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Liet Kynes stood near a towering mesa of orange-red rock, Maker hooks ready in her hands. The beat of the thumper drummed in her blood. For years she had watched and practiced. Now it was time for her to call her own sandworm, and ride it or die trying.
She felt its coming in her inner ear before the sensitive soles of her boots transmitted its upheaval. The slight vertigo told her the sands were moving beneath and toward her in a vast underground wave. She braced herself, distributing her weight evenly and crouching to lower her center of gravity. A fall would be deadly.
Dry lightning crackled between dune and sky. It was a straightforward scientific phenomenon caused by friction between scales and sand. It was a sacred herald of the coming of the Maker, the Old Man of the Desert, the Master, Old Father Eternity, the physical form of the One Who Made the Universe, Shai Hulud.
Sand erupted as the great sandworm reared up from the desert floor. Kynes staggered, both from the displacement of the ground beneath her feet and from awe. It was so vast. So much. Incomprehensibly huge, unknowably ancient, the desert itself made flesh. Every scale on its body was twice her size. Beside it she was a speck, a single plankton, a grain of sand.
Muscle memory and nerve training took over where the mind and soul quailed. Kynes lunged forward, Maker hooks moving as one, and caught the edge of a scale, prying it open. The sand thrown up by its passage showered into the tender flesh beneath, and the Maker rolled to protect the irritated area. Kynes was drawn upward, hands gripping the hooks, feet braced against its side.
It was an eternity; it was the blink of an eye. And then she stood atop the back of the Maker, amazed and triumphant.
Now consciously recalling her training, she moved the hooks. The Maker turned, smoothly and easily and without resistance, traveling in the direction she had indicated. Kynes turned the Maker this way and that, marveling. The sandworm moved like an extension of her own body; it moved as if it had always intended to take that path, and had communicated that intent to tell her which way to shift the hooks. They moved in a wide circle, to go on a short trip through the desert and back again, but there was no sense of one who commanded and one who obeyed. Kynes and Shai Hulud simply travelled on the same path.
Atop the back of the great worm, the dunes rolled like waves atop a sea of sand. There had been oceans on Arrakis once, before the coming of the makers. There had been lakes and ponds and rivers, all fringed and lush with growing green. Kynes had never seen such things in reality, but for the first time, she could imagine it here on Arrakis. It would be a beautiful world, fertile and full of life.
But for the sandworms, water was death. Kynes herself was a poison pill for the Maker she rode; it could swallow her without harming itself, but only because she was so small. Water pumped through her veins and cushioned her brain, filled her eyes and escaped her lungs in vapor. Her stillsuit, the outermost layer of her skin, was plump as a blister; if she was cut, she’d bleed clear.
From the tiny muad’dib to the great Shai Hulud to Liet Kynes herself, everything on Dune was part of a vast and complex web of life. Sand and water, death and life, air and stone, blood and spice: these were the elements of her world. The sandtrout found the water and made the spice and became the sandworms. The sandworms drowned in water and released the visionary poison used by the Sayyadinas. The Fremen drank water, saved water, stored water, became water.
Other planets had hundreds, thousands of ecosystems. Arrakis had one. But Kynes thought even such great and holy beings as the Makers could accept one more. Parts of the planet could be green and wet, and there they could grow more food and live without stillsuits. Parts could stay arid, and those parts would remain the realm of Shai Hulud. She needed no Water of Life to see that vision. It was all around her, everywhere. She’d needed only the perspective from a sandworm’s back to see.
Kynes spotted the formation of orange-red rock by the sands where she’d first placed her thumper. It rose to a mesa almost as high as the back of the sandworm she rode. She used the hooks to guide it toward the rock, almost close enough for scales to brush against stone.
Her heart hammered as she released the hooks, then leaped. If she misjudged the distance or slipped on scree, she’d be crushed or battered to death. But even as that fear gripped her, she felt her boots slam into solid stone. She landed in a crouch, a hook in either hand. Before she could even feel relief, she was straightening and turning.
The Maker she had ridden was diving into the sand. She could see nothing but its incomprehensibly vast back, and even that was disappearing fast.
She called out to it, “My thanks, Shai Hulud, Maker of life!”
The sandworm sank back into the dune. But they could sense the hop of a desert mouse, so who was to say that the vibrations of speech in the air couldn’t be transmitted through sand? She went on, more slowly for she was no longer on the sure footing of ritual, “Thank you for showing me the world and my place in it. I will tend it for you and for my people, for all the days of my life.”
Liet Kynes saw a ripple. A movement of the vast being beneath the golden sand, or the shimmer of a heat wave in the dry air?
Either way, Arrakis had answered.