The war dragged on, and people stopped coming to the Cultural Annexe. Institutions could barely afford to send staff on essential travel, let alone underwrite a research junket to Coruscant. Even if you could get funding, getting a berth on a GAR escorted convoy was more difficult than getting a tenure-track position in the Core. For the scholars who could make the trip, however, it meant easier access to the Annexe’s resources; usually there was a waiting list for the research carrels. Two years into the war, on this week’s end afternoon, there were more than a few unoccupied.
Sadly for the library’s staff, the academics demands’ had increased to match supply. Yanoiru wearily pushed the cart of materials up the aisle for the impatient Chandrilan in Carrel 32A, ignoring the carved stone arching over her. More interesting was one of the catalogue terminals and the person in armour standing in front of it. One of the clone soldiers. There were some at the train stations, but they were in red and white. This one was in green and grey, had an over-skirt, and some sort of flap arrangement over his shoulders. Importantly, he was also in her part of the Annexe.
He was still standing there when she trundled her way back with an empty cart, still there when she went to collect some limited time resources from 33B, still there after she’d re-shelved them, and still there when 33B wanted them back. 33B, Yanoiru decided, was a horrible person, and probably a plagiarist. She delivered the cache, about-faced, shoved her sleeves up to her elbows, and approached him.
“Excuse me?” she said to the tall figure. The helmet swivelled towards her, the visor opaque black.
“Ma’am,” he acknowledged.
“Are you looking for anything in particular? Can I help you?”
There was a short silence.
“No, thank you, ma’am,” he said. “I’m nearly done.”
“Oh,” said Yanoiru, obscurely disappointed. She risked a glance around his arm at the screen; whatever catalogue he was looking at wasn’t in Aurebesh. Hopelessly curious, she leaned in further. He didn’t seem to mind, and shuffled away a bit to give her more room.
“The Gree! They’re fascinating, aren’t they?”
“Ma’am,” he said.
“We have replicas of Captain Marrix’s original writings in the closed stacks, if you want to request them.”
“Ma’am, that’s very kind of you but.” There was a longer silence. “Ma’am, I’m not a citizen. I’m a clone.”
Yanoiru’s chin set. “The library,” she enunciated carefully, “is for everyone.”
“Ma’am.”
“Everyone,” she repeated emphatically. “You haven’t even taken anything off the shelves. There’s a carrel in the next section you can use.”
“That’s not necessary, ma’am.”
“It’s this way, please.” Greatly daring, Yanoiru nudged him with her empty book cart. Not necessary, her azure ass. He’d been poring through the catalogue for well over an hour. No one did that for fun.
“Here.” She unlocked 28D, and held the door open for him. It was a small enclosure of translucent transparisteel; between the two of them and the chair there was hardly any floor space left. On the desk was another catalogue terminal, and a translation module, both currently in hibernation.
“If you sit down, I’ll unlock the terminal for you,” she said, shyly. He sat, and edged the chair away from her as she keyed it open, bringing up the catalogue pages.
“You wanted to learn about the Gree?”
Silence. Yanoiru felt like the biggest fool on the planet for pressuring the poor man. He probably had much more important things to be doing. She was trying to muster up an apologise when he spoke, his voice less crisp than before.
“My commanding officer? He named himself Gree. He’s interested in the elder races, ma’am, and I had some free time, so I thought…” He trailed off. It had been a spur of the moment decision resulting from being a loose end in Arca Barracks and realising that the entire planet was outside the fence, and that he was allowed to. Or that no one would stop him, which amounted to much the same thing.
“So it’s more the elder races in general, then?” Yanoiru started re-typing her search terms.
“I was on - on a planet, and there were these stepped buildings - ” he gestured.
“Ziggurats,” Yanoiru automatically supplied.
“- ziggurats,” he repeated, “and they had these carvings all up and down the sides, and I was wondering, it looked like they were painted, once?”
She frowned. “Do you have any pictures?”
“Sort of, ma’am. I recorded some footage on my helmet.”
“If you’ve got it here, we can look at it on a portable, maybe narrow down which cultures it could have belonged to,” Yanoiru said.
“Ma’am, it’s not necessary,” he sounded surprised, as much as she could tell through the helmet filters. “There are citizens waiting.”
She stuck her head out of the carrel. He was right. Still - he was very polite, for a faceless soldier. Much more polite than the Sullustan professor who was tapping their foot by the counter.
“Can you wait here for a little while?” she asked. “Maybe see if you can get the video off your helmet and onto a datachip?” Yanoiru fumbled at her chatelaine, and handed him one of the disposables.
She’d begun to second guess herself again when he raised his gloved hands and took the helmet off, putting it carefully on the desk. His face was much nicer to look at than the visor, she thought, brown skin and some thin white scars snaking back into his curly black hair. Yanoiru beamed at him, forgetting herself, and won a half-smile back.
