Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambley

  still see her face. The brows pinched. "Like a fool I thought I was the only

  person who could ever teach her what I thought it was she had to learn in

  this life, that I was the only person who could give her what she needed for

  all that long and winding road of the human span. And all I managed to do,

  in clinging to her as I did, was hurt her terribly."

  Luke said nothing. Callista's face came back to him in the morning light of

  Yavin Four's temple tower, and the voices of the adepts playing with the

  image tank that she herself had instructed them in.

  "In the end," said Liegeus, "I understood that the most truly loving thing

  that I could do would be to let her go, to seek her own road. I suppose it

  was vain of me to believe myself the only guide she would ever have or need.

  Or to believe that she was the only one I would ever love."

  Luke was silent for a time, his whole soul crying out against the darkness

  of the past eight months. At last he whispered, "Was she?"

  Liegeus smiled, and touched his wrist. "I think the human capacity for

  loving is too great for a single loss, however enormous, to blight. At least

  I hope that's the case. You do not believe me now , but I have walked this

  road, Luke. I can tell you, if you keep walking, you do come out of the dark

  at last. The love I have for your sister is no less for the love I felt for

  both my wives, bless their long-suffering hearts. There is always love."

  Not like this, thought Luke. Not like this.

  He had meant to stay awake, to fight the drag of weariness that seemed to be

  pulling him to the edge of a bottomless dark well. In any case it seemed

  impossible to sleep with the itching crawl of electricity tingling in his

  flesh, cleansing the vile energies of the drochs, and with the night's

  unplumbed cold.

  But he found himself nodding, dragged himself awake with all his strength

  only to nod again. As darkness gathered him in the voices that had, it

  seemed, all this time been whispering in his mind stepped to the fore again,

  like men and women stepping out of shadows, and as he drifted from the

  mooring anchors of his consciousness he could hear what they said.

  They spoke of time and of still, tideless waters imbued with life and heat.

  They spoke of the heartbeat of the moonless world, and of the stars. This

  was a deep-colored background on which the bright flashes of closer

  consciousness moved like ephemeral dayflies amusement and concern at the

  flutrying little creatures come to live in their minute enclaves of soil and

  water and vegetative fluff. Worry about danger, some terrible danger.

  And then anger. Deep, burning, violent anger, the anger of those who have

  seen their friends and family members raped and murdered and enslaved before

  their eyes, the memory of voices outcrying in pain as their minds were

  stripped from them, helpless fury and pain.

  Don't let them. Don't let them. Why did he think they were standing all

  around him, looming shadows in the canyons' rocks, looking down at him while

  he slept. We can still hear their voices. Still they cry to us.

  Still they are part of us.

  Luke shook his head. I don't understand.

  He was on Tatooine. He was standing in the courtyard of his old home,

  restored, no longer just a subsidence half-filled with sand, as the

  stormtroopers had left it so many years ago. There were stormtroopers in the

  courtyard, and out of the kitchen doorway that led into the court they were

  dragging Jawas--shrieking, pleading, kicking, jabbering. Aunt Beru, of

  course, would never have permitted a Jawa into her clean kitchen, but dimly

  Luke realized that this wasn't the point. Someone standing just beside and

  behind him, someone he couldn't see, was making these images, someone very

  old and very patient and very angry, trying to make him understand.

  Two stormtroopers seized a Jawa by the arms. A third one raised up a huge

  hand drill of the kind used for taking water rock samples, and drove the

  spinning bit down into the Jawa's head. Horribly, the Jawa continued to

  kick, continued to struggle, as the drillmaster set aside his

  drill and withdrew from a tub at his side a brain, naked and gray and

  dripping clear fluid, and packed the stuff into the opening in the Jawa's

  head like a sapper packing explosive into a hole. Then the Jawa ceased to

  struggle and remained standing passively while the two storm-troopers

  released it, picked up white stormtrooper armor from a giant pile in front

  of the workshop door, and stuffed the Jawa inside it, closing up the armor

  like a trooper-shaped box and locking it along one side.

  Though the suit was rigid while it was being manipulated, once the hapless

  Jawa was inside it, it became articulated, like regular armor.

  Though it was impossible that anything as small as a Jawa would be able to

  fill it out, it seemed, within, to have grown to size.

  It saluted the others and walked smoothly up the steps and out of sight,

  just as if there were a man inside.

  A second Jawa was brought out of the kitchen (Aunt Beru must be havinG a

  fit. It had its head drilled and packed with brains, and was in its turn

  packed into armor--given a weapon, he now saw, an Atgar-4X blaster rifle,

  and sent on its way.

  I don't understand. He turned, to try to get an explanation out of the one

  who had invented the vision, but found himself back in the canyon with

  Liegeus. He was standing over his own body and that of the engineer, and

  though he could have sworn that the one who had shown him the images, the

  one who was trying to communicate with him, had returned to this reality

  with him, he saw nothing behind him by the dull-gleaming facets of the rock

  wall.

