While schisms and power struggles among naib, council and Reverend Mother were theoretically possible, they did not seem to occur. Each constituent of this authority structure carried out its function toward the purpose of preserving the Fremen as a people who faced the genocidal policies of the Harkonnens as well as the deprivations of life on the planet Dune.
As each sietch strove to maintain its autonomy while seeking to coordinate with other sietches in the interests of the common struggle, the Council of Leaders eventually came to play a significant role. Under the leadership of Muad'Dib, the Council brought together the powerful forces which finally defeated the oppressors. However, once the victory was achieved, the Fremen authority system was transformed utterly under the absolute rulership of Paul and the Regency that followed.
M.O.
Further references: FREMEN entries; REVEREND MOTHER; Daiwid Kuuan, Monuments of the Zensunni Migrations (Salusa Secundus: Morgan and Sharak); Defa 'l-Fanini, Taaj 'l-Fremen, esp. Vols. 5, 6 (Salusa Secundus: Morgan and Sharak).
SPACING GUILD, FOUNDATION
The early history of the Spacing Guild begins with Ixian (Koman) refugees from the Butlerian Jihad, led by Aurelius Venport and Norma Cevna, who landed on Tupile, established the Society of Mystic Mariners, and laid the groundwork for what would later become the Guild.
The development of the Guild itself began shortly after the disappearance of Venport and the death of Cevna. The Society they had founded had allowed gifted Tupilians to join their ranks, and one such was Frelo Mason, who, more than any other, was responsible for the Spacing Guild's mature form and activities. Mason (105 B.G. — 29 B.G.), described by contemporaries as swarthy, handsome and cunning, lacked the characteristic Tupilian desire for a settled life. He and some of his companions possessed a keener awareness of what the universe had to offer and harbored interstellar ambitions equal to those of the Ixian exiles. When Aurelius Venport was lost in space in 79 B.G., Mason assumed command of the dispirited Society, transforming it into a predominantly Tupilian organization serving Tupilian needs as he defined them. The remaining Ixians were neither cast out more to suffer a diminution in importance: they continued to fill valuable roles in the Society, enjoying the authority they had exercised before (subject to Mason's veto), a leavening the group with their idealism. Under Mason's leadership, the Society remained a closed hierarchy with strict entrance requirements; he thus protected the Society's integrity, discipline and mystique. But his ultimate goal remained that of the Ixian exiles: an interstellar shipping monopoly, moving swiftly and safely through hyperspace. By the time of his death the Guild was well along toward that goal.
Leadership of the now strong and well-organized Guild passed smoothly to Frelo's son Jasta Mason (60 B.G-31 A.G.), who inherited his father's abilities as well as ambitions. Over the next three decades Jasta concerned himself with assembling a substantial fleet and solving the problem of navigating it. The Guild had known of the powers of melange since the days of Venport through, it is believed, the clandestine machinations of the Bene Gesserit. It is also believed probable that during these early decades of Jasta's leadership, when the fleet was growing and making many secret interstellar voyages, the Guild found the planet Arrakis and the source of the spice so vital to their navigational mastery. Thus, by 12 B.G., the Guild was secure enough in its abilities and resources to reveal itself from a position of strength.
The Guild's reconnaissance missions had become more numerous, extending its knowledge of political developments in the inhabited worlds and stretching its reach beyond the borders of known space. Mason perceived that the Corrinos were eager to convert their empire into a true Imperium, with a more stable and long-lasting basis than the might of the Sardaukar. He immediately saw a central role for the Guild in this transformation. But the first approach Mason directed, though carefully planned, was a disaster.
Mason's first agent, Zarv, was sent to the Imperial Governor of Deneb to discreetly feel out response to the Guild's proposal. The agent offered the possibility of the return of interstellar travel and suggested the governor contact his superiors so a meeting could be arranged with the agent's principals. The governor, in a fit of ravening greed, promptly subjected the agent to the several crude interrogatory techniques available to him in an effort to seize this plum for himself. Unable to believe that the agent had never even seen a member of the Guild, the governor kept pressing his questions. The agent, unknown even to himself, had been provided by the Guild with mental conditioning which would result in his death before he could reveal anything of harm to the Guild. The agent died.
