Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [127]
There was a little cream-colored yarrock powder spilled on the bottom.
Easily obtainable enough in any spaceport, of course. If Irek was anything like some of the more self-destructive spirits at the Alderaan Select Academy for Young Ladies, he had packets of the stuff cached everywhere. It would explain how Drub McKumb had come by it, and obtained the temporary sanity it brought.
There were other things in the compartment, shoved farther in. Bundles of flimsiplast notes. Tiny skeins of wire. A couple of small soldering guns. A handful of xylen chips.
A gold ring that, when brought to the light and rubbed, proved to be the mark of an honorary degree at the University of Coruscant.
A small gold plaque commemorating the dedication of the Magrody Institute of Programmable Intelligence.
A woman’s gold-meshed glove.
Leia opened the notes, and at the bottom of the last page a signature caught her eye.
Nasdra Magrody.
To this day I don’t know if Palpatine knew.
Curled up in the window seat, Leia read the words with a strange sense of almost-grief, of pity for the man who had written them in this room, not all that many years ago. The heavy black lines of the chip schematics traced on the other side bled through the pale-green plast a little, giving the effect of a palimpsest, like an allegory of tragedy. Calm scientific fact and the dreadful usages to which it had been put. In his way, Magrody had been as naive as the Death Star’s hermetically sheltered designer, Qwi Xux.
She wondered if he’d written this on the back of his notes because it was the only writing material he was allowed.
Probably, she thought, considering the marginless edges, the way the bold calligraphy cramped at top and bottom. Probably.
I should have suspected, or known, or guessed. Why would an Imperial concubine, with all the pleasures and privileges available to those who have nothing to do but care for their own beauty, have sought out the bookish middle-aged wife of a robotics professor, if not for some kind of intrigue? I never paid attention to the affairs of the Palace, the constant jockeying for position among the Emperor’s ministers and the more vicious, behind-the-scenes power plays engaged in by wives and mistresses each intent on being the mother of Palpatine’s eventual heir.
I thought such matters beneath the concern of scholarship.
I paid a high price for my absentminded ignorance.
I only pray that Elizie, and our daughter, Shenna, will not be required to pay as well.
Leia closed her eyes. All the reports she had received after the destruction of Alderaan and the demolition of the Death Star had assumed Magrody had disappeared willingly, probably into the Emperor’s infamous think tank, in flight from retribution by the Rebellion for what he had done. Those reports, that is, that didn’t assume that Leia herself had been behind the distinguished scientist’s sudden absence. Many attributed work on the Sun Crusher to him. Took his wife and daughter and went into seclusion someplace …
Would her father have traded his ideals, gone to work for the Emperor, to save her?
It had been her biggest fear on board Vader’s Star Destroyer, and later on the Death Star itself—that Bail Organa would yield to threats to do her harm.
She still didn’t know. He’d never been offered the choice.
Mon Mothma will laugh, I suppose, at the ease with which I was lured to the place where they picked me up. And well she might, should circumstance ever permit her to laugh at anything connected with the evils that I have been required to perform. I thought all I had to do was some single service—they’d let Elizie and Shenna free, perhaps put me down on some deserted planet, where I’d eventually be found …
A frightening annoyance, but finite.
Dear gods of my people, finite.
Roganda Ismaren told me it was all in the Emperor’s name. She had a small collection of bullyboys around her,