Shield of Lies

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “So he changed the profile—what, to some other Adventurer? So some other ship left Coruscant.”

  “Oh—he did more than change it,” Akanah said. “If that’s all I’d asked for, it wouldn’t have been quite so dear. No, he put what he called a smuggler’s kit in the transponder.”

  “This ship’s black-boxed?” Luke stared wonderingly.

  “I guess that’s what it’s called. Every time we jump, the profile changes—to something that looks legitimate but isn’t. If I’d had the price, I could have bought bootleg IDs instead of counterfeits.”

  “And I suppose the system doesn’t activate until after you’ve jumped out from wherever the work was done, so the trail doesn’t point back to this gentleman.” Luke frowned. “Stang, the days we’ve wasted—we could have jumped out from Lucazec, or Teyr—”

  “I encouraged you to,” she protested. “I’m the one who asked you to disable the interlock.”

  “Yeah, but you neglected to mention that it’d be safe to do it,” Luke grumbled. “We blast out of one system under one ID, tiptoe into the next under another—and no one connects the two. Very sweet. This fellow on Golkus is going to do a brisk business.”

  “He chooses not to,” Akanah said. “I had the impression he considers himself retired. He says he’s very selective about who he’ll do this kind of work for.”

  “Well—I guess the fact he’s on Golkus and not in Talos backs that up,” Luke said, shaking his head. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I did,” she said. “Just now.”

  “That’s a cheat,” Luke said.

  “Yes,” she said. “The truth is I wasn’t ready to trust you with that information. I didn’t really know whether I might need to hide myself from you at some point. I have a lot to protect.”

  “But you’re ready to trust me now.”

  “If I don’t trust you, I’m completely alone,” she said, a hint of an old sorrow in her eyes. “And I can’t do that anymore. I never wanted to, and now I just can’t. I can’t hold you out when what I need is to be close to someone again.”

  “Akanah—”

  “Secrets are like walls, aren’t they? They separate people. And I’ve been alone behind these walls for as long as I can bear,” she said. “I’ll teach you to read scribing, Luke. And if you want it, and you allow me enough time, I’ll teach you the rest. You will become one of us in full measure—an adept of the White Current. You will finally walk your mother’s path.”

  Luke understood the significance of what he was being offered. “Thank you,” he said in a voice drawn tight by emotion. “Even the chance that I might find her—I want to bring as much of her into my life as I can—I want that balance—”

  “But you still have questions,” she supplied.

  “Yes.”

  “Please don’t hold them back because you don’t want to seem ungrateful. Ask them.”

  Her words captured the flavor of his reluctance exactly. “Is telepathy one of the adept’s skills?”

  She laughed lightly. “Are people now so afraid to look closely at Luke Skywalker that ordinary attentiveness seems remarkable?”

  Luke’s smile was rueful and faintly embarrassed. “Perhaps.”

  “They should not be,” she said. “Now ask me the real question. Something else in those reports, I think.”

  “Something that wasn’t there,” he said. “You were right. There wasn’t a word about the Fallanassi—not on Lucazec, or Teyr, or Coruscant, or Atzerri. Not that word.”

  “You must wonder whether there really is a circle,” she said, “or if this is just a fable spun by a lonely madwoman to lure you away with her.” She showed a small smile, inviting him to demur.

  “I just expected there to be something. Rumors, myths, legends, superstitions—it’s hard to understand how a people as powerful as the Fallanassi, with as long a history as you’ve suggested, could leave no trace of yourselves—”

  “Because we have made it so,” she said quietly.

  “—Or are the traces there, and I don’t know the right names to ask after—What did you say?”

  “Because we have made it so,” she repeated. “When such traces appear, we remove them. But there are not many to remove, because we have not made it our purpose to leave a mark.”

  Luke nodded slowly. “Not to conquer—not to convert—but to find the place where one belongs—”

  “Yes. If you understand that, you understand the most important truth of the Current,” she said. “If you let it, it will carry you to where you need to be, for the lessons you need to learn, the work you need to do, and the people who need you in their lives.”

