STAR WARS - THE NEW JEDI ORDER - Destiny's Way

by Walter Jon Williams

  Fyor Rodan turned his scornful eye toward Cal. "I thought you had more pride than to sell yourself to a bunch of renegades and their witch-doctor accomplices!" he said. "I refuse to have anything to do with supporting the illusion that your government is anything but illegitimate. I'll thank you to keep my name off any list of appointees."

  He turned, stiff-spined, and marched out. Luke and Cal looked at each other.

  "Stickier than I thought," Cal said.

  * * *

  Chapter 19

  Jacen spent his first day of freedom in the apartment, marveling at its strange solidity. The scratch of the carpet against his bare feet, air that didn't taste like a rich stew of organics, walls that were vertical and a ceiling that was a flat plane above his head. Holos on shelves. Popular music that bounced its rhythms from hidden speakers. A kitchen full of wondrous, gleaming appliances. A refrigeration unit full of food designed for the human palate.

  Furniture. The Yuuzhan Vong didn't have furniture the same way that people did. It wasn't crafted or assembled, it was sprouted. And their sense of scale was different, the way they placed it in one of their rooms with its resinous floors and walls of coral or stabilized protein.

  Jacen had said farewell to furniture, to holos and kitchen equipment and refrigeration units and to everything else that was human. Finding it again was a rediscovery.

  Messages appeared on the comm unit. WAY TO GO SPROUT. And ONCE AGAIN, JACEN, YOU HAVE ANSWERED A MOTHER’S PRAYERS. The messages gave him a singing joy that stayed with him for the rest of the day.

  That evening his aunt Mara tactfully hinted that he might buy some clothes, so the next morning he set off to do some shopping. He borrowed some of Uncle Luke's clothes and threw a cloak over everything, but people recognized him anyway. His face had been everywhere in the holocasts. Many were friendly, many curious, and only a few turned away with angry glares or muttered asides. The Jedi, it seemed, were more popular than they had been.

  He bought clothing from a Quarren tailor who assured him that the drape was perfect and in the mode, at least for humans. Afterward he wandered the city, enjoying the elegant architecture beneath the vivid blue sky, and tried to ignore the fact that wherever he went he was the center of attention.

  Later, from the apartment, he tried to contact Vergere, but was told she wasn't allowed calls. He spoke to Luke about it, but Luke only said, "You're on vacation. And that includes being on vacation from Vergere."

  Then Luke invited Jacen to sit by him. "I'd like to hear your ideas on the Yuuzhan Vong," he said.

  "Vergere would be the one to ask," Jacen said.

  "I have asked her. But I'd like to ask you. Their immunity to the Force aside, arc the Yuuzhan Vong so very different from us?"

  Jacen considered. "No. They have a tyrannical government, and their religion is absolute poison. But they're no better or worse than humans would be if we were raised in their system."

  Luke looked at him. "Do you hate them?" he asked.

  "No." Jacen's answer was swift and very certain.

  "Why not?"

  This time Jacen had to think. "Because," he said finally, "it would be like hating a child for being raised badly. It's not the child's fault, it's the parents'. I could hate the leaders who made the Yuuzhan Vong what they are, but they're long dead, so why waste energy in hatred?"

  Luke rose and put a hand on Jacen's shoulder. "Thank you, Jacen," he said.

  "I ... understand them," Jacen said.

  Luke seemed startled, his mind inward. "You do not hate, because you understand," he murmured.

  "Sorry?"

  Luke's attention snapped back to Jacen. "No. Go on."

  "I was implanted with a slave seed, remember, and it interfaced with my nervous system. It was supposed to be a one-way communication link, to enslave me and give me my orders, but I discovered that it worked the other way. It's produced a kind of ... telepathy. I can extend my mind into the Yuuzhan Vong and into their creatures, and sometimes I can influence them."

  Luke looked at him in surprise. "You can touch the Yuuzhan Vong with the Force?"

  "No. It's different. I can't use the Force and my—my 'Vongsense' at the same time."

  Luke's eyes narrowed in thought. "Can you teach this?"

