The Legends of Luke Skywalker

by Ken Liu

  I took copious notes and drew sketches. Luke and I discussed my biological theories and speculations about all the mini-ecosystems we encountered along the way. We also talked about the luminous writing and drawings, and Luke explained to me that he thought they were related to the Jedi religion. The gathering of knowledge in the face of our certain doom kept us sane and gave us the drive to go on, step after step, fight after fight.

  Then one day we took a new turn and emerged in a chamber we had not been to before.

  The semispherical cavern was covered by a soft carpet of grasslike vegetation, and the entire roof glowed with a pearlescent luster that made it brighter than all the other places we had been to. An altar-like structure constructed from neatly stacked rocks dominated the far wall. Despite all the wonders we had already seen, that chamber took our breaths away.

  “I think…this was built by them,” Luke said. He did not need to explain who he meant.

  We approached the altar and saw a group of life-size sculptures on top. There were three of them: one human and two from an insectoid species. All three were dressed in flowing robes, and the carving of the folds in the clothing was so intricate that they seemed to be flapping in a breeze.

  “No sign of erosion,” Luke said. “It’s as if they were carved yesterday. I can’t even imagine how this was possible.”

  The three figures stood in a circle and were all looking up at the glowing ceiling of the dome. Though I couldn’t read the insectoid expressions, the woman’s face was in a state of calm rapture, as though praying. There was more glowing writing near the feet of the figures, though we still couldn’t read it except for the symbol that Luke thought meant “mist.”

  “Beauty is a language of its own,” Luke said. He sat down before the altar, leaned back, and admired the statues. I sat down next to him and did the same.

  “They probably made these before they died,” I said. “This was their last defiant gesture to the universe, to proclaim that they were here.”

  “That’s not a bad last message.”

  A sense of peace came over us. The weariness from days of hiking through the maze inside the space slug, always having to stay vigilant, lifted. Somehow, I could tell that we would be safe there. It was a spiritual place, a refuge.

  We fell asleep.

  “Wake up! Wake up!”

  I woke up, still confused and groggy. Luke was shaking my shoulders and pointing at the statues. I looked, and then all drowsiness left me as my heart pounded wildly.

  The three statues had moved while we were asleep, and they were looking down at us. The compound eyes of the two insectoids appeared like honeycombs while the woman’s gaze was placid and warm, the light of life shining in those silicate eyes. She was leaning toward us, her hands outstretched.

  “I…don’t understand,” I said.

  Luke took a few steps closer to the statues.

  “Don’t!” I shouted. Visions of how we had come to be inside the space slug haunted me. What if it was another trap? What if we were simply seeing what we most wanted to see? Wasn’t hope also the greatest lure and bait?

  But Luke’s face looked rapturous. “It’s safe. I can hear them.”

  “Hear them? What are you talking about?”

  He waved at me to be quiet and walked all the way up to the altar. He bowed to the three figures and then raised his supplicating hands to the woman, grasping her stone fingers.

  Luke shuddered as though struck by lightning.

  I ran over and tried to pull him off but couldn’t. His body grew stiff as his movements slowed. He seemed to have become a part of the statue as life drained out of him. I screamed in despair.

  Then he let go and fell back onto the ground, gasping. I rushed up to him and cradled his limp figure in my lap. Sweat drenched his face, and he looked as exhausted as if he had been physically exerting himself. But there was a look of pure wonder on his face.

  “I heard them. I heard them.”

  It has been a long time….

  Once, the galaxy was a different place. The stars were younger and closer to each other, and some of the spinning globes around them were still raw, unformed. But the wanderlust was just as strong and the sense of wonder as insatiable.

  The three of us, Shareen, Awglk, and Wkk’e, were master weavers of the Luminous Mist. Our art was to knot and entwine the strings of Mist that cradled all the sentient species and connected the far-flung worlds to one another to create glowing portraits of the Mist’s all-encompassing magnificence. The Mist connects all of us and grows from all of us; it endows birdsong and cwilikdance with joy; it uplifts the downtrodden with laughter; it comforts the left behind when their loved ones fuse into the Mist-Beyond; it’s the bright essence that pulses within each cell of our being, far more important than the superficiality of our rough material shells.

