by James Luceno
“Why wouldn’t he go through the Council?”
“Perhaps he has some reason to believe,” Obi-Wan said carefully, “that the Council might have resisted sending you. Perhaps he did not wish to reveal his reason for this summons. Relations between the Council and the Chancellor are … stressed.”
A queasy knot began to tie itself behind Anakin’s ribs. “Obi-Wan, what’s going on? Something’s wrong, isn’t it? You know something, I can tell.”
“Know? No: only suspect. Which is not at all the same thing.”
Anakin remembered what he’d said to Padmé about exactly that last night. The queasy knot tightened. “And?”
“And that’s why I am out here, Anakin. So I can talk to you. Privately. Not as a member of the Jedi Council—in fact, if the Council were to find out about this conversation … well, let’s say, I’d rather they didn’t.”
“What conversation? I still don’t know what’s going on!”
“None of us does. Not really.” Obi-Wan put a hand on Anakin’s shoulder and frowned deeply into his eyes. “Anakin, you know I am your friend.”
“Of course you are—”
“No. No of courses, Anakin. Nothing is of course anymore. I am your friend, and as your friend, I am asking you: be wary of Palpatine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you are his friend. I am concerned that he may not be yours. Be careful of him, Anakin. And be careful of your own feelings.”
“Careful? Don’t you mean, mindful?”
Obi-Wan’s frown deepened. “No. I don’t. The Force grows ever darker around us, and we are all affected by it, even as we affect it. This is a dangerous time to be a Jedi. Please, Anakin—please be careful.”
Anakin tried for his old rakish smile. “You worry too much.”
“I have to—”
“—because I don’t worry at all, right?” Anakin finished for him.
Obi-Wan’s frown softened toward a smile. “How did you know I was going to say that?”
“You’re wrong, you know.” Anakin stared off through the morning haze toward the shuttle, past the shuttle—
Toward 500 Republica, and Padmé’s apartment.
He said, “I worry plenty.”
The ride to Palpatine’s office was quietly tense. Anakin had tried making conversation with the two tall helmet-masked figures in the red robes, but they weren’t exactly chatty.
Anakin’s discomfort only increased when he arrived at Palpatine’s office. He had been here so often that he didn’t even really see it, most times: the deep red runner that matched the softly curving walls, the long comfortable couches, the huge arc of window behind Palpatine’s desk—these were all so familiar that they were usually almost invisible, but today—
Today, with Obi-Wan’s voice whispering be wary of Palpatine in the back of his head, everything looked different. New. And not in a good way.
Some indefinable gloom shrouded everything, as though the orbital mirrors that focused the light of Coruscant’s distant sun into bright daylight had somehow been damaged, or smudged with the brown haze of smoke that still shrouded the cityscape. The light of the Chancellor’s lampdisks seemed brighter than usual, almost harsh, but somehow that only deepened the gloom. He discovered now an odd, accidental echo of memory, a new harmonic resonance inside his head, when he looked at the curving view wall that threw into silhouette the Chancellor’s single large chair.
Palpatine’s office reminded him of the General’s Quarters on Invisible Hand.
And it struck him as unaccountably sinister that the robes worn by the Chancellor’s cadre of bodyguards were the exact color of Palpatine’s carpet.
Palpatine himself stood at the view wall, hands clasped behind him, gazing out upon the smoke-hazed morning.
“Anakin.” He must have seen Anakin’s reflection in the curve of transparisteel; he had not moved. “Join me.”
Anakin came up beside him, mirroring his stance. Endless cityscape stretched away before them. Here and there, the remains of shattered buildings still smoldered. Space lane traffic was beginning to return to normal, and rivers of gnat-like speeders and air taxis and repulsor buses crisscrossed the city. In the near distance, the vast dome of the Galactic Senate squatted like a gigantic gray mushroom sprung from the duracrete plain that was Republic Plaza. Farther, dim in the brown haze, he could pick out the quintuple spires that topped the ziggurat of the Jedi Temple.
