Star Wars_ Traitor Part 2

Because Jacen was dead.

"Is that why you keep coming here?" he muttered into his folded arms.

"To gloat? To humiliate a defeated enemy?"

"Am I gloating? Are we enemies?" Vergere asked, sounding honestly puzzled. "Are you defeated?"

Her suddenly sincere tone caught him; he raised his head, and could find no mockery now in her eyes. "I don't understand."

"That, at least, is very clear," she sighed. "I give you a gift, Jacen Solo. I free you from hope of rescue. Can you not see how I am trying to help you?"

"Help?" Jacen coughed a bitter chuckle. "You need to brush up on your Basic, Vergere. In Basic, when we talk about the kind of things you've done to me, help isn't the word we use."

"No? Then perhaps you are correct: our difficulties may be linguistic." Vergere sighed again, and settled even lower, folding her arms on the floor in front of her and arranging herself on top of them in a way more feline than avian. Secondary inner lids shrouded her eyes.

"When I was very young... younger than you, little Solo--I came upon a ringed moon shadowmoth at the end of its metamorphosis, still within its coc.o.o.n, " she said distantly, a little sadly. "I had already some touch with the Force; I could feel the shadowmoth's pain, its panic, its claustrophobia, its hopelessly desperate struggle to free itself.

It was as though this particular shadowmoth knew I was beside it, and screamed out to me for help. How could I refuse? Shadowmoth coc.o.o.ns are polychained silicates--very, very tough--and shadowmoths are so delicate, so beautiful: gentle creature whose only purpose is to sing to the night sky. So I gave it what I think you mean by help: I used a small utility cutter to slice the coc.o.o.n, to help the shadowmoth get out."

"Oh, you didn't, did you? Please say you didn't." Jacen let his eyes drift closed, sorry already, for how he knew this story would end.

He'd had a shadowmoth in his collection for a short time; he remembered watching the larva grow, feeling its happy satisfaction through his empathic talent as it fed on stripped insulation and crumbled duracrete; he remembered the young shadowmoth that had emerged, spreading its dusky, beautifully striated wings against the crystalline polymer of its viewcage; he remembered the shadowmoth's thrilling whistle of moonsong, when he had released it from its viewcage and it had soared away under the mingled glows of Coruscant's four moons.

He remembered the desperate panic that had beat in waves against him through the Force, the night the shadowmoth had fought free of its coc.o.o.n.

He remembered his ache to help the helpless creature--and he remembered why he hadn't.

You can't help a shadowmoth by cutting its coc.o.o.n," he said. "It needs the effort; the struggle to break the coc.o.o.n forces ichor into its wing veins. If you cut the coc.o.o.n..."

"The shadowmoth will be crippled," Vergere finished for him solemnly.

"Yes. It was a tragic creature--never to fly, never to join its fellows in their nightdance under the moons. Even its wingflutes were stunted, and so it was as mute as it was planetbound. During that long summer, we sometimes heard moonsong through the window of my bedchamber, and from my shadowmoth I would feel always only sadness and bitter envy, that it could never soar beneath the stars, that its voice could never rise in song. I cared for it as best I could-- but the life of a shadowmoth is short, you know; they spend years and years as larvae, storing strength for one single summer of dance and song. I robbed that shadowmoth; I stole its destiny... because I helped it."

"That wasn't helping," Jacen said. "That's not what help means, either."

"No? I saw a creature in agony, crying out its terror, and I undertook to ease its pain, to a.s.suage its fear. If that is not what you mean by help, then my command of Basic is worse than I believed."

"You didn't understand what was happening."

Vergere shrugged. "Neither did the shadowmoth. But tell me this, Jacen Solo: if I had understood what was happening--if I had known what the larva was, and what it must do, and what it must suffer, to become the glorious creature that it could become--what should I have done that you would call, in your Basic, help?"

Jacen thought for some time before answering. His Force empathy had enabled him to understand the exotic creatures in his collection with extraordinary depth and clarity; that understanding had left him with a profound respect for the intrinsic processes of nature.

"I suppose," he said slowly, "the best help you could offer would be to keep the coc.o.o.n safe. Hawk-bats hunt shadowmoth larvae, and they especially like newly coc.o.o.ned pupae: that's the stage where they have the most stored fat. So I guess the best help you could offer would be to keep watch over the larva, to protect it from predators--and leave it alone to fight its own battle."

"And, perhaps," Vergere offered gently, "also to protect it from other well-intentioned folk--who might wish, in their ignorance, thelp' it with their own utility cutters."

"Yes..." Jacen said, then he caught his breath, staring at Vergere as though she had suddenly grown an extra head. "Hey..." Comprehension began to dawn. "Hey..."

