The Cestus Deception: Star Wars (Clone Wars): A Clone Wars Novel

by Steven Barnes

  Confusion warred with a powerful and unaccustomed urge to please her. Not so odd, perhaps. She had saved his life and proven a stout comrade.

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “Use your heart,” she said. “Tell me, what do you feel?”

  He stopped, and thought. Despite the warnings, he concentrated on ambient sound and sensation. He heard the faint shush of rippling water, and the distant sound of falling droplets echoing in the darkness. He felt the uneven ground beneath his feet, and …

  “Air, moving against my skin,” he said.

  Her voice sounded a bit frustrated, but still calm. “No. Deeper. Not your senses. Your heart.”

  “I hear water—”

  “No! Stop using your ears. What do you feel? In here.” She placed her hand over his heart. He sighed deeply, feeling her palm’s warmth as if it seeped into and beneath his ribs.

  Suddenly he had the urge to believe that she was not merely playing some kind of game with him. There was something there, if only he could find it.

  “I feel … warm.”

  “Where?”

  “Inside,” he answered. He tried to follow up with more words, but they wouldn’t form. Then he noticed that the blindfold-induced false midnight was no longer totally black. Inchoate shapes formed within it, as if faces watched him, judging him. He couldn’t quite distinguish them, but they seemed not like pictures, even dimensional pictures. They were more like squirming shapes pushing through a flat elastic surface. Rounded faces, with empty eyes. He had the sense that he knew this form, knew this creature, but couldn’t be certain where he had come to know it, or under what circumstances …

  “It feels like floating on a golden current,” he heard himself say. “I’m half asleep, but totally awake at the same time.”

  “Yes.”

  “I … oh!” He had started to speak again, but then his throat seemed filled with dust. Now speckles of light twinkled in the darkness. They were followed by shadowy forms flowing together, then separating, then together again …

  His legs wavered, buckled. A remnant of his injuries? He went down to his hands and knees, then felt her hands on his shoulders. It took a few moments to catch his breath. Then he stood again and dropped his arms to his sides, fingers flexing and unflexing, breathing shallow and high. Trembling, feeling as if he were about to burst, he raised his hands to the blindfold, then hesitated. “Sheeka?” he asked unsteadily.

  “Yes,” she said. Not a question. The single word was calming. He removed the sack from his head and untied the blindfold.

  The cave roof was low but glowed with warmth and dull orange light. The radiance originated beneath the surface of a water pool that rippled with a steady heartbeat rhythm.

  The ceiling dripped with stalactites, and the walls glowed as if they had been polished by hand. The very ground beneath them pulsed with a soft and persistent radiance, reflected back from waterfalls of frozen stone.

  He coughed, realizing that he had momentarily forgotten to breathe.

  A dozen eels floated at the surface, vast milky eyes studying them. That strange light seemed to come from within them, so that from time to time their skin appeared almost translucent. Jangotat could actually see the bones and organs suspended within.

  Blind.

  “What is this place?” he asked, realizing that some part of him already knew the answer to that question.

  “This is where the eels come to meet us.”

  “The dashta eels?” He knew little of them save the briefings of the Jedi. He knew that they were integral to the JK machines. “The living component of the bio-droids? We thought they came from the Dashta Mountains.”

  “No,” she said quietly. “Both mountains and eels are named for Kilaphor Dashta, the first explorer to map both mountains and the Zantay caves, four centuries ago. They were holy to the X’Ting for thousands of years, but withdrew to the caves when the hive began its conquest of Cestus.”

  “These look larger than the eels we’ve seen,” he protested.

  “Those are the young, prior to sexual differentiation.”

  The water rippled with their gentle wavering. One of them swam in a lazy circle and then returned. Their blind eyes studied him. Why?

  Sheeka was still talking, although she must have realized that his mind had been captured by the sight before him. “Cestus is honeycombed with passages, underwater rivers, and pools. Not even the X’Ting know the location of the dashta eels’ home nest. As far as we know this is the last remaining place where they interact with other species. It was here that they brought us the first fungus spores.”

