From a Certain Point of View

by Seth Dickinson

  Piett rubbed his head and let out a deep breath. “I’m going to cut to the end of this story to save what remains of your dignity. They say when you arrived, most of your shuttle was missing.”

  “That’s correct. After we made our first collections, we were struck by another asteroid. I executed an emergency separation and used the cockpit’s sublight thrusters to continue. The best we could manage was a crawl, I regret to say.”

  “I’m sure. Wait—you said first collections?”

  “That’s correct. The slower pace gave us the chance to find more mynocks on our route. We indexed the nearest large asteroids so we’d know where they came from—which ones were slug-infested, providing possible havens.” She decided to skip past the other hardships of the long journey. “Finally, today, we located the fleet.”

  “You did not make for your ship, to see what had become of your crew?”

  “I saw the wreck,” Sloane said, looking down for a moment. “But I also saw that Executor was returning to the fleet. I determined that it would be better to make for the command ship.”

  “Would it interest you to know there were no survivors aboard Ultimatum?”

  “It does interest me.” She pursed her lips. She’d suspected as much—but she’d also had time to come to terms with it out in the asteroid field. Then she looked up. “I made the right decision. I had information for Lord Vader.”

  “This foolishness about exogorths?”

  “That, and something to see.”

  “He sees you, I guarantee it! And he will see someone derelict in her duty. Who feared exactly the fate that befell Ultimatum, and who deliberately took her time returning.” Piett stepped back from her and snorted with derision. “Hiding with space slugs! The idea is laughable. The Millennium Falcon was almost certainly destroyed, just as your own ship was.” He threw up his hands. “This interview is over. A summary court-martial would be ordered, if it were solely my decision.”

  Sloane inhaled. “I take it that it’s not.”

  “Sadly for you.” He looked over to the ebon cylinder—and tugged at his collar. “What you do not know is that Lord Vader—”

  The doors to the room opened. Piett looked over, startled. “What now?”

  Lieutenant Deltic entered pushing a hovercart. On its bed was something covered by a tarp. “I found it, Commodore!”

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Piett stormed toward her. “Those doors are sealed. Who told you to enter here?”

  “Lord Vader did. He sent the order to the guards moments ago.”

  “But how did—” Piett stopped.

  Vader sees all, Sloane thought. She stepped toward Deltic. “Is this what I think it is, Lieutenant?”

  Deltic smiled and knelt beside her cargo. She yanked the tarp back. “Meet Smiley!”

  Piett looked down at the sprawled form of a massive winged beast: a mynock. He winced, covering his face with the back of his hand. “How dare you bring this here? It—”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty rank. It’s been thawing since we got it out of the collector.”

  Sloane covered her own nose and nodded. “During the trials at the nebular station, Bastinade was outfitted with gear to scoop up samples for later analysis. We’d first just wanted to confirm they’d died of mawshock. But when this one got close to the ship, we noticed something else.”

  With a heave, she and Deltic tipped the bed of the hovercart upward, causing the now oozing mynock to roll off it and onto the deck. It landed with a sickening squish.

  Sloane stepped around to it and knelt. “You see, Admiral, this creature’s death had nothing to do with exogorths.” She pointed. “It was killed with a hand blaster.”

  Piett gawked at the blackened scorch mark on the creature’s carapace. “Are—are you sure?”

  “Your forensic analysis tools down below confirmed it,” Deltic said. “It’s a score mark from a medium-weight blaster pistol. Not a ship turret—a hand weapon. A shot fired very recently, I might add.” She looked to Sloane. “Just as you suspected when you saw it in space, Commodore.”

  Sloane nodded. Thank you for saying the right thing just this once. She stood. “Dismissed, Lieutenant.”

  The scientist looked over at the black cylinder. “Ooh, look at that thing. What is it?”

  “Dismissed,” Sloane and Piett said in unison. Deltic and the troopers quickly exited.

  Sloane paced around the dripping carcass. “Someone was clearing mynocks off a starship with a blaster, Admiral. Whether they were on EVA in space or hidden inside an exogorth, there’s only one conclusion.”

  “The Millennium Falcon was not destroyed. It remained in the asteroid field,” boomed a voice from behind. Sloane’s whole body spun as she saw the black cylinder crack open. With a whoosh, two interlocking metal blossoms separated—and the upper half rose into the overhead, revealing an occupant in the lower portion. A seat mechanically rotated, revealing its occupant, who had been there all the time: Darth Vader.

  His voice boomed. “It seems your ‘thorough’ search was anything but, Admiral!”

  Piett flinched. Sloane stared, for a moment, bewildered. Vader had taken note of her once as a cadet, but she’d learned little about him beyond the rumors—and had no idea why he would have ensconced himself in such a chamber. The very sound of the man’s voice, his mechanical breathing, made her want to take a step back.

  But she controlled her emotions—and answered for Piett. “I was in the right place at the right time, my lord. We were all engaged in the same pursuit: finding the rebels. I just found something different.” The right thing, she did not say.

  The admiral broke from Vader’s gaze long enough to glance at the mynock. “It does tell us they were still here recently, my lord.”

