All corporations need directors, and CHOAM was no exception. Originally, they were the members of the Landsraad High Council. After the first few decades of operation, however, the composition of the board was changed to reflect the distribution of economic power among the Great Houses. Sometime toward the end of the first century after the Guild monopoly, membership on the board of directors of CHOAM was offered to any house which did more than 500 million solari's worth of trade through the Guild in a Standard year. Directors naturally voted their own shares in the meetings of the board, and also those of any house that wished to grant them a proxy. (It is worth noting that one of the reasons the Emperor and the Harkonnens moved so quickly after the Atreides took over Arrakis was their fears concerning the CHOAM board. Leto's popularity would probably have shifted the balance of power on the board, since he had become a member due to the wealth of the spice trade of Arrakis.)
The plan seemed more than fair with respect to the participation of the emperor. Moreover it also had the great advantage of cementing the power of the feudal powers vis-a-vis the remaining non-feudal states in the empire. In closing intersystem and interstellar trade to non-feudal states, the emperor offered an unequaled opportunity to the feudal powers to remove their most persistent worry. Not only did such an agreement offer the chance of restriction of these governments to their own worlds, it also, as the emperor's plan was organized, strengthened the very states that were most threatened by nonfeudal powers. The weakest feudal states were generally those that were closest geographically to non-feudal governments, those that had to compete on an almost daily basis with differing societies.
But brilliant as the structure of the proposal was, it would have failed if the participants had not been able to convince themselves that their shares in the corporation were fair. The shares were based on their trade without their systems over the past ten years. Such a sharing arrangement had some obvious advantages, one of the most compelling being the stipulation that once a government achieved membership, it could never fall below one share in the corporation. Thus, though shares in CHOAM were to be redistributed, on the basis of trade done, once every 100 years, participants would enjoy some benefit from off-planet trade even if they could no longer participate. The governments were all aware that natural resources were not permanent.
It was in this connection that the Imperial financial intelligence system proved its worth to the emperor and demonstrated its abilities to the governments. The fiscal information for each of the participants was so accurate and so complete that it was clear to many of the states that the emperor had been aware for many years of extensive tax fraud on their part. Others discovered to their surprise that internal corruption or inefficiency had been robbing them of a proper return on their own resources. The figures shocked some more than others, some pleasantly and others unpleasantly, but few escaped unscathed. When the time came for debate on the disposition of shares, many negative arguments were instantly ended.
Since the emperor was indeed as brilliant and cunning as he was now suspected of being, he had not depended on the unprepared reaction of the Synod to his proposal, He has tilled the soil of the Synod as the most assiduous of husbandmen. For months before the proposal was made to the whole Synod, a series of meetings had made clear to various of the feudal powers the advantages accruing to them. The most powerful of the Great Houses had been approached, first individually, and then in concert. The weaker of the feudal powers, which would become agents for the nonfeudal states, had been dealt with in regional groups. After several months of arguments concerning matters of detail, the charter was accepted. Once the approval of the Synod had been secured for the charter, the vote of the Landsraad was a foregone conclusion, since the membership in the two bodies so overlapped. A meeting of the Landsraad was necessary for the formality of a vote, however; this was accomplished in a matter of months after the Synod disbanded.
The creation of CHOAM, which limited membership to feudal states which controlled at least a planet, created the connection between Great Houses and control of off-world trade. Heretofore there had been several possible ways in which one might have defined a Great House; now one constant factor could be used. This new factor not only served to define the Great Houses, it also vastly strengthened them. The resources now available to a Great House through its shares in CHOAM produced, within a decade, such a substantial increase in the income of most of the participating houses that the possibility of a successful revolt all but disappeared.
More than this, the entire economy of the empire entered a period of rapid growth that lasted more than five centuries. This commercial expansion was accompanied by conquest; the empire expanded until it controlled all the habitable planets available to the current navigation abilities of the Guild.
The nature of the trade of these early centuries is not easy for us to grasp. Living as we do in a universe from which so many of the commodities in which our ancestors dealt daily have vanished, the normal commerce of this period seems the wildest extravagance. Even millennia after the formation of CHOAM, although long before the Atreides came to the planet, the residence of the Imperial governor of Arrakis was built with heavy wooden beams many meters in length. The largest of these beams discovered by archaeological excavations to date is 15.5 meters in length, and it is not complete. It is not clear where these beams came from, but it would have involved a very long journey, given the isolation of Arrakis and the ecological history of the nearest planets.
Such trade was supported with ease by the expanding economy of the empire after the formation of CHOAM. The rapacity of the exploitative economic practices of the time could be overlooked since the steady acquisition of new worlds not only replaced the losses but added to the available resources of the system.
But as trade began to penetrate to the limits of travel, and the expansion of the economy began to slow, the commercially weaker members of the empire began to suffer. Naturally, the first difficulties came in the financial aspects of their societies, but in the end this spread to the political sphere as well. Thus, some seven centuries after the formation of CHOAM, and two centuries after the economy's rate of expansion began to slow, we can discern the first substantial changes in the membership of the participating partners of CHOAM. The planet Ecaz now appears in the records of the meetings of CHOAM as an independent voter, as do the worlds of Harmonthep and Grumman. At least one of these worlds, Harmonthep, does not last long as an independent, and when it disappears from the records of the meetings of CHOAM it vanishes from the historical record altogether.
