Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [11]
Cray nodded once, briefly, taking no credit as they passed through a vestibule of lacy air walls and stalactites, like a sea cave festooned with flowers. “And he wouldn’t be, if it weren’t for some of the research Stinna Draesinge Sha did on captured Ssi-ruuk wreckage. On transferring the … the actual person, not just a data print … into an artificial construct. She was very hopeful about the work with Nichos, very helpful. She said the Ssi-ruuk entechment process would have fascinated Magrody—her teacher—and he would almost certainly have come up with better answers than she did about the relationship of organic and artificial intelligences, but he’d—uh—gone by that time. She …”
She shook her head. “I can’t imagine who would have wanted to hurt her.”
She was quiet again as they entered the pleasant, grottolike central chamber of her suite and Nichos took a seat at the table, with Luke opposite him under the dim pinkish light of the few sun-globes embedded in the translucent network of the low ceiling. A sinuous divan shaped for human contours nestled in a niche; Leia and Cray settled on it, Leia reaching up to unhook another sun-globe’s cover, to shed soft pinkish light around them.
Cray went on, low enough not to be heard by the men at the table, “I was just glad that when Nichos … when they diagnosed him …” She shied from any mention of those memories. “I was glad I was able to keep him alive. That he had enough training in the Force to … to detach himself from his … his organic body. And analyzing how to transmit Force skills to an inorganic sentience will only be a matter of time. Some of Magrody’s researches were pointing in that direction before he …”
Again she bit back the word “disappeared,” and Leia knew she, too, had heard the stories. The whispers. The rumors that she, Leia Organa Solo, had used her “smuggler friends” to take revenge on the man who had taught Qwi Xux, Ohran Keldor, Bevel Lemelisk, and the other designers of the Death Star.
Going into Nichos’s mind was one of the strangest things Luke had done. When he used the Force to probe someone’s thoughts or dreams, they most often came to him as images, as if he were recalling or dreaming about something he himself had seen long ago. Sometimes the images took the form of sounds—voices—and, very occasionally, a sense of heat or cold. Eyes closed, Luke sank now into the light trance of listening, searching. He was aware of Nichos’s mind, open and receptive to his as the meditations of the Jedi taught … aware of the personality of the young man who had come to him with such ability in the Force, with such open-hearted determination to use it responsibly and correctly.
Luke had had far more powerful students, but—though Nichos was Luke’s elder by a number of years—seldom a more teachable one.
Under Luke’s grip, Nichos’s hands felt warm—like his own prosthetic, heated by minute subcutaneous circuitry to exactly body temperature, so that those who touched them might not be disconcerted. Luke was aware that Cray and Leia had fallen silent, was aware of their breathing, and of the faint, wonderful drift of songs floating on the night air from the city’s thousand parties and balls.
He was briefly aware, as he sank deeper into his probing trance, that Nichos did not breathe.
He had wondered a little, on their way across the plaza, whether he’d be able to do this at all; whether, in fact, Nichos was the man he had known, the man who had come to Yavin to find him, saying, I think I have the powers you seek …
Cray Mingla, for all her relative youth, was one of the leading experts on artificial intelligence programming in the galaxy. She was in addition an apprentice Jedi herself, aware of the interaction of the Force, the body, the mind, and all of ambient life. She had followed Nasdra Magrody’s teachings, trying to close the gap between artificially constructed intelligence