Spice blow: the explosion that turns sand into melange

A spice blow, also written spiceblow, was the event on Arrakis in which a mass of pre-spice material deep beneath the desert reached its critical point and burst upward through the sand, throwing an enormous quantity of raw melange onto the surface. It was the last step of a cycle that began with the sandtrout and passed through the young sandworms the Fremen called little makers, and it was the reason the spice that held the Imperium together could be gathered at all. It was also lethal. Liet-Kynes was swallowed by one in 10,191 AG, and thousands of years later a blow beneath a shanty town on Rakis orphaned Sheeana Brugh.

The mass beneath the sand#

Everything in the spice cycle began with water, which on Arrakis was the one substance the desert could not tolerate. Sandtrout, the leathery flatworm stage of the sandworm's life, converged on any store of water deep beneath the surface and sealed it away. Where their excretions mixed with that water, a wild organic growth arose. This was the pre-spice mass, fungusoid in nature, and it developed far below the dunes out of anyone's sight.

The organism responsible for feeding the growth was the little maker, the young sandworm. As the mass took up more water and more organic matter from the sandtrout around it, it swelled and gathered pressure. There came a point at which it passed into a stage of wild growth, and from there the outcome was fixed. The mass could not stay where it was.

The bubble and the eruption#

At the critical stage a gigantic bubble of carbon dioxide formed deep in the sand at the centre of the mass. Pressure did the rest. The bubble heaved upward, forcing the whole deposit toward the surface, and broke through in a massive explosion with a dust whirlpool at its heart. The eruption traded places between two worlds: whatever had formed in the depths came up, and whatever had been lying on the surface went down.

What came up was not yet spice. The raw material of the pre-spice mass became melange only after the blow, transformed by exposure to the sun and the air of Arrakis. That is why the spice could be taken in open sand by machine at all. The planet manufactured it deep, delivered it to the surface in a single violent movement, and then cured it in the heat.

Reading a blow#

For the Fremen the blow was an event with a signature. Every Fremen knew the sound of one and could distinguish it immediately from the noise of worms or any other desert life, which meant that a sietch could tell from a distance whether the desert had just produced wealth or was about to produce death. Sound was the earliest warning available in open sand.

Sight came next. A dark patch on the sand at range might be a spiceblow, and a crew that saw one would signal a hovering ornithopter across to investigate before committing anything larger. Spice mining depended on exactly this kind of reconnaissance. Spotters ranged ahead of the working ground, and when they read the cresting ripples of wormsign they reported to the carryalls so that a spice harvester could be lifted clear before the worm arrived. A fresh blow site was the richest ground a crew could find and the shortest-lived, because the thing that made it valuable also announced it to the one creature guaranteed to come.

What the worms do#

Sandworms were drawn to spice blows and could not resist them. On Rakis, in the age long after the Scattering, every child knew that Shaitan would come to a blow, and the knowledge was elementary enough that it needed no explaining to anyone raised on the sand.

The attraction closed the cycle. Sandtrout massing on water produced the pre-spice mass, the mass blew, the worms came, and when the worms in their turn died they released sandtrout back into the sand so that the whole sequence could begin again. Nothing in the process was designed for human convenience. The Fremen and the mining crews simply learned to work inside a violent natural rhythm, taking what they could between the eruption and the arrival of the maker.

The death of Liet-Kynes#

The planetologist Liet-Kynes had spent his life reading the desert, and the desert killed him with the one process he understood better than any living person. After the fall of House Atreides on Arrakis, he was taken as an accomplice of the Duke and the Fremen and abandoned in open sand without water and without a stillsuit.

He came to rest above a pre-spice mass that had reached its critical point. Heat exhaustion, dehydration and delirium had already taken him past the point where escape was possible, and in his last hours he heard his father reciting the whole body of his teaching on ecology. Then the bubble lifted him, broke, and the dust whirlpool dragged him down into cool darkness. The coolness and the moisture came as relief for a moment. It occurred to Kynes at the end that his father and all the other scientists had been wrong, and that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error. He died in 10,191 AG, and his work on the greening of Arrakis passed to his daughter's line.

Sheeana and the village on the blow#

Millennia later the same mechanism produced a different kind of consequence. A shanty town on the outskirts of Keen, on the world by then called Rakis, had been sited disastrously on top of a pre-spice deposit. When the hoard far beneath came to fruition and expanded in an explosion of melange, the worms came as they always came, and consumed what was left of the settlement.

An eight year old girl named Sheeana watched from a distance while her parents and neighbours died. She then walked up to the worm that had orphaned her, and it did not kill her. It obeyed her. That single fact carried her to the priesthood at Keen and eventually into the Bene Gesserit, who used her ability to coax a worm aboard a ship before Rakis was burned, and so carried the spice cycle to Chapterhouse where sandtrout began turning a green world into desert. The blow that destroyed her village was, in the long account, the event that preserved the melange cycle after the planet that invented it was gone.