But that’s not Sith. Avoiding attachment is not the Sith way. Are you really wrong about all this?
Jacen shook himself mentally. The moments of indecision would pass. And … he wouldn’t have doubts if he’d been driven by ambition. Reluctance was becoming his touchstone, his proof that he was doing this for the right reasons.
“Why me?” said Mara.
“You’ve been an intelligence agent,” said Omas.
The head of the Security and Intelligence Council, Senator G’vli G’Sil, sat to one side of Omas in silence, scrutinizing Mara and then looking slowly toward Jacen and Luke as if he had never seen a Jedi before.
Mara’s reluctance wasn’t even disguised. “I’ll do my duty for the Alliance,” she said. “But I’m not sure I’m psychologically equipped to head up … well, a secret police force. There’s no other word for it. Spying is one thing, and maybe even assassination, but this is new to me.”
“We spent so much time dealing with the Yuuzhan Vong that we lost our focus on threats closer to home,” said G’Sil. “But I’m old enough to remember that when terrorist activity starts, you need to move fast before it spreads and networks get established.”
If they aren’t already. The World Brain tells me they’re on the move, gathering, meeting …
“Let me think about it,” said Mara. But that was just words. Everything else about her was adding,… and then say no.
Luke turned slowly, hands deep in his pockets, and stared out the window, and for a moment Jacen wondered if he was going to volunteer instead. No, that kind of warfare simply wasn’t Uncle Luke: he was head-on, lightsaber in hand, face-to-face with the enemy—the kind of enemy who came at you in open combat.
He was too decent and honest to think like a terrorist. He had rules. It was what made him strong.
“We’ll be going, then, Chief,” said Luke. He bowed his head slightly. “Let’s see how the next few days pan out, and then revisit this.”
He nodded politely to Jacen and left with Mara. She gave Jacen a glance over her shoulder and smiled anxiously. Omas waited for them to leave and then looked at Jacen.
“I can understand everyone’s reluctance,” he said. “It’s not heroic work, spying on your neighbors.”
G’Sil gave a little snort of amusement. “It’s heroic until you’re the person whose ID is being checked, and then it’s an affront to your rights …”
“People are going to have to get used to that again. It won’t be the first time,” Omas said.
Jacen thought now was as good a time as any to ask again. “Have you had further thoughts on the matter I suggested the other day, sir?”
Omas’s mind was clearly elsewhere. “Hitting the shipyards?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll discuss it with Admiral Pellaeon. If he thinks it has merit, I’ll table it with the Defense Council.”
“Thank you.”
Jacen should have gone back to his apartment and used his time to teach Ben more of the subtle techniques of the Force, but he admitted to himself that he was as impatient as his young pupil. He had set Ben a study task to occupy him in his absence: to visit the sites of the bombing and the attack on the Corellian Sanctuary, and to sense what he could of the people and events surrounding them. It was a tough assignment. It would frustrate him—and keep him busy for at least a day.
And Jacen needed a day to himself to resolve his doubts over Lumiya.
She was still in her asteroid habitat near Bimmiel. He felt her there: when he concentrated, he could sense her emotions, which were an odd blend of relief and sincerity. But if she can create the kind of Force illusions we experienced in her home, then she could fake anything. She could have been anywhere, even on Coruscant. She might be able to project totally false emotions, too, because he could do much the same himself and fool even other Jedi Masters into believing them.
I’m not proud of that. But it’s a necessary skill.
Jacen walked toward the restored Jedi Temple. It was there as it had been for millennia, albeit in a new, modern guise, and the destruction by the Yuuzhan Vong seemed no more than a brief absence, the guttering of a candle in a breeze. When the breeze dropped, the flame would reappear, as steady and unmoving as it had been before—and so had the Temple.
Jacen walked along the wide promenade to the entrance. The stepped base, cut from almost flesh-tinted stone, lifted the Temple complex a little above the buildings surrounding it. This wasn’t a world of constructed canyons like the rest of Galactic City. This quadrant was low-rise, and from the transparisteel pyramid was a view that few in Coruscant ever saw—not the close gaze of another towering building opposite and a dense forest of others as far as the eye could see, but a wide vista. It was one of permacrete, stone, and transparisteel rather than grassy plains; but it was a rare open view of the horizon nonetheless.
The Temple’s architecture and interior design were aggressively modern, but key parts of the layout, like the council chamber, had been retained; the marble floor was a replica of the original. It struck Jacen as obsessive rather than reverent, as if the Jedi order had never wanted change and challenge to interrupt its sense of permanence. Jacen paused, hands meshed, and saw something he had never seen before: he saw ambition.
He saw a love of power and status. He saw a statement of government, of inexorable permanence. We’re back. We’re not going to be swept aside again. The stone almost spoke to him.
This didn’t feel like spirituality. He didn’t like it. No wonder Luke had insisted that the new grand trappings in the council chamber be removed. Jacen shivered at the touch of mundane ambition.
And to think he’d been afraid that he was being lured to the Sith way by a lust for power.