  “The medicine?”

  “Yes. And the meatless meals.”

  “How can these be dashtas? According to my research, they are much too large. They … these creatures are intelligent …” How did he know that? So far they had done nothing but float. But something about those blind eyes. They made gentle sounds, cooing, calling, comforting …

  “Yes,” Sheeka agreed.

  He shook his head. “I’ve read the reports. Dashtas are nonsentient.”

  “Not nonsentient. Call it a form of sleep. A gift from the Guides—a lifetime of dreams. Even unconscious, their nervous systems supply the Force sensitivity. I don’t understand all of it. I’m just grateful it works.”

  He paused for a moment, digesting information. “What are you saying?”

  “Female dashtas lay millions of eggs,” Sheeka said to him. “The males fertilize only a few thousand. Unfertilized eggs produce young who never mature.”

  “The eels gave you their children?”

  She nodded. “Those who would have died in competition with their fertilized brothers and sisters. They lived on, and in living gave life to we who befriended them.”

  “Why would they do such a thing?”

  “Long ago,” Sheeka said, “this planet was more fertile, and there were more sentient species. They died out in competition with each other as the sand ate the forest. The struggle for survival was distasteful to the dashtas, who retreated deep into the planet’s core. We’ve been their first new friends in millennia.”

  “You.”

  “Yes. The eels offered us their unfertile eggs, knowing that the JKs would bring Cestus more fully into the community of worlds.”

  “There is conflict in that world, as well.”

  “Yes. As long as there are eaters and eaten, there will be conflict. But the dashtas hold the potential for sentient creatures to meet their needs without slaughtering one another. This is our potential, not our present.”

  Need rarely triggers war, Jangotat thought. Desire is far more deadly. The X’Ting had driven the spiders into the mountains. If the plagues had been no accident, then Cestus Cybernetics had all but destroyed the hive. The Separatists and the Republic might well destroy Cestus Cybernetics …

  An endless chain of domination and destruction. And he was one of its strongest links.

  Jangotat kept his thoughts to himself. There was something more important here than philosophical discourse. He desired understanding more than he yearned for his next two minutes of air. “They have no eyes. Why do they glow?”

  “For us,” she said, and sat on the rock to gaze more closely at the eels. “For you, and me. I come here sometimes. Not too often, but occasionally, when I need to renew myself.”

  Her words were true. He could feel it, and had for some minutes now. It was a sensation not of warmth, nor of cold … but of something else. Something that was an … aliveness. He felt a compressed lifetime of murderous lessons dissolve, as if he was not any of the things he had been trained to be. But if he was not those things, then what was he? “I’m a soldier,” he whispered.

  “No,” she said. “That is your programming.”

  His spine straightened. “I am a mighty warrior’s clone brother.”

  “No,” Sheeka said. And there was no mocking in her voice. There was, instead, some other emotion he could not name. “Tha
t is your body, your genetics. We’re more than that. You are not your ‘brothers’ and they are not you.”

  Jangotat’s sight began to blur, and he wiped at his eyes with his hand. Looked at the moisture collected there on his fingers, dumbfounded. He could not remember ever shedding tears before. He knew what they were, but had never seen them from his own eyes. And if he could do one thing that he had never done … perhaps there were others as well?

  What was this place? One part of him wanted to flee as swiftly as possible. And another wanted to lie down here and be bathed in eel-light for the rest of his days.

  “What do you feel?”

  He closed his eyes again. A marrow-numbing tingle flowed through him, lifting him up, seemingly above himself. He heard himself speak without recognizing the words, and realized it was possible he had never really known himself at all. “What do I feel?” he asked. His voice shook with emotion. “What have you done to me? I feel everything. Everything I never knew I lacked.” She had taken his hand. Her fingers were small and warm and cool. “I … see myself, back to infancy, out to old age.” It was true.

  Child.

  Infant floating in a decanter, the spawn of endless night.

