The Crystal Star

by Vonda McIntyre

  “I’ll talk in here if I want to!” Han said out loud.

  He slipped into the theater.

  The auditorium was filled, as before, with supplicants. They filled the seats, the resting pillows, and the aisles. Han had no way to get down to the front, where Waru held court. Standing on tiptoe, Han tried to look over the heads and backs and carapaces of the assembly. Finally he spotted Xaverri, standing near Waru’s base. As far as he could tell, she was all right, though he did not much like the way she stood with her head down, her shoulders slumped.

  If she collapses again, Han thought … What will I do? What can I do?

  He scanned the huge room, searching for another way to reach the stage. But the auditorium was dangerously crowded.

  Waru had accepted another subject for healing: an Ithorian family.

  “Do you wish me to try to heal you, seeker?” Waru said.

  Waru’s voice filled the auditorium. Inclined to find everything about Waru suspicious, Han noted the difference between Xaverri’s private conversation with the being and the public voice that drew everyone’s attention more firmly to the ceremony.

  “Then I will try to help you,” Waru said.

  Han snorted, then wiped the contemptuous expression from his face as a huge leathery being turned slowly to loom over him, gazing down with irritated distraction.

  “Just a little allergy,” Han said.

  The being waved its ears and returned its attention to Waru.

  Han could not reach the foot of the stage. The crowd was impassable. Han tried to keep an eye on Xaverri, for all the good it would do; at the same time he watched Waru’s performance and tried to figure out the illusion.

  A subfamily of Ithorians approached the altar. The quintet of tall, crooknecked beings carried a blanket-wrapped companion to Waru. The tallest of the Ithorians opened the blanket, revealing a youth, painfully thin. Its intelligent eyes blazed at the ends of its hammer-shaped head, and it struggled to remain upright. The adult family members petted it and whispered to the youth, perhaps promising that they would soon return to their herd-city, and helped the child lie down on Waru’s altar. Their stereo voices warbled strangely in the theater.

  The youth was pathetically weak. The family gave it into Waru’s care and stepped back.

  As before, the gold scales liquefied, flowed, and covered Waru’s patient. Ichor dripped around the cocoon and solidified. Light glowed through the translucent covering.

  But after that, everything changed.

  Waru shuddered violently, crying out. The cry rose and fell, simultaneously: it climbed to a piercing shriek and descended to a rumbling roar. The high pitch screamed in Han’s hearing, then vanished above his range. He felt as if his brain were being pierced by sound waves. At the same time, the low roar became an unsettling vibration. The walls reverberated at a low pitch that shook Han’s bones.

  It sounded, to Han, like a great cat growling in satisfaction over its prey.

  The supplicants cried out in a horrified, keening wail, and fell to the floor before Waru, covering their eyes. Only Han was left standing. Even Xaverri knelt at the base of the altar, her head down.

  Waru shuddered.

  But this ritual was different. Han strained to see, but he was certain Waru had changed the procedure. Instead of expanding, the chrysalis clenched, as if it were squeezing the Ithorian youth.

  Waru sighed.

  The chrysalis exploded. Like the embers from a forest fire out of control, whipped by a screaming wind, brilliant sparks whirled up from the altar. The whirlpool of fire spiraled through the hall. Sweat burst out on Han’s forehead. The air became hot and oppressive.

  Han watched in horror.

  Waru’s scales fluttered, and smoothed.

  On the altar, the Ithorian youth lay in a collapsed pile of awkward limbs. The youth’s family huddled in a heap, holding each other, crying, afraid to look up.

  “I regret,” Waru said. “I regret. I cannot always succeed. Perhaps you waited too long to ask my help, or perhaps your offspring’s time had come.”

  The Ithorian family climbed uncertainly to their feet, holding each other, silent.

  “We honor you, Waru.” Speaking Basic, the shortest of the Ithorians blinked sadly. The Ithorian’s voice fell to a ragged whisper. “We honor you.”

  “I have exhausted myself,” Waru said. “I must rest.” The golden scales contracted together, closing the ichor-producing veins.

