Hrrm: futar leader of the Ithaca

Hrrm was a male futar, a hunter of the half-human and half-feline breed created by members of the Bene Tleilax who had gone out into the Scattering. He was among the futars carried aboard the no-ship Ithaca when it fled Chapterhouse, and he became the leader of the small clan of his kind stranded on the vessel through its years of wandering. Though his breed had been shaped to hunt and kill Honored Matres, Hrrm formed an unlikely bond with Sheeana Brugh, the Bene Gesserit rebel who came to understand the torment of futars cut off from their masters, the Handlers. His life ended in 15264 AG on the world his people called home, where he and his clan gave their lives against the Enhanced Face Dancers of the Enemy so that Sheeana's landing party could reach safety.

A hunter far from his masters#

Futars were a genetic hybrid of human and feline stock, created by members of the Bene Tleilax who had gone out into the Scattering, allegedly as a tool for hunting down and destroying Honored Matres. They were not creatures made to live alone. Each clan looked to its Handlers, the masters who guided the breed, and a futar severed from that guidance was a diminished thing.

Hrrm knew that severance for years. When the no-ship Ithaca escaped from Chapterhouse carrying its crew, a faction of Bene Gesserit rebels, and the encumbered Duncan Idaho, Hrrm and his companions were trapped aboard, prisoners of the vessel's flight as much as any of its human passengers. As the ship wandered through the years that followed, the futars remained a strange presence in its corridors, loyal to no one aboard and waiting for masters who were nowhere to be found. Hrrm stood as the leader of this stranded clan, and he continually pressed his demand that his kind be guided by their unknown Handlers.

Sheeana's friend#

It was Sheeana Brugh who crossed the distance between the futars and the humans of the Ithaca. During the long years of the ship's escape she befriended Hrrm and the rest of his clan, and she came to understand what the others had missed: the half-feline beings were tormented by their separation from their masters. Whatever ferocity had been bred into them, the futars were suffering.

That ferocity had not been dulled by captivity. The futars had been bred for one purpose above all, the hunting and killing of Honored Matres, and the instinct did not distinguish cleanly between the Matres and the Sisterhood that opposed them. One night Hrrm slipped free aboard the no-ship, and Sheeana came upon him as he feasted on the bones and flesh of a Bene Gesserit sister. Another commander might have ordered the futars destroyed. Sheeana instead convinced Hrrm that the Bene Gesserit were different from the Honored Matres, and Hrrm vowed that he would never kill another sister. He kept that vow for the rest of his life.

The world of the Handlers#

After nine years of wandering, the ghola of Miles Teg guided the Ithaca out of foldspace above a lush, arboreal world inhabited by a race of raccoon-featured men. The reaction among the futars was immediate. The scanning crew found Hrrm and his clan agitated and excited beyond anything seen in their years aboard, and Hrrm declared that they had come home, to the home planet of the Handlers and the futars.

Hrrm and his entire clan were permitted to accompany the landing party, which included Sheeana, the Rabbi, the ghola of Thufir Hawat, and Teg. On the surface they were received by Orak Tho, the Chief Handler of that district of the planet, who announced that a special ceremony would be held for the visitors: the hunting and killing of five captured Honored Matres by a clan of futars. Hrrm and his sub-clan were invited to take part in the hunt.

The Handlers then divided the party. The full humans were led up to enclosed observation platforms standing four hundred feet above the hunting grounds, Sheeana and Teg on one guarded platform and Hawat and the Rabbi on another, separated by a kilometer. Hrrm and his clan were integrated with the futars native to the world. When the five Honored Matres were released into the woods, the Matres put up a long and bitter battle, and Hrrm led the hunters after their prey deep into the trees.

The last stand#

The hunt ended with all five Matres dead, at the cost of two futars, one of them from the Ithaca clan. But the ceremony had revealed something far worse than its own savagery. It became apparent to Sheeana and Teg that some of the Handlers were not Handlers at all but Enhanced Face Dancers, placed on the world by the Enemy, the thinking machine masters Omnius and Erasmus. The native futars, unable to tell the difference, still obeyed the look-alikes as they had obeyed their true masters.

The landing party broke for their craft, and the Handlers began to overwhelm them. In that moment the futars of the Ithaca made their choice. Hrrm and his clan turned on the disguised Face Dancers, the Handlers, and even the native futars who stood with them, and they attacked without regard for their own survival. Their sacrifice bought the party the precious time it needed to reach the landing craft and return to the no-ship, which folded space away from the world moments ahead of the machines' tachyon net.

Hrrm died on the planet he had spent nine years longing to reach, killed defending the humans who had once been his jailers. Whether all the Handlers of that world had been replaced by Enhanced Face Dancers, or only those the machines had strategically placed, was never learned by the survivors of the Ithaca. What was certain was that the futar who had once fed on a Bene Gesserit sister ended his life honoring the vow he had made to Sheeana, and that his clan followed him into that final hunt.