Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [140]
“Luke …”
He looked up quickly, to meet the blue glass eyes. In the shadowy gloom the face that he’d known so well was almost a stranger’s, affixed monstrously to the silver cowl of the metal skull.
“Am I really Nichos?”
Luke said, “I don’t know.” He had never in his life felt so helpless, because in his heart—in the secret shadows where the truth always lay—he knew that this was a lie.
He knew.
“I was hoping you would be able to tell me,” said Nichos softly. “You know me—or you knew him. Cray programmed me to … to know everything Nichos knew, to do everything Nichos did, to be everything Nichos was, and to think that I really am Nichos. But I don’t … know.”
“What do you mean?” protested Threepio. “Of course you’re Nichos. Who else would you be? That’s like asking if The Fall of the Sun was written by Erwithat or another Corellian of the same name.”
“Luke?”
Luke concentrated on pulling out the minutely programmed fiber-optic wires.
“Am I ‘another Corellian of the same name’?”
“I’d like to tell you one way or the other,” said Luke. The bolt came away from the brushed-steel chest, lay thick and heavy in Luke’s hand. One hand real, one hand mechanical, but both his. “But I … I don’t know. You are who you are. You are the being, the consciousness, that you are at this moment. That’s all I can tell you.” That fact, at least, was true.
The smooth face did not alter, but the blue eyes looked infinitely sad. “I had hoped that, being a Jedi, you would know.”
And Luke had the uncomfortable sensation that, having been a Jedi, Nichos knew perfectly well that he was keeping something back.
“I love her.” Nichos looked again toward the doorway, his face the calm face of a droid, his eyes the eyes of a desperately unhappy man. “I say that—I know that—yet I cannot tell the difference, if there is one, between the devotion, the loyalty, that Artoo and Threepio feel toward you. And I don’t remember whether that’s love or something else. I can’t set them side by side to compare. When they were holding Cray a prisoner, when they mistreated her, struck her—forced her to go through those stupid parodies of a trial—I would have done anything to help her. Except that, since I was programmed not to interfere with them, it was literally something that I could not do. I could not make my limbs, my body, act in a fashion contrary to my programming not to interfere.”
He took the restraining bolt from Luke’s hand, held it between thumb and forefinger, examining it dispassionately in the jaundiced glare of the lamp on the table beside them. “The terrible thing is that I don’t feel bad about it.”
“Why in the universe should you?” asked Threepio, startled.
“No reason,” said Nichos. “A droid cannot go against his basic programming, or restraints placed upon his programming if they do not conflict with the deepest level of motivational limiters. But I think Nichos would have.”
“She’s asleep now.”
Luke was as aware of her entering the room as if she’d come through the shut door that separated it from the tiny office. He was alone. In the dense shadows—the batteries on the lamp had gone, finally, and the only illumination came from the emergency supply of grease, burning with makeshift wicks in two big red plastic mess-hall bowls on the worktable—he could almost trick himself into believing he saw her, tall and lanky with her brown hair hanging down her back in a tail as long and thick as his arm.
I can’t let her be destroyed, he thought, and his heart twisted with despair.
“Is Nichos all right?”
Luke nodded, then caught himself, and shook his head. “Nichos … is a droid,” he said.
“I know.”
He felt her presence beside him, as if she had hiked herself up to sit next to him on the edge of the workbench, booted feet dangling, as he was sitting. The warmth of her flesh came back to him from his dream, the passionate strength with which she’d clung to him, the sweetness of her mouth under his.
“Luke,” she said gently. “Sometimes there is nothing you can do.”
He expelled his breath