  Acquiescing to Waru’s demand, the Ithorian family wrapped its offspring in the blanket, now a shroud, and picked its way from the altar through the crowd. The people made way for them, then followed them out of the theater.

  Han pressed himself against the rear wall of the theater. Sweat sparkled and prickled in his vision. He closed his eyes, trying to blot out what he had seen. People brushed past him, and finally the hall was silent.

  “Come with me, Solo,” Xaverri said.

  He opened his eyes. She stroked his arm, gently, soothing him; he stared at her. Horror possessed him. He could not speak. He could barely breathe. Xaverri wrapped her fingers around his, and led him silently from the theater.

  Behind them Waru hulked, and slept.

  Xaverri and Han walked in silence through the courtyard. Even after they passed beneath the arch, they did not speak.

  Luke ran toward them across the field, his robes flying. Threepio hurried after him, falling behind with every step.

  Luke stopped in front of Han and grabbed him by the shoulders.

  “What happened? Are you all right?”

  “Waru … I don’t know. I’m all right, but …” Han drew a deep breath, trying to collect himself.

  “I felt—I don’t know, a disturbance—” Luke let Han go and rocked back on his heels and raked his fingers through his hair. “What’s going on, Han? I feel like I’m standing on quicksand, and I can’t find solid ground.”

  “Somebody died,” Han said softly. “A kid. Come on, let’s go back to the lodge.”

  Without a word, Luke and Threepio—Threepio, without a word!—turned and joined them.

  Han trudged up the path, with leaden feet.

  When they were out of sight of Waru’s dome, Xaverri drew Han from the trail. She took his hands and looked into his eyes. He tried to shut her out. He did not want to think about what he had seen.

  “Now,” she said, “do you understand why I think Waru is true … and dangerous?”

  “Yes,” Han said, his voice as hoarse as if he had been screaming.

  The Ithorian family had given the youth into Waru’s care.

  And Waru had killed it. Killed it, and pretended effort and weakness and exhaustion in its benefit.

  But I saw Waru crush that child, Han thought, and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  Han had heard Waru’s growl of satisfaction as the Ithorian youth’s life passed into Waru’s power.

  “Yes,” Han said. “Now I understand.”

  Chapter 8

  Rillao’s strength returned quickly. She sat up in her bed, eating stew as the unnamed one had: picking out the chunks of meat with her fingers, then drinking the sauce when the meat was gone. Beside the wide port, Lelila and Geyyahab sat with her and planned a strategy. Outside the ship, the hijacked ships orbited each other in a complicated dance, against a brilliant backdrop of stars.

  Rillao watched the ship of the Firrerreo through the porthole.

  “Lelila,” she said, “when you found me, did you find anything else, anything … strange?”

  “Besides a web feeding on your body? Besides a shipload of abandoned people? Something strange like what?”

  “Like a small machine. You could … hold it in your hand. Perhaps it was on the table, or fallen on the floor?”

  “No,” Lelila said. “What was it?”

  “Nothing,” Rillao said. “Nothing of any importance.”

  Beyond the group of passenger freighters, the ship of the Firrerreo began to accelerate. It mov
ed slowly out of the dance of ships, speeding up so gradually that its motion was nearly imperceptible. The acceleration would accumulate, second by second and year by year, until the ship plunged toward its destination at a measurable fraction of the speed of light. Rillao watched the ship. Starlight shone along its dark flank, picking it out with streaks of silver.

  “You and your son should be on that ship,” Lelila said.

  “Yes …” Rillao replied.

  “Will you join them, when you recover him?”

  “I cannot think that far ahead. I can only think of finding him.”

  Lelila rose.

  “Where are you going?” Rillao asked.

  “To the other ships. To wake people, to ask them if they know where we should go. And to free them.”

  “That would be a waste of time.”

  “Freeing them?” Lelila exclaimed.

  “Yes! They know nothing of their abductors. If you wake them now, you’ll have to help them be on their way. It will take days.”

