XXXVII.
The Lost Steersman
[Miles]: Mentat Bellonda, I thought you were in charge of the spice workstream.
[Bellonda]: That I am. I am working on the Scytale plan.
[Miles]: The enormity of the holes we are leaving in our operations needs to be addressed.
[Murbella]: Teg, you will stop addressing a Reverend Mother in this way!
[Miles]: Must I shake your branches down until you have no leaves? The Space Guild had a monopoly on space travel for over ten thousand years, and yearly spice appropriations granted by the Tyrant for four thousand. So tell me, how is it possible that neither we, nor the Honored Matres ever found any spice on Junction?
– CHAPTERHOUSE'S ARCHIVE RECORDINGS
The emptiness of the Void was a thing of supreme beauty, but the Steersman swimming through the spice vapors of the Heighleiner's main deck lacked the words to express it. The stars hung there, furnaces blasting at incalculable distances, their innocent lights displayed with incredible fidelity on the spherical walls that surrounded him; making him feel he could almost touch them, through the yards of space alloy that separated him from the atmosphere-less space just outside of the ship and the parsecs of true void.
And so he waited, year after year.
On days when he felt grateful to be a small creature in the Universe, he swore he could hear the stars' music, a blend of harmonies across many wavelengths that peaked and rested in the pattern of spacetime, making gentle ripples in the paths of prescience. He spent whole afternoons listening in awe. Whatever an afternoon was like in space.
The spherical chamber that made the ship's main deck was a mile long, wide and deep, a giant gyroscope saturated with air enriched with spice gasses, allowing him to breathe and to remain alert across the kiloparsecs of space. The Steersman's vessel was an ancient one – the oldest of the great Space Guild fleet – and because of that, it had been the most magnificent: twenty miles of space-tempered alloys, its hold so large it could swallow thousands of modern Ixian ships and frigates from the Imperium of old. The gargantuan, cigar-shaped Heighliner shone at sunset over the sky of any planet it ever orbited around. It reminded him of a time when the Guild's grasp of space travel was absolute and complete.
And yet Solideum, that was the Steersman's name, had no illusions those times were past; presently, he was patience incarnated. There was no expectation in him, only the need to wait.
He continued to float in the orange vapors while swallowing a pill from a box taken from his belt. A planet dweller would have felt deeply disconcerted at the Steersman's appearance, whose long-term exposure to massive amounts of spice since a young age had mutated his body to be a mere mind-vessel: finned feet, fish-like membranes in between fingers, shriveled flesh concentrated around a big bald head, lizard-like eyes, and an atrophied v-shaped mouth.
I might be the last Navigator, he thought.
He waited, very patiently, to discover otherwise.
Time works differently for Guildsmen. In fact, Navigators experience the past just like the present. One memory from years past kept coming back to him, and he chose to live through it again and again, like it were the Now. It was the moment when the Navigator had pre-known the Guild's downfall just light-minutes from Tleilax's sun. He relaxed and remembered.
The presence of the Honored Matres' cloaked ships could only be inferred by their effect, but Solideum was thankful they ignored his ship for it was a harmless giant whale. Tleilaxu's orbital defenses were vaporizing like beautiful blue fireworks. His heighliner, aptly named Mira Ceti, stood immobile as an aimless giant; previously on its last voyage to pick up spice loads from Bandalong, it had nothing left to do as it could not reach its destination.
Solideum watched in disbelief, disturbed but unhurried, because his inner prescient compass vibrated with calm A-major harmonics; he felt no dampening, nor noise. It meant that his prescient senses could still get through the future transparently. The Heighliner was not going to be targeted or boarded, just yet, or the dampening effect of the nearby no-ships would have soften the soundscape, giving him a warning.
Solideum took a second brown pill from the box, paid careful attention to its flavor, the pungency of the spice on the tongue. Some day in the not-to-distant future he was going to swallow the last of his spice-laced food-pills.
