Navigators of Dune

23

Norma Cenva resided inside her tank of swirling orange spice gas, but she lived primarily within her mind. Her physical body was merely an appendage, of secondary importance. She required her biological machinery to survive, but she immersed herself so deeply in esoteric matters that she rarely thought about her body at all.

Her chamber rested on a dais overlooking the other Navigator tanks on Kolhar, on the outskirts of the capital city. Since returning from Arrakis, she had felt restless and disturbed within the ripples of fate, and even with her expansive thoughts, she could not understand the reasons for her discomfort. The large and fortified spice stockpile would help stabilize their supply, and now that Josef had tightened his control on the desert planet, melange harvesting and distribution should grow.

With the supply of melange, the future for her precious Navigators should be stable and bright … but she still felt grave concern for them, and for mankind.

Gazing toward the VenHold headquarters towers in the distance, she transmitted her wishes to her handlers — failed Navigator candidates with varying degrees of physical abnormalities — and they responded immediately, without questioning why.

The handlers arranged a heavy suspensor hauler to carry her tank across the gray sky, delivering it to the roof of the VenHold headquarters tower. They deposited the ornate chamber on the high rooftop, secured it, and then left her alone, as she requested. Unlike any other Navigator, Norma could have transported herself with her own abilities, but that would have disrupted her complex train of thought.

She felt she was on the verge of a revelation, an epiphany … possibly a specific warning.

Ever since she had rescued Josef from the Imperial Palace on Salusa Secundus after his role in the assassination was exposed, she had monitored the ongoing crisis in the Imperium, assessing second- and third-order consequences. But even with spice prescience, she experienced troubling blind spots that prevented her from seeing certain events and choices. Even prescience held imperfections, too much uncertainty, and for the sake of her Navigators, she needed to know.

This perch on the giant tower gave her a new perspective, from a cosmic standpoint. She gazed outward, and her mind extended beyond the limitations of human vision into the deepest tapestry of space-time. It was like a much larger version of the gas inside her tank and in an infinite variety of colors, with swirling nebulae and galaxies, so beautiful but challenging to her as well, for the difficulties they presented to her prescience.

She strained to envision all the way to the other side of the universe, and from there she peered back at herself with a powerful sense of reflective vision. From that infinite perspective, she gazed down upon Kolhar and her field of developing Navigators. Their tanks sparkled in the bright morning sun. Hundreds of Navigators, tank after tank, stretched across a wide, grassy field.

The universe is ours.

As her concerns knotted into questions that tangled into paradoxes, she needed this different vantage to help her find new solutions to serious problems.

Even though Josef had secured a stronger grip on Arrakis and had created the strategic spice bank, Norma was troubled by his recent rash of increasingly aggressive actions, which could well have unpleasant reactionary consequences. He had swept through the Imperial guard forces left behind on Arrakis, destroying Imperially sanctioned contract operations and seizing the profits for himself.

Norma agreed with the result of such actions … but not the provocative nature of the actions themselves. Roderick’s retaliations would cause more problems. Surely, Josef could see the danger. It did not require prescience to predict the Emperor’s response.

Josef considered himself invincible, but Norma could foresee possible disastrous consequences — and how they would affect her Navigators. Through a sudden spark of clarity, she recognized that they were all in the gravest danger!

But she couldn’t see the source of it. Was it the Emperor? Uncertain. She would have to monitor very closely.…