She put her hand between the lips of the mouth-like sensor receptacle beside the hatch sphincter, and the warted pucker of the hatch gaped wide.
"Everything I tell you is a lie," she said, and stepped through.
The Embrace of Pain gathered him once more into the white.
Jacen Solo hangs in the white, thinking.
For an infinite instant, he is merely amazed that he can think; the white has scoured his consciousness for days, or weeks, or centuries, and he is astonished now to discover that he can not only think, but think clearly.
He spends a white eon, marveling.
Then he goes to work on the lesson of pain.
This is it, he thinks. This is what Vergere was talking about. This is the help she gave me, that I didn't know how to accept.
She has freed him from his own trap: the trap of childhood. The trap of waiting for someone else. Waiting for Dad, or Mother, Uncle Luke, Jaina, Zekk or Lowie or Tenel Ka or any of the others whom he could always count on to fly to his rescue.
He is not helpless. He is only alone.
It's not the same thing.
He doesn't have to simply hang here and suffer. He can do something.
Her shadowmoth tale may have been a lie, but within the lie was a truth he could not have comprehended without it. Was that what she had meant when she said, Everything I tell you is a lie?
Did it matter?
Pain is itself a god: the taskmaster of life. Pain cracks the whip, and all that lives will move. To live is to be a slave to pain.
He knows the truth of this, not only from his own life but from watching Dad and Anakin, after Chewie's death. He watched pain crack its whip over his father, and watched Han run from that pain halfway across the galaxy.
He watched Anakin turn hard, watched him drive himself like a loadlifter, always pushing himself to be stronger, faster, more effective, to do more--this was the only answer he had to the pain of having survived to watch his rescuer die.
Jacen always thought of Anakin as being a lot like Uncle Luke: his mechanical aptitude, his piloting and fighting skills, his stark warrior's courage. He can see now that in one important way, Anakin was more like his father. His only answer to pain was to keep too busy to notice it.
Running from the taskmaster.
To live is to be a slave to pain.
But that is only half true; pain can also be a teacher. Jacen can remember hour after hour of dragging his aching muscles through one more repetition of his lightsaber training routines. He remembers practicing the more advanced stances, how much it hurt to work his body in ways he'd never worked it before, to lower his center of gravity, loosen his hips, train his legs to coil and spring like a sand panther's. He remembers Uncle Luke saying, if it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it right. Even the stinger bolts of a practice remote--sure, his goal had been always to intercept or dodge the stingers, but the easiest way to avoid that pain would have been to quit training.
Sometimes pain is the only bridge to where you want to go.
And the worst pains are the ones you can't run away from, anyway. He knows his mother's tale so well that he has seen it in his dreams: standing on the bridge of the Death Star, forced to watch while the battle station's main weapon destroyed her entire planet. He has felt her all-devouring horror, denial, and blistering helpless rage, and he has some clue how much of her relentless dedication to the peace of the galaxy is driven by the memory of those billions of lives wiped from existence before her eyes.
And Uncle Luke: if he hadn't faced the pain of finding his foster parents brutally murdered by Imperial stormtroopers, he might have spent his whole life as an unhappy moisture farmer, deep in the Tatooine sand-wastes, dreaming of adventures he would never have--and the galaxy might groan under Imperial rule to this very day.
Pain can be power, too, Jacen realizes. Power to change things for the better. That's how change happens: someone hurts, and sooner or later decides to do something about it.
Suffering is the fuel in the engine of civilization.
Now he begins to understand: because pain is a god--he has been in the grip of this cruel god ever since Anakin's death. But it is also a teacher, and a bridge. It can be a slave master, and break you--and it can be the power that makes you unbreakable. It is all these things, and more.
At the same time.
What it is depends on who you are.
But who am I? he wonders. I've been running like Dad--like Anakin. I think they stopped, though; I think Dad was strong enough to turn back and face it, to use the pain to make himself stronger, like Mom and Uncle Luke. Anakin did, too, at the end. Am I that strong?
There's only one way to find out.
For indefinite days, weeks, centuries, the white has been eating him.