  His body torn and war-ravaged, dying, the light of combat still glowing in his eyes.

  Then other flesh, aged Jangotats, ravaged and worn not by war hut by time, time he would never have. A wrinkled Jangotat, sight dimming, but smiling, surrounded by …

  “Yes?”

  For an instant he saw children he would never sire, grand-children he would never hold, and the sudden, wrenching sense of the path denied was so devastating that he felt himself implode. It was as if all he had experienced on Cestus had awakened some deep and irresistible genetic memory within him. The memory of what his life should have been. Could have been, had he been a child of love and not war. He saw those children, but then, in their eyes he gained the strength to go backward, back to his own infancy, back to …

  Jangotat sagged to his knees. The tears he’d spent a lifetime repressing welled up once again. “It’s wrong,” he whispered. “All wrong.” He gazed up at her with haunted, hollow eyes. “I never heard my mother’s heart. Never felt her emotions while I slept, safe in her womb.”

  “No,” Sheeka said gently. “You didn’t.”

  Hands shaking, he sank his face against his palms. On any other day of his life the heat and wetness would have shamed him, but Jangotat was beyond shame now. “No one ever cradled me,” he said. “No one will miss me when I’m gone.”

  He paused, and into that pause he heard a voice within him whisper, Please, Sheeka. Say that you’ll miss me when I’m gone. When I’ve performed that single function I have practiced to perfection.

  Die.

  Here on this planet. Or the next. Or the next. Tell me that some memory of me will stay with you. That you will dream of me. Remember my smile. Praise my courage. My honor. Please. Something. Anything.

  But she said nothing, and he realized that it was best that way, that he had come to a place in his life where lived the core conundrums that no outside entity could resolve for him. This was his loneliness, his grim and inexorable destiny . And in this terrible moment, all the fine words about the immortality of the GAR rang as hollow as a Sarlacc’s belly.

  “Jangotat?”

  Despite his horrific realization, he couldn’t stop another clumsily disguised plea! “No one ever said they love me.” He turned and looked up at her. It was as if tearing his gaze away from the pool required a physical effort. “Am I such an ugly thing?”

  “No.”

  No. He was not an abomination of nature. He could feel everything that she was not saying, knew why she had brought him to this place: to experience the fear and loneliness he had hidden away from himself. It was mind numbing. And necessary.

  His next words were a whisper. “Why would anyone ever leave this place, once they had found it?”

  And now for the first time in minutes, she spoke in complete sentences. “Jangotat, it’s not one or the other. We don’t live either a life of action and adventure, or one of spiritual contemplation. True, the brothers and sisters come here to meditate. But then they return to the world.”

  “The world?”

  “The world outside. Farms, mines, the city. The world needs us to be active, but to also contemplate the consequences of our actions. To obey orders is good, Jangotat. We all live within a society with reciprocal obligations. But to obey them without question is to be a machine, not a living being. Are you alive, Jangotat?”

  His mouth worked without producing words.

  “I think you are. Wake up before it’s too late. You’re not just a number, you’re a man, a living, breathing man. You were born dreaming that you’re some kind of machine, an expendable programmed device. You’re not.”

  “Then what am I?” He blinked hard, shivering. “What is this feeling? I’ve never known it.” He paused, mouth opening in astonishment. “Loneliness,” he said finally, answering his own question. “I feel so alone. I’ve never felt alone before. How could I? I was always surrounded by my brothers.”

  “I’ve felt lonely in a crowd,” Sheeka said. “Only one thing really cures loneliness.”

  “What is that?” Another plea, but this one did not shame him.

  “The sense that the universe knows that we’re here.”

  Confusion warred with clarity. “But how can it see me among so many brothers? We’re all the same.”

  “No,” she said, her voice carrying a new sharpness. “You’re not. As you told me, no two of you have ever had the same experiences. So no two of you can be the same.”

  “I lied,” he said, the words twisted with anguish. “There’s no me inside. It’s all us. The GAR. My brothers. The Code. But where am I? Who am I?”

