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I know you walk in two worlds and are known by many names.
Tell me, what is your report, Dr. Kynes? A message sealed with the impression of the Emperor’s own ring, ordering her steps as Imperial Ecologist and Judge of the Change.
Liet knows. Uttered with awe and certainty, mouths shaping the words like reciting a blessing assured by a saint.
Rarest and most precious of all: Ummi, when will I see you again? The sound of those syllables has faded with the years, across the distance from her daughter. Perhaps motherhood has marked her most in memory.
Kynes is a woman of science, bound within a broken system. Liet is a near-mythological figure. The woman between them walks everywhere and belongs nowhere.
By Fremen standards, Liet is getting on in years when she takes a man to be her husband. She has been busy, eyes cast on a farther future than her own. It is so easy to become blinded by one’s focus. But there is a man in Sietch Tabr, a soul as balanced in oppositions as her own: herbalist and warrior, one who restores life and takes it in turn. There is to everything a season.
Before long, her future changes shape once more.
“My water is yours,” she murmurs, hand pressed to where her belly will soon begin to swell.
She’d heard the rumors, of course, shortly after their landing, the pilgrims shouting to the Mahdi and his mother. The pilgrims have always been too eager. They see signs in every shadow, meeting each new oppressor with open arms.
But this Duke is something different from what she’d imagined. His son is something other still.
When Kynes goes to fix the fit of the boy’s stillsuit, she’s startled to find it already flawless. “Your desert boots are fitted slip-fashion at the ankles. Who taught you to do that?”
His eyes are wide, innocent for all his knowing. With half a shrug, he says, “It seemed the right way.”
A chill slides down the back of her neck. Lost in thought, she nods, averts her gaze. The words slip out in Chakobsa, a marveling murmur: “He shall know your ways as though born to them.”
A preternatural light of understanding flickers in Paul Atreides’ eyes. “Are you Fremen?” he asks quietly, curious.
“I am accepted in both sietch and village,” she answers briskly. True enough, though her dual citizenship engenders equal suspicion, too. “Now, come and see the spice sands on which your livelihood depends.”
Though she turns to address the father, she suspects the spice will mean more to the son, in the fullness of time. Time will tell whether the stories have reached the turning point to truth.
When the babe is born, furiously red and squalling, Liet knows at once that here is a girl whose voice will not be easily silenced.
They call their daughter Chani, though it’s her sietch name Liet likes best: Sihaya, the desert spring — a beautiful hope, the waiting fulfilled.
When the worm comes and the carryall fails, Kynes is prepared to bite her tongue. What she does not expect is for these Atreides to leap into action, trading profits for lives without second thought.
When Paul stumbles out onto the sands, shouting as savior to those he’d be justified to abandon, she thinks, Whose voice do you hear calling in the desert? When he sinks to his knees, overcome by exposure to spice, she feels her heart lodged in her throat. Sacrifice is the way of true leaders, but if Paul meets his death here, they haven’t yet met the beginning.
But the boy lives on, brash and brave. In that moment, he reminds her of Chani. Below, the Old Man of the Desert roars and reclaims what’s his to take.
“Bless the Maker and his water,” she recites, heedless of the curious ears around her. “Bless the coming and going of him. May his passage cleanse the world and keep the world for his people.”
Liet does not spend as much time with her daughter as she wishes she could. It becomes a repetition of her own childhood, dogging her father’s heels. Pardot Kynes was a man entrusted with a work too important to trifle overmuch with the softer side of fatherhood. Eventually, she’d learned not to let it bother her. If they shared a love of science, of this desert, what does any other matter? What greater inheritance does she need than her father’s dream of a green and fruitful Dune?
At three, Chani accompanies her mother to the nearest ecological testing station. Her eyes are huge in her small face. Curiosity tempts her toward gauges and wires, but even scarcely out of toddlerhood, the child is too Fremen to ignore a warning not to touch. Solemnly she watches, taking in the tasks of transformation.
“Ummi,” Chani begs, “will you teach me?”
Her small voice wrenches at Liet’s heart. Kneeling to her daughter’s level, she answers, “I will teach you, because curiosity is a gift, and all should have a chance to learn. But, Chani…” She sighs. “Perhaps you are still too young to understand.” She does not want to pass on this mantle. A legacy’s a heavy burden; so too’s duplicity. Already her calling drives distance between them. All she can ask in return is a child raised far from the influence of the Imperium.
“I’m big enough!” Chani protests. She puffs up her small chest with pride. “Baba trusts me to catch sandtrout.”
At this, Liet surrenders to the present; with a chuckle, she lifts the girl onto her hip. Talk of the future can wait.
“So, the Emperor’s taken a side,” observes the witch-woman. Already she appears haunted, hardened. “What says the Judge of the Change?”
Kynes shifts her gaze to the work at hand. This is not the first injustice she has learned to overlook. “The Emperor forbids me from saying anything at all.”
Tragedy has not dulled Paul’s intensity. “And yet you risk your life to help us.”
Who are these Atreides, that they inspire such loyalty?
