When Vergere had finished describing them, Jacen said slowly, "These slave gangs--you're saying they're being mentally controlled?"
Vergere nodded. "You may have noticed the lack of guards, with the exception of the dhuryam hive itself. And those are there only to prevent the dhuryams from using their slaves to murder their siblings."
"Murder...?"
"Oh, yes. Behaviors can be bred, but skills must be learned. Much of what the dhuryams are doing here is learning play--not unlike a pilot training in a flight simulator. Here they hone their skills, of mental mastery and the coordination of many disparate life-forms, that one of them will later use as the World Brain."
"One of them..." Jacen echoed.
"Only one. The games these children play are more than serious. They are deadly. These infant dhuryams know already the basic truth of existence: win or die."
"It's so..." Jacen's fists clenched helplessly. "...so horrible."
"I would call it honest." She smiled up at him, friendly, cheerful, untouched by the horror around them. "Life is struggle, Jacen Solo. It has always been so: an unending savage battle, red in tooth and claw... This is perhaps the greatest strength of the Yuuzhan Vong; our masters--unlike the Jedi, unlike the New Republic--never delude themselves. They never waste their energy pretending that this is not so."
"You keep saying ‘our masters.' " Jacen's knuckles whitened. "You mean your masters. This--this perversion--this has nothing to do with me."
"You will be astonished, I think, when you discover just how wrong you are."
"No," Jacen said, stronger. "No. The only master I've ever had is Master Skywalker. I serve only the Force. The Yuuzhan Vong can kill me, but they can't make me obey."
"Poor little Solo." Her arms rippled in another of her liquid shrugs. "Do you ever get embarrassed at being so thoroughly and consistently mistaken?"
Jacen looked away. "You're wasting your time, Vergere. I have nothing to learn from this place."
"You see? Doubly mistaken: my time is not wasted, nor is this your schoolroom." She lifted her hand--a flickering, blurred gesture--and the two warriors at Jacen's back seized his arms in grips hard as hull metal. Then the blur in her hand resolved into that wicked hook of bone.
The Force, he thought, panic surging into his heart. She Force--blurred it--she's been carrying it all along!
"This is your new home," she said, and stabbed him in the chest.
THREE
THE GARDEN
Just within the fringe of the galactic event horizon--that battlement of gravity where even infinite hyperspace finds its limit--the seedship fell beyond the reality of the universe for the last time. It became, for the last time, its own universe.
This seed-universe, like the larger one it had left, continued to evolve.
Over time that had meaning only within its bubble, the seed-universe differentiated and complexified. The flesh between the radiating fins altered, becoming thicker and harder here, softer and more billowy there, as fetal creature-devices coalesced inside wombs that grew themselves just within its thin skin of reality.
In the directionless nonlocation of hyperspace, this seed-universe began its long, long, slow fall toward the center of the galaxy.
Jacen saw Vergere coming: a small agile silhouette in the misty green gloom that passed for night in the Nursery. She hopped deliberately across the luminescent scum-smeared surface of the vonduun crab bog, her attention on her footing as though she scavenged tide pools.
Jacen's jaw locked.
He looked down again at the wound in the slave's belly: a long curved gash, not too deep. The slave's skin was pink, shading angry red at the lips of the wound; the slave shuddered when Jacen pulled the lips apart. The wound was superficial, only seeping blood--he could see soft tallow within, not hard red muscle or the webbed bulge of gut, and he nodded to himself.
"You'll be all right. From now on, stay away from the amphistaff grove."
"How... how can I?" the slave whined. "What choice do I have?"
"There's always a choice," Jacen muttered. He scratched his head: his hair had grown out enough to start to curl. It was caked with greasy dirt, and it itched--though not as much as the thin, patchy teenager's beard that roughened his cheeks and neck. He glanced back up at Vergere.
She was closer now, weaving through the fungal colony mounds of young oogliths. He hadn't seen her since his first day in the Nursery. That had been, by his best estimate, weeks ago.
Possibly months.
