"We'd better get under cover," said Han softly. "If that ship Mara talked about is going to try and finish up its mission, we don't know how far around the rift it was programmed to bomb. Let's just hope the caves are deep enough."
A burning pinpoint of white light flared suddenly in the dim sky, faded, then swelled suddenly to a monstrous glare. Han flinched, covering his eyes with his arm. Leia turned her face aside and saw their shadows--man, woman, Wookiee, droid--momentarily etched black against the blue-white meringue of the drifts among which they stood.
Han said, "What the...?"
"I don't know," said Leia. "But that was way too big for a Tikiar. It has to have been the Eye."
"Luke, forgive me."
He rolled over, body aching from the effects of the stungun's blast. There were soft hootings in the semidark, and a white, fluffy enormity came and bent over him, urging him down with padded black paws.
Talz. They clustered around the emergency bunk where he lay, and the whole dark space of the shuttle hold smelled of their fur.
Someone was singing. "Pillaging Villages One by One."
Luke sat up, and was immediately sorry.
"Forgive me," said Callista's voice as he lay down again. Somewhere close by the Jawas chattered, yellow eyes glowing in the dark. Over the heads of the Talz he could see one end of the shuttlecraft jammed with old droid parts and stormtrooper helmets used as buckets to hold scrap metal, wire, and power cells. He remembered Callista had told both groups of Gamorreans, in her pseudomessages from the Will, that it was the Intent of the Will that they leave all their weapons outside their respective shuttlecraft.
The voice was tinny, small. Turning his head, he saw the player set next to him on the thin mattress of the bunk. The holo of her face appeared dimly above it, no more substantial than the audio.
She looked exhausted, as she had in his dream-vision of her in the gun room, her brown hair straggling from the loose braid she'd put it in, her gray eyes at peace.
"It was my idea--mine and Cray's. I was afraid--we were both afraid--that at the last minute you'd try to settle for less than complete destruction of the Eye of Palpatine... that you'd try to play for time, to take me off the ship. I'm sorry that I... made your decision for you."
Her image faded out, and Cray's appeared, weary and stretched-looking, but with that same exhausted peace in her eyes. "With me in the gun room using the Force against the enclision grid, I figure it's just possible for a droid to make it up the shaft... And a droid could take a few hits and still be able to function. Nichos agreed to this."
The pale, still features of the Jedi who for a year had been Luke's pupil appeared beside hers, oddly detached-looking in front of the metal of the cranial cowling. The hand--the precise duplicate of Nichos's hand--rested on Cray's shoulder, and she reached to touch the fingers that had been programmed to human warmth.
"Luke, you know I was never more than a substitute; a droid programmed to think, and remember, and act like someone Cray wanted very much to keep. And that might have suited me, if I hadn't loved her--truly loved her--as well. But I'm not the living Nichos, and I know I never can be. I would always be something less, something that was not."
"Nichos is on the other side, Luke," said Cray softly. "I know it, and Nichos..." She half smiled. "And this Nichos knows it. Remember us."
Their images faded.
No image replaced it, but Callista's voice said again, "Forgive me, Luke. I love you. And I will love you, always."
From the starboard portholes came a blazing burst of white.
"No!" Luke flung himself to his feet. He thrust through the Talz, through the Jawas clustering around the ports, the gentle tripods crowding up against the massive piles of the Jawas' junk; fell against the wall to stare out in time to see the huge white flare on the far side of the drifting asteroid fade...
Tiny, it was, hanging in the distance...
"No!"
Then the explosion, like the shattering destruction of the world.
Chapter 25
Mara Jade picked them up in the Hunter's Luck very shortly after that.
"I came out of hyperspace almost on top of that Tikiar," she said as she and Leia helped Luke along the short, prehensile temp-lock from the Red Shuttle's lock to the Luck's. Behind them in the shuttle, Chewbacca was snarling furiously at the assorted Gamorreans and Jawas seeking to follow, so loudly that he could be heard in the thin almost-vacuum. See-Threepio, who'd more or less piloted both shuttles away from the spreading cloud of ruin that had been the Eye of Palpatine, had remained with the Wookiee to translate, explaining in a number of languages that everything was under control and they'd all be taken care of.
