Shatterpoint (звёздные войны)

by Matthew Stover

  Yet here I am awake, though I have slept little in the past three days.

  It was Depa's scream that woke me.

  A raw shriek of impossible anguish, it yanked me from nightmares of my own. It was not fear, that scream, but suffering so profound that it could have no other expression.

  Her scream woke her as well, and her first thought was to open her tent and exhaustedly reassure us that it had been only a dream. That seems always to be her first thought: to reassure the Korunnai, and me. From this I take considerable comfort.

  It's the third time this has happened so far tonight.

  And yet-injured as I am, and unused to sleeping on a Korun bedroll on the open ground- I find I have slept as well as I have yet managed on this planet.

  Depa's screams are a mercy.

  Because my own nightmares don't wake me.

  My nightmares suck me down, drowning me in a blind gluey chaos of anxiety and pain; they are more than simple anxiety dreams of wounds or suffering or the varieties of gruesome maiming, dismemberment, and death available in the jungle.

  In my dreams here, I have seen the destruction of the Jedi. The death of the Republic. I have seen the Temple in ruins, the Senate smashed, and Coruscant itself shattered by orbital bombardment from immense ships of impossible design. I have seen Coruscant, the seat of galactic culture, become a jungle far more hostile and alien than any on Haruun Kal.

  I have seen the end of civilization.

  Depa's screams bring me back to the jungle and the night.

  A week ago, I could not have imagined that to wake up in this jungle would be a relief.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU Tomorrow we leave this place.

  This is what I've been telling myself all day long, riding cross-legged on the ankkox's shell, talking with Depa. I should say: listening to her, for she seems to hear me only when it suits her.

  All day, I left the shell only to stretch my legs or relieve myself. and sometimes as I would climb up the shell to my spot, she'd be talking already, in that same low blurry murmur she used to speak with me-as though our conversation had been going on in her head, and my arrival was only a detail.

  When the gunships came and rained fire upon us, or blasted away randomly with their cannons, the guerrillas who were lucky enough to be near the ankkox often ducked beneath it for shelter, but Depa never did, so neither did I. She lay on her chaise within the howdah, and I sometimes leaned my back against its polished rail, so that her soft voice drifted in over my shoulder.

  We covered many kilometers today. The ground is rising; as the jungle thins we can move much more swiftly. It is not for nothing that a Korun does not speak of distance in kilometers, but in travel time.

  The same thinning of the jungle that increases our speed also leaves us more exposed to the gunships that seem now to be patrolling in an organized search pattern.

  I have much to tell of this day that has passed, and yet it's difficult for me to begin. I can only think of tomorrow, of meeting Nick, and finally calling down the Halleck to carry us away.

  I burn for it.

  I have discovered that I hate this place.

  Not very Jedi of me, but I cannot deny it. I hate the damp, and the smell, and the heat, and the sweat that trickles constantly around my eyebrows, trails down my cheeks, and drips from the point of my chin. I hate the stupid bovine complacency of the grassers, and the feral snarls of the half-wild akk dogs. I hate the gripleaves, and the brass-vines, the portaak trees and thyssel bushes.

  I hate the darkness under the trees.

  I hate the war.

  I hate what it's done to these people. To Depa.

  I hate what it's doing to me.

  The Halleck will be cool. It will be clean. The food will have no mold or rot or insect eggs.

  I know already what I will do first, aboard ship. Before I even visit the bridge to salute the captain.

  I will take a shower.

  The last time I was clean was on the shuttle, in orbit. Now I wonder if I'll ever be clean again.

  When I stepped off the shuttle at the Pelek Baw spaceport, I remember looking up at the white peak of Grandfather's Shoulder, and thinking that I had spent far too much time on Coruscant.

  What a fool I was.

  As Depa described me: Blind, ignorant, arrogant fool.

  I was afraid to learn how bad things might be here, and the worst of my fears didn't even approach the truth.

  I can't- I feel my lightsaber coming this way. I will continue later.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU Kar was ostensibly stopping at Depa's tent to discuss tomorrow's march before she settles in for the night; I suspect that his true aim was to check on me.

  I hope he is satisfied by what he found.

  This morning, I asked Depa why she hadn't left when the Separatists pulled back to Gevarno and Opari. Why she clearly would stay even now, were I not extorting her cooperation.

  "There is fighting to be done. Can a Jedi walk away?" Her voice was muffled, coming through the curtains. She did not invite me inside this morning, and I did not ask why.

  I'm afraid that she was in a state that neither of us wanted me to see.

  "To fight on after the battle is done-Depa, that is not Jedi," I told her. "That's the dark." "War is not about light or dark. It is about winning. Or dying." "But here you've already won." I thought back to the words of my strange waking dream.

  Her words, or the Force's, I did not know.

