Dune: House Atreides

by Brian Herbert; Kevin J. Anderson

  Any path that narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans do not thread their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities.

  —The Spacing Guild Handbook

  Junction was an austere world of limited geographic variations, unadorned scenery, and strict weather control to remove troublesome inconveniences. A serviceable place, it had been chosen as Spacing Guild headquarters because of its strategic location rather than its landscapes.

  Here, candidates learned to become Navigators.

  Second-growth forests covered millions of hectares, but they were stunted box trees and dwarf oaks. Certain Old Terran vegetables grew in abundance, cultivated by the locals— potatoes, peppers, eggplants, tomatoes, and a variety of herbs— but the produce tended to become alkaloid, edible only after careful processing.

  After his mind-opening examination, stunned by the new vistas opened to him through the melange surge, D’murr Pilru had been brought here without a chance to say his goodbyes to his twin brother or his parents. At first he had been upset, but the requirements of Guild training rapidly filled him with so many wonders that he’d disregarded everything else. He found he could now focus his thoughts much better . . . and forget much more easily.

  The buildings of Junction— huge bulging shapes with rounded and angular extrusions— were of standard Guild design, much like the Embassy on Ix: practical in the extreme and awe-inspiring in their immensity. Each structure bore a rounded cartouche containing the mark of infinity. Mechanical infrastructures were both Ixian and Richesian, installed centuries earlier and still functioning.

  The Spacing Guild preferred environments that did not interfere with its important work. To a Navigator, any distractions were potentially dangerous. Every Guild student learned this lesson early, as did the young candidate D’murr— far from home and totally engrossed in his studies to the exclusion of any worries about his former planet’s troubles.

  On a blakgras field he was immersed in his own container of melange gas— half swimming and half crawling as his body continued to change, his physical systems altering to adapt to the bombardment of spice. Membranes had begun to connect his toes and fingers; his body had grown longer than before and more flaccid, taking on a fish shape. No one had explained the extent of the inevitable changes to him, and he neither chose— nor needed— to ask. It made no difference. So much of the universe had been opened to him, he considered it a modest price to pay.

  D’murr’s eyes had grown smaller, without lashes; they were also developing cataracts. He didn’t need them to see anymore, though, since he had other eyes . . . inner vision. The panorama of the universe unfolded for him. In the process, he felt as if he were leaving everything else behind . . . and it didn’t bother him.

  Through the haze D’murr saw that the blakgras field was covered with neat rows of containerized candidates and their Navigator trainers. One life per container. The tanks vented orange clouds of filtered melange exhaust, swirling around masked humanoid attendants who stood nearby, waiting to move the tanks when told to do so.

  The Head Instructor, a Navigator Steersman named Grodin, floated inside a black-framed tank that had been raised high on a platform; the trainees saw him more with their minds than with their eyes. Grodin had just returned from foldspace with a student, whose tank was adjacent to his and connected with flexible tubing, so that their gases merged.

  D’murr himself had accomplished short flights on three occasions now. He was considered one of the top trainees. Once he learned to travel through foldspace by himself, he could be licensed as a Pilot, the lowest-ranking Navigator . . . but still vastly higher than he’d once been as a mere human.

  Steersman Grodin’s foldspace treks were legendary quests of discovery through incomprehensible dimensional knots. The Head Instructor’s voice gurgled from a speaker inside D’murr’s tank, using higher-order language. He described a time he had transported dinosaur-like creatures in an old-style Heighliner. Unknown to him, the monsters could stretch their necks to incredible lengths. While the Heighliner was in flight, one had chewed its way into a navigation chamber, so that its face appeared outside Grodin’s tank, peering in with a curious, wide-eyed expression. . . .

  So pleasant in here, D’murr thought without forming words as he absorbed the story. With enlarged nostrils he drew in a deep breath of the sharp, rich melange. Humans with dulled senses compared this pungent scent to strong cinnamon . . . but melange was so much more than that, so infinitely complex.