  Jacen had been wondering this himself. "I don't know," he said. "I don't think so. I think perhaps you need to be implanted with a slave seed, or some other form of Yuuzhan Vong control that can interface with your nervous system." A thought struck him. "I might be able to teach Tahiri. After what they put her through, it's possible that she . . . might still be attuned enough to the Yuuzhan Vong to learn to do as I've done."

  Luke frowned. "Tahiri found her experience at the hands of the Vong to be highly traumatic. And she's—had some traumatic experiences since. I wouldn't want to force her to revisit an experience that damaged her."

  "Nor would I."

  Jacen didn't tell Luke about one of the consequences of what he'd just called his "Vongsense"—the fact that he was still in occasional mental contact with the entity whom the Yuuzhan Vong called the World Brain, the dhuryam who controlled the environment of Coruscant. He and the dhuryam were conspiring against the planet's worldshaping, sabotaging it in minor but annoying ways: through the creation of an itching plague, for instance. Jacen had just inspired the World Brain to cause a sickness in the maw luur, the creatures who recycled Yuuzhan Vong waste, during what the dhuryam sensed was an important occasion or ceremony.

  Though Jacen could theoretically inspire the World Brain to more deadly action, from poisoning Yuuzhan Vong food to causing an ecological catastrophe, he had refrained. His empathy with the Yuuzhan Vong had grown along with his Vongsense: he would not be a mass murderer, not even of a deadly enemy.

  In part, that was why he hadn't told Luke of this particular ability. He didn't want his ability known for fear that someone would want him to use it as a weapon. Though he realized that Luke would never ask such a thing of him, he felt that the more private he kept this secret, the better.

  The conversation with Luke was interrupted when a holojournalist commed, asking for an interview. Jacen told the comm unit to refuse anyone it didn't already know was a friend.

  The following morning Jacen felt delicate, ate a bland breakfast, and returned to his bed. Luke left to do political things, and Mara went off to play counterspy with her mouse droids. He was awakened by a call on the comm, which meant that the comm's artificial intelligence recognized the caller as family or a friend.

  He answered and stared into a pair of green eyes framed by curling blond hair. Danni Quee.

  "Hello, Danni."

  "Jacen. I hope it's all right to call."

  "I'm not sick or in quarantine or anything. I'm allowed to talk to people."

  "That's good. Would you like to see a bit of the city? Or are you being besieged by friends?"

  "I'm not besieged by friends," Jacen said, "I guess because they're as tactful as you are. But I'd just as soon not go anywhere public, because I seem to attract crowds."

  She grinned, teeth white against her tanned face. "I saw you on the holonews yesterday. Was that cloak supposed to be a disguise?"

  "Not exactly."

  "If you're not ready to face your public, then, why don't I get a hovercraft and take you out to Mester Reef?"

  "Sure."

  Twenty minutes later, Jacen met Danni at a public pier. "Nice clothes," she remarked, and gave him a hug. Soon they were on a craft racing west on its repulsorlifts ten meters above the water. Danni had provided diving equipment for two, as well as a light lunch.

  "Fast work," Jacen said.

  "I was going to go anyway. If I hadn't reached you, I would have gone with another friend."

  He looked at her. "Anyone I know?"

  "Thespar Trode. She's another unemployed astrophysicist."

  "You're not employed these days?"

  Danni gave a wry grin. "We'll talk about that later."

  Meste
r Reef was in such tropical waters that no insulation suits were necessary, but Jacen and Danni wore them anyway to minimize abrasions. The air supply was a light unit worn on the back that silently extracted air from the water and fed it to the diver, and was limited only by its power supply, which was good for about fifty years. There was a vest that could be inflated or deflated to adjust for buoyancy, with pockets for weights to make sure the diver didn't pop back to the surface.

  Danni held up a pair of swim fins. "Old-fashioned transportation," she said. "I could have brought some drive units to speed us along under the water, but I think they're a distraction—it's better if it's just you and the reef and the ocean."

  "Fine with me," Jacen said. "It's not like we're in a hurry to go anywhere."

