Children of the Jedi Page 3

  "Like Uncle Owen," he said softly. "The worst yelling-at I ever got in my life was the one time I... I guess I found something using the Force. Aunt Beru had lost the little screwdriver she used to fix her mending stitcher. I shut my eyes and said, "It's under the couch." I don't know how I knew that. Uncle Owen claimed he punished me because the only way I could have known was if I'd put it there myself, but now I think he knew it was the Force, and that's why he was mad."

  He shrugged. "I must have been about six. I sure never did that again. I didn't even remember it until I was with Yoda on Dagobah."

  "Yes," said Cray. "Aunt Sophra was like that with Mother. And I must have picked it up, because until Nichos and I talked about it, it... it never even occurred to me I might be sensitive to the Force."

  Nichos remembered to smile, and put his hand on her shoulder. Luke knew they'd even got the body temperature right, in the hands and face at least.

  "They hid the children down the well," said Leia softly. "Do you think when... when Vader and the Emperor started hunting down and killing the Jedi, some of the Knights... I don't know, smuggled their spouses and children to some place of safety? Did you talk to Drub about the Jedi, Han? About the Force?"

  "I don't remember much about the conversation," admitted Han. "Especially not after we got drinking. But I remember telling him about Luke, and about Old Ben. Drub wouldn't let it get in the way of business, but he always did want to see the Rebels win." He shrugged, embarrassed. "He was kind of a romantic."

  Leia hid a smile and her own private reflections about smugglers who let the Rebellion interfere with their business, and returned her gaze to Luke. "They must have been scattered later," she said. "But if there was a group of the families of the Jedi hiding out in Plett's Well, or Plettwell... they might have left records of where they went. And who they were."

  She picked up the earring again, turning it to the light. "You say Yetoom's on the edge of the Senex Sector. Sullust is between Yetoom and here. Most of the credit papers here are Sullustan... What would the Smelly Saint's range be?"

  "It's a light stock freighter, like the Falcon," said Han thoughtfully, glancing at Chewbacca for confirmation. The Wookiee nodded. ”It's got deepspace capabilities, but most small-time smugglers don't go more than about twenty parsecs to a jump. Since there's nothing much below or above the ecliptic around there, that would put his point of origin somewhere in the Senex or Juvex Sector, or in the Ninth Quadrant, say, between the Greeb-Streebling Cluster and the Noopiths."

  "That's a lot of territory," said Leia thoughtfully. "It's broken up, too--Imperial holdouts and little two-planet confederacies; Admiral Thrawn never made much headway with the Ancient Houses that rule in the Senex Sector, but we haven't, either. I know the House Vandron runs slave farms on Karfeddion, and the House Garonnin gets most of its revenue from strip-mining asteroids under pretty scary conditions--even back in the old days there were always questions in the Senate about Rights of Sentience in those areas."

  "It doesn't sound like someplace that would be easy to search for word of the Jedi," said Cray.

  "No place will be easy," said Leia. "Because we can jump from one hyperspace point to another, we forget how much distance--how many thousands of light-years--lie between one inhabited system and the next. People can hide anywhere, or be hidden anywhere. All it takes is for one line, one collection of phosphor dots, to get dropped out of a computer somewhere, and they're lost. Completely. Forever. You can't really search."

  "Surely there're backup records somewhere." Cray looked uneasy at the concept of such possibilities for loose ends. Leia gathered that with Luke's teaching, Cray wasn't as firmly wedded as she had once been to the principle that all things were ultimately controllable by intelligence, but she had a long way to go. She looked over at Luke. "Have you tried to go into McKumb's mind?"

  Luke nodded, flinching from the memory. Whether because of the yarrock, or the brain damage, or from some other cause, he had encountered none of the normal human barriers that prevent invasion by telepathic force, but neither had he found in the old smuggler's mind anything for his own seeking thoughts to link to, nothing to ask, to see. Only a burning chaos of pain, through which hideous shapes came slamming: rending monstrosities, scalding streams of acid, noise that beat and hammered in his ears, and fire that suffocated him. He'd come to shaking all over, Tomla El holding him up and gazing at him in deep concern, fractions of a second after he'd tried to go in.

