Anakin stood relaxed and ready, assuming nothing, as he had been trained. With the barest of signals, at the appearance of the Magister, Obi-Wan had alerted his Padawan that they were now acting as Jedi, representatives of the order and the Temple, but in a covertly defensive mode.
Something was not right. Something was incomplete.
"We've come here for another reason," Obi-Wan said. "We're looking for a-"
The air seemed to shimmer inside the large room. Obi-Wan shook his head. He had been about to ask a question, and it had fled from the tip of his tongue, leaving no trace.
"Our way of life is precious to me," the Magister said calmly. "As you can see, we have something unique on Zonama Sekot. Customers, clients, come and go with only a vague notion as to where they've been." He smiled. "Not that our little tricks will work against Jedi. And of course, we do have to trust those who deliver our clients to us."
A second girl walked from a door on the opposite side of the room. She was identical in appearance to the first, of the same age and size, and wore the same long green Sekotan dress.
Anakin stared at the second girl with a puzzled expression. Obi-Wan's critical faculties were fully engaged. Something is being playful, he thought. Or testing us. Something hidden.
"Still, I'm pleased you've come," the Magister continued. "I wanted. . needed to meet with you personally. You appear to be the genuine article-a Master and an apprentice."
"You've studied the Jedi?"
"No," the Magister said, grimacing as if at an unpleasant memory. "I was a promising student. There were difficulties, not entirely of my own making. . Misperceptions. But that was fifty years ago."
Obi-Wan judged the man before him to be no more than forty. But then, deeper still, a question: What man? His facial expressions are subtly false. Like a marionette.
The Magister lifted his hands. "Sekot seems to have taken a liking to you! All is explained. Sekot is sensitive, and it favors Jedi. . Very well. I accept you as clients. You may proceed. Please excuse me. There's so much work to do. I trust you'll be comfortable on your way back to Middle Distance."
The Magister smiled warmly at Anakin and left the room.
"That's it?" Anakin asked, eyebrows arched. "He's not going to, like, put us through a test or something? We're home free?"
Obi-Wan pressed his temples with finger and thumb, trying to clear his mind, but he could not penetrate whatever illusion surrounded them.
The second daughter escorted them from the block-shaped building and across the stone pathway, now black in the late twilight gloom. She said nothing and barely glanced at them.
Obi-Wan was tempted to reach out and touch her, but controlled the impulse. No need to reveal his suspicions at this point.
The double star and the brightest coil of the spiral lay below the horizon. Scattered stars and faint spills and streaks of nebular gas showed between thin veils of swiftly moving clouds.
The evening breeze passed cool and sweet over them as the Magister's daughter left them by the transport. She turned and walked with an even gait back to the darkened silhouette of the Magister's dwelling.
It had been one of the strangest meetings in Obi-Wan's experience. Strange, unsatisfying, and unrevealing. They knew little more than when they had arrived. Obi-Wan tried to remember the meeting in detail. He had not even bothered trying to persuade the humbly dressed man to tell them more about himself, about Vergere, because he was not sure the figure they saw could tell them more.
The man and his daughters were not real. Yet the illusion had been powerful and almost completely convincing. In Obi- Wan's experience, no single being-not even a Jedi Master-could delude two Jedi at once. Hide, yes-that had certainly been done by Qui-Gon and others. Yet the Council had long suspected that the Sith knew how to disguise themselves and pass undetected by Jedi. Obi-Wan was positive, however, that this was no Sith conspiracy. Even with time to ponder the experience, what they had actually witnessed was not at all clear to him.
"Maybe now we know why they call him Magister," Anakin said in a low voice as they boarded the transport. "Maybe nobody really gets to meet him, and that's how he protects himself."
Obi-Wan again held his finger to his lips. Persuading the pilot not to listen was insufficient. The transport itself, as part of Sekot, was now suspect, and Obi-Wan doubted he could effectively use Jedi persuasion and deception on the living tissue, the biosphere, of an entire world.
The transport lifted away from the promontory and flew them north and east again, back to Middle Distance.
We've met our match, Obi-Wan thought grimly. Perhaps that is what happened to Vergere, and she is hidden. . completely hidden from us.
Then he faced his Padawan across the space between the seats. He moved his lips without sound:
The planet's recent past is closed to us. Observe the path of the transport-the weather is calm, the way is unobstructed, yet we fly a zigzag course. We may be avoiding other evidence of the battle-if there was a battle. We cannot avoid passing over the one scar-it was too large to miss.
Anakin agreed. Someone is hiding something. But why give us a chance to see the gouge?
The Magister may assume we saw it from orbit. He just doesn't want to make things too obvious. "No," Obi-Wan whispered, his eyes half-closed. He believes he has nothing to fear from Jedi. But he may be ashamed, perhaps, of a past weakness. A near-defeat. I am speculating now.
And how! Anakin said with a slight chop of one hand. He faced forward. At least we're going to be allowed to make the ship.
Obi-Wan found no comfort at all in that. The weak lie to survive. What would make an entire planet feel weak. . out here, isolated, on the edge of nowhere1?
Anakin shook his head. It was outside the range of his experience. The boy sighed. I'll bet it all has to do with Vergere and why she came here in the first place.
Chapter 28
The mood at Middle Distance was much subdued, a contrast to the festival that had begun the ceremony of choosing. People went about their business on the terraces as if this were a time like any other. From their apartment parapet, Obi-Wan watched the late-night lanterns flicker across the canyon and listened to the distant voices while his three seed-partners clung to him like a long-lost parent.
Anakin slept very little that night. His bed was crowded and busy with twelve molting seed-partners. The seeds were not used to being separated from a client after the choosing, and had suffered some distress, though nothing, Sheekla Farrs told them, they would not soon forget. They crawled about on his thin covers, mewling plaintively, and occasionally fell to the floor with soft plops, then cried to be picked up.
The seeds were splitting along one side, showing firm white flesh covered by a thick and downy fuzz. The spikes on each had twisted into three thick stiff feet on one side, and along the seam of the sloughing shell, the spikes were curling up and withering away.
***
In the morning, now that he and Obi-Wan had passed inspection by the Magister, or so Gann thought, they were given the keys to Middle Distance. Gann delivered client robes to them, red and black, conspicuous amid all the green, and they were allowed access to the valley's small library, housed above the rim in the trunk of a huge and ancient bora.