by Sean Stewart
tilting her glass and sipping. The juice went down like honeyed summer rain.
"Thanks to you," Whie said grinning. "I can't wait to tell everyone how you
commandeered those ships at the spaceport to get us off Vjun. 'Quick,
Lieutenant—the Jedi assassins are getting away in their Chryya! We've got to
scramble up some ships and follow them!' "
"It was you guys doing your Mind Thing that sold it," Scout said modestly,
flushing with pleasure. It was nice of Whie to make her feel as if she had
really contributed to the mission, rather than being nothing but the excess
baggage Jai Maruk had expected her to be. Jai and plenty of others, she thought,
remembering Hanna, her white Arkanian eyes full of contempt during the
Apprentice Tournament. She sipped her juice. "Whoa. I just found myself missing
Hanna Ding."
"The Arkanian girl who gave you such a hard time?"
"She's worried she might be killed in this war," Scout said, surprising
herself. "She doesn't want to die for nothing. The Jedi matter to her. To all of
us. The Order is the only family we have."
For the second time in as many minutes, she clapped her hand over her mouth.
Whie gave her a pained smile.
Yoda snuffed. "Hard it was, I think: to meet your mother after Dooku had
fled."
"All those years she had been waiting," Whie said. "But the funny thing is,
it wasn't me she was waiting for. Not really. What she lost was her baby, and
that baby is gone. When she saw me, she saw a stranger."
"It was like that when everyone went to Geonosis," Scout said unexpectedly.
"The Temple was just deserted. We tried to do our lessons and be good, but
really we were just marking time, waiting for them to come back. Only they never
did." She sipped the juice. "I don't just mean the ones who died. Even the ones
who survived came back different people. Grimmer."
Whie swirled his juice around in his glass. "Do you think we'll . . . fit,
when we get back? I just can't imagine doing the same classes, talking to the
same people as if nothing had happened. Everything feels different to me," he
said, and his voice was troubled.
He has changed, Scout thought. He used to be the boy who knew everything. Now
he sounded much less certain, but it made him seem older. He wasn't a boy
pretending to be a Jedi anymore; he was a young man beginning to grapple with
the shifting, uncertain, grownup world in which a real Jedi Knight had to live.
Whie glanced over at her. "So—are you still worried about being sent to the
Agricultural Corps?"
And to Scout's surprise, she found she wasn't. "Nah," she said comfortably.
"I think the Jedi are stuck with me now."
"I guess we can learn to live with that." Whie smiled, but his eyes were
haunted. "You know," he added, after a moment of silence, "I chose to leave
Château Malreaux. I chose to come back to Coruscant. I was hoping it would feel
like home to me—like Vjun did when I first stepped on the planet. But it
doesn't."
He looked at the planet rapidly swelling in the viewscreen. "It feels as if
I've come unstuck. I don't belong on Vjun, I know that: I couldn't go back there
now, no matter how much my mother wanted me to. I'm not Viscount Malreaux, I'm
me, Whie, Jedi apprentice. But I don't feel like I belong on Coruscant, either.
Is that a Jedi's destiny?" he asked Yoda. "To wander everywhere and never be at
rest? If so, I accept that. I pledged my life to the Order and I won't take that
back, but I guess .. . I guess I didn't know it would be so hard. I guess I
didn't know I could never be at home."
Yoda refilled Whie's glass, and sighed. "Never step in the same river twice
can you. Each time the river hurries on. Each time he that steps has changed."
He furled his ears, remembering. "On many long journeys have I gone. And waited,
too, for others to return from journeys of their own. The Jedi travel to the
stars: and wait: and hope, with a candle in the window. Some return; some are
broken; some come back so different only their names remain. Some choose the
dark side, and are lost until the last journey, the one we all must take
together. Sometimes, on the darkest days, feel the pull of that last voyage, I
do." He threw back his glass of juice and glanced at Whie. "The dark side within
you is: you know this."
Whie looked away. "Yes."
"But other things, inside you there are." Yoda tapped him gently on the
chest. "The Force is inside you. A true Jedi lives in the Force. Touches the
Force. It surrounds him: and it reaches up from inside him to touch that which
surrounds." Yoda smiled, and Scout felt his presence, warm and bright in the
Force, like a lantern shining in the middle of the cabin. "Not a pile of
permacrete, home is," Yoda said. "Not a palace or a hut, ship or shack.
