Children of the Jedi Page 8

  "They may have had perishable dwellings--tree houses or brush huts con the lower bench where the MuniCenter now stands, or on the valley floor," said Jevax. "Though before the dome was built the valley was intermittently subject to cold--nothing like the cold up on the surface, of course. And I suspect that if they'd stayed in the houses of the villagers, more people would have remembered."

  He gestured with a long arm to the roofless buildings, the tower whose every open floor and window embrasure, like the cliff behind it, sported its own pendant garden of fern, spider plant, Wookiee-beard, and sweetberry vine. "As far as I know, this is all there ever was."

  "This can't have been more than Plett's original laboratory," objected Leia. "You couldn't fit ten families into the place."

  "You obviously haven't been in a tenement in Kiskin," muttered Han. He walked through the broken gateway to the inner court and stepped through a gap in the wall of the single square building left standing roofless against the cliff at the foot of the tower. "So Plett was here first?"

  "He was a botanist and a savant," said Jevax. "A Jedi Master of great age, we've heard; a Ho'Din from the planet Moltok. We've deduced by the growth of the lichens at the foot of the walls that he built this place about a hundred years ago, and since many of the plants that grow in the valley have been genetically tailored to our climate of geothermic heat and low light--even to the microclimates of high acidity down in the more active lower end of the valley--we assume he was an ecologist and scientist of considerable skill. Legends say he could talk to birds and animals as well, and send away the storms that periodically swept down even into the valleys. Some of this we know from the original inhabitants of the other rifts, of Wutz and Bot-Un, where, apparently, their memories were not tampered with."

  "Meaning that the Jedi didn't stay there." Leia gazed around her at the square of heavy lava-block walls, over a meter thick and the hue of old blood. Despite the fortress-like appearance of the place, Plett's House was filled with the most profound sense of peace she had ever encountered.

  Good people lived here, she thought, not knowing why the sense of it filled her so strongly, like the scent of forgotten flowers. Power, and love like a sun's light. She closed her eyes, overwhelmed with the impression that, if she listened hard enough, she could hear the voices of children playing.

  "Exactly," she heard Jevax say, his voice diminishing as he and Han walked around the chamber's inner wall. "We think Plett originally chose this place not only because of the singular climate of the rift valleys, but because the glacial winds and extreme atmospheric conditions on the surface make landing any kind of spacecraft extremely difficult, and any kind of signals or sensors almost impossible."

  "Yeah, tell me about it." Han had had some scary minutes bringing the Millennium Falcon down the tightest guidance beam he'd encountered in years and into a vertical hundred-meter landing silo bored straight into the rock, virtually blind.

  "What about the tunnels?" Leia opened her eyes.

  Jevax turned, raising his white shelf of brow. Han, who'd been inspecting one of the line of keyhole-shaped openings in the wall--doors or windows, though if they were doors they were so narrow only someone as slight as Luke or Leia could have slipped through--looked surprised at the question.

  "That's just it, Your Excellency," said Jevax. "There are no tunnels. No "secret crypts," in spite of the rumors. Every few months someone comes up with a new theory and makes a search, and believe me, nobody has ever found a thing."

  A sleek, small, green mammal Leia didn't recognize ran along the top of the wall; a yellow manollium perched in one of the window arches and fluffed its feathers, regarding the intruders into his domain with bright ruby eyes. The manollium must have come in with the Ithorians of Brathflen Corporation, she thought automatically. She'd seen hundreds of them already and she and Han had arrived only that morning.

  "They hid the children down the well," she repeated softly. "Nichos mentioned tunnels--I assumed McKumb meant there were crypts of some kind under Plett's Citadel. I suppose that's the "well" in question?" She nodded toward the heavy disk of durasteel, sunk into the stone of the floor.

  "One of them," said Jevax. "All of these rift valleys were called wells at one time, because of the hot springs. This..." He gestured up toward the green-hung dome visible high above the roofless walls, the town hidden within the mist, the varying microclimates of hot springs, warm springs, and mud pots that ranged up and down the vent; the towering dark cliffs with their suspended volutes of fern and orchid, the trailing banners of mist, his... this is all Plett's Well."

