Star Wars_ Traitor Part 21

But we can do better. We can make this a dry run: a rehearsal, with this one standing in for my sister. In the way of dreams, the Jedi Knight understands that the trap into which he has fallen was set for Jaina.

There's something wrong with that, though; something he can't quite remember. If they had really wanted to catch Jaina, there must have been a better option, but what it might be he cannot summon. As always, the Prophet objects to the traitor's plan: even the existence of the traitor is a closely held secret. Too many people, Yuuzhan Vong and slave, would partic.i.p.ate in this rehearsal; the secret would inevitably be lost.

Secrecy has outlived its usefulness, the traitor counters serenely.

My conversion to the True Way serves no purpose if it remains secret. I will proclaim the Gospel of the True G.o.ds to the whole galaxy on the day we take my sister--but we must prepare. We must practice, if the ceremony is to be flawless.

I must practice.

Practice what? the Prophet asks. A sacrifice is not a complex ritual. The alien speaks: The Great Sacrifice, when it comes, will be a willing sacrifice: the Other Twin will walk to her death eagerly, with head high and joy in her heart, knowing that she brings the Truth to this galaxy.

As will this one, the traitor claims. This is why you have made me what I am. I must bring him to the Truth. To the Light. He will hear Truth ring from my mouth, and see the Light of the G.o.d I Am s.h.i.+ne from my eye.

The Prophet appears skeptical, but he says: Preparations will take some time.

Take whatever time you require, the traitor says. When all is prepared, I will speak to this Jedi. And always, the Jedi Knight reaches into the Force here, to pound the traitor's brain with the hammer of his refusal, and receives in return another invisible Force wink. The traitor never makes any other indication he's aware of the Jedi Knight's presence; and here he turns to the Prophet. On that day, Ganner Rhysode will walk proudly at my heel, as I lead him into the Well of the World Brain, where we will together offer up his death to the glory of the True G.o.ds. It is always at this point that a familiar clench of dread squeezes him back down into darkness for a time, until he surfaces once more and begins the dream again. So it goes, over and over and over, etched in psychic acid upon his brain. Over and over and over and over until...

With a great shuddering gasp, Ganner Rhysode awoke. Waking up hurt.

Somebody had stuck his whole arm to the elbow down Ganner's throat, fingers jammed into his bronchi; now the fingers and hand and wrist and arm slowly withdrew, dry and hard and rough as a scab, grating up the inside of Ganner's throat as he choked and retched and tried to cough. At the same time, tubes and wires and needles pulled out of his veins and nerves and through his stretching skin...

Ganner Rhysode, awaken! Awake and arise! It is commanded! He knew he had been dreaming, and he knew he was waking up, but he couldn't fight free of the dream.

It stretched around him, gluey, clinging, membranes of goo dividing into thin strings and sagging ropes that bound him with impossible things: wild fantasies of having been captured by a dozen Yuuzhan Vong warriors who all looked like Jacen Solo, mad images of sacrifice and aliens and Jaina and that Nom Anor character...

His eyelids cranked open like rusted-shut hatches. The arm that withdrew from his windpipe was less an arm than it was a branch, its bark coated with blood-tinged slime. The tubes that pulled free of his veins through his skin looked like ovipositors of immense bloated wasps that had grown like galls on the trunks of stunted trees to either side of him. He lay in a hammock that seemed to have been made of vines--but the vines writhed muscularly beneath him, flexing and squeezing like a net woven of snakes.

More vines dangled from the ceiling, long ropy vines, knotted and coiled-- but they weren't vines, they were more like tentacles, because vines couldn't uncoil and coil again, untie and retie themselves in impossibly complex knots-- and they weren't tentacles, because tentacles don't end in huge round glowing red eyes that even through all the coiling and tying seem to always focus on you with unblinking concentration...

Drugs, he thought groggily. They drugged me. I'm hallucinating.

"Awaken, Ganner Rhysode! Awaken to the Truth!"

This had to be a hallucination--had to be, because when he rolled his head to the side to blearily stare at whoever was giving him these pompous, vaguely stupid-sounding orders, the guy looked just like Jacen Solo.

Ganner blinked, and lifted a hand to wipe sleep gunk from his eyes- -which was how he discovered he was no longer paralyzed, nor was he restrained.

But he might as well have been: the alkaloids still circulating through his bloodstream made his hand feel only a couple of grams lighter than the Sun Crusher. When he looked again, with slightly clearer vision, it was still Jacen.

But he was no longer the boy Ganner remembered. Jacen was taller now, and broader across the shoulders. His brown curls had been sun-bleached to streaks of golden blond, and a dark beard sprang wiry from his jaw.

