by Sean Stewart
The children worried Leem the most. The Temple, nearly empty of adults, felt like a school the teachers had abandoned. Suddenly orphaned Padawans, acolytes with too few teachers and too many responsibilities: Maks Leem feared for them. As hard as Yoda and the other teachers tried to instill the ancient Jedi virtues, this generation could not help but be marked by violence. As if they had been weaned on poisoned milk, she always thought. For the first time since the Sith War, there would be a generation of Jedi Knights who grew up surrounded by a Force clouded by the dark side. They were learning to feel with hearts made too old, too hard, too soon.
It was one of these children, the gentle, graceful boy named Whie whom she had taken as her Padawan, who had called her to the Temple entrance. Maks had arrived to find the boy remaining (as always) remarkably serene, while enduring a good deal of moist bluster from a pompous, overbearing, and furious Troxan diplomat, who could not believe he was to be stopped at the Temple doors by a mere boy. This purple-faced being with furiously vibrating gills claimed to have a dispatch to be delivered to Master Yoda personally.
Maks came to Whie’s rescue at once, using the Force in the way that came most naturally to her, soothing the Troxan until his gills lay still, pink, and moist, and seeing him off with the promise that she would personally deliver the package to Master Yoda. Whie could have done the same—the Force was strong in him—but Padawans were not encouraged to use their powers lightly. The boy’s gifts had always been great; perhaps in consequence, he always took special care not to abuse them.
Whie handed her the packet. It was a high-security diplomatic correspondence pouch, of a type in common usage by many Trade Federation worlds. A mesh of woven meta-ceramic and computational monofilaments, the pouch was both a container and a computer, whose surface was its own display. Most of that surface was presently covered with a bristling array of letters, the same message repeated in Troxan and Basic.
The bag seethed in her hand, not unpleasantly, as computational monofilaments shifted and flowed under her touch until they cradled the palps of her fingers. It was rather like standing on the shore at the seaside and feeling the outflow of each wave pulling the sand gradually out from under her feet. A brief topographic map of her fingerprints appeared on the packet’s surface. Another part of the packet cleared to a small mirror surface, with the ideogram for “eye” marked neatly above it. Master Leem blinked at her own reflection, then blinked again as the packet flashed briefly with light.
*Gill Pattern:
Not Applicable
Fingerprint Identification:
Negative
Retinal Scan:
Negative
Current Bearer cannot be identified as the intended recipient of this Bureau of Diplomatic Liaison Incendiary Packet.
CONTENTS WILL PLASMATE ON PACKET RUPTURE!
Maks and her Padawan exchanged looks. “Better not drop it,” the boy said, deadpan. Maks rolled her eyes—another remarkably expressive gesture among the three-eyed Gran—and padded back into the Temple, looking for Master Yoda.
She found him in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. He was perched on a boulder of black limestone that jutted out of a small pond. Approaching him from behind, she was shocked by how small he looked, sitting there, dumpy and awkward in his shapeless robe. Like a sad swamp toad, she thought. When she was younger, she would have suppressed the thought at once, shocked at herself. With age she had learned to watch her thoughts come and go with detachment, and some amusement, too. What an odd, quirky, unruly thing a mind was, after all! Even a Jedi mind. And really, with that great round green head and those drooping ears, a sad swamp toad was exactly right.
Then he turned around and smiled at her, and even beneath Yoda’s weariness and his worry she felt the deep springs of joy within him, a thousand fountains of it, inexhaustible, as if he were a crack in the mantle of the world, and the living Force itself bubbled through him.
The shaggy brows over Master Leem’s three warm brown eyes relaxed, and her teeth stopped grinding. She picked her way down to the edge of the pond, gently brushing aside long fronds of fern. The sound of water was all around, rushing over pebbled streambeds, bubbling up through the rock, or dripping into small clear pools: and always from the far side of the enormous chamber, the distant roar of the waterfall. “I thought I would find you here, Master.”
“Like the outdoor gardens better, do I.”
“I know. But they aren’t nearly so close to the Jedi Council Chamber as this room up here.”