  Callista's voice said to him, "It's their world, Luke. It's their world."

  He saw' her walking away from him, her long brown hair hanging in a tail

  down the back of her jacket of leather and nerf wool that, though it was

  black in the starlight, he knew was red.

  Walking away down her own road in the starlight, toward a destination that

  he could not see.

  Around her, Leia was conscious that the glittering walls of crystal had

  changed. When she had entered the cave, a crevice far up the canyons above

  the Theran camp, she had been dazzled by the lights thrown from the thick

  encrustation of gems. But as she extinguished her lamp, as she had been

  instructed, and walked farther into the dimly radiant chamber, she was aware

  that somehow the deep-buried geode had been transformed, morphed into

  something familiar, a room she knew...

  Dark pillars ascended to the striated greemand-gold glass of the vaults.

  Shadows chased one another across the dull gold intricacy of the floor.

  Palpatine's audience hall. Why did she dimly hear the funky jizz-wailing of

  that horrible band Jabba the Hutt had kept to play in his palace? Why did

  she smell, behind the perfumes and incense and subtle hurlothrumbic gas with

  which the Emperor had flooded his court hall, the rank stink of Hutt, the

  greasy odor of meres and soldiers of fortuneS.

  She walked farther. The fear that came over her she attributed to the ga
s.

  Her father had warned her about it, the first time she'd had an audience

  with the Emperor, when she was a youngster. "Don't be afraid," Bail Organa

  had murmured as he opened the door for her. "It's just a trick he's playing

  on you, to make you think he's more dangerous than he is."

  She had been afraid, but had known it wasn't real. That memory remained with

  her, that knowledge, whenever afterward she felt fear.

  There was someone on Palpatine's throne.

  Leia stepped clear of the pillars. A robed figure, stooped forward, face in

  the shadow of a hood. She saw the gleam of eyes. At the foot of the throne

  huddled a woman, nearly naked in scraps of gold and silk, long chestnut hair

  braided down her back and a chain collar around her neck.

  Herself, eight years ago. Eyes downcast, beaten, submissive as she had never

  been, not even in Jabba's awful palace. Hopeless, knowing that this time

  there would be no rescue.

  Her hand went to the lightsaber at her belt, but she remembered what

  Callista had said, that it was better not to use a weapon until she knew

  against whom to use it. Leia stood still, but her heart hammered in her

  chest.

  "Draw it," drawled a deep voice, a woman's voice, like smoke and honey, and

  she recognized the voice as her own. The robed figure on

  the throne put back her hood. Leia saw' herself, matured and beautiful,

  beautiful beyond description nearly six feet tall, with the attenuated,

  slender grace she had always envied Mon Mothma and Callista. Though there

  was maturity and wisdom in her face the crow's-feet around the eyes were

  erased, the mouth was fuller and stronger and redder, the hair a cinnamon

  cloud. Every beauty idealized and raised to terrifying perfection.

  "Draw it. You must give it to one of us."

  She stood up from her throne, shrugged aside Palpatine's robe so that it

  folded down her back in dark curtains. Leia saw that she, too, wore the gold

  slave harness, jeweled and flashing, but she wore it like an Imperial gown.

  The Empress Leia leaned back her head and laughed and stretched forth her

  hands to the shadows of the ceiling. Force lightning rained from her

  fingers, crawled up the pillars, illuminated the perfect cheekbones, and

  cold auburn eyes. Behind her, as in Jabba's palace, Leia could see on the

  wall a man frozen in carbonite, but the contorted face was Luke's, not

  Han's.

  She didn't know where Han was. Dead, she thought.

  Dead of the Death Seed, somewhere in Meridian sector. And she, the Empress,

  was free of him at last.

  "Which of us will you give it to, Leia?" The Empress jerked the golden

  chain, pulling the slave Leia sprawling. The wretched girl buried her face

  in her arm and wept, as Leia had sometimes longed to do at that time, in

  that place, in her life. "Draw your lightsaber, and give it to one of us.

  This is what you must do."

  Leia unhooked the weapon from her belt. She held it in her hands, slender

  and silvery, the weapon she had made under Luke's tutelage and later feared

  to use. The hands of the slave Leia, clutched into fists of frustration and

  hopelessness, were nerveless and weak.

  Those of the Empress before her throne were large, strong as a man's,

  long-fingered, and white as Leia had always wished her hands could be.

  Behind the throne she could see Jacen and Jaina, smiling, lightsabers in

  their hands, and just visible was the corner of her father's white robe, the

  one he had been wearing in her other dream, when Anakin had cut him dead.

  There was no sound but the slave girl's sobbing.

  The Empress walked toward her, Palpatine's robe billowing around her like

  wings of smoke containing the flame of her golden harness.

  "Give it to one of us," she commanded. "Give it to me."

  Leia backed away, frightened of the woman's power. Even as bad as I am with

  this, i could kill her here. She deserves it, for what she did to my father.

