synthdroid bearing food and another pitcher of water, paused in the act of
setting them down, shook his head.
"Don't," he said, and the pain in his voice, the shame, told her a thousand
things that he hadn't meant. Their eyes met for a time. Then he said to the
synthdroid, "You may go."
The door swished shut behind it. Leia could see the dark patch of necrosis
on the back of its neck, and smell the faint stink of rot in its wake. She
didn't know how to ask what she wanted to know without raising suspicions,
so she only said, "Why are you here? How did you come here? Beldorion called
you a philosopher."
"And I am," sighed Liegeus. He made a move as if he would fuss with the
water pitcher, the covered dish of aromatic and exquisitely cooked insect
life, but let his hand fall to his side again. He faced her.
"A wanderer. A blot on the familial escutcheon. They don't speak my name.
Alas, it has also been my misfortune to be a competent designer of
artificial intelligence systems for spacecraft, and a very, very good holo
faker."
"A holo faker?"
"Of course, my dear. it was my art, my hobby--the source of my joy and the
material for a thousand silly pranks in my youth. The bane of my existence,
now Beldorion has drafted me into editing and retap-ing his formidable
library of Huttese pornography. Even my stint on Gamorr, ghost-writing love
poems for the boars to pass off as their own when they go courting in the
wintertime, wasn't so fearful."
Leia laughed, like sudden summer breaking the ice lock of her fears, and
Liegeus laughed, too. For a moment she thought he might have reached out and
taken her hand, but he drew back at the last moment, saying instead, "Is
there something you'd like me to make for you? I have digitalized holo scrap
of every imaginable background, face, animal, and bit of furniture that's
ever been recorded motions, sounds, the slightest variations of movement.
You would not know that you weren't there. I can give you the hatching of
the glimmerfish by starlight, in the lake of Aidera below the palace where
you were raised, or the Starboys in their heyday . . . or your husband," he
added diffidently. "I have scrap of him, you know. And your children."
It gave Leia a queer pang to hear him say so, but she knew that Han was a
public figure, the children were public figures and had been holo-taped tens
of thousands of times. Liegeus's dark eyes were like those of a dog who
fears to be kicked--he was afraid, she realized, that he'd offended her, and
she reached out reassuringly and touched his hand.
"No," she said. "Thank you, no. It would hurt too much, I think."
He opened his mouth to give her a reassuring lie, as he had before when he'd
brought her water, but closed it instead, the lie unsaid. Their eyes met
again, she in the light and he in shadow. He began to say something else and
lost his nerve, and before he could find it again the door opened and the
synthdroid returned.
"Master Vorn, Master Ashgad wishes to speak with you on the terrace."
Leia followed him inside the chamber, and to the door, and was careful, when
he took his departure, not to let herself be seen as she
crept back to the railing of the balcony, where she could hear every word
said on the terrace below.
"I trust everything is proceeding on schedule? came Ashgad's voice.
"It is, sir. I can begin bringing the core up the day after tomorrow; I'm
feeding in escape trajectories to establish an exit program now."
"Try to set the work forward as much as you can, Liegeus," said Ashgad.
"The longer we delay, the more possibilities exist for something going
wrong. We're bringing in boxes tonight, both kinds. See they're properly
stored."
Liegeus's voice was almost inaudible. "Yes, sir."
"It will be up to you for the next three days," Ashgad went on. "I'm leaving
in the morning for Hweg Shul, to start things in motion there.
I should be gone . . ."
"Leaving`.," Liegeus sounded aghast.
"Oh, things will be all right." Ashgad spoke rather quickly, like a man who
hopes things will be all right. In the five days Leia had been under his
roof she had neither seen nor spoken to the man; he evidently did not like
being brought face-to-face with the victims of his crimes.
"Beldorion will be in charge, but you're not to permit him to come near Her
Excellency. I heard about that little incident yesterday, and I've had words
with him. He knows it's not to be repeated."
"But will he honor his word?" asked Liegeus, clearly alarmed. "If he tried
yesterday to gain control over her, he may . . ."
"He'll do what he's told," snapped Ashgad. "As will Dzym."
"No," said Liegeus softly. "He won't. And Dzym won't."
"You worry too much," said Ashgad, too loudly and too swiftly.
"I'll be back in three days."
"But--"
"I said, don't worry about it!"
Leia heard his footfalls retreat and felt through her knees on the terrace's
tiles the heavy whoosh of a closing door. She sat back against the railing,
feeling curiously sick with dread.
Ashgad was leaving. She would be alone in this house with Beldorion.
And with Dzym.
"You find your friend`.," Luke raised his head quickly from the valves he
was cleaning--in a dust-heavy atmosphere like Nam Chorios's, engines needed
almost constant regrinding and refitting--as the doorway of Croig's Fix-It
Barn darkened, and he grinned a greeting at Umolly Darm.
The prospector had the grimy look of one just into town from the wastelands,
her baggy trousers and thick, padded jacket pregnant with dust. Beyond her,
in the street, Luke saw her heavy X-3 Skid piled high with a load of boxes,
crystals glimmering like great heaps of broken blue-and-violet glass in the
thin sun.
"Not yet," he said. He wasn't terribly surprised to see Darm. Arvid had told
him when he'd recommended him for the job as mechanic at Croig's that it was
the biggest repair shop in Hweg Shul, which meant on the planet. And it was
big, for Hweg Shul, meaning it housed about thirty repair bays that refitted
anything from pumps to speeders to small household appliances for little
more than the cost of a cheap lunch for his workers. Like every other
Newcomer building it sat on stilts--the T-47 being worked on in the next bay
had shorted all its coils from being too close to the ground during the
recent storm.
Croig was a Durosian, and Luke was positive he had connections to half the
smugglers in the sector.
"What can I do for you?" He set aside the valves and crossed the dirty,
oil-streaked floor. Unshaven and clad in the local mix of homespun and
blerd-leather, after three days in Hweg Shul, Luke had so completely blended
with the scenery that even Taselda's tame fanatics would not have noticed
him in the street.
Darm handed him a banthine sonic drill. "Ruptured core sheath," she said. "I
don't know whether you can do anything with it or not.
And I wanted to ask your boss if I could bring in the skid after I unload
it-
-again. We're sending a shipment up tonight, or trying to.
Loronar's got a pick-up cruiser in high orbit."
"Loronar?" asked Luke, suddenly curious. "You sell the crystals to Loronar
Corporation?" The way Arvid had spoken, he'd gotten the impression of a
small-time operation--Darm digging around in the
desert for crystals to make some kind of obscure optical or medical
equipment, useful only to high-level boffins at the university research
labs. Loronar was anything but small time.
"Sure." Darm dug in the pocket of her sand-scored red vest and fished forth
a hunk of crystal the length and width of two of Luke's fingers, and perhaps
twice the depth. "Smokies we call them, or Spooks.
This one's a little small for what they want, and they look for better color
than this--see how pale it is?--but they'll buy as many as we can ship.
Watch this. Hold it up to the light?"
Luke nodded.
"See the shadows in it? Those gray lines? Now watch." She carried it across
the bay floor to where the heavy coils of the recharger--smuggled in
piecemeal and Croig's pride and joy--crouched like a greasy metal monster in
the corner, the center of an organic-looking nest of cable and tube.
Gingerly--the recharger had been set up in a corner of the room to protect
it from sand, and because it was in the dark, it was always crawling with
drochs--Darm pulled out a recharger block, set the terminals against the
crystal, and thumbed the switch.
Luke flinched, appalled and disoriented, though Darm didn't appear to feel
anything The disturbance in the Force axed his brain like a scream. The
woman regarded him in surprise as he fell back a step, trembling. "What is
it"
"You didn't feel that?" His mind was still ringing with it, though it had
ended in a split second, even before she turned off the switch. Sweat stood
out on his face and he felt vaguely sick.
She shook her head, clearly puzzled. "You okay, Owen? What happened?"
Luke hesitated. It was impossible to explain matters of the Force to those
unaware of its existence and, given Taselda's attempt to control him--and
Officer Snaplaunce's account of her attempt to kidnap Cal-lista--in the town
he was very careful to whom he spoke. "It's nothing."
He took the crystal from Darm's hand, and held it to the nearest window once
more. The threadlike gray striations in the Spook's heart had changed their
orientation, forming two starlike blotches where the terminals had touched.
"if that Spook had had the proper cc lot, said the prospector with rueful
amusement, "I'd just have done myself out of a hundred credits.
They can program them, realign the structure to act as a receiver."
She flipped the pale arrowhead of quartz in her hand, then tossed it to
Luke.
His hand jerked back, and the crystal fell to the floor and shattered into
glittering slivers. "Sorry, he said. sorry She kicked the fragments casually
out of sight under the recharger.
"Not to worry. Like I said, it wasn't anything they'd take, but even the
tiny ones can be reoriented like that with an ion zap." She frowned at him
again, studying his face, which still, Luke feared, showed too much of the
sickened shakiness he felt inside. "You sure you're okay?" She probably
meant, thought Luke, that it wasn't like him to drop things and after years
of a Jedi's hair-trigger physical training it certainly wasn't.
Whatever their other properties, the Spook crystals somehow seemed to be
loci or triggers for the Force.
"Yeah," said Luke, and rubbed his temples, trying to gather his wits.
"Yeah, I'm fine." No wonder the planet reverberated with the Force.
Could they be used to . . .
"There's a meeting tonight," went on Darm, her voice breaking into the
half-formed train of thought. "Seti Ashgad's back. Turns out he met with
some bigwig in the Republic, how do you like that We're all going to his
place tonight. You know it. That big old joint that used to belong to some
Hutt who ran things around here way long ago. Pretty fancy, but it must get
fairly exciting during ground lightning. if you wanted to go I could get you
in, introduce you around. People will be there from as far away as Outer
Distance. If your friend's still in settled territory at all, someone will
have seen her."
"Thanks," said Luke, his sense of confusion, of despair, returning at the
mention of her presence on this world. He'd walked past Taselda's house two
or three times in the past twenty-four hours, carefully, had walked past
Ashgad's, too. At least this would be a way in without rousing the
suspicions of the too-intelligent Officer Grupp. "I'd like that."
Darm waved his thanks away, with the easy friendliness of communities where
humans, or at least humans of a certain persuasion, feel
that they have to stick together. "We'll find her for you," she said.
"Sooner or later, somebody'll know. Tonight at twenty hours, then.
I'll come by here at quarter of. Arvid and Gin'll probably be there as
well."
Luke nodded. After Ilmolly Darm had left he knelt and touched the broken
fragments of crystal with his fingertips, trying to recap-ture--trying to
understand--what it was exactly that he'd felt.
But they were only bits of silicon, like the rubbish heaped in all the
corners beneath the repair shop's stilts.
So, Taselda's enemy--whose house had been taken over by Seti Ashgad--had
been a Hutt.
An evil Jedi? wondered Luke. Or was that just another of her lies? A "crime
boss," Grupp had called him, but that could be only a layman's description
of something he did not understand.
Could Hutts be born, imbued with the Force?
There was a time when someone would have asked that about the Khomm people
as well, until Luke's pupil Dorsk 81 had made his appearance on Yavin Four.
Had Taselda tried to get Callista to break in and search for her lightsaber?
Ashgad's palace itself, though typical of Hutt dwellings in its burrowlike
arrangement of rooms leading out of rooms, round doors, and feeding niches
in every available wall, had been in human ownership long enough to have had
windows put into it and been cleansed many times. As Luke, Arvid, and Aunt
Gin struggled against the millrace of the evening wind, Luke fingered
Taselda's sketch map in his pocket.
"You know anything about the meeting, Grupp?" asked Arvid, as the paunchy
cop fell into step beside them. Grupp shook his head.
"Far as I can tell nobody did. I did sort of wonder where he's been these
past few months." Howling out of the fast-falling darkness, the wind thrust
them this way and that, making it almost impossible to speak. "Snaplaunce
and I have been keeping an eye out here and most times there's been nobody."
Luke didn't think it likely that a prisoner---especially one who'd already
attracted the man's notice--could be kept here undetected.
Nevertheless, when they entered the house, he took the occasion to slip away
from the others and make his way to the old kitchen courtyard.
Though sheltered by its high walls from the wind, the place gave him the
transparisteel showed him a long room embellished with what he vaguely
recognized as state-of-the-art culinary esoterica Four types of electronic
stoves; freeze and slow dryers; dehydrators and rehydrators; bowls and
measures and work surfaces of every conceivable size and material; bottles,
boxes, and sacks on shelves that reached to the ceiling.
A glutton's heaven, but little more.
Across the court the corresponding chamber was shuttered close.
Opening its door, Luke had a dim vision of glass-enclosed vats of every
size, tanks of oxygen and methane, feeder-tubes, shunts, and apparatus to
which Luke could put no name. He couldn't imagine the purpose of such a
display, but the whole long room resonated with ugliness and evil.
But there was no sign of Callista, no sign of any prisoner. The doorway to
the treasure vaults that Taselda had described stood shut behind an iron
grille, grille and door both covered with a thick blanket of podhoy of
clearly many years' growth. He reached out with his mind, calling Callista's
name, searching for some trace of her in this place. But whether because of
her loss of ability to use the Force or because of the strange, thick
presence of the Force in the ether of the planet or simply because she was
not and had never been there, he felt nothing.
A tall, androgynous individual whom Luke recognized as one of Ashgad's
synthdroids-either a member of the party who'd escorted him aboard the
Borealis or an identical creation--appeared behind him and inquired
politely, "May I help you?"
Luke meekly allowed himself to be herded back to the others in what had
clearly been the house's banqueting chamber in earlier times, the biggest
room in any Hutt's dwelling. It was now filled with men and women, some of
whom Luke recognized from the abortive attack on the gun station. Others he
knew by sight from his brief tenure at Croig's Fix-It Barn. Their clothing
marked them all as Newcomers, following standard cut and fashion in the Core
worlds even if they could no longer acquire the usual materials, and there
was more diversity in complexion than he'd seen in the limited Oldtimers
gene pool.
Croig was there, grayish, orange-eyed, and glum, keeping close to his
brother (or sister--the Durosian word was the same) and the two or three
Planet of Twilight Page 19
