Lillis was unsettled and unrecognizable when she came to him wearing a clean jumpsuit. Her light brown hair was clean and loose, and — Taref marveled about this — still wet. Waddoch drank and drank of the free-flowing water until he became sick and vomited up a puddle, which embarrassed him. The ship’s maintenance workers used even more water to wash the vomit away.
“This is … unbelievable.” Taref felt a bit ill from being surrounded by so much moisture; he and his companions had some difficulty breathing the humid air, but he assumed that gradually they would get used to it.
When the spacefolder arrived at Kolhar, the planetary shields were shunted aside to allow passage for the descending shuttle. The ship passed through storm clouds, and water pelted the hull, streaming in amazing runnels along the windowport.
When they landed at the Kolhar spaceport and emerged onto a new world, cold white ice fell from the sky and pelted Taref’s face. He had never felt such biting cold. The stinging droplets drenched him and his companions. Shurko protected his face with his hands and peered through his fingers into the sky, awestruck and afraid.
Draigo laughed and ushered them away. “That is called sleet, or snow — frozen water. It falls from the sky and collects on the ground. Some planets are covered with it, just as Arrakis is covered with sand.”
Taref held out his hand, marveling as the snowflakes dissolved in his palm. “This is water? Frozen water?” The snow continued to fall, and though it melted quickly at the warm spaceport, brushstrokes of white marked the hills outside the city.
“Offworld weather patterns may be interesting to you, but they are not relevant to our goals.” Draigo brushed white flakes off his shoulders. “This is just a part of the new universe I have promised you. We’ll show you more later, and there will be time for instruction.”
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Draigo took Taref and his companions out to the field of proto-Navigators, private compartments that contained volunteers undergoing transformation.
Taref sniffed. “There is melange in the air.”
“Not much of it, I hope,” Draigo said. “Spice is too valuable to let it leak out indiscriminately.”
Lillis went to one of the chambers and peered through an observation window. “There are people inside, suffocating in spice gas!”
“It causes them to transform into something special. This is why we need to harvest so much melange from Arrakis. Combined Mercantiles helps us create the Navigators that guide our starships.”
The desert people gathered around the chambers, saw misshapen forms wallowing in spice gas. “Spice helps the Freemen to open their minds and see possibilities,” Taref said. But this was not what he had expected, and the grotesque sight made him uneasy.
“It does the same for our Navigators, but in ways no one can understand,” Draigo said. “They encompass the vastness of space in their minds, and envision safe pathways for our spaceships.”
The pungent cinnamon odor was comforting to Taref, though he did not miss the desert planet at all. Although Shurko and Bentur already seemed homesick, Taref did not regret his choice. He was determined to see the marvels in the rest of the galaxy. While these spice-filled chambers and the distorted Navigators were intriguing, Taref thought the snow falling from the sky was even more amazing.…
Draigo took them back to the sprawling Kolhar spaceport complex, and Lillis noted out loud that the high, exposed buildings would never survive one of the powerful Coriolis storms of Arrakis. Along the way, he also told them about his abilities as a Mentat, noting their wide-eyed stares of disbelief. Just another marvel.
Myriad ships of all types and configurations sat alongside cranes and suspensor lifts that brought the components together and locked them into place. Work crews assembled frameworks, then added engines and fleshed out the interiors. Other workers welded and painted the ships. The air smelled of acrid solvents, grease, and spilled fuel.
Draigo took his new recruits from one spacecraft to another, dodging cargo unloaders and refueling vessels, as well as flatbeds filled with replacement energy packs. Shurko put his hands to his ears. “So much noise. And the new smells! It makes my mind spin.”
“This is a spaceport,” Draigo said. “You’ll have to grow comfortable with it, because I intend to turn you loose in the shipyards at other spaceports. Familiarize yourself with the hangars, the activity, the tasks. You will need to look as comfortable in places like this as you do in your sietch.”
When his friends seemed intimidated, Taref squared his shoulders. “We learned how to operate spice machinery. We can learn the simple tasks performed by shipyard and spaceport workers.” He looked over at Draigo. “And then you want us to sabotage your rival’s engines?”
The Mentat nodded. “That time will come. We have ships of all common designs here on Kolhar. We will show you how to do basic work, teach you what you need to know, so that you’ll qualify for a job with EsconTran or any other shipping company.” As Draigo talked, Taref looked at the numerous spaceships, the rising shuttles, a cargo ship landing, a passenger vessel being constructed.
Draigo briskly got his attention again. “We’ll tell you what to say to convince others that you understand how a spacefolder works, as much as a dockhand needs to know. And”—he lowered his voice and leaned closer—“I will show you the simple things you can do to make critical systems fail.” He gestured around the busy spaceport. “You will become experts at making spacefaring vessels go wrong.”
Chapter 24 (Thinking machines did not have a monopoly on cruelty)
Thinking machines did not have a monopoly on cruelty, for human beings do unspeakable things as well. The Butlerians paint machines with too broad a stroke, and use only the color black. They do as much harm to human civilization as the thinking machines ever did.
— GILBERTUS ALBANS, personal journal, Mentat School records (redacted as inappropriate)
After the madness in the streets of Zimia, and his disturbing time with Manford Torondo, Gilbertus was glad to be safely back at the Mentat School. The Butlerian leader had not seemed at all troubled by the destruction his followers had caused.
Gilbertus hoped to calm himself by playing a round of pyramid chess with the Erasmus core. His robot mentor was far more intelligent than a combat mek and would likely win the game, as he usually did, but Gilbertus knew tricks that were not based entirely on mathematical analyses. Anytime he won a game, it was because he leveraged his humanity, adding to the knowledge this unique robot had given him over the centuries.
In his sealed and secure office, the Headmaster brought out the gelcircuitry memory core and set up the antique pyramid chessboard. Erasmus said, “I would have been disappointed if you’d lost the game to that cumbersome combat mek, my son.”
“I would have been disappointed as well, Father,” Gilbertus replied. “In fact, I would be dead, because they would have executed me.”
“Then I am doubly glad you won. That mek was a rudimentary model, utterly without sophistication. You should have had no trouble formulating a strategy to defeat it.”
“I should have had no trouble — and yet it was a close match. I was under great stress, of course, which might have disrupted my thinking processes. My emotions interfered with my Mentat abilities. My human vulnerability and mortality seeped into my mind, and nearly sabotaged me.”
The robot’s core throbbed with pale blue light. “The mek used its intelligence, meager though it was, to intimidate you into making mistakes. Doesn’t that demonstrate the superiority of thinking machines?”