Star Wars_ Traitor Part 18

i guess i mean, did you blame her?

"That's different." Jacen's face was bleak as a sandstone cliff on Kirdo III. "I blamed all of them. I hated them. And I set out to hurt them."

really?

"I knew what I was doing; I knew exactly what it meant. I reached into the dark. I wanted it. I reveled in it. I remember laughing. I remember telling them how much trouble they were in. I remember feeling them through the Force as their fake regret turned to real fear. I remember liking it." They had fired on him, blaster bolts streaking scarlet through the greenish acid-fog. Laughing, Jacen had caught their blaster bolts with the palm of his right hand, effortlessly channeling away the destructive energies before they could do him harm.

Flicks of his wrist had seized those blasters with the Force and tossed them negligently aside.

how many of them did you kill?

"All of them." Jacen looked down at his trembling hands. He clenched them until his burns leaked blood onto his palms. "None of them.

What's the difference?"

While the Force had roared through his head, he'd reached down into the hollow center of his chest, into the void where the slave seed had been, and there he had found the dim semiconsciousness of the cavern beast.

With the Force for power, he'd created a delusion: a simple conviction so deeply rooted in the cavern beast's murky mind that no evidence to the contrary could ever shake it. Humans are poisonous. So is every other sentient species of the New Republic.

The cavern beast had had no resistance against this kind of trick; it lacked even the rudimentary ability to say to itself, 'But none of the ones I've already eaten have made me sick'... All it'd had was a defensive reflex. It vomited. A ma.s.sive surge of reverse peristalsis had swept up the people, the girl, Jacen, and every other foreign object throughout the cavern beast's immense interior and washed them all out through the luminescent cartilage-lined throat down which Jacen had entered. He remembered their anger, and their growing panic as the pile of people outside the cavern beast's mouth had disentangled itself into individuals again, and they'd found the teeth of their sanctuary locked against them. No longer could they pay for safety from the Yuuzhan Vong with the lives of others.

You've killed us, someone had sobbed. You've killed us all. Jacen had stared at them, icy with power. Not yet. These soft, weak, contemptibly treacherous creatures--he could imagine nothing more loathsome. He'd turned his back on them. Walked away. He'd left them to the Yuuzhan Vong, and to each other. but you did help them. better death than life bought with innocent blood.

"Is that supposed to make it all right? I wasn't trying to help them.

I wanted them to suffer. I can't even blame it on the dark side--I know that now. The dark side didn't make me do anything."

i know. that's not the way it works.

"It was all me, Anakin. I gave in to my own darkness. I let my dark side run wild..."

you could have killed them all. you had the power. and you could have killed the cavern beast. you had power enough for that, too, i bet.

just like you could have killed vergere, and nom anor. but you didn't kill anybody. instead you used the power you'd found to serve life. your dark side ain't all that dark, big brother.

"It doesn't matter. You can't fight the dark with the dark."

that's uncle luke talking. fighting the dark was his job. the yuuxhan vong aren't dark. they're alien.

"And I can't seem to make myself fight them."

who says you have to?

Jacen's head snapped up. "You do. Everyone does. What other answer is there?"

why are you asking me?

Anakin had lost his playful crooked smile, and he'd moved close enough that Jacen could reach out and touch him. If he could make himself move his hand. If there had been anything there to touch. The despair that pinned him to his seat swelled into a black hole of hopelessness that sucked air from his chest.

"Who else can I ask? What can I do? What am I supposed to do now?"

He sagged, shaking. "I've completely lost it, haven't I? Here I am, arguing with a hallucination. You don't even exist!"

does it matter? you're not that easy to get through to, big brother.

i have to take any means available.

"How can it not matter?" Jacen suddenly shouted. "I need... I need... I don't know what to believe! I don't know what's real anymore!"

on the seeds.h.i.+p, i was a force projection. then i was telepathic bait.

now i'm a hallucination. that doesn't mean I'm not me. why does everything have to be one or the other?

"Because it does! Because things are either one thing, or something else! That's the way it is! You can't be fake and real at the same time!"

why not?

"Because--because you can't, that's all!"

the force is one, jacen. it encompa.s.ses all opposites. truth and lies, life and death, new republic and yuuxhan vong. light and dark and good and evil. they're all each other, because each thing and everything is the same thing. the force is one.

"That's a lie!"

yes. and it's the truth.

"You're not Anakin!" Jacen shouted. "You're not! Anakin would never talk like that! Anakin would never believe that! You're just a hallucination!"

okay. i'm a hallucination. that means you're talking to yourself.

that means what i'm saying is what you believe.

Jacen wanted to howl, to rage, to leap from his chair and fight--something.

Anything. But the black hole ate his breath, his strength, his anger; it swallowed even the universe of hate, and ended up emptier than it had begun. Where all his hope, all his love, all his certainty had ever been now gaped a cold void, filled only with the blank inanimate hunger of vacuum, and Jacen collapsed. He didn't even have the strength to cry.

He fell into the black hole. Eons pa.s.sed, or nanoseconds. Within the black hole, there was no difference between the two. Stars condensed from intergalactic hydrogen, ignited, fused, burned heavy metals, shrank to white dwarfs that faded to brown, all between one breath and the next.

Eternity within the dark. Information infell across the event horizon: a voice. He knew the voice, knew he should not listen--but he was not just in the black hole, he was the black hole, capturing everything, holding it forever.

