Yoda

by Sean Stewart

“—And the ship is clearly Ventress’s Last Call. My point being,” Mace Windu said doggedly, “I know Master Yoda wasn’t in that ship. I told you Master Yoda wasn’t in that ship. So why, in the face of news reports of his death that are having a very bad effect on morale, does your office not come forth with a statement?”

  For the first time, Chancellor Palpatine’s tone held the trace of an edge. “Master Windu, you may recollect that you only thought to inform me that the ship publicly seen to be carrying Master Yoda was a decoy after it had launched. In effect, I have only your word that he isn’t dead.”

  “My word,” Mace Windu said deliberately, “is one of the few things in the galaxy that a Chancellor of the Republic can trust.”

  “Of course I trust you,” Palpatine snapped. “It’s not enough. We have due process for a reason. The Chancellor serves the people and the Senate, not the Jedi Order. The Jedi, likewise, cannot be seen to be my private army. The people of this Republic must believe their government is directly answerable to them and them alone. It’s Count Dooku’s whole cry that the Republic is run by a handful of corrupt Senators and their cronies in the Order and the government bureaucracy. If I go before the people and say, I know you’ve seen the footage, but my pals in the Temple tell me the whole thing was just a joke, that Master Yoda is still alive, but we don’t care to produce him at this time…how do you suppose that will play?”

  Wearily Mace Windu rubbed his face. “You’re the politician.”

  “I am, Master Windu. Not a profession you hold in much esteem, but I am a politician—a superb politician—and until such time as you hear me giving you helpful tips on how to wield a lightsaber, I beg you to consider I just might know what I’m doing.”

  After a brief silence, the Chancellor sighed and the asperity left his voice. “Master Yoda arranged for a decoy so he could travel undetected on his very delicate mission. Tragically, several beings have died to carry out that deception. Shall we throw away their sacrifice? Or shall we honor it, and give Master Yoda a few more days to travel in secret to Vjun, and perhaps end this terrible war?”

  “Very well,” Mace Windu said at last. “I just hope we’re doing the right thing.”

  “So do I,” Palpatine said gravely. “In the meantime, I would take it very kindly if you would take over, on a more formal basis, the daily briefings Master Yoda used to give me.”

  “Of course.”

  An aide appeared at the edge of the transceiver’s view of Palpatine, telling the Chancellor in a low voice that he was very late for his next appointment. “Duty calls,” Palpatine said, moving to cut the comm channel. Then he paused. “Master Windu, since we are being frank with one another today, let me add that in these briefings I wish to hear your own unvarnished opinions—not what you think Master Yoda would have said. He is a great being—perhaps the greatest in the Republic. But Master Yoda is a teacher at heart. You are a warrior. Regrettably, this sad age of the world may be your time more than his.”

  “Master Yoda is many things, and I am not his equal in peace or war,” Mace said.

  “That’s too bad,” the Chancellor said, “because right now you are all I have. I expect your best service.”

  “For the Order and the Republic, I will give anything and everything, including my life.”

  The Chancellor reached to cut the channel. “Good,” he said. “We may need that, too.”

  “And in this time of crisis,” Senator Orn Free Taa of Ryloth rumbled on, “of may I say deepening crisis, the apparent death, the willful assassination of the Grand Master of the Jedi Order underscores the urgent need for an entirely new level of security. The Jedi will naturally attempt to carry on their good work: but they are spread too thin. Master Yoda’s tragic death makes that shockingly plain.”

  Muttered agreement throughout the vast Senate chamber.

  “What we need,” the Twi’lek Senator continued, “is a massive, expert, committed security and counterintelligence force. My fellow legislators, a war such as the one we find ourselves in may be won in battle with great difficulty, but far more easily lost through treachery and sabotage. The resolution I place before you seeks to create such a large, dedicated, aggressive force, not under the jurisdiction of any of our innumerable, glacially slow bureaucracies, but answerable directly to the Chancellor’s office and, through it, to us. It is time to put the security of the Republic first,” he cried. “It is time to put the security of the Republic directly in the hands of her people!”

