LUKE ACCEPTED SEL’S INVITATION TO SETTLE HIMSELF ON THE SOFA, but declined her offer of caf or wine. With the most imperceptible of gestures, he indicated to Ben and Vestara, sitting respectively on the sofa beside him and in the stuffed chair, that they should decline, too, and they did.
Sel settled in a chair at the table and turned to the two teenagers. “Master Skywalker is stretching a point, I’m afraid. I’m no longer a Jedi. Have not been since before I can remember. If anything, I’m a Theran Listener now, and a healer. And sometimes, the one the Oldtimers send strangers to in order to see if I can sort them out.”
Ben shook his head. “You weren’t really represented in my father’s accounts of what happened on Nam Chorios all those years ago.”
Sel glanced at Luke. He thought the look carried just a touch of gratitude. “I doubt I made a good impression.” She fell silent for a moment. “But yes, I was a Jedi once. I have the faintest memories of some happy times on Coruscant … As a young Jedi Knight I was sent here with a senior Jedi Knight named Beldorian.”
“Him I’ve heard of. The Hutt Jedi.”
“This world is toxic for Force-users if they stay long enough, unless they have a very rare level of emotional grounding. Which the Listeners do, through their contact with the tsils. But Beldorian was too much of a Hutt, fighting the greedier, more self-indulgent side of his nature while a Jedi, succumbing to it here. I was too young, too ignorant, too inexperienced; I hadn’t attained sufficient skill even to make a lightsaber. I fell to the dark side … and then to insanity.” Sel’s tone was oddly light, as if she were explaining the details of a shopping trip made earlier in the day.
Vestara’s eyes flickered; it looked to Luke as though she was doing some calculation. “This would have been—what? Fifty, sixty years ago?”
Sel smiled again and offered a little shake of her head. “Much longer than that. Centuries ago.”
Vestara frowned. “But you look true human. You’d be dead.”
“I am true human. Of Alderaanian and Hapan descent. And not a prosthetic or replacement part in my body—except for my teeth, which were damaged beyond repair long ago by neglect.” She shrugged. “But even as my mind decayed and flaked away, my body was preserved. By the consumption of drochs.”
Ben’s eyebrows rose and he glanced, suspicious, at his father. “That wasn’t in your official report, either.”
“Do you imagine that I wanted anyone to think they could achieve quasi-immortality by coming here and becoming involved with the drochs?” Luke gave his son a shake of the head. Indeed, he felt as though there was considerable danger in Vestara discovering these facts. If her true loyalties remained with the Sith, if she did not gain a healthy respect and fear of the drochs and what they represented while she was here … “Besides, it’s not an issue of coming up with a dish, a recipe, that you can prepare for its health benefits.”
“No.” Sel’s voice took on a distant quality. “You have to eat them live. Pop them wiggling into your mouth. Sometimes they try to chew their way into your cheek or your tongue when you do so. You bite down on them, crunch crunch crunch.”
Ben tried to suppress a shudder. He wasn’t entirely successful.
Sel shook off the mood and looked at Ben again. “As you consume them in this way, they give off little bursts of Force energy, life energy they have consumed. These bursts, in conjunction with secretions from their exoskeletons, cause the body to perform little acts of regeneration and repair beyond what bodies normally do. Nerve tissue regenerates. Cells are replenished … But there are problems. The larger drochs, the ones with more energy, have also drained memories and thoughts from their victims. Consumption of these drochs causes you to absorb these memories in turn, fragmenting your own mind over time. And the drochs have achieved their growth in the first place by draining other living things. To benefit from them, you find yourself at the top of a pyramid scheme, staying alive at the expense of others, animals and people—dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe more over time.” She offered the slightest of shudders, matching Ben’s.
Luke, still wary because of the way he had been deceived by this woman all those years before, hoped she was telling the truth—hoped the sympathy growing within him for her had a basis in truth. “But you’ve given up consuming drochs.”
“Long ago.” Sel gestured at herself. “Look at me. Aging at a normal rate now. My life has a finite span again … but at least it is a life. Not a terrible, endless story told to frighten children.”
Ben knit his brows, still putting things together. “The HoloNet resources on Nam Chorios talk about the drochs as the source of the Death Seed plague, and talk about Nam Chorios’s new medical economy, but don’t link them. All this new development is from exploring medical by-products from study of the drochs, right?”
