flat- bladed shovel and scooped into the ash, then flipped out a broad, flat, fringed disk, immobile, sooty, and gray. He wiped off some of the ash and revealed a palm-swipe of pearly white. His crew grabbed the disk by its fringe and flung it callously onto the back of a carapod. Vagno probed, discovered, and laughed once more, flipped out another disk, and again the crew grabbed and stacked.
Anakin looked to Obi-Wan, his eyes dancing with joy. The seeds had been forged. All fifteen seeds had survived. Each had exploded in the heat, puffed out into the fringed disks now loaded on the carapod behind them.
Then the boy's face fell. 'I don't feel them,' Anakin said. 'Are they still alive?'
Obi-Wan had no answer. He was almost punch-drunk with what he had experienced. He felt like a boy himself now, lost in shock and wonder and an irritating tickle of fear.
At last you know the spirit of adventure!
Obi-Wan closed his eyes tightly, as if to ward off the voice. He missed his Master intensely, but he would not let a vagrant fantasy besmirch Qui-Gon's memory.
'Adventure,' Anakin said. The boy rode beside Obi-Wan on the carapod. Vagno was taking them across the valley, around several of the tall, river-carved pillars, toward a narrower and darker cleft on the southern side. 'Is adventure the same as danger?'
'Yes,' Obi-Wan said, a little too sharply. 'Adventure is lack of planning, failure of training.'
'Qui-Gon didn't think so. He said adventure is growth, surprise is the gift of awareness of limits.'
For an instant, Obi-Wan wanted to lash out at the boy, strike him across the face for his blasphemy. That would have been the end of their relationship as Master and apprentice. He wanted it to end. He did not want the responsibility, or in truth to be near one so sensitive, so capable of blithely echoing what lay deepest inside him.
Qui-Gon had once told Obi-Wan these very things, and he had since forgotten them.
Anakin stared at his master intently. 'Do you hear him?' he asked.
Obi-Wan shook his head. 'It is not Qui-Gon,' he said stiffly.
'Yes, it is,' Anakin said.
'Masters do not return from death.'
'Are you sure?' Anakin asked.
Obi-Wan looked south into the dark maw of the cleft. There were no fires there, no forges. Instead, a cold blue light flickered across the wet stone walls, and long tendrils crawled like snakes over the walls and the sandy, rock-strewn floor.
'Clients never return!' Vagno shouted at them as he marched alongside the carapod, his stumpy legs pounding the ground. He capered and poked his blade into the air. 'They don't remember, and if they did remember, they'd be too afraid! But me and my crew, we live here We're the bravest in all the universe!'
Obi-Wan, at this moment, could not have agreed more.
Chapter 40
Vagno gruffly introduced them to the chief of the shaping team, a tall, wiry man named Vidge. Where Vagno was squat and red, Vidge seemed more like a tall wisp of night fog-pale, with large, wet eyes. Even his clothes were wet and sprinkled with bits of glowing slime that made him look like a creature hauled forth from the depths of an ocean.
'You've brought so many,' he complained in a sepulchral tone as he counted the disks stacked on the three carapods. 'What are we to do with fifteen?'
Vagno shrugged expressively. Vidge turned to gloomily sur vey Anakin, then glanced over at Obi-Wan. 'Did you pay more to the uplanders, to get so many seeds?'
'No questions!' Vagno cried out. 'It's time to paint and shape!'
Vidge raised his hands in mock surrender and turned to his own team, all tall and damp and insubstantial. They wielded different tools, long heavy brushes and rough-edged paddles. Behind them rose a tall warehouse made of roughly assembled sheets of lamina, sagging and corroded from years of rough use. Vidge grabbed the carapod closest to him by its center leg and pulled it toward the warehouse. It hung back reluctantly, as did the other two, who were urged forward by Vidge's crew.
Vagno stood back. 'Not my place,' he said, suddenly hum ble. 'Here's a different art.' He waved them to follow Vidge.
The warehouse echoed with hollow bubbling and sighing. Tendrils crept in from around the edges and spread wide and flat, and at their tips grew broad fruits unlike any they had seen elsewhere: swollen, translucent, and filled with a sparkling, thick fluid that swirled slowly within, churned by screw-shaped organs at the core of each fruit.
Anakin and Obi-Wan helped Vidge's crew unload the seed- disks and arrange them upright in racks near the shaping platform. Here, on a riser about ten meters wide, Vidge and two assistants lifted a long knife and harvested one of the fruits, slicing it along a lateral line with three swift whacks. The glowing clear fluid within oozed forth and writhed slowly along the platform, filled with a haze of flexible white needles.
From a door at the back of the warehouse, a large carapod crawled out of the shadows. On its back it balanced a metal and plastic frame, apparently a form for their spacecraft.
'A ready-made frame, sent here by Shappa Farrs,' Vidge said sorrowfully, as if announcing the death of a dear friend. 'The shaping brings it alive.'
Another carapod, protected by thick metal plates woven into a fabric shield, carried objects Anakin recognized immediately: two Haor Chall type-seven Silver-class light starship engines, as well as a very expensive
