The canyon walls spread farther apart, and the airship moved closer to the eastern rim. Its cable guides depended from long, leafless limbs pushed out by the gnarled boras that lined the edge of the precipice. The pilot deftly kept a uniform strain on the cables.

The river's roar subsided with the broadening of the canyon, and the wind quieted, as well. The gondola rocked gently.

Anakin's partners grew more agitated as the airship glided above some of the most spectacular congregations of Sekotan creatures they had yet seen. With more purchase available on the canyon walls, boras and other organisms had carved out terraces similar to those that supported the houses at Middle Distance. In their natural state, the terraces supported dense jungles. Like acrobats, large, long- limbed climbers slowly lifted themselves up and over the canopy with slender, vine-clinging claws. Avians with translucent carapaces flitted over broad flowers spread wide in the sun. Minutes later, the flowers folded their spectacular petals, broke loose from the boras, and inched up hanging tendrils to higher, more brightly lit terraces.

Anakin whispered soothingly to his seed-partners as he absorbed Sekot's variety.

A young woman emerged from the small gondola cabin and walked past Obi-Wan with a polite smile. Her attention was on Anakin, and she paused beside him in the bow. Obi-Wan ob served her with interest, not least because she was the spitting image of the Magister's illusory twin daughters.

This girl, however, was solid and real.

A seed slipped down Anakin's arm in small jerks and clamped its hooks painfully into his flesh. Anakin grimaced, turned to lift the seed back onto his shoulder, and saw the girl. His eyes widened.

"Have we met?" she asked him, with a pretty frown of inquiry.

"You look familiar," Anakin said.

"Oh, then maybe it was one of Father's things," she said, nodding as if that explained everything. "He puts holograms of me in different places at different times. Like arranging flower pots. It's aggravating."

"How does he do that?" Anakin asked, but the girl decided not to answer.

"Sheekla told me to explain the different kinds of boras here."

"Finally! Everything is so mysterious."

"Trade secrets-I know," the girl said. "Sometimes it's a bore. What's your name? Father forgets that when I'm not really there, I don't actually meet people."

Anakin was at a loss for a moment and looked past her at Obi-Wan. She, too, looked over her shoulder. "Is he your father?"

"No," Anakin said. "He's my teacher. Didn't your father tell you?"

"There's a lot my father doesn't tell me, and a lot you don't know about my father. I actually haven't seen him in months- not since. ." Her eyes lost their focus for a moment, then brightened once more.

"I am Anakin Skywalker, and this is Obi-Wan Kenobi."

"I live in Middle Distance with my mother and my younger brother, but he's just a baby. Father sends us messages now and then. Anyway, I can't explain everything to you now. Maybe later. I'm supposed to tell you about boras, and where they come from, and what they do when they're forged and annealed. You can listen, too," she said, glancing back at Obi-Wan.

"Thank you," Obi-Wan said.

"By the way, my name is-"

"Wind," Anakin said.

She laughed. "Wrong! That's one of Father's jokes. My real name is Jabitha. Father knows all about Jedi training," Jabitha said solemnly. "He told me a year ago that it's very hard to become a Jedi Knight. So you must be special." She patted a seed. "They seem to think so. You're popular." She took a deep breath. "Seeds are where the boras begin. Each bora creates seeds in the middle of our summer, when the storms whirl out of the south and bring rain. Most of the seeds creep off into the growth, the tampasi, in the old Ferroan language. Boras means trees, and tampasi means forest, but they're not really trees or forests."

"All right," Anakin said. The vibrating seeds were a real distraction now. His head was starting to hurt from their jostling.

Jabitha patted a few of his restless seeds, and they made little drum sounds. Her touch seemed to soothe them for the moment. "The seeds take root in a nursery protected by the oldest boras. Then they go through the forging. That's really something to see! The boras drop-dead limbs and old dry leaves and these special little pellets all over the nursery, until the entire open area is covered. The seeds just dig around and eat and eat and eat for hours, growing all the time. When the seeds are big enough, the oldest boras call down lightning from the sky-just call it down, with uplifted branches. The branches actually have iron tips! The lightning forks down and sets what's left of the nursery heap ablaze, and the seeds kind of cook inside, though they aren't killed. Something changes and they split open. The seeds have a way of expanding outward, almost exploding, making these puffed-out bubbles, shapes with thin walls of tissue- like the lamina, only even more malleable and alive.

"Other boras called annealers have these long spadelike shaping arms that sculpt the exploded seeds. The air is thick with this perfumey smell, like cakes in an oven. . It's very complicated, but when they're done, the seeds become different kinds of boras, and they can move out of the nursery and take up their places in the tampasi."

"When did the settlers learn to control the shaping?" Obi- Wan asked.

"Before I was born," Jabitha said. "My grandfather was the first Magister. He and my grandmother studied the boras and made friends with them-that's a really long story-and they were allowed to watch the changes in a tampasi nursery. After a while, the boras invited them in as shapers-but it took them twenty years to learn the craft. They taught it to my father. A few years later, the rest of the settlers came from Ferro."

"The image we saw of you in the Magister's house was not a hologram," Obi-Wan said. "It was a mental image, projected by some extraordinary will."

Jabitha looked uncomfortable. "I guess that's my father, then," she said. She turned and looked over the basket's railing. "Those are wild-type boras," she said. "We call them rogues. They don't have any nursery affiliations. They scavenge off the communal fields."

Anakin again saw white triangular flying shapes, as well as many-legged creeping cylinders, bigger than a human, moving in and out of caves in the walls of the valley. Small avians twinkled in the valley shadow like night wisps on Tatooine. Dark tentacles lashed out from the shadows beneath overhangs to snatch at them.

This part of the valley seemed engaged in a much more familiar planetary life cycle-eating and being eaten.

"Do they ever rejoin with the communal boras?" Anakin asked.