  We traveled around the galaxy seeking out new wonders to be depicted on our loom, to give the ineffable form and color.

  One day, we landed in a belt of stones strung out in space like a trail of crumbs in a dark forest. The sense of foreboding was palpable.

  Bright sparks flashed among the stones and danced away. Excitement. Thrills. Adventure.

  I know, a Mist-Weaver is not supposed to crave these things.

  But the heart wants what the heart wants. We followed the sparks.

  Into the trap we fell, like ships tumbling down a gravity well. We were sealed inside the belly of the beast. No crumb trails led to the way out. In circles we turned, twisting, winding, gyrating, like a shuttle caught in an endless back-and-forth that led to no new pattern, no advancement, no way through.

  We sat down, ready to die.

  Wkk’e was the one who would not give up. It was the nature of members of her species to pass from the larval stage to the adult stage by enclosing themselves inside cocoons in which the children slept and dreamed the Long Dream.

  “What if we built cocoons for ourselves out of the Luminous Mist?” she asked.

  So we wove our masterpiece, the most beautiful weaving in the history of Mist-Weavers. We spun the formless form of the Luminous Mist into resilient silk strands that contained the hidden dimensions of the universe; we twisted them into yarn that was strong enough to bind time; we wove them into a sheath that we wrapped around ourselves to slow time to a crawl—a shroud and a birth caul at once.

  Inside this cocoon, the three of us waited. We stretched one lifetime into thousands. While an eon passed in the grand universe, but a second had ticked by within. We waited as the beast that swallowed us grew. We waited as more adventurers came after us and died after their brief sojourns. We waited as we forgot what else to do, content to let time devour us, even as we sought to stop its passage.

  Once in a while, when visitors came, we pulled aside a few strands in the cocoon and let a bit of time slip in. We liked to watch the strangers.

  “This one is unusual,” said Wkk’e.

  “Yes, I sense it, too,” said Awglk. “I’ve never seen such a bright Mist Heart. It’s more brilliant than a thousand suns.”

  We admired the Bright-Heart for a while, and then I noticed something else.

  “I sense a rot in the Mist,” I said. It had been millennia since we last gazed outside the cocoon into the grand, Mist-filled universe. “There are…so many holes in the Mist. A darkness has come and corrupted it.”

  The pain of watching our beloved Mist so debased was wrenching.

  “Bright-Heart means to restore the beauty of the Mist,” I said.

  “How do you know this?” asked Wkk’e.

  “Bright-Heart wants what all bright hearts want,” I said.

  “But he’s trapped here, just as we are,” said Awglk.

  Trapped. I thought we had found a way to escape death, but we had only been lured by the fear of death into imprisoning ourselves in stasis. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the turbulent flow of time, the violent palpitations of hope. Until Bright-Heart had come.

  �
�We must offer him our help,” I said.

  And I explained how.

  Wkk’e and Awglk were silent for a while.

  Awglk asked, “Are you sure?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not sure. Were we sure of the future on the day we fell in? None of us can ever be sure of the future. But we can hope. And without hope, we’ll never know.”

  Wkk’e and Awglk responded in the way I knew they would, from the Book of Luminous Mist: “Hope is the knowing heart of Eternity.”

  “Time flows incredibly slowly for them. Even as they sped up the flow with a small slit in their cocoon, it took them all the days we’ve been trapped in the exogorth to have that short conversation.”

  Luke tried to explain the Mist-Weavers’ offer to me. He spoke of how much we still didn’t understand about the Force, of ancient wisdom and lost arts; he described the way time could be converted into energy and vice versa; he drew pictures with a stick in the mossy ground to show me how cocoons could be unwound in an instant to unleash eons of pent-up time, like a massive flood held back by a dam until released with an explosion.

