Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [122]
Against his shoulder, he felt her sigh. “I couldn’t … let anyone come aboard.”
“All those years …”
“It wasn’t … so bad, after a time. Djinn had taught us, had theoretically walked us through, the techniques of projecting the mind into something else, something that would be receptive, to hold the intelligence as well as the consciousness, but he seemed to regard it as cowardly. As being afraid or unwilling to go on to the next step, to cross over to the other side. Once I was in the computer …”
She shook her head, and he felt the gesture of her hand, trying to speak of some experience beyond his ken. “After a time it began to seem that it had been my entire life. That what came before—Chad, and the sea, and Papa; Djinn’s teaching, the platform on Bespin, and … and Geith—they turned into a sort of dream. But the tripods … they’re a little like the treems back home, sweet and harmless and well-intentioned. I wanted to help them. I was so glad when you did. That was the first time I really … really saw you. And even the Jawas …”
She sighed again, and tightened her hold on him, her arm around his rib cage sending a shock of awareness through him, as if its shape and strength and the pressure of her hand had somehow a meaning and a truth to which all other things in his life were tied. He understood for the first time how his friend Wedge could write poems about Qwi Xux’s pale, feathery hair. The fact that it was Qwi’s made all the difference.
She said, “Luke …” and he brought her face to his, and kissed her lips.
Chapter 18
In the throbbing indigo darkness, Framjem Spathen rolled back his head so that the long electric ropes of his glowing hair brushed the floor, raised arms glistening with cutaneous diamonds to flash in the bloody light, and screamed. The scream seemed to lift him onto his toes, rippling through that hard-muscled body in wave after wave of sound and pain and ecstasy as he rolled his head, heaved his hips, stretched his fingers to the utmost …
“Were those muscles all really his?” wondered Bran Kemple, drawing on a hookah that smelled like old laundry steeped in alcohol and regarding the holo—an extremely old one, Han had seen it in dozens of cheap clubs from here to Stars’ End—with half-shut eyes.
“Sure they were,” said Han. “He paid about two hundred credits per ounce for ’em, plus installation, but after that they were his, all right.”
The dancers on either side of Framjen’s holo were real; a boneless Twi’lek boy and a massively breasted Gamorrean female, undulating under the red glare of lights for the edification of half a dozen seedy customers. It would have been hard to picture anything less conducive to lust, Jungle or otherwise. The day-shift hustlers of various races and sexes were working the floor hard, chatting up the patrons and drinking glass after glass of watered liquor at prices that should have brought 100 percent Breath of Heaven. Even they looked tired.
Han supposed that having to listen to a fifteen-year-old Framjen Spathen holo for eight hours would tire anyone.
Bran Kemple sighed heavily. “Nubblyk the Slyte. Now there was a hustler who could run things. Things was all different in his day.”
Han sipped his drink. Even the beer was watered. “Pretty lively, hunh?”
“Lively? Pheew!” Kemple made a kiss-your-hand motion toward the ceiling, presumably a signal to the Slyte’s departed spirit. “Wasn’t even the word. Half a dozen flights in a week that never made it on the port manifests, people appearin’ and disappearin’ through the tunnels out under the ice … Decent drinks and decent girls. Hey, Sadie!” he yelled, gesturing to the one-eyed Abyssin barkeep. “Get my friend here a decent drink, fer pity