Shatterpoint

by Matthew W. Stover

  I told him he was half wrong.

  “Which half?”

  Depa answered for me. “The part about letting Kar win.”

  She knows me so well.

  “You mean he really beat you?” Nick couldn’t seem to believe it. “He really, really beat you?”

  “We share a bond in the Force now, Nick. Did it feel like I threw the fight?”

  He shook his head. “It felt like you were a smazzo drummer’s trap skin.”

  “As you said earlier: Vastor is a difficult man to lie to. He would have known if I was holding back. Then the beating would have been much worse, and he might very well have killed me. What I did was pick a fight I knew I couldn’t win.”

  “Couldn’t?”

  “Vastor is… very powerful. Half my age and twice my size. Training and experience can compensate only up to a point. And he is naturally ferocious in a way that no Jedi can duplicate.”

  “You’re telling me you twisted his nose like that, knowing he was gonna beat you so bad your whole family would bleed?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t have to win. All I had to do was fight.”

  “Kar’s shatterpoint,” Depa murmured. “You saw it all along.”

  I nodded. Nick wasn’t familiar with the term; when I described shatterpoint as a critical weakness, he shook his head. “I didn’t see anything weak out there.”

  With a sidelong glance at Depa’s thoughtful frown, I quoted Yoda: “You see, but you do not see.

  “Kar’s great strength is his instinctive connection to pelekotan. The jungle lives in him as much as he lives in it. And like I keep telling you: even in the jungle, there are rules.”

  I explained that a fight between Kar and myself was inevitable: two alpha males in the same pack. I could smell it on him even during the battle at the outpost when we first met. My only hope of a good outcome was to make it personal and immediate.

  And unarmed.

  If the fight hadn’t happened, he and the Akk Guards might very well have killed Nick and me both for setting free the prisoners. If he and I had gone at it blade to shield, I would be dead now—even if I’d killed him, the guards and the dogs would have torn me to shreds—and Depa, too, if she’d tried to save me; we’d only barely survived being attacked by three akks in the Circus Horrificus.

  Against a dozen—

  Well. It didn’t happen that way. Because I knew what Kar really wanted, in the grip, as he was, of his alpha-male jungle instincts.

  He wanted me to submit.

  And like many other pack hunters, once his rival submitted, his instincts led him to allow that rival to peacefully sniff around the fringes of his pack—so long as I did not renew my challenge.

  “That’s why you gave him your lightsaber? So he wouldn’t feel threatened?”

  I shook my head, and for a moment I was tempted to smile. “No, I would have let him cut it up.”

  “You would?”

  “If it would make him more comfortable with letting me stay? Of course. A lightsaber can be repaired or rebuilt. But I admit, Depa’s idea was a stroke of genius.”

  She smiled at me. “I am a bit proud of myself for that.”

  Nick again expressed his confusion, and I explained. “Even with the Force, I can’t pick Kar out from the jungle around us. He is so much a part of it, and it of him, that he is practically invisible. My lightsaber, on the other hand—”

  “I get it!” Nick breathed. “As long as he carries it—”

  “Exactly.” I could feel it even now: I knew without thinking its precise position relative to my own. “It is a bell collar that Depa managed to buckle onto a singularly ferocious vine cat.”

  “Wow. I mean, wow. Y’know, everybody hears about how scary Jedi are—but those stories aren’t the half of it,” he said. “Your real powers don’t have anything to do with lightsabers or picking up things with your minds…” Nick shook his head uncomprehendingly. “It’s not natural—not just taking the beating, but bowing down like that… and being able to come up with stuff like giving Kar the lightsaber—”

  “It requires a certain detachment of mind. When your emotions are not involved, answers are often obvious.”

  “It’s still not natural. Can I just say, here, how much you two creep me out?”

  “When I was Mace’s student,” Depa mused, “he would often remind me that nothing about being a Jedi is natural.”

  “I thought you guys were all about going with the flow and using your instincts and stuff…”

  “The difference,” I said, “lies in the instincts themselves. It is possible for an untrained Force-user to wield as much power as the greatest of Jedi—look at Kar. But untrained, the instincts he falls back on are those granted him by nature. It is another of the central paradoxes of the Jedi: the ‘instincts’ we use are not instinctive at all. They are the product of training so intense that they replace our natural ones. That’s why Jedi must begin at such an early age. To replace our natural instincts—territoriality, selfishness, anger, fear, and the like—with the Jedi ‘instincts’ of service, serenity, selflessness, and compassion. The oldest child ever accepted for training was nine—and there was much debate over that. A debate that has continued, I might add, for more than ten years.

