[Black Fleet Crisis] - 02(71)

“Perhaps.”

“They should not be,” she said. “Now ask me the real question.

Something else in those reports, I think.”

“Something that wasn’t there,” he said. “You were right. There wasn’t a word about the Fallanassi-not on Lucazec, or Teyr, or Coruscant, or Atzerri. Not that word.”

“You must wonder whether there really is a circle,” she said, “or if this is just a fable spun by a lonely mad-woman to lure you away with her.” She showed a small smile, inviting him to demur.

“I just expected there to be something. Rumors, myths,

legends, superstitions–it’s hard to understand how a people as powerful as the Fallanassi, with as long a history as you’ve suggested, could leave no trace of yourselves!”

“Because we have made it so,” she said quietly.

“—Or are the traces there, and I don’t know the right names to ask after- - What did you say?”

“Because we have made it so,” she repeated. “When such traces appear, we remove them. But there are not many to remove, because we have not made it our purpose to leave a mark.”

Luke nodded slowly. “Not to conquer—not to con-vert—but to find the place where one belongs—” “Yes. If you understand that, you understand the most important truth of the Current,” she said. “If you let it, it will carry you to where you need to be, for the lessons you need to learn, the work you need to do, and the people who need you in their lives.”

Nodding, Luke slid across to the pilot’s seat.

“Speaking of which—we’ve been sitting here a long time.

We should get going,” he said. “But I need to know where.”

“J’t’p’tan,” she said. “The world is called J’t’p’tan.”

Luke turned away toward the controls. “Well—you’ve stumped me again.

I’ll have to look that one up in the navigation atlas.”

“Luke—” “What?”

“Isn’t there a question you haven’t asked?”

Luke thought for a moment. There were many he still could ask, but the urgency had left them. He believed she would answer them all, in their turn. “Yes, one,” he said finally. “Did you love Andras?”

“That isn’t the question I expected,” Akanah said, and bit her lower lip. “Yes. I loved him. He held me lightly. He found something in me that he thought was beautiful, and he never tried to change me. And he was never cruel. It was like being a child—like being a child should be. I wish that it could have lasted.”

Curiously, J’t’p’tan wasn’t in the skiff’s navigational database.

Since the spelling was so odd, he pressed Akanah about it.

“It isn’t a Basic word,” she said, calling forward to him from the refresher. “It’s the Basic transliteration of four mystical glyphs in H’kig— ‘jeh,’ the immanent; ‘teh,’ the transcendent; ‘peh,’ the eternal; and ‘tan,’ the conscious essence. Only ‘tan’ may be written out in full. The H’kig consider the others too sacred. The spelling I gave you is the convention that respects that belief.”

“You could have just said ‘I’m sure,’” he said with mock grumpiness.

“Next time, I will.”

The failure of the skiff to identify their destination forced Luke to make a query to Coruscant, and Mud Sloth to linger a while longer near the Oort Cloud. When the Astrographical Survey Institute returned the requested coordinates, they caused Luke’s eyes to widen.

“A long way,” he said, zooming and scrolling the nav chart across the primary display. “And we can’t go there directly, because that’d put us on the wrong side of the Borderlands for the whole middle third of the trip.”

“Which would be unsafe, I take it.”

“There are Interdictor patrols all in through there,” Luke said. “But that’s okay, because it’s too far to go in one jump anyway. We’d be twenty hours over the skiff’s endurance. I’m going to have to pick a stopping place somewhere along the way.” He waggled a finger over one section of the map. “Somewhere in here—that’ll keep us on the right side of the line.”

“I’ll leave that decision up to you.”

Luke drew a small square around their destination and zoomed the map in to a more familiar scale. Legend marks and other identifiers popped into view. “Farlax Sector,” he said under his breath.

“What?”

“Talking to myself,” Luke said. “I’m tired. My mind’s already lying down in the bunk.”