His face had thinned, sharpened, refined: he had lost that impish softness, that playful roguishness that once had made him resemble his father, and replaced it with a cold-forged durasteel expression that reminded Ganner of Leia denouncing a corrupt Senator from the Chief of State's Podium of the Great Rotunda. He wore a long, flowing robe of black so dark that its folds vanished into formless night. Along his sleeves spidered an intricate design that glowed with a light of its own, chased in scarlet and viridian like a network of external arteries that pulsed light instead of blood.

Draped over his shoulders he wore a surplice of s.h.i.+mmering white on which strange, unidentifiable sigils wrote themselves in twists of s.h.i.+ning gold.

He opened his mouth to ask Jacen what kind of stupid masked ball he was planning to crash in this ridiculous costume, but before his drug-numbed lips could shape the words, he remembered: Jacen Solo is a traitor.

"Do not fear, Ganner Rhysode," he said, in a weird dark voice like a bad imitation of a hypnotist. "Instead rejoice! The day of your Blessed Release has arrived!"

"Does..." Ganner had to hack a wad of haven't-talked-in-days out of his throat. "Does this mean... you're going to let me go?"

"The Gifts of the True G.o.ds are three." His words fell like boulders down a well. "Life They give us, that we may serve Their Glory: this is the least of Their Gifts. Pain They give us, that we may learn Life's value lies only in Their Service: this is a greater Gift. But the Greatest Gift of the G.o.ds is Death: it is Their Release from the Burden of Pain and the Curse of Life. It is their reward, their grace, their mercy, granted liberally even to the unjust and the infidel."

Captured. Drugged. Helpless. About to be murdered. Boy, it's a good thing I was so cautious and un.o.btrusive, Ganner thought muzzily.

Otherwise I might have gotten myself into trouble.

"Um, yeah, y'know," he said with a weak laugh, "those wacky G.o.ds...

I guess they mean well, but they just don't know when to stop. They're way too generous. I'm getting along fine with just the first Gift. The other two, hey, y'know, I can wait..."

"Silence!" Jacen commanded, stretching forth his arms, hands high, palms forward as though to address a mult.i.tude from a mountaintop. "Waste not your breath in prattle! Hear now the lore of the True Way!"

Ganner stared, speechless, but instead of continuing, Jacen's eyes drifted closed. He swayed in place as though he were about to faint.

"Jacen?" One hand curled to a fist, then extended a forefinger: Wait.

"Jacen, what did they do to you? Whatever it is, we can fix it. You have to come back with me, Jacen. You don't know what's been happening.

Jaina...

everyone needs you. I don't know what they've done to you, but it doesn't matter. Whatever you've done, it's not your fault. We can help you..."

Jacen's eyes opened, then his left lid drooped in a long, slow wink.

Ganner's mouth snapped shut. Jacen's eyes closed again. Then slowly, one at a time, so did each eye on the end of each of the tentacle-vines that hung from the ceiling: as the red glow within each orb faded into darkness, a pair of vertical eyelids squeezed across them, and the tentacle-vines gradually relaxed, hanging limp, motionless.

Jacen dropped his arms and opened his eyes. His face seemed to collapse into an exhaustion too profound for any human to bear.

"How do you feel? Any strength coming back? You think you can walk?" He sounded like a teenager again--but a teenager old beyond his years. Old...

too old... that's part of what was so strange about him. Something in his eyes: some old, cold knowledge, a broken admission of bitter truths, that made him not resemble a Solo at all.

"What are you... what's going on? Jacen..."

"We can talk now, but not for long. I persuaded all the creatures monitoring us to take a nap."

"Creatures? Monitoring? I don't..."

"They were watching us. That was the point of that silly nerf-and-Wookiee show just now. The Yuuzhan Vong have decided I'm the avatar of one of their Twin G.o.ds."

Ganner stared. His life had become a succession of inexplicable strangenesses.

"I had a dream--a dream about a sacrifice--you were going to kill me, then find Jaina and kill her, too... That was just a dream, wasn't it?" He swallowed. "Wasn't it?"

Jacen reached into one sleeve and pulled out a pouch similar to the one in which he'd carried that poison pad back on the camp s.h.i.+p; this pouch contained a similar wad of damp fabric, which Jacen began to apply directly to the blood-welling punctures where the tube-vines had withdrawn through Ganner's skin.

"They can't see us or hear us right now. Pretty soon somebody's going to come around to find out why. We have to be ready to go when they get here."