“Do you see, Anakin?” Palpatine’s voice was soft, hoarse with emotion. “Do you see what they have done to our magnificent city? This war must end. We cannot allow such … such …”
His voice trailed away, and he shook his head. Gently, Anakin laid a hand on Palpatine’s shoulder, and a hint of frown fleeted over his face at how frail seemed the flesh and bone beneath the robe. “You know you have my best efforts, and those of every Jedi,” he said.
Palpatine nodded, lowering his head. “I know I have yours, Anakin. The rest of the Jedi …” He sighed. He looked even more exhausted than he had yesterday. Perhaps he had passed a sleepless night as well.
“I have asked you here,” he said slowly, “because I need your help on a matter of extreme delicacy. I hope I can depend upon your discretion, Anakin.”
Anakin went still for a moment, then he very slowly lifted his hand from the Chancellor’s shoulder.
Be wary of Palpatine
“As a Jedi, there are … limits … to my discretion, Chancellor.”
“Oh, of course. Don’t worry, my boy.” A flash of his familiar fatherly smile forced its way into his eyes. “Anakin, in all the years we have been friends, have I ever asked you to do anything even the slightest bit against your conscience?”
“Well—”
“And I never will. I am very proud of your accomplishments as a Jedi, Anakin. You have won many battles the Jedi Council insisted to me were already lost—and you saved my life. It’s frankly appalling that they still keep you off the Council yourself.”
“My time will come … when I am older. And, I suppose, wiser.” He didn’t want to get into this with Palpatine; talking with the Chancellor like this—seriously, man-to-man—made him feel good, feel strong, despite Obi-Wan’s warning. He certainly didn’t want to start whining about being passed over for Mastery like some preadolescent Padawan who hadn’t been chosen for a scramball team.
“Nonsense. Age is no measure of wisdom. They keep you off the Council because it is the last hold they have on you, Anakin; it is how they control you. Once you’re a Master, as you deserve, how will they make you do their bidding?”
“Well …” Anakin gave him a half-sheepish smile. “They can’t exactly make me, even now.”
“I know, my boy. I know. That is precisely the point. You are not like them. You are younger. Stronger. Better. If they cannot control you now, what will happen once you are a Master in your own right? How will they keep your toes on their political line? You may become more powerful than all of them together. That is why they keep you down. They fear your power. They fear you.”
Anakin looked down. This had struck a little close to the bone. “I have sensed … something like that.”
“I have asked you here today, Anakin, because I have fears of my own.” He turned, waiting, until Anakin met his eye, and on Palpatine’s face was something approaching bleak despair. “I am coming to fear the Jedi themselves.”
“Oh, Chancellor—” Anakin broke into a smile of disbelief. “There is no one more loyal than the Jedi, sir—surely, after all this time—”
But Palpatine had already turned away. He lowered himself into the chair behind his desk and kept his head down as though he was ashamed to say this directly to Anakin’s face. “The Council keeps pushing for more control. More autonomy. They have lost all respect for the rule of law. They have become more concerned with avoiding the oversight of the Senate than with winning the war.”
“With respect, sir, many on the Council would say the same of you.
” He thought of Obi-Wan, and he had to stop himself from wincing. Had he betrayed a confidence just now?
Or had Obi-Wan been doing the Council’s bidding after all? … Be wary of Palpatine, he’d said, and be careful of your feelings …
Were these honest warnings, out of concern for him? Or had they been calculated: seeds of doubt planted to hedge Anakin away from the one man who really understood him?
The one man he could really trust …
“Oh, I have no doubt of it,” Palpatine was saying. “Many of the Jedi on your Council would prefer I was out of office altogether—because they know I’m on to them, now. They’re shrouded in secrecy, obsessed with covert action against mysteriously faceless enemies—”
“Well, the Sith are hardly faceless, are they? I mean, Dooku himself—”
“Was he truly a Lord of the Sith? Or was he just another in your string of fallen Jedi, posturing with a red lightsaber to intimidate you?”