As planet Tleilax was enveloped by a carpet of bombs and the atmosphere turned opaque due to the heat, Solideum looked beyond and plotted plot a direct course to Junction. He extended his mind to touch the harmonics of spacetime, applying his willpower to gently stroke the string of his present so that a ripple would expand forth and back, forth and back, its frequency vibrating to disturb the calm of all future states like a pebble dropped in a pond. The soundscape produced a coherent harmony – it found a familiar three-jump path to Junction via a safe and empty course around many dust nebulae that were slowly accelerating to cosmic hurricanes – then he sensed a vague B-flat minor in his mind. Minor interference. He gave the crew and the passengers the shortest notice, and proceeded to jump.
Another train of thought in the many-state awareness of the Steersman went back to the ball of cinder that was Rakis, and to the Bene Tleilax planets' present obliteration. The worst case scenario the Guild had so obsessively worried about for thousands of years had materialized: the Great Starvation, the end of the melange, the indispensable commodity only sandworms and axolotl tanks could produce; neither of which existed anymore by means of the Honored Matres' rage.
Solideum jumped to Junction, but following his intuition, he emerged from foldspace at a full thirty light-minutes distance. A swarm of tiny shapes shining in the light of the sun stood in front of him. He stretched out his senses, found silence/blindness – Navigators lacked proper words for single-state humans to grasp it – certainly caused by the presence of other oracles nearby. The swarm was the entirety of the Guild's Junction fleet on a mad rush to reach fold-space. Flashing lasers coming from invisible points in space pierced holes in the Guild's ships, cutting them into pieces; other ships were exploding in silent detonations. Relying on their Navigators' prescience, many of the Guild's ships had no cloaking. Why use Ixian technology when the mere presence of a Navigator would make the entire ship invisible to a prescient search? Why would anybody attack the Guild, the logistics company with the longest history and tradition of neutrality? And yet, lasers lit up the Guild's ships like fireflies in the darkness of the cosmos. They glowed and slowly burned away one by one. The Matres' ships who did not participate in the chase, invisible to prescience and to the eye of the future-teller, were surely landing on Junction at that moment, or igniting the planet's atmosphere with thermonuclear devastation.
The Guild was a corporation, but more than a corporation it was a tradition and a calling. Solideum saw an entire nation disintegrating in front of his eyes. A surge of panic took him over finally, and the paths of the future in his mind collapsed into a cacophony of noise… no more beauty, only randomness. He frantically imparted the commands to the Holzmann engines. And the folds opened up to swallow him and the Mira Ceti to safety.
Except, for the first time in his century-long career with the Guild, First-Stage Navigator Solideum lost his inner compass. The ship's hull creaked the instant it emerged from foldspace. He had plunged the ship into the middle of an asteroid field. Collision alarms started blaring via the comms systems as space debris and meteorites in orbital velocity started scraping the Mira Ceti still traveling at dangerous speed. Solideum had his ear out for new coordinates in the soundscape, but his focus failed. He could not tell a C sharp from B flat. Too much gravitational mass was nearby. Sirens continued to blare around him as the officers' reports and screams through the intercom made him aware that a large asteroid had scraped the ship, opening a large breach in the stern and loading bays… a half-mile tear had opened, jagged edges across the stern. The impact had imparted a slight spin to the ship but not to its cargo. With horror he watched several lighters and frigates, their floor locks broken, slowly drift out of the fracture and be devoured by the asteroid field, while their crews fired the engines in an attempt to stabilize their vessels and avoid the encroaching rocks.
Solideum, mortified, closed his eyes in the void of his chamber.
The emergency lasted several days. He pushed the Mira Ceti just outside of the danger zone, but the bulk of its surface was going to be forever riddled by the thousands of space rocks that had scraped and smashed and cratered into it. The cargo was moved, the vessels the asteroids had not damaged beyond repair were loaded back, while the stern was abandoned, lacking the cyclopic machinery a ship-yard would use to repair it.
Despite the thousands of people in the crew, the passengers and traders, it was still his vessel, and Solideum felt sorry mostly for the irreparable damage done to his big space whale. He had maimed his best friend.
