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By Root 957 0

its front wall broken out to reveal two stone floors and the remains of two more, reduced to little better than ledges around the tower’s inner wall. What looked as if it might have been a curtain wall lay about fifteen meters out from that, more or less halfway between the point of the triangle and the edge of the bench. It had been shattered in a dozen places, as if some huge creature had taken bites out of the stonework. Another curtain wall, reduced to a chain of dark rubble, skirted the edge of the bench itself, punctuated with trees, and between them lay a lush, rather unkempt lawn pitted with old blast craters in which thickets of lipana grew around small, silvery rain pools.

“How many of them stayed here?” asked Leia, making quick mental calculations and feeling a sort of shock of surprise and disappointment.

“It can’t have been very many, that’s for sure.” Han surveyed the narrow space of the inner courtyard, hands on hips and a slight frown between his brows. “Not unless they were real friendly.”

“They may have had perishable dwellings—tree houses or brush huts—on the lower bench where the MuniCenter now stands, or on the valley floor,” said Jevax. “Though before the dome was built the valley was intermittently subject to cold—nothing like the cold up on the surface, of course. And I suspect that if they’d stayed in the houses of the villagers, more people would have remembered.”

He gestured with a long arm to the roofless buildings, the tower whose every open floor and window embrasure, like the cliff behind it, sported its own pendant garden of fern, spider plant, Wookiee-beard, and sweetberry vine. “As far as I know, this is all there ever was.”

“This can’t have been more than Plett’s original laboratory,” objected Leia. “You couldn’t fit ten families into this place.”

“You obviously haven’t been in a tenement in Kiskin,” muttered Han. He walked through the broken gateway to the inner court and stepped through a gap in the wall of the single square building left standing roofless against the cliff at the foot of the tower. “So Plett was here first?”

“He was a botanist and a savant,” said Jevax. “A Jedi Master of great age, we’ve heard; a Ho’Din from the planet Moltok. We’ve deduced by the growth of the lichens at the foot of the walls that he built this place about a hundred years ago, and since many of the plants that grow in the valley have been genetically tailored to our climate of geothermic heat and low light—even to the microclimates of high acidity down in the more active lower end of the valley—we assume he was an ecologist and scientist of considerable skill. Legends say he could talk to birds and animals as well, and send away the storms that periodically swept down even into the valleys. Some of this we know from the original inhabitants of the other rifts, of Wutz and Bot-Un, where, apparently, their memories were not tampered with.”

“Meaning that the Jedi didn’t stay there.” Leia gazed around her at the square of heavy lava-block walls, over a meter thick and the hue of old blood. Despite the fortresslike appearance of the place, Plett’s House was filled with the most profound sense of peace she had ever encountered.

Good people lived here, she thought, not knowing why the sense of it filled her so strongly, like the scent of forgotten flowers. Power, and love like a sun’s light. She closed her eyes, overwhelmed with the impression that, if she listened hard enough, she could hear the voices of children playing.

“Exactly,” she heard Jevax say, his voice diminishing as he and Han walked around the chamber’s inner wall. “We think Plett originally chose this place not only because of the singular climate of the rift valleys, but because the glacial winds and extreme atmospheric conditions on the surface make landing any kind of spacecraft extremely difficult, and any kind of signals or sensors almost impossible.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.” Han had had some scary minutes bringing the Millennium Falcon down the tightest guidance beam he’d encountered in years and into a vertical hundred-meter