Yoda, Dark Rendezvous

by Sean Stewart

  As one got better at the game—and Dooku was much the quickest learner in his

  year—it became more and more like sparring, with victory going to whichever

  fighter could make his or her foe lose balance first. As they got older, they

  more often started in a fighting stance, fingers lightly on one another's

  forearms. Dooku's first push would come light and fast, or slow and heavy; the

  energy would come up from below or drop from above, or come in a sudden thrust

  right to the chest. He won the Twelve-and-Under Tournament when he was nine,

  using the trick of starting with very gentle probes, as if feeling his enemy out

  in the kid's version of the game, and then suddenly popping the pressure point

  inside his enemy's elbow and attacking in the instant of shock and pain.

  But as good as he got, he never beat Master Yoda. No matter what trick he

  tried—a Force push from behind, a slap to the eyes—the Master always felt the

  blow coming before it landed and twitched aside, like a stingfly dodging angry

  hands. Every time Dooku thought he had the old Jedi set up and made his final

  push, Yoda would melt away from the blow, and like someone walking down a

  staircase with two steps inexplicably missing, Dooku would find himself

  flailing, the old familiar lurch and loss of balance. The drop.

  What made it more frustrating was that Yoda frequently lost these games of

  push-feather. He would shove out at some little boy or girl with half Dooku's

  talent, who would twist clumsily to the side, and the Master would pitch

  comically to their feet, making woeful faces while the kid giggled and shrieked

  with jubilation. He let them win on purpose, Dooku could tell. He was building

  confidence in them. But he never lost to Dooku, never once. It was unfair;

  blatantly unfair, and for six months Dooku attacked with greater and greater

  fury, trying anything to win, but at the same time making his own balance ever

  more vulnerable, so when he lost—and he always lost, always, always, always—he

  did it in progressively more spectacular fashion. He made a point of losing

  badly, painfully. Daring everyone else to notice how unfairly Yoda was treating

  him.

  Dooku was twelve years old the last time they played. Yoda had been coming to

  the unarmed combat classes once a week or so, and that whole spring they had

  sparred through a long series of humiliating defeats in which Dooku found

  himself taking an increasingly proud, contemptuous, bitter kind of satisfaction.

  He was twice the Master's height now, and still Yoda had never let him win, not

  even once. Never admitted what he was doing, either, and Dooku would certainly

  never give him the satisfaction of crying about it, or complaining.

  As they bowed to one another, Dooku decided that he would make this loss

  something spectacular: so blatant that everyone would have to acknowledge what

  was going on. He decided he would break his own arm.

  They straightened from their bows. Dooku settled into his ready stance,

  calming himself and preparing for the pain to come.

  "I win," Yoda said.

  "What!" Dooku had yelped. "We haven't even started!" "When one fighter his

  balance has lost, win his opponent has," Yoda said mildly. "I win."

  —And at that instant, again, as always, the sudden lurch: the falling: and

  Dooku saw Yoda was right. As soft as Dooku had made his limbs, his pride was

  still stiff, and that's where Yoda had pushed by never letting him win, until he

  was so wound up in his rage and humiliation that he had gone into the match

  intending to lose.

  The realization was so big he could hardly hold it. He blinked, dazzled by

  the genius of the Master's teaching: showing him a weakness he would never have

  found, no matter how many times he beat his fellow students. "Th-thank you," he

  had stammered, his insides all mixed up between rage and humiliation and abject

  gratitude: and the old Jedi's face had broken into a smile. He had gripped

  Dooku's hand and brought him close and hugged him, laughing. "When you fall,

  apprentice . . . catch you I will!"

  That night, lying on his cot, two sensations were still mixing uneasily in

  Dooku's chest. The lurching, tipping, drop into space, unbalanced again,

  outfoxed and tumbling: and Yoda's tight, delighted hug afterward, a physical

  promise, delivered skin-to-skin—when you fall, catch you I will.

