The galaxy is filled with countless wonders—beautiful worlds and harsh ones. No person could visit them all in a single lifetime, not even me, with all the years I have been alotted.

—VORIAN ATREIDES, private journals, Kepler period

The spice workers were glad to receive Vor among them. The rugged men had open minds and an accepting attitude toward an offworlder who found himself with no better options than to work out in the deep desert. But they had a hard and impatient discipline. Irresponsibility was not tolerated in the desert, because the simplest mistake could cost many lives.

New recruits had to learn quickly, and in the midst of that physically demanding challenge, Vor greatly missed Mariella and all his family and friends on Kepler.

The gruff, leathery-faced crew chief named Calbir took Vorian under his wing, treating him as an inexperienced young man, even though Vor was much, much older than he was. He didn’t seem to know Vor’s surname, though Vor had held onto his identity, placing his full name on the hiring documentation for Combined Mercantiles. He did not tell his comrades here anything about who he really was, and no one at this level seemed to have made any connection with his name at all. They just knew him as “Vor,” and his first name generated no interest.

Noticing that the new hire wore a shield belt, Calbir scowled. “That identifies you as an offworlder, boy. I know why you wear that—for personal protection in Arrakis City—but don’t activate it out here, or it will be the end of us. Holtzman fields attract the great worms. Just to play it safe, let me put it in your locker until we get back to base.” Vor removed the belt and handed it over.

Given his many years of experience flying aircraft and spacecraft, Vor suggested he would be a good candidate to pilot one of the single-man scout skimcrafts over the desert wastelands, keeping on the alert for any telltale sign of melange-stained sands, but Calbir had scoffed at the offer. “Years of experience?” He ran his eyes up and down the young-looking man who stood before him. “The winds of Arrakis are harsh and unexpected. You have to demonstrate real mastery before I’m going to trust you with a skimcraft. I don’t care where you’re from or where else you’ve flown, you’re not ready for this place—trust me when I say that.”

Vor knew the old crew chief was wrong, but in order to convince him otherwise, he would have to reveal more about himself than he wanted to. Instead, he went to work with the others in the gigantic spice-excavator, a roving machine the size of a large building. Like an artificial grazing beast, it chewed trenches across spice-enriched sands. On big treads the excavator could make surprisingly good time across the dunes, racing from one sheltered rock outcrop to another while aircraft kept watch for an approaching sandworm. Hopscotching across the desert, the excavator gathered large amounts of melange and tried to outrun the monstrous creatures that roved the spice sands.

The collectors spilled debris from one centrifuge to the next to the next, like the successive stomachs in an ungulate, except in this instance they were separating out the sand particles. All that remained was the rich soft powder that smelled like cinnamon but was an extremely potent drug.

Early in Vor’s life, melange had been an interesting commodity, a rare substance distributed to nobles by the merchant Aurelius Venport. During the Omnius-induced plagues, however, spice had proved to be an effective palliative, boosting immune systems and helping many people recover. That discovery, and humanity’s desperation, had sparked a boom of melange harvesting on the harsh desert planet, where few civilized people had previously wanted to go. During the spice rush, hordes of ambitious fortune-hunters (both optimists and charlatans) journeyed across space to Arrakis. Many died in the rush, and a few got rich. The influx of offworlders forever changed the lives of the reclusive denizens, expanding small company towns like Arrakis City into bustling commercial hubs.

As an unforeseen consequence of the measures to fight the plagues, much of the Imperium was now addicted to spice, although Vor couldn’t recall having seen users on Kepler. The interplanetary markets demanded increased production. During the epidemics, all competitors were tolerated in order to help meet the needs of sick populations. Now, however, the powerful Combined Mercantiles, part of the Venport commercial empire, was ruthless about driving out all competition and quashing rivals one by one, through bribery, blackmail, sabotage, or more extreme means. Many rival settlements were now just ghost towns in the desert rocks.

Calbir and his spice crew, including Vorian, worked for Combined Mercantiles. When Vor had arrived in Arrakis City and asked for work on a deep-desert crew, he was repeatedly warned to steer clear of anything but a Venport operation if he valued his life. “Then again,” said one desiccated and sad-looking woman who sold him supplies, “if you valued your life, you wouldn’t be going out there in the first place.”

