Planet of the Handlers: futar homeworld in the Scattering

The Planet of the Handlers was the name given by the crew of the no-ship Ithaca to an arboreal world in Human Scattering space, the homeworld of the futars and of the masters who guided the breed, whom the crew called Handlers. Whatever the Handlers themselves called the world was never learned. It entered the recorded history of the Ithaca's long flight in 15264 AG, when a prescience-guided jump by the ghola of Miles Teg brought the vessel out of fold space above its jungles. The landing that followed began as a homecoming for the ship's stranded futars and ended as an ambush, for behind the courtesy of the Handlers waited Enhanced Face Dancers in the service of the thinking machine leaders Omnius and Erasmus. The visit cost the Ithaca the futar clan of Hrrm, and it cost the ship two more lives whose loss stayed hidden for years afterward.

A nameless world in the Scattering#

The world lay in the regions settled by humanity during the Scattering, lush and arboreal, its surface covered in deep woods and jungle. It was the homeworld of the futars, the half-human and half-feline hunters bred by descendants of the Bene Tleilax who had gone out into the Scattering, a breed shaped for one purpose above all others, the hunting and killing of Honored Matres. Alongside the futars lived their masters, a race the Ithaca's people described as raccoon-looking men and came to call Handlers, since the native futars looked to them for guidance in all things.

The crew of the Ithaca gave the world the only name under which it was ever recorded. What the Handlers called their own planet was never discovered, and after the events of the Ithaca's visit, no one from the ship returned to ask.

The Ithaca's arrival#

The no-ship Ithaca had fled Chapterhouse carrying its crew, a faction of Bene Gesserit rebels, the captive Duncan Idaho, and a small clan of futars stranded aboard with no masters to guide them. After nine years of wandering, the ghola of Miles Teg drew on his surfacing prescient abilities and took the ship out of fold space above an arboreal and lush world no chart had promised.

The reaction aboard was immediate. The futars began acting nervously, and when the ship's scans detected futars living on the surface below, the agitation of Hrrm and his clan turned to joy. Hrrm, the leader of the ship's futars, declared that they had come to home, the home planet of the Handlers and futars. On the strength of that recognition, Hrrm and his entire clan were allowed to accompany the landing party to the surface. Sheeana Brugh led the party, joined by Teg, the ghola of Thufir Hawat, and the Jewish Rabbi who had sheltered among the ship's passengers.

Orak Tho and the hunt#

The leader of the Handlers in that district of the planet was named Orak Tho, and he received the visitors with an invitation. The landing party would observe a hunt of the Honored Matres, and the futars of the Ithaca were welcome to take part alongside their native kin. The crew had come down to the jungle world in one group, but the futars' Handlers soon guided them apart into two separate parties. Sheeana and Teg were placed in one group, the Rabbi and the ghola of Hawat in the second, and the full humans were led up to enclosed observation platforms standing four hundred feet above the forest, the two decks separated by a kilometer. The whole party remained especially on guard.

Hrrm and his clan were integrated with the futars native to the planet and encouraged to join the hunt. Five Honored Matres were released into the woods, and Hrrm led the group that followed the prey deep among the trees. The futars killed all five of the Matres, though the fighting also took the lives of two futars, one of them from the Ithaca clan.

The masks come off#

In the struggle, the Honored Matres killed one of the Handlers, and the death exposed what no scan had found. The Handler was in truth an Enhanced Face Dancer, one of the new breed of shapeshifters under the control of the thinking machine leaders Omnius and Erasmus. Sheeana and Teg, watching from their platform, were shocked to realize that the Handlers were Face Dancers and that the landing party was to be the next victim of the hunt they had been invited to observe.

Sheeana immediately shouted across to Hawat and the Rabbi in the other observation pod to get back to the Ithaca by any means necessary. Teg reawakened his faster-than-sight fighting abilities and killed many of the Face Dancers that stood between his group and the landing craft. The native futars, unable to tell the look-alikes from true Handlers, still obeyed the disguised Dancers, and as the party fought toward its craft the Handlers began to overwhelm them. It was Hrrm's clan that turned the balance. The futars of the Ithaca attacked the disguised Dancers, the Handlers, and the native futars alike, sacrificing their lives to buy the landing party the time it needed to escape. Hrrm died on the world he had greeted as home.

Flight of the Ithaca#

Sheeana and Teg's craft boarded the Ithaca safely, and Garimi, who had remained behind on the vessel, raced to the bridge. She found Duncan Idaho locked in a trance he had hypnotized himself into, dwelling on the sexual bonding he had undergone years earlier with Murbella, and had to bring him out of it. Sheeana ordered Idaho to keep a sharp watch for the returning craft carrying Hawat and the Rabbi. That craft was rammed hard by the pursuing Handlers as it approached, and though it caught fire in the landing bay, two figures disembarked from it alive.

Two more Handler craft then tried to ram the Ithaca itself. Idaho folded space to safety just as Omnius and Erasmus attempted once again to seize the vessel in their tachyon net, and as the no-ship sped away, the net was severely damaged.

A deception years in the unmasking#

The Ithaca left the Planet of the Handlers believing it had escaped with the loss of its futars alone. It had not. The ghola of Thufir Hawat and the Jewish Rabbi had been killed on the surface, and the two figures who walked out of the burning landing craft were Enhanced Face Dancers wearing their forms. Erasmus, whose mathematical projections had led him to believe that the ultimate Kwisatz Haderach was aboard the no-ship, had gained agents inside the very vessel he hunted. Over the following decade the two infiltrators quietly killed important gholas that the ship's leaders were raising, and when the deception finally broke into the open, the duplicates set about destroying the Ithaca's navigation, cloaking, and engine systems from within. Only then did Idaho look back and realize that the Dancers must have boarded years earlier, at the Planet of the Handlers.

The full extent of the machines' hold on the world itself was never established. It remained unknown whether all of the Handlers were Enhanced Face Dancers, or whether the machines had strategically placed their agents among a true Handler race on the futars' homeworld.