  "Perhaps I have. But look around you: is what you see a victorious army? Or are they ragged fugitives, spending the last of their strength to stay a step ahead of the gallows?" I have enormous sympathy for them: for their suffering and their desperate struggle. It is never far from my thoughts that only chance-a whim of Jedi anthropologists and the choice of some elders of ghosh Windu-separates their fate from my own.

  I could too easily have grown to become Kar Vaster myself.

  But I said none of this to Depa; my purpose here was not to muse upon the twists in the endless river that is the Force.

  "I understand their war," I told her. "It's very clear to me why they fight. My question is: Why are you still fighting?" "Can't you feel it?" And when she spoke, I could: in the Force, a relentless pulse of fear and hatred, like what I had felt from Nick and Chalk and Besh and. Lesh in the groundcar, but here amplified as though the jungle had become a planetwide resonance chamber. It was hate that kept the Korunnai fighting on, as though this whole people shared a single dream: that all Balawai might have a single skull, bent for a Korun mace.

  She said: "Yes: our battle is won. Theirs goes on. It will never be over, not while one of them still lives. The Balawai will never stop coming. We used these people for our own purposes- and we got what we wanted. Should I now throw them away? Abandon them to genocide, because they are no longer useful? Is that what the Council orders me to do?" "You prefer to stay and fight a war that is not yours?" Her voice gathered heat. "They need me, Mace. I am their only hope." That heat quickly faded, though, and she went back to her exhausted mumble. "I've done. things. Questionable things. I know. But I have seen. Mace, you cannot imagine what I have seen. As bad as it is-as bad as I am. Search the Force. You can feel how much worse everything could be. How much worse it will be." With this, I could not argue.

  "Look around you." Her mumble took on a bitter edge. "Think about everything you've seen.

  This is a little war, Mace. A little sputtering on-again, off-again series of inconclusive skirmishes. Until the Republic and the Confederacy mixed into it, it was practically a sporting event. But look at what it's done to these people. Imagine what war will do to those who've never known it. Imagine infantry battles in the fields of Alderaan. DOKAWs striking spacescrapers on Coruscant. Imagine what the galaxy will be if the Clone War turns serious." I told her it was already serious, and she laughed at me. "You haven't seen serious yet." I told her I was looking at it.

  And I think, now, of the clo
ne troopers on the Halleck, and how their clean crisp unquestioning bravery and discipline under fire is as far from these ragged murderers as it is possible to be for members of the same species. and I remember that the Grand Army of the Republic numbers 1.2 million clone troopers-just enough to station a single trooper-one lone man-on each planet of the Republic, and have a handful of thousands left over.

  If this Clone War escalates the way Depa seems to think it will, it will be fought not by clones and Jedi and battle droids, but by ordinary people. Ordinary people who will face one stark choice: to die, or to become like these Korunnai. Ordinary people who will have to leave forever the Galaxy of Peace.

  I can only hope that war is easier on those who cannot touch the Force.

  Though I suspect the truth is exactly opposite.

  There were hours, too, when we did not speak. I sat beside the how-dah while she dozed in the afternoon heat, drowsy myself with the ankkox's rocking gait and the unchanging flow of the trees and vines and flowers, and I listened to her dream-mumbles, and was shocked, sometimes, by her sudden nightmare shrieks, or the agonized moans that her migraines might pull from her lips.

  She seems to suffer from an intermittent fever. Sometimes her speech becomes a disjointed ramble through imaginary conversations that shift from subject to subject with hallucinatory randomness. Sometimes her pronouncements have an eerie sibylline quality, as though she prophesied a future that had no past. I've occasionally tried to record these on this datapad, but somehow her voice never comes through.

  As though our talks are my own hallucination.

  And if so- Does it matter?

  Even a lie of the Force is more true than any reality we can comprehend.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU Much of the day we spent talking about Kar Vaster. Depa has spared me many of the less savory details, but she has told me enough.

  More than enough.

  For example: when he calls me doshalo, it's not just an expression. If what he has told Depa is the truth, Kar Vaster and I are the last of the Windu.

  The ghosh into which I was born-and with which I lived for those months in my teens, while I returned to learn some of the Korun Force skills-has apparently been destroyed piecemeal over the past thirty years. Not in any great massacre, or climactic last stand, but by the simple, brutal mathematics of attrition: my ghosh is just another statistical casualty of a simmering guerrilla war against an enemy more numerous, better armed, and equally ruthless.

  Depa told me this hesitantly, as though it were horrible news that must be broken gently.

  And perhaps it is. I cannot say. She seems to think it should matter a great deal to me. And perhaps it should.

  But I am more thoroughly Jedi than I am Korun.

  When I think of my doshallai dead and scattered, Windu heritage and traditions perishing in blood and darkness, I feel only abstract sadness.

  Any tale of pointless suffering and loss is sad, to me.

  I would change them all if I could. Not just my own.

  I would certainly change Kar's.

