21

On Coruscant, Chewbacca and Threepio took the twins through the sculpted duracrete columns at the entrance to the Holographic Zoo of Extinct Animals.

At home the pestering children had rapidly worn down even Threepio’s patience programming and had driven Chewbacca into a roaring frenzy. Getting Jacen and Jaina outside seemed like a good idea for all concerned. The foursome took transit tubes across the upper skyscrapers in old Imperial City to reach the rooftop levels of the Holographic Zoo.

At the Zoo’s gaudy archway Chewbacca let his furry arms dangle behind him; his huge paws engulfed the tiny hands of the children. Chewbacca took two sprawling strides forward, then waited for the twins to catch up before he took two more steps and waited again. Threepio scuttled ahead as if he were in charge. He had just undergone a deep oil bath so that his gold alloy plating gleamed in the artificial lights.

They stepped under the grandiose arches. Threepio went to the cashier kiosk, punching in Han and Leia’s credit code. Chewbacca, impatient with Jacen’s and Jaina’s short legs, scooped up the twins, one in each arm, and strode forward.

They endured a dull preshow in an empty waiting room filled with chairs, cages, and sockets to accommodate the bodies of all alien visitors, until the far doors automatically clicked open. Chewbacca, still carrying the twins, marched down a sloped tunnel to the lower levels. Threepio hurried after, trying to lead the way, but he could not get past the bulky Wookiee.

Arcing, glowing lights shot overhead, inept simulations of stars and comets and planets. As they passed motion sensors, booming godlike voices echoed in stereo from microspeakers in the walls.

“Journey down the corridors of time! Travel the lanes of space! You will experience forgotten wonders from a long time ago and far, far away. You will see extinct creatures lost from our galaxy but recreated here—and now!”

The walls around them darkened. Streaks of light shot out, funneling down in a crude animation of starlines for a fake journey into hyperspace. The floor beneath their feet rumbled and vibrated in the simulation. The children were startled, but Chewbacca groaned at the corniness of it. The illusion ended, and the recorded voice spoke in a conspiratorial whisper. “We have arrived … at a universe of possibilities!”

They stood before a choice of several doorways.

“This way children, this way,” Threepio said, stepping forward. He had already scanned the data brochures about the exhibits, and after correlating them with the twins’ interests, decided exactly which dioramas he would show them first. “Let us go see the mammoth krabbex of Calamari.”

As they stepped through the portal, holograms flared, surrounding them with a turbulent oceanscape, a jagged reef thrusting out from white foamy waters. Standing in a swirl of green-and-purple seaweed battered by the rushing waves stood a segmented crustacean, a ten-legged krabbex with dual mandibles in its mouth, twin rows of spines down its back, and eighteen glossy black eyes, four of which were on its front grasping claws. The krabbex reared up and let out a bellow like a wampa ice creature set on fire.

The twins watched as three green-skinned mermen thrashed out of the foaming waves, cocking jagged spears made of pale bone. The mermen hauled themselves onto the reef and attacked.

The spears pierced the exoskeleton of the krabbex, and the monster clipped at them with its pincers. It swung to the left and grabbed one of the mermen, slicing into his smooth green flesh and dragging him out of the water, where his fused finned legs thrashed like the tail of a fish.

“Let’s go,” Jaina said.

“Next one,” Jacen said.

“But, children, I haven’t told you the biological background of these creatures yet,” Threepio said.

“Go now,” Jaina insisted.

They walked right through the surrounding illusion to the far wall, where several more openings presented themselves. Chewbacca urged the children through the left-hand door.

“Oh, not that one, Chewbacca,” Threepio said. “I’m not certain—”

But they had already entered the second chamber to be surrounded by the illusion of a desert planet. Waves of invisible heat rippled from a scabbed, dried clay surface. A strange creature scuttled atop a rocky outcropping with a bloodcurdling roar. It had a squarish humanoid head and a massive feline body, huge curved claws, and a segmented tail that thrashed back and forth, capped with a wicked-looking scorpion stinger. As it opened its mouth to bellow again, cracked yellow fangs dripped with venom.

“A manticore?” Threepio said in disbelief. “Well, really! I’m astonished they haven’t updated their display yet. That creature was proved to be a jumble of mismatched fossils long ago. Manticores never existed.”

