Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [15]
“I don’t know.” They retreated to the small dining area where Luke had earlier probed his mind, and Luke stretched up to pin back a corner of the lamp-sheathe, letting a slim triangle of butter-colored light fall on the purple of the vulwood tabletop. “A dream. A premonition, maybe.” It was on his lips to ask, Do you dream? but he remembered the ghastly, imageless darkness in Nichos’s mind, and didn’t. He wasn’t sure if his pupil was aware of the difference in his human perception and knowledge, aware of just exactly what he’d lost when his consciousness, his self, had been transferred.
“How aware are you of the computerized side of your being?” he asked instead.
A man would have knit his brows, pressed his thumb to his lips, scratched his ear … something. Nichos answered with a droid’s promptness, “I am aware that it exists. If you were to ask me the square root of pi or the ratio of length to frequency of light waves I would be able to tell you without hesitation.”
“Can you generate random numbers?”
“Of course.”
Of course.
“When I probed your mind, read your memories of that childhood planet, I felt a … a disturbance. As if something were reaching out, searching … Something evil, something …” Saying it out loud, he knew now what he’d felt. “Something conscious. Could you place yourself in a receptive trance, as if meditating on the Force, open your mind to it, and … generate random numbers? Random coordinates? I’ll get you a stylopad, there’s one connected to the terminal here. You were trained as a Jedi,” Luke went on, leaning against the table and looking up into those cobalt-blue, artificial eyes. “You know the … the feeling, the taste, the heft and hand, of the Force, even though you can’t use it now. I need to find this … this disturbance. This wave of darkness that I felt. Can you do this?”
Abruptly Nichos smiled, and it was the smile of the man Luke had known. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said. “But we can certainly try.”
In the morning Luke excused himself from the expedition Tomla El had organized with Nichos and Cray to the Falls of Dessiar, one of the places on Ithor most renowned for its beauty and peace. When they left he sought out Umwaw Moolis, and the tall herd leader listened gravely to his less than logical request and promised to put matters in train to fulfill it. Then Luke descended to the House of the Healers, where Drub McKumb lay, sedated far beyond pain but with all the perceptions of agony and nightmare still howling in his mind.
“Kill you!” He heaved himself at the restraints, blue eyes glaring furiously as he groped and scrabbled at Luke with his clawed hands. “It’s all poison! I see you! I see the dark light all around you! You’re him! You’re him!” His back bent like a bow; the sound of his shrieking was like something being ground out of him by an infernal mangle.
Luke had been through the darkest places of the universe and of his own mind, had done and experienced greater evil than perhaps any man had known on the road the Force had dragged him … Still, it was hard not to turn away.
“We even tried yarrock on him last night,” explained the Healer in charge, a slightly built Ithorian beautifully tabby-striped green and yellow under her simple tabard of purple linen. “But apparently the earlier doses that brought him enough lucidity to reach here from his point of origin oversensitized his system. We’ll try again in four or five days.”
Luke gazed down into the contorted, grimacing face.
“As you can see,” the Healer said, “the internal perception of pain and fear is slowly lessening. It’s down to ninety-three percent of what it was when he was first brought in. Not much, I know, but something.”
“Him! Him! HIM!” Foam spattered the old man’s stained gray beard.
Who?
“I wouldn’t advise attempting any kind of mindlink until it’s at least down to fifty percent, Master Skywalker.”
“No,” said Luke softly.
Kill you all. And: They are gathering …
“Do you have recordings of everything he’s said?”
“Oh, yes.” The big coppery eyes blinked assent. “The transcript is available through