"Go? Go where? Where are we, Jacen? What--hey, what are you doing to me? What is that stuff?" Everywhere the moisture of the pad touched, Ganner stopped bleeding. Strength flowed back into his drugged muscles.

"We're on Yuuzhan'tar." Jacen kept wiping him down with the pad.

"The Yuuzhan Vong homeworld."

Ganner had heard the name from refugees on the camp s.h.i.+ps.

"You mean Coruscant."

"No. I don't."

"Just changing a name doesn't make it..."

"The Yuuzhan Vong remake everything they touch." Jacen's hand fell to his side, and a dark distance stretched his gaze far beyond the walls of this small chamber. "It's not about names. My name is still Jacen Solo."

Ganner frowned. An instant later, Jacen seemed to remember where he was. He dropped the pad on the floor and shook out a long, flowing robe of white.

"Here, sit up. Put this on." Ganner discovered, to his astonishment, that he could now move without discomfort. He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the hammock. The Yuuzhan Vong had left him his boots and leggings, but he was obscurely grateful to Jacen for providing the robe; being bare-chested here made him feel oddly uncomfortable. Vulnerable.

He stood and shrugged into the robe, marveling at how good he felt.

Being dressed. Being able to stand. He never could have guessed what profound joy might spring from such simple pleasures. A s.h.i.+mmer of motion caught his eye, and he looked down. The robe he wore bore glowing designs like Jacen's, colors pulsing along arterial networks down the sleeves and front, except the designs on Ganner's robe were in black and green upon the white.

He frowned.

"What's this?"

"It's your sacrificial robe. For the processional to the Well of the World Brain."

Ganner stared. His dream flooded back to him. On that day, Ganner Rhysode will walk proudly at my heel, as I lead him into the Well of the World Brain, where we will together offer up his death to the glory of the True G.o.ds.

"Oh, no you don't," he said. He started pulling the robe off over his head.

"Oh, yes I do."

"This is some kind of trick." Wasn't one of the Yuuzhan Vong Twin G.o.ds supposed to be some kind of trickster or something? How much truth was Jacen telling?

"This is all some kind of trick. You're lying to me."

"Well, actually, yeah. I am."

Ganner stopped, staring at Jacen out through the neck hole of the robe, which was now halfway over his head. Jacen's lips twitched in that unmistakable Solo half smile.

"Everything I tell you is a lie."

"What?"

"See, the thing is, everything everyone tells you is a lie. The truth is always bigger than the words we use to describe it."

"I knew it! This is some kind of trick!"

"Yeah. But not on you."

Ganner shook his head wordlessly. He couldn't connect this Jacen to the cheerful dark-haired kid he used to know. He suffered an instant of wild hope: maybe Jacen wasn't Jacen--maybe this traitor who had promised to murder him was some kind of impostor, some kind of clone, something force-grown in a Yuuzhan Vong shaper's vat...

"Uh, Jacen? You are you, aren't you?..." Ganner grimaced. That sounded stupid, even for me.

"No," said the man who looked like a sad, grown-up Jacen Solo. "I'm not. But I was."

"I don't understand."

He sighed.

"Thinking of me as Jacen Solo," he said distantly, "will only get in your way.

I was the boy you knew, Ganner, but I'm not the boy who knew you."

"But you're alive." Ganner shrugged into the robe, and smoothed it down.

"That's the only thing that counts. I found you. After all this time. That's the important thing. You're alive."

"No."

"Yes it is," he insisted. "You have no idea how important... you have no idea what it'll mean to the New Republic that you're alive! What it'll mean to Jaina..."

"But I'm not."

Ganner blinked. Jacen only looked sad.

"I don't understand," Ganner said.

"I can't help that."

"But, but, but, Jacen, come on, don't be ridiculous..."

That dark distance captured his eyes altogether.

"I've been dead for months, Ganner. I died not long after Myrkr. I just haven't gotten around to lying down, yet."

A chill trickled the length of Ganner's spine.

"You're... dead?"

"That's right," Jacen said. "And so are you."

Some of Jacen's quick-sketched explanation made sense. The planted rumors leading to the "trap" on the camp s.h.i.+p had never really been intended to catch anybody; Jacen had only been stalling for time. As weeks pa.s.sed with no results, Jacen hoped Nom Anor would lose patience and pull him out of there. If he'd really wanted to catch Jaina, all he would have had to do was reopen the Force-bond that had linked them since birth. Nothing in the galaxy would have stopped her from finding him.

"Nothing in the galaxy stops Jaina from doing pretty much whatever she decides to do. So I have to hold that part of myself shut down. If she finds out I'm alive, she'll come for me--and that'll just get her killed, too. Like Anakin.