But a far more important indication of internal unrest in the political systems of the members of CHOAM can be inferred from the percentages of the vote exercised by the emperor. Having begun with only 20% of the votes of the corporation, within the proceeding five centuries the emperor had increased his share to 25%, and with the votes of those members whom he controlled, the emperor commanded in fact closer to 35% of the partners' votes, While still short of an outright majority, the Great Houses could not fail to see the meaning of the trend. Since the emperor could almost always persuade at least 15% more of the partners to his arguments, in almost all instances the partners affirmed the position of House Corrino.
In general, though, what we have of the records of the meetings of CHOAM are a testimony to the stability of the worlds of the empire. While it is true there is a steady growth in the power of the emperor in the meetings of the Directorate, the emperor and his supporters never controlled more than 60% of the vote, and the emperor himself never more than 40%. In addition, while there was a continuing turnover in the membership from century to century, the change was never more than 10%, a rate of change which the political and economic balance of the empire could easily support. Such a rate of change proved that some entrepreneurs had succeeded in raising the status of their minor house to the exalted level of the Great Houses. The certainty of the chance of social mobility made the restrictions of the faufreluch
es (class system) tolerable.
Once established, only minor changes occurred within the workings of CHOAM until the defeat of House Corrino by House Atreides on Arrakis. Even that event did not immediately affect the management of CHOAM other than to transfer to Duke Paul Muad'Dib, now the emperor, the shares of CHOAM once controlled by House Corrino. At the time of transfer these shares represented 38% of the votes of the Directorate.
The profound alteration in the affairs of CHOAM resulted from the crusade launched against those houses — and there were many — who went into revolt against the new government. The shares of all defeated houses were taken over by House Atreides, and after the battles were over, the Imperial House for the first time was in outright control of CHOAM with 51% of its shares. In addition, the priesthood of Muad'Dib, the power of which had waxed during the crusade, owned 5% of the shares. This shift in the control of CHOAM accounts for much of the ensuing hatred of House Atreides. Not only were the citizens of the empire exposed to an increasingly despotic rule, they had lost much of their wealth.
F.M.
Further references: IMPERIAL ADMINISTRATION; LANDSRAAD; T.B. Jones, Series of articles in Journal of Ancient Economies (Lagash VII), Vds. 2933; T. Eboyane, The Faufreluches, the Great Chain of Being, and Natural Science (Yorba: Rose).
CIBUS HOOD
A form of military camouflage. The earliest model of this disguise is believed to have been developed for Sheset X, the Corrino Emperor, in 9731. The hood was one of several devices Sheset requested from the Ixian Council of Scientists during the first two months of his reign, all providing concealment of protection. The emperor had assumed the throne knowing that several factions wished to assassinate him, and his enlistment of Ixian technology was his way of trying to protect himself against them.
One of those factions succeeded in 9732, only a year after Sheset came to power. The cibus hood, however, survived the man who had commissioned it and went on to become one of Ix's most popular exports.
The hood was a purposely shapeless sack of deepest black material, the secret of whose manufacture remains known only to the Ixians to the present day. Cibus cloth absorbed not only visible light, but all known forms of radiation; this characteristic rendered the features of its wearer indetectable even to the sublest investigative instruments. It is believed that part of the manufacturing process for the cloth involved treating it with chemicals similar to those used on Guild ship heatshields; but this theory has yet to be proven. The Ixians neither confirm nor deny it.
Some property of the cloth limits its effectiveness in accordance with the amount used, with a sharp decrease in concealing power first observed when hoods larger than those needed to fit the average human head were manufactured during the 9800s. After many experiments were conducted, the notion of using cibus hoods as military camouflage was reluctantly abandoned even by the most determined of the Great Houses, and personal-sized hoods became standard issue for assassins and spies.
CONE OF SILENCE
A field or zone wherein the sound of the human voice was electronically distorted so that recording and amplifying devices could not reproduce it effectively or clearly, sometimes called a "sound-deadening field." The size of a "cone of silence" depended partly on the strength of the electronic impulse broadcast, but for practical purposes it was usually a small area about three to four meters in diameter.
The purpose of the cone of silence was fairly obvious in an aristocratic society given to Byzantine refinements of palace intrigue. According to the Oral History, there were more than twenty cones of silence in the main Harkonnen palace on Giedi Prime, and it was in one of these that Mentat Piter de Vries and Baron Vladimir discussed an unsuccessful assassination attempt — the famous episode of the poisoned kindjal — on Duke Leto Atreides. It is known that Baron Harkonnen once threatened an emissary of Emperor Shaddam IV, Count Hasimir Fenring, in a cone of silence at his palace. The cone of silence was also used by other Great Houses, of course, and enjoyed an existence at the Imperial court in the pre-Atreides Imperium.