He lowered his arms to his side and tried again to feel something that would explain the sense of a tightly grasped power that pervaded the building. It almost tingled in his fingers. It moved in his chest like a symbiont that had invaded his body.
It might be the ambition and pride of architects, craftspeople, builders. Don’t judge so fast.
But construction droids had done most of the work.
He couldn’t shake off the clear impression of the exercise of power—and the love of it—that felt as if it had built up like sediment in an ancient river over centuries. He hadn’t felt it before.
Marble and pleekwood created an understated, cool interior interrupted occasionally by faithfully copied busts of great Jedi Masters, displayed in niches in exactly the same places as they had been before the Yuuzhan Vong, and before the Temple had burned in the purges following Palpatine’s seizure of power.
Jacen paused again as he walked through the lobby.
There had been objections to the cost of the reconstruction of the Temple when so many urgent postwar restoration projects seemed more pressing. Some citizens couldn’t see the point. The government insisted. The Jedi council said it wanted to restore normality.
Uncle Luke, this was never the way you saw the order, was it? How did they talk you into this?
Jacen knew exactly where he was now, and it scared him. He had a finely tuned sense of where he was in space. Had he rolled back time by fifty-nine years to this exact distance from the planet’s core, this exact distance from the planet’s north pole, this very point in three dimensions, he would have been walking with his grandfather Anakin Skywalker.
But I can walk back in time.
Jacen could time-drift. He was almost too afraid to. But he did, almost without thinking. As he projected himself into the past and merged with its reality, he saw a young blond Jedi with his lightsaber drawn, flanked by troops in white armor. Jacen was looking at him from behind. He could see the muscles in his jaw twitching as his head turned, seeking something: he could feel his dread and determination.
Nobody spoke. They were searching, all of them looking to one side then the other, aiming rifles and lowering them a little. Something terrible was happening.
Anakin.
&nb
sp; Anakin Skywalker held his lightsaber two-handed, and for a moment Jacen was one with his grandfather’s emotions. He was overwhelmed by a dread and reluctance—the same dread and reluctance he had felt himself when Lumiya told him his destiny. Jacen felt, too, a crushing sense of something terrible and deadly about to happen.
He hung back. He’d been spotted while time-drifting before and had been forced to withdraw. But he had to stay with this. He hardly dared think ahead.
I might be able to ask him. I might be able to ask Grandfather about his own fall to the Sith.
This would be his answer about his own path.
He touched Anakin’s emotions again, comparing them with his own, and then he felt something that was not within him at all: it was desperate, terrified loss. For a second he couldn’t identify it. Then it settled and became clear in the form of a tight sensation in his throat and the pressure of tears behind his eyes that stung and burned. It was very like the brief misery he had felt when he left Tenel Ka and his daughter. Anakin was facing separation from Padmé, and was terrified by it.
But it wasn’t a moment’s emotion for his grandfather: it was the whole of him. Anakin had been driven to the dark side by agonized love. The revelation stunned Jacen because it was so narrow and so … selfish. Relief flooded him.
This is different. That isn’t what I feel, or what’s driving me.
And right then he wanted to talk to his grandfather more than anything he could imagine. It was a burst of love for a man he had never known—a man who had helped bring balance to the Force.
You’re insane. You’re going too far. Don’t even think about influencing the past—
But he had absolutely no idea what the past really was, right up to the point where he saw the younglings approach Anakin, scared but clutching their lightsabers, telling him there were too many soldiers for them to drive off. Anakin stared down at them. Then he drew his own saber and Jacen tasted absolute grief and shame and duty.
He was hunting Jedi. He was killing them somehow for Padmé’s sake. His reasoning was vivid and focused. Jacen knew that Anakin had done this, but seeing it—feeling it—living it—was agonizingly new and shocking because the emotion was so desperately animal in its intensity.
No, I’m not feeling this. It’s one of Lumiya’s vile tricks. I’m not seeing this.
Then one of the armored troopers appeared, raising his rifle, and Jacen jerked himself out of time and back to the present, heart pounding.
Grandfather …
“Are you all right, Master?” said a very young apprentice. The girl had a bright, optimistic face like polished ebonite; she held a datapad in one hand. “Can I get you some water?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” he lied. “Just a little giddy, that’s all.”
The girl bowed her head politely and walked off, eyes fixed on her datapad.
Jacen wanted to vomit. But he controlled his shock and revulsion: he now knew things he could never erase from his mind. It was Anakin’s moment of madness, his surrender to slaughter even though he knew it was insane. That wasn’t the man he had grown to understand through his mother and uncle.
Would be go that far for his own wife? Would he know where personal need outweighed his duty?
He centered himself with every scrap of effort he could muster and waited for the turbolift, eyes averted when anyone passed. He felt they could see the horror in his soul. But, of course, he was now adept at concealing even that from other Jedi.
I’m not Grandfather.
The lift seemed to take forever to arrive.
I was meant to see how low he fell.
He hit the control with the heel of his hand, fighting tears. “Come on. What’s keeping you?” Two apprentices stared at him but hurried past.
That’s my proof. That’s my pain. I have to embrace it to understand that I am not making my grandfather’s mistake all over again.
