Chapter 5: The Senate's Familiar Stench

The Senate District did not announce itself with grandeur. It announced itself with noise.

Arthur became aware of it before they crossed the bridge that separated the Temple's precinct from the broader governmental quarter — a thickening of the air's texture, a layering of voices and vehicle engines and the particular ambient agitation of ten thousand people whose professional purpose was to make decisions and whose institutional talent was for deferring them. The sound was not loud so much as it was dense. It pressed.

Qui-Gon walked at his left, unhurried, his robes moving slightly in the artificial circulation that the city's thermal management produced in lieu of actual wind. He had not said a great deal since the Council chamber, which Arthur had come to recognize as the man's preferred mode of processing: not silence exactly, but a reduction of language to what was strictly necessary while thought completed itself at depth. It was a quality Arthur respected. He had known too many counselors who mistook speech for thinking.