  I didn’t understand most of it, to be honest. All I knew was that the Mist-Weavers had figured out a way to save us.

  “You mean there’s a way out?” I exclaimed. “That’s wonderful!”

  “They can’t unwind the cocoons themselves,” Luke said. His voice trembled, and I sensed that something terrible and momentous was being unveiled to me, even if I didn’t understand the full import of his words. “I have to cut the cocoons open with my lightsaber.”

  “Then let’s do it!” I said. The heat of hope filled my chest, drowning out the vague sense of dread.

  “You don’t understand,” Luke said. “They’ll die.”

  His words pounded against my heart, as heavy as stones. I stumbled back. “Oh.” I tried to find something more appropriate to say, but my mind was blank, overwhelmed by the revelation.

  I looked at Luke and took stock of our situation. There were lesions on our faces, and our wounds had never fully healed. The food we were eating inside the exogorth was deficient in certain nutrients and not fully compatible with our metabolism. Though we had tried to keep a positive attitude, our bodies were slowly, inexorably failing. The cocoon of decay was tightening around us, and I knew that we were growing weaker and sicker with each passing day. We weren’t going to last much longer.

  Luke’s eyes were locked on to the statues. He sat there, unmoving, as though he had turned to stone himself.

  It was one thing to sacrifice yourself for something you believed in, but how much heavier was the burden of accepting someone else’s sacrifice?

  I watched Luke’s face go through a range of emotions: sorrow, regret, terror, anger.

  I watched him pace around the chamber and remonstrate with the statues, pleading for another way.

  I watched him sinking to the ground in despair, cradling his head between his hands.

  He muttered to himself, and I caught only fragments of sentences.

  “I’ve seen too many sacrifices.…Obi-Wan…If only Master Yoda could have taught…I can’t…useless…”

  I left him alone with his thoughts and went away to collect food and water. I couldn’t stand to watch him struggle with an unbearable weight, and I didn’t know how to help him.

  When I returned, I saw that Luke was again holding hands with the statue of the woman. His body was shaking violently.

  Alarmed, I ran up to help him, but he let go and stumbled back. I caught him and held him up.

  “I once watched a dear friend, who was also my teacher, face the very embodiment of evil in a duel,” he whispered.

  I listened, knowing that no response was required.

  “He knew that he couldn’t overcome his opponent by force, and yet he needed to save me and our friends. So when he saw that I was near the ship that would take us to safety, he stopped fighting and allowed his opponent to cut him down. But in fact, he had released himself from this world and become part of the Force. What the enemy had cut down was only an empty cloak.”

  I could only imagine what an awe-inspiring scene was summarized by those simple words.

  “Surprised, the enemy focused all his attention on the discarded cloak, forgetting about me and my friends. That was my teacher’s intent: to use himself as a lure to distract the monster. We escaped, and I have never been able to forget the look my teacher gave me before he died.”

  Luke’s voice was growing stronger. He had emerged from the wrenching struggle within his heart.

  “It was a look of pure peace and contentment. No fear, no anger, no regret, no sorrow. He became stronger than his enemy could possibly imagine because he knew it was time to let go. He trusted the Force. It was a lesson I still have a hard time accepting….”

  He pointed at the statues. “Do you see her face? That’s the exact same expression my friend and teacher had before he faded into the Force.”

  Luke turned on his lightsaber and gently plunged it into the opening between the three statues. Sizzling arcs of energy connected the lightsaber with Luke and with the Mist-Weavers.

  There was no fear in his eyes, or regret, or anger. Only a deep, abiding reverence.

  The statues glowed brighter and brighter. I could feel the heat emanating from them. I pulled back instinctively and tried to pull Luke after me.

  “No,” he said. “It’s all right. Let go of your fears.” His voice was suffused with utter faith and trust.

  He gestured that I should pull down the visor of my helmet, and I did so.

  The statues appeared to be made of molten iron. They were so bright and gave off so much heat that I had to shield my face. And still they glowed even brighter.