  The water was like a warm salt bath. Adjusting to the breathing apparatus felt natural and was easier than using a pressure suit. The inflatable vest was a little more difficult, and Jacen found himself sinking or bobbing toward the surface until he managed to equalize his buoyancy properly. Once he adjusted to the experience, he found he could think himself higher or lower—and he didn't need the Force for it either, just a kind of relaxation.

  A current ran along the reef here, and he and Danni simply drifted along. The water that leaked past the mouthpiece tasted of salt and iodine and a thousand living things. Above was the rippled sunlight of the ocean surface; to one side the vivid colors of the reef; on the other side the boundless ocean; and below the profound blue of the ocean deeps, clear and seeming to go down forever.

  They didn't dive below twenty meters or so, because below that depth the light faded away badly, and they wanted to see the brightness of the coral. The coral formations, the anemones, and the sponges were ablaze with brilliant color, and the fish and other animals were as incandescent as the coral through which they swam.

  There were hierarchies here. The coral rose like great ramparts of a castle, occasionally breaking toward the surface in towers. Living things attached themselves to the coral, or sheltered inside its convolutions, or imitated the coral with its colors, its seeming quiescence, and its stinging spines. Reef fish hunted these, searching among the coral for their dinners and sometimes being engulfed and digested by a cunningly camouflaged predator, while torpedo-shaped pelagic fish from the deep water ate the reef fish, darting in from the open ocean to strike, kill, and devour, coming from a place far beyond the comprehension of the reef fish, like pirates from another world.

  And everything on the reef was alive! The coral, the sponges, the fish, the crustaceans, and anemones—all were living things. Even the seemingly empty ocean was filled with microscopic life. That was the true wonder of it. Jacen summoned his Force-sense and let the song of the reef enter him, all the tiny creatures living together in a complex, interconnected pattern, basking for a moment in the sheer glory of it.

  This was such a glorious change from the Yuuzhan Vong environment. There everything lived as well, but all was alien, strange, and full of sinister purpose. It was like living in a void. Here, the reef and its life practically shouted at him through the Force.

  Jacen extended his Force-sense toward Danni. She was Force-sensitive, but her training had been unsystematic, scattered into spare moments between battles and obsessive research. He sensed her startled surprise at the first touch of his mind, but she then relaxed, and he let the reefs existence flow into her, the great vital accumulation of all the tiny lives, and the two floated along the reef in silent communion, absorbed in the reefs complexity and abundance.

  Eventually they grew chilled even through their insulation suits, so he and Danni rose to the surface, and Danni triggered the transponder that would bring her hovercraft flying toward them. It settled into the water five meters away and lowered its ladders so they could climb aboard. They took off their dive suits and let the sun warm them as they ate their lunch. And then, while digesting, they simply relaxed, stretched out side by side on the foredeck.

  "You said you weren't working?" Jacen asked.

  "No. I was working for the Jedi until my unit began to achieve results, and then we were co-opted by the government. And then, after we reached a certain stage, we were—well, we weren't disbanded, but some of my team was taken away. I'm taking some training in communications and infiltration, so that I can help set up Resistance cells, and then I'll get back in the war."

  Jacen rolled on his side to look at her. "But you've done such crucial work!" he said. "You discovered how to jam the yammosk signal. That's the single critical discovery that's enabled our ships to survive battle with the Yuuzhan Vong. Why would they disband your group now?"

  She turned her green eyes to his. "Astrophysicists aren't important for war work," she said. "I made the initial discovery about how yammosks communicate, yes. But now that the discovery's been made, it isn't a theoretical problem anymore, it's an engineering one. Now it's up to the engineers to build jammers and spoofers and try to work out more and more ingenious ways to foul up enemy communications. All the theoretical work has been quietly shunted aside." She sighed. "I was working so hard and for so long—nothing has ever been so thoroughly studied in such a short time as the Yuuzhan Vong. What Cilghal and I did alone could have won us half a dozen major scientific prizes. But our work is secret, so the prize committees will never find out, and as tar as anyone knows, I'm just a twenty-three-year-old stargazer without a job and with no hope of finding one." She stretched languidly and looked at the brilliant sky.

