Guild Navigator

A Guild Navigator, also known as a Steersman, was a senior rank of pharmaceutically enhanced human within the Spacing Guild and the highest rung of Guild ambition. Physically transformed by consuming massive amounts of spice melange in a microgravity habitat, Navigators used a highly conditioned form of prescience to cross interstellar and intergalactic space safely in the colossal starships called Heighliners. Their foresight let them perceive aspects of the grand designs of Paul Atreides, whom they came to regard as a threat to their power and to the stability of the Known Universe. (Dune; Dune Messiah)

Transformation#

As with all spice addicts, the first sign of melange-induced biochemistry showed in the eyes, tinting the sclera and iris the dark shade of blue known as blue-in-blue, or the Eyes of Ibad, a total blue so dark as to be almost black. To sustain their prescience, Navigators not only consumed large quantities of melange but lived within rectangular antigravity tanks filled with high concentrations of orange spice gas. This extreme and prolonged exposure, together with years in microgravity, caused their bodies to atrophy, mutate, and elongate over time. A late-stage Navigator was likened to a humanoid fish, an elongated figure with finned feet and hugely fanned membranous hands, a tiny mouth and small nose set in a gigantic face with pulsing temples. Their speech took the form of singsong ululations rendered by a mechanical translator into impersonal Galach. (Dune; Dune Messiah)

Purpose and the fold of space#

Navigators were responsible for guiding spacefolders through fields of celestial hazards. Through clairvoyance bestowed by excessive exposure to melange, taken both orally and as gas, they could peer across vast distances of space and into the near future. In the expanded books, early Holtzman spacefolding lost roughly one ship in ten; a Navigator's time-defying senses could plot a safe course and avoid dangerous routes before the fold even began. They effectively replaced the navigational supercomputers banned and destroyed during the Butlerian Jihad, whose crusade against thinking machines forbade making a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Humanity relied on these peculiar individuals and their foresight for thousands of years, though by the age of the God Emperor and after it Ixian no-ships and navigation machines had begun to offer another way across space. (Dune; Dune: The Battle of Corrin; God Emperor of Dune; Heretics of Dune)

David Lynch put a Navigator on screen near the start of his film, as covered in our guide to the 1984 Dune. (Dune (1984 film))

The Guild's privacy and Paul Atreides#

Duke Leto Atreides I noted that the Guild was as jealous of its privacy as of its monopoly, and that not even its own agents ever saw a Navigator, leading his son Paul to wonder whether they had mutated beyond human appearance. Because of their limited divination, Guild Navigators could see aspects of Paul's grand designs and perceived him as a threat, a fear visible in the Guild's frenetic activity around Arrakis. After Paul's victory in the Desert War and the Battle of Arrakeen, two Guildsmen present in the entourage of Shaddam Corrino IV, tall figures in grey, sought to gain the upper hand by threatening Paul's shipping privileges. They were soon cowed by his threat to permanently poison all spice creation on the planet, an outcome their prescience confirmed as legitimate. (Dune)

Edric#

A prominent figure during the reign of Padishah Emperor Paul Muad'Dib Atreides, the Navigator Edric took part in a plot against the Emperor some twelve years after his ascension. His fellow conspirators were the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, the Tleilaxu Face Dancer Scytale, Princess Irulan Corrino, and a number of Fremen defectors. Edric's role was to shield the conspiracy from the Emperor's prescient foresight, since oracles had difficulty seeing one another in the timescape, and to deliver a resurrected and lethally conditioned Mentat-ghola of the Atreides swordmaster Duncan Idaho to the young monarch. After the plot failed following Scytale's death, Edric and Mohiam were executed by the Fremen Naib Stilgar, on orders from Paul's sister, Alia Atreides. (Dune Messiah)