“Hi,” she said. “I’m sorry I monopolized the bunk for so long. I didn’t mean to do that.”
Taken aback by her apology, Luke pulled himself up to a sitting position. “
“‘s all right,” he slurred. “You must have needed it. You looked like you did, anyway, back at Talos.”
She nodded. “About Talos—there’s some things we have to talk about,” she said. “You’ve been very patient with me, and I’ve been terribly unfair to you. You deserve to know what’s been happening with me.”
Having had his own opening speech preempted, Luke could find nothing more to say than “Go on, then—I’m listening.”
Akanah nodded toward the foredeck. “You have some messages. You’ll probably want to look at them first.”
Eyeing her quizzically, Luke moved to the copilot’s couch and browsed the list of waiting replies.
There was an acknowledgment from Streen on Yavin 4, which Luke skipped for the moment. He also skipped the press folders from the Senate and General Ministry, which were irrelevant for the moment.
The New Republic Reference Service had responded with a short precis on naming, ending in the messages: Search Key: FALLANASSI—Not Found Search Key: WHITE CURRENT—Not Found As Single Term Search Key: FALLANASSI + WHITE CURRENT Not Found It was the same with the response from the information broker on Atzerri—an apologetic note and an offer to apply half of the search fee to Luke’s next request.
With increasing agitation, Luke skimmed through half a dozen more replies from various agencies and companies on Carratos and Coruscant.
All were singularly uninformative—a few dates, a few facts that fell into the category of vital statistics, and several NO RECORD and NOT FOUND messages, with a pair of REQUEST DENIED rebuffs scattered among them.
“Let me tell you what your messages say,” Akanah said gently. “My full name was Akanah Norand Goss, now Akanah Norand Pell. I was married on Carratos to Andras Pell, a man thirty-six years my senior. Andras died a year later, and I inherited this ship and a few thousand credits.
His obituary says it was an innocent death, and no one official seems to have taken any notice of his passing, but you wonder if I might have both married and killed him to escape from Carratos. And no matter who and where you asked, there’s nothing at all to be found about the Fallanassi.”
“How do you know?” he demanded, twisting around to face her. “Did you read my mail?”
“No. I didn’t need to.”
“You knew I was going to check up on you,” he said.
“Oh—I thought you would, eventually. I rather thought it would be sooner.”
“So you checked yourself, and you knew how little I’d find.”
“I checked for myself,” she corrected. “You’re not the only one looking for pieces of your past.”
He sat down on the edge of the copilot’s couch.
“Why are there so few?” he asked, the accusatory tone leaving his voice.
“Talsava and I lived in the shadows on Carratos. We came in unregistered. We lived in a part of Chofin where people come and go without notice. When Tatsava left, I became one of the invisibles—I owned nothing, did nothing that put my name in the identity records of the occupation. The only time I ever lived above the line on Carratos was the last two years—the years I was with Andras.”
“No one questioned who you were, where you came from?”
“No. The old records were seized by the Empire, and the occupation records were destroyed by the liberty movement. Everyone was given a fresh start. I took a name in the local custom for women—given name, mother’s name, father’s name. But it means nothing anywhere but there, anytime but then.”
“So there’s no reason for it to be anywhere in Coruscant’s records.”
“Or Lucazec’s, or Teyr’s. It’s not that there are other names behind which the records hide—” “As far as the bureaucrats and census-takers were concerned, you didn’t exist.”
She smiled. “On Carratos, the census is of property and the owners of property,” she said. “When I owned nothing, I did not count. When Andras took me, I was his property. Now that I own this”—she raised her hands to indicate the skiff “I am a person.”
Luke nodded slowly. “I guess that all makes sense, the way you explain it,” he said. “But something else I learned still doesn’t have an explanation. The traffic records say we’re still on Coruscant, and I’m starting to think that we’re still going to be there no matter how many systems we visit.”