Star Wars_ The Approaching Storm - Alan Dean Foster [19]
Ranjiyn did not hesitate. “Go east. Or west, or any other direction. Go away from civilization. Leave the cities behind.” He ventured the thin Ansionian version of a smile. “You will find the Alwari. Or they will find you. I wish I could be there to watch you try to talk sense into them. That would be something to see.”
“Something to see,” Tolut grunted in agreement.
Luminara and Obi-Wan rose simultaneously. The conference was at an end. “You know our reputation,” Obi-Wan said. “We have put it behind our words thousands of times before. This will be no different. Dealing with your Alwari can’t be any more frustrating than trying to negotiate the traffic patterns on Coruscant.” His expression twisted at the memory of his last visit. He didn’t much care for intracity travel.
The mention of urban confusion further solidified the growing, if wary, rapport that had developed during the conference between visitors and delegates—which was of course precisely why he had alluded to it. Official business concluded, visitors and delegates alike chatted amiably for another hour, both sides grateful for the chance to learn something more of one another off the record and on a personal level. In particular, the now nearly dried-out Tolut had taken a special shine to Luminara. She tolerated the hulking delegate’s proximity without concern. In the course of her career she had been required to make friends with far more obnoxious sentients.
While engaged in her own conversations, she noted with admiration how Obi-Wan Kenobi put others at ease. For all his vaunted skills and experience, his was a personality others found nonthreatening. His tone was understated, while his words fell on the ears of others as gently as a therapeutic massage. If he had not become a Jedi, she mused, he would have been a great credit to the diplomatic service.
But that would have meant a career in the very bureaucracy that they both decried, the consequences of whose blundering and stumbling they were both here to try to smooth over.
Barriss was doing her best to charm both Ranjiyn and the elder human representative, while Anakin was spouting a streak of self-assurance at the other human. The woman listened intently to everything he said, more engrossed in his words than Luminara would have expected. She would have listened in, but she had Tolut and the still-suspicious Kandah to try to win over. Anyway, if Anakin needed monitoring, that was Obi-Wan’s job, not hers.
If only, she reflected, succeeding in their mission here could be reduced to a matter of choosing the right phrases. Unfortunately, she had been involved in too many disputes on too many unruly worlds to believe that the quandary of Ansion would be solved by shrewd words alone.
Delegate Kandah, of the Unity of Community that represented the urban citizens of Ansion, waited uneasily in the dark passageway. Beyond, the lights of Songoquin Street, with its chanting vendors and night-strolling patrons, beckoned. Like all her big-eyed kind, she was comfortable moving about even on moonless nights. But in such a restricted defile, with only one way in and out, even a night-sighted Ansionian might be forgiven for wishing for a little more illumination.
“What have you for me?” Though she recognized the voice immediately, the abruptness of it snapping unannounced out of the darkness startled her. “What of the meeting between the visitors and the representatives of the Unity?”
“It went all too well.” She did not know the identity of the contact with whom she was speaking, much less his name. She could not even be sure it was a he. None of that mattered. What was important was that he paid handsomely, without delay, and in untraceable credits. “The delegation was mistrustful and skeptical at first. I did my personal best to sow confusion and dissent. But