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Ben stood silent. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to say anything. It was just that his entire vocabulary, including some choice swear words in Rodian and Huttese he’d gone to great pains to memorize, had just vanished. He wondered where it was.

Nelani cast a worried glance at Jacen. “Does he talk?”

Ben’s vocabulary suddenly returned. “You’re being condescending,” he said.

Absently she ruffled his hair. “Certainly not. You just had me puzzled for a moment.” She returned her attention to Jacen. “So what did you want to do first? Get settled in your quarters at the station?” She gestured toward the exit from the hangar pit, then led them in that direction.

“Have you researched the matter I commed you about?” Jacen asked.

Ben fell into line behind them, furiously smoothing his hair.

“Yes, and I’ve found a contact who seems to know something about your tassels, a Doctor Heilan Rotham. Tactile writing and recording methods are her specialty…”

Dr. Rotham’s offices—also her quarters—were on the ground floor of a university building built of duracrete bricks and falsewoods, then comfortably aged for a couple of centuries. The walls of the corridors and chambers were dark—either soothing or shadowy and threatening, depending on one’s attitude toward such things—and so somber that it seemed to Ben that they could swallow all humor.

Not that, in the office chambers, the walls were all that easy to see. Shelves lined the room, displaying books, scrolls, figurines of strangely misshapen males and females of many species, coils of irregularly knotted rope, and small wooden boxes with hinged lids.

He looked over to the table where Dr. Rotham sat with Jacen and Nelani. Dr. Rotham was a human woman, tiny and ancient. Her hair was white and wispy; her skin was pale, traced with blue veins, and almost transparent. She wore a heavy maroon robe, even though Ben found the temperature in these chambers to be on the warm side, and her eyes were a piercing blue unclouded by age. She sat on a self-propelled chair, a wheeled thing with a bulky undercarriage that suggested it was equipped with short-range repulsorlifts. She held Jacen’s mass of tassels up before her eyes, scrutinizing them from a distance of only four or five centimeters.

“You have a lot of stuff here,” Ben said.

Without looking at him, Dr. Rotham said, “I do, don’t I? And what’s remarkable is that every datum that can be derived from those objects has been recorded into my office memory for my datapads, into Lorrd’s computer system, and into the computers of any person who has ever asked for them.”

Ben took another look around the room’s extensive banks of shelving. “But if it’s all recorded, why do you keep the original things? They take up a lot of room.”

“A reasonable question from a Jedi, who must travel often and lightly. But you must remember that there is a tremendous difference between a thing and the knowledge of a thing. For instance, think about your best friend. Would you prefer to have your best friend, or a datapad stuffed full of knowledge about him?”

Ben considered. He didn’t want to give her the obvious, “correct” answer—it seemed like a defeat. Instead, he said, “That’s a good question.” It was an answer he had heard adults offer many times, one he suspected they used whenever they couldn’t think of anything better to say.

Jacen chuckled and Dr. Rotham did not follow up on her question. Ben concluded that he had held his own.

“This one,” Dr. Rotham said, “is definitely Bith, a recording method of an isolated island race, the Aalagar, that concocted the knotting style as a means of recording genealogies—‘strings of ancestors.’ Later the technique was expanded to permit the recording of thoughts and statements. Roughly translated, it means, ‘He will ruin those who deny justice.’”

Nelani frowned. “That’s…curiously ominous.”

“Why?” Jacen asked.

“Yeah,” Ben said. “Jedi do that all the time. Ruin those who deny justice.”

Nelani shook her head. “Ruination is sometimes a result of what we do.