“I …” Anakin frowned. How could he be sure? “But Sidious …”
“Ah, yes, the mysterious Lord Sidious. ‘The Sith infiltrator in the highest levels of government.’ Doesn’t that sound a little overly familiar to you, Anakin? A little overly convenient? How do you know this Sidious even exists? How do you know he is not a fiction, a fiction created by the Jedi Council, to give them an excuse to harass their political enemies?”
“The Jedi are not political—”
“In a democracy, everything is political, Anakin. And everyone. This imaginary Sith Lord of theirs—even if he does exist, is he anyone to be feared? To be hunted down and exterminated without trial?”
“The Sith are the definition of evil—”
“Or so you have been trained to believe. I have been reading about the history of the Sith for some years now, Anakin. Ever since the Council saw fit to finally reveal to me their … assertion … that these millennium-dead sorcerers had supposedly sprung back to life. Not every tale about them is sequestered in your conveniently secret Temple archives. From what I have read, they were not so different from Jedi; seeking power, to be sure, but so does your Council.”
“The dark side—”
“Oh, yes, yes, certainly, the dark side. Listen to me: if this ‘Darth Sidious’ of yours were to walk through that door right now—and I could somehow stop you from killing him on the spot—do you know what I would do?”
Palpatine rose, and his voice rose with him. “I would ask him to sit down, and I would ask him if he has any power he could use to end this war!”
“You would—you would—” Anakin couldn’t quite make himself believe what he was hearing. The blood-red rug beneath his feet seemed to shift under him, and his head was starting to spin.
“And if he said he did, I’d bloody well offer him a brandy and talk it out!”
“You—Chancellor, you can’t be serious—”
“Well, not entirely.” Palpatine sighed, and shrugged, and lowered himself once more into his chair. “It’s only an example, Anakin. I would do anything to return peace to the galaxy, do you understand? That’s all I mean. After all—” He offered a tired, sadly ironic smile. “—what are the chances of an actual Sith Lord ever walking through that door?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Anakin said feelingly, “but I do know that you probably shouldn’t use that … example … in front of the Jedi Council.”
“Oh, yes.” Palpatine chuckled. “Yes, quite right. They might take it as an excuse to accuse me.”
“I’m sure they’d never do that—”
“I am not. I am no longer sure they’ll stop at anything, Anakin. That’s actually the reason I asked you here today.” He leaned forward intently, resting his elbows on the desk. “You may have heard that this afternoon, the Senate will call upon this office to assume direct control of the Jedi Council.”
Anakin’s frown deepened. “The Jedi will no longer report to the Senate?”
“They will report to me. Personally. The Senate is too unfocused to conduct this war; we’ve seen this for years. Now that this office will be the single authority to direct the prosecution of the war, we’ll bring a quick end to things.”
Anakin nodded. “I can see how that will help, sir, but the Council probably won’t. I can tell you that they are in no mood for further constitutional amendments.”
“Yes, thank you, my friend. But in this case, I have no choice. This war must be won.”
“Everyone agrees on that.”
“I hope they do, my boy. I hope they do.”
Inside his head, he heard the echo of Obi-Wan, murmuring relations between the Council and the Chancellor are … stressed. What had been going on, here in the capital?
Weren’t they all on the same side?
“I can assure you,” he said firmly, “that the Jedi are absolutely dedicated to the core values of the Republic.”
One of Palpatine’s eyebrows arched. “Their actions will speak more loudly than their words—as long as someone keeps an eye on them. And that, my boy, is exactly the favor I must ask of you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Anakin, I am asking you—as a personal favor to me, in respect for our long friendship—to accept a post as my personal representative on the Jedi Council.”
Anakin blinked.
He blinked again.
He said, “Me?”
“Who else?” Palpatine spread his hands in a melancholy shrug. “You are the only Jedi I know, truly know, that I can trust. I need you, my boy. There is no one else who can do this job: to be the eyes and ears—and the voice—of the Republic on the Jedi Council.”
“On the Council …,” Anakin murmured.