"And also, perhaps," Vergere went on, "you might stop by from time to time, to let the struggling, desperate, suffering creature know that it is not alone. That someone cares. That its pain is in the service of its destiny."

Jacen could barely breathe, but somehow he force out a wisper.

"Yes..."

Vergere said gravely, "Then, Jacen Solo, our definitions of help are identical."

Jacen s.h.i.+fted forward, coming up onto his knees.

"We're not really talking about shadowmoth larvae, are we?" he said, his heart suddenly pounding. "You're talking about me."

She rose, legs unfolding like gantry cranes beneath her. "About you?"

"About us." His throat clenched with impossible hope. "You and me."

"I must go, now; the Embrace has become impatient for your return."

"Vergere, wait...!" he said, struggling to his feet, the Embrace's branch-grips dangling from his wrists. "Wait, Vergere, come on, talk to me.... and, and, and shadowmoths..." he stammered. "Shadowmoths are indigenous! They're not a transported species... they're native to Coruscant! How could you have found a shadowmoth larva? Unless, unless you... I mean, did you... are you..."

She put her hand between the lips of the mouthlike sensor receptacle beside the hatch sphincter, and the warted pucker of the hatch gaped wide.

"Everything I tell you is a lie," she said, and stepped through.

The Embrace of Pain gathered him once more into the white.

Jacen Solo hangs in the white, thinking.

For an infinite instant, he is merely amazed that he can think; the white has scoured his conciousness for days, or weeks, or centures, and he is astonished now to discover that he can not only think, but think clearly.

He spends a white eon, marvelling.

Then he goes to work on the lesson of pain.

This is it, he thinks. This is what Vergere was talking about. This is the help she gave me, that I didn't know how to accept.

She has freed him from his own trap: the trap of childhood. The trap of waiting for someone else. Waiting for Dad, or Mother, Uncle Luke, Jaina, Zekk or Lowie or Tenel Ka or any of the others whom he could always count on to fly to his resque.

He is not helpless. He is only alone.

It's not the same thing.

He doesn't have to simply hang here and suffer. He can do something.

Her shadowmoth tale may have been a lie, but within the lie was a truth he could not have comprehended without it. Was that what she had meant when she said, Everything I tell you is a lie?

Did it matter?

Pain is itself a G.o.d: the taskmaster of life. Pain cracks the whip, and all that lives will move. To live is to be a slave to pain.

He knows the truth of this, not only from his own life but from watching Dad and Anakin, after Chewie's death. He watched pain crack its whip over his father, and watched Han run from that pain halfway across the galaxy.

He watched Anakin turn hard, watched him drive himself like a loadlifter, always pus.h.i.+ng himself to be stronger, faster, more effective, to do more--this was the only answer he had to the pain of having survived to watch his rescuer die.

Jacen always thought of Anakin as being a lot like Uncle Luke: his mechanical apt.i.tude, his piloting and fighting skills, his stark warrior's courage. He can see now that in one important way, Anakin was more like his father. His only answer to pain was to keep too busy to notice it.

Running from the taskmaster.

To live is to be a slave to pain.

But that is only half true; pain can also be a teacher. Jacen can remember hour after hour of dragging his aching muscles through one more repet.i.tion of his lightsaber training routines. He remembers practicing the more advanced stances, how much it hurt to work his body in ways he'd never worked it before, to lower his center of gravity, loosen his hips, train his legs to coil and spring like a sand panther's. He remembers Uncle Luke saying, if it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it right. Even the stinger bolts of a practice remote-- sure, his goal had been always to intercept or dodge the stingers, but the easiest way to avoid that pain would have been to quit training.

Sometimes pain is the only bridge to where you want to go.

And the worst pains are the ones you can't run away from, anyway.

He knows his mother's tale so well that he has seen it in his dreams: standing on the bridge of the Death Star, forced to watch while the battle station's main weapon destroyed her entire planet. He has felt her all-devouring horror, denial, and blistering helpless rage, and he has some clue how much of her relentless dedication to the peace of the galaxy is driven by the memory of those billions of lives wiped from existence before her eyes.

And Uncle Luke: if he hadn't faced the pain of finding his foster parents brutally murdered by Imperial stormtroopers, he might have spent his whole life as an unhappy moisture farmer, deep in the Tatooine sand-wastes, dreaming of adventures he would never have--and the galaxy might groan under Imperial rule to this very day.

Pain can be power, too, Jacen realizes. Power to change things for the better. That's how change happens: someone hurts, and sooner or later decides to do something about it.

Suffering is the fuel in the engine of civilization.

Now he begins to understand: because pain is a G.o.d--he has been in the grip of this cruel G.o.d ever since Anakin's death. But it is also a teacher, and a bridge. It can be a slave master, and break you--and it can be the power that makes you unbreakable. It is all these things, and more.

At the same time.

