Sohna - The Star Kingdom

The crowd pressed in around them tightly.

Great, thought Virginia, I’m in the middle of an intergalactic rush hour. Out loud she said, “Wolf. Where exactly are we going?” hoping she wouldn’t have to repeat it yet again because he could hear her (or chose not to hear her) over the crowd.

But he surprised her by replying, “I thought we could go back to the rotunda. Maybe someone is there who could tell us a good place to stay.”

“Stay?” she asked. “You mean for the night?”

He nodded.

“It’s going to get late. You can’t keep going on indefinitely in your condition.”

She started to protest, then realized he was right. While she was accustomed to running around New York, it was not on quite the same scale. She was beginning to get tired.

“You politicians?” a male voice asked in Virginia’s ear. She turned her head and stared at close range into a pair of friendly brown human eyes.

“Errr... not exactly,” she replied carefully, envisioning getting stuck listening to a long list of grievances with the government.

But “Wherefrom?” was all he asked.

Behind her, Wolf instantly replied, “Naboo,” causing her to hope fervently that it wasn’t also the home planet of their questioner.

But it didn’t seem to be.

“Why don’t you go to the Naboo embassy then, if you’re looking for a place to stay?”

“Embassy?” she asked dully, even as she realized that of course, this part of the city would be similar to the area around the United Nations building, only on a much larger scale.

“I can’t remember the address,” he was continuing, “But the driver will know where you want to go if you just say ‘Naboo embassy.’ I can’t believe they left you on your own. Usually they take very good care of their cadre.” And then before she could stop him, he said, “Here, I’ll place the stop for you,” and pushed a button on the bulkhead in front of them. “Naboo embassy,” he stated loudly.

“Thank you, sir,” said Wolf in a heartfelt voice “Wasn’t he nice, Virginia? We wouldn’t have known how to get back to our group without his help.”

“Yes,” she replied, trying to be pleasant. “Very nice.” Privately, however, she was irritated that it was going to take them even longer to find a place to stay for the night, since now they would be obligated to exit the bus at a location they didn’t want to visit. It hadn’t occurred to her just how much she had been looking forward to showering and sinking into a comfortable bed until then, and she spent the remainder of the ride in a black mood with a fake smile plastered to her face, feeling like the politician she was not.

Until, that is, they actually reached the Naboo embassy.

“Ah, I see you recognize it,” their benefactor declared with a twinkle in his eye.

“Yes,” Virginia replied distractedly. “Thank you!” she added as they exited, her voice at last genuinely warm.

Wolf didn’t speak. He was too busy staring open-mouthed at what they’d thought all along was simply Padme’s apartment building.

From street level, which they had never seen, the building did indeed have a sign over the door which read, in an arcane-looking script (which they surprisingly could nevertheless read) Offices of the Government of Naboo. Virginia looked up at Wolf.

“What now?” she asked. Now that they’d been let off in front of the building, she was beginning to have second doubts about how fortuitous their finding it was. They weren’t really citizens of Naboo, after all, so what were they supposed to be doing there?

“Don’t worry,” Wolf assured her. “I have a great plan. Let’s go.”

She held him back a moment.

“You’re not going to break in or anything, are you?” she asked fearfully.

He looked hurt.

“Virginia,” he scolded softly, “Of course I wouldn’t do that. This kind of place is probably crawling with all kinds of high-tech security systems. We’d be thrown in jail like that!” He snapped his fingers for emphasis, then continued on across the street purposefully. Virginia followed, wondering what he could possibly have in mind.

The door swung open on a quiet reception area that reminded them both of the pseudo-neoclassical greco-italian architecture of the Naboo capital (and, not surprisingly, Padme’s apartment). The ceiling soared two stories overhead, flanked by half-columns to the reception desk straight ahead, over which hung a red, white, and gold flag with a geometric emblem. Hung between the half-columns were a series of holographic portraits facing each other. The larger single one to their right was of the Naboo queen, replete with ceremonial makeup. To their left were two portraits - one a portrait of Padme, recognizable even without the caption “Senator Amidala,” although she did not quite bear a complete likeness to Natalie Portman, and one labeled “Representative Binks,” who really looked nothing at all like the buffoon in the movie (except for being a gungan). The likenesses surprised Virginia so much she stopped and would have stared at length at them, except that Wolf pulled her along with him on his purposeful march to the main desk.