  He led the way through the empty doorway--of the same keyhole shape as the windows, a characteristic of the old lava-block houses that clustered in what had been the original town at the foot of the bench at the high end of the valley--and out into the courtyard again. Gorgeous, filmy-winged insects blossomed up from the grass around them as if the warm earth itself had hurled handfuls of celebratory confetti.

  Leia said, "But the rumors persist."

  The heavy-browed, simian face widened into another smile. "Your Excellency, for all its beauty, Plawal is a very dull place. The central library, the municipal archives, and all the city services rent space from the computer system that Brathflen, Galactic, Imperial/republic, and Kuat teamed up to install twelve years ago, and there's very little room for new entertainment. Those people who don't have families to keep them interested have only work in the canneries or the silk-packing plants, and the bars along Spaceport Row. Of course they'd like to think there are secret crypts under the only ruins in the town that aren't being used for the foundations of perfectly ordinary Sorosub prefab housing. One has to do something."

  He gestured around him again, the gluey breezes stirring the silky white fur of his long arms. "You're perfectly welcome to remain and search if you wish. I warn you, people have gone over the place with sensors of every variety. Research facilities in the archives won't be available until eighteen hundred hours--which is when the packing houses shut down their systems for the night-b after that, come down to the MuniCenter and I'll give you whatever help you wish rooting around in the records."

  From a pocket of his utility belt he produced three laminated wafers, and held them out to Han, Leia, and Chewbacca. "These will open any room in the MuniCenter, the spaceport, the city garages, or the elevators that lead up the shafts from the spaceport and out onto the surface of the glacier, though I strongly advise that you get me or someone else local to go with you if you want to go out onto the ice for any reason. Will you care to walk back to the MuniCenter with me, or do you want to stay here awhile? The only decent cafe in town is the Bubbling Mud, by the way, off Brandifert Court."

  "We'll stay awhile, thanks," said Han doubtfully.

  "One more thing." Leia held up a finger; the Chief Person turned politely back. "Have you ever seen this man before?"

  The holo cube of McKumb, taken while he was asleep, showed a slack, shut-eyed, skeletally thin face not much like the ruddy pot roast of a man Han had known, but it would have to do. Drub McKumb, like Han himself, had been in a business that discouraged accurate portraiture.

  Jevax tilted his head, the white bar of brow curving in the middle with his frown. "I don't think so," he said. "You can try it in Port Records this evening, though if the man were a smuggler there would be no record of him. During the last decade or so of the Empire we had quite a problem with smugglers--the Imperial Governor kept only a small staff of tariff police. Lately even that's slacked off."

  "I'll check Port Records." Leia returned the cube to her pocket. "Thank you, Jevax. Thank you for all your help."

  "Thank you, Your Excellency, General Solo." The Mluki's ugly face brightened into another grin. "You've spared me an entire afternoon at the Computer-Time Reapportionment Board--a gift more valued than glitterstim." And he strolled off through the somber green grass, wreathed in bright insects, all his earrings twinkling in the pallid light.

  Chewie
growled softly.

  "You're right," said Han quietly. "I think he was lying."

  "Or someone lied to him."

  Han nodded toward the curving bites taken out of the inner wall. "If Imperials had meant business there wouldn't be a wall standing," he said. "This looks like two or three carriers and a bunch of TIE'S, tops. All the way out here with no assault wing? No destroyers? If they knew the Jedi were here, there'd be nothing but a hole in the ground. All right, all right," he added at Chewbacca's gruff rumble, "so this place is a hole in the ground. You know what I mean. If they didn't mean business, why attack at all?"

  Leia shook her head, still looking around her at the broken walls, the small kitchen wing, the few rooms that could have been workshops. Still haunted by that sense of vanished happiness, that deep, silent aura of rest.

