Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [174]
“Flowers were the easiest,” said Callista. “Something you’re familiar with. Flowers or animals. Make them come up out of the sand.”
There was silence again. Leia perched on the bench in front of the tank, relaxing and focusing her mind as Luke had taught her, seeing in every detail the little candy-pink pittin that had once played with the end of her braids. Thinking through the sand …
And in some fashion she couldn’t define, the images went through the sand and appeared in the tank, not bit by bit, but with an odd sort of abrupt gradualness. AT-AV, rolling on her back to bat at starblossom petals, as if she hadn’t been dead for eleven years.
“Oh, pretty!” said Callista. “Is she yours?”
“Was,” said Leia. “A long time ago.”
“The Masters always had a problem with the children born Jedi to non-Jedi parents, you know,” Callista went on, after a silence in which Leia let the image fade. “Because it’s usually passed on in families, but not always … and it often manifests spontaneously, in people who had no experience with it and no way of knowing how to deal with children who had it. The Masters tried to catch those as early as they could, because those were the ones at the most risk from the dark side. Those,” she went on, “and the children born of Jedi parents who were only a little Force-strong, who had only a tiny bit of what their brothers and sisters and playmates had full strength. Some of those were … the most dangerous of all.”
She stopped, and there was a very awkward pause.
Then, quickly, Callista turned away. “This is a mental maze.” She tapped one of the metal spheres in their rack on the wall. Leia shrank back from it as Callista took it down, remembering Irek holding it out for her, reaching out to suck her spirit into it, to be trapped forever.
“Most people didn’t go into them really,” said the taller woman. “Not with their whole … whole being, whole spirit. And they’re easy to get out of once you know how. The big ones are the simplest, and they get more complicated the smaller they get, mazes within mazes within mazes. The juniors used to make them for fun, and try to confuse and trap each other, the way kids do.”
She set the sphere on the table, spun it with her fingers, the light gleaming wetly off its whirling sides. “I wish … I wish I could show you.”
It had been last night, when Leia, Han, and Callista had come down to the toy room, that they’d discovered that Callista was no longer able to use or touch the Force.
Luke had been taken to the Brathflen Corporation’s Medcenter, to spend most of the night in the glass tank of viscous bacta fluid. It had occurred to Leia that this young woman—who despite her strong superficial physical resemblance to Cray now seemed no more like her than some distant cousin—would know the nature and uses of the toys in their room in the vaults beneath Plett’s House.
Armed with tranquilizers, stunguns, and massive restraints, Jevax and Mara Jade had led parties of searchers to round up the remaining insane guardians of the crypts, so it was fairly safe to enter through the tunnels from Roganda’s house on Painted Door Street. At the sight of them Mara’s cold anger was revived. Many of them were people she knew.
In addition to the team from Diplomatic, a group of psychologists and healers was due to arrive tomorrow from Ithor to help deal with rehabilitation, using the techniques that, Tomla El had informed Leia over subspace, seemed at last to be working on Drub McKumb. The two shuttlecraft and the lander had been brought in safely and their occupants—with the exception of the Sand People, who were drugged and under firm restraint—were in protective custody, to be reoriented, deprogrammed, and returned to their home planets. Both Klaggs and Gakfedds had adamantly refused reorientation and were currently negotiating with Drost Elegin to be taken on as a bodyguard.
Only when Callista had attempted the first, most simple demonstrations of the toys—separating the colored fluids within the sphere, setting to motion the delicately poised levers and wheels of the Dynamitron