  It was the lurch and drop, the loss of balance, and the sudden helpless fall

  that gripped Dooku again after all these years as he stared out in wonder at the

  ancient grinning goblin who squatted, dripping, on his window ledge.

  He had a brief fantasy of letting go with a single blast of Force energy,

  shattering the window, flaying the old Master with the shards. He imagined Yoda

  tumbling through the air, bloody and insensible, dashing his brains out on the

  flagstones far below. Then it would all be mercifully over and Dooku wouldn't

  have to feel this strange, jumbled confusion. His hands would stop shaking and

  he would be dry inside and tight: dry and tight and empty as a drum, just a drum

  for Darth Sidious to play. How easy that would be.

  But Yoda would be prepared for that; it would never be so easy. Count Dooku

  prided himself on his ability to see reality for what it really was.

  He opened the casement window. "Master! Come in."

  Yoda hopped from the window ledge to Dooku's desk, stamping through the

  various landscapes being broadcast to the holomonitors there and shaking like a

  dog, so a shower of Vjun rain spattered off him, splotching the desk top, and

  the spines of several of the more valuable titles in Dooku's outstanding

  collection of rare books. Yoda had his lightsaber, but for now it was still

  belted at his side. In one hand he held his stick—of course he had somehow

  clambered to a fifth-story window ledge without letting go of his stick. In the

  other he had a Malreaux rose, white petals trimmed in blood red.

  "You've been picking the roses from my hedge?" Dooku said genially.

  Yoda held up the rose. "Yes. A pretty thing it is," he said, examining the

  needle-sharp spines. Gingerly he tipped the cream-and-crimson flower head toward

  himself and snuffed. He closed his eyes and sighed with pleasure at the

  fragrance. It was an old, wild perfume: heady and sharp and tingling like a

  childhood secret.

  "Actually, the roses are why I decided to stay here," Dooku remarked. "There

  are other mansions on Vjun that would have done as well. But we had roses in the

  great house on Serenno; I suppose these reminded me of home."

  "Remember them, did you?" Yoda asked lightly.

  "Obviously. I just said—"

  "From before?"

  "Ah." Dooku gave a little laugh. "As a matter of fact, yes. One of the very

  few memories I have from before I came to the Temple . It was a hot day, I

  remember that; a bright day, and the sun heavy in the sky. The rose smell was

  very strong, as if the sun were beating the fragrance out of them. Burning them

  like slow incense. I was hiding in the rose garden and my finger was bleeding. I

  guess I must have been playing in the bushes and pricked myself. I can still

  remember sucking the blood. The way it welled up from this hole in my fing
er."

  "Hiding?"

  "What?"

  Yoda squatted down on Dooku's desk. "Hiding, you said you were." He stuck his

  short legs over the edge and let his feet swing. A holofeed from Omwat played

  unheeded on the back of his head. "Why went you not into the house to find a

  bandage, or get a kiss?"

  "My mother got angry if I hurt myself."

  Yoda looked at him curiously. "Angry?"

  Silence.

  "It's not our way," Dooku said abruptly. "The Counts of Serenno do not

  complain and cry. We are born to take care of others. We don't expect others to

  take care of us.

  "And yet, your finger . . . hurt, did it not?"

  "I don't expect you to understand," Dooku said. He felt angry at the old

  Jedi, absurdly angry and for no reason.

  Off balance.

  There was a knock on the door. "What?" Dooku called sharply.

  The door rattled open, and Whirry came into the room in an obvious agitation

  of spirits. "The Baby!" she said. "The Baby's back! But the land is all slipping

  too fast for me to read the fortune, and I'm worried your young lady will do him

  a mischief, begging your pardon, Count."

  The little Vjun fox padded into the room from between her legs. It caught

  sight or scent of Yoda, stopped stiff-legged, arched its back, and hissed. Yoda

  glared down at the thing from the desktop, bared his teeth, and hissed back.