Originally, the cone of silence was developed by Ixian technicians in the fourth millennium, but it proved to be fairly easy for electronic technicians to reproduce. Nevertheless, the Great Houses frequently hired Ixian masters, under the supervision of the House master assassin, to inspect and refurbish the auditory facilities — both recorders and cones — of a residential palace.
Further references: Harq al-Ada, The Dune Catastrophe, tr. Miigal Reed (Mukan: Lothar); Tovat Gwinsted, The Chronicles of the Conquerors (Caladan: INS Books).
CONTRACEPTION
For centuries after the Butlerian Jihad, contraception was an idea seldom mentioned and a practice even more rarely put to use. Since it was the machine-ordered abortion of one female child which sparked the Jihad, and since so few planets had escaped the Jihad's wrath without substantial loss of life, the practice on most worlds was for each couple to have and raise as many children as possible.
After the Treaty of Corrin — and, more importantly, the Great Convention — established the Imperium, however, that custom was slowly changed. Smaller families with two to four children became more the norm among the Houses Major; the Houses Minor and others occupying lower stations in the faufreluches behaved in the usual fashion, aping the habits of their superiors. By 980, the earliest Imperial publications on the subject of birth control had been published and research in this area was advancing rapidly.
After 6795, there is little to indicate that any further work in the field, aside from the inevitable minute refinements, was done. (One notable exception, which will be discussed later, took place in the 7200s on Arrakis.) Contraceptive methods had been reduced to an extremely reliable few and were in use on every world in the Imperium.
Most popular was the scrotal implant. This technique, which involved the insertion of a pellet weighing approximately one-tenth of a gram on the underside of the scrotum, ensured timed release of Siranil into the surrounding tissues for a period of six months. The drug, which was a specific against active spermatozoa, completely dissipated at the end of that time, restoring the user's fertility. It exhibited no harmful side effects and could, if desired, be used throughout a man's fertile years.
There were some men, of course, who considered the implant unsatisfactory. The Corrino Emperors, high-ranking officers in the Imperial Sardaukar, and the heads of most of the Great Houses were among them. It was far more the rule than the exception for these men to maintain a wife and one or more concubines — the Royal Harem being the most obvious example — and while they might choose not to impregnate a certain woman at any one time, the idea that they could impregnate no woman lacked appeal. The practice in such families then was for the woman to use a contraceptive drug (usually ingested in one form or another) as effective, if not as long-lasting, as Siranil: Estrekan and Dalavix were among the most popular.
Exceptions to this drug use were those women who had received training with the Bene Gesserit. The Sisterhood taught its members to maintain and adjust many of the internal balances of their bodies, and one of the skills a B.G. commanded was the ability to regulate the pH balance of her uterus. From the point at which ovulation took place until the beginning of her menstrual flow, a woman who did not wish to conceive simply made her womb an inhospitable environment. (It was a similar, but more delicate process which allowed the B.G. to choose the gender of the fetus by allowing only the desired type of sperm to teach the Fallopian tubes.)
Yet another method was introduced in the 7200s by the Fremen of Arrakis. From their earliest years on the desert planet, the Fremen had known that addiction to melange was unavoidable and that interaction between the spice and almost any other type of drug ranged from dangerous to deadly. It was obvious that the common drugs in use in the rest of the Imperium could not be used by Fremen; nor was it desirable to go to the Bene Gesserit "witches" for help. The Fremen doctors studied the problem carefully, considering it in light of their people's unique re
quirements, and arrived at an elegant solution.
Patterning their method after a sexual technique mentioned in some of their earliest historical records, the Fremen learned to separate the male orgasm from ejaculation. At the time they reached puberty, boys were given detailed instruction on the technique and were not considered to have entered into true adulthood before mastering it, whatever their other accomplishments. A young man who proved incapable of learning such control was seen as a danger not only to himself (since unnecessary ejaculations were a waste of precious water) but to his partners. Because the late stages of pregnancy could slow a woman down and sometimes make it dangerous for her to travel, no Fremen woman would endanger herself and her troop by running a constant risk of unwanted impregnation; an uncontrolled male was generally a celibate.
While abortifacients were available, their use was unpopular and they were illegal on a number of worlds. This revulsion for contraception-after-the-fact also had its roots in the period of the Butlerian Jihad, and it was far stronger than the distaste for contraceptive techniques had ever been. In part because of this hatred, and in part because of the near-absolute effectiveness of the available contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs were manufactured and used primarily as weapons of intrigue. (How much easier to eliminate a rival's heir before its birth!) Giedi Prime, homeworld of House Harkonnen, was the source of more than eighty percent of the abortifacients produced from 3005-10193; this unpopular specialization invited harsh criticism from the rest of the Great Houses, and especially from the Bene Gesserit, who saw the existence of any such drugs as an implied threat to their breeding plan. (That abhorrence only applied to their existence in the hands of those outside the control of the Sisterhood, it should be noted. The B.G. were not above employing so distasteful a method in their own service.)
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