Unless, of course, he hadn’t gone unnoticed. Perhaps the Emperor had known all about him, but had deliberately left him alone.
Which would in turn imply : what?
Luke didn’t know. But it was something he had better find out.
They had walked no more than two hundred meters when the driver and vehicle C’baoth had summoned arrived: a tall, lanky man on an old SoroSuub recreational speeder bike pulling an elaborate wheeled carriage behind it. “Not much more than a converted farm cart, I’m afraid,” C’baoth said as he ushered Luke into the carriage and got in beside him. Most of the vehicle seemed to be made of wood, but the seats were comfortably padded. “The people of Chynoo built it for me when I first came to them.”
The driver got the vehicles turned around-no mean trick on the narrow path-and started downward. “How long were you alone before that?” Luke asked.
C’baoth shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Time was not something I was really concerned with. I lived, I thought, I meditated. That was all.”
“Do you remember when it was you first came here?” Luke persisted. “After the Outbound Flight mission, I mean.
Slowly, C’baoth turned to face him, his eyes icy. “Your thoughts betray you, Jedi Skywalker,” he said coldly. “You seek reassurance that I was not a servant of the Emperor.”
Luke forced himself to meet that gaze. “The Master who instructed me told me that I was the last of the Jedi,” he said. “He wasn’t counting Vader and the Emperor in that list.”
“And you fear that I’m a Dark Jedi, as they were?”
“Are you?”
C’baoth smiled; and to Luke’s surprise, actually chuckled. It was a strange sound, coming out of that intense face. “Come now, Jedi Skywalker,” he said. “Do you really believe that Joruus C’baoth-Joruus C’baoth-would ever turn to the dark side?”
The smile faded. “The Emperor didn’t destroy me, Jedi Skywalker, for the simple reason that during most of his reign I was beyond his reach. And after I returned :”
He shook his head sharply. “There is another, you know. Another besides your sister. Not a Jedi; not yet. But I’ve felt the ripples in the Force. Rising, and then falling.”
“Yes, I know who you’re talking about,” Luke said. “I’ve met her.”
C’baoth turned to him, his eyes glistening. “You’ve met her?” he breathed.
“Well, I think I have,” Luke amended. “I suppose it’s possible there’s someone else out there who-“
“What is her name?”
Luke frowned, searching C’baoth’s face and trying unsuccessfully to read his sense. There was something there he didn’t like at all. “She called herself Mara Jade,” he said.
C’baoth leaned back into the seat cushions, eyes focused on nothing. “Mara Jade,” he repeated the name softly.
“Tell me more about the Outbound Flight project,” Luke said, determined not to get dragged off the topic. “You set off from Yoga Minor, remember, searching for other life outside the galaxy. What happened to the ship and the other Jedi Masters who were with you?”
C’baoth’s eyes took on a faraway look. “They died, of course, he said, his voice distant. “All of them died. I alone survived to return.” He looked suddenly at Luke. “It changed me, you know.”
“I understand,” Luke said quietly. So that was why C’baoth seemed so strange. Something had happened to him on that flight : “Tell me about it.”
For a long moment C’baoth was silent. Luke waited, jostled by the bumps as the carriage wheels ran over the uneven ground. “No,” C’baoth said at last, shaking his head. “Not now. Perhaps later.” He nodded toward the front of the carriage. “We are here.”
Luke looked. Ahead he could see half a dozen small houses, with more becoming visible as the carriage cleared the cover of the trees. Probably fifty or so all told: small, neat little cottages that seemed to combine natural building elements with selected bits of more modern technology. About twenty people could be seen moving about at various tasks; most stopped what they were doing as the speeder bike and carnage appeared. The driver pulled to roughly the center of the village and stopped in front of a thronelike chair of polished wood protected by a small, dome-roofed pavilion.
“I had it brought down from the High Castle,” C’baoth explained, gesturing to the chair. “I suspect it was a symbol of authority to the beings who carved it.”
“What’s it used for now?” Luke asked. The elaborate throne seemed out of place, somehow, in such a casually rustic setting as this.