Jacen knew what it was to love, and he was older and far more experienced than Anakin Skywalker had been then. He could handle what was happening to him now. He would never do another’s bidding and he could become a Sith without fear of being sucked down into something evil. He still didn’t relish the duty, but it was a duty, not a delusion: he wasn’t repeating his grandfather’s mistakes. He was absolutely certain of that now.
Relief, unbearable sorrow, and disbelief fought in him. He might have asked his grandfather for his reasons, but that was for his personal comfort and not for the purpose of peace, so it would have to wait. That was something for later, once he had become a full Sith Lord and brought peace and stability to the galaxy at last.
By then, he might be ready to deal with the truth of his grandfather’s shame.
Finally—the turbolift doors opened. Jacen ascended to the re-created Room of a Thousand Fountains to sit among the plants and pools to meditate. He knew what he had to do now: he knew he had to test Lumiya to be sure she could help him achieve full Sith knowledge, as she promised, or if she was following her own agenda and planning to exploit him.
It should have been a terrifying thought, but a delicious sensation of complete stillness settled around him. He had found a precious piece of absolute truth, both about the universe and about himself.
Crossing his legs in a mediation position, he let his consciousness reach out across the Force, not as an open hand but as a commanding fist.
Lumiya. Come here, Lumiya.
Come to Coruscant and answer to me.
CORELLIAN SANCTUARY, CORUSCANT.
It was one of the saddest places that Ben had ever visited.
He felt the loneliness the moment he got within fifty meters of the Corellian Sanctuary. Outside, three men—one of them very old—were scrubbing away at bright red paint that had splashed and run down the polished gold and black marble inlay of the little domed memorial. They looked up at him as he approached, frowning and suspicious. Ben wasn’t sure what to say.
“What d’you want, kid?” said the youngest man.
“I wanted to look inside, sir.” Be polite; be humble. Jacen had taught him that if you treated people kindly, they normally returned the favor. “Is that okay?”
“You a Jedi?”
The brown and beige robes were a giveaway. “Yes.”
“Why do you want to see inside?”
“My uncle’s Corellian.” And it wasn’t even a lie: he was genuinely as curious about Corellians as he was determined to complete the task that Jacen had given him. “May I go inside?”
The men looked at him, then at each other.
“I’ll take him,” said the old man.
Ben hesitated on the threshold. The doors of the arched entrance looked as if they’d been forced open. He followed the man into darkness and when his eyes adjusted, he was in a black-walled chamber that swallowed up the light. Then he looked up. The domed ceiling was studded with sparkling chunks of rough diamond set in constellations.
“They compressed the carbon left from cremations,” said the old man. “Turned it into diamonds. That’s the night sky as you’d see it from Corellia.”
“Why?”
“Corellians who couldn’t get home during the New Republic.” The old man kicked through rubble on the floor of the chamber; some chunks bore black paint, signs of how the vandals had hacked at the plaster. “Next best thing to resting in home soil.”
“Did you find all the stones they took out?” asked Ben.
“No.”
“Who’d want to steal diamonds made from bodies?”
The old man frowned at him. “Some people don’t care about that kind of thing.”
The man was hurt and angry. Ben could understand that. He bent down and helped him pick up the rubble, checking each chunk for fragments of diamond, because that was, after all, a person. While they cleared the chamber, one of the younger men wandered in and stood watching. He was about eighteen, with short blond hair scrunched into spikes.
“We can’t stand by and let them get away with th
is,” he said.
“Who’s them?” said Ben.
“Coruscanti.”
“You know who did this?” Ben sensed an echo of halfhearted malice from the chamber, no real plans or hatred or intention to outrage. He finally understood what Jacen meant by mindless violence. Some people really did seem to do it without thinking very much. “Then you ought to tell CSF.”
“Yeah, like they’d really take that seriously, I don’t think. Not when they’re looking for Corellians who planted a bomb.”
Ben went to sweep up the remaining dust but the old man took the broom from him and did it himself. Ben sensed some resentment. He bowed his head, even though the man had turned his back on him, and walked outside into daylight that seemed painfully bright. The blond man went with him, and they sat down on the honey-colored marble steps that led up to the sanctuary.
“I’m Bark Saiy,” said the blond man, and held out his hand.
Ben shook it gravely. “I’m Ben.”
“So you’ve got Corellian relatives.”
“Yeah.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“I’m a Jedi. We don’t take sides.”
“You reckon?” Barit laughed, but not as if he thought it was remotely funny. “Everyone’s going to be taking sides soon, what with this government trying to force its rules on everybody. I hate them. My granddad says it’s like the Empire all over again.”
“You live here, though.”
“I was born here. So was my dad. My folks own an engineering workshop in Q-Sixty-five. Never even been to Corellia, yet.”
“But you could live on Corellia if you hate it here so much.”
“Would that stop them treating us the way they do?”
Ben was finding it hard to understand the them and the us of the conversation. He’d traveled the galaxy with his parents; he’d seen less of Coruscant than he had of a dozen other worlds.
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