Guild Navigator

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In the Dune universe, Guild Navigators are humans, mutated through high consumption of the spice melange, who are safely able to navigate interstellar space in a Heighliner. Guild Navigators are specially selected for their prescience, which is required for their position.

History

The Spacing Guild first started using Guild Navigators because the travel technique of spacefolding was not safe; only about 1 out of every 10 Heighliners made it to their final destination before Navigators. Norma (the first Navigator and the creator of the Spacing Guild) at first used super-computers to Navigate space but as the Butlerian Jihad did not allow for "thinking machines," she used spice to develop the ability to see the Heighliners path before the Heighliner actually flew.

Mutation

Guild Navigators are continuously immersed in highly concentrated amounts of orange spice gas and a micro-gravity environment. This changes their body as the spice develops their prescient abilities. The first external sign of melange-induced metabolic change is that eyes become blue on blue. For those who wish to hide their use of large doses of spice, efforts must be taken to hide the entire eyeball that has become tinted blue. This is done through the use of large contact lenses that cover all the space visible between the eyelids. Few people have actually seen a Guild Navigator: They use envoys and ambassadors to present a human face and hide their deformity from those with whom they deal.

Description

Because the Spacing Guild uses mainly envoys and ambassadors Guild Navigators are seldom seen, therefore descriptions vary. Although their appearance was a mystery in the original novel Dune, one is fully revealed in the first chapter of Dune: Messiah. Here, the Guild Navigator Edric is described as having rodent-like eyes, a thin fish-like mouth, webbed feet, and grossly elongated fingers and hands. In "Chapterhouse: Dune" references are made to a Guild Navigator meeting-hall on the planet Junction; it is stated that the hall is vast, in order to accommodate the very large tanks in which Navigators are obliged to live whilst on a planet's surface. The size of the tanks is partly to prevent a sense of claustrophobia (elswhere in the Dune saga it is stated that Navigators spend most of their lives in space, presumably in the weightless environment of a Heighliner's control room) and partly because of their physical size.

David Lynch's depiction of a Navigator in his much-maligned film adaptation of Dune is a re-use of the puppet used in his previous film, Eraserhead, and is seen by many fans as both totally innacurate and flagrant ego-stroking.