  "I've never dealt with an implanted belief," she said after a time. "Luke has. He says they can go pretty deep. For all we know, the Jedi implanted their own children--Nichos, and Cray's mother--with beliefs after they left, to keep them from being traced. The damage looks bad enough that these people would have needed some outside help right after it was over. Turning it over to an Ithorian corporation at least kept it from being exploited by some relative of the Emperor's, once everyone knew it was here. But even if they did that--even if they implanted everybody in the village with the belief that there never were crypts--the Jedi were gone by the time the corporations arrived. Maybe the Ithorians who run Brathflen treat the inhabitants of their commercial worlds decently, but I can't see them--and I certainly can't see the Twi'leks who run Galactic--passing up rumors of secret crypts. You notice how Jevax sort of skipped over the part about rumors "persisting." "Every few months" doesn't sound like something that gets put out of the way by a sensor check. There's got to be something else going on."

  As they spoke they worked their way back into the triangle of the ruins, where the tower poked domeward under the massive, graceful spring of the girders and beetling outcrops of the cliff leaned inward, garlanded with hanging tapestries of flowers. Beds of vine-coffee hung above the remains of Plett's House, like obese and gaudy hoverbirds, the trailing ends of the vines only a dozen meters above the highest peak of the tower itself. Beyond them Leia could see the dome through the fragments of mists, and was surprised at how dark the sky appeared overhead.

  In an inner room, one of a line cut into the cliff itself, a pipe tapped into a warm spring deep in the rock. Up at this end of the valley the water emerged from the earth little warmer than a truly hot bath, and without the sulfurous stink of the scalding springs lower down. The opening was crusted with pink and yellow deposits of sinter. Leia broke off a fragment, turned it over in her fingers. "Look familiar?"

  "So much for there not being any crypts," said Han cynically. "It doesn't mean the jewelry in Drub's pocket came out of a crypt near this particular spring. Even a source with the same combination of sulfur and antimony could have a number of outlets."

  "You take a whole lot of convincing."

  Leia grinned at him. "I deal with politicians all day."

  "Yeah..." Han glanced toward the wrecked gate through which Jevax had passed. "I think you just got to deal with another one."

  In one of the cliff-cut rooms Chewbacca found an old ladder, which they dragged up after them, floor by floor, to climb the remains of the tower, Leia picking her way carefully through the broken-out doorways, the thick embrasures of what had been windows, the curve of the broken stair. From the highest room the view out over the valley was breathtaking, mist filling the land like swirling water in a dark basin, the white or green plastic roofs of the packing plants rising through on the far end like a floe of bizarrely regimented icebergs where the greater heat stirred the fogs at the dark cliff's base.

  Above them, the gondola beds of vine-coffee moved along their tracks, homegoing boats headed for the small wooden wasp's nest of the Supply Station, curtained in vines like everything else, clinging to the cliff. From the far end of the broken remains of the tower floor, Leia gazed down at the miniature ecosystem of the rift, a steaming jungle snuggled in the midst of some of the most vicious icefields in the galaxy, fed by the heat of the planet's core.

  What had the place been like, she wondered, when they'd been here, those children whose shrill voices she could almost hear? Those families whose wisdom and love had soaked, it seemed, into the very stone of the walls?

  Intermittently colder, without the dome, she thought--necessitating the building of the rock houses of the old town over the hot springs. Wilder jungles near the warm vents, bare tundra perhaps away from them... Why had the Jedi Master Plett come here in the first place, deliberately seeking a world where none could easily follow? Who had convinced him to offer sanctuary, and how?

  A pair of strong arms circled her waist from behind. Han said nothing, just gazed out past her, and Leia leaned back into his strength, closing her eyes and letting her mind drift.

  To Ithor, green and graceful and busy.

  To the curious, meaningless death of a woman in the Senex Sector, killed by a man too expensive for the job.

  To the fact, relayed to her that morning, that the head of the House Vandron, in whose territory the crime had taken place, was obstructing any investigation of Draesinge's death.

  To Drub McKumb.

  They hid the children down the well...