  D’murr no longer needed to concern himself with the mundane affairs of humans, so trivial were they, so limited and shortsighted: political machinations, populations milling about like ants in a disturbed hill, lives flickering bright and dull like sparks from a campfire. His former life was only a vague and fading memory, without specific names or faces. He saw images, but ignored them. He could never go back to what he had been.

  Instead of simply finishing his story about the dinosaur creature, Steersman Grodin spoke on a tangent about the technical aspects of what the chosen student had just accomplished on his interstellar journey, how they had employed high-order mathematics and dimensional changes to peer into the future— much the same way the long-necked monster had looked into his tank.

  “A Navigator must do more than observe,” Grodin’s scratchy voice said over the speaker. “A Navigator utilizes what he sees in order to guide spaceships safely through the void. Failure to apply certain basic principles may lead to Heighliner disasters and the loss of all lives and cargo aboard.”

  Before any of the new adepts like D’murr could become Pilots into foldspace, they must master how to deal with crises such as partially folded space, faulty prescience, the onset of spice intolerance, malfunctioning Holtzman generators, or even deliberate sabotage.

  D’murr tried to envision the fates that had befallen some of his unfortunate predecessors. Contrary to popular belief, Navigators did not themselves fold space; the Holtzman engines did that. Navigators used their limited prescience to choose safe paths to travel. A ship could move through the void without their guidance, but that perilous guessing game invariably led to disaster. A Guild Navigator did not guarantee a safe journey— but he vastly improved the odds. Problems still arose when unforeseen events occurred.

  D’murr was being trained to the limit of the Guild’s knowledge . . . which could not include every eventuality. The universe and its inhabitants were in a state of constant change. All of the old schools understood this, including the Bene Gesserit and the Mentats. Survivors learned how to adjust to change, how to expect the unexpected.

  At the edge of his awareness, his melange tank began to move on its suspensor field and fell into line behind the tanks of the other students. He heard an assistant instructor reciting passages from the Spacing Guild Manual; gas circulation mechanisms hummed around him. Every detail seemed so sharp, so clear, so important. He had never felt so alive!

  Inhaling deeply of the orange-hued melange, he felt his concerns begin to dissipate. His thoughts drew back into order, sliding smoothly into the neuropathways of his Guild-enhanced brain.

  “D’murr . . . D’murr, my brother . . .”

  The name swirled with the gas, like a whisper in the universe— a name he no longer used now that he had been assigned a Guild nav-number. Names were associated with individuality. Names imposed limitations and preconceptions, family connections and past histories, they imposed individuality— the antithesis of what it meant to be a Navigator. A Guildsman merged with the cosmos and saw safe paths through the wrinkles of fate, prescient visions that enabled him to guide matter from place to place like chess pieces in a cosmic game.

  “D’murr, can you hear me? D’murr?” The voice came from the speaker inside his tank, but also from a great distance. He heard something familiar in the timbre, the inflections. Could he have forgotten so much? D’murr. He’d almost erased that name from his thoughts.

  D’mu
rr’s mind made connections that were becoming less and less important, and his slack mouth formed gurgling words. “Yes. I hear you.”

  Nudged by its attendant, D’murr’s tank glided along a paved path, toward an immense, bulbous building where the Navigators lived. No one else seemed to hear the voice.

  “This is C’tair,” the transmission continued. “Your brother. You can hear me? Finally, this thing worked. How are you?”

  “C’tair?” The fledgling Navigator felt his mind fold back into itself, compressing to the remnants of its sluggish, pre-Guild state. Trying to be human again, just for a moment. Was that important?

  This was painful and limiting, like a man putting blinders on himself, but the information was there: yes, his twin brother. C’tair Pilru. Human. He got flashes of his father in ambassadorial dress, his mother in Guild Bank uniform, his brother (like himself) with dark hair and dark eyes, playing together, exploring. Those images had been shunted out of his thoughts, like most everything of that realm . . . but not quite gone.