He had brushed her aside with a laugh. “I’ve had enough comforts in my life. The open dunes call to me. There are people far out in the desert that I’d like to meet.”

“If you say so. But don’t be so sure that they want to meet you.”

By now, Vor had spent several weeks on the spice crew. It was hot and dusty work, but he didn’t mind. He found it rejuvenating, for he could let his mind relax into a blank state and go about his duties with no thought for the future except what lay at the end of the next long and exhausting shift. The work itself was exciting: How could a job ever become tedious when at any moment a leviathan could burrow up from beneath the sands and devour everything?

During its daily work, the excavator scuttled across the open sands, hurrying to the next rock outcrop. From the moment a scout skimcraft spotted a spice deposit, to the moment the framework haulers dropped harvesting machinery onto the open dunes, Vor and his team worked in a race against time. The giant machinery heaved itself across the sand, scraping up as much rust-colored melange as possible. As a last resort, if they should ever find themselves too far from safety and unable to outrun an oncoming worm, the crew could eject in an escape pod, and cargo containers of melange would launch into the sky, guided by sluggish jets to the nearest safety zone, where Combined Mercantiles could retrieve and salvage the people and spice.

So far, that hadn’t happened. A miscalculation by even a minute would doom them. Vor did not want to end his life in the midst of of wreckage slowly digested in a worm’s gullet.

Rather than returning to Arrakis City each day, which was hundreds—sometimes thousands—of kilometers away, the excavator spent the nights on lonely rock outcroppings, hard islands safe from the sandworms. Now, as the stars shone forth out of the impenetrable blackness of an empty desert night, Vor walked restlessly around on the rocks, thinking of Kepler, of Mariella, wondering how many years he’d have to wait before he could risk slipping back there, just to see them again. And if Mariella would still be there.

As he wandered, alone, Vor was intrigued to find evidence of an old shelter made out of stacked boulders. He called Calbir over. “Looks like we aren’t the first ones to camp here. Another excavating crew?”

The grizzled crew chief made an expression of distaste. “Desert people. Zensunnis, probably—descendants of escaped slaves. They came to Arrakis because they thought no sane person would want to settle this place. During the spice rush, they packed up and retreated into the most isolated wilderness, just to get away from people. I hear they still call themselves the Freemen, but scraping out a living here, with no sign of civilization, is hardly being free.”

“Have you ever met one?” Vor asked. “I … I’d like to talk to them.”

“Now why would you want to do that? Get those dreams out of your head! You’ll probably see a desert man if you work around here long enough, but we don’t have much to do with them.”

The weary spice crew bedded down in the open, glad to be out of the stifling confinement of the dusty machinery. Calbir posted a watch, though the men grumbled that it seemed a ridiculous and paranoid precaution, until he showed them the signs of the old desert camp. “I’d rather you lost a little sleep than we all lost our lives. And if you’re not worried about a few nomads, just keep in mind that Josef Venport has made a lot of enemies, too.”

The men didn’t argue further.

The sand and rocks had absorbed thermal energy during the day, and radiated warmth for the first several hours of darkness, but the desert air was so devoid of moisture that it retained little heat. Eventually, the night grew chilly.

The men sat around the rocky camp, wearing cloths over their mouths and noses to keep dust out. They relaxed by telling stories of powerful desert storms they had survived, narrow escapes from sandworm attacks, crew members they had known and lost, and loves they had left behind on other worlds.

Vorian listened, but kept his own stories to himself. He could have spent all night, every night, describing his harrowing escapades throughout the Jihad. He had fought in more battles and visited more planets than all these men combined. But he did not try to gain standing among the spice workers by bragging. Here on a spice crew, a man’s privacy was his privilege, and his past was his own, which he could choose to share, or not. Vor’s favorite moments were not the adventures anyway, but the peaceful years, the day-to-day life with women he had loved for decades, watching his children grow up and have families of their own.

Preferring to reminisce privately about what he had left behind, he lay back with his head against a rounded rock, staring into the quiet desert night as the conversation slowly faded. Vor had much to think about, but he had nothing left to prove in his long life.