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.

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 hyperdrive core unit. Anakin saw that on both the engines and on the core unit, some parts were oddly missing, and other parts had been modified.

And yet a third carapod, much smaller-barely as large as Anakin himself-walked with jaunty steps forward into the greenish light emanating from the warehouse walls. This one carried a delicate crystalline structure Anakin did not recognize.

Obi-Wan, however, did. Organoform circuits had been rumored for hundreds of years, and supposedly had been developed on the more advanced Rim worlds that had continued to resist involvement with both the Republic and the Trade Federation. Rumors only. . until now.

"What's that?" Anakin asked, fascinated by the glittering curves and continually active circuitry.

"I think it's the device that will integrate our ship," Obi-Wan said. "The interface between the living and the machine."

The first thing Vidge did was cut away and scoop up a thick glob of fluid from the fruit. He spun the glob about, tossed it in the air, and caught it with his long spade, forming it into a ball. He then dropped it deftly onto the back of the smallest carapod, where, with a hiss, it settled over the organoform circuit. Cutting loose more globs, he spread them on the edges of each of the white seed-disks as his assistants carried them past. Where the gel touched, the disks turned a dark purple, and the edges began to curl and stretch forth sinuous, questing pseudopods.

Next, the shaper critically analyzed the frame atop the largest carapod. "Not enough," he grumbled. "Shappa never tells us what we need to know." To his crew, he said, "Get a second frame."

His crew conferred doubtfully among themselves. Vidge shouted out, "Fifteen forged plates, too many for one frame! We need two frames!"

"Are they going to make two ships?" Anakin asked Obi-Wan.

"I don't think so," Obi-Wan said. But he was in no position to be certain.

"Now, we move fast," Vidge called out, his tone as slow and tomb-haunted as before. "To the Jentari!"

Anakin and Obi-Wan climbed up beside the large carapod just as a second frame was loaded beside the first.

Vidge gave them their instructions. From this point on, they would ride inside the frames, sitting on thick flat beams between the oval-shaped main members, surrounded by a flexible weave of struts and cross braces. "It's the way it's done."

Anakin took his position within one frame. Obi-Wan sat in the other. The frames creaked and rattled on the back of the carapod.

The entire warehouse smelled of flowers and baking bread, and of other things less pleasant, odors that made Anakin dizzy. He felt as if the dream had become too much for him, too strong. His stomach was doing flip-flops.

Obi-Wan felt the same incipient nausea, but kept his attention on the slow, deliberate walk of Vidge beside the three carapods conveying the components of the Sekotan ship. The carapods exited through the back of the warehouse, back into the sea-gleam shadows of the cleft. Darker shadows like giants rose on each side, backs pressed against the walls of the cleft, with more giants on their broad shoulders, climbing hundreds of meters to a canopied ribbon of night, a few lonely stars gleaming through the interlaced branches.