Coral smokes, dying, liquefying instantly. The shard of the Great Door begins to melt. Blast bugs zing toward him from the warriors, and the melting shard dances before him, deflecting them into the acid-burned wall. Their explosions splash liquid coral and duracrete splinters. Above their heads, the building groans. Warriors flinch, glancing upward in sudden fear. The tank beast howls.
Ganner laughs. The Force is with him, and he has become once more the dancer. He has become the dance. With the Force, he reaches into the duracrete around them all, and he begins to shove.
Jacen was surprised by life. The teeth of the World Brain had not closed upon him. Its tentacles had not ripped the flesh from his bones. He had not drowned in the slime pool, asphyxiating on phosphorescent goo. No Yuuzhan Vong warriors swarmed around him to drag him from the slime and carve the life from him with amphistaffs.
Instead, a bubble of air had formed around him, and tentacles had cradled him like a sleeping child, and lips had closed over sword-edged teeth to touch him with a kiss. Because he was the World Brain, and the World Brain was him, and each was everything else, and Jacen had learned that one can meet the Universe and all its irrational pain--which means meeting oneself--with fear, or with hatred, or with despair. Or one can choose to meet it with love. Jacen had chosen.
But still, he was astonished to discover that the Universe could love him back.
At the far end of an infinite distance--which was the same as right here--he felt an oceanic roll of the Force gathering an interstellar fortissimo of symphonic joy; at the same time, within the hollow at his center, he felt rage and pain and fierce hot combat, and he understood another reason why he was still alive.
Ganner... He reached out with his feelings and gathered power from across the Universe. Tentacles fell away from his arms and legs, and the air bubble around him collapsed. He brushed the World Brain lightly with his fingertips: a good-bye to a friend. Then Jacen Solo shot from the slime pool as though fired from a torpedo launcher. He burst into the brimstone smoke, his robe blazing with slime that trailed from him in shining ropes and dripped like falling stars; he sailed over the slime pool to alight at the bowl rim, where the coral met the bare durasteel of a Senate platform. He lifted his head, fixing his gaze upon the cantilevered bridgeway that stuck out into the Well like a tongue, a tongue from a mouth that belched smoke and scarlet flame and the amethyst lightning of a lightsaber biting flesh. And he could hear a human voice up there. He could not make out words, but the tone was unmistakable.
Ganner was laughing. Deep in the Force, Jacen seized that bridgeway with the hands of his mind. One long, smooth tug would lift him to it, and he could reach Ganner's side, and join in his fight, stand at his shoulder against the Yuuzhan Vong...
"Jacen, wait."
The words were spoken not loudly, but so perfectly resonant that they chimed in his ear as though the speaker were at his side. And she might as well have been: in the Force he felt an invisible hand take his shoulder. He nodded to himself. "I should have known, somehow. I should have known you'd be here."
Vergere stood only a few meters above and to his right, on the coral-draped Senate platform that had once belonged to the delegation from Kashyyyk.
"Come, Jacen. Your sojourn in the lands of the dead is at an end. It is time once more to walk the bright fields of day."
Instead of answering, he turned back toward the bridgeway above--but her Force grip tightened on his shoulder. "You cannot save him, Jacen. All you can do is die with him. He has chosen this destiny. The only aid you can offer is to honor his choice. You stand at the very gates of death; life lies before you. If you turn back now--even for a single glance over your shoulder--you are lost."
"What do you want me to do? I won't leave him! I won't!" He turned on her. A wave of trembling started at the back of his neck and shivered out through his arms and down his legs. "I can't let people keep giving their lives for me!"
"He does not give his life for you. He gives your life to you. Will you refuse the gift of a dying man?"
"I can't... Vergere, I can't just..."
"In the story of your life, is this your best ending?"
He reached into the Force and gave a wrenching shove that twisted him free of her grip. "I won't leave him."
She shrugged. "Then you'll be wanting this." She tossed something down to him. It spun lazily through the air, flashing silver in the slimelight; he caught it instinctively.