"It was heading up the Corridor like it had a pack of Void Demons on its tail. If I'd known who it was I'd have taken a shot at them, but they were going so fast I probably wouldn't have got a hit. You be all right, Skywalker?" She keyed the entry to the Luck's main lock, and regarded Luke worriedly as the air cycled in.
Luke nodded. There seemed no point in saying anything. He'd heal, he supposed, inwardly as well as physically. He knew that people did.
The black gulf of nothingness inside him wouldn't always be the only thing he could see.
Now he just wanted to sleep.
Leia put her arm around his waist, and he felt the touch of her mind on his. Tell me later, she said.
Leia, he thought, would have liked Callista.
Mara would have, too, in her cold, cautious way.
"I'll be fine," he said, knowing it was a lie.
"There's a pretty good company medcenter in Plawal," Mara was saying as she eased Luke down the short corridor to one of the small cabins. The Hunter's Luck was a rich kid's yacht that had fallen to pirates years before, but some of the old amenities still remained, including a self-conforming bed in a niche with a small monitor screen onto the bridge. After sleeping on heaps of blankets on the decking in corners of offices, the gentle comfort was strange.
"Who's the old duffer you got riding herd on the Blue Shuttle, kid?" Han, on the bridge, glanced up at what was clearly his own screen.
Luke smiled a little at his friend's nickname for him. "Triv Pothman. He used to be a stormtrooper, a long time ago." He leaned his head back into the pillow, barely feeling it when Leia stripped open the leg of his suit and slapped two heavy-duty gylocal patches and a massive dose of antibiotics onto the bruised, inflamed flesh.
He heard Mara swear and ask, "How long has it been like that?"
It was hard to estimate time. "Five days, six days."
She sliced off the splint Bullyak had braced it with; he barely felt her stripping away the pipe and engine tape. "The Force healed that? By the look of those cuts you should have gangrene from your quads to your toenails."
"Artoo-Detoo!" He heard Threepio's voice in the hall. Turning his head, through the door he saw the protocol droid hold out his dented arms to his stubby astromech counterpart, himself battered and smoke-stained and crusted with mud and slime. "How extremely gratifying to find you functional!"
I'll never be anything but a droid, he heard Nichos's voice in his mind. If I didn't love her...
He tried to close his mind to the hurt of memory. Five days, six days, he had said...
"And Your Highness," Threepio's voice continued. "I trust your mission to Belsavis went as you had hoped?"
"You could say that, Threepio," said Leia.
"If you were being kind of free with the truth," put in Han from the bridge. "Whoa, what have we got here? We got a signal in the debris field. Escape pod, it looks like."
Luke opened his eyes. "Cray." So she decided to live after all. Something inside him wondered why.
While Mara went off to the bridge to work the tractor beam, Luke insisted that Leia strap another splint to his leg so that he could go down to the hold when they brought the pod in. "She'll need... to be taken care of," he said, easing himself to a sitting position as his sister fixed the brace tight. Sit
ting up, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror on the other side of the cabin behind what had once been a bar, and was startled to see how the past week had lined and thinned his face. The blue eyes seemed very light in eye sockets discolored by fatigue and sleeplessness, and fading bruises marked jaw and cheekbone under the wicked gouges that shrapnel had left. With a ragged growth of brown stubble, he looked like some dilapidated old hermit, leaning on his staff...
He looked, he realized, a little like old Ben.
Leia helped him to his feet. She, too, had the appearance of someone who'd been through the mill.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
She nodded, brushing away his concern. "What about Cray? Did Nichos..." He saw her hesitate on the word "die," as she remembered that Nichos, after what Cray had done for him--to him--had been incapable of death.
"It's a long story," he said, feeling utterly weary. "I'm... surprised she took the escape pod. My impression was she didn't want very much to live anymore."