This horrible failure sent a shock of fear through the Guild's directors, locking them in a policy struggle. They had learned enough about the Sardaukar to feel understandable qualms about dealing directly with House Corrino — what was to prevent invasion of their planet if its location became known to this ruthless military organization? Nor could the Guild approach the Landsraad for a similar reason — what was to prevent the Houses Major from joining to use the Guild against the emperor? And what of their use of melange — how could that secret be safeguarded indefinitely once hyperspace commerce brought the inhabited worlds much closer together?
These were hard questions, involving the survival not just of the envisioned Guild monopoly, but of Tupile itself. The debate narrowed to two choices: retreat back into secrecy, or continue trying to negotiate. When put to a vote, the issue deadlocked. As chairman, Mason broke the impasse in a speech that one historian, Adelheyd Heyman, claiming access to the minutes of the meeting, records:
Zarv died horribly, and we're all sorry about that, but we can't let it panic us. You say, "Be safe; be careful," but Zarv wasn't. Norma Cevna wasn't when the spice was killing her brain cell by cell. Venport wasn't when he took the fleet into The Void. If the Ixians had been safe and careful, all of us right now would be sitting around a campfire wearing skins.
This guild can make us great — I tell you, we can be the wings of the Imperium. Right now, this moment, as we argue, a new humanity is being conceived, and we have the chance to shape the child that will be born. Hesitate now, and the chance will never come again. As the Imperium develops, that child will grow, and if we hide on Tupile for — how long? a century? two centuries? — when we come out of our burrows and look at him, we'll see that he can fly, all right, but his wings won't be Guild ships.
But they can be: we can be those wings — if we remember who and what we are, and be bold!
His speech moved them, and a unanimous board affirmed his policy. The approaches would continue, mixing boldness with a reserved prudence based on a realistic appraisal of current politics. They sent another emissary, this time to the governor of Nabatea, who proved more temperate in his reaction.
Even so, the Nabatean was not inclined to believe claims put forth by an agent who had never seen his superiors (having gotten his instructions by radio), and the governor demanded a demonstration. The Guild therefore transported the governor to the Imperial Court in three standard days, a journey which usually took two years. (Initiating a practice that was later followed without exception, a Guild pilot brought the governor's ship into orbit and docked it within the heighliner. The Nabateans were confined to their own craft during the voyage, and were never permitted a glimpse of the Guild ship or its crew.)
The Emperor Saudir I was then involved in touchy dealings with the Landsraad over the form of a government that would permit both parties to thrive. The revelation of the Guild, whose claims were manifestly true, brought a pause to the Corrino-Landsraad talks while Saudir integrated the potent new factor of the Guild into his political calculations. He saw three alternatives: deal with the Guild on a basis of mutual advantage; seize control of the Guild for himself; or destroy the Guild. The Sardaukar made the last solution possible, but the potential advantages offered by a return of swift interstellar trade argued against it. The determination of the Guild to remain secret and separate from the rest of society,
and the abilities they had shown in the Deneb affair, convinced Saudir that taking control would be very difficult. Finally, Saudir had to take into consideration the position of the Landsraad, who certainly could see the benefits of what the Guild had to offer, but also greatly feared the threat to their feudal governmental structure which unrestricted interstellar trade posed.
Saudir, a wise and canny ruler, chose to deal with this complex problem in a great Financial Synod, convened on Aerarium IV in 10 B.G. The emotions of those attending were not unlike those of a rabbit faced with a snake: an almost unbearable combination of fascination and fear. The Guild, too, came to Aerarium IV with intense mixed emotions. While the advantages of rebirth of interstellar trade were clear to them, the dangers of dealing with the emperor and the Landsraad were also obvious. For at the root of the extraordinary secrecy of the Guild lay its great danger. Their ability to guide ships through interstellar hyperspace lay not only in learning, but also in a secret. Certainly one needed to be a trained navigator, but the essence of their abilities lay in the spice-trance. Thus, unlike the abilities gained through a long period of training, the central power of the Guild could be stolen. If one learned the secret of the spice-trance, one learned what the Guild knew.