“Good afternoon,” Wolf announced with gusto to a young human female receptionist (there were five altogether, two men, two women, and a well-fed gungan of indeterminate sex).

“Good afternoon, sir,” she replied pleasantly. “How may I help you?”

“I’m Wolf, and this is my wife, Virginia Lewis,” he began. “We’re here to begin our internship with the senator’s office.”

Virginia blinked, but forced her face to remain neutral, at least until she noticed the woman eyeing her with hostility, her gaze sweeping Virginia up and down, finally coming to rest pointedly on her very pregnant midsection.

After a profound silence, the receptionist shifted her gaze back to Wolf and replied icily, “Please tell my why I shouldn’t call the authorities on you this very moment.”

“Excuse me?” he countered.

She folded her hands on the desk.

“If you were truly graduates of the public service school of Naboo,” she began, biting the words off sharply, “you would know that it is against our constitutional law to enter or continue in public service while simultaneously holding family commitments.”

Virginia’s grip on Wolf’s hand tightened. Everyone at the desk was now staring at them openly, making it impossible for Wolf to use his Persuasion to extricate them. She noticed too late that the room they were in dead-ended at the desk, with only a single closed door visible to their right. No doubt several banks of hidden cameras were busily capturing their every movement. The path back to the door they’d entered the building through felt light-years long; they were trapped. How had they not foreseen this, she wondered furiously. Padme had been hiding her pregnancy, after all. Why do that? Why bother when it was only the identity of the father she needed to keep secret in order to avoid scandal, unless there was more to it than that? Something more; like this, for instance?

“Wolf ...” she murmured hesitantly.

But to her astonishment, Wolf did not apologize or back down.

“Naboo?” he inquired with (mock) astonishment. “I’m so sorry! We must have gotten the directions wrong. We were looking for the Alderaan embassy.”

“Alderaan?” the woman asked skeptically (as well she might, thought Virginia).

“Yes,” he insisted, brazening it out. “Could you be so kind as to give us directions on how to get there?”

The woman blinked several times, clearly weighing her options. Finally she said, “Of course. But why don’t I call ahead so they’ll know to expect you?” She smiled thinly, obviously expecting Wolf to refuse.

But he surprised both her and Virginia by replying, “Oh, would you please?” in an innocently earnest tone.

Though taken aback by his response, the woman hesitated only a moment before picking up a flat, circular disk and pressing some touchpads on its perimeter. After a moment, the a grainy holograph of another woman’s head and shoulders appeared centered on the disk. Virginia willed herself to sink out of sight through the floor, but it didn’t happen.

“Hello,” said the woman in the Naboo office to the holograph. “This is the Naboo office down the street. I know this is going to sound slightly irregular, but I have a couple of interns here that you were probably expecting.”

It was difficult to gauge the exact reaction of the woman on the other end due to the fuzziness of the signal. It took her a moment to reply, but when she did her voice was steady.

“Of course,” she replied. “Yes, please send them down. We’ll be waiting.”

The woman in front of them hung up and regarded them both with newfound respect.

“Please accept my apologies,” she told them graciously. “I forget sometimes how disorienting it can be for someone to come to Coruscant for the first time. If you can wait just a moment, Senator Amidala’s assistant will be down. It’s only a short walk to the Alderaan embassy; she can take you there to make sure you don’t get lost again.”

“Senator Amidala’s assistant?” asked Virginia, surprised.

“Yes,” the woman assured her. “Dorme supervises all our interns; having her make sure you get where you’re going is the least we can do after such a misunderstanding.”

“Thank you very much,” Wolf told her.

