Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [138]
She switched her comm board back on to broadcast. “Gray One, this is Four. Over.”
“Go ahead, Four. Over.”
“Would it be all right if I dropped down into Tralus’s atmosphere before I return to the Diver? I’d like to run this unit through some paces. Atmospheric speed and heat tests, some aerobatics. Over.”
“That’s showing some initiative, Four. You’re authorized. Over.”
“Thanks, and out.” Syal returned the comm board to its previous status.
Zueb gave her a sorrowful look. “Going to fly me dizzy, aren’t you?”
Syal nodded, her expression sympathetic. “Only till you throw up.”
“All right.”
LORRD CITY, LORRD
Ben returned to Dr. Rotham’s offices just as the elderly scholar was commencing her initial evaluation. He walked in, seeing the real tassels set out on the main table and a hologram of them floating above, each tassel labeled.
Rotham was speaking: “—top to bottom, as that seems, from internal evidence, to be the order in which they’re to be read. Hello, Ben.”
“Hello.” Ben moved forward to stand behind Jacen’s chair. He stared up at the hologram.
“So,” Dr. Rotham continued, “number one, at the top, is from Firrere, a dead world, its population scattered; the knotting technique was originally for recording and, in some superstitious cultures, magically influencing names. Its message, ‘He will remake himself’—or perhaps ‘rename himself,’ the two concepts being identical in this context.
“Next is the one I translated for you earlier, from the Bith species, Aalagar race: ‘He will ruin those who deny justice.’
“The scarlet-and-black one was easy, as it was the second of the tactile writing systems I learned—a recording technique used by the prisoners on Kessel. ‘He will choose the fate of the weak.’”
Though Jacen didn’t move, Ben felt a jolt of emotion from him. Nelani must have felt it, too; she gave Jacen a curious look, but he did not acknowledge it, keeping his attention on Dr. Rotham. The scholar seemed to be oblivious to the exchange.
“I can’t determine the meaning of the next one in sequence, the poisonous-looking yellow-and-green one. After that comes a very tricky one. The red, yellow, and pale green tassel is actually a representation of a flower arrangement, from the old Alderaanian language of flowers—imagine it as a bouquet in a vase, the red and yellow splotches constituting the petals and the green the stems, and you get a sense of it. Its meaning is ‘He will choose how he will be loved.’ Actually, instead of ‘he’ it should be ‘I,’ but I’m taking the liberty of assuming that the third person is to be used here, as it is everywhere else.”
“Speaking of which,” Nelani interrupted, “is it definitely ‘he,’ or could it also be read as ‘she’ throughout?”
Dr. Rotham shook her head. “It isn’t defined in all the tassels, but everywhere it is, it’s distinctly ‘he.’ Where was I? Oh, yes. After that, a very simple one. The gray-and-brown one is from a still-extant Coruscanti subculture of indigents, transients who pride themselves on being jobless, living by theft and begging. They leave messages for others of their kind, symbols on the walls of shops to say, for instance, that a restaurateur is an easy touch. This three-dimensional representation of their language states, ‘He will win and break his chains.’”
She continued. Ben, increasingly bored, began to lose focus, taking only distracted note of her translations: “‘He will shed his skin and choose a new skin,’ ‘He will strengthen himself through sacrifice,’ ‘He will crawl through his cloak,’ ‘He will know brotherhood,’ ‘He will make a pet’—by which I don’t mean he will tame some creature, but that he will somehow fabricate a pet…”
Mostly Ben kept his attention on Jacen,