Now, he begins to eat the white.
Executor Nom Anor toyed idly with a sacworm of dragweed broth while he waited for the shaper drone to finish its report. He sat human-style on a fleshy hump to one side of the unusually large villip to which the drone addressed its monotonous, singsong analysis of the Embrace chamber's readings on the young Jedi, Jacen Solo.
Nom Anor had no need to pay attention. He knew already what the drone would say; he had composed the report himself. This particular Embrace chamber was equipped with an exceptionally sophisticated nerve-web of sensors, which could read the electrochemical output of Jacen Solo's nerves down to each individual impulse and compare the pain they registered with its effects on his brain chemistry. The shaper drone mumbled on and on in its description of minute details of its data collection, and its deadly dull murmur was excruciating...
Perhaps that's why we call them drones, Nom Anor thought with a humorless interior smile. He did not share this observation with the third occupant of the small, moist chamber. It wasn't even a joke in any language but Basic, and it wasn't that funny, anyway.
Instead he simply sat, sipping broth occasionally from the sacworm, watching the villip, waiting for Warmaster Tsavong Lah to lose his patience.
With vegetative accuracy, the villip conveyed the physical features of the warmaster: his tall narrow skull, bulging braincase, dangerously sharp teeth bristling within his lipless gash of a mouth, as well as the proud array of scars that defined his devotion to the True Way
.
Nom Anor reflected idly how well some of those intricately scarified designs would look on his own face. Not that he had any real interest in the True Way
beyond its use as a political tool; from long experience, he knew that the appearance of piety was vastly more useful than its reality could ever be.
The villip also captured perfectly the frightening intensity of Tsavong Lah's fanatic glare.
That gleam of faith's power in his eye was the reflection of an inner conviction the like of which Nom Anor could only imagine: to know, beyond the possibility of doubt, that the True Gods stood at his shoulder, guiding his hand in Their service. To know that all truth, all justice, all right, shone from the True Gods like stellar wind, illuminating the universe.
The warmaster was a true believer.
To Nom Anor, faith was an extravagance. He knew too well how easily such true believers could be manipulated by those who believe in nothing but themselves.
This was, in fact, his specialty.
The moment he'd been waiting for came during the drone's exhaustive point-by-point cross-species interpolation between Jacen Solo's readings and those of three different control subjects, all Yuuzhan Vong: one warrior caste, one priest caste, and one shaper caste, each of whom had earlier undergone excruciation by the very same Embrace of Pain in which the young Jedi now hung.
Anger gathered upon Tsavong Lah's villip image like the ion peak that precedes a solar flare.
Finally, his patience broke. "Why is my time wasted with this babble?"
The shaper drone stiffened, glancing nervously at Nom Anor. "This data is extremely significant..."
"Not to me. Am I a shaper? I have no
interest in raw data--tell me what it means!"
Nom Anor sat forward. "With the warmaster's permission, I may perhaps be of some service here."
The villip twisted fractionally to fix Nom Anor with the warmaster's glare.
"You had better," he said. "My patience is limited--and you personally, Executor, have required too much of it already in recent days. You swing from a thin vine, Nom Anor, and it continues to fray."
"All apologies to the warmaster," Nom Anor said smoothly. He gestured dismissal to the drone, which made a hasty obeisance toward the villip, triggered the room's hatch sphincter, and scuttled away. "I mean only to offer analysis; interpretation is my specialty."
"Your specialty is propaganda and lies," Tsavong Lah rasped.
As if there were a difference. Nom Anor shrugged and smiled amiably: gestures he had learned from his impersonations of the human species. He exchanged one quick glance with the other occupant of the chamber--his partner in the Solo Project--then directed his gaze back to the villip.
"The import of the Embrace chamber's data is exactly this: Jacen Solo has become capable of not only accepting torment, but thriving on it. As the warmaster will recall, I predicted such a result. He has discovered resources within himself of the sort that we find only in our greatest warriors."
"And?" The warmaster glared. "Make your point."
"It will work," Nom Anor said simply. "That is the point. The only point. Based on our current figures, Jacen Solo will inevitably--provided he lives--turn to the True Way
with his whole heart."
