Part 15 (1/2)

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 amus.e.m.e.nt, ”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 owners.h.i.+p 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 n.o.body 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 n.o.body.”

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 w.i.l.l.i.e.s for reasons he couldn't quite define. On one side, wide 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 gla.s.s-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 fas.h.i.+on 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 other aliens of Hweg Shul: the Arcona who operated one of the majie-processing plants and a couple of Sull.u.s.tans who owned the biggest branswed towers in the district. Luke noticed that all were vaguely ostracized by most of the Newcomer humans. He'd encountered this a number of times at the shop, this unspoken prejudice against the non-human species of the Core worlds. Stupid, when you thought of their technologies. But then the prejudices of the Empire had been stupid and had, in fact, brought about its downfall.

More synthdroids guarded the door. He doubted that most of the people in the room realized that the guards weren't alive or human.

They were realistic to the smallest degree, though the hair was a give-away-perfect, human, but with the oddly dead look that replants frequently had-and the smell. Everyone in the room smelled: of sweat, of beer, of coffbine; of the salt of work and life. Synthflesh, until it grows into organic matter as a patch, requires no nourishment and excretes no by-products. Luke recalled an article he'd read about Loronar Corporation's efforts to make synthdroids that would be acceptable to scentcued species like the Chadra-Fans and Wookiees.

There were even humans who reacted badly to the deeply buried anomaly of something that looked like a human and smelled like nothing.

The conclusion of the article, as he recalled, was that the project was low on the Loronar priorities list. Chadra-Fans and Wookiees had little purchasing power and were considered an insufficient market to take the trouble over, even at a hundred thousand credits a throw'.

”Arvid.” Gerney Caslo jostled over to them through the crowd as people began to settle themselves on the edges of the low daises that were scattered around the room and on the compressed chairs set between.

The whole place had been carpeted in a kind of dense industrial weave, which lent it an odd hybrid look. What had been food niches were now filled with the sort of cheap knock-off artwork available to the wealthy on thinly settled worlds: bad holos of famous sculp ture, sometimes edited to subst.i.tute the faces of the new owner and his or her family, or cheap little sixteen-color-lights displays that ran through their cycles in a minute and a half. Luke had seen some beautiful sand-glazed Oldtimer pottery, and wondered that neither Seti Ash-gad nor his father, after all those years on the planet, had thought to include it in the house.

Had the elder Ashgad so much resented this world that he'd have none of its works? But surely the son, who had been born there, or at least raised there he didn't look more than forty-wouldn't share the prejudice to the same degree? Or was Ashgad's other house, his dwelling in the Mountains of Lightning, more his than his father's?

”We're looking for a couple of boys for a job,” Caslo went on, speaking from the corner of his mouth like a bad guy in a holovid.

”There's a drop coming in tomorrow night.”

”Where?”

”Ten Cousins.”