Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [72]
The door swished shut behind it. Leia could see the dark patch of necrosis on the back of its neck, and smell the faint stink of rot in its wake. She didn’t know how to ask what she wanted to know without raising suspicions, so she only said, “Why are you here? How did you come here? Beldorion called you a philosopher.”
“And I am,” sighed Liegeus. He made a move as if he would fuss with the water pitcher, the covered dish of aromatic and exquisitely cooked insect life, but let his hand fall to his side again. He faced her. “A wanderer. A blot on the familial escutcheon. They don’t speak my name. Alas, it has also been my misfortune to be a competent designer of artificial intelligence systems for spacecraft, and a very, very good holo faker.”
“A holo faker?”
“Of course, my dear. It was my art, my hobby—the source of my joy and the material for a thousand silly pranks in my youth. The bane of my existence, now: Beldorion has drafted me into editing and retaping his formidable library of Huttese pornography. Even my stint on Gamorr, ghost-writing love poems for the boars to pass off as their own when they go courting in the wintertime, wasn’t so fearful.”
Leia laughed, like sudden summer breaking the ice lock of her fears, and Liegeus laughed, too. For a moment she thought he might have reached out and taken her hand, but he drew back at the last moment, saying instead, “Is there something you’d like me to make for you? I have digitalized holo scrap of every imaginable background, face, animal, and bit of furniture that’s ever been recorded: motions, sounds, the slightest variations of movement. You would not know that you weren’t there. I can give you the hatching of the glimmerfish by starlight, in the lake of Aldera below the palace where you were raised, or the Starboys in their heyday … or your husband,” he added diffidently. “I have scrap of him, you know. And your children.”
It gave Leia a queer pang to hear him say so, but she knew that Han was a public figure, the children were public figures and had been holo-taped tens of thousands of times. Liegeus’s dark eyes were like those of a dog who fears to be kicked—he was afraid, she realized, that he’d offended her, and she reached out reassuringly and touched his hand. “No,” she said. “Thank you, no. It would hurt too much, I think.”
He opened his mouth to give her a reassuring lie, as he had before when he’d brought her water, but closed it instead, the lie unsaid. Their eyes met again, she in the light and he in shadow. He began to say something else and lost his nerve, and before he could find it again the door opened and the synthdroid returned.
“Master Vorn, Master Ashgad wishes to speak with you on the terrace.”
Leia followed him inside the chamber, and to the door, and was careful, when he took his departure, not to let herself be seen as she crept back to the railing of the balcony, where she could hear every word said on the terrace below.
“I trust everything is proceeding on schedule?” came Ashgad’s voice.
“It is, sir. I can begin bringing the core up the day after tomorrow; I’m feeding in escape trajectories to establish an exit program now.”
“Try to set the work forward as much as you can, Liegeus,” said Ashgad. “The longer we delay, the more possibilities exist for something going wrong. We’re bringing in boxes tonight, both kinds. See they’re properly stored.”
Liegeus’s voice was almost inaudible. “Yes, sir.”
“It will be up to you for the next three days,” Ashgad went on. “I’m leaving in the morning for Hweg Shul, to start things in motion there. I should be gone …”
“Leaving?” Liegeus sounded aghast.
“Oh, things will be all right.” Ashgad spoke rather quickly, like a man who hopes things will be all right. In the five days Leia had been under his roof she had neither seen nor spoken to the man; he evidently did not like being brought face-to-face with the victims of his crimes. “Beldorion will be in charge, but you’re not to permit him to come near Her Excellency. I heard about that little