  Whirry jumped with a little shriek. "Which it's one of they nasty

  cellar-goblins," she cried, staring at Yoda. "Don't worry, Your Lordship—I'll

  get a broom and knock it on the head."

  "Master Yoda may be small and old and shriveled up like an evil green

  potato," Count Dooku remarked, "but he is my guest, and I would prefer you not

  hit him with a broom unless I particularly desire it."

  "Oh! Which it is Your Lordship's guest, is it?" the housekeeper said

  dubiously. "Each beau his own belle, so they say. But come, will you talk to

  your young lady with the knifing eyes and check her before she does the Baby any

  mischief? I did what you asked, Lordship; the droid brought them in right as

  whip-smelt in a net," she added piteously, and her large chest quivered with

  emotion under her grimy pink ball gown.

  "

  "At the moment, I am occupied," Dooku said sharply. "Asajj may play with her

  scrap mice any way she likes for all I care."

  "But sir—!"

  "Don't pretend you love him," the Count said. "If you loved him, you would

  have kept him."

  Whirry looked at him, shocked. "Love the Baby? Of course I always loved—"

  "You had a fine house, wealth, everything a person could desire, and you gave

  him up," Dooku said. "The Jedi arrived like beggars on your doorstep and asked

  for your firstborn, your heir, your precious Baby . . . and you gave him up."

  The Count's face was white. His traitorous hand was shaking and shaking. "You

  sent him away to a distant planet, never a letter or a message, sent him from

  the only home he had ever known and let them lock him up in the Temple and steal

  everything that should rightfully have been his, and now you have the impudence

  to come here and say you loved him? Loved him?" the Count shouted.

  Whirry and her fox were backing from the room, frightened. Dooku mastered his

  voice. "Mother? Son? Love?" he said wearily. "You don't know the meaning of the

  words." He waved at her with his hand. "Leave us."

  The housekeeper turned and fled. For a moment the fox stayed in the doorway,

  staring at Dooku and Master Yoda. Then it, too, turned tail and scampered away.

  Dooku rubbed his forehead with a tired hand. "Forgive me. As you know, most

  of Vjun ran mad, and Whirry is no exception."

  "Everyone on Vjun, goes mad I think," Yoda murmured. "Later or sooner."

  "Forgive my comments on the Temple . You know I have never doubted your

  goodness," Dooku said. "But—and I say this with all respect—there are things you

  choose not to see, Master. The Jedi principles—your principles—are noble ones:

  but the Jedi have become a tool in the hands of a corrupt Republic. If you truly

  want to see real justice—"

  Yoda looked up and met Dooku's eyes with a look of such infinite, distant

  boredom that the Count's speech staggered to a halt. "No lies for me, Dooku,"

  Yoda said, knocking a rather fine statuette off the desk with a lazy whack of

  his stick. "Through the motions, do not go. No Sora Bulq am I, to be caught in a

  web made of ideals. Pfeh. Thin stuff. Save it for the young.

  "I am not young," he said, turning his deep green eyes wholly on Dooku. "The

  old, easily bored are. Even Yoda, though I try not to hurt feelings by showing

  it. But come across the galaxy to hear you tell me about nobility and justice?"

  Yoda laughed. It was by far the tiredest, bitterest, most unpleasant sound Dooku

  had ever heard him make.

  He had thought he was beyond shock: but the disgust in Yoda's voice was

  shocking to him.

  Yoda looked down at the floor, making little patterns in the air with his

  stick. "Something real, tell me about. Show me another way we can end this war.

  Tell me something Dooku knows that Yoda does not." The Count looked at Yoda,

  baffled. "Come across the galaxy I have for one thing, Dooku."

  "Yes, Master?" Dooku said, hating the words as soon as they were out of his

  mouth. He only had one Master now, and a jealous one.