  With a quick, agile side step, Luke slashed the lightsaber down, as though cutting through a sheath shimmering between the glowing figures.

  Turning off his lightsaber, he stepped back and bowed deeply to the statues before pulling down his visor.

  I risked peeking through the cracks between my fingers. The statues were coming to life, as though they were melting wax figures. The woman embraced her companions, and I could not tell if her expression was one of sorrow or joy.

  Then her face settled into a tranquil smile, and I saw nothing in her eyes but resolution.

  Now, she seemed to say.

  Luke spread his arms to shelter me.

  And the world disappeared around me with the light of a thousand newborn stars.

  There was a new, gigantic crater in the side of the asteroid. We lay on its rim, gasping in our suits, like two fish that had been tossed onto the beach by the tide.

  Later, after we stumbled back to the safety of the A-wing and Luke took off his helmet, I saw wet streaks on his face.

  “There are patterns in the Force, like the rise and fall of the tide,” he said. Maybe he was talking to himself; maybe he was talking to me. “Deeds from the past echo in the present. The Mist-Weavers were lured here eons ago by bright sparks; we were lured here by the same lights. My teacher once acted as a lure to save me; we saved ourselves from the flock of monsters with another lure. My teacher freed himself from fear and doubt to save me; the Mist-Weavers freed themselves from fear and stasis to save us. I once watched as my teacher died, feeling helpless; only now do I understand that accepting the sacrifice of those who love us and share our ideals is the first step to becoming more powerful than we can possibly imagine.”

  It was, in truth, a speech too mystical for me to fully grasp. I was never well versed in the tenets of the ancient religion of the Force.

  But I thought back to the way Luke had kept the flames of hope in me alive; the way he had protected me and rescued me, even when it put him in harm’s way; the way he had made sure that I didn’t stop admiring the wonders around me. He was my friend, and I was grateful that his sacrifices had freed me from the trap of despair and the lure of dejection to love the galaxy more.

  I understood enough.

  �
��I’m sorry all your notes were destroyed during the escape,” Luke said.

  We were on an ice-covered lake on Agoliba-Ena, where I was determined to complete the study.

  “There will be other chances,” I said. “I’m thinking of switching to exogorths as my specialty.”

  “You haven’t had enough of being inside one?”

  “It will take a long time to digest everything I’ve seen, and who knows what wonders are hidden inside others?”

  “There is always more knowledge to seek in the galaxy,” he said, a grin of understanding on his face.

  I nodded and stepped back.

  The A-wing took off, leaving behind a melted, slushy trail on the lake. I watched it disappear into the sky, knowing that I would have to face an uphill battle for the rest of my life to get people to believe what I had seen. The inside of the space slug was big—really, really big, like the universe hidden inside each of us, like the eternity curled inside each second.

  The galaxy is knowable, and that’s what makes it wondrous.

  But it didn’t matter. It was enough to have glimpsed what no one else had seen. It was enough to have witnessed the Mist that suffused the universe parting for one second to reveal the bright heart of wonder and hope underneath.

  THE FATHIERS MOANED FROM TIME to time in their slumber. Who knew what kind of dreams they dreamed?

  The Wayward Current glided out of the sky over Canto Bight like a drifting leaf and touched down gently among the glittering pleasure domes connected by necklaces of arched walkways. Nestled at the feet of towering mountains next to the shore, the city was like a bejeweled empress seated on her throne, dipping her toes into the sea.

  Armies of heavy stevedore droids swung into motion, connecting air hoses, supply chutes, cargo conveyer belts, and water and sewage pipes.

  The sluices at the stern of the ship opened, and torrents of fresh, clean water poured into the bilge, dissolving and diluting the filthy sludge as garbage and grease slicks floated on the rising surface. At the other end of the ship, the bow, the round access port whirled open, and the grimy tide, filled with dead vegicus, space barnacles that couldn’t hold on to the hull, yearling bilge-water lobsters, and three young deckhands, a stowaway, and a custodian droid, spilled out of the ship into a wide sewage pipe.