considered the assignment a license to hunt any

Fremen found wandering near legitimate spice-harvesting operations.

What made those dirty wanderers think they could trespass on

Harkonnen lands without permission from the district office in

Carthag? But few Fremen were ever caught abroad in daylight, and the

task had grown dull.

Garan flew the 'thopter, rising up and dipping down to catch thermals,

as if operating an amusement ride. He maintained a stoic expression,

though occasionally a grin stole across his lips as the craft bucked and

jostled in rough air. As they completed their fifth day on patrol, he

continued to mark discrepancies on topographical maps, muttering in

disgust each time he found another mistake. These were the worst

charts he had ever used.

In the back passenger compartment sat Josten, recently transferred from

Giedi Prime. Accustomed to industrial facilities, gray skies, and dirty

buildings, Josten gazed out over the sandy wastelands, studying

hypnotic dune patterns. He spotted the knot of dust off to the south,

deep in the open Funeral Plain. "What's that? Spice-harvesting

operation?"

"Not a chance," the sidegunner Kiel said. "Harvesters shoot a plume

like a cone into the air, straight and thin."

"Too low for a dust devil. Too small." With a shrug, Garan jerked the

'thopter controls and soared toward the low, reddish-brown cloud.

"Let's take a look." After so many tedious days, they would have gone

out of their way to investigate a large rock sticking out of the sand...

When they reached the site, they found no tracks, no machinery, no

sign of human presence-and yet acres of desert looked devastated. A

mottled rust color stained the sands a darker ochre, as if blood from a

wound had dried in the hot sun.

"Looks like somebody dropped a bomb here," Kiel said.

"Could be the aftermath of a spice blow," Garan suggested. "I'll set

down for a closer look."

As the 'thopter settled onto the churned sands, Kiel popped open the

hatch. The temperature-controlled atmosphere hissed out, replaced by a

wave of heat. He coughed dust.

Garan leaned over from the cockpit and sniffed hard. "Smell it." The

odor of burnt cinnamon struck his nostrils. "Spice blow for sure."

Josten squeezed past Kiel and dropped onto the soft ground. Amazed,

he bent down, picked up a handful of ochre sand and touched it to his

lips. "Can we scoop up some fresh spice and take it back? Must be

worth a fortune."

Kiel had been thinking the same thing, but now he turned to the

newcomer with scorn. "We don't have the processing equipment. You

need to separate it from the sand, and you can't do that with your

fingers."

Garan spoke in a quieter, but firmer voice. "If you went back to

Carthag and tried to sell raw product to a street vendor you'd be hauled

in front of Governor Rabban-or worse yet, have to explain to Count

Fenring how some of the Emperor's spice ended up in a patrolman's

pockets."

As the troopers tromped out to the ragged pit at the center of the

dissipating dust cloud, Josten glanced around. "Is it safe for us to be

here? Don't the big worms go to spice?"

"Afraid, kid?" Kiel asked.

"Let's throw him to a worm if we see one," Garan suggested. "It'll give

us time to get away."

Kiel saw movement in the sandy excavation, shapes squirming, buried

things that tunneled and burrowed, like maggots in rotten meat. Josten

opened his mouth to say something, then clamped it shut again.

A whiplike creature emerged from the sand, two meters long with

fleshy segmented skin. It was the size of a large snake, its mouth an

open circle glittering with needle-sharp teeth that lined its throat.

"A sandworm!" Josten said.

"Only a runt," Kiel scoffed.

"Newborn-do you think?" Garan asked.

The worm waved its eyeless head from side to side. Other slithering

creatures, a nest of them, squirmed about as if they'd been spawned in

the explosion.

"Where in the hells did they come from?" Kiel asked.

"Wasn't in my briefing," Garan said.

"Can we ... catch one?" Josten asked.

Kiel stopped himself from making a rude rejoinder, realizing that the

young recruit did have a good idea. "Come on!" He charged forward

into the churned sand.

The worm sensed the movement and reared back, uncertain whether to

attack or flee. Then it arced like a sea serpent and plunged into the

sand, wriggling and burrowing.

Josten sprinted ahead and dove face-first to grasp the segmented body

three quarters of the way to its end. "It's so strong!" Following him, the

sidegunner jumped down and grabbed the thrashing tail.

The worm tried to tug away, but Garan reached the front, where he dug

into the sand and grabbed behind its head with a stranglehold. All three

troopers wrestled and pulled. "Get it!" The small worm thrashed like an

eel on an electric plate.

Other sandworms on the far side of the pit rose like a strange forest of

periscopes sprouting from the sea of dunes, round mouths like black os

turned toward the men. For an icy moment, Kiel feared they might

attack like a swarm of marrow leeches, but the immature worms darted

away and disappeared underground.

Garan and Kiel hauled their captive out of the sand and dragged it

toward the ornithopter. As a Harkonnen patrol, they had all the

equipment necessary to arrest criminals, including old-fashioned

devices for trussing a captive like a herd animal. "Josten, go get the

binding cords in our apprehension kit," the pilot said.

