Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [16]
They didn’t. Luke listened to them all, the incoherent groans and screams, the chewed fragments of words that could be only guessed at, and now and again the clear disjointed cries: “Solo! Solo! Can you hear me? Children … Evil … Gathering here … Kill you all!”
Punctuation is everything, thought Luke wryly, removing the jack from his ear. Is that one thought or three? Or only the bleeding seepage of his dreams?
From a pocket at his belt he took the strip of hardcopy that the stylopad had extruded early that morning under Nichos’s rapid generation of random numbers, and, clipped to it, the readout he’d had from the herd’s central computer a few hours later. What it meant he didn’t know, but the fact that it quite clearly meant something was intensely disquieting.
Feet passed in the corridor, the sharp click of Cray’s exquisite but intensely impractical shoes, and he smiled to himself. Even on an expedition to the jungles, Cray could be counted upon to dress fashionably if she could. He heard her voice, its usual brisk sharpness honed to the brittleness he’d heard in it more and more in the past six months …
“It’s really just a matter of finding a way to quadruple the sensitivity of the chips to achieve a pattern, instead of a linear, generator.” She was the expert, Luke knew—his own knowledge of droid programming and droid minds started and ended with how to talk Threepio out of his more impractical ideas for the care of Han and Leia’s children … But his sense, his perception of the slight shifts of feeling audible in the human voice, picked up the desperate note of one trying to convince herself, of a rear-guard action against doubt and unwanted certainty and too little sleep.
“Hayvlin Vesell of the Technomic Research Foundation spoke in an article of going back to the old xylen-based chips, because of the finer divisibility of information possible. When I return to the Institute—”
“That’s what I’m trying to impress on you, Dr. Mingla—Cray.” Tomla El’s voice was a murmuring concert of woodwinds. “This may not be possible no matter how finely you partition the information. The answer may be that there is no answer. Nichos may simply not be capable of human affect.”
“Oh, I think you’re wrong about that.” She’d gained back the smooth control in her voice. She might have been speaking to a professional colleague about programmatic languages. “Certainly a great deal more work needs to be done before we can dismiss the possibility. I’m told also that in experiments with accelerated learning, at a certain number of multiples of human learning capacity, tremendous breakthroughs can occur. I’ve signed up for another accelerator course, this one in informational patterning dynamics …”
Her voice faded down the corridor. A great deal more work, thought Luke, hurting for her, pressing his hand to his brow. It was Cray’s answer to everything. With sufficient effort, sufficient maneuvering, any problem could be surmounted, no matter what the cost to herself.
And the cost to herself, he knew, had been devastating.
He remembered the weeks after Nichos had been diagnosed with the inexplicable degenerative decay of the nervous system: remembered Cray turning up for her training every morning after nights spent with the learning accelerator therapies she’d had shipped to Yavin, brittle, exhausted, not telling him or anyone that she was forcing herself through hypnosis and drug therapies to absorb the farthest frontiers of her chosen field in order to know enough, to learn enough, to save the man she loved before it was too late. After Nichos was hospitalized he remembered those terrible nights of going to the medcenter on Coruscant, while day after day Cray bullied and hurried her suppliers, sweated sleepless over her designs, racing the disease while Nichos’s body weakened and melted away before their eyes.
Cray had worked a miracle. She had saved the life of the man she loved.
After a fashion.
A man who could recall the