Sel brightened but shook her head. “No. The Theran Listeners also promote healing. They do it by convincing the patient’s body to heal itself. This is the basis of the new economy. Take someone who is ill, run a complete series of tests on his body chemistry. Then put him through a regimen of Listener healing. Run a comparison suite of tests. The patient’s body will have manifested chemicals that were not present before—for example, to diminish or eliminate a cancer. Newcomer doctors analyze those chemicals, trying to replicate them. Sometimes they can, resulting in new medicines. Not just for humans. Duros, Chadra-Fan, Gamorrean, Wookiee, Twi’lek … I’ve seen so many species helped.”
Vestara looked doubtful. “And that’s why you stay on this sad excuse for a world? So you can heal ungrateful, insular farmers and the occasional desperate visitor one by one?”
Sel gave her a wan smile. “More because there is no place for me anywhere else. I was raised in the Jedi Temple. I never knew my family. My contemporaries, all dead. Even my enemies, my rivals … dead and gone. I feared and struggled against death for longer than some planets have been settled. Now I know that death is part of life, a part I embrace. I do not rush toward it … but I might as well meet it here as anywhere.” She gestured around at her modest home. “At a certain point in life you realize how little you need. Now I enjoy days without hatred and insanity, nights without bug bites and bad dreams.”
Luke caught her eye. “How were you healed? The last time I saw you …”
“I suspect I was not a pretty holo.”
“No.”
“There is a Listener technique. I needed many applications of it over many years. I apparently knew, when they explained it to me, that it would probably restore my sanity but would rob me of memories … because I was so far gone, of most of my memories. The Listeners call it vein routing, meaning that you completely grind out every memory contributing to some traumatic response or insanity. I call it mnemotherapy, a gentler term, less frightening.”
Luke nodded. “Which is why you don’t remember meeting me.”
“Yes.”
“Teselda …” Luke battled a mix of emotions as he leaned forward. Dimly remembered revulsion at what Teselda had been, anger at how she had tried to use him and Callista, warred with his native sympathy … and his need for help in the here and now. “I suspect you’re in greater danger than anyone on this planet.”
Her smile widened. “That will be a refreshing change.”
“I’m not kidding. Something is coming here, or has arrived already. A great menace that preys on the vulnerable through the Force. Before, you were too undertrained to have even the basic set of Jedi techniques. And then you couldn’t keep from falling to the dark side, couldn’t keep madness at bay. Couldn’t control me for very long even when I was a much younger, much more emotional man. Unless you leave Nam Chorios now, I doubt you stand a chance. Especially if, as you say, you’re a Listener now. I suspect their techniques of opening themselves to voices in the Force will make them especially vulnerable to Abeloth.”
She blinked, considering. “And yet, knowing me, you stand a much better chance of recognizing this Abeloth’s influence if you can witness changes to my manner. My personality.”
“That’s … very noble of you, but you don’t want to be Abeloth’s tool before you die.”
“And yet here is where I will die. I made that choice a long, long time ago. So, how can I help?”
Luke sighed. “We suspect, from asking around at Koval Station, that Abeloth has not arrived yet—she’d be in a very small, very distinctive ship. But we can’t be sure. Do the Oldtimers still operate the old weapons emplacements?”
“Yes, as sensor stations only.”
“Can you get me any reports of small craft entering the atmosphere in the last few days, especially if they bypassed Koval Station?”
“Probably.”
“And I was hoping to learn something of the Theran Force Listening technique …”
“Which I’d be honored to teach you.”
“But now, I think I’d also like to see this mnemotherapy technique.”
“Which I can’t teach you … but I can introduce you to someone who can.”
“Thank you.” It felt strange to be grateful to someone who, for the last thirty years, Luke had remembered as an object of revulsion at worst, pity at best.
She put her hands over his. “Welcome back to Nam Chorios.”
SENATE BUILDING, CORUSCANT
The shuttle DeepRay, a Lambda-class vehicle much newer than the one Luke had boarded at Koval Station, glided through the open blast-style hangar doors south and west of the Senate Building’s main entrance hall. Alone in its tiny flight deck, Seha Dorvald put all her attention on making the last moments of this flight smooth and unremarkable.
Ahead and below, a jumpsuited Gamorrean, his greenish, porcine features disinterested, gestured with a pair of guidance glow rods for her to bring the DeepRay farther into the hangar. Seha did as directed, gliding forward on repulsorlifts only until the shuttle was directly over a landing spot limned by glows embedded in the gray permacrete floor—the entire hangar was like that, the layout of its landing spots computer-controlled and infinitely reconfigurable.