  “Clearly your methods are insufficient,” Vader said. “Summon bounty hunters.”

  Piett blanched. “My lord?”

  “The fleet cannot remain in the asteroid field indefinitely, but individual searchers may succeed—if you fail again.”

  Piett audibly gulped. “It will be done, my lord.”

  Vader’s chair began to turn.

  Sloane spoke up. “And me, my lord?”

  She didn’t know why she’d opened her mouth. It was wrong to say anything, she knew. And yet she had gone unseen for so many years that now, here, with her command in ruins, she wanted to hear—something definitive. Anything. Even an end.

  Vader’s chair stopped, but he did not turn to face her.

  She took a breath.

  “Report to the Kuat Drive Yards to take command of Vigilance.” His chair resumed its rotation, and the chamber’s shell slammed tight around him.

  “Vigilance,” Piett repeated, taken aback. “But…that was to be my nephew’s command.”

  “Things change quickly…Admiral.” Sloane smiled pleasantly. “And I’ll need a shuttle. Any functional one will do, sir.”

  Piett smoldered. “Dismissed.”

  She turned and walked toward the exit. The doors opened before her, and the stormtroopers stationed there turned. She pointed her thumb behind her. “You two—in there. There’s a body to carry out.”

  At her words, the troopers took half a step backward.

  “Relax,” she said, smirk barely visible. “It’s just the mynock.” She walked past them and headed up the hall, alone.

  VERGENCE

  Tracy Deonn

  There have been many of them. So many that the number is not worth counting. This I know.

  What I did not know, even after a millennium of their minds in mine, and mine in theirs, is why they approached me with thoughts of light and dark. These words were never enough. Why did they matter, here? Here there are the deep greens of moss, the silken silver of slow mist, the dim blue of steam rising through the ever-twilight. Inside me are the twis
ting gray shadows of desire and the bright crimson flare of wrath.

  And yet, the dark ones called me dark, too, so dark is my color.

  They used to arrive in their ships. The harsh, piercing whine of engines—that artificial, lifeless sound—jarred every living thing within my stone walls and without.

  It took scores of them before I knew that I…was. That I had been. That I am. That some few of them had created stairs to make my entrance easier to manage. Before that, I existed, but did not know so. I absorbed awareness from these visitors, these Force-users, until I gained my own first understanding.

  Time.

  Just as the beings had a beginning and birth, so did I. Before, all had been dreadfully present. But with their awareness of life, death, growth, I saw that time moves as a stream, and there is a before for these beings, a present that they ignore, and a future toward which they are always turning, minds busy with life unlived.

  They were disruptive creatures. They’d come climbing through the woods with their minds so loud that my second understanding came quickly.

  Thoughts.

  Some thoughts were sharp, fresh, and brandished before them like a shield. Some were worn like tumbled stone on the bottom of the bog, thoughts rolled around in a mind, then buried. Thinking themselves alone, many would broadcast their curiosity. Their needs. Their questions.

  I could always feel them coming. At the edges of the swamp shore, their boots either slowed with care or quickened with pride. But when they reached the gnarltree, they’d pause at my cold and dread. Always.

  This threshold is where they made a decision. Oh, certainly a decision had been made to bring the beings here. Decisions were made to avoid the dragonsnake, duck the bogwings, trek through the swamp. But lying in wait at my gnarltree are the questions of unknown sacrifice. The hesitation before shapeless risk. Am I ready? their minds asked. What will I find inside? What will I see? What if? What if? And most would proceed forward, ducking beneath the gnarltree’s roots, finding purchase on soil long since smoothed over by previous supplicants.

  Once they entered my realm, they were mine. I seized upon the shields. Slithered like a vine snake around their mental barriers. Exhumed the stone. I sought their thoughts no matter how buried, how polished. No matter where their secrets hid, I’d find them. Past their hopes, I struck like a scrange to the source of their pain.

  Their minds carried images and words. It took many more of them to give name to what I experienced. My third understanding:

  Memories.

  I consumed these memories until they flooded me, a fuel so rich as to bring a kind of life to stone and slime and rot like me. While the visitors pursued themselves within my walls, I fed from them. Full lives on other planets across the galaxy. Dry planets. Gas planets. Ice planets. Worlds teeming with species. I saw beings that looked like them. Beings that birthed them. Faces bending at the mouth, lip edges turned up or down. Written records called books. Transparent speaking records called holos. Languages that I could never utter, and yet I became fluent. Great battles. Power at their fingertips.

  I fed until I became sentient, almost as alive as the bogwings, the pythons, the prowling and stomping elephoths.

  Then, the fourth understanding. The one I value most of all.

  Fear.

  I learned how to parse through their memories (times past) their thoughts (words, names, action), and their fears. Eventually, such an assortment of visitors had landed on the surface that I could offer more than a space to gather power and strength, to meditate and plan. Instead of simply reflecting what they brought, I could manipulate.

  * * *

  —

  This is when the hunger began. Every twist of their emotions, warp of their thoughts, produced more fear. Enough to sustain my evolution and enough to make me stronger. Just as there is no morning, no night in my forest, but an endless twilight, there is no waxing and waning of my ravenous hunger. And, I learned, there is no limit to what I can devour.