  The voices of the children floated up to her. They were playing in the big, square room below; she saw them darting among the heavy tables of shalaman wood set along the inner wall, a whole pack of them: mostly human, but including an Ithorian, Wookiees, a Twi'lek, Bith... A woman repairing a half-dissected sterilizer at one of the tables called out an indulgent warning to one toddler who'd ventured too near the bronze, flower-shaped grille that screened the well in the floor's center, though the grille's openings were too small to admit anything except the smallest of the toys with which they played. Steam floated up through the openings, warming the room, as did the dim sunlight magnified by the angled crystalplex set in each keyhole window. A dark-haired man played a red-lacquered mandolin. Pittins of every color that pittins came in dozed on the windowsills or tracked the occasional myrmin across the floor.

  The door in the rear wall opened, and an old Ho'Din came in, two and a half meters tall and graceful in his black cloak of Jedi mastership, his flowerlike headstalks faded with age. Calm seemed to flow from him, and a deep sense--such as she sometimes felt from Luke--of vast strength bought at a terrible price.

  She opened her eyes. The roofless chamber below her at the base of the tower was empty, full of shadows as the feeble daylight waned. There was no door in the rear wall.

  "They sealed it somehow." Han passed his palms along the smooth dark stone where the rear wall of Plett's House had been cut into the rock of the cliff. "Even the best patch jobs will leave a join, but this is watertight."

  "It was about here, though." Leia half closed her eyes again, recapturing the scene. There was a kind of pain in the memory, a sense of having lost or mislaid something treasured, a long time ago.

  The happiness she had felt rising from that room? The peace of being loved unconditionally, which had dissolved in searing laser violence when someone on the Death Star had thrown a final switch?

  Looking at the man beside her, she wondered if Han had ever known that kind of peace, that sense of belonging, in his childhood.

  Chewie growled a query; Han gave it some thought. "Yeah, I think we've still got the echolocator--if Lando didn't borrow it the last time he flew the Falcon for some cockamamie treasure-hunting scheme."

  "I wouldn't bet on even an echolocator finding the tunnel that Master came out of," said Leia. She turned to survey the empty chamber once again. "The Jedi..." She hesitated, thinking about the things Luke had taught her, the things the old Jedi Vima-Da-Boda had said. "If the Jedi could cover their tracks to the extent of having everybody in the valley just forget they'd ever been there in the face of some pretty sever
e bomb damage, I don't think an echolocator's going to do us a lot of good."

  "I think you're right." Han caressed the stone again, as if he half believed it was illusion rather than technology that concealed it. And perhaps, thought Leia, it was. "But at least now we know two things."

  "Two things?"

  "That there was an entrance here," said Han grimly, his... and that it wasn't the entrance Drub used."

  Chapter 6

  The Jedi Knights had murdered his family.

  A band of them had descended on the town where he'd grown up, summoning fog by the power of the Force in the dead of night and moving through it in cold and shadow, wraiths of power and silence with eyes glowing green as marshfire in the dark. He'd fled, gasping, the icy pressure of their minds clutching at his, trying to cripple him and bring him back. He'd lain in the trees outside of town... (trees?) ... and seen them line up the women, laughing at their screams as they pulled their babies from their arms and sliced them to pieces with their lightsabers. He'd seen cauterized stumps lying on the ground, heard the shrieks that had echoed in the bitter night air. The Jedi had sought him, hunting him in speeders, whooping derisively while he fled over rocks and mud and streams... (mud and streams? I was raised in the desert.)... and then turned back, to slaughter the children. He'd seen his younger brother and sister...(What brother?)... cut down while they pleaded for their lives... Who made this up? It was true. Every word of it was true. Or something very like it was true, anyway.

  Luke shut his mind, breathed deep through the pain that remained in his chest and lungs. He gathered the Force to him, let the knowledge run off him like water from oiled armor. The memories were like those in Nichos's mind, he realized. Words, sometimes powerful words, but absolutely without images. Words that said they were the truth, that felt like the truth...

  His head ached. His body ached. His concentration wavered, darkened, and the feeling of betrayal, the bruised and savaged ache in his heart, returned. The Jedi had betrayed him.