“I’ll be back soon,” she promised, and turned in the opposite direction from the counter to beeline for one of the other intrastaff comlinks, around the corner.
“Dillu? It’s Yanoiru. Can you take over for me?”
Dillu would, but only if Yanoiru would give them her weekend shifts as well. Most of Dillu’s paycheck went off world to support their extended family; with the Coruscant economy the way it was they would take every spare shift they could.
“Deal,” she agreed. She could do with the time out of this place anyway, maybe go up the Jedi Archives again and get some sunlight.
The man, still helmetless, was tapping away at the catalogue terminal when she got back to the carrel, but he stopped and turned around as she dragged the other chair in.
“What…?”
“For first timers we usually do a walk through of the main catalogues, how to request restricted material, that sort of thing.”
“Ma’am,” he said, “I’ve done the tutorial. You don’t need to waste any more of your time -”
Yanoiru huffed. “It’s not a waste of my time, and the tutorial is terrible, it doesn’t even tell you about the emulators.”
He was frowning at her, puzzled, she thought. She felt horribly self-conscious under those eyes; a Pantoran woman of no great beauty, with wisps of pale lavender hair escaping the flat braids she’d tried to contain it in this morning, and wide sith-yellow eyes. She dropped her gaze automatically; most Coruscanti didn’t like them.
“You think I need help,” he said, curiously.
“I don’t think you’re stupid, if that’s what you mean,” she said. “The Annexe library is old, and so’s the catalogue. The index has never been up to date. If I’m here you’ll learn quicker.”
“All right,” he said, holding out a data chip. “I got the footage off my helmet, but I can’t tell you where I got it from. Opsec.”
She took it gratefully. “It’s a single use chip - the academics are paranoid about their research being stolen. Your secrets are safe with me.”
He tilted his head to one side. “Really? They’re that - uh”
“Oh, yes,” Yanoiru answered with bitter emphasis, slotting the chip into her library portable, and loading the video. “They absolutely are that, and lots of them are more.”
He chuckled. She stopped scrolling through the frames to look at him quizzically.
“It’s not what I expected,” he defended himself.
“I’ve seen more than one fist fight in this very hall,” Yanoiru informed him. One had involved a Wookie, an enraged Chandra-Fan, and a lot of hair pulling. “What did you expect?” He’d gotten some lovely clear shots of the carvings. On magnification she could see some paint caught in the crevices, but couldn’t make out the colour. It was a pity she only had the human visible spectrum to look at.
“Not this,” he said, gesturing to encompass the entire Cultural Annexe. It had started off as a cathedral or vault of knowledge - according to the promotional literature of the time - all warm red-orange stone, and light wood panelling, but successive administrations had layered upgrades on top of restoration on top of reburbishment. The high arches and domes of the ceiling in this hall had been covered in sound dampening foam some two hundred years ago. Everyone thought it was a fire hazard, but they didn’t have the money to replace it, and no-one wanted to deal with the echoes.
“It’s been here for thousands of years!” The ziggurats were stepped quite high, with a small building on top. The number of steps was probably significant, but the base looked to be partly covered in vegetation. That was a lower bound of steps, at least, and what looked to be a partially collapsed ramp up to the summit.
“I haven’t,” he retorted with inarguable truth.
“It’ll begin to feel like it on long afternoons,” she replied absently, and added in horror, “No! Not you! Doing this is fun.” Yanoiru greyscaled the images and pushing an algorithm across to look for light/dark boundaries, trying to tease out the details of the dancing? fighting? figures.
“Doing what?”
“Helping people find things, I guess,” she said. That might be a river deity, on the left. It was bigger than the surrounding figures, and was surrounded by zig-zags. “Helping people find out how to find out things.”
“People like me.”
“Especially people like you.” Honestly, it was like he expected her to have had him thrown out or something. “Did you happened to notice how it was oriented?
“Say again, ma’am?”
“Lots of these sorts of things are aligned with the cardinal directions, so north/south on two faces, and east/west on the other.”
“No, I don’t know, and my helmet’s zerofilling.”
“Pity.” There were some shots of the sky, but it was overcast. She couldn’t even see what type of sun it had, or how many.
“Is it OK if I look for matches for the vegetation?”
“Sure.”
“It’s not a security thing?”
“I don’t think you’re a spy, ma’am,” he said, dryly.
She laughed, and the sound pealed out over the top of the carrel walls. Next door thumped angrily on the divider. Yanoiru shoved her hand over her mouth; how embarrassing! Even the clone was laughing at her, silently, the corners of his mouth quivering with suppressed giggles.
