Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [9]
“Margolis was my mother’s name,” said Cray softly.
There was another silence.
“The children of the Jedi,” Luke whispered.
“A—a colony of them? A group?” Leia shivered, wondering why that sounded so familiar.
“My mother …” Cray hesitated, smoothed back a tendril of ivory-pale hair with one long-fingered hand. “My great-aunt was always watching my mother, criticizing her. Later I put together that my mother’s mother had been a Knight and Aunt Sophra was afraid Mother—or I—would show signs of sensitivity to the Force as well. Mother never did. I told you about that when Nichos first brought me to Yavin, Luke.”
Luke nodded, remembering. Remembering Nichos’s shining grin, The most brilliant AI programmer at the Magrody Institute—and strong in the Force as well.
“Like Uncle Owen,” he said softly. “The worst yelling-at I ever got in my life was the one time I … I guess I found something using the Force. Aunt Beru had lost the little screwdriver she used to fix her mending stitcher. I shut my eyes and said, ‘It’s under the couch.’ I don’t know how I knew that. Uncle Owen claimed he punished me because the only way I could have known was if I’d put it there myself, but now I think he knew it was the Force, and that’s why he was mad.”
He shrugged. “I must have been about six. I sure never did that again. I didn’t even remember it until I was with Yoda on Dagobah.”
“Yes,” said Cray. “Aunt Sophra was like that with Mother. And I must have picked it up, because until Nichos and I talked about it, it … it never even occurred to me I might be sensitive to the Force.”
Nichos remembered to smile, and put his hand on her shoulder. Luke knew they’d even got the body temperature right, in the hands and face at least.
“They hid the children down the well,” said Leia softly. “Do you think when … when Vader and the Emperor started hunting down and killing the Jedi, some of the Knights … I don’t know, smuggled their spouses and children to some place of safety? Did you talk to Drub about the Jedi, Han? About the Force?”
“I don’t remember much about the conversation,” admitted Han. “Especially not after we got drinking. But I remember telling him about Luke, and about Old Ben. Drub wouldn’t let it get in the way of business, but he always did want to see the Rebels win.” He shrugged, embarrassed. “He was kind of a romantic.”
Leia hid a smile and her own private reflections about smugglers who let the Rebellion interfere with their business, and returned her gaze to Luke. “They must have been scattered later,” she said. “But if there was a group of the families of the Jedi hiding out in Plett’s Well, or Plettwell … they might have left records of where they went. And who they were.”
She picked up the earring again, turning it to the light. “You say Yetoom’s on the edge of the Senex Sector. Sullust is between Yetoom and here. Most of the credit papers here are Sullustan … What would the Smelly Saint’s range be?”
“It’s a light stock freighter, like the Falcon,” said Han thoughtfully, glancing at Chewbacca for confirmation. The Wookiee nodded. “It’s got deepspace capabilities, but most small-time smugglers don’t go more than about twenty parsecs to a jump. Since there’s nothing much below or above the ecliptic around there, that would put his point of origin somewhere in the Senex or Juvex Sector, or in the Ninth Quadrant, say, between the Greeb-Streebling Cluster and the Noopiths.”
“That’s a lot of territory,” said Leia thoughtfully. “It’s broken up, too—Imperial holdouts and little two-planet confederacies; Admiral Thrawn never made much headway with the Ancient Houses that rule in the Senex Sector, but we haven’t, either. I know the House Vandron runs slave farms on Karfeddion, and the House Garonnin gets most of its revenue from strip-mining asteroids under pretty scary conditions—even back in the old days there were always questions in the Senate about Rights of Sentience in those areas.”
“It doesn’t sound like someplace that would be easy to search for word of