And finally Solideum reached out for a patch of clear sky, found it, was elated that he could feel the timelines vibrate like harmony once again, and jumped... and emerged in true emptiness. Oh, the lights around him flickered like the stars he was so familiar with.
They weren't familiar. They weren't stars, but islands of light. Galaxies.
In his continued disorientation, the jump had taken the ship into one of the gigantic cosmic voids, millions of parsecs away from any galaxy cluster. The purest emptiness.
Where... where am I?
As only Navigators know, the inner compass senses the future, but accuracy degrades proportionally with the square of the distance.
He had missed twice. He was a lost Navigator.
The irony was not lost on him.
The inconceivable had happened. A great deal of work was required when a Navigator lost its way. Had he been on a Ixian ship that was converted to a Guild ship, he still would have had access to machinery which could triangulate the position of the galaxies around him and help pinpoint his location. He could not venture into foldspace without confirmation. And so began the painstaking work that had kept him and his crew busy for the better part of two years.
Solideum did not care about human loss, the crew's depression, or the feeling of loneliness. He stopped once in a while to listen to cosmos' harmony, the incredible silences around him. That could always fill the loneliness of an afternoon. Whatever an afternoon meant in the void of space.
When finally he figured out how to trace back his steps, leaving the void felt like a betrayal. Once re-emerged among familiar stars, the Guild's officers, those ape-like creatures he had shared genetics and appearance with a long time before, had convened. They looked a bit older than at the beginning of their voyage. Thinner too, because of food rationing. They proposed to jump into the Scattering, dump the cargo and few passengers, and go on to live their lives.
Solideum smiled. The Guildsmen were all single-state minds, not a single one touched by the spice. But they needed him to jump to the location of their goodbye. The Guild was gone, but Solideum had no hesitation about his plans. Of course, at the time of the Junction attack, there must have been thousands of steersmen out, on duty – the Guild operated a tentacular transport service after all – so Solideum deemed it unlikely that the Mira Ceti were the only survivor. However, for the same reason a prescient seer could not see another, there was no way for him to find other Navigators… as oracles were blind to one another.
There must be thousands of us out there, so close and yet so distant!
He had lost his way, until now. But there had been plenty of time to think. Were there survivors, they would gather at the only obvious rally point. Naturally, he could not see them through the veils of time. He had to fold his way there.
Arriving at Tupile Core, the secret Guild hideout, Solideum was once again surprised. Navigators did not like surprises. The planet was deserted, abandoned. No ships orbited the system. There were signs it had been evacuated in a rush; further investigations would reveal many atomics from Tupile's renegade Houses had been left behind. This was not going to be the goodbye place.
To the Steersman, it did not matter. He could wait forever for other Heighliners to emerge from space, and shine in the light of Tupile's red sun. The Guild crew, the few passengers and the cargo were unloaded planetside. They protested for a bit. But Tupile was a pleasant planet. No need for the Scattering, when paradise is already under your feet. Maintenance crew still came up every now and then to help. Otherwise, up alone in the Mira Ceti, Solideum had no care in the world, no fear for the Great Starvation.
Because Tupile was the location of the Hoard.
He expected that in time, any Navigator who had survived would find his way here. None could live without spice, and Tupile was the last known storeroom in the Universe. So large that even its fleeing inhabitants could not move it all.
But time plays tricks to Navigators. The more time they spend in space, the more erratic their personal perception of time becomes. Moments feel like years, years feel like seconds. So long as they perceive the paths, they can stop and listen to the eternal beauty.
And so, Solideum was not really sure for how long he had waited. When it happened, he only marked it at some point in Time. Unexpectedly like he had hoped, three small crafts uncloaked themselves no farther than a mile from the Mira Ceti while the heighliner rested in stationary orbit around the planet. To his dismay, their alien shape betrayed they were not Guild's vessels. Something new. He reached out into spacetime to hear the music that his many futures could play. He heard the music of invisibility.
It was going to be an interesting afternoon indeed.