Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [187]
But others were not so easy to detect, such as the gnarled old woman with whom he had initiated a conversation. He’d only meant to ask directions to a work site where he had been assigned. She hadn’t sought him out at all, except to appear harmless . . . somewhat like a child with a grenade in its pocket.
“Such an interesting choice of words,” she’d said, and he didn’t even remember his own phrasing. “And your inflection . . . you are Ixian nobility, perhaps?” She looked meaningfully at some of the ruined stalactite buildings in the ceiling.
He had stammered an answer. “N-no, although I have been a s-servant all my life, and perhaps I picked up some of their distasteful mannerisms. My apologies.” He had bowed and departed quickly, without ever getting directions from her.
His response had been awkward and perhaps incriminating, so he’d thrown away the clothes he’d been wearing and hadn’t gone down that narrow street again. Afterward, he had paid more attention than ever before to masking his own vocal identity markers. Whenever possible, he avoided talking to strangers at all. It appalled C’tair that so many opportunistic Ixians had switched allegiance to the new masters, forgetting House Vernius in less than a year.
In the first days of confusion following the takeover, C’tair had hoarded scraps of abandoned technology, from which he had constructed the cross-dimensional “Rogo” transceiver. Soon, though, all but the most primitive technology had been confiscated and made illegal. C’tair still snatched what he could, scavenging anything that might prove valuable. He considered the risk well worth taking.
His fight here might continue for years, if not decades.
He thought back to the childhood he’d shared with D’murr, and the crippled inventor, Davee Rogo, who had befriended the boys. In his private laboratory, secreted inside an ignored coal vein in the upper crust, old Rogo had taught the youths many interesting principles, had shown them some of his failed prototypes. The inventor had chuckled, his bright eyes sparkling as he goaded the boys into disassembling and reassembling some of his complicated inventions. C’tair had learned a great deal under the crippled man’s tutelage.
Now C’tair recalled his Navigator brother’s lack of interest when he’d told him of the wavy vision he’d seen in the rubble. Perhaps the ghost of Davee Rogo had not come back from the dead to provide instructions. He’d never seen a similar apparition, before or since. But that experience, whether a supernatural message or a hallucination, had permitted C’tair to accomplish a very human purpose: remaining in communication with his twin, maintaining the bond of love as D’murr became lost in the mysteries of the Guild.
Trapped in his various hiding places, C’tair had to live vicariously, soaring across the universe in his brother’s mind whenever they made contact via the transceiver. Over the months he learned with excitement and pride of D’murr’s first solo flights through foldspace as a trainee Pilot in his own Guild ship. Then, a few days ago, D’murr had been approved for his first commercial assignment, navigating an unmanned colony transport craft that plied the void far beyond the Imperium.
If his outstanding work for the Guild continued, the Navigator trainee who had been D’murr Pilru would be promoted to transporting goods and personnel between the primary worlds of the Houses Major, and perhaps along the coveted Kaitain routes. He would become an actual Navigator, possibly even working his way up to Steersman. . . .
But the communications device exhibited persistent problems. The silicate crystals had to be sliced with a cutteray and connected in a precise manner; then they functioned only briefly before disintegrating from the strain. Hairline cracks rendered them useless.