She brought the shuttle down to a landing smooth enough that it was almost undetectable as a cessation of motion. She began powering down immediately and toggled her comm board. “This is Pilot Dorn. Welcome to Coruscant and the Senate Building. I hope you enjoyed your flight.” With no additional speech making, she tripped the switch to lower the belly boarding ramp.
In her peripheral vision, from the port side, she saw an interior hangar door slide upward, allowing a small party, mostly humans, to enter. She recognized Chief of State Daala, gleaming in a spotless white admiral’s uniform. With her were a number of security agents and aides, including a green Twi’lek woman.
Seha pretended to pay no attention. She brought up a diagnostics screen—a simulated diagnostics screen—and began tapping each item on it in turn as she would for a normal power-down checklist.
She heard her passengers catch up their carry bags and briefcases. Noisily, they began trooping down the boarding ramp.
And then there was Daala’s voice, drifting up from the ramp: “Wynn. General Jaxton, Senator Bramsin. Delighted to have you back in one piece.”
The gruff voice of General Jaxton followed, but grew fainter with each word. “Good to be back. So I can mount an operation against the Errant Venture and the Jedi. Imagine the arrogance …” Seha saw the Chief of State’s party, now considerably larger in size with the addition of her passengers, move back toward the door.
Moments later there was a creak as someone moved up the boarding ramp too silently for footsteps to be audible but not so carefully that the ramp itself settling did not make noise. Then a man spoke from just behind Seha: “What do you think you’re doing?”
Seha glanced up at him. He was youthful, nice-looking, with brown hair in a military cut. He wore a Galactic Alliance Security lieutenant’s uniform and a scowl that suggested he needed her to be impressed with his sternness and force of will.
She smiled up at him. “Powering down. I’m getting some anomalous readings from the thrust generators.”
He shook his head. “You’re authorized only to set down, let your passengers off, and lift. You’re going to have to leave.”
She gestured at the monitor screen with the checklist on it, at the three items blinking red. “I’d really rather—”
“I’m sorry, I have to insist.”
Seha let her tone turn frosty. “Well, then you have two seconds to get your rear end off my shuttle.” She turned her back on him and began a fast restart of powered-down systems.
The lieutenant was halfway down the ramp when the right stern thruster blew.
It didn’t explode, not really. The plastoid-shelled capacitor and associated chemical package wired into the circuitry there, activated by the power-up switch, discharged, frying all the circuitry in that module, as well as catching on fire and emitting a tremendous amount of red-gray smoke.
Seha let out a well-practiced yell of outrage and frantically flipped all the emergency-off switches within reach.
On the permacrete just ahead of the shuttle, the lieutenant stood, staring up into her viewport, looking stricken. She glared at him, then rose. She ran back and down the boarding ramp to confront him.
A holodrama stereotype of righteous hostility, she thrust her datapad, showing a feed of the new, revised diagnostics screen, toward his face. “You see this? Couldn’t wait five minutes for a simple diagnostics check and slow restart, could you? What do I tell my captain? What do I tell the Senator? The whole thruster array is blown because somebody couldn’t wait. What is your name, Lieutenant Used to Have a Career? The Senator’s going to want to know.” She didn’t bother to say which Senator. It was better for him to assume it was the one the shuttle had just delivered.
The lieutenant’s words came out in a desperate, disorganized string: “Didn’t. Predict. Regulations. Fire.”
Smoke, pooling up against the permacrete ceiling, triggered the hangar’s fire-control system. Articulated tubes descended from the ceiling, aimed, made a coughing noise, and emitted a tremendous quantity of gray-white fire-smothering foam.
Seha and the lieutenant were drenched in it. Seeing his uniform suddenly become matted with material the approximate consistency of dessert topping, seeing his once-natty hat adorned with a large triangular quantity of the stuff, Seha burst into laughter and couldn’t stop.
The lieutenant managed a few more disjointed words and then heaved a sigh. The tubes ceased spewing. The lieutenant’s pose of military competence irreparably shattered, he gave Seha an apologetic half grin. “All right. Start over. What do you need?”
Seha managed to bring her laughter under control. “Um, extend my access until I can get a mechanic in to look her over?”
“Consider it done. Twenty-four standard hours, maybe more pending your mechanic’s report.”
“And take a lady out to dinner? Once she’s cleaned up, that is.”
“Also done.”
“What is your name, anyway?”
“Javon Thewles. Lieutenant, GA Security.”
She held out a hand lightly insulated in foam. “Sela Dorn.”