Directly behind them in the hologram another manticore echoed the bellowing challenge and climbed over the baked rocks. The twins tugged on Chewbacca’s furry arms and headed through the nonexistent creatures toward the next set of openings.

“Let me choose this time, children,” Threepio said.

Chewbacca groaned. The twins didn’t seem to care.

“Go home,” Jacen said.

Jaina nodded in agreement. “I want to go home.”

“But, children,” Threepio said, “I’m sure you’ll enjoy this next one. Let me tell you all about the mournful singing fig trees of Pil Diller.…”

After three more dioramas and three more of Threepio’s boring lectures, the twins decided that they would much rather play hide-and-seek than continue the tedious expedition through the Holographic Zoo.

While they couldn’t communicate telepathically with each other word for word, they did know in a clear but general way what the other was thinking. When Jacen broke away from Chewbacca to run through the glacier eyries of the Snow Falcons, he headed to the left. At the same time, Jaina sprinted in the opposite direction, brushing past a startled Threepio. The twins used their fledgling talent with the Force to guide them into one of the other openings that led to an exit corridor.

Chewbacca bellowed; Threepio called after the children, but Jacen and Jaina met up outside the dioramas, pleased with their escape and giggling. They trotted down the white-tiled corridor as fast as they could go, past icons for refreshments, rest-and-recharge rooms, repair facilities.

At an intersection of corridors, an old maintenance droid worked in an open turbolift. Jacen and Jaina had seen turbolifts before. That was how they got back home once they reached the Imperial Palace.

The maintenance droid was gunmetal-gray with two heads and numerous mechanical arms, each studded with a handful of attachments. The droid’s two heads faced each other. One head bore a set of bright optical sensors, while the other face was a blank screen that displayed data, statistics, and official Imperial Building Code specs.

Muttering to itself in binary, the droid searched its back compartment for a particular tool, found it missing from its bin, then puttered down the corridor. It left the turbolift wide open with only a small dangling sign saying Out of Service.

The children ran for the turbolift and ducked inside. They had watched their parents and Threepio use the controls many times.

The panel looked different from the one in the Imperial Palace: much less ornate, discolored with age and rough use, with a wall of buttons marking hundreds of different floors in the kilometer-high metropolis. Since the lower levels of the city had been abandoned and buried long ago, a thick metal plate had been welded onto the bottom half of the panel, sealing off the first 150 floors. But the maintenance droid had removed the barrier plate to check the turbolift circuits.

The children barely knew their numbers, though Threepio had been trying to get them to recognize the primary numerals. The lessons frequently frustrated the protocol droid, but the twins were bright. They had picked up more than Threepio had realized.

The rows of buttons looked like shiny colorful circles to Jacen and Jaina. They stared at them, not knowing which to push, but they did recognize some of the numbers.

Jaina spotted it first. “Number one,” she said.

Jacen pushed the button. “Number one,” he repeated.

The turbolift door closed, and the floor fell away as the elevator shot downward, humming as it accelerated. Jacen and Jaina looked at each other in momentary terror; then they giggled. The turbolift descent went on and on, until finally the platform came to a stop. The door whisked open.

Jacen and Jaina stood blinking. They stepped out into the shadowy bottom levels of the forbidden metropolitan wilderness. Around them they heard large startled creatures clattering through the fallen debris.

“It’s dark,” Jacen said.

Behind the twins the turbolift door slid shut as the elevator reset itself and returned to the upper floors, leaving Jacen and Jaina alone.

Chewbacca blasted through the exhibits like a land-speeder out of control. He howled and called out for the two lost children. Threepio scurried behind him, trying to keep up.

“I can’t see anything through these holograms,” Threepio said. Chewbacca sniffed for the twins. He charged through another opening.

All the shouting and chaos finally brought one of the Bothan zoo attendants. The Bothan fluffed up his white fur and flailed his arms as he tried to get Chewbacca to calm down. “Shhhh! You are disturbing our other patrons. This is a quiet place for enjoyment and education.”