"This has been attempted before," Tsavong Lah growled. "The Jeedai Wurth Skidder, and the Jeedai Tahiri on Yavin Four. The results were less than satisfactory."
"Shapers," Nom Anor snorted derisively.
"Mind your tongue, if you would keep it in your mouth. The shaper caste is holy unto Yun-Yuuzhan."
"Of course, of course. No disrespect intended, naturally. I only mean to point out, with the warmaster's permission, that the methods used in the Tahiri disaster were crude physical alterations--possibly heretical." Nom Anor leaned on the word.
Tsavong Lah's face darkened.
"They were performing sacrilegious research," Nom Anor went on. "They tried to make her into a Yuuzhan Vong--as though a slave can be altered into one of the Chosen Race. Is this not blasphemy? The ensuing slaughter was far kinder than they deserved, as the warmaster will no doubt agree."
"Not at all," Tsavong Lah countered. "It was precisely what they deserved. Whatever the Gods decree is the definition of justice."
"As you say," Nom Anor conceded easily. "No such heresy will take place in the Solo Project. The process with Jacen Solo is precisely the opposite: he will remain fully human, yet acknowledge and proclaim the Truth. We will not have to alter or destroy him in any way. We merely demonstrate; he will do the rest himself."
The warmaster's image chilled over with calculation. "You still have not made clear why I should desire this. Everything you have told me implies that he would make an even greater sacrifice than I had dreamed. Explain why I should await this promised conversion. Should he die in the process, I will have broken an oath to the True Gods: cheated them of their due sacrifice. The True Gods are unforgiving to oathbreakers, Nom Anor."
You couldn't prove it by me, Nom Anor thought smugly, but he spoke with utmost respect. "The symbolic importance of Jacen Solo cannot be overestimated, Warmaster. First, he is Jedi--and the Jedi stand in place of gods in the New Republic. They are looked to as surrogate parents, gifted with vast abilities that legend further magnifies beyond all reason; their purpose is to fight and die for the New Republic's debased, infidel perversions of truth and justice. Jacen Solo is already a legendary hero. His exploits, even as a child and a youth, are known throughout the galaxy; together with those of his sister--his twin sister--they rival even those of Yun-Harla and Yun-Yammka..."
"You utter such blasphemies too easily," Tsavong Lah grated.
"Do I?" Nom Anor smiled. "And yet the True Gods do not see fit to strike me down; perhaps what I say is not blasphemy at all--as you shall see."
The warmaster only glared at him stonily.
"Jacen Solo is also the eldest son of the galaxy's leading clan. His mother was, for a time, the New Republic's Supreme Overlord..."
"For a time? How is this possible? Why would her successor let her live?"
"Does the warmaster truly wish a disquisition upon the New Republic's perverse system of government? It has to do with a bizarre concept called democracy, in which ruling power is given to whoever is most skillful at directing the herd instincts of the largest masses of their most ignorant citizens..."
"Their politics are your concern," Tsavong Lah growled. "Their fighting strength is mine."
"The two are, in this case, more closely related than the warmaster might suspect. For a quarter of a standard century, the Solo family has dominated galactic affairs of all kinds. Even the warmaster of the Jedi is none other than Jacen Solo's uncle. This uncle, Luke Skywalker, is popularly considered to have single-handedly created the New Republic by defeating an older, much more rational government called the Empire. And, I might add, it is fortunate for us that he did; the Empire was vastly more organized, powerful, and potently militaristic. Lacking the internal divisions we have exploited so successfully in the New Republic, the Empire could have crushed our people utterly in their first encounter."
Tsavong Lah bristled. "The True Gods would never have allowed such a defeat!"
"Precisely my point," Nom Anor countered. "They didn't. Instead, Luke Skywalker, the Solos, and the Rebel Alliance destroyed the Empire, leaving the galaxy in a state of disarray, a power vacuum that we could exploit--for even then, the Solo clan served the True Gods without ever knowing it!"
For the first time, Tsavong Lah began to look interested.