  “Listen to your heart.” Her palm and fingers rested against his chest. He felt the warmth, so deeply that for a moment he feared its cessation, feared that if she drew her hand away he would become a man of ice.

  Again.

  “Your heartbeat says it all. It says we are all completely unique.”

  She paused.

  “And that, in that very uniqueness, we are all the same.”

  We are all the same … because we are all unique. The words echoed through the chamber, but he heard them not merely with his ears. He knew now why she had asked him to cease listening to the sounds. Cease using his outer ears, so that the inner voices could whisper their secrets. “Unique, as every star is unique. As every particle of the universe is unique.”

  And in that uniqueness, we are all the same. Every being. Every particle. Every planet. Every star.

  He was speaking to himself. She spoke to him. The dashta eels spoke to him. His wrinkled, bearded, and beloved future self, the Jangotat who would never be, spoke to him. The child he had never been, who had known a mother’s love and a happy home, a mother who would nurture him that he might one day make his own choices in the world …

  All of these spoke to him. Each in its own voice, but together they blended into a single chorus, a single blended sentiment, overwhelming in its simplicity and abiding love.

  He sagged from his knees onto his side. All false strength, all bravado drained from him like water squeezed from a sponge. In its place remained a sense of lightness rather than power. He had always felt himself to be a man of iron, if not durasteel. What need had durasteel for air or water or love?

  Jangotat heard a wet slippery sound, then another and yet another. He looked up. The legless eels wriggled cooing from the pool, surrounding him. Very tentatively, he bent and reached out, touched the nearest. Its blind, eyeless face observed him with a vast and aching intelligence. Its touch was Love itself.

  “What did you see?” Sheeka asked from behind him.

  “Another life,” he said.

  “Another life?”

  He nodded. “I might have been born to a mother and father. Had brothers and sisters. Played with
my pets.”

  That last seemed to surprise her. “Pets?”

  Absurdly gentle emotions flooded him. “I saw a Corosian phoenix once. The most beautiful thing I ever saw. I wanted one. As a pet.” He laughed at himself. “Not at that station. Not at any post I know of. A burden to the army, you see?”

  “Strange,” she said, voice troubled. “Strange. Usually the Guides are a healing influence.”

  “They are.” His bruised lips turned up in a smile. “For given that other option, I choose my life. However and for whatever purpose I was given life, still I choose everything that led me to this moment.”

  He paused again, the world spinning around him. Within him. “I choose everything that led me to this place, and to you.”

  She sank down beside him, the eels parting to make room. Although they could not see, they saw all.

  She pressed her full warm lips against his, setting her hands against his cheeks to draw him even closer. Although he had shared kisses with other women, this was different, an unfolding in his heart.

  Sheeka Tull placed her cheek against his, and whispered something that he could not quite hear.

  “What?” he asked, afraid to know. “What did you say?”

  “That thing you’ve never heard,” she answered. Then paused again before speaking the words he had waited a full, brief lifetime to hear. “I love you.”

  Sheeka Tull’s beautiful dark face rippled with reflected light. Jangotat knew that his existence had contained no greater peace and fulfillment than this. They kissed again, her lips warm against his.

  68

  The next days seemed a sort of dream, a phantasmal passage from which he would inevitably awaken. The village accepted the fact that he had moved into Sheeka’s house, her children that he had moved into her guest room.

  As Jangotat sat sunning himself, Sheeka’s son Tarl came to sit with him on the porch. They talked for a time, and then Jangotat began to use his knife to carve the yellow-haired lad a toy.

  He knew that they were welcoming him to become one of them. That while such a choice was impossible, Sheeka was inviting him to stay. These were peaceful folk who prayed Cestus would not be pulled into a conflict beyond their understanding. He now comprehended so much more. The eels had given their beloved friends permission to use the sterile young, but for defensive purposes only. Only to give the humans a means of income, to save the economy of the planet that gave them life. Modifying security droids for the battle-field was an abomination that might destroy them all. Just another level of confusion.