What it is depends on who you are.

But who am I? he wonders. I've been running like Dad--like Anakin.

I think they stopped, though; I think Dad was strong enough to turn back and face it, to use the pain to make himself stronger, like Mom and Uncle Luke. Anakin did, too, at the end. Am I that strong?

There's only one way to find out.

For indefinite days, weeks, centuries, the white has been eating him.

Now, he begins to eat the white.

Executor Nom Anor toyed idly with a sacworm of dragweed broth while he waited for the shaper drone to finish its report. He sat human-style on a fleshy hump to one side of the unusually large villip to which the drone addressed its monotonous, singsong a.n.a.lysis of the Embrace chamber's readings on the young Jedi, Jacen Solo.

Nom Anor had no need to pay attention. He knew already what the drone would say; he had composed the report himself. This particular Embrace chamber was equipped with an exceptionally sophisticated nerve-web of sensors, which could read the electrochemical output of Jacen Solo's nerves down to each individual impulse and compare the pain they registered with its effects on his brain chemistry. The shaper drone mumbled on and on in its description of minute details of its data collection, and its deadly dull murmur was excruciating...

Perhaps that's why we call them drones, Nom Anor thought with a humorless interior smile. He did not share this observation with the third occupant of the small, moist chamber. It wasn't even a joke in any language but Basic, and it wasn't that funny, anyway.

Instead he simply sat, sipping broth occasionally from the sacworm, watching the villip, waiting for Warmaster Tsavong Lah to lose his patience.

With vegetative accuracy, the villip conveyed the physical features of the warmaster: his tall narrow skull, bulging braincase, dangerously sharp teeth bristling within his lipless gash of a mouth, as well as the proud array of scars that defined his devotion to the True Way.

Nom Anor reflected idly how well some of those intricately scarified designs would look on his own face. Not that he had any real interest in the True Way beyond its use as a political tool; from long experience, he knew that the appearance of piety was vastly more useful than its reality could ever be.

The villip also captured perfectly the frightening intensity of Tsavong Lah's fanatic glare.

That gleam of faith's power in his eye was the reflection of an inner conviction the like of which Nom Anor could only imagine: to know, beyond the possibility of doubt, that the True G.o.ds stood at his shoulder, guiding his hand in Their service. To know that all truth, all justice, all right, shone from the True G.o.ds like stellar wind, illuminating the universe.

The warmaster was a true believer.

To Nom Anor, faith was an extravagance. He knew too well how easily such true believers could be manipulated by those who believe in nothing but themselves.

This was, in fact, his specialty.

The moment he'd been waiting for came during the drone's exhaustive point-by-point cross-species interpolation between Jacen Solo's readings and those of three different control subjects, all Yuuzhan Vong: one warrior caste, one priest caste, and one shaper caste, each of whom had earlier undergone excruciation by the very same Embrace of Pain in which the young Jedi now hung. Anger gathered upon Tsavong Lah's villip image like the ion peak that precedes a solar flare.

Finally, his patience broke.

"Why is my time wasted with this babble?"

The shaper drone stiffened, glancing nervously at Nom Anor.

"This data is extremely significant..."

"Not to me. Am I a shaper? I have no interest in raw data--tell me what it means!"

Nom Anor sat forward.

"With the warmaster's permission, I may perhaps be of some service here."

The villip twisted fractionally to fix Nom Anor with the warmaster's glare.

"You had better," he said. "My patience is limited--and you personally, Executor, have required too much of it already in recent days. You swing from a thin vine, Nom Anor, and it continues to fray."

"All apologies to the warmaster," Nom Anor said smoothly. He gestured dismissal to the drone, which made a hasty obeisance toward the villip, triggered the room's hatch sphincter, and scuttled away. "I mean only to offer a.n.a.lysis; interpretation is my specialty."

"Your specialty is propaganda and lies," Tsavong Lah rasped.

As if there were a difference. Nom Anor shrugged and smiled amiably: gestures he had learned from his impersonations of the human species. He exchanged one quick glance with the other occcupant of the chamber--his partner in the Solo Project--then directed his gaze back to the villip.

"The import of the Embrace chamber's data is exactly this: Jacen Solo has become capable of not only accepting torment, but thriving on it. As the warmaster will recall, I predicted such a result. He has discovered resources within himself of the sort that we find only in our greatest warriors."

"And?" The warmaster glared. "Make your point."

"It will work," Nom Anor said simply. "That is the point. The only point. Based on our current figures, Jacen Solo will inevitably--provided he lives-- turn to the True Way with his whole heart."

"This has been attempted before," Tsavong Lah growled.

"The Jeedai Wurth Skidder, and the Jeedai Tahiri on Yavin Four. The results were less than satisfactory."

"Shapers," Nom Anor snorted derisively.