It was a lightsaber. It was his lightsaber. It felt strange in his hand. Weird. Alien. He had not seen it since the death of the voxyn queen. The last time he'd held it, he'd been somebody else. A boy. A sad, conflicted boy, searching desperately for anything he could be sure of, willing to die on a sure nothing rather than live for an uncertain something.
She said, "Choose, and act."
He looked at the flare of battle above. He ached to go, burned to go, to find in himself the pure release, the cosmic symphony that he could feel echoing through Ganner... but...
He looked back at Vergere. "Every time you say that to me, it's a trick."
"As it is now," she admitted. "But it's not the same trick. The first time, you were but a boy. You did not truly understand what you were throwing away. The second time you were lost in the dark, and you needed flint and steel to spark a torch. Now, though--now, what are you, Jacen Solo?"
In an instant, it all flashed through him, from Sernpidal and Belkadan through Duro and Myrkr to the Embrace of Pain, the Nursery, the Jedi Temple, and the cavern beast...
He was no warrior, he was certain of that. Not like Jaina was, or Anakin had been. He was no hero like Uncle Luke or his father, no great statesman like his mother or strategist like Admiral Ackbar or scientist like Danni Quee... He remembered that he didn't have to know what he was. All he had to do was decide.
"I... I guess..." he said slowly, frowning down at the weapon in his hand. "I guess... I'm a student."
"Perhaps you are." Vergere nodded. "Then you are also a teacher, for the two are one. But to be such, you must learn, and you must teach. You must live."
She was right. He knew she was right. He could feel it as surely as he'd ever felt anything.
But Ganner... As he looked up, a new sun was born in the Well of the World Brain, somewhere deep in the tunnel above, a rising yellow glare that grew bright, and white, that flared until Jacen had to shield his eyes with his hand and turn away. The Well shook, and he could feel sudden terror from the World Brain as the cantilevered bridgeway and platform collapsed, plunging a hundred meters to crash into the slime pool, and the world seemed to rock and tremble, and a blast of smoke and dust burst from the tunnel...
"What..." Jacen gasped, coughing in the dust that smelled of burning blood and duracrete, "...what...? Is that Ganner? What's happening up there?"
"It may be Ganner. It may be a weapon of the Yuuzhan Vong. It makes no difference. Your choice is the same: stay, or go."
The glare from above died in a long groundquake rumble and new billows of dust, and when Jacen reached out once more through the Force, Ganner was no longer there. In the hollow of his chest, the warriors who had fought him were similarly absent. Jacen stared up at the mouth of the tunnel. He could see it now, choked with rubble. Then the platforms around it began to sag, to crumble, and slide down the bowl toward the slime pool. Even the gloom-shrouded ceiling high above seemed to droop, and he felt a warm hand on his shoulder, and heard a warm whisper in his ear: Go.
It sounded like Ganner. He frowned at Vergere. She returned his gaze blankly. He would never know what had happened up there. He would never know if that voice he'd just heard had been Ganner's, or another of Vergere's tricks. He would never really know--could never really know--much of anything. Truth is elusive, and questions are more useful than answers.
But he knew this: life is more a matter of choosing than of knowing. He could never know the eventual destination of his path, but he could always choose in which direction to take each step.
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He chose.
"You're the one who's supposed to be my guide through the lands of the dead, right?" he said. "So go ahead and guide. Show me the way out of here."
She smiled down upon him fondly. "Of course," she said. "I was only waiting for you to ask."
EPILOGUE
LESSONS
Jacen reclined on a couch beast in the coralcraft's cargo stomach, staring through the clear curve of a corneal port at the vast noncolor of hyperspace.
Vergere sat curled up in feline repose on the other side of the room. She might have been napping, but Jacen doubted it. He still hadn't seen her sleep. Every time he looked at her, he remembered coming to the coralcraft hidden below the Well, remembered finding Nom Anor tied up like a field-dressed nerf. He remembered how the Yuuzhan Vong executor had begged to be taken along.
"Leaving me here... that's the same as murder!"