"Now, imagine," Nom Anor said, scenting blood, "the effect on the morale of the remaining New Republic forces when this Jedi, this hero, this scion of the greatest clan of their entire civilization, announces to all his people that they have been deceived by their leaders: that the True Gods are the only gods...that the True Way
is the only way!"
The villip conveyed perfectly a spark kindling in the warmaster's eyes.
"We hurt them when we took their capital, but we did not kill their spirit,” he murmured. "This would be gangrene in the wound of Coruscant."
"Yes."
"The New Republic could sicken, and finally die."
"Yes."
"You are certain that you can make Jacen Solo submit to the Truth?"
"Warmaster," Nom Anor said intensely, "it is already happening. Jacen and Jaina Solo are twins, yet male and female, complementary opposites. Don't you see it? Yun-Yammka and Yun-Harla. Warrior and Trickster. Jacen Solo will become one half of the Twin Gods--to fight in service of the God he is! He will be proof no creature of the New Republic could ever refute."
"This may have value," Tsavong Lah admitted.
"May?" Nom Anor said. "May? Warmaster, you have personally performed every sacrifice the True Gods demand for victory...every sacrifice save one..."
The spark in the warmaster's eyes suddenly blazed into a fusion furnace.
"The Great Sacrifice--you speak of the Sacrifice of the Twins!"
"Yes. You yourself, Warmaster, must have wondered in your heart of hearts, must have doubted the True Gods' promise of victory, when the final sacrifice could not be performed."
"The True Gods do not mock, and They do not promise in vain," the warmaster intoned piously.
"But Their gifts are not given," Nom Anor said. "You know this. They require that we earn them: that we bring Their prophecies to pass."
"Yes."
"And so on that great day, Jacen Solo will himself capture his sister, his twin--he will drag her to the altar, and he will himself take her life in the Great Twin Sacrifice, and the will of the True Gods shall finally be brought to pass."
"The True Gods' will be done!" Tsavong Lah thundered.
"The True Gods' will be done," Nom Anor agreed.
"You will do this."
"Yes, Warmaster."
"You will not fail."
"If it be within my power, Warmaster..."
"No," Tsavong Lah said. "You do not understand. I tell you, Nom Anor, you will not fail. The True Gods are not mocked. Should Jacen Solo not turn to the True Path, no breath of this can be whispered; no hint of this can be thought. For Nom Anor, there is only victory; lacking victory, the creature that is currently called by the name Nom Anor shall be sacrificed to the True Gods as a nameless thing."
Nom Anor swallowed. "Ah, Warmaster...?"
Tsavong Lah went on inexorably. "All who have breathed the air of this plan shall die, screaming and without names, and their bones shall be scattered to drift between the stars. In every Name of all True Gods, this is my word."
Abruptly, the villip inverted to its quiescent state, folding in upon itself with wet slaps like raw meat smacking bone.
Nom Anor sat back, and discovered that he was trembling. This was not quite how he had expected matters to go. There's the trouble with fanatics, he thought. They're easy to manipulate, but somehow they take everything five steps too far.
He took a long sip of the dragweed broth in the sacworm that he had held, forgotten, throughout the interview. He turned to the other occupant of the small chamber.
"Well, now we are partners in truth: together, we face either total victory or utter destruction," he said heavily. "We are, as the Corellians say, off to a flying start."
Across the quiescent villip, his partner met his gaze with unblinking avian calm.
"Well begun," Vergere said neutrally, "is half done."
TWO
THE NURSERY
Deep in the infinite space above the plane of the galactic ecliptic--in the spark-scattered velvet so far from any stellar system that the place was not, strictly speaking, even a place at all, only a statistical array of vectors and velocities--a small vessel of yorik coral dropped from hyperspace. It was so far from any observable point of fixed reference that its motion was arbitrary: on an Obroa-skai referent, the vessel streaked away at a respectable fraction of lightspeed; referent to Tatooine it swung in a long, lazy arc; referent to Coruscant it infell, gathering velocity.
Star Wars - The New Jedi Order - Traitor Page 3