He teased open the mouth of a bulging sacworm that lay on the ground beside him, and stuck his hand inside. The clip beetles that filled the sacworm's belly attacked his hand savagely; Jacen waited until twenty or thirty had clamped their mandibles into his skin, then pulled his hand out and let the sacworm's mouth snap closed once more. The clip beetles bristled like a knobbed insectile glove. He used his beetle-gloved hand to pinch the slave's belly wound together.
With his free hand he tickled the head joint of a clip beetle until its jaws opened; then he pressed the beetle along the wound until its mandibles engaged once more, clipping the wound together. A quick twist of his fingers snapped off the beetle's body; its head remained in place.
It took twenty-three clip beetles to close the slave's wound.
He gently disengaged the living beetles that still clung to his hand and returned them to the sacworm, then tore strips from the lower edge of the slave's robeskin to tie around his middle in a makeshift bandage. The robeskin and the strips alike bled milk from their ripped edges: a sticky resinous blood that glued the strips together and healed them in place.
"Try to keep it dry," Jacen told him quietly. "And don't go anywhere near the amphistaff grove until it heals. I'm pretty sure they can smell wounds. They'll cut you to ribbons."
This amphistaff grove was very different from the one he had found on the worldship at Myrkr; those had been shaped, altered, domesticated. Tamed. The amphistaff grove in the Nursery was the original, the baseline. Nothing about it was tame.
The amphistaff polyps in this grove ranged from one to three meters tall: deep-rooted mounds of leather-fleshed tissue, each with two to five muscular nodules from which sprouted triads of juvenile amphistaffs.
Amphistaff polyps are sessile carnivores; the juvenile amphistaffs act as the polyp's arms and weapons, spearing, envenoming, and eventually dissecting a polyp's prey into chunks small enough to be swept into the polyp's fist-sized groundmouth. They will kill and eat any living thing.
Only the vonduun crab, the amphistaff polyp's sole natural enemy, can approach them in safety, protected by the shallow curve of their impenetrable topshell.
"But... but if I'm sent," the slave moaned. "What then?"
"The slave seed-web is only hooked into your touch-pain nerves. The worst it can do is cause pain," Jacen said. "The amphistaffs will kill you."
"But the pain... the pain..."
"I know."
"You don't know," the slave said bitterly. "They never make you do anything."
"They don't make you do anything either. They can't. All they can do is hurt you. It's not the same thing."
"Easy for you to say! When was the last time they hurt you?"
Jacen rose, looking away toward Vergere.
"You'd better get some sleep. They'll turn the sun back on soon."
Muttering, the slave dragged himself away, moving toward the rest of the slaves. He didn't say thanks.
They rarely did.
Except when the slaves brought their wounds for him to treat, they barely spoke to him at all. They avoided him. He was too strange, too unlike any of the others, and he wasn't easy to talk to. He walked among them in a permanent bubble of solitude; no one wanted to get too close. They feared him. Sometimes they hated him, too.
Jacen bent down and swept up a handful of the headless beetles.
While he watched Vergere approach, he cracked their abdominal shells one by one between his thumb and first knuckle, scoo
ping out the pale purple flesh.
Clip beetle flesh was high in protein and fats, and tasted like Mon Cal ice-lobster.
It was the most appetizing thing he ever got to eat.
Vergere picked her way among the sleeping slaves. She looked up and met his eye, smiling, and gave a flickering wave with one hand.
Jacen said, "That's close enough."
She stopped. "What, no hug? No kiss for your friend Vergere?"
"What do you want?"
She got that wise smile and opened her mouth as if she was about to give one of her cryptic nonanswers, but instead she shrugged, sighed, and the smile faded.
"I am curious," she said plainly. "How is your chest?"
Jacen touched his robeskin over the suppurating hole below his ribs.
His robe had healed weeks ago. Even the bloodstain was gone. He suspected that the robeskins lived on the secretions of the creatures who wore them: sweat, blood, sloughed skin cells, and oils. His was large and healthy, even though he continually ripped strips from it for bandages, both for himself and for the wounded slaves he treated; it always grew back to the original length within a day or two.