  "Could you go into mine?" asked Nichos. ”I only remember what a child would see, but at least you could narrow down your field of search. I was human then," he added, and remembered again to smile. "And at the time, I was able to touch the Force."

  Only Cray and Leia accompanied Luke and Nichos down the curving sweeps of narrow stairs and across the small rear garden to the suite Cray and Nichos shared. Though Han and Luke were both fairly certain now that Drub McKumb's intent had been warning rather than assassination, Han was unwilling to assume that they knew everything he'd been trying to say. So he and Chewbacca remained in the Presidential Guest House near the children, with Artoo-Detoo hooked into a printer spilling out starcharts and calculations concerning the Senex Sector and See-Threepio standing happily on the balcony comparing the elaborate Ithorian herd ceremonials taking place in the square below to his internal records of what they were supposed to be.

  "We knew that he'd--at least temporarily-lose his ability to use the Force when he was... was transferred." Cray spoke quickly, with a slight brittleness in her voice, as if admitting that a contingency had been expected would somehow give her power over it. She glanced ahead at Nichos and Luke, walking side by side, the tall, silvery shape of the onetime student almost dwarfing Luke's black-cloaked slightness. The terrace outside the Guest Quarters faced away from the dances in the square, and their passing footfalls sounded loud on the elaborate lapis and gold of the starmap pavement.

  "I know Luke and Kyp Durron, and some of the others who studied the Holocron, think the Force is completely a function of organic life, but I don't see how that can be necessarily so. It isn't like he's a construct, like Threepio or Artoo. Nichos is as alive as you or I." She kept her head up, her voice brisk, but by the light of the sun-globes half hidden in the branches of their parent trees, Leia saw the telltale silvery gleam of suppressed tears in the younger woman's eyes.

  "Right now I'm working on crunching and cubing hypersmall micros, in order to duplicate what can be reconstructed in X-rays from the brains of the other students in the Academy. The good thing about what I've done with Nichos's brain is that the information can be transferred to more efficient processors as I improve and fine-tune the design." She touched her hair again, as a cover for a quick brush at the corners of her delicately colored eyelids. Hers was a perfection that would admit neither grief nor doubt.

  "He's only been in that body for--what, six months?" Leia hated herself for holding out a comfort that in her heart she suspected was false. Quite sincerely, she added, "It's a miracle he's alive at all."

  Cray nodded once, briefly, taking no credit as they passed through a vestibule of lacy air walls and stalactites, like a sea cave festooned with flowers. "And he wouldn't be, if it weren't for some of the research Stinna Draesinge Sha did on captured Ssi-ruuk wreckage. On transferring the... the actual person, not just a data print... into an artificial construct. She was very hopeful about the work with Nichos, very helpful. She said the Ssi-ruuk entechment process would have fascinated Magrody--her teacher--and he would almost certainly have come up with better answers than she did about the relationship of organic and artificial intelligences, but he'd--uh--gone by that time. She..."

  She shook her head. "I can't imagine who would have wanted to hurt her."

  She was quiet again as they entered the pleasant, grotto-like central chamber of her suite and Nichos took a seat at the table, with Luke opposite him under the dim pinkish light of the few sun-globes embedded in the translucent network of the low
ceiling. A sinuous divan shaped for human contours nestled in a niche; Leia and Cray settled on it, Leia reaching up to unhook another sun-globe's cover, to shed soft pinkish light around them.

  Cray went on, low enough not to be heard by the men at the table, "I was just glad that when Nichos... when they diagnosed him..." She shied from any mention of those memories. "I was glad I was able to keep him alive. That he had enough training in the Force to... to detach himself from his... his organic body. And analyzing how to transmit Force skills to an inorganic sentience will only be a matter of time. Some of Magrody's researches were pointing in that direction before he..."

  Again she bit back the word "disappeared," and Leia knew she, too, had heard the stories. The whispers. The rumors that she, Leia Organa Solo, had used her "smuggler friends" to take revenge on the man who had taught Qwi Xux, Ohran Keldor, Bevel Lemelisk, and the other designers of the Death Star.

