Dune

The epigraph from Princess Irulan’s text “Arrakis Awakening” contemplates the “mystical fusion” of Fremen religious belief. Irulan recites “The Old Man’s Hymn,” which she claims all who audiences are moved by, and which describes desert flora and fauna while relating it to themes of time, glory and danger.

A man crawls along the top of a sand dune in the blazing sun. It is Liet-Kynes, who was captured by House Harkonnen and then left in the desert without supplies or equipment. With no stillsuit, Liet-Kynes cannot survive in the fierce conditions. He is delirious from the heat and lack of water, and so weakened that he is now stumbling and crawling along the sand.

Even in his delirious state, Liet-Kynes recognizes the smell of a pre-spice mass under the sand and can tell that it will soon explode upward out of the sand. He starts to hallucinate that his father Pardot Kynes (the first Arrakeen planetologist) is with him, lecturing him about how to terraform Arrakis into a paradise for human life with lush vegetation and bodies of surface water. His father reproaches Liet-Kynes for straying from his ecological mission to help Paul Atreides. He also signals the importance of his son educating the Fremen communities about their planet and how they can help shape it toward a more hospitable ecology.

As birds of prey begin to circle overhead, Liet-Kynes considers the organic process that is occurring deep below the sand. There are small creatures that he calls “little makers” who are giving water and organic matter to feed and grow a pre-spice mass. At a certain point the mass begins to grow quickly, and produces a large amount of carbon dioxide. This gas will reach a point where it explodes, blowing the pre-spice mass to the planet’s surface where the oxidation turns the material into crop known as spice.

Liet-Kynes continues to hallucinate visions of his father Pardot Kynes, who is explaining the plans he began decades ago to alter the Arrakeen climate and that his son has continued. The pre-spice process that Liet-Kynes has been thinking of reaches a critical point amount of carbon dioxide, and the resulting explosion kills the planetologist.