A masterstroke of purposeful misdirection saved the Guild. Like kings bearing gifts, they offered melange, representing it only as a spice which would extend human longevity. The Guild ambassadors had been insulated from the exploration and development arms of the organization, and could honestly assert ignorance of the source of melange. By this maneuver — a daring one for the Guilds — they hoped to allay any suspicion that melange had additional effects. The stratagem worked for centuries until the Guild's reliance on spice-prescience was discerned by Paul Atreides.
At the same time, the emissaries warned against attempts to use the Guild for purposes other than those negotiated. They referred obliquely to earlier debate within the Imperial Court on the possibility of finding and seizing the planetary base of the Guild. The ambassadors clearly implied that if any such action was even seriously entertained, the Guild would retreat into secrecy. They pointed out that no political entity then existing could match the Guild in space, and furthermore, that a search for their home world would take years. During those years, the Guild, even if eventually found, would have destroyed its hyperspace industry. No one would benefit from reckless adventurism, but everyone would benefit if the Guild were allowed to exercise its modest function. And so it was agreed.
The few years following the close of the Synod in 5 B.G., which had given rise to CHOAM and the Imperium Mason had foreseen were spent in bargaining sessions in which a host of details — commercial areas, product rights, monetary exchange, tariffs, schedules, transport costs and priorities — were haggled over until agreement was achieved. These sessions involved the newly created CHOAM directors and the growing number of off-world Guild agents.
Jasta Mason died in 31 A.G. of natural causes, after a long and distinguished career. He was one of the great figures in the history of human commerce, but he died without a successor of comparable stature and authority. Yet it was a measure of his accomplishment that the Guild did not suffer from his passing. The organization that Jasta, and his father before him, had partly inherited and partly created worked well through a board of directors. Intelligent and capable people, they no longer needed empire builders; their purpose was not to create but to maintain and refine the Spacing Guild — to plume the wings of the Imperium.
S.T.
Further references: VENPORT, AURELIUS; CEVNA, NORMA; SPACING GUILD OPERATION; INTERSTELLAR FLIGHT, PRE-GUILD; TUPILE; Adelheyd Heyman, Kvelenbuk zur Reyksgishikls des Grosser Geldgishaftersynod, trans. T. H. Erussus (orig. pub. 753; rpt. Fides: Manx).
SPACING GUILD, OPERATIONS AND ORGANIZATION
The term "Spacing Guild" was a name offered for convenience to those it served; among its members it was known as the Corpus Luminis Praenuntiantis, which may be translated "The Union of the Foreseeing Eye"; its motto was Quilibet, Quolibet, Quandolibet: "Anything, anytime, anyplace." Composed in part of members genetically engineered for special sensitivity to melange, the CLP, hereafter referred to as the Guild, produced Navigators and Steersmen whose prescience enabled them to guide spacecraft through hyperspace without the computers tabued by the Butlerian Jihad. Beyond these specialized members, it included ancillary personnel, all of them making up a closed society of an unknown homeworld whose heighliners maintained and regulated transportation between planetary systems.
The Guild held the civilized worlds together until the invention of Ixian navigation devices in 14132, when the Guild monopoly was broken. For millennia its power was great, in one case even naming the successor to the Golden Lion Throne. Only when the Atreides came to power was Guild influence checked through control of the melange they required.
DISCOVERY AND USE OF MELANGE. A historical puzzle that has resisted solution for tens of thousands of years is how the Guild discovered the navigational uses of melange. (It is probably the best known of all historical mysteries, from the Kaitainan proverb at the head of the chapter on the Accompanitive Case in R. V. Yun's Galach First Book, used by thousands of students on scores of worlds:
Gwipoot gwigilizim, gwinau gwispitim;
Gwipoot gwigilitim, gwinau gwispiizim.