  Meaning us, Senator Amidala thought, looking at her fellow Senators. All around her, her colleagues cheered, stomped, whistled, and applauded. Padmé’s heart sank. Of course, everyone badly wanted to get some control over a situation that felt increasingly uncontrollable. But if the resolution passed—and it looked very likely to pass—then at some level, the charge of securing the Republic was being shifted from the cool, dispassionate, professional hands of the Jedi Order into the shouting, emotional, highly politicized mob of her colleagues.

  Somehow, that didn’t make her feel any safer.

  The ship on which Whie, Scout, Maks Leem, Jai Maruk, and Master Yoda found themselves finally heading for the Outer Rim had originally been christened the Asymptotic Approach to Divinity when she came off her Verpine assembly line, intended as a pilgrim boat for a colony of mathemagi cultists. Unhappily, they had lost their communal savings in an investment banking scandal, leaving the Approach without a buyer. Rechristened the Stardust, she had gone into the glamour cruise business, taking well-heeled sophisticates on tours of exotic galactic sites and events, such as the Black Hole of Nakat, or the much-anticipated nova of Ariarch-17. Unfortunately, a miscalculation of the shock wave coming off the dying star had caused a dramatic and unexpected failure of the ship’s artificial gravity, from which dozens of lawsuits ensued. The litigation lasted two generations, until the lawyers defending the Stardust’s owners seized her in lieu of fees owed, renamed her Reasonable Doubt, and sold her off to Kut-Rate Kruises, whose maintenance protocols basically consisted of filling the ship up with breathable atmosphere and then waiting around in spacedock a couple of days to see how fast the air was leaking out.

  The Verpine, though excellent starship engineers, were essentially two-meter-tall bipedal insectoids who communicated instantly through radio waves produced in their chests, and whose visual acuity was so extreme that they could distinguish between male and female lice in a nerf’s fur at twenty paces. In consequence, the beds on Reasonable Doubt were no more than a hand span wide, the intercom system was nonexistent, and the ship signage, while no doubt screamingly obvious to other Verpine, was completely invisible to Scout. On their first day in space, it had taken her nearly an hour to find a refresher station, wandering the corridors with increasing agitation until she finally broke down and asked a crew member for directions. Embarrassing as that had been, coming out two minutes later to confess that she couldn’t figure out which bits of plumbing to use had been worse.

  Three days later she and Whie were lost, again, trudging through the labyrinth of corridors that were all slightly too narrow for human comfort. Master Yoda, who loathed being trapped in the R2 shell but was still trying to maintain his disguise, had sent them out to get food well over an hour ago. (Kut-Rate Kruise Lines had no time for frills such as room service.) Other luxury services—bedding, for instance—were also conspicuous by their absence. Scout had spent literally all her life dreaming of the day she would fly offplanet, escaping the Jedi Temple and crowded Coruscant for the wonders of the galaxy. But there had been some kind of mix-up in customs that kept them sitting at spacedock for hours, so that she had actually been asleep for the moment of liftoff, dozing fitfully on what was more like a plank than a bed, still dressed and wrapped in her cloak, aware of the great moment only because a sudden lurch had dumped her onto the floor. It had been a bit anticlimactic, and she had been grumpy ever since.

  Plus she was now quite certain that Jai Maruk, her Jedi Master, didn’t like her
at all. But she wasn’t going to let herself think about that just now.

  As for the food…Scout shuddered. Master Yoda ate it without complaint, but then, perhaps he had evolved beyond ordinary mortal concerns.

  Like smell.

  Anyway, the last time she had seen the old Jedi with a bowl of food in the Temple rectory, there had been a tail hanging over the edge.

  “I’m telling you, we’re too low,” Scout said. “We should have taken the lift tube to Level Fourteen. That’s what the sign said.”

  “That wasn’t a sign. It was a scuff mark on the lift tube wall.”

  “Sign.”

  “Scuff.”

  “Sign!”

  Whie took a breath. “Perhaps it was a sign, and I am mistaken. Let’s try Level Fourteen.”

  Scout stalked along the narrow corridor. “You know, the way you do that takes all the fun out of being right.”

  “The way I do what?”

  “Give in. It’s like even though I’m right and you’re wrong, somehow you’re just humoring me. Jedi serenity is all very well, but in a thirteen-year-old boy it’s sort of creepy.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Argue! Fight! Don’t be this…this pretend Jedi,” Scout said. “Can’t you just be human, for once?”