He smiled tiredly. “Truth, speak you.” His ears, which had pricked up at the sight of her, drooped again. “Meetings and more meetings. Sad talk and serious, war, war, and always war.” He waved his three-fingered hand around the Room of a Thousand Fountains. “A place of great beauty, this is. And yet…we made it. Tired I am of all this…making. Where is the time for being, Maks Leem?”
“Somewhere that isn’t Coruscant,” she answered frankly.
The old Master nodded forcefully. “Truer than you know, speak you. Sometimes I think the Temple we should move far away from Coruscant.”
Master Leem’s mouth dropped open. She had only been joking, but Yoda seemed completely serious. “Only on a planet such as Coruscant, with no forests left, no mountains unleveled, no streams left to run their own course, could the Force have become so clouded.”
Maks blinked all three eyes. “Where would you move the Temple?”
Yoda shrugged. “Somewhere wet. Somewhere wild. Not so much making. Not so many machines.” He straightened and snuffed in a deep breath. “Good! Decided it is! We will move the Temple at once. You shall be in charge. Find a new home and report to me tomorrow!”
Master Leem’s teeth began to grind at double speed. “You must be joking! We can’t possibly do such a thing now, in the middle of a war! Who could we find to—” She stopped, and the three eyes that had been so very wide went narrow. “You’re teasing me.”
The old gnome snickered.
She had half a mind to pitch the Troxan packet at Yoda’s smirking face but, remembering all the scary legal warnings on the side, she held her hand. “I promised I would give this to you.”
Yoda scrunched up his nose in distaste. He gathered the hem of his robe up above his wizened knees and slid off the rock with a splash. It was an indoor garden near the top of a mighty artificial spire, after all, and the water in the pond was only shin-deep. He stumped to the shore and took the packet. Wrinkles climbed up his forehead and his ears twirled in surprise as the Incendiary Packet took its fingerprint scan.
Fingerprint Identification: Positive
The reflective mirror appeared on the packet’s surface. Yoda stuck his tongue out at it and made a face.
Retinal Scan: Inconclusive
Please present intended recipient’s face or equivalent bodily communication interface to the reflective surface.
“Machines,” Yoda grumbled, but he stared glumly into the packet.
Retinal Scan: Positive
Current bearer has been identified as the intended recipient of this Bureau of Diplomatic Liaison Incendiary Packet. Destruct device disabled.
A microperforation appeared around the edges of the packet and then the pouch peeled back, revealing the charred and battered handle of a Jedi lightsaber. Yoda’s stubby green fingers curled lightly around it, and he sighed.
“Master?”
“Jang Li-Li,” he said. “All that is left of her, this is.”
Water dripped and whispered all around them in the garden.
“Thinking of the dead, have I been.”
“The list grows longer every day,” Master Leem said bitterly. She was thinking of the last time she had seen Jang Li-Li. They had shared dinner duty not long before she left, and the two of them had gone down to the gardens to pick vegetables for the evening meal. She remembered sitting on an upturned bucket, Jang making a droll face at her and asking if Maks thought using the Force to shell Antarian peas was an abuse of powe
r. Laugh lines around her almond eyes.
Yoda’s face, dark in reflection, looked up at him from out of the pond. “Some believe it possible to enter completely into the Force after death.”
“Surely we all do, Master.”
“Ah—but perhaps one can remain unique and individual. Can remain oneself.”
“You are thinking of Jang Li-Li,” the Gran said with a sad smile. “I would love to believe she is safe and free and laughing still, somewhere in the Force. I would love to, but I cannot. Every people longs for the hope of something after death. These hands and eyes have been knit into a shape by the universe, will hold it for a few score years, then lose it again. That must be enough. To enter more completely into the Force: one would dissolve, like honey mixed into hot stimcaf.”
Yoda shrugged, looking down at poor Jang Li-Li’s lightsaber handle. “Perhaps you are right. But I wonder…” He picked a pebble from a crack in the rock on which he was sitting. “If I drop this pebble into the pond, what will happen?”
“It will sink.”
“And after?”
“Well,” Master Leem said, feeling out of her depth. “There will be ripples, I suppose, spreading out.”