  Going into Nichos's mind was one of the strangest things Luke had done. When he used the Force to probe someone's thoughts or dreams, they most often came to him as images, as if he were recalling or dreaming about something he himself had seen long ago. Sometimes the images took the form of sounds--voices--and, very occasionally, a sense of heat or cold. Eyes closed, Luke sank now into the light trance of listening, searching. He was aware of Nichos's mind, open and receptive to his as the meditations of the Jedi taught... aware of the personality of the young man who had come to him with such ability in the Force, with such open-hearted determination to use it responsibly and correctly.

  Luke had had far more powerful students, but--though Nichos was Luke's elder by a number of years--seldom a more teachable one.

  Under Luke's grip, Nichos's hands felt warm--like his own prosthetic, heated by minute subcutaneous circuitry to exactly body temperature, so that those who touched them might not be disconcerted. Luke was aware that Cray and Leia had fallen silent, was aware of their breathing, and of the faint, wonderful drift of songs floating on the night air from the city's thousand parties and balls.

  He was briefly aware, as he sank deeper into his probing trance, that Nichos did not breathe.

  He had wondered a little, on their way across the plaza, whether he'd be able to do this at all; whether, in fact, Nichos was the man he had known, the man who had come to Yavin to find him, saying, I think I have the powers you seek...

  Cray Mingla, for all her relative youth, was one of the leading experts on artificial intelligence programming in the galaxy. She was in addition an apprentice Jedi herself, aware of the interaction of the Force, the body, the mind, and all of ambient life. She had followed Nasdra Magrody's teachings, trying to close the gap between artificially constructed intelligence and the workings of the organic brain; had even studied what could be known of the technology of the forbidden Ssi-ruuk, seeking to learn what the essence of human personality, human energy, actually was.

  But he still hadn't known whether this was Nichos Marr, or only a droid programmed with everything the man had known.

  The memory was there. A child's memory, as Nichos had said: dark tunnels twisting through rock seams, and a dense, damp heat; in other places bitter cold. Snowstorms howling across empty wastes of ice and black rock; caves of ice, and below them caldera of sullenly smoking mud. Crystalline cliffs flashing blue in a dim twilight of a heatless sun; thick jungles; banks of ferns shoulder-deep around streams and pools that steamed in the weird sharpness of the air.

  A woman singing. ”Children playing in the field of flowers, The Queen's on her way to the King's three towers..."

  He remembered that song, so far back he couldn't even recall whose voice he'd heard singing it.

  But he was aware of those memories as if he'd read them somewhere. Snowstorms howling across empty wastes...was a string of words in his mind unattached to the sear of the ice-wind he himself recalled from Hoth; he knew the streams had steamed near the glaciers without seeing either water or ice.

  All the words of the old song were there--the tune, too, in standard musical notation, he supposed. But no memory of the voice that had sung them, any more than he had himself.

  Only a darkness, eerily, heartbreakingly empty. ”The Queen had a hunt-bird and the Queen had a lark, The Queen had a songbird that sang in the dark. The King said I'll hang you from the big black tree If your birds don't bring three wishes to me...."

  Then it hit him. Breathtaking, terrifying, a sense of cold horror and a stinging almost-sound that lanced through his brain like a splinter of frozen steel. He saw, for one instant, the massive cliffs of ice glittering like volcanic glass in iron twilight and below them the beveled and faceted jewel face of a shallow antigrav dome closing in all the valley beneath. Lights shone dimly through steaming mists, trees thick with blossom and fruit, gardens like enchanted ships suspended in the air...

  A ruined tower, standing dark against the face of the dark cliff.

  And something else. Some image, some shock...a wave of darkness that spread outward, reaching, searching, calling in all directions. A wave that chilled him, then folded in on itself before he could identify it, like a black flower growing backward into a deadly seed that vanished...

  And he was gasping, fully conscious once more and feeling the startled flinch of Nichos's hands under his.

  "What is it?" he demanded at once, as Cray sprang up and strode across the room.

  "Nic..."