Five days after she returns little Chani to Sietch Tabr and once more departs, Liet receives word that her husband has died. She knows better than to waste time or moisture on mourning. She goes first to Stilgar, arranges with him to look after her daughter. As Naib, Stilgar is entrusted with the water of many lives, but he’s always been fond of his niece. It doesn’t take much convincing.
Then, with a renewed sense of the precious resource of time, she turns back to the work set before her.
The truth unfolds when they reach the old testing station. Fitting, for a place dedicated to the uncovering of knowledge.
“Yes, Liet.”
“Of course, Liet.”
The boy and his mother are well-trained to spot markers of status. Their eyes widen fractionally as understanding unfolds.
Paul speaks softly, a question that is not a question: “Who are you to the Fremen?”
Liet-Kynes’ only answer is a fleeting tight smile.
The woman says nothing. She’s just lost her man to violence, Liet considers with a pang of sympathy. So easily she recalls moving through grief on momentum alone.
“The Fremen speak of the Lisan al-Gaib.”
“Careful,” Jessica warns, though her son blazes forward.
“The Voice from the Outer World who will lead them to paradise.”
“Superstition,” Liet-Kynes says dismissively, hiding the chill that slides down her spine.
“I know you loved a Fremen warrior and lost him in battle. I know you walk in two worlds and are known by many names. I’ve seen your dream. As Emperor, Dr. Kynes, I could make a paradise of Arrakis with a wave of my hand.”
Could this boy truly be the one? His voice has the ring of an echo, a truth beyond future or past. Have they reached the fulfillment of time? Could this very generation — could Chani — live to see Dune restored?
“Stilgar wants me to take up the training as a Sayyadina.”
Liet pokes at another loose element in the windtrap her daughter is helping her to fix. She holds out a hand; Chani hands her a tool without asking. “And you don’t want to?”
She doesn’t have to turn or squint in the warren darkness to pick up on Chani’s pensive frown. “Don’t you think it’s a waste of time?”
“I think it’s a way to carry forward the history of your tribe.”
“I want to be a Fedaykin, like Shishakli. I want to fight for our people.”
“Your father was a warrior and an herbalist both. If you would wield a crysknife, you’ll be a messenger of Shai-hulud. There’s no people to fight for without the living soul we share.” She gives the windtrap another rattle; satisfied, she steps back and taps Chani on the shoulder. “All right, your turn. Show me what you know.”
Already she’s growing into her father’s height; she barely has to stretch to reach. As she goes through the motions of checking the trap, Chani huffs. “You’re a scientist. Don’t you have bigger dreams for your daughter than carrying on old superstition?”
With the back of her hand, Liet gently strokes the girl’s cheek. “Sihaya,” she says. “My only dream for my daughter was that she be fully Fremen, that you would never know the burden of divided loyalties. What you would build on that foundation is yours to dream.”
The path diverges ahead. They’ve come to a parting of the ways.
“I’m Fremen. The desert’s my home.”
The boy who could be the one stares at her. His eyes still mark him as an outsider — the green of paradise, of life that comes through death — but for an instant, she glimpses, superimposed, the eyes of Ibad, the brilliant blue that will be his passport among her people.
“Good luck,” Paul says simply.
As though luck had anything to do with it. Or maybe it might — they live in an age of prophecy, after all.
Arrakis stands poised on the edge, an end of one kind or another in the making.
She stands with her daughter at the edge of Sietch Tabr’s sacred well of souls. Thousands upon thousands of pasts shimmered here, waiting for a prophesied future to arrive in the guise of the present.
She’s just finished explaining her plan to Stilgar; he’s gone to spread word through the sietch. She’ll head first toward the city, taking a leader’s risk. Stilgar and his fighters will leave with the morning light and attempt to intercept any survivors.
“Do you have to go?” Chani asks.
“Only a fool or a coward hides from fate.”
Chani scuffs her boot, looking away. “But does it have to be you?”
Perhaps there’s a glimpse of prescience in her daughter — it’s not unheard of, among the Fremen; some unlock it in snatches, in the spice orgy. Whatever the reason, Chani’s eyes have taken on a suspicious shine. As she blinks it back fiercely, trained too well to waste her water, Liet encloses her in a flash of a hug. “Oh, Sihaya. Your water is special, you know,” she says, before stepping back.
Chani snorts. “Desert spring tears, I know.”
Liet smiles. “Yes, but I mean something more than the prophecy. You were born of my water, Chani. My life is yours; your water and mine are one, even when we’re apart. Remember that.”
A blade bursts through her chest, spilling her water on the sand. In shock, she falls and tumbles down the dune.
“Kynes,” booms a Sardaukar voice. Fittingly, the Imperial soldiers sound inhuman, mechanical. “You have betrayed the Emperor.”
It goes much deeper than that. She has betrayed one part of herself for the other.
She thinks of hope: a messiah, and her daughter. She thinks of love, expressed as obedience and sacrifice. She thinks of the future, made up of an infinity of present moments.
Honor demands its final price of the woman who lived a life divided.
“I serve only one master,” declares Liet-Kynes. “His name is Shai-hulud.”
She pounds the sand. In his mercy, Shai-hulud brings her end, and her enemies’.