He could see himself seated in one of the low, curving chairs, opposite Mace Windu. Opposite Yoda. He might sit next to Ki-Adi-Mundi, or Plo Koon—or even beside Obi-Wan! And he could not quite ignore the quiet whisper, from down within the furnace doors that sealed his heart, that he was about to become the youngest Master in the twenty-five-thousand-year history of the Jedi Order …
But none of that really mattered.
Palpatine had somehow seen into his secret heart, and had chosen to offer him the one thing he most desired in all the galaxy. He didn’t care about the Council, not really—that was a childish dream. He didn’t need the Council. He didn’t need recognition, and he didn’t need respect. What he needed was the rank itself.
All that mattered was Mastery.
All that mattered was Padmé.
This was a gift beyond gifts: as a Master, he could access those forbidden holocrons in the restricted vault.
He could find a way to save her from his dream …
He shook himself back to the present. “I … am overwhelmed, sir. But the Council elects its own members. They will never accept this.”
“I promise you they will,” Palpatine murmured imperturbably. He swung his chair around to gaze out the window toward the distant spires of the Temple. “They need you more than they realize. All it will take is for someone to properly …”
He waved a hand expressively.
“… explain it to them.”
POLITICS
Orbital mirrors rotated, resolving the faint light of Coruscant’s sun to erase the stars; fireships crosshatched the sky with contrails of chemical air scrubber, bleaching away the last reminders of the fires of days past; chill remnants of night slid down the High Council Tower of the Jedi Temple; and within the cloistered chamber itself, Obi-Wan was still trying to talk them out of it.
“Yes, of course I trust him,” he said patiently. “We can always trust Anakin to do what he thinks is right. But we can’t trust him to do what he’s told. He can’t be made to simply obey. Believe me: I’ve been trying for many years.”
Conflicting currents of energy swirled and clashed in the Council Chamber. Traditionally, decisions of the Council were reached by quiet, mutual contemplation of the flow of the Force, until all the Council was of a single mind on the matter. But Obi-Wan kne
w of this tradition only by reputation, from tales in the archives and stories told by Masters whose tenure on the Council predated the return of the Sith. In the all-too-short years since Obi-Wan’s own elevation, argument in this Chamber was more the rule than the exception.
“An unintentional opportunity, the Chancellor has given us,” Yoda said gravely. “A window he has opened into the operations of his office. Fools we would be, to close our eyes.”
“Then we should use someone else’s eyes,” Obi-Wan said. “Forgive me, Master Yoda, but you just don’t know him the way I do. None of you does. He is fiercely loyal, and there is not a gram of deception in him. You’ve all seen it; it’s one of the arguments that some of you, here in this room, have used against elevating him to Master: he lacks true Jedi reserve, that’s what you’ve said. And by that we all mean that he wears his emotions like a HoloNet banner. How can you ask him to lie to a friend—to spy upon him?”
“That is why we must call upon a friend to ask him,” said Agen Kolar in his gentle Zabrak baritone.
“You don’t understand. Don’t make him choose between me and Palpatine—”
“Why not?” asked the holopresence of Plo Koon from the bridge of Courageous, where he directed the Republic Navy strike force against the Separatist choke point in the Ywllandr system. “Do you fear you would lose such a contest?”
“You don’t know how much Palpatine’s friendship has meant to him over the years. You’re asking him to use that friendship as a weapon! To stab his friend in the back. Don’t you understand what this will cost him, even if Palpatine is entirely innocent? Especially if he’s innocent. Their relationship will never be the same—”
“And that,” Mace Windu said, “may be the best argument in favor of this plan. I have told you all what I have seen of the energy between Skywalker and the Supreme Chancellor. Anything that might distance young Skywalker from Palpatine’s influence is worth the attempt.”
Obi-Wan didn’t need to reach into the Force to know that he would lose this argument. He inclined his head. “I will, of course, abide by the ruling of this Council.”
“Doubt of that, none of us has.” Yoda turned his green gaze on the other councilors. “But if to be done this is, decide we must how best to use him.”