Yoda’s ears perked up. “Yes! The pebble strikes the water, and a wave carries out until…?”
“It reaches the shore.”
“Just so. But is the water in the wave where the pebble drops the same as the water in the wave that touches the shore?”
“No…”
“And yet the wave is the same wave?”
“You think we can become…waves in the Force, holding our shape?”
Yoda shrugged. “Speak of this once, Qui-Gon did.”
“I miss him,” Maks Leem said sadly. She had never really approved of Qui-Gon Jinn; he was too quick to rebel against the Order, too ready to oppose his solitary will to the good of the group. And yet he had been a brave and noble man, and kind to her when she was young.
She turned her attention back to Jang’s broken lightsaber. “Who sent it, Master?”
Maks wasn’t sure Yoda had heard her question. For a long time he was silent, stroking the handle with his blunt old fingers. “Have you now a Padawan, Master Leem?” She nodded. “Your second?”
“Third. Rees Alrix was my first. She is fighting with the clone troops at Sullust. My second…my second was Eremin Tarn,” she said reluctantly. Eremin had become a follower of Jeisel, one of the more outspoken of the dissident Jedi, who believed the Republic had lost the moral authority to rule. Eremin had always resisted authority—including hers when she was his Master—but he was fiercely principled. Intellectually, Maks could understand his decision to withdraw from the Order, but it had torn a hole in her Gran heart to see her very own Padawan, one she had taught from thirteen years to the status of a full Jedi Knight, deliberately cut himself out of the Order.
As if reading her mind, Yoda asked, “Does he fill that empty place in your heart, this new Padawan?”
Maks flushed and looked away.
“No shame in this, there is. Think you the relationship between Master and Padawan is only to help them?” Yoda cocked his head to one side and looked at her with ancient, knowing eyes. “Oh, this is what we let them believe, yes! But when the day comes that even old Yoda does not learn something from his students—then truly, he shall be a teacher no more.” He reached up to give her hand a little squeeze, his three fingers around her six. “No greater gift there is, than a generous heart.”
Tears came to Maks Leem, and she let them come. “Attachment is not the Jedi way, I know. But…”
Yoda gave her hand another squeeze, and then returned to considering the handle of the lightsaber. For a moment she saw his finger stop on a little piece of metal, surprisingly clean and fresh looking, as if it had escaped the blast or been added afterward. Yoda frowned. “This Padawan of yours—ready for the wide galaxy, is he?”
“Whie? No! And yes,” she said. “He is young. They are all so young. But if any of them are ready, he is. The Force is strong in him. Not so strong as in young Skywalker, but in the next level down: and between you and me, he carries it better than Anakin ever has. Such calm. Such serenity and poise; truly it is incredible in one so young.”
“Truly.”
Something in Yoda’s voice caught her ear. “You think it impossible?”
“I think he wishes to please you very much,” the old Master said carefully.
Before she could ask him what he meant, a gong sounded the hour. “Ah—my class!” Maks said, slapping one hand against her forehead horns. “I am supposed to be teaching hyperspace navigation in Tower Three.”
Yoda bugged out his eyes and made little shooing motions with his hands. “Then engage your hyperdrive you must!” He watched, chuckling, as she ran from the chamber with the hem of her robe flapping excitedly around her hairy ankles and her boots thudding into the distance.
When he was sure he was alone, he tabbed the power switch on what had once been Jang Li-Li’s lightsaber. As he had suspected, the weapon had been modified; instead of Jang’s blue blade humming to life, a hologram appeared: Count Dooku, ten centimeters tall, as if standing on the lightsaber handle. He looked old…much older than he had on Geonosis. Careworn. He was sitting at an elegantly appointed desk. There was a window behind him spattered with rain; behind it, a cheerless gray sky. Before him on the desk lay the candle Yoda had sent.
“We should talk,” Dooku said. He did not look at the holocam, as if, even across weeks of time and the endless black chasm of space, he was afraid to look his old Master in the eye.