Chewbacca roared at him. The Bothan, much smaller, stood on his pointed toes, trying to draw himself up in a laughably ineffective attempt at meeting Chewbacca’s eyes. “We never should have let Wookiees into the Holographic Zoo.”

Chewbacca grabbed the Bothan by the white chest hairs and hefted him off the ground. He let loose a string of growls, grunts, and howls.

Threepio rushed up to them. “Excuse me, if I might be allowed to translate,” the droid said, “my friend Chewbacca and I are currently searching for two small children who appear to be lost. Their names are Jacen and Jaina. They are two-and-a-half years old.”

Chewbacca roared again.

“Yes, yes, I was just getting to that. This is really something of an emergency. The children just ran off from us, and any assistance you could offer—”

Chewbacca used both hands to shake the Bothan attendant like a rag doll.

“—would be most appreciated,” Threepio finished.

But the Bothan had fainted.

Jacen and Jaina hiked through a forest of fallen girders, orange and yellow toadstools, and lumpy fungus growing in ancient garbage. Unseen feet skittered across fallen beams and webwork structures overhead.

The massive foundations of the buildings looked indestructible, overgrown with thick moss. Things moved in the shadows, but nothing came clear, even as the childrens’ eyes adjusted to the shadowy light. Drips of warm, bad-tasting water fell around them in a slow arrhythmic rain.

Jacen looked up, and the enormous buildings seemed to rise forever and ever. He could glimpse only a blurred slice of what might have been the sky.

“I want to go home,” Jaina said.

The wreckage of abandoned equipment lay in piles, rusted and corroded. The twins scrambled over crashed vehicles, the hulks of discarded battleships and fighting machines, deep debris left from the previous year’s civil warfare.

Jacen and Jaina came upon a half-collapsed wall that had once contained a computer screen. The terminal lay tilted on its side with the screen smashed inward, leaving broken teeth of transparisteel. But the twins recognized it as a data unit similar to the ones inside their own quarters.

Jacen stood in front of the broken panel and put his small hands on his hips, trying to look like his father. He addressed the computer screen—and he knew exactly what to say, after having heard the bedtime story many times before. “We are lost,” he said. “Please help us find our home.”

He waited and waited but received no response. No lights illuminated the panels. He heard no answer from the torn speaker unit, where glistening black beetles had made a nest.

Jacen sighed. Jaina took his hand, and the two turned around as they heard a slithering sound down the cramped alleyway.

A formless gray-green creature paused behind them, a granite slug with two eyes protruding on gelatinous stalks as if assessing the two children. As it moved, it scoured green sludge off the cracked duracrete alleyway, trailing thick translucent slime.

The granite slug slithered toward them, and the twins backed away. From the bottom of the slug’s underbelly, a jagged crack opened up, a quivering lipless mouth that sucked in a long hollow whistle of air.

Jaina stepped up to it. It was her turn this time.

“We are lost,” she said. “Please help us find our home.”

The granite slug reared until it towered over the little girl. She blinked up at it. Jacen stood by her side.

Then the granite slug seemed to deflate again, hooked its body into a broken passage to the right, and landed on the stones with a wet slapping sound.

A rustle of wind suddenly kicked up, and the granite slug churned down the side alley in alarm. Jacen looked up just in time to see the sharp mantalike wings of a hawk-bat that swooped down from high above, metallic talons outstretched.

The granite slug attempted to burrow into the rusted debris, but the hawk-bat landed on top of the wreckage, ripping and tearing at the fallen hunks of metal with its claws. Its triangular beak bobbed up and down like a piston until it had exposed the granite slug and slashed at the slimy creature. The hawk-bat flapped its broad wings again, heading toward the sky with its squirming, dripping prey.

Jacen and Jaina looked up at the creature, then at each other. The two began trudging through the dark underworld of Coruscant again.

Jaina said, “And he walked, and he walked …”

“We must sound the alarm immediately, Chewbacca!” Threepio said. But the Wookiee seemed reluctant to admit they had lost the two small children.

They left the unconscious Bothan attendant in one of the holographic dioramas, then made their way to the white-tiled corridor leading to the souvenir shops, refreshment stands, and other parts of the museum. Threepio wondered what the poor Bothan would think when he woke up lying inside the web lair of a cannibal arachnid from Duros.