Dorme proved to be as sweet a woman in person as her fictional counterpart. She inquired about the baby, managing to sound excited about it although she’d never met them before and would likely not have much interaction with them in the future - and without giving anything away about her boss’s secret pregnancy. Surely they must know by now, even if they’ve never been told and are pretending it doesn’t exist, Virginia thought, looking down at her own swollen waistline. She’s expecting twins, for gosh sakes! Omar the tentmaker wouldn’t be able to hide that! She held her breath the entire way against Wolf’s inadvertently blurting something out about Padme’s condition, but he was surprisingly circumspect. It didn’t take them long to walk the three blocks to Alderaan’s offices, and the time passed quickly in Dorme’s sunny presence.

“I’ve brought them to you,” she announced cheerily to a woman Virginia supposed had been the one on the holographic phone, once they were safely inside the building. Then she turned and bade them goodbye: “If you need anything, please feel free to call on me. Again, we’re very sorry about the misunderstanding.”

She smiled again and vanished out the door, leaving them in the Alderaan reception area, a human-scaled room with recessed lighting, done in frosty blues reminiscent of the home planet’s mountainous capital city. A holographic fire burned in a metal fireplace that dominated a sunken seating area, and looked like it belonged to the Jetsons. Over the fireplace hung a large portrait of the royal couple in full regalia, snow-capped peaks visible behind them.

“Welcome to the offices of Alderaan,” a female voice bade them. They turned to see a tall, dark-haired woman of about 30, dressed in a long white gown; not the same woman who still sat behind the reception desk. “I am Charysa,” she introduced herself. “And I would like to begin by apologizing to you.”

“Apologizing?” Virginia asked distractedly. She was busy wondering how long it was going to take before whatever real interns they were expecting finally showed up, and trying to calculate how quickly they could get away before that happened.

“Yes,” Charysa insisted. “I’m afraid the orders for your arrival must have gotten misfiled. It’s not a problem,” she hastened to add, “except that the quarters we’ve reserved for you haven’t yet been cleaned. In the meanwhile, you’re welcome to dine in the cafeteria. If you’ll come with me, I’ll show you where everything is.”

“Oh, yes, thank you,” Wolf gushed before Virginia could stop him. “That would be wonderful. We’re famished!”

Why did she have to mention food? she wondered irritably. We might have been able to beg an excuse and get away. Now we’ll be further inside the building. What if the real interns show up?

But as Charysa had their hands scanned (for entrance to the rest of the building) and Virginia listened to what she said as they walked the short distance to the cafeteria (which was on the second floor), she slowly realized that maybe there weren’t any real interns at all. In fact, she was so surprised by something Charysa told them that she nearly gave them away, but managed to stop herself just in time. When they finally sat down at the table to eat - alone - Virginia whispered her thoughts to Wolf.

“Did I hear that wrong or does she think that we’re exchange interns from Naboo?”

Wolf’s mouth was predictably full already, and she had to wait for him to swallow.

“Of course that’s what she thinks,” he told her as if it should have been obvious.

“How did you know that?” she hissed.

Again she had to wait for him to swallow.

“Governments will go to huge lengths to keep from insulting each other,” he said. “When the Naboo receptionist called here, she couldn’t just say, ‘I have a couple of imposters here’ in case we weren’t imposters. She had to word it so that we might be who we said we were, because otherwise she could have been insulting Alderaan.”

“How did you know that Alderaan would say they were expecting us?”

There was another pause while he finished chewing and swallowed again.

“I didn’t,” he admitted. “But if they’d said they weren’t expecting us, I’d have claimed they must have lost our paperwork and asked them for directions on how to get here anyway, except of course we wouldn’t have actually come. You need to eat something, Virginia. Try this stuff, it’s very tasty!”

She looked down at the plate of unfamiliar food and picked at it once with her fork, then looked back up again.

“So there aren’t any real interns about to show up and expose us as imposters?”

His mouth was full again, so he just shook his head.

“But why did they say they were expecting us?” she pressed.

“Because they couldn’t say they weren’t or they’d have been insulting Naboo,” he explained. “If Naboo had really arranged an intern exchange with them, they couldn’t refuse to host us at the last minute just because they lost the paperwork.”

“But there was no paperwork.”

“They don’t know that.”

She digested this.

“So ...”

“So we have a place to stay for the night, dinner, probably breakfast ...”

“And a government job,” she mused softly to herself.