"What is real? What is illusion? Where is the line between truth and lie? Between right and wrong? It's a cold and lonely place, Jacen Solo: the void of not knowing."

He didn't answer. A black hole can't reply. An event horizon is the ultimate valve: anything at all can pa.s.s through in one direction, nothing at all in the other. But the infalling voice triggered this black hole into quantum decay. His personal event horizon shrank in an instant to a point ma.s.s in the middle of his chest...

And Jacen opened his eyes.

"Vergere," he said dully. "How did you find me?"

She had settled felinelike upon the Solo dining table, arms and legs folded beneath her. She stared at him with interstellar eyes.

"I do not share our masters' prejudice against technology. Portions of the planetary database survive in memory cores. Discovering the home address of the former Chief of State was no great trick."

"But how did you know? How did you know I'd come home? "

"It is an instinct of all pack animals: the mortally wounded crawl back to their own dens to die."

"Wounded?"

"With the greatest wound a Jedi can suffer: freedom."

Another riddle. He had no strength for riddles.

"I don't understand."

"When you always know what is right, where is freedom? No one chooses the wrong, Jacen Solo. Uncertainty sets you free."

Jacen thought about that for a long time.

"Die at home," he murmured. "Some home. Have you seen this place?

Jaina's room is full of some kind of plant that tried to eat me.

The kitchen looks like a coral reef. My collection..." He could only shake his head. "This isn't my home."

"Neither are you going to die," she said cheerfully. "Have you forgotten?

You're dead already. You have been these many months; you have nearly completed your pa.s.sage through the lands of the dead. Now is time not for death, but for new life. You are healed, Jacen Solo. Arise and walk!"

Jacen sank lower in the chair, staring blindly up through the tangle of arachnoid cables.

"Why should I?"

"Because you can, of course. Why else would anyone bother to get up?"

"I don't know." He closed his eyes again. "It doesn't matter whether I get up or sit here until I starve. Nothing matters. Nothing means anything."

"Not even your brother's death?"

He shrugged listlessly. Life, death--all was one. One with the Force.

He said, "The Force doesn't care."

"Don't you care?"

He opened his eyes. Her gaze had the peculiar, almost humorous intensity he'd seen in the Embrace chamber, in the Nursery, at the crater. But he was too tired, too broken, to puzzle through whatever she might want him to discover.

"Whether I care doesn't matter, either." Corners of her mouth tricked up and down.

"Does it matter to you?"

He stared at his hands. After a long, long silence, he sighed.

"Yes. Yes, it does." It never occurred to him to lie to her. "But so what? Sure, I care--but who am I?"

She gave a shrug so subtle it was almost a s.h.i.+ver.

"That's always been the question, yes?"

"But you never have an answer--"

"I do have an answer," she said kindly. "But it's my answer, not yours. You will find no truth in me."

"You keep telling me that." Bitter ashes rasped in the back of his throat. "Or in anybody else, either, I guess."

She said, "Exactly."

A high buzzing whine rose in his ears, skirling around his head like an angry sparkbee trapped inside his skull.

"Then where is the truth supposed to be?" he asked blurrily.

"Where?

Tell me. Please." He could barely hear his own voice over the buzz in his ears. It grew to a roar.

She leaned forward, smiling, and the roar drowned what she said, but he could read the words from her lips.

Ask yourself where else can one look.

"What?" he gasped faintly. "What?" As the roar became a storm inside his head, pounding away all words, all hope of sense, she gathered her four opposable forgers into a point and lightly tapped his chest--right on the center, right over the void left by the slave seed, right over the point ma.s.s of his own personal event horizon--as though knocking on a door.

Down in that void, there was quiet. There was calm: the eye of the storm inside him. He threw his mind into the calm, quiet void, let the quiet calm swell to envelop everything he was. The storm blew away. The black hole swallowed itself. He was not alone in the quiet calm. Here was the Force: the living connection that bound him to everything that is, that ever has been, that ever will be. Here too was the Vonglife: from the dim satisfaction of the blue puffball basking in the warmth of his and Vergere's body heat, to the industrious concentration of the arachnoids that skittered through their growing web... to the balanced readiness for instant violence of twelve Yuuzhan Vong warriors who now filed into the room--And the breathless antic.i.p.ation of triumph that shone through Nom Anor, as he entered behind them.

Yuuzhan Vong warriors. Twelve of them. Armed. And Nom Anor. The warriors spread out in a shallow arc. Jacen regarded them steadily, without alarm. Here in the quiet calm of his center, there was no such thing as surprise, no such thing as danger. There was only him, and all of them, and the universe, of which each was a small interlocking component.

He looked at Vergere in wonder. He understood now, where he never could have before.

She had not said Ask yourself where else can one look.

She had said: Ask yourself.

Where else can one look?

Nom Anor paced forward, hands clasped to each other within the voluminous sleeves of a floor-length robeskin so black it gleamed. Jacen could see his own reflection distorted in its glossy surface.

Nom Anor, Jacen thought, is standing in our dining room.

"The meaninglessness and despair from which you suffer," Nom Anor said silkily, "is the inevitable result of your bankrupt religion. This Force of yours, it has no purpose. It merely is what it is: corrupt with the rot that infects this whole galaxy. Full of lies and illusions, petty jealousies and betrayal. But there is purpose in the universe. There is a reason to get up, and you can find it. I can share it with you."

He's been listening, Jacen thought. Of course. Vergere would have led him here.