  A strange look came onto her face, and she sat up, crossing her legs and leaning toward Jacen. "Not all the theoretical work has been pushed aside. Did I mention that? There's some still going on, and it's kind of strange."

  Jacen blinked up at her. "Tell me."

  "We had some people in our group who were working on the details of Yuuzhan Vong bioscience. They made a discovery, and right away were pulled away into a new unit in the Intelligence division. They're working directly under a group of Chiss, who report directly to Dif Scaur."

  "Scaur's working with Chiss?" Jacen was surprised.

  "They're all offplanet now. None of my messages to my friends get through, I just get messages saying they're temporarily oft" the HoloNet."

  "All at the proverbial secret laboratory off in deep space," Jacen muttered.

  "And why the Chiss?"

  "And you say they're working on Yuuzhan Vong bioscience." Jacen pondered for a moment, then shook his head. "The problem is, we don't know enough about the Chiss to know why they'd be valuable. We don't even know where their home planet is. Maybe their bioscience is ahead of ours. Maybe they know something about the Yuuzhan Vong that we don't. Maybe their own weird metabolism gives them an insight into what the Yuuzhan Vong can do."

  "Weird metabolism?"

  "They're blue. That's a clue right there."

  Danni laughed.

  Jacen looked at her. "Do you know the nature of the discovery the bioscientists made?"

  She nodded. "It had to do with Yuuzhan Vong genetics— which are generally like ours, by the way."

  Jacen blinked. "That's pretty odd, considering they're from another galaxy."

  "There's one bit of their genetics that isn't like us," Danni said. "There's a sequence that seems completely unique, and it's common to all Yuuzhan Vong life. Yorik coral, yammosks, plant life, the Yuuzhan Vong themselves. All of it."

  "Is that what makes us unable to see diem in the Force?"

  Danni shrugged. "Maybe. The geneticists didn't know—or anyway they didn't when I last saw them."

  Silence fell. Jacen gave a reluctant grin. "We probably shouldn't even be talking like this," he said. "Whatever Scaur's doing with the Chiss, it's probably so deeply secret and oft" the map that our speculations are going to both be wrong and get us in trouble."

  "Even speculating here?"

  "It wouldn't surprise me if I'm under some kind of casual observation," Jacen said. "I just came back from weeks of imprisonment at the hands of the Yuuzhan Vong. Int
elligence can't be sure I haven't switched sides." He looked up at the sky and gave a wave. "Say hi to the satellites!"

  Danni laughed and waved at any invisible observers, then turned back to Jacen. "That's enough danger for today," she said. "I think I feel safer underwater."

  "Me, too."

  Danni and Jacen flew in their craft a few kilometers farther down the reef and put on their equipment again. As soon as they descended to the reef Jacen drew again on his Force-awareness and let the life of the reef fill his spirit. He reached out again to Danni, and the two shared the swarming, intricate existence of the reef until it was time to return to Heurkea.

  The next day Jacen went to the reef again with Danni, this time with her friend Thespar Trode, a female Ishi Tib, whose dive gear had been adapted to her giant head and eyes that thrust out on stalks. The two astrophysicists' conversation tended to be technical, but Jacen didn't mind: he enjoyed the display of agile intelligence even though he didn't understand it, and while he listened he let his Force-sense descend to the reef and fill his mind with living glory.

  After the dive he invited Thespar and Danni to the apartment for snacks, but when he opened the door he saw Jaina standing in the front room, still in her pilot's coveralls, her military duffel partly opened on the floor. He and Jaina stared at each other for a long moment of exquisitely painful joy, and then their twin bond flared with a thousand shared emotions and memories, the rich harvest of lives shared since their first day in their mother's womb, and they rushed into an embrace. They pounded each other on the back and laughed until the tears came.

  Family was another tiling that Jacen had surrendered to the Yuuzhan Vong. The sensation of finding his twin again took his breath away.

  When he found it he looked at the insignia on Jaina's coveralls. "You're a major now?"

  "I'm better than that, I'm a holovid star. Not to mention a goddess." Her eyes shifted to the two visitors standing near the door. She knew Danni Quee, of course, but had to be introduced to Danni's friend Thespar.