His chest, though--Looking at Vergere, he could feel it happen once more: the bone hook slicing in below his ribs, curving up to puncture his diaphragm.
Its point had nicked his lung, then scratched against the inside of his sternum: an icy shuddering nonpain that punched a hole through his strength. He had sagged in the warriors' grips.
Vergere had withdrawn the hook slowly; it skidded through clamped muscle.
She examined him at some length, her crest shimmering an iridescent, unreadable rainbow. "Do you feel it yet?"
Jacen had stared down at the sluggish trail of blood that leaked from the hole below his ribs. The hole had been no bigger than the end of his little finger; he'd felt an absurd desire to stick his finger in the hole like the stopper in a bottle of Corellian whiskey.
Only then had Vergere told him what that hook of bone had done: implanted a slave coral seed inside his chest.
"Well done," she had said to the weapon cheerfully. "Go; enjoy yourself."
The hook had relaxed, coiling around her wrist for a moment like a hug from an affectionate snake, then unwrapped itself and dropped to the ground, slithering away into the underbrush.
"I know you've been implanted before," she had told him.
"On Belkadan, yes? That seed, though, grew too slowly and was removed too easily. So I've made your new, improved one less...mm, less accessible."
And the agony that had blossomed over his heart...
The slave seed had sprouted in seconds, filaments wriggling like screwworms into his celiac plexus. It said hello by secreting algesic enzymes, triggering a star flare in his chest that slapped him off his feet like a blow from a club.
He lay on the knotted hump of vein flesh, curled around his pain. Vergere and the warriors had left him there. No instructions or orders were necessary; the slave seed--with an efficiency Jacen had come to think of as typically Yuuzhan Vong--had let him know what was required of him, simply and directly. It had hurt him. The slave seed was linked telepathically to one of the dhuryams.
Whenever Jacen wasn't doing what the dhuryam wanted, the slave seed set his nerves on fire. The only way to escape pain was to discover the dhuryam's desire: he'd try one thing after another until he found an activity that did not hurt. Often it took a while to figure out. Sometimes a long while. Here in the Nursery, the sun was extinguished for about a third of each day; instead of moons for light during the artificial night, the Nursery had an abundance of phosphorescent mosses and algae. He could count days now, if he wished, but he didn't bother. He could chart the passage of time by the spread of slave seed filaments webbing his nerves.
He could feel it growing. As it grew, its control refined; through the increasingly sophisticated slave seed-web, the dhuryam could tell him to go forward by hurting his back. It could tell him to pick something up by hurting his empty hand. At need, it could spike his nerves so sharply that involuntary spasms would jerk an arm or a leg in the appropriate direction.
The injection wound left by Vergere's weapon had gone bad: red and inflamed and crusted with yellow ooze. Jacen pressed his palm against the stiff robeskin-bandage over it. He stared expressionlessly at the alien avianoid creature who had inflicted this on him.
"My chest?" he said. "It's all right."
"Let me see."
"Leave me alone."
"Have we not yet discussed, Jacen Solo, the futility of acting like a child?" She hopped nimbly toward him.
"Stay away from me, Vergere. I mean it."
"I believe you," she said. She reached solid ground and stalked up to him. "But what matters your meaning? How will you prevent me? Will you slay?"
Jacen clenched his fists and did not answer.
"Will you maim? Cripple your friend Vergere? No?" She gave him her arm as though inviting him to dance. "Break a bone, then--above the wrist, if you don't mind. It should heal cleanly enough to be a merely temporary inconvenience."
"Vergere..."
"Inflict pain," she offered. "Twist my elbow. Pluck feathers from my crest. Otherwise, sit down and show me your ribs. Orders not backed by force are only suggestions, Jacen Solo."
And her orders are orders, Jacen thought. She could have a squad of warriors here in minutes; she could probably Force-hold him in midair and do whatever she wanted. But still he did not move.
She cocked her head quizzically, smiling sideways up at him.