  Terror comes in many flavors. Threaded through it most often is anger at being mistreated or wronged. There is a layer of arrogance, because if one is not lofty, then one is lowly. Many times I taste envy at being left without, then a desperate sort of doubt at what being left behind might mean of their value. But the base note of all of these emotions is raw, animalistic fear. Always fear.

  Visitors seek my offerings, perhaps even claim to desire them. But none truly desire what I show them. None hold them close when they exit. None carry them out willingly. No. They leave in a rush, already shedding what I’ve given, pressing my images down and away and pushing them out of their young minds as quickly as possible. They leave seeking the vast emptiness of space or the faces of comrades or the life that does not ask them to face the fears that I relish.

  And so, for millennia, there was only one kind of entrant. Those who seek me, resist, and flee. I watched them run with my belly full.

  * * *

  —

  Then one day, a new type of visitor arrived.

  * * *

  —

  A small, green being. Accompanied by another whose body did not manifest—Qui-Gon, returning to Dagobah. Unusual in and of itself. I felt the green one’s arrival, but as he approached, there was silence. Nothing.

  No, not nothing.

  A well so deep I could not take its measure. His measure. Not until Qui-Gon guided him closer to my threshold.

  Then. Then! A flood greater than any who had come before me.

  Time. He’d lived hundreds of years. Not rivaling my own age, but more than any other living thing I’d encountered. Eight centuries. No, nearly nine.

  Thoughts. Weighted. Curious. Measured.

  Memories. So very many. More than I could ever sift through in a single visit.

  Fear. At the surface, there was none for himself, but much for others. Fear only for others.

  This fear tasted sweeter than any I’d fed on before. The agony of loss so rich I could barely stand it. But such fodder. Such material to work with.

  For this small being who felt fear for his Order, I showed loss on a scale beyond imagining. Bright blades of blue and green. One of purple. Clashing, sparking, and thrust through flesh.

  For this ancient being, whose fear held dread, I showed a hooded, faceless lord so great that I wished I had form so as to fall servant at his feet. Sidious. Sidious. Sidious.

  And then he was gone.

  * * *

  —

  Until he came back. He came back! No offworld visitor had ever returned to Dagobah and chosen a life in its swamps, so close to my domain. He made a home far from my reach so that I could not find his thoughts in the dark and damp, but that did not mean he intended to stay away.

  No offworld visitor had ever come to me a second time. And yet this one did.

  And then a third.

  A fourth.

  A fifth.

  His name is Yoda.

  He visits me once every few orbits, and our dance continues.

  * * *

  —

  Today Yoda approaches slowly, and I wonder what fear he desires to see. His body is not as spry as it once was. I feel his anxiety before he reaches my tree.

  He pauses. Looks up at the worn roots of my gnarltree, at the canopy that blocks the light. Then he stares into my chamber, a strange look on his wrinkled features. It has been several orbits since he last came to see me, and I am surprised at the intention I feel in his mind, even at this distance.

  “A crucial visit, this will be.”

  Crucial? What has changed for him? What has happened? No one has arrived. No ships have landed. And yet I sense a new purpose in his mood. Anticipation.

  “Begin, shall we?” he asks, hobbling forward one small step at a time, his three-pronged foot sinking into the soil in heavy slow
steps.

  And so we begin.

  The images in Yoda’s mind are new to me, recent to him:

  A shimmering, near-translucent older human man sitting near him in his small, warm hut.

  No fear. Yet.

  Yoda speaking, “I am old, Master Kenobi.”

  A ripple of emotion. Slight. Yoda is old. Though not as old as I.

  “Master, I want you to take on a new Padawan.”

  Something new, now. Not a feeling others have brought to me. The shape of this emotion is strange. I can’t place it. Yoda is always surprising me.

  He gives me the word even as I grasp for it. “Pleasure, that is.”

  I rankle. I’ve heard this word. A multitude of minds, thousands of years of envy all say the same thing: that pleasure is for others to wield over our heads. Mocking laughter fills the cave, regurgitated from entrants who were once hunted, berated, harmed to the tune of others’ pleasure.

  Yoda frowns, shakes his head. Disappointment.

  The new memory continues.

  “Master, I want you to train Luke.”

  Who is Luke? There are no images of this Luke.

  Older memories. Flashes of a scowling, furious young man with light hair and blue—no, yellow—eyes. A woman in distress. A birthing chamber. An infant. Two. Yoda murmurs words from the then, in the now. “To Tatooine, to his family send him.”

  Luke. The boy child. But what does—

  To the ghostly man in Yoda’s hut, Yoda had replied. “And if I try to teach this rash, this impatient, this mindless boy the ways of the Force and fail, what then?”

  There! Fear. Sour and bright and mine!

  I do not let Yoda’s thoughts continue, instead I show him exactly what he fears, and why it will happen again.

  Around the old Master swells the black mist of memory and the spoiled green of regret.

  I create Dooku, his former Padawan, face twisted in corrupt passion. Yoda’s failure to steer him away from the dark.