Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [128]
Though she told me—and the guards—that all was by his command, I never received one scrap of empirical or circumstantial evidence that Palpatine was in any way involved.
It didn’t matter.
I didn’t even know what planet they took me to, or where Elizie and Shenna were, after the one time I saw them.
Leia shivered, though the window seat where she read was the warmest spot in the room, and looked out into the eerie rainbows of the atmosphere under the dome. She remembered, the night before the Time of Meeting, sitting beside one of the fountains in the rooftop gardens of the Ithorian guest house while Han pointed out to Jaina and Jacen which star was Coruscant’s sun. On Coruscant itself—the Scintillant Planet, old songs called it—the flaming veils of its nightly auroras prevented amateur astronomy, but Ithor was without even the lights of cities. The sky there seemed to breathe stars.
Most of those stars had worlds of some kind circling them, though they might be no more than bare balls of rock or ice or frozen gas habitable only after prohibitively expensive bioforming. Fewer than twenty percent had been mapped. Before the day of Drub McKumb’s attack, Leia had never even heard of Belsavis.
Worlds were large.
And life appallingly short.
What they wanted was simple, they told me. My talents—unsuspected, I thought, by any—had led me to study the records of the old Jedi, to experiment with the mental effects attributable by them to the energy field referred to as the Force.
Talents? thought Leia, startled. Magrody was Force-strong?
It was something she hadn’t known, something Cray had never mentioned, probably hadn’t known either. Considering the Emperor’s attitude toward the Jedi—in which he had never been alone—it was hardly surprising the man had kept it hidden.
I thought I had been successful in concealing, in my experiments, my own abilities to influence this energy field by means of thought wave concentrations, an ability that I believe to be hereditary and not limited to the human species. Perhaps Roganda Ismaren, or the Emperor himself, had deduced from my articles in the Journal of Energy Physics that I knew more about directed thought waves than I ought.
In any case, for my sins, I had reflected on the tradition, or legend, that the Jedi were unable to affect machinery or droids by means of the “Force.” In the light of the nature of subelectronic synapses, I speculated about the possibility of an implanted subelectronic converter, to be surgically inserted in the brain of one who possessed such hereditary ability to concentrate thought waves, enabling him or her, with proper training, to influence artificial intelligences of varying complexities at the individual synaptic level.
This was what they wanted me to do.
Irek, thought Leia. Perhaps the boy actually was the Emperor’s son, though given Palpatine’s age at the probable time of Irek’s conception—and given Roganda’s coolly unscrupulous talents as a planner—the odds were good that he wasn’t.
And if Roganda was his mother, there was no need for Palpatine’s seed to guarantee that Irek would be himself strong in the Force.
Given the atmosphere of Palpatine’s Court, the pervasive use of fear and threat, the infighting of factions and pretenders to power, Leia could only guess at what attempts might have been made on Roganda’s life before Irek was born.
No wonder Roganda was a liar, a chameleon, an adept manipulator of emotions and situations and behind-the-scenes power. If she hadn’t been she’d have been killed.
It was quite clear from the timing of events that Roganda, a child of the Jedi herself,