  “Being a Jedi is a discipline imposed upon nature, just as civilization is, at its root, a discipline imposed upon the natural impulses of sentient beings.

  “Because peace is an unnatural state.

  “Peace is a product of civilization. The myth of the peaceful savage is precisely that: a myth. Without civilization, all existence is only the jungle. Go to your peaceful savage and burn his crops, or slaughter his herds, or kick him off his hunting grounds. You’ll find that he will not remain peaceful for long. Isn’t that exactly what happened here on Haruun Kal?

  “Jedi do not fight for peace. That’s only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace. We fight for justice because justice is the fundamental bedrock of civilization: an unjust civilization is built upon sand. It does not long survive a storm.

  “Kar’s power comes from natural instinct—but he is also ruled by instinct, in a way no Jedi ever is. A single Jedi who succumbs to his natural drives for power, for respect, for success or revenge, could do damage that is literally unimaginable.”

  “Mace,” Depa interrupted me softly, “are we still talking about Kar? Or is this about Dooku?”

  Or, I wondered silently, was it about her?…

  I sighed and lowered my head, suddenly aware of how exhausted I was. But still I finished the thought, less for Nick’s benefit than for Depa’s.

  And my own.

  “Our only hope, against beings whose instincts control them, is to absolutely and utterly control our own.”

  Chapter 13: Jedi of the Future

  Night in the jungle.

  Korun bedrolls scattered in clumps. Low voices blending into the background mutter of the jungle. Smells of hotpack ration squares and smoke from homemade cigarras of green rashallo leaves.

  Mace sat on a borrowed bedroll a few meters from where Depa’s wallet tent had been pitched in an abandoned ruskakk nest under a tangled arch of thyssel bushes. While Nick treated his injuries, he had been watching her vague silhouette cast on the tent wall by the light of a captured glow rod.

  When the light winked out, it was as though she’d never even been there.

  The muddy pastel pulse of glowvine light had Nick squinting at the medpac’s scanner. “Looks like we took care of your internal bleeding,” he said. “One more shot of anti-inflammatory, to keep the concussion swelling in your brain under control…”

  Mace leaned his head to one side as Nick pressed the spray hypo against his carotid artery. The Jedi Master stared sightlessly off through the night; he didn’t even feel the brief sting of the injection.

  He was tracking his lightsaber.

  “He’s not settling,” Mace
said.

  “Who’s not what?”

  “Vastor. He’s pacing. Circling. Like a rancor staked out in the desert.”

  “You surprised?”

  “I shouldn’t be. He probably senses that even though the fight was real, my submission was fake. He’s just not sure what to do about it.”

  Nick clipped the spray hypo back into its receptacle. “Unless your idea of fun is quality time with me and a medpac, I’d suggest you stay out of his way.” He tapped the bacta patch that covered the bite wound on Mace’s trapezius. “You wouldn’t believe how many different kinds of lethal bacteria I found in there. I do not want to know what he’s been eating.”

  “I am less concerned with what he’s eating,” Mace said, “than with what’s eating him.”

  “One easy guess.” Nick nodded toward Depa’s tent. “How is she?”

  Mace shrugged. “As you saw.”

  “No—I mean, that whole dark side crap. Like what we were talking about before I left you at the outpost.”

  “I… can’t say.” Mace’s habitual frown deepened. “I would like to say she’s fine. But what I would like has little to do with what is. She seems… unstable.”

  “Well, y’know, a few months in the war could do that to anybody.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU

  I am not sure what time it is. After midnight, I suspect, with some hours to go before dawn. I cannot be more accurate, as this datapad’s chronometer function has suffered the same fate as its concealed transmitter. There is a time of night here when even the glowvines mute their light, and the prowling predators go quiet, and sleep seems the only activity that has meaning.

  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 WINDU

  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 brassvines, 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 WINDU

  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 ghôsh Windu—separates their fate from my own.

  I could too easily have grown to become Kar Vastor 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.”