  The silvery man regarded him inquiringly. He'd felt Nichos's hands flail away from his, and Nichos was looking at them in some surprise.

  "You convulsed." Cray was kneeling by the chair, already checking the row of gauges on Nichos's chest.

  "What happened?" asked Luke. "What did you feel?"

  "Nothing." Nichos shook his head, a fraction of a second too late to be natural. "I mean, I have no recollection of any untoward sensation at all. I felt Luke's hands over mine, and then I was out of the trance and my hands had moved away from his."

  "Did you see anything?" Leia had come to stand at his other side. Cray was still checking gauges, though she knew their ranges by heart.

  "I think it has to be Belsavis." Luke rubbed his temples; the ache in them was different from the throbbing that sometimes developed when he'd used the Force to probe deeply against resistance, or to listen for something far beyond human hearing. "I saw an antigrav-supported light-amplification dome of some kind over a volcanic rift valley; Belsavis is the only place I know of that has one like that."

  "But the dome was only built a dozen years ago," objected Cray. "If Nichos was there as a child..."

  Luke hesitated, wondering where that image had come from. Why he felt shaken, shocked... why he felt there was some part of the vision he had already forgotten. "No, it fits with other things as well," he said. "The tunnels he remembers could have been geothermic vents; I think the rift valleys were all jungle before the fruit-packing companies moved in." He glanced quickly at Cray, at the way her hands rested on Nichos's shoulders, her gaze on his face...

  No visual, no aural, no olfactory memories at all. Only that neutral knowledge of what had been.

  The sense of something forgotten tugged at his mind, but when he reached for it, it evaporated like light on water.

  "Belsavis is on the edge of the Senex Sector, too," he went on after a moment. ”So it's within striking distance of Yetoom. What's the name of the valley where they built the dome? Do you know, Cray?"

  "There's two or three domed volcanic valleys in the glaciers," said Cray, seeing Leia's inquiring frown. "The domes are standard light-amp with apex-mounted antigrav systems to take the stress. Brathflen Corporation built the first one twelve or fourteen years ago over Plawal..."

  She paused, as if hearing the word for the first time. "Plawal."

  "Plettwell," said Leia. "Plett's Well."

  "How long have colonies been there?"

  Leia shook her head. "We'll ask Artoo. At least twenty-five or thirty years. The Ninth Quadrant's pretty isolated; the systems there
are far apart. It would be the ideal place for the Jedi Knights to hide their families, once they knew the Emperor was out to destroy them."

  She straightened, the folds of her tabard falling into shimmering sculpture about her. "They hid the children in the well," she repeated. "And after that they scattered, and didn't even remember who they were."

  Leia frowned, a diplomat again. ”Belsavis is an independent ally of the Republic," she said. "They keep pretty tight security there because of the vine-coffee and vine-silk, but they should let me in to have a look at their records. Han and I can get the Falcon from Coruscant and be back before we were due home from the Time of Meeting. It's supposed to be beautiful there," she added thoughtfully. "I wonder if the children--“

  "No!" Luke caught her sleeve, as if to physically stop her from taking her children; both Leia and Cray regarded him in surprise. ”Don't take them anywhere near that place!"

  The next moment he wondered why he'd spoken, wondered what it was that he feared.

  But all that remained was a sense of something wrong, something evil--some vision of blackness folding itself away into hiding...

  He shook his head. "Anyway, if there's folks like Drub McKumb there, it's not someplace you want to take the kids."

  "No," said Leia softly, seeing again--as Luke saw--the groaning figure strapped to the diagnostic bed, the jarring reds and yellows of agony on the monitor screens. "We'll be careful," she said quietly. "But we'll find them, Luke. Or we'll find where they went."

  The muted radiance of the sun-globes caught the flicker of her robes as she passed beneath the pillars and out into the luminous velvet of the Ithorian night.

  Chapter 3

  Tatooine.

  The iron cold of the desert night; the way the darkness smelled when the wind died. Luke lay staring at the low adobe arch of the ceiling of his room, barely visible in the small glow of the gauges on the courtyard moisture condenser just outside his window...