  "Obvious, is it not, Dooku?" And then Yoda was doing it to him again—the

  unexpected lurch, his balance gone, and the world turned inside out as Yoda

  said, "Turn me, Dooku. I beg you. Show me the greatness of the dark side."

  Far below, in the Crying Room of Chateau Malreaux, Scout snarled and reached

  for her lightsaber.

  Ventress raked her with a vicious clawing strike across the head, knocking

  her to the ground. "Stay still until I tell you to move," she said.

  A fire burned in a grate across the room. The wood was wet, making the flames

  gasp and sputter. Thin strings of bitter smoke crept from logs and drifted

  toward the ceiling.

  Scout gasped, crouched on her hands and knees, waiting for the stars to clear

  from in front of her eyes. Blood trickled from the cuts in her forehead and

  scalp, dripping onto the richly embroidered rug. Little red drops, pit-pat. Red

  spots appearing on the carpet.

  Pit, tick, pat, tock, drip.

  "Thank you," Asajj said, glancing at Fidelis. "Who doesn't relish a nice spot

  of gentleman's personal gentle-treason? Oh, don't look so shocked," she said to

  Whie. "Did you think it was just your bad luck I was waiting here?"

  Whie turned to Fidelis. "But . . . you're supposed to look after me."

  "Indeed, sir," Fidelis said, looking embarrassed. "But your lady mother is

  still the head of House Malreaux, and she represented to me that it would be

  best for you both—in the long-term interests of House Malreaux overall, if you

  follow me—for you to come to an accommodation with Count Dooku and his, ah,

  representatives."

  Ventress chuckled. "You just can't get good help these days. Do you know what

  you're playing with, boy? This is a Tac-Spec Footman. Very dangerous. The

  hardware alone would retail for the cost of a small planet these d
ays, for the

  right collector." She frowned. "As it happens, I could do with a bit of cash.

  The price of a small planet is looking pretty good. Present arms," she added

  absently. The assassin droids instantly took a bead, every one of them, on

  Whie's chest and head.

  "What are you doing? I demand to speak to Her Ladyship," Fidelis said. "Put

  those things down, or I will be obliged to take steps," he added meaningfully.

  "Don't be ridiculous. Even you couldn't take me and six droids out before we

  killed the boy. And I will kill the boy if you cause me any trouble. I gave him

  his chance to live the last time we met."

  Scout lurched heavily to her feet, wiping the blood out of her eyes with her

  sleeve. She watched Fidelis, wondering what the droid would do. Numbers and

  diagrams poured in a flickering glow across its eyes as it sized up the tactical

  situation.

  Asajj pulled out a blocky hand weapon. "Do you know what this is?"

  The Padawans glanced at one another blankly. Fidelis shifted, coughed.

  "Neural-net eraser," he said.

  "That's right," Asajj said pleasantly. "Take it." She held it out. "Come on,

  droid. Take it, or else." Her eyes flicked over to Whie.

  Woodenly Fidelis reached out for the ugly weapon.

  "Put it to your head and pull the trigger," Asajj said.

  Tip, drip, tap. More blood trickling down Scout's face.

  "Come on, droid. Put it to your head and pull the trigger, or I blow the

  boy's head off. What are you waiting for?" she asked. "Is this the legendary

  loyalty I've read so much about? There is a clear and present threat to a

  Malreaux here."

  Whie licked his lips. "Fidelis. Don't. I won't die here. I can't. I can only

  be killed by a Jedi. I saw it in a dream. Don't throw your life away."

  "That would be risking a lot on a dream," Asajj said. "And even if it's true,

  why do you suppose that is? Because Fidelis is going to save your life. He is

  going to make the ultimate sacrifice, like a good little droid. He knows his

  duty, doesn't he?"

  If the droid had been programmed to hate, he would have looked at her with

  hate. Instead he lifted the neural gun to his head. "Only remember, I served the

  House Malreaux," he said.

  "Fidelis, no! Don't!"

  The droid blinked. "I didn't think it would end like this," he said. Then he