"Without Guild, no spice; without spice, no Guild.") Disregarding fantasies such as the claim that melange was a gift from aliens desiring the reunion of humanity, we are left with only two serious possibilities: independent discovery by the Guild, or a disclosure from the Bene Gesserit. Each of these explanations has serious drawbacks.
The Aurelian exiles who found and restored Tupile knew nothing of spice, yet by 84 B.G. they understood its navigational benefits. In that year Norma Cevna made the first spice-trance-guided journey through hyperspace. By the year 10, when the Guild joined the Imperium, melange had been extensively tested and its use in hyperspace was routine. If the Guild, or its forerunner, the Society of Mystic Mariners, had discovered melange on their own, the find must have come between Aurelius Venport's departure from Ix in 110 B.G. and Cevna's first flight in 84 B.G. Arrakis was the sole source of melange. Therefore, if the Aurelian exiles touched on an uninhabited Arrakis (a possibility) and found it uninhabitable (a certainty), how could they have located melange, and if they had, what possible reason would they have had for taking some with them? Its value would have been unknown to them (they surely could not have tested it in situ), and we must remember that the exiles were searching desperately for a home world, not for a new cuisine.
If the exiles learned of the effects of spice after settling on Tupile, where did that spice come from? It seems beyond reason that the Society, wrestling with the problem of hyperspace navigation without computers, would have sent scouts on years-long realspace journeys to remote planets on the off chance that one might find some natural substance of value in navigation. No matter how intelligent and energetic, how does a small group (numbering in the hundreds) rebuild a planetary industry, restore its educational system, overawe and regiment its populace, redesign spacecraft along revolutionary lines, and carry out lengthy and numerous random explorations, all in sixteen years? That the Ixian exiles accomplished the first four of these jobs is marvelous; that they did all five is incredible.
A second hypothesis has attracted more support. On Praxus III, the exiles admitted to their group a woman who claimed to have been cast out of the Bene Gesserit — Dardanius Leona Shard. Her name at least is consonant with her allegation of Reverend Mother status. According to the second theory, Leona taught Norma Cevna about melange. To accept it, we must believe that the B.G. knew of spice a century before the rest of humanity, a fact for which there is no evidence. We know that the B.G. used many substances in the rite that conferred Reverend Mother status, and melange is never mentioned among them.
Finally, the "voices within" of the Bene Gesserit adepts seem different in kind from the effects of m
elange useful to the Guild: the voices were echoes of the past, but Guild Steersmen needed windows into the future.
Despite all these objections, there is something attractive about the idea of a secret B.G. hand in the founding of the Guild: suppose Leona Shard was not cast out, but planted on Praxus specifically to intercept and join the exiles. What motive could the B.G. have had? The answers to that question are as numerous as the benefits an organization like the Guild may furnish: the genes of intelligent and adventurous people, perhaps one day useful in the breeding program; an organization tying an empire together, widening the resources of the gene-pool; the enormous political leverage that hyperspace monopoly would wield. Still, how could the Sisterhood have known that the exiles would stop on Praxus? Even Bene Gesserit sources shed little light on this and associated questions, but one of the most closely reasoned conjectures outside their ranks comes from Doris Bhrazen in her Pursuit of the Kwisatz Haderach:
The future to the Bene Gesserit was a flux, its swirls dependent on every pebble dropped into the pool. A larger pool meant less serious consequences from slight disturbances, but a larger gene-pool required better physical transportation. If the Sisterhood could have become the Guild, they would have done so. But open operation was not their way. Also, at heart they were Butlerians, and averse to traveling paths open to people like Aurelius Venport. He had the boldness and the lack of scruples to test the spice given him by the B.G. But it would have been a purchase, not a gift: their scheme was to control his possible success by routing melange through his mistress, Norma Cevna, who would then rule Aurelius and the entire enterprise; and the B.G. would then rule Norma. It almost worked.1
The Dune Encyclopedia Page 99