Jacen had turned his back and walked onto the coralcraft, stone-faced. "Don't think of it as murder," he'd said. "Think of it as your Blessed Release."
Once Nom Anor had understood that no plea would help, his pleading had turned to curses. He'd insisted that only his protection had allowed either of them to live this long.
"Take her with you, yes, you vile little traitor," he spat at Jacen. "One traitor deserves another."
Vergere had answered cheerfully, "And what did you expect? How was I to teach treason, had I not learned it already myself?"
And yet, Jacen reflected, there was truth in the epithet traitor. She and he had both lied, had both deceived, had both pretended loyalty to serve their own ends.
Funny how when Vergere was around, even straight-forward concepts like treason became slippery. Every once in a while he took another sip from his sacworm of dragweed broth or thoughtfully scooped the flesh from another clip beetle. He wondered idly how his stomach would react to regular old synthsteak and protato.
He couldn't remember what regular food tasted like. He wondered what Jaina might be eating right now, and for an instant he was tempted to open himself to their twin bond... But he didn't. He couldn't. Not yet. He wasn't ready.
What could he possibly tell her? What information could pass through the bond that would even hint at who he had become? And more than that: he was afraid to find out what she might have become. He didn't know what he was going to tell people once he got back to New Republic space.
He couldn't imagine facing his mother. Or his father. Or Uncle Luke. He couldn't imagine trying to explain how Ganner Rhysode had died. He had brooded about Ganner quite a bit during the first few days of their voyage. He couldn't reconcile the pompous, arrogant, slightly silly Ganner he'd known most of his life with the transcendent power and profound joy he'd felt through the Force.
How had Ganner gone from the one to the other? It didn't make sense. He couldn't even really understand why Ganner had chosen to sacrifice himself.
"He didn't even like me," Jacen had told Vergere. "I didn't like him."
Vergere had regarded him from one corner of her bottomless eyes. "You need not like someone to love him. Love is nothing more than the recognition that two are one. That all is one."
Jacen had thought of the dhuryam that had become the World Brain, and he'd nodded. "Ganner knew that, at the end, more fully than even you do,"
Vergere said. "That knowledge is the seed of greatness."
Jacen shook his head, smiling ruefully. "I still have a hard time putting ‘greatness' and ‘Ganner Rhysode' in the same sentence."
"He was born to be a legend."
"Maybe he was." Jacen sighed. "Ganner's Last Stand. Too bad nobody saw it."
"Nobody? You mean, nobody from the New Republic. Let me tell you of a vision I have had," she said. "An image of the far future. It came to me through the Force some time ago, but only now have I come to understand it. In that vision, I saw a new figure in the mythology of the Yuuzhan Vong. Not a god, not a demon, but an invincible giant called ‘the Ganner.' "
"You're kidding, right?"
"Not at all. They will come to believe that the Ganner, the Jedi Giant, is the Guardian who stands before the Gate to the Lands of the Dead. It is the Ganner--and his forever-blazing blade of light who stands eternal guard to prevent the shades of the dead from passing back through the Gate, to trouble the living. The curious part of the vision"--she chuckled a little--"as if it could be any more curious than it is already--is the words engraved on the stone of the Gate, in an arc above the great head of the Ganner: they're in Basic."
"In Basic? Why would they be in Basic?"
"Who can say? Such visions are enigmatic, and rarely come equipped with footnotes."
"What does it say?"
Vergere spread her hands, palms up, a shrug of helpless incomprehension. "In deep-carved block letters, it reads: NONE SHALL PASS."
Days passed, each much the same as the last. Jacen had plenty of time to think. He thought about being a student. About being a teacher. Being a Jedi.
Being a traitor. Being a shadowmoth.
Once he brought it up to Vergere. "Can you tell me, now, what you've been after all this time? What it was you wanted me to be?"
"Of course," she said easily. "I wanted you to be exactly what you are."
"That's not a very helpful answer."
"It's the only answer there is."