A maintenance droid finished its turbolift repairs and removed the Out of Service sign. Its two heads began humming a duet to themselves at having completed a satisfying menial task.

Chewbacca pointed to the maintenance droid, but Threepio became indignant. “What could a low-level maintenance droid possibly know about this situation? Those models aren’t much smarter than loader vehicles.” But a large Wookiee hand dragged him along. “Oh, all right, if you insist.”

Chewbacca sprinted ahead and stood in the path of the trundling maintenance droid. Automatic sensors instructed the droid to swerve one way, then the other, but Chewbacca forced it to stop. The maintenance droid emitted a high-pitched whine of confusion.

Threepio came up behind it. “Excuse me,” he said, and garbled out a long series of crude binary questions. The maintenance droid answered with a blat like a stepped-on steam whistle. Threepio repeated his question, but got the same answer.

“I told you he’d be no use,” Threepio said. “Maintenance droids aren’t programmed to notice anything. They just do their repairs and wait for new instructions.”

Chewbacca moaned, shaking his big hairy head.

Threepio said, “Oh, be quiet, you … you big walking carpet—I was not talking too much! Besides, you’re the one who has the life debt to Han Solo.”

The maintenance droid continued, oblivious to their bickering. Threepio wished that he could simplify his own programming and be so blissfully ignorant in the ways of the galaxy. He felt his circuits overheating as the full impact of what might happen to him slammed down on his poor head.

“Master Solo will probably remove my legs and make me recompile and alphabetize all the fragmented files in the Imperial Information Center!”

In the dim underworld Jacen pointed to a noisy machine in front of them as the cluttered street widened. “Look,” he said. “Droid.”

The children ran, waving their hands and hoping to get the droid’s attention. But they stopped as the machine continued along a polished path worn through the debris.

The droid was vastly older than the maintenance model up at the turbolift. It had bulkier joints, squarish limbs; large bolts held the pieces together. The antique repair droid was little more than a mobile cart of tools with a torso, arms, and an angled hexagonal head. One of its optical sensors had fallen off. Thick cables ran down its spine and along its neck, corroded and caked with dust and dirt. Moss had begun to grow on its sides. It moved with a stuttering motion as if desperately in need of lubricant.

Along the street a line of corroded poles stood a meter taller than the twins. Atop each pole rested an old glowcrystal, engraved with magnifying facets, but each crystal was a dead translucent gray, shedding no light into the dim streets. Some poles had come loose from their ground-level moorings and tilted sideways.

The repair droid worked its way to the end of the street, stopped at an appropriate position, and ratcheted its torso high on accordion joints so its arms could reach the darkened glowcrystal. The droid removed the burned-out crystal, cradling it carefully in segmented pincers. After placing it in the back of the cart, the repair droid removed another thick glowcrystal from an open bin. Following complex programming, the droid positioned the replacement crystal on top of the pole and activated it.

The new glowcrystal remained as dead and lightless as the first, but the repair droid didn’t seem to notice. It moved to the next pole, repeating the process.

Jacen stood in front of the droid, addressing it in his best Daddy voice. “We’re lost,” he said.

Jaina came up beside him. “Please help us find our home.”

The repair droid ratcheted up as if in alarm, then lowered itself down to study the children with its single optical sensor. “Lost?” it said in a clanking voice.

“Home,” Jaina insisted.

“Not in my programming,” the droid said. “Not my main task.” It ratcheted up again and moved to a third malfunctioning glowcrystal pole. “Not in my programming.”

Jaina and Jacen began to cry. But upon hearing each other, rather than reinforcing their tears, the twins stopped. “Be brave,” Jaina said.

“Brave,” Jacen agreed.

The two exhausted twins sat down on a time-smoothed chunk of duracrete in the middle of the open street. They watched the repair droid continue removing dead glowcrystals from poles and replacing them with equally useless lights.

The droid moved all the way to the end of the street, unsuccessful in getting any of the streetlights to work again. Then, picking up speed, it whirred down the worn path it had traveled for a hundred years, back to where it had started.

The droid stopped in front of the first dead glowcrystal pole all over again, ratcheted itself up, and replaced the lightless crystal it had changed only a short while earlier with another one.…