“Sorry,” she whispered. “I think I’ve got some possible matches. The most likely one is the Harappans, if this is their river goddess and these are the mirrored twins, here and here,” she pointed. “Was there at least one more ramp on the other side of the ziggurat?”
“I think so. I’m no Alpha ARC.”
“Um - I don’t understand?”
“Never mind. Harappans, you were saying?”
“Oh, yes. Here you go.” She handed him the library portable, and he was shocked to find the screen filled with pictures of what could have been his ziggurat, but with the edges sharpened, and the walls painted in bright ochres.
“How did you know - this is amazing - this is what it would have looked like?”
“Maybe. We’ll never know for sure. You were standing at the centre of an entire city, did you know?” She leaned over his arm and opened a folder. “It might’ve stretched for klicks.”
“How old -”
“About ten thousand years. A bit older than the Archives.”
“Oh…” he breathed out, face soft with wonder. “What happened to them?”
“We can find out, if you want to - oh, you probably can’t tell me where you were.”
“No,” he said, a little wistfully.
“Hmm. I could see if they had religious or cultural centres, and trace that forward? There’d probably be more information.”
The clone hesitated. “No, ma’am, I’ve taken up too much of your time already.”
“No!” she hissed quietly, mindful of next door’s wrath. “This is what the library’s for!”
He blinked, surprised by the intensity of her response. In his experience, people preferred clones to leave as quickly and quietly as possible.
“I want to help you,” said Yanoiru, anticipating defeat, fingers twisting white on her lap.
“My name’s Tane,” he offered, and she looked up, forgetting her sith-yellow eyes, meeting his warm brown gaze.
“Tane,” she said, carefully, sounding out both syllables. “There’s so much information in here - and it’s supposed to be used - there’s no point in collecting anything if people don’t use it, if they don’t think of new questions to ask.”
“My questions aren’t very new, or exciting.”
“That doesn’t mean they don’t matter,” she persisted. “Like - your friend Gree?”
“My commanding officer, Gree,” he said, amused.
“The Gree are very xenophobic, now, but they used to travel everywhere, and we know some of the places they went, because on some planets they still use a blue nonagon to mark clean water, just like the Gree did. Maybe they still do.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Um,” said Yanoiru, whose mouth had outpaced her brain. “I mean, history isn’t even past - that wasn’t supposed to be a joke, don’t laugh - there are pieces of it all over the place if you know how to look. Layers and layers of it on top of itself. I think the Kiffar tattoos are yellow because of some Harappans influence, although I don’t remember why.”
“Like the way they’re always building here?” On Coruscant, the richer you were, the higher you lived. Yanoiru lived far enough down that it didn’t matter that she couldn’t afford windows. No sunlight reached down there.
“Exactly like that, but Coruscant is so fascinating in itself,” Yanoiru said, dragging out the name of the planet, her face alight. “Generally, the lower the level, the older it is, but the lower levels aren’t safe, so mostly I work from maps. We have street maps of Coruscant that are more than fifteen hundred years old, and tourist guidebooks that tell you which districts to visit, and - oh, I’m sorry to go on. It’s a hobby of mine.”
“No, no, it’s interesting. You mean, even though the Harappans have gone, they’re not really gone?”
“If you know what to look for, no, they’re not gone, not completely. Even if they were, you know to record the alignment of any ziggurats you might come across,” she pointed out.
“I do, thanks to you,” he said.
“If you can record in ultraviolet or infrared, you should do that too. Not everyone sees in the human or near-human spectrums.”
“I can’t believe I forgot that. It’s why our armour’s white, did you know?”
“No?”
“It’s made by a species that sees in ultraviolet. It’s not white to them.”
Yanoiru frowned. “Is that secret? My cousin always wondered.”
“Probably not.” There were pictures of clone soldiers all over the holonet these days.
“Do you want to know why it’s yellow?” she blurted. “The Kiffar?”
“I do,” Tane said, and so she helped him - just like he was a citizen! - navigate the labyrinth that was the Annexe catalogue until they found out. From there they got sidetracked by retrocognition and telemetry, which is how Yanoiru found herself leading a clone trooper to the post-graduate lounge.
“There were at least two more, but we don’t know where they were.”
“That’s creepy.” He was looking at the walls as if he expected blood to drip out from behind the wood panelling.
She nodded to the familiar faces, strewn across the battered furniture in various attitudes of exhaustion and despair. None of them bothered moving.
“Just doing the tour,” she explained, and led Tane over to the corner, and pulled up the worn carpet.
“The people killed here had mildly acidic blood, and it ate away at the stone before it got cleaned up. There’s the edge of a pool, there - “ she motioned to the line, etched in the floor. At least it meant the administration made it a priority to keep the room carpeted. Even with the light wells and biolumes the Annexe could get chilly in the mild Coruscant winter. The temperature and humidity controlled sections were reserved for books, not staff members, and especially not graduate students.
