"Brian Herbert - Dune - Nightime Shadows On Open Sand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)
As Kynes operated the simple controls, he gestured toward the buttery morning light that melted
across the stark dunes. "There are rewards here, too." Kynes exhaled a long breath between his
hard chapped lips.
Young Liet stared 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.тАж
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, the Emperor and
the Harkonnens 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.
file:///C|/3226%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/Brian%20Herbert%20-%20Dune%20-%20Nightime%20Shadows%20On%20Open%20Sand.txt
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," or prophet.
Liet-Kynes's features echoed many of his father's, though with a leaner face and the close-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 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
byproducts 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
| © 2025 Библиотека RealLib.org (support [a t] reallib.org) |