Children of the Jedi Page 4

  Small, comforting clicks and whirrings came from the household machinery: Aunt Beru's yogurt maker, the hydroponics plant Uncle Owen had set up last year, the hum of the security fence...

  Why did the night feel so silent?

  Why did his chest hurt with a terror, a sense of some malevolent enormity moving slowly through the dark?

  He rose from his bed, taking his blanket to wrap around his shoulders. The stairs were tall for his short legs, the night air biting on his fingers. The desert smell made his nostrils itch, prickled on the skin of his face and lips.

  He was very young.

  At the top of the steps, above the sunken court of the farmstead, the desert lay utterly still. Huge stars stared from the absolute black of the sky with the wide-open glare of mad things, deeply and personally aware of the child pattering across the sands to the point just clear of the fence's field--even in those days, he knew that to a centimeter.

  He stared out across the long wastes of dune and salt pan and harsh, pebbled regions, formless in the dark and without movement.

  There was danger out there. Danger vast and terrible, moving stealthily toward the isolated house.

  Luke woke.

  His open eyes gazed at the lofty arcs of resin and pendants woven with patterns of glass vines. Latticed flowers curtained the windows and the sun-globes among the courtyard trees made shadow-lace on the wall. Though it was deep in the night, still the music of the feasting, of hundreds of weddings and joyous dances of reunion and celebration wafted on the air thick with the green scents of the jungle below, with the honey and spice and vanilla of a dozen varieties of night-blossoming plant.

  Tatooine.

  Why did he dream about his childhood home? Why about that night, the night he'd waked to that silence more in his heart than in the night, knowing that something was coming?

  In that case it had been the Sand People, the Tusken Raiders. He'd gotten too near the fence and tripped one of the small alarms. Uncle Owen had just come out looking for him when the first, far-off groaning of the banthas was heard. If Luke hadn't wakened when he had, the first anybody would have known would have been when the Sand People attacked the fence.

  Why did he feel that huge silence, that approaching evil, tonight?

  What had he sensed in that split second when his mind was open, reaching for the memories stored in Nichos's electronic brain?

  Luke got out of bed, gathered the sheet around his body as he had in the childhood he'd just experienced, and walked to the window.

  All was stillness in the courtyard, save for the whisper of an unseen fountain, the night conversation of trees. A bird warbled a few notes...

  The Queen had a songbird that sang in the dark....

  Han and Leia were gone. They had used Drub McKumb's attack as an excuse, arguing concern for the safety of their children, and this the Ithorian herd leaders had understood. Of course their visit must be cut short, they must return to Coruscant in the face of possibly unpredictable attacks. Drub McKumb himself remained, under the care of Tomla El, sunk deep in his muttering dreams.

  Artoo-Detoo had gone with them. His greater computing capacity would be needed more where they were going, Luke knew. And See-Threepio, fussy and particular as he was, was needed here, for the strange and difficult task that had brought Luke to Ithor in the first place: A droid communicator and translator was needed, to work with Cray Mingla and the Ithorian healers in integrating Nichos Marr back to being the man he once had been.

  But it was Artoo whom Luke needed now.

  Another thought came to him.

  Hitching the sheet up over his shoulders, he padded to the doorway. See-Threepio, seated in the empty dining room of the Guest House, switched on the moment Luke crossed the threshold, the glow of eyes springing up like round yellow moons in the dark. Luke gestured, shook his head. "No, Threepio, it's okay."

  "Is there something I can do for you, Master Luke?"

  "Not right now. Thanks."

  The protocol droid settled back into his chair, but Luke was aware, as he descended the few steps to the outer door and crossed the terrace in the violet dark, that Threepio did not switch himself back off. For a droid, Threepio had a very human nosiness.

  Like See-Threepio, Nichos Marr sat in the outer room of the suite to which Cray had been assigned, in the power-down mode that was the droid equivalent of rest. Like Threepio, at the sound of Luke's almost noiseless tread he turned his head, aware of his presence.