  Nodding, Luke slid across to the pilot’s seat. “Speaking of which—we’ve been sitting here a long time. We should get going,” he said. “But I need to know where.”

  “J’t’p’tan,” she said. “The world is called J’t’p’tan.”

  Luke turned away toward the controls. “Well—you’ve stumped me again. I’ll have to look that one up in the navigation atlas.”

  “Luke—”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t there a question you haven’t asked?”

  Luke thought for a moment. There were many he still could ask, but the urgency had left them. He believed she would answer them all, in their turn. “Yes, one,” he said finally. “Did you love Andras?”

  “That isn’t the question I expected,” Akanah said, and bit her lower lip. “Yes. I loved him. He held me lightly. He found something in me that he thought was beautiful, and he never tried to change me. And he was never cruel. It was like being a child—like being a child should be. I wish that it could have lasted.”

  Curiously, J’t’p’tan wasn’t in the skiff’s navigational database. Since the spelling was so odd, he pressed Akanah about it.

  “It isn’t a Basic word,” she said, calling forward to him from the refresher. “It’s the Basic transliteration of four mystical glyphs in H’kig—‘jeh,’ the immanent; ‘teh,’ the transcendent; ‘peh,’ the eternal; and ‘tan,’ the conscious essence. Only ‘tan’ may be written out in full. The H’kig consider the others too sacred. The spelling I gave you is the convention that respects that belief.”

  “You could have just said ‘I’m sure,’” he said with mock grumpiness.

  “Next time, I will.”

  The failure of the skiff to identify their destination forced Luke to make a query to Coruscant, and Mud Sloth to linger a while longer near the Oort Cloud. When the Astrographical Survey Institute returned the requested coordinates, they caused Luke’s eyes to widen.

  “A long way,” he said, zooming and scrolling the nav chart across the primary display. “And we can’t go there directly, because that’d put us on the wrong side of the Borderlands for the whole middle third of the trip.”

  “Which would be unsafe, I take it.”

  “There are Interdictor patrols all in through there,” Luke said. “But that’s okay, because it’s too far to go in one jump anyway. We’d be twenty hours over the skiff’s endurance. I’m going to have to pick a stopping place somewhere along the way.” He waggled a finger over one section of the map. “Somewhere in here—that’ll keep us on the right side of the line.”

  “I’ll leave that decision up to you.”

  Luke drew a small square around their destination and zoomed the map in to a more familiar scale. Legend marks and other identifiers popped into view. “Farlax Sector,” he said under his breath.

  “What?”

  “Talking to myself,” Luke said. “I’m tired. My mind’s already lying down in the bunk.”

  He zoomed the map another order of magnitude. Not just Farlax—Koornacht Cluster, he realized with a troubled frown. Pulling the datapad from the tie-down keeper, he brought up the news abstract and searched it for J’t’p’tan. It was a relief not to find it listed among the worlds involved in the fighting.

  Still frowning, Luke next turned to the PIO reports still waiti
ng in the message queue. Skimming, he found confirmation for the key element in the news reports—some colony worlds within Koornacht had been attacked, and their populations exterminated, by the Yevetha. Some colonies were given by name, some only by the origin of the colonists. But J’t’p’tan was not mentioned. Nor were the H’kig.

  He zoomed the navigation map once more and studied the geography of Koornacht Cluster. J’t’p’tan lay in the interior, out of scanning range for a ship on the edge of the Cluster. If something had happened there, Coruscant might not have any way to know.

  Do I tell her? Do we wait here until we know more, or do we go?

  As he plotted an alternate course—one that would take them as close to the border as possible without crossing the line—he allowed himself to consider the horrendous possibility that the Yevetha had fallen on J’t’p’tan and exterminated the Fallanassi. It was possible that he and Akanah had set out on their journey too late—by no more than a few tens of days. It was possible that Nashira had been alive that short a time ago—and was now dead.