'Wherever a Jedi is, there must the Force be, too. Wherever we are, is home."
Scout raised her glass, and clinked it gravely against the others': tink,
ting. "To coming home," she said, and they drank together.
Far, far away, on a minor planet in a negligible system deep behind Trade
Federation lines, Count Dooku of Serenno walked along the shore of an alien sea,
alone. He had established his new headquarters here, and in an hour he would be
back in the camp, surrounded by advisers, droids, servants, sycophants,
engineers, and officers, all vying for his time, all presenting their schemes
and stratagems, sucking like bees on the nectar of his power. Possibly Asajj
Ventress, his protegee, would be there, clamoring to be made his apprentice. He
had a meeting scheduled with the formidable General Grievous, who was even more
powerful than Ventress, but a great deal less interesting as a dinner-table
conversationalist. And of course at any time his Master might summon.
What are we?
On the surface of the bay, water heaped and rolled, landing with a white
crash to run hissing up the cold sand.
What are we, think you, Dooku?
The sea foamed up around his boots and then withdrew, leaving an empty shell
half buried in the sand. Dooku picked it up. He had a sudden vivid memory of
doing this back on Serenno when he was still a tiny boy, before the Jedi ever
came. He could remember the smell of the sea, the thin salty mud trickling from
the shell as he held it to his ear: and in this memory something wonderful had
happened, something magical that filled him with delight, only he could not now
recall what it had been.
He shook the shell to dry it, and held it up to his ear. An old man's ear,
now: that child he had been had lived long ago. He felt his heartbeat speed up,
as if—absurd thought—he might hear something in the shell, something terribly
important.
But either the shell was different, or the sea, or something inside him was
broken beyond repair. All he heard was the thin hiss of wind and wave, and
beneath it all the dull echoing thud of his heart.
In the end, what we are is: alone.
Alone, the shell whispered. Alone, alone, alone.
He crushed the shell in his hand, letting the fragments drift down to the
beach. Then he turned and started walking
back to camp.
Whie's mother sat in the big study chair in the broken shell of Château
Malreaux, looking at the sunset. The window Dooku had smashed with her body had
not been repaired; ragged spikes of glass showed around the edge of the casement
like teeth in a howling mouth. The glass had slashed her pink ball gown to
ribbons and spattered it with blood. She didn't care. The Baby was gone.
When she first read her future in the broken glass, she wept. Then the time
for tears was past. There was nothing left, now. Nothing to do but sit at the
window.
The sun sank. With the coming of night, the wind turned to a rare land
breeze, and the ever-present clouds rolled back. The sun touched water:
floundered: drowned. Darkness crept over the sky, clear for once. The stars
overhead like chips of ice. Her boy out there, somewhere. Never coming back.
Full dark fell, but she did not move to put a light in the window.
Dark now, and colder still. The little Vjun fox whined and nosed around her
stiffening legs.
By morning, it, too, was gone.
Light.
Gray at first, touching the spires of the Jedi Temple , the tall peaks of the
Chancellor's residence. A soft light the same color as the sleepy trantor
pigeons just sidling from their roosts in the great ferrocrete skyrises of
Coruscant. The low, continuous hum of traffic began to swell as the first
commuters hurried to their early-morning jobs at bakeries and factories and
holocomm stations. Then the rim of the sun peeked up over the horizon. The light
turned pale watery gold, splashing across windows.
Dew sparkled on parked fliers; their sleek metallic sides took on the day's
first blush of warmth.
Dawn on Coruscant.
A bell rang in the depths of the large suite housing the Senator from Naboo,
and a few moments later the second handmaiden of Padme's entourage hurried into
the main room, still struggling into her dressing gown, to find her mistress
standing at the window. "You rang, m'lady?"
"Put on some water for tea and set out a suit of clothes, would you?
Something I can wear outside, but it must make me look wonderful," Senator Padme
Amidala said, and she laughed out loud.
The second handmaiden found herself grinning. "Wonderful it is, m'lady. Can I
ask what the occasion is?"
"Look!" A kilometer away, a ship had settled on the landing platforms of the
Jedi Temple . Little figures came down her ramps; other little figures ran
forward to greet them. Padme turned. The smile on her face was radiant. "They're
home," she said.