  "Luke?" Cray had equipped him with the most sensitive vocal modulators, and the word was calibrated to a whisper no louder than the rustle of the blueleafs massed outside the windows. He rose, and crossed to where Luke stood, the dull silver of his arms and shoulders a phantom gleam in the stray flickers of light. "What is it?"

  "I don't know." They retreated to the small dining area where Luke had earlier probed his mind, and Luke stretched up to pin back a corner of the lamp-sheathe, letting a slim triangle of butter-colored light fall on the purple of the vulwood tabletop. "A dream. A premonition, maybe." It was on his lips to ask, Do you dream? but he remembered the ghastly, imageless darkness in Nichos's mind, and didn't. He wasn't sure if his pupil was aware of the difference in his human perception and knowledge, aware of just exactly what he'd lost when his consciousness, his self, had been transferred.

  "How aware are you of the computerized side of your being?" he asked instead.

  A man would have knit his brows, pressed his thumb to his lips, scratched his ear... something. Nichos answered with a droid's promptness, "I am aware that it exists. If you were to ask me the square root of pi or the ratio of length to frequency of light waves I would be able to tell you without hesitation."

  "Can you generate random numbers?"

  "Of course."

  Of course.

  "When I probed your mind, read your memories of that childhood planet, I felt a... a disturbance. As if something were reaching out, searching... Something evil, something..." Saying it out loud, he knew now what he'd felt. ”Something conscious. Could you place yourself in a receptive trance, as if meditating on the Force, open your mind to it, and... generate random numbers? Random coordinates? I'll get you a stylopad, there's one connected to the terminal here. You were trained as a Jedi," Luke went on, leaning against the table and looking up into the cobalt-blue, artificial eyes. "You know the... the feeling, the taste, the heft and hand, of the Force, even though you can't use it now. I need to find this... this disturbance. This wave of darkness that I felt. Can you do this?"

  Abruptly Nichos smiled, and it was the smile of the man Luke had known. "I haven't the slightest idea," he said. "But we can certainly try."

  In the morning Luke excused himself from the expedition Tomla El had organized with Nichos and Cray to the Falls of Dessiar, one of the places on Ithor most renowned for its beauty and peace. When they left he sought out Umwaw Moolis, and the tall herd leader listened gravely to his less than logical request and promised to put matters in train to fulfill it. Then Luke descended to the House of the Healers, where Drub McKumb lay, sedated far beyond pain but with all the perceptions of agony and nightmare still howling in his mind.

  "Kill you!" He heaved himself at the restraints, blue eyes glaring furiously as he groped and scrabbled at Luke with his clawed hands. "It's all poison! I see you! I see the dark light all around you! You're him! You're him!" His back bent like a bow; the sound of his shrieking was like something being ground out of him by an infernal mangle.

  Luke had been through the darkest places of the universe and of his own mind, had done and experienced greater evil than perhaps any man had known on the road the Force had dragged him... Still, it was hard not to turn away.

  "We even tried yarrock on him last night," explained the Healer in charge, a slightly built Ithorian beautifully tabby-striped green and yellow under her simple tabard of purple linen. "But apparently the earlier doses that brought him enough lucidity to reach here from his point of origin o
versensitized his system. We'll try again in four or five days."

  Luke gazed down into the contorted, grimacing face.

  "As you can see," the Healer said, "the internal perception of pain and fear is slowly lessening. It's down to ninety-three percent of what it was when he was first brought in. Not much, I know, but something."

  "Him! Him! HIM!" Foam spattered the old man's stained gray beard.

  Who?

  "I wouldn't advise attempting any kind of mindlink until it's at least down to fifty percent, Master Skywalker."

  "No," said Luke softly.

  Kill you all. And: They are gathering...

  "Do you have recordings of everything he's said?"

  "Oh, yes." The big coppery eyes blinked assent. "The transcript is available through the monitor cubicle down the hall. We could make nothing of them. Perhaps they will mean something to you."

  They didn't. Luke listened to them all, the incoherent groans and screams, the chewed fragments of words that could be only guessed at, and now and again the clear disjointed cries: "Solo! Solo! Can you hear me? Children... Evil...Gathering here... Kill you all!"