Over the tannoy he heard Mara say, "Got it. Bringing it in through the shield."
Leia put her shoulder under his arm, and helped him down the hall, the two droids and Chewie trailing in their wake. "Apparently Trooper Pothman has succeeded in calming the Klaggs and the Affytechans on the Blue Shuttle, Master Luke," Threepio informed him. "General Solo has already sent a subspace message to the Contacts Division of the diplomatic corps, and they're arranging a party to deal with reorientation of the Eye's prisoners. They say they would like your help on that."
Luke nodded, though it was hard to think more than a few minutes ahead, a few hours ahead. He saw now why Cray had done everything in her power, had wrung her body and her mind to keep Nichos with her, to try to keep Nichos with her.
Because she could not conceive of what life would be like without him as a part of it.
He is on the other side, she had said.
As Callista, now, was on the other side.
Whatever had changed her mind, he thought, she would need him there when she came out of her chilled sleep.
The lights on the hold door cycled green and the door hissed open. The pod lay on the square of the doors, directly under the hooded, cooling eye of the quiescent tractor beam. It was barely two meters long and eighty centimeters or so wide, matte Imperial green, and icy to his touch with the cold of space.
He slid the cowling back. Under it, she lay in the coma-like sleep of partial hibernation, shallow breasts barely moving under the torn and smoke-stained uniform and long hands folded over her belt buckle. Despite the bruises that still marked it, her face was so calm, so relaxed, so utterly different from the brittle, haggard features of the woman she had become that he almost didn't recognize her.
Had she looked like this, he wondered, that first day over a year ago, when Nichos had brought her to Yavin? The most brilliant AI programmer at the Magrody Institute--and strong in the Force as well.
The standoffish elegance she had worn as a protective cloak was gone.
She was a different woman.
A different woman...
Luke thought, No...
He shook his head.
No.
It wasn't Cray's face.
The features, the straight nose and delicate bones, the full, almost square shape of the lips, were the same...
But everything in him said, It isn't Cray.
No, he thought again, not wanting to believe.
For a long time the universe stood still.
Then she drew a long breath, and opened her eyes.
They were gray.
No.
He put out his hand and she raised hers, quickly, as if fearing the touch. For a few moments she simply looked at her own hands, turning them over like one marveling at the shape of palms and fingers, some unfamiliar piece of sculpture, stroking the backs of them, the fingers and the knobby, stick-out bones of the wrists. Then her eyes met his, and flooded with tears.
Very gently, afraid to touch--afraid she would vanish, evaporate, turn out to be only a dream--he helped her to sit. Her hands were warm where they touched his arms. For a time they only looked at each other... This can't be real...
She touched his face, the bruises and the shrapnel cuts and the beard stubble, his mouth that had pressed to hers in the dream that hadn't been a dream.
If I could ask for only one thing, one thing in my entire life...
He brought her gently against him, holding the long slender bones, the light sinewiness of her, pressing his face against the pale ragged hair, which he knew would turn brown in time. She was breathing. He could feel it against his cheek, under his hands, next to his heart.
Then she laughed, a soft and wondering sob, and he flung his head back and everything rose within him in a single wild whoop of triumph and joy. ”Yes!" he yelled, and they were laughing and crying both, hanging on to each other, and she was saying his name, over and over again as if she still didn't believe it; couldn't believe that such things were occasionally permitted by Fate.
It was her voice, and nothing like Cray's at all.
His hands shook as they framed her face, Leia and Mara and Han and the others standing in the doorway of the hold watching all this in silence, knowing something was taking place and not quite knowing what.
But after a time Leia said, hesitantly, "That... that isn't Cray." There was no question in her voice.
"She stepped aside," said Luke, knowing absolutely and exactly what had happened in the last moments on board the Eye.