She gathered her four opposable forgers into a point and jabbed firmly, accurately, through the robeskin onto his infected wound.
Pain blazed in his side. Jacen didn't even blink.
"I told you," he said evenly. "It's all right."
She pointed to the ground, to the crushed layers of moss where the slave had lain while Jacen had beetled his wound.
"Lie down."
Jacen didn't move.
"Jacen Solo," she said patiently, "you know the Force is with me. Do you think I cannot feel your infection? Am I so blind that I cannot see fever boiling in your eyes? Am I so weak that I cannot knock you down?"
There may come a time, Jacen thought, when we will answer that last one.
But he sighed and lowered himself to the moss. Vergere seized his robeskin with both hands, then lowered her face to nip a hole in it with her small sharp dental ridges. She tore the hole wide, then stripped off the bandage beneath.
Folding the bandage upon itself, she roughly scrubbed away the infected crust over the wound. Jacen watched her expressionlessly, not reacting to the coarse scrape across his inflamed ribs. She noted his regard, and winked at him.
"Pain means little to you now, yes?"
"Since the Embrace?" Jacen shrugged. "I don't ignore it, if that's what you mean."
"But it does not rule you," she said approvingly. "There are some who say that humans are incapable of overcoming their fear of pain."
"Maybe the people who say that don't know very many humans."
"And maybe they do. Maybe they simply know none like you." She lowered her head and closed her eyes, cupping the folded bandage in the palm of one hand.
Jacen stared, astonished, while she wept. Liquid gems gathered at the corners of her eyes and rolled down her muzzle, gleaming in the misty green twilight.
Vergere's tears... He remembered the little vial of tears, and Mara's sudden recovery from the coomb-spore infection that everyone had privately expected would take her life. Vergere mopped tears from her face with the crusted bandage, then applied that bandage once more to Jacen's wound. His pain vanished.
"Hold this in place," she said, and when Jacen put his hand on the bandage she began to tear strips from the lower edge of his robeskin. Jacen couldn't stop himself from lifting the bandage. He had to see. The inflammation was gone. The skin around his wound was pink and healthy, and the wound itself dripped blood that looked and smelled normal, instea
d of the thick death-reeking ooze of infection that had leaked from it these many days.
"How...?" he gasped. "How could you possibly..."
"Didn't I tell you to keep that in place?" Vergere slapped the bandage flat again, then briskly tied it down with the strips she'd torn from Jacen's robeskin.
"Those tears... what are they?" Jacen asked, awed.
"Whatever I choose them to be."
"I don't understand."
"If you still had the Force, it would be obvious. Females of my species have very sophisticated lachrymal glands; even the Force-blind can...could... alter their tears to produce a wide range of pheromonal signals and chemical intoxicants for use on our males. Using the Force, my control is very precise: I can match the molecular structure of my tears to my desire, whether that desire be a systemic cure for coomb-spore infection...or merely a potent topical antibiotic with instant steroidal properties."
"Wow," Jacen breathed. His heart stung with sudden hope. "I mean, wow. Vergere, do you think... I mean, would you, uh.... could I...?"
She gazed at him steadily. "Ask."
"There are so many..." he began. "There's a slave--a Bothan, Trask--he shattered his ankle. Compound fracture, and it's septic. I'll have to take off his foot. And that'll probably kill him anyway. Pillon Miner, he's human--he was the first one to find out that the amphistaff polyps in that grove over there are mature enough to attack. Peritonitis. He's dying. I have dozens of slaves carrying cuts and slashes, most of them infected--every time a slave goes by there, the amphistaffs attack. We're just lucky their venom glands aren't mature, or none of the slaves would survive at all. The oogliths budding on those hummocks, the ones you came by just now? Two of them got hold of a Twi'lek, across her back, but they're immature, too, and they don't have the antibacterial enzymes of the adults; when their feeder filaments stabbed through her pores, they carried who knows what kind of germs. That's her over there...the one who's moaning. There's nothing I can do for her. I don't think she'll live until morning."
Star Wars - The New Jedi Order - Traitor Page 5