  Punctuation is everything, thought Luke wryly, removing the jack from his ear. Is that one thought or three? Or only the bleeding seepage of his dreams?

  From a pocket at his belt he took the strip of hardcopy that the stylopad had extruded early that morning under Nichos's rapid generation of random numbers, and, clipped to it, the readout he'd had from the herd's central computer a few hours later. What it meant he didn't know, but the fact that it quite clearly meant something was intensely disquieting.

  Feet passed in the corridor, the sharp click of Cray's exquisite but intensely impractical shoes, and he smiled to himself. Even on an expedition to the jungles, Cray could be counted upon to dress fashionably if she could. He heard her voice, its usual brisk sharpness honed to the brittleness he'd heard in it more and more in the past six months...

  "It's really just a matter of finding a way to quadruple the sensitivity of the chips to achieve a pattern, instead of a linear, generator." She was the expert, Luke knew--his own knowledge of droid programming and droid minds started and ended with how to talk Threepio out of his more impractical ideas for the care of Han and Leia's children... But his sense, his perception of the slight shifts of feeling audible in the human voice, picked up the desperate note of one trying to convince herself, of a rear-guard action against doubt and unwanted certainty and too little sleep.

  "Hayvlin Vesell of the Technomic Research Foundation spoke in an article of going back to the old xylen-based chips, because of the finer divisibility of information possible. When I return to the Institute--”

  "That's what I'm trying to impress on you, Dr. Mingla--Cray." Tomla El's voice was a murmuring concert of woodwinds. "This may not be possible no matter how finely you partition the information. The answer may be that there is no answer. Nichos may simply not be capable of human affect."

  "Oh, I think you're wrong about that." She'd gained back the smooth control in her voice. She might have been speaking to a professional colleague about programmatic languages. ”Certainly a great deal more work needs to be done before we can dismiss the possibility. I'm told also that in experiments with accelerated learning, at a certain number of multiples of human learning capacity, tremendous breakthroughs can occur. I've signed up for another accelerator course, this one in informational patterning dynamics..."

  Her voice faded down the corridor. A great deal more work, thought Luke, hurting for her, pressing his hand to his brow. It was Cray's answer to everything. With sufficient effort, sufficient maneuvering, any problem could be surmounted, no matter what the cost to herself.

  And the cost to herself, he knew, had been devastating.

  He remembered the weeks after Nichos had been diagnosed with the inexplicable degenerative decay of the nervous system: remembered Cray turning up for her training every morning after nights spent with the learning accelerator therapies she'd had shipped to Yavin, brittle, exhausted, not telling him or anyone that she was forcing herself through hypnosis and drug therapies to absorb the farthest frontiers of her chosen field in order to know enough, to learn enough, to save the man she loved before it was too late. After Nichos was hospitalized he remembered those terrible nights of going to the medcenter on Coruscant, while day after day Cray bullied and hurried her suppliers, sweated sleepless over her designs, racing the disease while Nichos's body weakened and melted away before their eyes.

  Cray had worked a miracle. She had saved the life of the man she loved.

  After a fashion.

  A man who could recall the complete text of that old childhood song but had no sense--not either joy nor sorrow nor nostalgia--of what it meant to him.

  "Luke?"

  He'd heard the light, soft step in the corridor, and with it the very faint mechanical hum of Threepio's servos. The two of them--the golden droid and the pewter-gray one with the man's pale face--stood in the doorway.

  "Did the random numbers I generated turn out to mean something?"

  Faint water stains marked the silvery arm and shoulder on his left side, as if he'd stood close to the Falls. Luke wondered how the experience of that beauty, shared with the woman he loved, had registered in his memory banks.

  "They're coordinates, all right." Luke touched the hardcopy that lay on the cubicle's small desk before him. "They're the coordinates for the Moonflower Nebula, out on the Outer Rim, past the K Seven Forty-nine System. There's nothing out there, never has been, but...I've made arrangements with Umwaw Moolis to lend me a ship. I just think it needs to be checked out."

  One of Luke's hardest lessons concerning the use of the Force had been to abandon mechanical, provable realities and trust his hunches. These days people generally didn't ask questions of the man who had destroyed the Sun Crusher.

