gyroscope and keeping his balance But now the wire begins to heave, to flutter, to bounce and spin and buck But our balancer can see the future, can predict each movement to come and can therefore place himself m the right attitude and angle, spinning his batons at the speed and vector essential to remain upright Picture such a performance (for we will certainly never see one) and you have a metaphor of the task of the Spacing Guild Steersman at work Our outline of the navigation of a heighlmer through hyperspace is the system in use in the tenth millennium, when the Guild was at the apex of its power and skill The globular shape of the heighlmer was not accidental as freight earners, the huge ships might take on cargos endlessly varied m mass and volume The cargo was distnbut ed through the craft and secured, the control room, located at the center of the globe, was a double walled sphere Between the two walls of the sphere were the controls for realspace movement and the Navigator's station Inside the inner sphere, its enclosing shell pierced by airlocks was the Steersman s station, filled completely with water containing an extremely high concentration of dissolved oxygen At its very center was a Laser Pen containing a point-source Holtzman Effect node SPACING GUILD OPERATIONS 466 SPACING GUILD OPERATIONS The sequence for hyperspace transit was this first, die Navigator, calling on his melange-prescience, determined the optimum moment for the transit to begin He com manded crew and passengers to strap down (not, as believed, for their immediate safety, but to prevent shifts of mass within the liner during the drop) When the moment arrived, he switched the rmcrolasers within the pen to a specified wavelength for a single pulse, and then disconnected them, a!l by remote control When the lasers disengaged, power was fed to the now-incarnated Holtzman Effect field, and the familiar suspensor-nullifi-cation effect came into being Realspace was fractured in a locality about a kilometer in radius, and the mass inside the locality (the heigbiiner and its contents) dropped into The Void Next, me Navigator gave the 'clear' light to passengers and crew, signalling them that they might resume their activities The Navigator continued to monitor the progress of the voyage at intervals-"Where would we be if we returned to realspace now?"-but control of the heighlmer was passed to the Steersmen, floating in their spice-laced, oxygen-flooded bath So well protected were the details of Spac ing Guild techniques that for thousands of years, not a single person outside the Guild realized that Steersmen had their peculiar form because they had been bred to be m essence, manne mammals Certainly there were plenty of clues, and many unwittingly came close to the secret Steersmen had webbed hands and feet, in the tanks in which they visited the surfaces of planets, their motion was described as "swimming" Princess Irulan described Steersman Ednc as having a "fish mouth", even Muad'Dib called Ednc a "man-fish ' But fish they were not Steersmen had no gills It was simpler to increase the oxygen-concentration of their tank, thus allowing them to drain their lungs of the enriched fluid and breathe air, if need arose Then genetic adaptations equipped them to move quickly and precisely-even delicately-within the tank The Steersmen had only one responsibility, but one which necessitated their modifications the Navigators dropped the ship into The Void and set it moving through hyperspace at trans-light speed (or more accurately though harder to imagine, realspace was moving through die ship's hyperspace bubble at trans light speed) The job of the Steersmen was to keep it on that course finding the line of the ship's future that avoided catastrophe But that line could not be determined once and for all, because of movement within the heighhner the crew went about their duties, passengers though confined within their Ugh ters or frigates, moved to and fro, the cargo might contain live animals pacing in their cages Because of this continuous shifting of mass, each heighlmer earned eight Steersmen, four of whom were on duty at a time The duty Steersmen quartered an imaginary sphere centered on the original location of the point-source node, floating about that nondimensional transcendent "seed" in a prescient trance they compensated for shifts of mass within the heighliner, keeping it 'on course' rela live to the flowing realspace by a sinuous dance never witnessed by one outside their brotherhood Whatever faults the Spacing Guild may have had, when the day of the Steersman ended, a real beauty passed from the universe The experience of the Steersmen, breathing and drinking melange, rocking to the beat of space and time, swaying with the music of the spheres led m their dance by the pulse of life around them alive to every note in the pavane both composed and played by their quartet is beyond the power of words to describe or the imagination to conceive ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE (see chart) The Spacing Guild was divided into five main departments Accounting Legal Secunt) Operations, and Tupile While Accounting and Legal were standard, the latter three departments were unique, as an examination of their parts and functions discloses Security Under the umbrella heading of Security the Guild set up one of the most efficient secret police organizations ever founded Covert Operations was divided into two branches Planetary and Interior Plane tary mainly used subverted locals with * controls' who held offices m the Guild's local offices A separate command was devoted to operations on Ix The Interior branch SPACING GUILD, OPERATIONS 468 SPACING GUILD OPERATIONS was staffed completely by full time Guild employees Interior was responsible for finding out the exact cargo loaded onto every Guild Liner Even when the cargos were personal ships of the passengers.