  “Yes,” D’murr said. “I know you. I remember.”

  • • •

  On Ix, in a shadowed alcove where he used his cobbled-together transmission device, C’tair hunched over, desperate to avoid discovery— but this was worth any risk. Tears streaked down his cheeks, and he swallowed hard. The Tleilaxu and the suboids had continued their rampages and purges, destroying any residue of unfamiliar technology that they found.

  “They took you away from me, in the Guild testing chamber,” C’tair said, his voice a husky whisper. “They wouldn’t let me see you, wouldn’t let me say goodbye. Now I realize you were the lucky one, D’murr, considering everything that’s happened here on Ix. It would break your heart to see it now.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Our city was destroyed not long after the Guild took you away from us. Hundreds of thousands are dead. The Bene Tleilax now rule here.”

  D’murr paused, taking time to slide back into the limited manner of person-to-person communication. “I have guided a Heighliner through foldspace, brother. I hold the galaxy in my mind, I see mathematics.” His sluggish words garbled together. “Now I know why . . . I know . . . Uhhh, I feel pain from your connection. C’tair, how?”

  “This communication hurts you?” He drew back from the transmitter, concerned, and held his breath, fearful that one of the furtive Tleilaxu spies might hear him. “I’m sorry, D’murr. Maybe I should—”

  “Not important. Pain shifts, like a headache . . . but different. Swimming through my mind . . . and beyond it.” D’murr sounded distracted, his voice distant and ethereal. “What connection is this? What device?”

  “D’murr, didn’t you hear me? Ix is destroyed— our world, our city is now a prison camp. Mother was killed in an explosion! I couldn’t save her. I’ve been hiding here, and I’m at great risk while making this communication. Our father is in exile somewhere . . . on Kaitain, I think. House Vernius has gone renegade. I’m trapped here, alone!”

  D’murr remained focused on what he considered the primary question. “Communication directly through foldspace? Impossible. Explain it to me.”

  Taken aback at his twin brother’s lack of concern over the horrendous news, C’tair nonetheless chose not to rebuke him. D’murr had, after all, undergone extreme mental changes and couldn’t be blamed for the way he was now. C’tair could never understand what his twin had been through. He himself had failed the Guild’s tests; he had been too fearful and rigid. Otherwise, he, too, might be a Navigator now.

  Holding his breath, he listened to a creaking sound in the passageway overhead, distant footsteps that faded. Whispering voices. Then silence returned, and C’tair was able to continue the conversation.

  “Explain,” D’murr said again.

  Eager for any kind of conversation, C’tair told his brother of the equipment he had salvaged. “Do you remember Davee Rogo? The old inventor who used to take us into his laboratory and show us the things he was working on?”

  “Crippled . . . suspensor crutches. Too decrepit to walk.”

  “Yes, he used to talk about communicating in neutrino energy wavelengths? A network of rods wrapped in silicate crystals?”

  “Uhhh . . . pain again.”

  “You’re hurting!” C’tair looked around, fearful of the risk he continued to take himself. “I won’t talk much longer.”

  The tone was impatient. D’murr wanted to hear more. “Continue explanation. Need to know this device.”

  “One day during the fighting, when I really wanted to talk with you, bits and pieces of his conversation came back to me. In the rubble of a ruined building, I thought I saw a hazy image of him next to me. Like a vision. He was talking in that creaky old voice, telling me what to do, what parts I would require and how to put them together. He gave me the ideas I needed.”

  “Interesting.” The Navigator’s voice was flat and bloodless.

  His brother’s lack of emotion and compassion disturbed him. C’tair tried to ask questions about D’murr’s Spacing Guild experiences, but his twin had no patience for the queries and said that he couldn’t discuss Guild secrets, not even with his brother. He had traveled through foldspace, and it was incredible. That was all D’murr would say.

  “When can we talk again?” C’tair asked. The apparatus felt dangerously warm, ready to break down. He would have to shut it off soon. D’murr groaned with distant pain, but gave no definite response.

