Edrik: the Steersman of Kralizec

Edrik was a Spacing Guild Navigator, one of the line of Steersmen known as the Edrics, who took on leadership over his fellows as the prophesied time of Kralizec came to fruition. As the New Sisterhood's grip on melange closed around the Guild, he pursued both a larger spice allotment and a synthetic source of the substance, only to fall to the schemes of the Enhanced Face Dancers in the final crisis of his age.

Serving the New Sisterhood#

As Murbella cemented her control over the flow of spice, the Guild grew desperate under the near blackmail the New Sisterhood exercised over melange. The Sisterhood demanded that the Guild ferry raw materials and workers to the shipyards of Richese and Ix at a reduced rate, while granting the Guild only enough melange for its basic needs. Edrik and the Guild's Chief Administrator Rental Gorus traveled to Chapterhouse to persuade Murbella to increase their allotment, but on the counsel of her advisors she chose to show the Guild a hard line, to Edrik's dismay.

Distressed, Edrik sought the guidance of the Guild's founding patron, the Oracle of Time, Norma Cenva. When he communed with her, the Oracle warned him that his over-concern for spice was not what was paramount, for the beginning of the "battle of battles" was about to begin.

Waff and the Ultraspice#

Out of his search for a new source of spice came the final ghola incarnation of the Tleilaxu Master Tylwyth Waff, whom Edrik had ordered restored years earlier in the hope that the reborn Master would recall the secret of producing melange in an axlotl tank. Waff could not remember the process, but when he met Edrik aboard the Navigator's heighliner in the Thalim system he revealed that he could instead produce a new variety of worm that was water resistant.

Over the following four years Waff's work exceeded all expectation. He perfected a synthetic worm, and the variant he raised in the oceans of Buzzell, the seaworm, produced a potent new form of spice that came to be called Ultraspice. His only payment was to be set down on the ruined planet of Rakis with his own experiment of armor-covered worms. In the same period Edrik learned of a deep fracture within the Guild: its Administrator branch had fallen, unknowing, under the influence of Enhanced Face Dancers, whose leader Khrone, in the guise of an Ixian researcher, had persuaded the Administrators to kill their guild-ship Navigators and replace them with Ixian mathematical compilers. Edrik watched again and again as one Navigator after another was killed and supplanted by the machine.

Death#

Once Edrik delivered Waff and his expedition to Rakis, he raced into deep space to attend a meeting the Oracle of Time had called. Khrone, still posing as a Guild Administrator, had uncovered the secret project. He surrounded Edrik's heighliner, took the Ultraspice for himself, and then killed Edrik as the Navigator destroyed his own vessel, in 15263 AG.