  "Will I be accompanying you, Master Luke?"

  "Of course you'll be accompanying him, Threepio." Nichos stepped back a half pace to regard the protocol droid. "As will I. And Cray, too, I hope." He turned his head, and Luke heard, a moment before he saw her come into the lights of the cubicle doorway, Cray's quick-tapping footfalls in the hall.

  "You hope what?" She put her arm around Nichos's waist, smiled up at him almost the way she used to, though Luke observed the almost infinitesimal pause before he draped an arm around her shoulders in return. As Luke had known she would be, Cray was beautifully turned out in a gown of black and white, carefully made up, a bright scarf wound in her flaxen hair.

  "That you'll be coming to the Moonflower Nebula with Luke and Threepio to investigate this... whatever it is. This hunch he has."

  "Oh, but I..." She stopped herself from saying something--probably, Luke guessed, from protesting that she had to continue Nichos's rehabilitation and rehumanization therapies with Tomla El. He saw her visibly rein herself in, and look at him again with concern in her face. ”What, Luke? Nichos told me this morning about the random number field."

  "It may be nothing." Luke rose from the little table, switched off the monitor, and shoved the hardcopy back into the pouch on his belt. "The two of you came here to work--to help you, Nichos. It's not—was”

  "You had work of your own to do back on Yavin." Cray met his eyes gravely, her brown gaze almost on level with his own. "Yet you came here with us."

  "You don't know what's out there, Luke." Nichos put a hand on Luke's arm. "Between the warlords and Grand Admiral wannabes of the various parts of the Imperial Fleet, and whatever Princes of the Ancient Houses in the Senex Sector who think they can grab a piece of power... they're coming up with new things all the time. Request Umwaw Moolis to get you a bigger ship."

  The Outer Rim. Many years ago Luke had described his homeworld of Tatooine--one of the worlds in that very sparsely settled and marginally habitable region of the galaxy--as the point that was farthest from the bright center of the universe, with considerable accuracy. He had since visited places beside whic
h Tatooine looked like Coruscant during Carnival Week, but his original definition would still hold up... and the same could be said for most of the rest of the Outer Rim as well.

  Swollen crimson suns circled by frozen balls of methane and ammonia. Hot-burning blue stars whose light and heat crisped their planets to cinders. Pulsars whose orbiting worlds alternately froze and melted and clusters so filled with ambient radiation as to cook out any possibility of life on whatever bodies weren't torn apart by the conflicting gravitational fields.

  Everywhere in the galaxy were a lot of empty planets, balls of rock and metals too expensive to exploit because of heat, or gravity, or radiation, or proximity to strange hazards like gas cauldrons or fluctuating anomalies. As Leia had said to Cray, distances in space were vast, and it was easy to lose or forget about whole systems, whole sectors, if there was no reason to go there. In the Outer Rim, the Empire had never bothered much with local law.

  The armored explorer-cruiser Huntbird the Ithorians had lent to Luke came out of hyperspace a healthy distance from the luminous zone of dust and ionized gases listed on the starcharts as the Moonflower Nebula.

  "Are you sure that's what the random coordinates were for?" asked Cray doubtfully, studying the readouts of all information on the area on the three screens immediately beneath the bridge's main viewport. "It isn't even listed in the Registry. Might the coordinates have been for System K Seven Forty-nine, for instance? That's only a few parsecs away, and at least there's a planet there--Pzob..." She read off the screen. "Human-habitable and temperate... the Empire could have had a base there, though there's none listed."

  "It's habitable," agreed Luke, tapping through instructions on the keypad with one hand and keeping an eye on the changing images on the central screen as he spoke. "But it was colonized way, way back in the days by Gamorreans, goodness only knows how or why. Anybody wanting a permanent base there would have had to spend a fortune in security."

  "A most unpleasant people, Gamorreans," agreed Threepio primly from the bench seat he shared with Nichos in the passenger area of the bridge. "They were difficult enough to deal with in the entourage of Jabba the Hutt....Procedures programs for visiting Gamorr consist of a single line: DO NOT VISIT GAMORR. Really!"