"After Nichos went up the shaft," said Callista softly. "He was hit, badly, most of his systems cut to pieces... He was in no pain, but he could feel himself shutting down as he set the core on overload. Cray said to me that she wanted to stay with him. To cross to the other side with him. To be with him. She was a Jedi, too, remember... not fully trained, but she would have been one of the best."
Tears flooded the gray eyes again. "She said if she couldn't be with the one she loved in this world, at least someone could. She said to thank you, Luke, for all you tried to do for her, and for all you did."
He kissed her, like the breath of life coming into his body after long cold, and stumbled trying to get to his feet on his bad leg. Laughing shakily, holding on to each other for support, they got to their feet and turned to the group in the doorway.
He said softly, knowing it for the truth as he knew the truth of his own bones, "Leia--Han-Mara... Threepio, Artoo... This is Callista."
Chapter 26
"Everything has to be paid for." Callista passed her hands across the surface of the glass sphere, where the pink-gold liquid glittered--unstirring--in the glow of the lamp. Shadows bent and flickered over the other objects in the toy room, catching angles of color, shadow, light. Outside, the stream that ran through the wide hall clucked and muttered in its stone channel, and the glowrod hissed a little in a loose socket, but there was no other sound.
"I should have known there would be a risk," she went on in that soft, slightly husky voice with the slight inflection of the Chad deep-water ranges. "I might have guessed there would be a price."
"Would you have done it," asked Leia, "if you knew?"
Callista said, "I don't know."
She crossed the room to the flat rectangular tank, with its thin layer of yellow sand, moving with an odd, graceful awkwardness. She had on the faded blue jumpsuit of a spaceport mechanic, laced down as tight as it would go in the back and still baggy over flanks and shoulders, and a mechanic's heavy boots. With her cropped hair and shy, rather quirky cast of face she had an unfledged look, like a military cadet. A lightsaber hung at her belt, a gleaming line of bronze sea creatures inlaid in its grip.
"The Masters used to call images in the tank, like forming up holos. They'd project their thoughts through the sand. I don't know what its exact composition is, but it occurs naturally on a world in the Gelviddis Cluster. The sand is what makes it easy for a child to do the same."
Leia frowned, considering
the faintly glittering, daffodil-colored dust, trying to evoke Han's face, or Jacen's, by thinking through it.
"Flowers were the easiest," said Callista. ”Something you're familiar with. Flowers or animals. Make them come up out of the sand."
There was silence again. Leia perched on the bench in front of the tank, relaxing and focusing her mind as Luke had taught her, seeing in every detail the little candy-pink pittin that had once played with the end of her braids. Thinking through the sand...
And in some fashion she couldn't define, the images went through the sand and appeared in the tank, not bit by bit, but with an odd sort of abrupt gradualness. AT-AV, rolling on her back to bat at starblossom petals, as if she hadn't been dead for eleven years.
"Oh, pretty!" said Callista. "Is she yours?"
"Was," said Leia. "A long time ago."
"The Masters always had a problem with the children born Jedi to non-Jedi parents, you know," Callista went on, after a silence in which Leia let the image fade. "Because it's usually passed on in families, but not always... and it often manifests spontaneously, in people who had no experience with it and no way of knowing how to deal with children who had it. The Masters tried to catch those as early as they could, because those were the ones at the most risk from the dark side. Those," she went on, "and the children born of Jedi parents who were only a little Force-strong, who had only a tiny bit of what their brothers and sisters and playmates had full strength. Some of those were... the most dangerous of all."
She stopped, and there was a very awkward pause.
Then, quickly, Callista turned away. "This is a mental maze." She tapped one of the metal spheres in their rack on the wall. Leia shrank back from it as Callista took it down, remembering Irek holding it out for her, reaching out to suck her spirit into it, to be trapped forever.
"Most people didn't go into them really," said the taller woman. "Not with their whole... whole being, whole spirit. And they're easy to get out of once you know how. The big ones are the simplest, and they get more complicated the smaller they get, mazes within mazes within mazes. The juniors used to make them for fun, and try to confuse and trap each other, the way kids do."
Children of the Jedi Page 38
