Watching the desert planet recede as the spacefolder accelerated away, Taref struggled to imagine the sights and experiences they would have on faraway worlds. The Holtzman engines folded space, and the ship twisted itself out of the Canopus star system.
While the great vessel was in transit, Draigo went to address his new recruits. “You have everything you need? We will provide water, food, and new clothing.”
“So much water,” Lillis said in a voice like a sigh.
“And we already have clothing,” Chumel said.
Though Taref knew their distilling suits were well-made outfits that had saved their lives many times out in the open desert, Draigo frowned at the dusty garb. “You will clean up and dress exactly like other workers. You cannot complete your mission if you stand out. You must pass unnoticed like faint shadows.” He wrinkled his nose and sniffed deeply, although Taref had never noticed any odor among the desert people. “We will instruct you in traditional hygiene practices.”
“No Freeman will let another take away his stillsuit,” said Bentur, a gruff-voiced young man who usually kept his words to himself.
“We will provide better garments for your temporary use. In the meantime we will hold your things for you and return them whenever you wish to go back to Arrakis.”
“I heard offworlders are thieves,” Shurko said.
Draigo gave a small smile that was more like a smirk. “And I heard that the Freemen of the desert know very little about offworlders.” Shurko took offense and looked ready to fight the Mentat.
Taref said, “Stop, Shurko — you gave me your word.”
“I did not agree to be insulted!”
“Stop being stupid. They are taking us away from Arrakis at great expense, showing us their ways. They have no need to steal from us. Remember that planet with the ocean and the rain falling from the sky? If he meant to deceive us, this is an elaborate and costly trick.”
“But what does he expect from us that would be worth such an investment?” Lillis asked.
“It is not a trick — it’s an opportunity,” Draigo said. “We will teach you about offworlders and about our commercial competitors. We will give you the modern wonders that were merely rumors in your little desert village.”
“It’s called a sietch,” Lillis said.
Draigo gave a brief nod. “Very well. I will learn from you, as you learn from me.”
TAREF WAS STUNNED when he and his friends were sprayed with water to rinse off the dust and grit, and the leftover water was allowed to simply drain away, where it was presumably recycled. Always before, he had scrubbed his hands and body with fine powder-sand, but now he felt much cleaner — even cleaner than a person might be if he were blasted by a sandstorm.
This waste of water was an unbelievable extravagance — and a hint of what was possible out there. Draigo had told them there were many worlds in the Imperium, and most were far more hospitable than Arrakis. Thinking back on his life up to this point, Taref realized that he had seen nothing, done nothing, been nothing. If VenHold let him travel as promised, there seemed as many possibilities for him now as there were stars in the night sky.
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.”