  Akanah emerged from the refresher, and Luke pushed the datapad back in the keeper as she came forward. I can carry this. I can tolerate this uncertainty—she can’t, he told himself as he blanked the secondary display.

  “We have a good line to Utharis,” he said to her. “A Tarrack world, just inside the border. We should be able to take care of the skiff there with no problems.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “No,” Luke said, sending the coordinates to the autopilot. “You?”

  “No.”

  “Can’t get a better recommendation than that,” Luke said, suddenly feeling as tired as he had pretended to a short time before. “When we get there, I’ll buy you a souvenir hat.”

  He did not wait for Akanah to settle in her couch. Thumbing the hyperdrive safety and throwing the actuators forward, Luke bent time, stretched the stars, and hurled the ship toward Utharis.

  Lying on his back in the bunk, Luke stared up into the mesmerizer that covered the bulkhead above the bunk.

  The thin panel offered several holographic depth illusions intended to combat shipbound claustrophobia, an array of hypnotic sleep-inducing light and color patterns, and several other displays of a purely recreational nature. Playing before Luke’s eyes was the slowly spinning disk of a great spiral-armed galaxy as viewed from outside, a thousand light-years above the galactic plane.

  Luke had seen such a sight once before—from the Alliance’s medical frigate, at the deep rendezvous point they had code-named Haven. The sight took him back. That had been after the debacle at Hoth, after the escape from Bespin. He held his right hand, the bionic hand, up before his face and flexed the fingers, remembering—trying to remember.

  Even more than leaving Tatooine in the Falcon with Han and Obi-Wan, it was his encounter with Vader, there in Cloud City, that divided his life into two halves. Before that, Luke had been little different from any of the Empire’s many casual victims—uprooted from his home by Imperial brutality, recruited into the Rebellion more by rage and tragedy than ideology. The blaster bolts that killed Owen and Beru had destroyed one future and sent him tumbling into another. But it had seemed a matter of chance, not destiny.

  His meeting with his father, though, had laid a greater weight on his shoulders. Not until he was hanging from the power gantry, hearing the voice from behind the black mask speaking unthinkable words, had he understood what was being asked of him. Not until then had he known that he and no one else could carry that weight. Looking back to that moment was looking back to the moment he became himself. Looking back beyond that moment was almost impossible.

  You can hardly see twenty-one from thirty-four, he thought.

  The soft click of the curtain release interrupted his introspection. A moment later, Akanah slid the sections apart.

  “Somehow I knew you were still awake,” she said, showing that now familiar quick smile. “What did I leave you wondering about?”

  He shook his head. “I was just thinking about when I stopped being a kid. And how long ago it seems.”

  “What if you live to be as old as Yoda?”

  He smiled ruefully. “Then I’ll probably laugh at myself for feeling the way I feel right now.”

  “It’s not the time. It’s the responsibility,” she said, and the smile left her eyes. “Luke—I’m sorry to intrude on you this way. But there was something I didn’t tell you, and should have. And I didn’t feel right letting it wait.”

  Luke sat up far enough to prop himself up on his elbows. “Okay.”

  She sat down on the wide sill at the edge of the bunk where the curtain track ran. “Even though I held back some things you might wish I’d told you, I’ve tried to always tell you the truth,” she said. “But I did lie to you about Atzerri.”

  Luke sat up a little farther. “Oh?”

  “I took you to Atzerri under false pretenses,” Akanah said. “The circle was never there. You were right about Star Morning. The writing at Teyr said to go to J’t’p’tan.”

  “Then why?”

  “I had to,” she said. “I had to try to find my father.”

  Luke looked hard at her for long seconds, but his words were surprisingly soft. “Did you think I wouldn’t understand?”

  “I was afraid of what I might find,” she said, dropping her eyes. “I was afraid of what you might think of me if my father turned out to be someone even I can’t respect.”

