Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [67]
Overwhelmed, Leto thought back to the small-scale activities on Caladan: the pundi rice harvest, the boats unloading cargoes from ships . . . and the dedicated cheers the population had hurled at the Old Duke after the bullfight.
Grating sirens sounded from speakers mounted through-out the huge chamber. Below, like iron filings flowing within magnetic-field lines, the suboid workers evacuated from all sides of the newly constructed Heighliner. Up and down the ceiling city, lights twinkled from other large observation windows in the stalactite towers. Leto could make out tiny forms pressed close to distant panes.
Rhombur stood near Leto as the spectators around them fell into a hush.
“What is it?” Leto asked. “What’s happening now?”
“The Navigator is going to fly the ship out,” the twin C’tair said.
“He’ll take it away from Ix so it can begin its rounds,” D’murr added.
Leto stared at the rock ceiling, the impenetrable barrier of a planetary crust, and knew this was impossible. He heard a faint, barely discernible humming.
“Piloting such a vessel out isn’t difficult—uh, at least, not for one of them.” Rhombur crossed his arms over his chest. “Much easier than guiding a Heighliner back into a confined space like this. Only a top-level Steersman could do that.”
As Leto watched, holding his breath just like all the other spectators, the Heighliner shimmered, became indistinct—then vanished entirely.
The air inside the huge grotto reverberated with a loud boom from the sudden volume displacement. A tremor ran through the observation building, and Leto’s ears popped.
The grotto now stood empty, a vast enclosed space with no trace of the Heighliner, just leftover equipment and a pattern of discolorations on the floor and walls and ceiling.
“Remember how a Navigator operates a ship,” D’murr said, seeing Leto’s confusion.
“He folds space,” C’tair said. “That Heighliner never passed through the crustal rock of Ix at all. The Navigator simply went from here . . . to his destination.”
A few members of the audience applauded. Rhombur seemed immensely pleased as he gestured to the new emptiness below that extended as far as they could see. “Now we have room to start building another one!”
“Simple economics.” Kailea glanced at Leto, then demurely flicked her eyes away. “We don’t waste any time.”
The slave concubines permitted my father under the Bene Gesserit–Guild agreement could not, of course, bear a Royal Successor, but the intrigues were constant and oppressive in their similarity. We became adept, my mother and sisters and I, at avoiding subtle instruments of death.
—From “In My Father’s House”
by the Princess Irulan
Crown Prince Shaddam’s tutoring chambers in the Imperial Palace would have been large enough to house a village on some worlds. With total disinterest, the Corrino heir brooded in front of his teaching machine while Fenring watched him.
“My father still wants me to sit in training classes like a child.” Shaddam scowled down at the lights and spinning mechanisms of the machine. “I should be married by now. I should have an Imperial heir of my own.”
“Why?” Fenring laughed. “So the throne can skip a generation and go directly to your son when he reaches his prime, hmmmm?”
Shaddam was thirty-four years old and seemingly a lifetime away from becoming Emperor. Each time the old man took a drink of spice beer, he activated more of the secret poison—but the n’kee had been working for months, and the only result seemed to be increasingly irrational behavior. As if they needed more of that!
That very morning Elrood had scolded Shaddam for not paying closer attention to his studies. “Watch, and learn!”—one of his father’s tedious phrases—“Do as well as Fenring, for once.”
Since childhood, Hasimir Fenring