Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [160]
“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’murr’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