  Whie’s mouth quirked in a little smile. “No,” he said.

  The truth was, Whie was preoccupied. Master Leem had hinted they were going to Vjun to meet with someone very important—maybe Count Dooku himself, and possibly the famous Jedi-killer Asajj Ventress. Whie had done a computer look-up on her, and found himself staring at the woman from his dream.

  Ventress would be waiting for them on Vjun. In a few days, a week at most, he would be standing in a room with a ticking detonator. Ventress would be smiling. Scout would turn to him with blood trickling down her shirt. “Kiss her,” Ventress would say.

  He wished he knew what he was going to answer.

  They were standing in the cooked-food line—the lines for raw were far too long—when someone tapped Scout politely on the shoulder. “Passenger Pho?”

  “What? I mean, Yes?” Scout said, belatedly remembering that she, Whie, and Jai Maruk were traveling as the Pho family, en route to a cousin’s wedding on Corphelion.

  She found herself looking up at a tall humanoid-shaped droid that had seen better days. If it had ever featured any markings—paint, interface instructions, or even a brand name—they had long since been worn away, so its whole body had a dull, scuffed, scratched look, as if it had been sanded down and never refinished. “The ship’s purser asked me to fetch you,” the droid said. “It seems one of your belongings has been turned in to the Lost and Found.”

  Scout blanched. It had become depressingly clear over their first few days together that Jai Maruk didn’t think much of her. She could just imagine the expression on his lean, closed face if he heard she’d had to bail her lightsaber out of Reasonable Doubt’s Lost and Found. “What did I lose?”

  “The purser neglected to mention,” the droid said politely. “Will you come this way?”

  She looked at Whie, who nodded. “Go ahead. I can manage.” Still Scout hesitated. “Don’t worry,” Whie said. “I won’t tell.”

  He isn’t trying to humiliate me, Scout told herself. It just works out that way.

  The scuffed droid turned and headed for the lift tube. Scout trudged after him. “Your finish is pretty worn,” she said, making conversation.

  “I am not a regular part of Reasonable Doubt’s crew,” he explained. “I offered to work for them in exchange for my passage. Regrettably, my owner is dead,” the droid went on. “I am responsible for my own upkeep.”

  The lift tube door opened. “I never thought of that,” Scout said. “What would happen to a droid with no owner, I mean.”

  “I hadn’t, either,” her companion remarked dryly, “until it happened to me.”

  “What do you do about maintenance?” Scout asked. “Go back to the factory? Find a repair tech? But how would you pay for repairs?”

  “Your grasp of the problem is admirable,” the droid said. “As it happens, I was part of a rather small production run, now very obsolete. I am programmed to perform a good many repairs on myself, but spare parts are hard to come by, and correspondingly expensive, as they must be either bought as antiques or custom-built from my specifications. The challenge is considerable, as you surmised.”

  “Wouldn’t cost you much for a couple of cans of metal paint, though,” Scout said, glancing at her guide’s scuffed bare metal surfaces.

  “Ornamentation is not logically a high priority.”

  “Easier to get a job if you look smart, though. Think of it as a business expense.”

  The droid shrugged, a strangely human gesture. “There is some truth in what you say…and yet, there is something honest about this,” he said, touching the bare metal surface of his cheek. “It seems to me that most sentients live in a…cocoon of illusions and expectations. We are full of assumptions: we think we know ourselves and those around us; we think we know what each day will bring. We are confident we understand the arc and trajectory of our lives. Then Fate intervenes, strips us down to bare metal, and we see we are little more than debris, floating in darkness.”

  Scout looked at him. “Whoa. You must have been a philosopher droid off the assembly line.”

  “Quite the opposite,” he said, with a sharp inward expression. “Philosophy has come rather late to me.” The lift tube arrived at Level 34, and the doors slid open. “After you, Mistress Pho,” he said.

  “My friends call me Scout.” She stuck out her hand.

  Gravely the droid accepted it. “I don’t think I can count myself as a friend, yet. Just a droid with a job to do.”

  “Now you tell me your name,” Scout prompted. “That’s how this works.”

  “Certainly not. However trusting you are, I certainly don’t know enough about you to give you my real name.” Relenting, he added, “For now, you may call me Solis, if you prefer.”