  “Do you expect me to leave them here, derelict?” Thinking that she had sounded too sympathetic, Lelila added, “If I free them, they’re likely to be … grateful.”

  “They haven’t the resources to be grateful,” Rillao said. “They’re refugees. Exiles. They have nothing you could want—unless you want their seed corn.” She snorted. “And you can always come back and get that.”

  “How can you be sure no one here knows where our quarry went?” Lelila asked.

  “Sit down, and I will tell you.”

  Unwillingly, Lelila sat on the edge of the chair. Her nerves tingled as if they extended beyond her skin. They made her restless and sensitive. If she tried to use the sensitivity, she slipped off into the despair that had gripped her previous identity. As soon as she had reached this wilderness of drifting, dying ships, her sensitivity had not only failed but punished her.

  Lelila the bounty hunter craved action, any action, that would keep her from remembering.

  Rillao closed her eyes, took a deep long breath, and began to speak.

  “An evil man—I will tell you his name—seized the ships drifting here in this desert. He thought he had the right, because he was responsible for their existence. He was responsible for building them, for arresting and convicting the people imprisoned within them. Any world that defied the Emperor, he condemned.

  “This evil man—I will tell you his name—even condemned his own homeworld. His own planet, Firrerre! And all his own people.

  “He condemned people, and sent them into the wilderness to colonize new planets.

  “In a thousand years he would seek them out, and plunder whatever they had built.

  “For, you see, this evil man—I will tell you his name—believed the Empire would last a thousand years. He believed he would live a thousand years.

  He believed that when he returned to the people he had wronged, their descendants would remember him as a god. An evil and all-powerful god whom they must obey.

  “For, you see, he was Procurator of Justice for the Empire.”

  Rillao’s calm, storyteller’s voice broke with contempt on the word justice. Lelila nodded, and Geyyahab, sitting on the floor beside the bed, rocked back and forth in grim understanding. The Procurator of Justice had been a shadowy, mysterious figure, never named or pictured during the Emperor’s reign.

  His actions had been anything but mysterious. Both Lelila and Geyyahab remembered the Empire’s justice.

  “But his plans went awry. The Empire fell! His power vanished. He fled. But he fled with his resources intact: wealth, and sycophants, and above all his own small planet, a worldcraft, which can travel between the stars.

  “He chased down the passenger freighters he had dispatched into the void. He towed them into hyperspace.

  “He would not wait a thousand years. He would plunder them now!

  “He could have freed his former prisoners. He could have returned them to their homeworlds, to their families. He could have submitted himself to the compassion of the New Republic, which is said to be merciful—”

  Lelila glanced at Rillao sharply from behind her curtain of hair, seeking recognition but not finding it.

  “—and perhaps he would have been forgiven.

  “But this evil man—I will tell you his name!—did not ask for the Republic’s mercy. He towed the captured freighters into hyperspace, and he brought them here. He left their passengers sleeping and unaware. He visits. He passes through the ships like the vengeful god he wished to be. He chooses children, and takes them away to sell them into slavery.

  “Sometimes he wakes the parents and tells them he is stealing their children. For the adults are rebels and he would like to break them. Then he could sell them, too.

  “He lives in luxury, planning the rebirth of the Empire. Planning to rule over the Empire Reborn!

  “His name … is Hethrir.” She spoke the name with a growl.

  Rillao smiled with grim satisfaction when she revealed the Procurator’s name. She folded her hands, finished with her story.

  “Is that … is that what happened to you? He made you watch while he stole your son?”

  “It is more complicated than that,” Rillao said. “My relationship with Hethrir is … unique.”

  “How could your people leave, knowing their children had been stolen?” Lelila cried.

  Rillao hesitated for some moments before replying.

  “Their children were not stolen. My son is the only youth of our people left alive. Hethrir did not force my people to watch their children be sold into slavery. He took them away from Firrerre, and he left their children behind. Then he destroyed our world. He made them watch while their children, and all the rest of our people, died.”

  Rillao folded her hands in her lap and lay back on the bunk, drained even of her anger.

