Everything about Guild Navigator totally explained
In the
Dune universe created by
Frank Herbert,
Guild Navigators or
Steersmen are humans, mutated through high consumption of the spice
melange, who are able to safely navigate interstellar space in a
heighliner using
prescience.
History
According to the
Legends of Dune novels, the
Spacing Guild first started using Guild Navigators because the travel technique of
spacefolding wasn't safe; only about nine out of every ten heighliners made it to their final destination without Navigators.
Norma Cenva (the first Navigator and the creator of the Spacing Guild) at first used super-computers to navigate space, but as the
Butlerian Jihad didn't allow for
thinking machines, she used melange to develop the prescient ability to see the heighliner's path before it actually traveled.
In the
Prelude to Dune novels, some of the previously-unseen process of becoming a Navigator is revealed through the story of
D'murr Pilru.
Mutation
Guild Navigators are continuously immersed in highly concentrated amounts of spice gas and a micro-gravity environment.
The micro-gravity atrophies their bodies and the gas disfigures them further in the process of granting them prescient abilities. The first external sign of melange-induced metabolic change is that the eyes become "blue within blue." The Navigators' bodies change drastically over time, their heads and extremities elongating to the point that they only appear human if compared to human
embryos. In
Dune chronology, these effects were first experienced by Norma Cenva at the end of :
Her direct physical senses were deadened, and Norma no longer cared about taste, touch, or smell ... She found it remarkable to see webbing between her fingers and toes. Her face, once blunt-featured and later flawlessly beautiful, now had a small mouth and tiny eyes surrounded by smooth folds. Her head was immense, while the rest of her body atrophied to a useless appendage.
Description
Because the Spacing Guild uses mainly envoys and ambassadors in their dealings (presumably to hide the nature of the Navigators), Guild Navigators were historically seldom seen. Although their appearance was a mystery in the original novel
Dune, a Navigator is fully revealed in the first chapter of
Dune Messiah. Here, the Guild Navigator
Edric is described in his tank of spice gas as "an elongated figure, vaguely humanoid with finned feet and hugely fanned membranous hands — a fish in a strange sea." In
Chapterhouse Dune references are made to a Navigator meeting-hall on the planet Junction; it's stated that the hall is vast, in order to accommodate the very large tanks in which Navigators are obliged to live while on a planet's surface (Due to the genetic change a navigator undergoes after being subjected to concentrated spice gas, they're no longer able to process oxygen. They can only survive in a spice gas environment; they'd literally choke to death in open air). The size of the tanks is partly to prevent a sense of claustrophobia (elsewhere in the
Dune saga it's stated that Navigators spend most of their lives in space, presumably in the weightless environment of a Heighliner's control room) and partly because of their physical size. This ties in with
David Lynch's depiction of a Navigator in his tank in the opening section of his film version of
Dune. In the film, the Navigator's mutation affects his entire body, and he resembles a large newt or grasshopper with a heavily deformed head and V-shaped mouth. His limbs are vestigial. (The Navigator's head in Lynch's Dune is believed by some to be a reworking of the embryo puppet from his earlier film
Eraserhead.) Interestingly, the Navigator puppet in this film did
not appear to have the all-blue eyes of a spice addict.
It should be noted that in an unused passage from
Dune Messiah published in
The Road to Dune,
Edric is described as surviving in air, without spice gas, once his tank is destroyed. His prescient abilities are practically useless in this state.
Notable Navigators
Norma Cenva
The very first Navigator, Norma pioneered the use of melange to develop the prescience necessary to safely guide a spaceship though foldspace.
D'murr Pilru
(10,136 A.G. – 10,175 A.G.)
In the
Prelude to Dune novels,
D'murr and
C'tair Pilru (twin sons of Ambassador
Cammar Pilru of
Ix) take the initial examination to become Navigators, but only D'murr passes. From the moment he enters training, D'murr is told he'll never communicate with his family again; he eventually becomes a full Navigator.