"But what am I...? No, don't say it, I already know: ‘That's always been the question, hasn't it?' If you only knew how aggravating that gets after a while..."
"Forgive my curiosity," she interrupted with an air of changing the subject, "but I have been wondering: just what, exactly, did you do in the Well of the World Brain?”
Jacen settled into himself then, and moved around on the couch beast into a more comfortable position. "What were you expecting me to do?"
Her crest flared green. "We know each other too well, you and I. Very well, I confess it: I did not know what to expect. I guessed you would either kill the World Brain, or yourself. The third possibility--that you would go ahead and sacrifice Ganner... I didn't think likely."
"But not impossible."
"No," she said. "Not impossible."
"I chose a different option," Jacen said. "I seduced it."
Vergere's crest flickered to orange. "Indeed?"
"I'm using the dhuryam to teach the Yuuzhan Vong a lesson. A real lesson. Kind of like the ones you taught me." Jacen smiled, but it was a hard smile, a cold one, that glinted like pack ice in his eyes. "The World Brain's on our side, now."
"It's going to fight the Yuuzhan Vong? Work for the New Republic?" Vergere asked skeptically. "A genengineered double agent?"
"No. Not the New Republic's side. Our side. Yours and mine."
"Oh." Now she settled into her feline repose, and her black eyes gleamed. "We have a side of our own, do we?"
"I think we do," Jacen said. "The dhuryam isn't going to fight them. The Yuuzhan Vong are fanatics. For them, everything is Right or Wrong, Honorable or Evil, Truth or Blasphemy. When you fight fanatics, all you do is make them even more fanatic than they were when they started. Instead, my friend the World Brain is going to teach them something." He sat upright. "They are about to discover that the Vongforming of Yuuzhan'tar is not going exactly to plan. In fact, everything is going to go just a little bit wrong for them from now on. No matter how hard they try, nothing will happen quite the way they want it to."
Vergere's crest flickered quizzically. "And this teaches them what?"
"It's that fanatic thing," Jacen said. "That's most of what's wrong with the Yuuzhan Vong. Instead of working with what is, they keep trying to force everything to be what they think it should be. That's not going to work on Yuuzhan'tar. They'll either have to murder the dhuryam and start over from scratch--which they have neither the time nor the resources for--or they're going to have to learn to compromise. Get it?"
"I do," Vergere said appreciatively. "This is the most valuable lesson one can teach a fanatic: that fanaticism is self-defe
ating."
"Yeah." Jacen looked back out the corneal port into the infinite nothing of hyperspace. "I can think of a few Jedi who could stand to learn that one, too."
Suddenly Vergere was on her feet, and her arms encircled Jacen's shoulders in a surprisingly warm hug. When she drew back, her eyes glistened--not with their customary mockery, but with tears.
"Jacen, I am so proud of you," she whispered. "This is the greatest moment of a teacher's life: when she is surpassed by her student."
Jacen found himself blinking back tears of his own. "So is that what you are, finally? My teacher?"
"And your student, for the two are one."
He lowered his head. His chest ached with a hard, cold solidity that wouldn't let him meet her eyes. "Hard lessons."
"It is a hard universe," she said from beside him. "No lesson is truly learned until it has been purchased with pain."
"Maybe you're right." Jacen sighed. "But there has to be an easier way."
She joined him at the port, and stared with him out into the space outside the universe.
Perhaps there is," she said at long last. "Perhaps that is what you will have to teach me."
A tiny bubble of existence hangs in the nothing. This bubble is called a ship. The bubble has neither motion nor stillness, nor even orientation, since the nothing has no distance or direction. It hangs there forever, or for less than an instant, because in the nothing there is also no time. Time, distance, and direction have meaning only inside the bubble, and the bubble maintains the existence of these things only by an absolute separation of what is within from what is without.
The bubble is its own universe. Within this universe, there are traitors.
One is a teacher, and a student; another is a student, and a teacher.
One is a gardener.
This universe falls toward another, wider universe: a universe that is a garden...
Star Wars - The New Jedi Order - Traitor Page 24