Kangaroo mouse. Muad’dib. An animal admired by the Fremen, seen as a figure on the planet’s second moon, as well as a constellation. A cunning earth-spirit hopping through their mythology. This diminutive creature can teach all of us lessons in desert survival. The Fremen word can mean “the mouse” but also “the Teacher”.

Muad’dib has a more personal connotation for me — less scholarly, less explainable. If you stare into mirror long enough, disassociation sets in. The face you see becomes a stranger. You float out of your body and identity. I feel the same disassociation when I look at muad’dib. Something uncanny. As if, in another time, another reality, it’s the symbol of…

No. I lost it. It’s on the tip of my mind, but the harder I grip it, the more it escapes like sand through squeezing fingers.

Mortimer done called me a feckin’ flower sucker, so I punched him so hard them bones above his eye came down over the socket like an avalanche over a cave mouth. Ain’t never winked the same since. All on account of feckin’ idiots thinking a reluctance to sip cadaver juices is a sign of softness. Sometimes, there ain’t no bodies to sip. So you listen.

There’s evening primrose. They grow red ‘round here. Surprisingly delicate petals. Good moisture.

There’s poverty grass. Grows on practically nothing. Tastes like nothing. Gotta work hard to get a proper thimble full. There’s also onion grass which tastes like well, feckin’ onions.

There’s incense bush. Fremen used it to make incense. They knew to cultivate hardy, deep-rooted plants like this and sand-verbenna and saguaro and burrowbush.

I also hear tell that some of these plants species came about from some planetologist or another treading in the creator’s domain.

Separated from convoy. Leg shattered and useless. Evening now, thank God. Stopped bleeding. Will try and seal stillsuit. Update later.

Dawn. Desert hawks circling. Back home, hawks are an Atreides symbol. Arriving, our Duke took kinship with them. Liet-Kynes wrote fascinating report. How they find food, conserve water. Wish they could teach me. Update later.

Afternoon. Stillsuit failing. Thirsty. Hawks landing near me. Predators, but not above scavenging. Sky burial, ancient tradition on Old Terra. Fremen thought hawks were psychopomps. Update later.

Thirsty! Waving arms. When hawks get too close. Let them know I’m alive. Wasting nutrients. I’m not food.

Night. Thirst. Hawks all around. Bobbing heads. Excited. Human faces. People I know. Human hands instead of talons. Reaching for me. Take me home.

Desert bats, from the order Chiroptera, descended from species native to Old Terra and remarkably adapted to thrive in the hateful cradle that is Arrakis. My interests lie solely with cielago, Chiroptera modified to carry distrans messages. Distrans technology allows information to be implanted in an animal, to be retrieved later.

These subliminally stored messages can be retrieved by uttering the correct word or phrase. The Fremen, as well as certain assassins on Arrakis, use distrans animals for covert communication. Fremen sietches included nesting holes teeming with bats. Vermin squatting and hiding amidst their own filth in deep caves… the fellowship between Fremen and bat becomes easy to perceive.

One must wonder, with the extermination of the Fremen, how many delicious secrets are fluttering about out there in the nighttime sky?

The most ancient records and art, Fremen or otherwise, fail to depict the larger species of cacti found on Arrakis. As near as I can conclude, these came from some ancient and abandoned botanical lab of the Old Imperium. Left by a dying civilization, these plants found their way out onto Arrakis, adapted to and subtly changed the environment. Life is tenacious and rude — it finds a way in, without invitation or hospitality.

Pardot Kynes, himself, modified and introduced plant species on Arrakis. I am trying, with some difficulty, to parse out which species came from him and which came from those lost labs. Those ancient structures are not all accounted for. What else grew down there? What else escaped?