  It seems that as a young man, Kar Vaster was fairly ordinary: more in touch with pelekotan than most, but not in any other way unsual. It was the Summertime War that changed him, as it has changed so much on this world.

  When he was fourteen, he saw his whole family massacred by jungle prospectors: one of the casual atrocities that characterize this war.

  I do not know how it is that he alone escaped; the stories Depa has heard from various Korunnai are contradictory. Kar himself, it seems, will not discuss it.

  What we do know is that after witnessing the murders of his entire family, he was left alone in the jungle: without weapons, without grassers, without akks or people, food or supplies of any kind. And that he lived in the jungle-alone-for more than a standard year.

  This is what he meant when he said he had survived tan pel'trokal.

  The term has an irony that only now do I begin to appreciate.

  The tan pel'trokal is a penalty devised by Korun culture, to punish crimes deserving death.

  Knowing that human judgment is fallible, the Korunnai leave the final disposition of the sentence to the jungle itself; they consider it a mercy.

  I would say: it is a mercy they grant themselves. Thus can they take life without the shame of bloodied hands.

  In Kar's case, he faced his tan pel'trokal for the crime of being Korun. He was as innocent-and as guilty-as the Balawai children to whom he was planning to do the same.

  Their crimes were identical: they were born into the wrong family.

  He was, at the time, perhaps a year older than Keela.

  But there was no Jedi nearby to save him, and so he had to save himself.

  I believe that his ability to form human speech was part of the price he paid for his survival.

  All Jedi know that power must be paid for; the Force maintains a balance that cannot be defied.

  Pelekotan traded him power for his humanity.

  I sometimes wonder if the Force does the same for Jedi.

  He and his Akk Guards clearly have much in common with Jedi: they seem to be our reflections in a dark mirror. They rely on instinct; Jedi rely on training. They use anger and aggression as sources of power; our power is based upon serenity and defense. Even the weapon he and his Akk Guards carry is a twisted mirror image of ours.

  I use my sword as a shield. They use their shields as swords.

  Depa tells me that these "vibroshields" are Kar's own design. Vibro-axes are common equipment among jungle prospectors, used for harvesting lumber and clearing paths through stands too thick for their steamcrawlers to crush through; since the sonic generators that power vibro-axes are fully sealed, they are remarkably resistant to the metal-eating molds and fungi.

  And the metal itself. well, that's an interesting story of its own. It seems to be an alloy that the fungi don't attack. It is extremely hard, and never loses its edge. Nor does it rust, or even tarnish.

  It also seems to be a superconductor.

  This is why my blade could not cut it: the entire shield is always the same temperature throughout. Even the energy of a lightsaber is instantly conducted away. Hold a blade against it long enough and the whole thing will melt, but it cannot be cut. Not by an energy blade.

  File the data.

  When Kar accepts a man into his Akk Guards, the man builds his own weapons, not unlike the tradition in the spirit of which Jedi construct our lightsabers.

  It strikes me now that Kar may have hit upon this idea from stories of Jedi training I shared with my long-lost friends in ghosh Windu, thirty-five years and more ago: Korunnai have a living oral tradition, and stories are passed through families as treasured possessions.

  I have not shared this speculation with Depa.

  And Depa swears that she did not teach Kar and his guards the Jedi skill of interception; she says Kar knew this already when she first met him. If what she says is true, he must have taught himself-and he probably got the idea from those same stories that I, in my thoughtless youth, innocently shared with my innocent friends.

  And so: in some odd, circuitous way, Kar Vaster may be my fault.

  The source of this metal is a mystery; though Kar never speaks of it to anyone, I believe I know what it is.

  Starship armor.

  Thousands of years ago-before the Sith War-when shield generators were so massive that only the largest capital ships could carry them, smaller starships were armored with a mirrorlike superconducting alloy, which was sufficient to resist the low-fire-rate laser cannons of the day.

  I think Kar, somewhere out in the jungle of the Korunnai Highland, I

  sometime during his yearlong tan pel'trokal, had stumbled upon the ancient Jedi starship whose crash stranded on this planet his ancestors, and my own.

  It was earlier this evening that I learned the real truth of Kar Vastor. Not only who he is, and why he is- But what he means.

  Somewhere along our
line of march Kar had located a cave that he deemed adequate to shelter a fire from gunship or satellite detection, and that night he set about curing Besh's and Chalk's fever wasp infestation. Besh and Chalk had remained in thanatizine suspension, tied to a grasser's travois like a bundle of cargo. The crude hacking Terrel had done to them had been mostly repaired with tissue binders from a captured medpac, though of course the wounds could not heal; the body's healing processes are suspended by thanatizine as well.

  Depa was in attendance, as was I, as well as a select few others. A pair of the Akk Guards had carried her, chaise and all, in from her howdah. She lay back with one slim arm across her eyes; she was having another of her headaches, and the light from the fire of tyruun, the local wood that burns white-hot, was causing her pain. I suspect she might have preferred to skip the whole business.