“There is a cloud around me now. Around all of us. I felt it growing in the Republic years ago. I fled it then, and tried to bring the Order with me. You wouldn’t come. Cowardice, I thought then. Or corruption. Now…” He rubbed his face wearily. “Now I don’t know. Perhaps you were right. Perhaps the Temple was the only lantern to keep the darkness at bay, and I was wrong to step outside, into the night. Or perhaps the darkness was inside me all the time.”
For the first time he looked up. His eyes were steady, except for a faint flicker of pure anguish, like the sound of weeping from a locked room. “It’s like a sickness,” he whispered. “A fever in the blood. War everywhere. Cruelty. Killing, and some in my name. Blood like rain. I feel it all the time, the cries of the dying in the Force, beating in me like a vein about to burst.” He gathered himself; shrugged; went on. “I have come to the end of myself. I don’t know what is right anymore. I am tired, Master. So tired. And like any old man, as the end nears, I long to go home.”
The tiny hologrammic Dooku touched the candle Yoda had sent, turning it over in his old fingers. “I want to meet. But nobody outside the Temple must know. I am always watched, and you are betrayed more profoundly than you guess, Master. Come to me; Jai will show you the way. We will talk. I promise nothing more. I cannot think you corrupt, but even you, Master, are snared beyond your understanding. If word reaches my allies of your coming, they will stop at nothing to kill you. If they guess why you are coming, they will stop at nothing to destroy me.”
His eyes came fully back into the present: shrewd and practical. “I would be disappointed if you took my invitation as a tactical opportunity. If I see even the slightest sign of new forces deploying in the direction of the Hydian Way, I will abandon my current location, and carry the war forward until droid battle cruisers burn the life out of Coruscant with a rain of plasma fire. Bring none but Jedi with you.” He gave a sad, crooked smile. “There are some things that should be kept inside the family…”
Count Dooku of Serenno, warlord of a mighty army, among the richest beings in the galaxy, legendary sword-master, former student, notorious traitor, lost son, flickered in front of Yoda’s ancient eyes, and went out.
Yoda tabbed the lightsaber’s power switch and watched the recording again, three more times. He clambered back onto his favorite rock, deep in thought. Somewhere above him, in his private quarters, messages from
the Republic would be piling up: dispatches from military commanders, questions from far-flung Jedi about their various assignments and commands, perhaps a summons from the Senate or a meeting request from the Chancellor’s office. He had come to know the weight of all those anxious eyes far too well. Today they would have to wait. Today, Yoda needed Yoda’s wisdom more than anyone else.
He breathed deeply, trying to clear his mind in meditation, letting thoughts rise up before him.
Dooku’s hands on that candle, the hum of emotion like a current, making his fingertips tremble.
Jai Maruk giving his clipped report in the Council Chamber with the charred welt of a lightsaber burn on his gaunt cheek.
Farther back, he and Dooku in a cave on Geonosis. The hiss and flash of humming lightsabers, darkly beautiful, like dragonflies, and Dooku still a boy of twenty, not the old man whispering on top of poor dead Jang’s blade. Yoda’s ears slowly drooped as he sank deeper into the Force, time melting out beneath his mind like rotten ice, setting past and present free to mix together. That proud boy in the garden sixty years ago who murmured, Every Jedi is a child his parents decided they could live without.
Little Jang Li-Li, eight years old, misting the orchids in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. A bright day, sunlight pouring through transparisteel panels, Li-Li making puffs of water with her mister and shrieking with laughter as every little cloud she made broke a sunbeam into colors, fugitive bars of red and violet and green. Master, Master, I’m making rainbows! Those colors hadn’t come to mean military signals, yet, or starship navigating lights, or lightsaber blades. Just a girl making rainbows.
Dooku newly brought from Serenno, grave-eyed, old enough to know his mother had given him away. Old enough to learn one can always be betrayed.
Water bubbled and seeped and trickled around Yoda, time past and time present, liquid and elusive: and then Qui-Gon was beside him. It would be wrong to say the dead Jedi came to Yoda; truer would it be to say Qui-Gon had always been there, in the still point around which time wheels. Qui-Gon waiting for Yoda to find his way down the untaken path and pass through the unopened door into the garden at the still heart of things.