Pardot Kynes

Pardot Kynes was the Imperial Planetologist first sent to study Arrakis, who remained on the desert world, married a native Fremen woman, and fathered his only child, Liet-Kynes. For Kynes the planet was an expression of its sun's energy, ready to be reshaped, and he gave the Fremen a vision of a green Arrakis that would guide them for generations. Most of what Frank Herbert tells of him is in Appendix I of Dune, The Ecology of Dune. (Dune)

Meeting the Fremen#

Kynes was the first planetologist sent to study Arrakis. His chance to begin reshaping the planet came while he was out exploring in a one-man groundcar behind the Shield Wall, near the village of Windsack, and came upon six shielded and armed Harkonnen bravos bullying three Fremen youths. Realising the bullies meant to kill the boys, Kynes triggered his own shield, waded in, and killed two of the Harkonnens with a slip-tip, slit a third's throat, and saw the remaining attacker felled by the two Fremen youths he had saved. (Dune)

The Fremen were uncertain what to make of him, a known servant of the Imperium who had nonetheless killed Harkonnens and seen their crysknives. Owing him a mortal obligation, the youths took him to their sietch, where he spoke to the Fremen of water, of grass, of palmaries filled with date palms and of open qanats flowing across the desert. The experienced fighter Uliet was sent with a consecrated knife to kill him as a water burden and a servant of the Imperium. When Kynes told him to "remove himself" and went on speaking of his vision, Uliet walked three paces and deliberately fell upon his own knife, removing himself instead. (Dune)

His first years on the planet are told at length in House Atreides, the first Prelude to Dune novel, one of the expanded books by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. (Dune: House Atreides)

Terraforming Arrakis#

The Fremen took Uliet's act as a sign that Kynes was to be heeded, and most came to embrace his vision for the planet's future. Hailed as an umma, a prophet, Kynes returned to his Imperial post and directed the Biological Testing Station, bringing in Fremen as personnel and quietly taking tools such as cutterays to dig underground catchbasins and hidden windtraps to collect water. He set up small-unit experiments with constant interchange of data for a swift Tansley effect, accumulating vast quantities of fine observation on the planet's climate, biology and ecosystems. Through this work the sandtrout were discovered, and through the sandtrout Kynes learned the relationship between the spice and Shai-Hulud. (Dune)

After understanding how melange was created, Kynes turned to planting greenery, beginning with poverty grass and ephemerals and moving through scotch broom, low lupine, vine eucalyptus brought from Caladan, dwarf tamarisk and shore pine, along with shrubs such as camel sage, sand verbena and creosote bush. He then introduced burrowing animals, predatory birds, insects and the desert bat, and finally planted more than two hundred food crops, among them cotton, melons and coffee. (Dune)

Family and death#

Kynes married into a Fremen sietch and had a son, Liet, whom he taught alongside the other Fremen children the ecology and the language of Arrakis, its terrain, climate and seasonal limits, and finally how to break through all ideas of force into an awareness of order. He was killed in a cave-in at Plaster Basin when Liet was nineteen. His son carried on the work both as Imperial Planetologist and as a Fremen leader, steering his people toward the goal Pardot had envisioned would take some five hundred years to achieve, a plan that would be dramatically quickened by the coming of Muad'Dib. (Dune)

Character and legacy#

The Fremen he converted kept his work going long after him. By the time of Children of Dune, the greening of Arrakis he had planned was far enough along that desert Fremen protested it as the death of their way of life. (Dune; Children of Dune)