The new recruit came running back with the cords, fashioning a loop

which he slipped over the worm's head and cinched tight. Garan

released his hold on the rubbery skin and grabbed the rope, tugging

while Josten slipped a second cord lower on the body.

"What are we going to do with it?" Josten asked.

Once, early in his assignment on Arrakis, Kiel had joined Rabban on an

abortive worm hunt. They had taken a Fremen guide, well-armed

troops, even a Planetologist. Using the Fremen guide as bait, they had

lured one of the enormous sandworms and killed it with explosives. But

before Rabban could take his trophy, the beast had dissolved, sloughing

into amoeba creatures that fell to the sand, leaving nothing but a

cartilaginous skeleton and loose crystal teeth. Rabban had been furious.

Kiel's stomach knotted. The Baron's nephew might consider it an insult

that three simple patrolmen could capture a worm, when he'd been

unable to do so himself. "We'd better drown it."

"Drown it?" Josten said. "What for? And why would I want to waste

my water ration to do that?"

Garan stopped as if struck by a thunderbolt. "I've heard the Fremen do

it. If you drown a baby worm, they say it spits out some kind of drug or

poison. It's very rare."

Kiel nodded. "Oh, yeah. The desert people use it in their religious

rituals. It makes everybody go crazy, wild orgies and everything."

"But ... we've only got two literjons of water in the compartment,"

Josten said, still nervous.

"Then we only use one. I know where we can refill it, anyway." The

pilot and his sidegunner exchanged glances. They had patrolled

together long enough that they'd both thought of the same thing.

As if understanding its fate, the worm bucked and thrashed even more,

but it was already growing weaker.

"Once we get the drug," Kiel said, "let's have some fun."

· · · · ·

At night, with the patrol 'thopter running in stealth mode, they flew

over the razor-edged mountains, approaching from behind a ridge and

landing on a rough mesa above the squalid village of Bilar Camp. The

villagers lived in hollowed-out caves and aboveground structures that

extended out to the flats. Windmills generated power; supply bins

glittered with tiny lights that attracted a few moths and the bats that fed

on them.

Unlike the nomadic Fremen, these villagers were slightly more

civilized but also more downtrodden: men who worked as desert guides

and joined spice-harvesting crews. They had forgotten how to survive

on their world without becoming parasites upon the planetary

governors.

On an earlier patrol, Kiel and Garan had discovered a camouflaged

cistern on the mesa, a treasure trove of water. Kiel didn't know where

the villagers had gotten so much moisture; most likely, they had

committed fraud, inflating their census numbers so that Harkonnen

generosity provided more than they deserved.

The people of Bilar Camp covered the cistern with rock so that it

looked like a natural protrusion, but the villagers placed no guards

around their illegal stockpile. For some reason desert culture forbade

thievery even more than murder; they trusted the safety of their

possessions from bandits or thieves of the night.

Of course, the Harkonnen troopers had no intention of stealing the

water-that is, no more than enough to refill their own supply

containers.

Dutifully, Josten trotted along with their sloshing container, which held

the thick, noxious substance exuded by the drowned worm after it had

stopped thrashing and bucking inside the container. Awed and nervous

about what they'd done, they dumped the flaccid carcass near the

perimeter of the spice blow and then taken off with the drug.

Garan operated the Bilar cistern's cleverly concealed spigot and refilled

one of their empty containers. No sense in letting all the water go to

waste just for a practical joke on the villagers.

"Do you know what this drug will do to them?" Josten asked.

Garan shook his head. "I've heard plenty of crazy stories."

"Maybe we should make the kid try it first," the sidegunner said.

Josten backed away, raising his hands.

Kiel took the container of worm bile and upended it into the cistern.

The villagers would certainly have a surprise next time they all drank

from their illegal water hoard. "Serves them right."

Garan looked at the contaminated cistern again. "I bet they tear off their

clothes and dance naked in the streets, squawking like dinfowl."

"Let's stay here and watch the fun for ourselves," Kiel said.

Garan frowned. "Do you want to be the one to explain to Rabban why

we're late returning from patrol?"

"Let's go," Kiel answered quickly.

As the worm-poison infused the cistern, the Harkonnen troopers

hurried back to their ornithopter, reluctantly content to let the villagers

discover the prank for themselves.

· · · · ·

It is said that the Fremen has no conscience, having lost it in a burning

desire for revenge. This is foolish. Only the rawest primitive and the

sociopath have no conscience. The Fremen possesses a highly evolved

world view centered on the welfare of his people. His sense of

belonging to the community is almost stronger than his sense of self. It

is only to outsiders that these desert-dwellers seem brutish ... just as

outsiders appear to them.

-Pardot Kynes, The People of Arrakis

"Luxury is for the noble-born, Liet," Pardot Kynes, Imperial

Planetologist to Arrakis, said to his son as the groundcar trundled

across the uneven ground. "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."

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Dune:NighttimeShadowsonOpenSandbyBrianHerbertandKevinJ.Anderson1Naturecommitsnoerrors;rightandwronga...

展开>> 收起<<

Dune - Nighttime shadows on open sand.pdf

共16页,预览5页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Dune - Nighttime shadows on open sand

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: