"I know you feel loyal to her but she's a..."
Vines. The earth. A tiny reptile with jewel-colored feathers picking up a thrown breadcrumb in the doorway. The smell of the stream. The reality of what had been. The years of peace.
"She's a Rebel and a saboteur..." His voice trailed off.
What had really been, thought Luke. He held it out to Pothman, shining memories of place and time; memories of those things that he himself had actually seen and knew, like a slice of sunlight piercing the digitalized tape loop in Pothman's mind.
The light above the door blinked faster.
1559.
"Festering Skybolts!"
Pothman wheeled and dragged on the locking rings of the doors. Luke sprang, scrambled to help him, the rings gripping fast, refusing to budge, as if held from the other side--or from within the walls themselves, by the Will. Nichos seized them, twisted with the sudden, inexorable, mechanical strength of a droid. Air hissed as the seals broke. ”It's fighting me!" yelled Nichos, dragging the door open, and indeed, the heavy steel leaf was pulling visibly at his grip. "It's trying to close..."
Luke's lightsaber whined to life in his hands. Cray stood manacled between two support posts, face white with shock and exhaustion in the chalk-opal sheen of the grid's strange light. She yelled, "It's too late!" as Luke limped, stumbled in, slashed at the steel that held her wrists. "It's too late, Luke!"
With the last of his strength Luke blasted at the grid with his mind--misfire, flawed connection, a crucial jump of energy not jumping...
A searing, single bolt of lightning pierced the calf of his bad leg like a white needle as Cray dragged him out through the door.
Chapter 20
Cray said softly, "He was there." She wrapped her arms around herself, pulling close the thermal blanket he'd brought her, bowed her head until her cheek rested on her drawn-up knees. "He was there the whole time. He kept saying he loved me, he kept saying be brave, be brave... but he didn't do one damn thing to stop them." With her chopped-off hair ragged and dirty and her face haggard with exhaustion and emotional ruin, she looked much younger than she had when Luke had seen her on Yavin, or in her home territory at the Institute, or in Nichos's hospital room.
In all of those places, for all of her life, she had worn her perfection like armor, he saw.
And now that, and all things else, were gone.
Smoky light wavered from the crude lamp in the corner, the only illumination in the room. The air in the cul-de-sac of the quartermaster's office and the workrooms beyond it had gotten so bad Luke wondered if he should take the time to wire the local fans to cannibalized power cells, provided he could find them...
If there was time.
Heart and bones, he felt there wasn't.
"He had a restraining bolt--”
"I know he had a scum-eating motherless restraining bolt, you jerk!" She screamed the words, spat them at him, hatred and fury a bitter fire in her eyes; and when the words were out sat staring at him in blind, helpless rage behind which Luke could see the fathomless well of defeat, and grief, and the ending of everything she had ever hoped.
Then silence, as Cray turned her face aside. The nervous thinness that had advanced on her during Nichos's illness had turned brittle, as if something had been taken, not just from her flesh, but from the marrow of her bones. Over the torn uniform, grimed with blood and oil, the blanket hung on her like a battered shroud.
She took a deep breath, and when she spoke again her voice was perfectly steady. "He was programmed not to obey anything I said. He wouldn't even get me food."
Luke knew this--Nichos had told him. The tray Threepio had brought from the mess hall was untouched.
"Don't hate him for being what he is," he said, the only thing he could think of to say. "Or for being what he's not."
The words sounded puerile in his own ears, like a half-credit computerized fortune-teller at a fair. Ben, he thought, would have had something to say, something healing... Yoda would have known how to deal with the wretched ruin of a friend's heart and life.
The mightiest Jedi in the universe, he reflected bitterly--that he knew of, anyway-the destroyer of the Sun Crusher, the slayer of evil, who'd defeated the recloned Emperor and the Sith Lord Exar Kun, and all he could offer someone who had been disemboweled was, Gee, I'm sorry you're not feeling so well...
Cray brought her hands up to her head, as if to press some blinding ache from her skull. "I wish I did hate him," she said. "I love him--and that's worse to the power of ten."
She looked up at him, her eyes tearless stone. "Get out of here, Luke," she said without animosity, her face like flash-frozen wax that would crack at a breath. "I want to go to sleep."
Luke hesitated, instinctively knowing that this woman shouldn't be left alone. At his side, Callista said softly, "I'll stay with her."
Nichos, Pothman, and Threepio were in the fabrication lab outside. Threepio was explaining, "They're quite the slowest and most deliberate race in the galaxy. To the best of my knowledge all of the Kitonaks are still grouped in the section lounge exactly where the Gamorreans put them, still discussing their grandparents' recipes for domit. It's most extraordinary. And yet during their mating season--during the rains--they move with quite amazing speed..."
They all turned as Luke came through the office door, and Nichos stepped awkwardly forward, holding out one hand. Cray had taken the mold for it when he was in the hospital, accurate down to the birthmark where the V made by thumb and forefinger came to a point.
Accurate like the blue eyes, the mobile fold at the corner of the lips. Like the gigabytes of digitalized information on family, friends, likes and dislikes, who he was, and what he wanted...
"She all right?" asked Pothman into the silence.
"Come on, Nic," said Luke quietly. ”Let me get that restraining bolt off you."
Nichos's eyes went past him to the shut door. "I see."
Luke drew breath to speak--though he didn't know what he was going to say, what he could say--but Nichos held up his hand, and shook his head. ”I understand. I expect she will not want to see me ever again."
As he fetched the toolkit from the locker on the wall, and the old stormtrooper brought one of the flickering battery lights to illuminate his work, Luke honestly didn't know whether, given Cray's parting words to him, she would want to see her fiancé again or not. He took refuge in the task at hand, which was more complicated than a simple pop-on, pop-off bolt usually employed with droids. This one was dogged in with minute magnetized catches, and, Luke could see, programmed in a number of specific ways. The Will had to have instructed the Klaggs in its installation. He ran a quick integral test on it to make sure it hadn't been booby-trapped, then collimated the probe down to the smallest increment and began to pull the internal relays.
There was a certain amount of comfort to be obtained from purely mechanical tasks. He told himself to remember that for another time.
"Luke..."
He looked up quickly, to meet the blue glass eyes. In the shadowy gloom the face that he'd known so well was almost a stranger's, affixed monstrously to the silver cowl of the metal skull.
"Am I really Nichos?"
Luke said, "I don't know." He had never in his life felt so helpless, because in his heart--in the secret shadows where the truth always lay--he knew that this was a lie.
He knew.
"I was hoping you would be able to tell me," said Nichos softly. "You know me--or you knew him. Cray programmed me to... to know everything Nichos knew, to do everything Nichos did, to be everything Nichos was, and to think that I really am Nichos. But I don't...know."
"What do you mean?" protested Threepio. ”Of course you're Nichos. Who else would you be? That's like asking if The Fall of the Sun was written by Erwithat or another Corellian of the same name.
"Luke?"
Luke concentrated on pulling out the minutely programmed fiberoptic wires.
"Am I "another Corellian of t
he same name"?"
"I'd like to tell you one way or the other," said Luke. The bolt came away from the brushed-steel chest, lay thick and heavy in Luke's hand. One hand real, one hand mechanical, but both his. "But I... I don't know. You are who you are. You are the being, the consciousness, that you are at this moment. That's all I can tell you." That fact, at least, was true.
The smooth face did not alter, but the blue eyes looked infinitely sad. "I had hoped that, being a Jedi, you would know."
And Luke had the uncomfortable sensation that, having been a Jedi, Nichos knew perfectly well that he was keeping something back.
"I love her." Nichos looked again toward the doorway, his face the calm face of a droid, his eyes the eyes of a desperately unhappy man. "I say that--I know that--yet I cannot tell the difference, if there is one, between the devotion, the loyalty, that Artoo and Threepio feel toward you. And I don't remember whether that's love or something else. I can't set them side by side to compare. When they were holding Cray a prisoner, when they mistreated her, struck her-forced her to go through those stupid parodies of a trial--I would have done anything to help her. Except that, since I was programmed not to interfere with them, it was literally something that I could not do. I could not make my limbs, my body, act in a fashion contrary to my programming not to interfere."
He took the restraining bolt from Luke's hand, held it between thumb and forefinger, examining it dispassionately in the jaundiced glare of the lamp on the table beside them. "The terrible thing is that I don't feel bad about it."
"Why in the universe should you?" asked Threepio, startled.
"No reason," said Nichos. "A droid cannot go against his basic programming, or restraints placed upon his programming if they do not conflict with the deepest level of motivational limiters. But I think Nichos would have."
"She's asleep now."
Luke was as aware of her entering the room as if she'd come through the shut door that separated it from the tiny office. He was alone. In the dense shadows-the batteries on the lamp had gone, finally, and the only illumination came from the emergency supply of grease, burning with makeshift wicks in two big red plastic mess-hall bowls on the worktable--he could almost trick himself into believing he saw her, tall and lanky with her brown hair hanging down her back in a tail as long and thick as his arm.
I can't let her be destroyed, he thought, and his heart twisted with despair.
"Is Nichos all right?"
Luke nodded, then caught himself, and shook his head. "Nichos... is a droid," he said.
"I know."
He felt her presence beside him, as if she had hiked herself up to sit next to him on the edge of the workbench, booted feet dangling, as he was sitting. The warmth of her flesh came back to him from his dream, the passionate strength with which she'd clung to him, the sweetness of her mouth under his.
"Luke," she said gently. "Sometimes there is nothing you can do."
He expelled his breath in an angry gust, fist clenched hard; but he did not, after all, speak for a time. Then it was only to say, "I know." He realized he hadn't known that, two weeks ago. In some ways, learning about Sith Lords and cloned Emperors had been easier.
He made a crooked grin. "I guess the trick is learning when those times are."
"Djinn Altis used to teach us that," said Callista softly. "We have been for ten thousand years the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy. He always used to preface his stories, and his teaching, with that. But sometimes justice is best served by knowing when to fold one's hands. And he'd come up with some illustrative story from the archives and the oral tradition of the Jedi about some incident where what appeared to be going on wasn't actually what was going on."
He felt the rueful chuckle of her laughter.
"It used to drive me crazy. But he said, Every student is obliged to make one thousand eighty major mistakes. The sooner you make them, the sooner you will not have to make them anymore. I asked him for a list. He said, Thinking there's a list is mistake number four."
"How long were you with him?"
"Five years. Not nearly long enough."
"No," said Luke, thinking about the few weeks he'd spent on Dagobah. He sighed again. ”I just wish some of those one thousand eighty mistakes didn't involve teaching students. Teaching Jedi. Transmitting power, or the ability to use the Force. My ignorance--my own inexperience--cost one of my students his life already, and threw another one into the arms of the dark side and caused havoc in the galaxy I don't even want to think about. The whole thing--the Academy, and bringing back the skills of the Jedi-is too important for... for "Learn While You Teach." That's..." He hesitated, hating to say it of his teacher but knowing he had to. "That's the mistake Ben made, when he taught my father."
There was silence again, though she was as near to him as she had been in the landspeeder on the canyon rim, passing binocs back and forth while they watched for Sand People...
"If Ben hadn't taught your father," said Callista softly, "your father probably wouldn't have been strong enough to kill Palpatine... nor would he have been in a position to do so. You couldn't have done it," she added.
"Not then, no." He'd never thought of it that way.
She went on, "I'm recording everything I remember about Djinn's teaching." Her voice was very quiet, like the offer of a gift she wasn't sure would be well received. "I've been working on this, on and off, since you first told me about what you're doing. Techniques, exercises, meditations, theories--sometimes just the stories he'd tell. Everything I remember. Things that I don't think should be lost. Things that will help you. I understand that a lot of the techniques, a lot of the... the mental powers, the ways to use the Force... can't be described, can only be shown, one person to another, but... they may be able to help you, after you leave here."
"Callista...," he began desperately, and her voice continued resolutely over his.
"I'm not a Master, and my perception of them isn't a Master's perception... But it's all the formal training that you didn't have the chance to receive. I'll make sure you have the wafers of as much of it as I can finish, before you leave."
"Callista, I can't..."
He felt her gaze on him, rain-gray and steady, as she had looked at Geith; and he couldn't go on.
"You can't let this battle station fall into the hands of whoever it is who's learned to use the Force to move electronic minds," she said. She was so real--she had come back so far along the road--that he would have sworn he felt the touch of her hand on his. "I traded my life for it thirty years ago, and I'd trade yours and Cray's and whoever else is on this battle station if I--if we--have to. Where did you send the others?"
He recognized it as a shift of topic, a deliberate looking away from the realization that he would have to destroy her; or perhaps, he thought, it was just that she knew--as he knew--that time was too short to waste words when they both knew she was right.
He took a deep breath, reorganizing his thoughts. "To the main mess hall," he said. "I've figured out how to neutralize the Sand People and get at the shuttles."
"If she's angry at you for only doing what you had to," said Triv Pothman, his soft bass voice echoing strangely in the utter silence of the lightless halls, "she's not going to want to even see my face. And I don't blame her!"
See-Threepio's hyperacute hearing dissected the tight shrillness of anguish in his voice, and the sensors on his left hand--which the human was clasping, since the corridor was pitch dark--registered both abnormal cold and greater than usual muscular tension, also signs of stress.
That Pothman would experience stress in the circumstances was of course understandable. Threepio had learned that total darkness created disorientation and symptoms of fear even when the human involved knew that he was in perfect safety--which was certainly not the case on this benighted vessel. But he gathered from the context of the words that the darkness, the realization that air was no longer circulating on these decks and available supplies of oxy
gen would be exhausted in eight months--even with the small amount of photosynthesis being produced by the Affytechans –and the knowledge that Sand People occupied the vessel, were not the main sources of the former stormtrooper's distress, though in Threepio's opinion they should have been.
"Surely she realizes that the indoctrination process rendered you no more capable of independent action than Nichos was while under the influence of the restraining bolt?" Threepio kept his voder circuits turned down to eighteen decibels, well below the hearing threshold of either Gamorreans or Sand People, and adjusted the intensity so that the sound waves would carry exactly the.75 meters that separated his speaker from Pothman's ear.
"I hit her, I... I insulted her...said things I wish I'd cut out my own tongue rather than say to a young lady..."
"She was indoctrinated herself, and will be familiar with the standardized secondary personality imposed by the programming."
"Threepio," said Nichos's quiet voice from the darkness behind, "sometimes that doesn't matter."
Pale light dimmed the darkness up ahead, delineating the corner of a cross-corridor, the appalling mess that littered the floor-plates, gutted MSE'S and SP'S, shell casings from projectile grenades, broken ax handles, and spilled food and coffee. Morrts scuttled among the filth and their sweetish stink, like dirty clothes, added to the general offensiveness of the scene. The soft murmur of air-circulating equipment became audible, if one could separate it out from the truly appalling clamor coming from the mess hall: squeals, shrieks, and drunken voices singing "Pillaging Villages One by One."
Pothman closed his eyes in a kind of embarrassed pain. Nichos remarked, "Well, I see everybody made it back from the battle."
"Awful thing is," said Pothman, "I suspect Kinfarg and his boys are doing the same thing up on Deck Nineteen. Mugshub was pretty sore at them for not doing their duty by her and getting into fights with everybody they saw."
"Really," said Threepio in prissy disapproval, "I doubt that I shall ever understand organically based thought processes."
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