Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [44]
The shuttle slid smoothly into the docking port of a Wayku passenger ship that hung in its designated berth inside the cavernous hold of the Heighliner. Leto boarded, his suitcases floating along behind, and made up his mind to do as his father had instructed.
Learn from everything. His determined curiosity pushing his intimidation aside, Leto climbed a stairway to the main passenger lounge, where he found a seat on a bench by another window. Two soostone merchants sat nearby, their rapid conversation sprinkled with jargon. Old Paulus had wanted Leto to learn how to fend for himself. So, to enhance the experience, Leto was traveling as an ordinary passenger, with no special amenities, no pomp or entourage, no indication that he was the son of a Duke.
His mother had been horrified.
Aboard the ship, Wayku vendors wearing dark glasses and earclamp headsets moved from passenger to passenger, selling confections and perfumed beverages at exorbitant prices. Leto waved off a persistent vendor, though the spicy-salty broths and broiled meat sticks smelled delicious. He could hear an overflow of music from the man’s headset, saw his head, shoulders, and feet moving to the beat of music piped into his skull. The Wayku did their jobs, tended to the customers, but managed to live in their own sensory cacophony; they preferred the universe within to any spectacle they might experience outside.
This mass-transit craft, operated by the Wayku under Guild contract, carried passengers from system to system. A disgraced House Major whose planets had all been destroyed in the Third Coalsack War, the Wayku were gypsies now and lived as nomads aboard Guild Heighliners. Although ancient surrender terms prevented members of their race from setting foot on any planet in the Imperium, the Guild had, for undisclosed reasons, granted them sanctuary. For generations, the Wayku had showed no interest in petitioning the Emperor for amnesty or a revocation of the severe restrictions placed upon them.
Looking through the window of the lounge, Leto saw the dimly illuminated cargo hold of the Heighliner, a vacuum chamber so large that this passenger ship was, by comparison, even smaller than a grain of pundi rice in the belly of a fish. He could see the ceiling high overhead, but not the walls kilometers away. Other ships, large and small, were arrayed in the hold: frigates, cargo haulers, shuttles, lighters, and armored monitors. Strapped-together stacks of “dump boxes”—unpiloted cargo containers designed to dump material directly from low orbit onto a planet’s surface—hung next to the main exterior hatches.
Guild regulations, etched on ridulian crystals mounted to the main wall of every room, prohibited passengers from leaving the isolation of their ship. Through adjacent windows Leto snatched glimpses of passengers inside other craft—a potpourri of races bound for all parts of the Imperium.
The Wayku deckhands finished their first round of service, and the passengers waited. The trip through foldspace took no more than an hour, but preparations for departure sometimes required days.
Finally, with no announcement whatsoever, Leto detected a faint, smooth purring that seemed to come from far away. He could feel it in every muscle of his body. “We must be heading out,” he said, turning to the soostone merchants, who seemed unimpressed. From the quick diverting of their eyes and the way they studiously ignored him, Leto thought they must consider him an uncultured yokel.
In an isolated chamber high atop the craft, a Guild Navigator swimming in a tank of gas saturated with melange began to encompass space with his mind. He envisioned and threaded a safe passage through the fabric of foldspace, transporting the Heighliner and its contents across a vast distance.
At dinner the previous evening in the Castle’s dining hall, Leto’s mother had wondered aloud if Navigators might somehow violate the machine-human interaction prohibited by the Butlerian Jihad. Knowing Leto would soon be off to Ix and