  She wasn't sure why she thought this or of whom she actually spoke. If she

  gave it to the slave, the Empress would only take it from her. Besides, the

  slave was a crawling weakling, sobbing miserably, not raising her face. Leia

  felt a stab of shame and embarrassment, knowing that, too, was her.

  I could kill her. i could kill them both.

  She backed farther, holding the lightsaber in both hands, her breath coming

  fast. The auburn eyes--her own eyes, raised to the glory of suns--stared

  into hers, compelling her, as Palpatine could compel. On the dais, the slave

  girl groveled and wept. Leia clutched the weapon's hilt, not willing to

  surrender it, yet feeling she must. She was almost panting with fear, and

  the thin choke of gas in her throat was what brought her to her senses.

  It isn't real. Her father--her true father, the father of her heart--had

  said. It's just something he wants you to feel.

  She stepped sideways, out of the Empress's path.

  "I don't have to give it to anyone," she said. "It's mine, to do with as I

  choose."

  And turning her back on them, she walked out of the palace, out of the cave.

  "Luke was able to confront Vader," said Callista. "To be defeated by him--to

  cut off his hand, as his own had been cut off to accept that this was his

  father. To surrender that fact, and go on from there.

  You never had that chance."

  "It's not an experience I'd stand in line for," remarked Leia drily.

  "I knew Vader. I saw him tagging after Palpatine every time I went to Court.

  Believe me, I'll never accept that he was my father."

  "Then you'll always be the slave to his shadow."

  Anger sprang to Leia's eyes. For a long moment they met the other woman's

  gray gaze in the campfire's wavering glow, the chilly flare of sodium lamps

  set here and there around the Theran camp. Most of the cultists had lain

  down around the mouth of the largest of the glittering caves, when the

  aftermath of the Force storm had blown itself out. Save for a few mounting

  guard farther up the canyon, they had given themselves up to sleep. Be had

  disappeared, to commune with the night, someone said. Apparently this was

  what Listeners commonly did, because everyone just nodded.

  Leia and Callista, apart from the others, were virtually alone.

  It was Leia who looked aside first. Her nightmares came back to her, the

  shape and face of her fears. She recalled the rage that came over her, the

  need to prove herself other than Anakin Skywalker's daughter.

  She had taken and used his weapon, the Noghri, for her safety and that of

  her children and to repair the damage that he had done them; but she

  flinched from the thought of standing up and saying, I am Lord Vader's

  daughter.

  "I don't know what it would mean," she said slowly, groping for words, "if I

  accepted it. If I made him a part of me, the way Luke has."

  "You mean for others'." Callista wrapped her long arms about her knees,

  sitting perched on a smooth hunk of crystal like fused glass, her dark hair

  frayed by straying winds across the crimson leather of her jacket. "Those

  who would ask what his daughter was doing ruling the Council?"

  "Maybe," said Leia. "Mostly for myself.
And for the children. It will take

  time." The thought of it revolted her, furious anger succeeded by the heat

  of tears in her throat.

  "No one is asking you to do it tomorrow. But if you know what parts of him

  are inside you, you can know what to build a wall around and what to take

  into yourself. Because you cannot afford not to be strong, Leia," she said.

  "You cannot afford to let this kind of thing happen to you, ever again."

  "No," she said softly. "I know that."

  Callista stood and unhooked the lightsaber from her belt. The sun-yellow

  blade slid forth like a lance of summer into winter's dark.

  "Then let's begin."

  Sparring with Callista was in some ways easier than sparring with Luke,

  though the lost Jedi was of a height with her brother and no less exacting a

  teacher. Still, Callista understood the differences in technique required of

  Leia's lesser height and lighter weight, knew the finer points with the

  instincts of one who has been rigorously coached for many years, and was far

  more conscious of distance and timing than any man Leia had ever worked

  with. As when she worked with Luke, Leia had no sense of danger whatever, no

  fear of the softly humming laser blades

  that could slide through flesh like a hot silver wire through cheese; only a

  strange exhilaration, a sense of freedom that she mistrusted instinctively

  because it felt so utterly right.

  "Footwork," said Callista dispassionately, searing a tiny curl of smoke from

  the rock a centimeter from Leia's much-taped golden boot.

  "Footwork. Don't be afraid of your spirit. Don't always be watching

  yourself."

  Leia stepped back, the blade whispering, shedding pale azure light over her

  sweating face, the long tendrils of her cinnamon hair hanging down in her

  eyes. "If I don't watch myself I'm afraid I'll do something wrong."

  "I know," said Callista. "You've watched yourself like that all your life.

  What are you afraid you'll do?"

  "Hurt someone," said Leia, and knew it for the truth from the bottom of her

  soul. They weren't talking about combat now. They both knew that.

  "You'll know when the time is to strike," said Callista. "And when to step

  away. The only way to learn it is to do more of this, not less."

  "I don't want to be another . . ." The words froze in her throat.