  “Well—I understand that, too,” Luke said. “I think Leia’s been afraid to look for our mother. Maybe if I were Leia, I would be, too.”

  “Why?”

  Luke considered for a moment before answering. “Her memories of our mother—few as they are, and little as they’ve told us—are very precious to her. They’re a child’s memories, innocent, idyllic. And she’s protecting them.”

  “Protecting them? From what?”

  “Reality,” Luke said. “There’s nothing Leia could possibly learn about Mother that could improve on those memories—and a lot she could learn that could damage them. Leia’s never had to consider our mother in her full complexity. What kind of relationship did she have with Vader? Why did she have his children? Why did she give us up? When you start letting yourself ask questions like those, you risk getting an answer you don’t like.”

  “But it’s different for you?”

  “I don’t have any memories to protect,” he said, with a hint of wistful regret in his voice. “I just want to know who I come from—what else I carry inside me. I’m not as worried about being disappointed.” He smiled wryly. “Though if I discovered that Mother had something to do with turning Anakin Skywalker into Darth Vader—”

  “Oh, no,” Akanah said, looking up and touching his hand reassuringly. “I promise you—Nashira is nothing like that. Please believe me.”

  He nodded. “I do.”

  “That’s so important to me—and I’m afraid I’ve destroyed it,” she said, her voice quivering with anguish. “I didn’t want you to have any reason to doubt me, any reason to question coming with me.” She smiled sadly. “So, of course, I lied to you. I’m so sorry, Luke. I knew better. I knew I would never be able to deceive you.”

  Luke folded his fingers around hers and squeezed. “Did you find him?”

  “Yes,” she said, and her eyes began to glisten. “In a way, I did. I found him in Trasli District. He’s the very minor chief of a shabby little tribe, puffed up with flattery and brain-burned on Rokna blue. He didn’t remember my mother. He didn’t know he had a daughter.” She bravely tried a smile. “These little pieces of us that others hold inside them—some know their value, and others are careless with them. When you find Nashira, I know that she will have more to give you than Joreb Goss did me.”

  “You didn’t have much time,” Luke said. “You can go back.”

  “No. My father is dead,” she said simply. “Someone else lives in his body. I will never speak to that person again.”


  Luke could tell that her composure at that moment was simply an exercise of will. There was a tremble in her hand, her eyes were tear-bright with loss, and her skin was hot with her misery. But she would not let herself ask him for anything but forgiveness.

  “I understand that, too,” he said gently. “I know how that feels, to have that door locked, and only an empty space beyond. I’m sorry. I know it hurts.”

  “He was my last hope for a key,” she said, unable to keep the pain from her voice. “They’re both gone now—my mother and my father. If we don’t find the circle, I’m always going to be alone.”

  Words no longer offered any hope of comforting her, and her need was too acute to ignore. With a gentle tug on her hand and a meaningful, confirming look, Luke invited her into the bunk with him.

  After a moment’s hesitation, Akanah climbed in through the gap in the curtains and curled up against him, nestled in the crook of his arm. Before long, she was sobbing quietly, her body shaking beside his.

  But the tears felt to Luke more like welcome relief than distress. Saying nothing, he held Akanah close and tried to wrap her in a blanket of comfort.

  The galaxy turned like a wheel high above them, all its tumult far away and, for the moment, forgotten.

  Part III: Leia

  Chapter Ten

  Viceroy Nil Spaar returned to the spawnworld of the Yevetha as more than a hero and just less than a god.

  On the day of his return, more than three million of the Pure gathered to watch the gleaming sphere of Aramadia descend through the leaden sky of N’zoth. By means of Imperial hypercomm and planetary net, the vast throng at Hariz was joined by the entire population of the Twelve and the new worlds of the Second Birth. The consular ship was so brilliantly lit by spotlights that it seemed as though a fragment of a star were delivering the architect of the Purification back to his people.