  “It beats ‘Hey, Scuffy!’” Scout had the distinct impression that if the droid’s factory programming had included an eye-roll function, he would have deployed it. She grinned. “Solis it is.”

  The line in the cafeteria was interminable, even for cooked food, but after what felt like a galactic age Whie had finally placed his orders and paid for them. Now he stood looking uneasily over his haul. One large bubble-and-squirt; five orders of vacuum flowers; half a dozen of what the menu called Blasteroids! and appeared to be double-fried chili dumplings; a bucket of crispy feet; and a sloshing half bucket of rank (extra gummy), along with five drinks and a handful of napkins. That ought to be enough, Whie thought. But how was he going to get it back to the cabin?

  Would Asajj be the one who left Scout bleeding? Or would they be captured by guards and taken before her already hurt?

  If he kissed her, would he taste the blood on the edge of her mouth?

  Stop! Don’t think about it.

  Don’t think. Don’t think.

  Whie’s immediate instinct was to pile the food in a stack and trust to balance and a little judicious application of the Force to keep it from toppling over, but that seemed a bit conspicuous. How would an ordinary person handle this? Awkwardly, he decided, glancing around the cafeteria and watching a hefty female shouldering between tables with a tray on each hand and a sniveling toddler attached to each leg. Maybe he could grab one of the Doubt’s little service droids and get it to help carry trays down to their rooms.

  “May I help you, sir?” said a tall droid painted with immaculate cream-and-crimson livery, appearing at his elbow as if conjured by his thoughts.

  The Force is with me, Whie thought with an inward smile. “No, that’s all right. I don’t want to take you from your owner’s duties. If you could help me find a ship’s droid, though…”

  The droid picked up the Blasteroids and the bucket of rank. “I insist, Master Whie.”

  “
That’s very k—” Whie froze. “I’m sorry. What did you call me?”

  “Master Whie,” the droid said, in a low, pleasant voice.

  “My name is Pho—”

  The droid shook its head. “It won’t do, Master Whie—it really won’t. I know a very great deal about you. It’s possible I know more about you than you know about yourself.”

  Whie set the food on an empty table. His hand was light and tingling, ready to dive beneath his robes and draw his lightsaber. “Who are you? What are you? Who do you belong to?”

  “I suggest,” the droid said—and his voice was in deadly earnest now—“you ask yourself those exact questions.”

  Down in the ship’s exercise room, Jai Maruk was working out in anticipation of his second meeting with Count Dooku, honing his body as another person might sharpen a knife.

  Maks Leem was meditating in what had once been a storage closet, but was now officially listed on Reasonable Doubt’s directory as Cabin 523. Master Leem had her own room, next door to the others. Partly this was because she liked to meditate for several hours every day, preferably surrounded, as now, by a choking cloud of Gran incense that smelled, to the human olfactory system, like burning thicklube. But the chief reason the others had encouraged her to take a room of her own was that the Gran’s four ruminant stomachs worked loudly and continuously all night long in a way that humans found impossible to sleep through.

  Being at heart a social creature, Master Leem regretted being secluded from her human comrades, and in fact spent most of the waking hours with them. But now, with Jai exercising and the Padawans dispatched to the cafeteria, she had gone next door to her little snuggery. Surrounded by smoke thick enough to drop a small mammal, she was happily reestablishing her connection to the living Force that bound all things.

  Next door, in Cabin 524, Grand Master Yoda was wondering what in space was keeping the Padawans. He wasn’t worried for their safety. He was starving.

  The whole point of travel, Scout reflected, was to learn about oneself. In that sense, this trip was going really well. She had learned all sorts of things. She had learned that being chosen to be a Padawan did not necessarily bring every happiness with it, as she had thought it would, if one’s Master obviously viewed you as excess baggage. She had learned that her body was entirely too used to the comfortable and familiar food served at the Jedi Temple, and that the galaxy was large, and full of people who willingly ate the most disgusting stuff imaginable. And she had learned that she had absolutely no sense of direction at all, because it seemed as if her interminable trek with the droid Solis—whom she couldn’t stop thinking of as Scuffy—must have taken her through the whole ship about three times. “Look, this is ridiculous,” she finally said. “Have the purser send whatever it is to my cabin. If I can ever find my cabin again,” she added.