  Still, even knowing his brother’s discomfort, he had a human need to say goodbye, even if D’murr no longer did. “Farewell, for now, then. I miss you.” As he spoke the long-overdue words, he sensed an easing of his own pain— odd, in a way, since he could no longer be sure his brother understood him as he once had.

  Feeling guilty, C’tair broke the connection. Then he sat in silence, overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: joy at having spoken to his twin again, but sadness at D’murr’s ambivalent reactions. How much had his brother changed?

  D’murr should have cared about the death of their mother and the tragic events that had befallen Ix. A Guild Navigator’s position affected all mankind. Shouldn’t a Navigator be more caring, more protective of humanity?

  But instead the young man seemed to have severed all ties, burned all bridges. Was D’murr reflecting Guild philosophy, or had he become so consumed with himself and his new abilities that he’d turned into an egomaniac? Was it necessary for him to behave that way? Had D’murr severed all contact with his humanity? No way to tell yet.

  C’tair felt as if he had lost his brother all over again.

  He removed the bioneutrino machine contacts that had temporarily expanded his mental powers, amplifying his thoughts and thus enabling him to communicate with distant Junction. Suddenly dizzy, he returned to his shielded bolt-hole and lay down on the narrow cot. Eyes closed, he envisioned the universe behind his lids, wondering what it must be like for his twin. His mind hummed with a strange residue of the contact, a backwash of mental expansion.

  D’murr had sounded as if he were speaking underwater, through filters of comprehension. Now, underlying meanings occurred to C’tair— subtleties and refinements. Throughout the evening in the isolation of his hidden room, thoughts percolated through his mind, overwhelming him like a demonic possession. The contact had sparked something unexpected in his own brain, an amazing reaction.

  For days he did not leave the enclosure, consumed with his enhanced memories, using the prototype apparatus to focus his thoughts to an obsessive clarity. Hour after hour, the replayed conversation became clearer to him, words and double meanings blossoming like flower petals . . . as if he traversed his own kind of foldspace of mind and memory. Nuances of D’murr’s dialogue became increasingly apparent, meanings C’tair hadn’t noticed at first. This gave him only an inkling of what his brother had become.

  He found it exciting. And terrifying.

  Finally, coming back to awareness an unknown number of days later, he noticed that food and bevera
ge packages lay scattered around him. The room stank. He looked in a mirror, shocked to see that he had grown a scratchy dark brown beard. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair wild. C’tair barely recognized himself.

  If Kailea Vernius were to set eyes on him now, she would draw back in horror or disdain and send him to work in the dimmest lower levels with the suboids. Somehow, though, after the tragedy of Ix, the rape of his beautiful underground city, his boyish crush on the Earl’s daughter seemed irrelevant. Of all the sacrifices C’tair had made, that was among the smallest.

  And he was sure there would be harder ones to come.

  Before cleaning himself or the hiding place, though, he began preparations for the next call to his brother.

  Perceptions rule the universe.

  —Bene Gesserit Saying

  A robo-controlled shuttle left its orbiting Heighliner in the Laoujin system and streaked toward the surface of Wallach IX, transmitting appropriate security codes to bypass the Sisterhood’s primary defenses. The Bene Gesserit homeworld was just another stop on its long circuitous route wandering among the stars in the Imperium.

  Her thick hair beginning to turn gray, her body starting to hint at its age, Gaius Helen Mohiam thought it would be good to be home after many months of other duties, each separate assignment a thread in the vast Bene Gesserit tapestry. No Sister understood the entire pattern, the entire weaving of events and people, but Mohiam did her part.

  With her advancing pregnancy, the Sisterhood had called her home, to remain at the Mother School until such time as Mohiam delivered the much-anticipated daughter. Only Kwisatz Mother Anirul comprehended her true value to the breeding program, how everything hinged on the child she now carried. Mohiam understood that this baby was important, but even the whispers of her Other Memory, which could always be called upon to offer a cacophony of advice, remained deliberately silent on the subject.