#sandtrout

VI

Sandtrout are not native to Arrakis, or at least that was true about 15,000 years before the original Dune. When Leto II accesses his Other Memory, he dives deep into the past and it is revealed that Arrakis used to be a wet planet before sandtrout were brought to it, causing the planet to dry out so they could evolve into sandworms.

This intrigued me and thus came around this story. I hope you enjoy it!

o0o0o0o

???

ca. 5000 BG

The planet was filled with oceans and swamps, but the air was breathable, and there was enough dry land to establish a colony. The various analyses and lab results promised a fruitful future with relatively minor adaptations.

The captain of the Bold Endeavour looked through the reports. He wasn’t a scientist, but he understood the terms and analyses well enough to see that they supported what he was being told by the science team, and he appreciated their sense of caution. They were refugees from a dying planet, and tempting as it was to just throw themselves at the first promising planet they saw, the captain knew all too well that there were hidden dangers everywhere. Their home planet had dried over the last half millennia because of the huge sandworms that roamed its arid surface.

Naturally, measures had been taken to try to stop their incursion, but the planet dried more as the giant worms stole the water. Once-thriving cities fell before the sand and the giant worms. People tried to exterminate the worms, but it was no easy task when the bastards hid in the sand and could create pits from below, inhaling people, buildings, and vehicles into their maw.

Many decades were spent in preparation for what could – and did – become the inevitable. The worms were winning, the planet was all but theirs. An ark was built, collecting people, plants, and animals, and so the Bold Endeavour took off into space. Perhaps those left behind would find a solution at the eleventh hour, but if not, well, at least the ark held the hope of survival for their civilization.

The captain nodded and gave the orders. The ship was opened and the colonists were sent out. Plants and seeds were brought out of the hydroponics and cryo-storage. One by one, certain animals were hatched or released.

o0o0o0o

“So, what do we do with these?" one of the younger scientists asked as she stared at the tank of the creatures that would eventually become known as sandtrout. These creatures had appeared sometime after the home planet started drying out, and people noticed that they were drawn to water. So when there were these amorphous blobs, there was water. Water-seekers, they were called.

If these animals had been studied more closely – and if the scientists had had more time before they had to prepare the ark – they would have realized that the connection to water did not mean what they thought it did.

“I mean, this is a planet full of water. Do we need them?” she asked as she studied the leech-like creatures. Her companion stared at the tank for several moments, pursing his lip thoughtfully.

“I don't know. Seems a shame not to let them out. But as you said, there's plenty of water. It's quite overwhelming at times," he said with a chuckle. They were both born after most of the world's oceans had dried up, a scant few lakes and rivers remaining in the vast dusty terrain. And that water dwindled through their childhood. Both of them remembered all too well the strict water rationing and the very real threat of dehydration overcoming towns and cities.

Here, water was almost always a stone’s throw away wherever they might be. The crops were coming in well, and the colonists and animals alike were well-fed. Much of the local flora and fauna had proved itself agreeable, though there had been a few incompatibilities or accidental poisonings. This planet was not without danger, as forays into the deep water proved. Still, there appeared to be no major apex predators on land.

“There's so few of them, anyway. A new beginning for us, a new beginning for our children and animals. If they learn to adapt to this, they can prove useful in the future. And if they die out, that's life." He shrugged and walked off.

She shrugged at that. Almost all of the animals were doing decently enough in the colony. Local growth was augmented by ship-manufactured kibble. Not all of the animals thrived, and the scientists had predicted that a few species might face these issues. They would simply have to adjust and make do with what they had, which was more than adequate.

The last of the animals were removed from the facility several months later, including the water-seekers. They had been given a limited amount of water throughout the trip to conserve them, going into what appeared to be a state of hibernation.

Such curious creatures, she mused. They were relatively new in the history of their taxonomical records. Like most biological creatures, they were drawn to water, and she wondered where they had come from, especially since they’d been noticed long after the world started drying up. Fleeing from the sandworms, the biologists that studied the encroaching desert concluded.

Several scientists wheeled the tank over to a pond several hundred meters away and tipped its contents near the water. The slug-like creatures burrowed into the mud, wiggling toward the water.

o0o0o0o

The water-seekers were relatively few, but in such fertile conditions, they encapsulated water and bred, their numbers multiplying so that they could prepare the word for the next stages of their cycle.

The scientists would be blissfully unaware of what they had done because it would be almost a thousand years before the shores of the vast oceans started to recede. The aquatic predators of the deep waters found their territories dwindling. Swamps drained to transform into forests which gave way to savannahs that eventually transformed into deserts. This time around, the presence of sandworms was noted long after the water-seekers.

Since the water-seekers had been released onto this planet, the colony split up, establishing cities on other landmasses, people spreading across the planet as planned, across the generations. Water was plenty, and so were the crops that grew with its sustenance. The descendants of the ark flourished, creating different societies, thinking they had all the time in the world, their dry homeworld little more than a footnote in history and a mythical place in story.

Societies rose and fell as they did on any world, older history becoming obscured with more recent events like strata in layers of the earth. Still, some people studied history, intrigued by the stories of the ancient world and its parallels with what was happening centuries after the colonization of the planet that would become known as Arrakis. Records were dug through, experiments conducted, and as has so often happened in the past and would in the future, the correct answer was finally deduced after centuries if not thousands of years of mistaken belief.

The damn water-seekers were responsible for the dry-out. They didn't merely drink water, they took it somewhere deep underground, far too deep for drilling, so that they could evolve into the next stage and become the sandworms that had terrorized the old world and were now tearing apart the new.

History repeated itself as people fled the sand and the worms, the oceans turning to seas, and then lakes, disappearing as former islands connected to one another and seemingly rose out of the water if one looked at the maps that were made through the succeeding decades.