This will turn out to be a series (I hope) of brief vignettes (yes, I know, redundant, but I mean brief even for vignettes) dedicated to the different Dune characters I'd like to explore in turn. They will, in all probability, come out rather slowly, but I wanted to play here just the same. (winks)
Pardot Kynes
His mouth is parched as the planet under his feet.
Here, there is nothing more than his own existence; he clings to it in a desperate grip of life. His vitality is the one voice in his brain, and he listens. Here is the voice of the land, and the soul, and the wordless whisperings that may keep him from the desperate talons that scrape away at the waterfat offworlders.
The sand swirls about his feet, reaching out tendrils to touch this supplementary inhabitant, to know this form of life that it will strive to destroy. For that is the way of the desert, ever in the past to perpetuate into the future. It allows no weakness; the only motion is the grit that dances in the wind and tears at the cliffs with brutal fingers in a mocking parody of life. If there is moisture, the desert will take. If there is movement, the wilderness will beat it down and grind it away in a violent effort to annihilate the insolent life that dares enter this hell.
But he is different. He is not a weed that would plant itself in the ground and remain there until death. He possesses motion and intelligence. What the desert throws at him he will study and learn to avoid. If he did not remember and repeated the mistake, his life would be standing on the brink of cessation. But he knows this; he is shrewd. He has learned from his other studies. As he has had to accustom himself to Salusa Secundus, so also will he adapt to Arrakis's lethal embrace.
The sand laces about his fingers as he bends down to place another probe at the very base of the rock, as if the constitution of the Habbanya Erg, as a representative of Dune itself, has admitted to acknowledging the man as more of a worthy adversary than the other foreigners that have come before him. It comes about his fingertips in a diaphanous handshake; this is the sort of mutual friend — the desert knows, the Umma knows — that one must watch carefully. This is the sort of friend who will readily confuse chaumurky with good wine, the sort that will be openly underhanded, benignly malicious.
As the probe leaves his hand, he sweeps his fingers to claim an infinitesimal portion of the sand's surface. He keeps his fingers tight in a practiced means; no grains of sand slip away as he raises them up for inspection.
The spice, the mystery, the very thought of the sandworm captivates him. The hanging aroma piques his imagination, stirs his thoughts into a chaotic structure. A multitude of number-lacking formulae catapult through his mind. The melange, like the wasteland, is forcefully pristine in its simple lack of mercy for any unwilling to bend to its discipline. It has created galaxies of slaves for its own keeping, and wears that mild smirk so telling of desert savagery.
But the friend… the refuge of the Fremen. The indistinct saviour of an entire race of people pursued by a different sort of slavery altogether. From one slavery to the other? he wonders, and contemplates which would be the harsher master. From that sort of perspective, it is inevitably the desert, the wilderness — his first love — that wins him over. His callous companion, the familiar that so enjoys toying with his life as he relentlessly dedicates himself to studying every last aspect of it. Nature is willing to be explored, but unwilling to let a man's body or life slip past her untouched just as he infringes upon her himself.
The Umma lets a sigh slip from his dusty lips. It nearly seems unfair, really, that he should pit himself and the Fremen to work so adamantly at the destruction of such a wild and clever beast…
Whose distant prowlings blur one point of the horizon in a maddened smudge.
Hulasikali Wala. He experimentally rolls the words over his mind's tongue, and must admit that the demon's traditional name has something more to it than the scientific term that files the phenomenon away as a Coriolis storm, even if it would lend nothing but confusion to whoever might deign to read his next report.
The Umma lingers by his view of the Erg, and the planetologist picks up his gear to move on to the next station he's appraised for a likely spot to plant another probe.
There is much learning to be done.