  Lelila could not speak. She was horrified by the evidence of secret evil, an evil she believed had been vanquished. A few remnants of the Empire remained, of course, causing misery when they struck, but at least they had the spirit to reveal themselves.

  This evil had to be uncovered. Hethrir had to be hunted down and captured. This “Empire Reborn” had to be destroyed.

  She pulled her knees to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face.

  “And now, I think,” Rillao said, “Hethrir has run out of freighter children to sell. Has he begun to steal them from the Republic’s worlds? Are you trying to rescue one?”

  Lelila hesitated, then decided to tell as much of the truth as she dared.

  “At first the parents thought it was a kidnapping. For ransom.”

  “But no ransom demand arrived, so they hired you.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are …” Rillao paused, choosing her words carefully to avoid offense. “You are new to this profession.”

  “This particular profession, yes.”

  “I will help you,” Rillao said. “And you will help me.”

  “Yes,” Lelila said.

  “Take us to Chalcedon,” Rillao said.

  Rillao slept.

  * * *

  Tigris carried Anakin down the long tunnel to the worldcraff’s landing field, following Lord Hethrir and eleven handpicked Proctors. The newest Proctor strutted at the end of the line. Tigris hurried to catch up, to even out the line by walking two by two.

  “Nursemaid!” The new Proctor sneered at him. “How dare you walk beside me? Walk behind me, where you belong!”

  Humiliated, Tigris fell back.

  I hope you die, he thought furiously at the new Proctor. It’s about time for a new Proctor to fail the purification ritual! I hope it’s you!

  Whenever a purification ritual failed, the Proctors were all sworn to secrecy about the death of their comrade. No one ever bothered to extract an oath from Tigris, so he could tell the new Proctor the risk, if he chose. He held the power close to him, cherishing it, but once again decided not to use it. He would be lo
yal to Lord Hethrir, even without an oath.

  Tigris’s arms ached from the weight of the child Anakin. The pain humiliated him. He had thought he was strong. He spent hours each day training with a practice sword. He trained during every bit of spare time he could snatch. Sometimes he snuck out of the dormitory in the middle of the night to practice, even though he had to fight to stay awake the next day, to be alert for Lord Hethrir’s commands. He only wished the worldcraft’s sleeping period always corresponded to the worldcraft’s night. He liked to practice in the darkness, where no one could see him, where no one could taunt him about using only a homemade practice sword instead of a real lightsaber. The worldcraft’s days and nights were so short that sometimes everyone slept during full daylight, and sometimes he was seen.

  Anakin held tightly to Tigris’s neck. The hot light of the worldcraft’s tiny sun fell into the tunnel mouth. Silhouetted ahead of him, the Proctors followed Lord Hethrir onto the landing field.

  The child can walk, Tigris thought. He should walk onto the Lord’s starship. He should approach his destiny on his own two feet.

  Tigris put Anakin down.

  “No!” Anakin shouted. “No, no, no!”

  He grabbed Tigris by the leg and clutched him desperately.

  “Stop it, now,” Tigris said. “You aren’t acting at all dignified.”

  “Not walk!” Anakin screamed. “No!” He opened his mouth and screamed, a high-pitched cry that pierced Tigris’s hearing.

  “Be quiet!” Tigris said.

  Anakin only cried louder. Tigris crouched down beside Anakin, gently disengaging the child’s clenched fingers from his ragged brown robe.

  “Little one,” Tigris said more gently, “everything will be all right.”

  Anakin stopped screaming long enough to take a breath.

  Tigris hugged the child.

  “It will be all right,” he said again.

  Anakin flung his arms around Tigris’s neck and sobbed quietly against his shoulder, hugging him fast.

  Tigris tried to remember the last time another person had touched him. Lord Hethrir never touched him, even for discipline. The Lord’s voice was sufficient to impose his will. Tigris recalled with desperate envy the times when the Lord placed an approving hand on the head of one of his Proctors, or pinned a medal or promotion on one’s shoulder and shook his hand.