Tane, like everyone else, immediately knelt down and touched the edge of the blood pool, where the smooth stone of the floor became rough and pitted.
“If I was from a Kiffar template,” he said, wondering, pulling one glove off to run his bare hand over the texture.
“You might be able to feel someone bleeding to death,” she finished. “This is the only massacre in the Annexe we can definitively locate. Some people think one of the others happened in one of the basement bathrooms, but it’s probably just the plumbing.”
“So people died in here, and now it’s a - a wardroom?” he said, getting to his feet and putting his glove back on.
“Mostly,” guessed Yanoiru. “We can go look at the Jedi graffiti, too, if you want?”
“The what?”
“Someone carved obscenities into a wall with a lightsaber. It’s very distinctive.”
“I’m going to need to record this, or no-one is going to believe it,” said Tane, gleeful. It’d make good video currency.
He spent a few minutes making sure he had gotten some decent shots of the graffiti, and was still laughing when he took his helmet off. Yanoiru thought it made his face look very young.
“You don’t know who did it?”
Yanoiru shrugged. “There’s rumours. I always wanted to think it was Master Yoda after a tragic love affair, but it’s too high up.”
“He could have lifted himself with the Force.”
“Or sat on someone’s shoulders. I asked about it up at the Jedi Temple, once.”
“You didn’t.”
“I did. They didn’t really want to know, but it has to have been a Jedi.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“The Sith were eradicated a thousand years ago, and it’s not that old. You can tell by the style of lettering. So it was a Jedi, or the Sith survived and were in my library, and I want to sleep at night.”
“I’ve seen a Sith. Hells, I’ve fought Sith. Lots of us have.” In his experience, you didn’t fight Sith so much as try and distract them long enough that some of your brothers might make cover until a Jedi turned up. Or you died.
“You what?” Yanoiru stopped dead, and swung to stare at him in shock, before she abruptly remembered her sith-yellow eyes, and stared at the floor in shame. He certainly didn’t sound like he was joking.
“They exist,” he said, grimly, and Yanoiru decided not to ask.
Tane was wonderfully quick at learning how to use the various Annexe subsystems; he actually listened, until a large number of people that included the occupant of 33B. The library was so old and the collections so unwieldy no one had ever managed to digitise everything. With the current levels of funding, they couldn’t even manage to bring all the older files up to date. Instead, the Annexe maintained emulators to access the older attempts at digitisation, which worked with varying degrees of ease and accuracy.
“This one’s just high resolution holographs, which can be useful, depending on how good the character recognition algorithms are for whatever it was written in,” she explained. “If you want something searchable, then it’s this, because they got droids to input the entire text. Most of the time it’s the entire text, anyway, since it turned out some of the droids were second-hand from a religious order that thought some things shouldn’t be written down.”
“Why -”
Yanoiru giggled. Quietly. “It’s a question I ask myself daily. But the answer is; because it is. It’s the way it is because it is the way it is. It’s why we don’t have many droids down here. It drives them mad.”
“I never thought I’d sympathise with a clanker,” Tane said ruefully. She’d been right; he wouldn’t have made it this far without her help.
“It’s not all bad, though, is it?” she asked. It was important that he liked the Annexe.
“No,” he said. “It’s not all bad.”
“Not the plumbing,” she said, a faint indigo blush climbing her cheeks.
“I wasn’t talking about the plumbing, no,” he agreed.
They were looking at the findsmen of Gand when the chimes sounded for the last time. Dillu had to come to kick them out of the carrel in person, and she jerked away from Tane guiltily.
“Out,” they said, unsympathetically, with a jerk of their chin. “I want to go home.”
“Sorry, we’re going now!” she apologised, pushing the chair back to where she’d looted it from.
“I can see why you wanted the weekend off,” said Dillu critically, looking at the figure in armour standing - was he waiting for her? - at the inner doors.
“No, I - “ started Yanoiru, before stumbling to a flustered halt. Dillu smiled at her, gently, for all their wide mouth and needle-sharp teeth.
“Go on, Yanya.”
Tane and Yanoiru pushed their way through the outer doors together, and came to a halt in the Annexe plaza.
“Well, then,” she said, trying hard to not be awkward, and twisting her fingers together with the effort. Being with him all afternoon hadn’t seemed much like work at all.
“Thank you,” said Tane, unsuccessfully trying to meet her eyes. “Can I - it’s late - would you mind if - can I walk you to your train station?”
“I - yes. I’d like that,” she replied, still looking down, and so missed the widening smile of disbelief and satisfaction that spread across his face.