In, D'murr is piloting one of two heighliners which
Hasimir Fenring uses to secretly test the synthetic melange created by the
Tleilaxu in their
Project Amal. The flawed spice disrupts and confuses D'murr's thoughts, feelings and prescience. He is compelled to send a
telepathic message to his twin C'tair (who is hiding on Tleilaxu-conquered Ix) that his own heighliner carries rightful Ixian ruler
Rhombur Vernius, on his way to free the planet. Disastrously, the first heighliner emerges from foldspace at the wrong point, striking the defensive shields of
Wallach IX and plummeting into the atmosphere to its destruction. Affected by the tainted melange, D'murr misguides his ship out of the known universe and collapses. As his spice supply is replaced with real melange, D'murr senses with alarm that 'the enemy has seen us' (this is presumably the first reference to the Unknown Enemy that, millennia later, chases the
Honored Matres back to the
Old Empire in
Heretics of Dune and threatens to destroy humanity). D'murr uses the last of his strength to return the ship safely to
Junction, home of the Guild Headquarters, and dies.
Edric
In 1969's
Dune Messiah, a Navigator named
Edric takes part in a plot against the emperor,
Paul Atreides (the other conspirators being the
Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the
Tleilaxu Face Dancer Scytale and Paul's embittered consort,
Princess Irulan Corrino). Edric's involvement is solely to protect the conspirators from discovery by Paul's prescient sight, as the presence of a prescient (in this case, Edric) hides the activities of that person, and those around him, from other prescients. After the plot fails, Edric and Mohiam are executed in 10,207 A.G. by
Fremen Naib Stilgar on orders from Paul's sister
Alia Atreides.
Edrik
In
Hunters of Dune the 2006 Herbert/Anderson
sequel to
Chapterhouse Dune, the Navigator
Edrik fears his kind's obsolescence when the Spacing Guild itself (pressured by a shortage of melange) begins funding the development of superior
Ixian navigation technology that wouldn't require Navigators. Seeking an alternative source of spice to break the
Bene Gesserit monopoly, he meets with
Uxtal, the last of the
Lost Tleilaxu, hoping that he can rediscover the method of producing melange in
axlotl tanks (a secret believed lost when the
Bene Tleilax were destroyed by the
Honored Matres). However, Uxtal is in the forced service of the
Matre Superior Hellica; her price for his expertise is Edrik's help transporting a certain cargo. He agrees, delivering by heighliner the
Obliterators that destroy the planet
Richese, where the Bene Gesserit are mass-producing weapons and armed battleships. Uxtal is ultimately unsuccessful, but the
ghola he creates of deceased Tleilaxu Master
Waff later offers Edrik something better in exchange for sanctuary — the genetic knowledge for the Guild to create their own, optimized
sandworms to produce melange.
In
Sandworms of Dune (2007), the sequel to
Hunters and finale of the original
Dune series, the Spacing Guild has begun replacing its Navigators with the more cost-effective Ixian navigation devices and cutting off the Navigators' supply of melange. More and more Navigators are dying from withdrawal of the spice — including Ardrae, "one of the oldest remaining Navigators" — and many defect and disappear into space rather than allow the devices on their ships. All are unaware that
Face Dancer infiltrators are behind the plan, plotting their own takeover of the universe.
Waff works in secret, hidden on Edrik's own heighliner, on genetically engineering his "advanced" sandworms. He accomplishes this by altering the
DNA of the
sandtrout stage and creating an aquatic form of the worms, which are then released into the oceans of
Buzzell. Adapting to their new environment, these "seaworms" quickly flourish, eventually producing a highly-concentrated form of spice, dubbed "ultraspice."
Edrik and the ultraspice are later intercepted by
Face Dancer leader
Khrone, who seizes the valuable optimized melange. He incapacitates Edrik by damaging his tank and releasing its spice gas, soon destroying the entire heighliner to rid himself of the Navigator altogether.
Emperor: Battle for Dune
Apart from navigating heighliners ferrying the troops of the three Houses to
Arrakis, Navigators have also been utilized by the Guild in the War of Assassins in the
computer game as pilots for their NIAB Tanks (a hover tank that projects a single electrical bolt from the Navigator's containment tank) and NIAP Flyers (an aerial version of the NIAB Tank). The NIAB also has the ability to fold-space for short distances on the battlefield (suggesting a Holtzman generator, smaller than that of the massive heighliners).
Notes and references
Further Information
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