Mentats of Dune

Chapter 77 (Sand flows through my veins)

He discarded everything from offworld before returning to the desert. He felt like a prodigal son with no family to receive him. Taref had no place to go, not on Arrakis, not anywhere.

Thanks to the largesse of Directeur Venport, he could have bought himself the finest home in Arrakis City and a tanker of water to fill his household cistern. He could have traveled to Caladan, as he’d once fantasized … but that dream had crumbled into ashes, and he wondered why it had ever seemed important.

In his galactic journeys he had felt rain and sleet on his skin, and although those were wondrous experiences, Taref could not measure them against watching a yellow sunrise spill across the dunes, or the smell of raw melange from a fresh spice blow so pungent that it made him want to pull out his nose-plugs and inhale the desert’s bounty deep into his lungs.

Taref didn’t want to return to his sietch, though, at least not in defeat. He had ideas but didn’t know what to do with them. The desert would help him find himself.

He considered his modified distilling suit, the one VenHold had given him with sophisticated “improvements.” It was comfortable and functioned efficiently, but it smelled wrong, felt wrong. He stripped off the suit, intending to dispose of it, but realized he had only offworlder clothes with him, which would not let him survive in the desert. Instead, he sold the suit to a blue-eyed vendor, who immediately saw its value. Taref accepted the man’s first offer, caring only that he had enough money to trade for an old but serviceable distilling suit. He should have thought of that before throwing away the money that Venport gave him, scattering coins in the street and watching scavengers rush in to retrieve them.

He carefully looked over the offered distilling suit before accepting it from the vendor. No true Freeman would ever surrender a good stillsuit, so this one must have come from the body of a dead man. Taref studied the fittings and seams and discovered where a knife puncture to the kidney area had been cleaned and repaired. Such things happened all the time. No desert dweller would let a suit go to waste, but would fix and reuse it. Taref donned the garment, fitted it to his body, and pronounced it acceptable. Then he left the vendor’s shop and discarded his offworld clothes. They were worthless to him.

Though Directeur Venport had covered up the assassination of Emperor Salvador Corrino, Taref felt the stain of his own actions on his conscience. The Imperial Barge had escaped — but it would likely be lost, since he had sabotaged its navigation systems. He remembered, though, that he had not taken the time to finish his work, upset by Manford’s ghost. Still, what he had done should be more than enough to make certain the barge was never seen again.

He learned that Directeur Venport had purged the records of the Arrakis City spaceport and the orbital tracking systems. Everyone back on Salusa Secundus would be mystified when the opulent Imperial Barge vanished en route — another tragic loss, like so many other ships that had been lost recently, due to the dangers of galactic travel.…

Taref also wanted to vanish. The desert would enfold and caress him, in spite of its dangers, which were at least familiar to him. Maybe he would die, and maybe he would be saved, but he needed to find out one way or the other.

He left the city behind, along with its ways that were nearly as alien to him as those of Venport Holdings. Taref had his stillsuit, a literjon of water, spice, and food. A man of the desert required nothing more.

As a dreamer, he’d once led a difficult life in the sietch, estranged from his father and brothers and from many of the other Freemen. They only wanted to keep doing things as they’d done them for centuries, never daring to extend their experiences beyond a parochial comfort zone.

Yes, Taref had seen things far away from that life, and learned from his experiences. He had dreamed, but had come to realize he’d been dreaming of the wrong things. Now it was time for a change. Again.

Alone, he wandered into the furnace-hot, shimmering wasteland.