Star Wars_ Destiny's Way Part 7

So for two nights the seed-partners clung to me, and I lived in a joyous trance that I shared with them, their dream of becoming. When I had my living ship, I planned to fly it in a search for intruders.

And then came the first strike of the Far Outsiders.

Those whose worlds have been subdued by the Yuuzhan Vong will recognize the pattern. It has been seen at Belkadan, at Sern-pidal, at Tynna, Duro, Nar Shaddaa. At first there is an invasion of a hostile life-form, a living wind of change that sweeps across the world like a consuming plague, scores of native species dying as the invading life takes its hold. Suddenly entire regions become friendly to the Yuuzhan Vong, hostile to the world's own native life.

So it became with Zonama Sekot. The Far Outsiders-the Yuuzhan Vong-seeded the southern hemisphere with their own devouring forms of life.

Two complete ecosystems engaged in pitched battle. The beautiful, towering boras died, writhing in their death agonies as they called the lightning to blast the alien parasites that devoured their flesh.

Through the Force I felt the planet shudder. From my dwelling near the factory valley, I saw the boras tossing their leaves and limbs in horror at the battle that was being lost in the other hemisphere. The Ferroans ran about in confusion and growing panic. Even the clouds reacted, flying through the sky in fright and terror. The forging of my ship was postponed as the entire planet mobilized to deal with the emergency.

At this point I revealed myself as Jedi. The reaction of the Ferroans was strangely ambivalent-not hostile, precisely, but warier than I expected. I later learned that they had been taught a version of Jedi doctrine, though far from an orthodox one. They were believers in the Potentium, the doctrine that the Force is light only and that evil and the dark side are a kind of illusion. They were afraid I had come to persecute them for heresy. By the time I appeased their fears, the ecological onslaught had grown to embrace much of the southern hemisphere.

I was brought to meet their leader, their Magister-by that time his mountain palace was besieged by the world-plague. Here, in a symbiosis with the planet that was his home, he directed his world's defenses. And he succeeded! The living world of Zonama Sekot possesses more resources than the Yuuzhan Vong had imagined. In the war of ecosystems, Zonama Sekot began to push the enemy back. The invading organisms began to die.

It was then that the Yuuzhan Vong attacked with conventional forces. Frigates bombarded the world from orbit; coralskippers descended into the atmosphere to bomb and strafe. But Zonama Sekot again had hidden resources, fighters and other planetary defenses, and the Yuuzhan Vong were driven off. This was not, you see, an invasion such as the one you know, but merely a reconnaissance in force, the Yuuzhan Vong scouting our defenses.

I tried to protect the Magister, but in the end I failed him. A Yuuzhan Vong squadron attacked his palace, and that brave, inventive man was killed. His belief that evil was an illusion did not save him.

But scarcely did I have a chance to mourn the greatness of the man.

His death brought forth a miracle! I felt, stirring in the living Force, a powerful Presence-a great mind uncoiling and feeling its power for the first time. A new being caught in the first, astonishing moment of self-awareness.

That being was Zonama-Sekot! For three generations the Magisters, with their unconventional doctrine of the Force, had communed with the living world that they believed was their mythical Potentium, their all-benevolent Force. Unknowing, they had taught the harmony that was Zonama Sekot to realize itself as an individual. What had been an egoless perfection now became a self-conscious, self-aware being, with all the confusion and uncertainty of a new, fragile creature dropped suddenly into a hostile universe.

I needed to give the planet time. I offered to negotiate with the enemy on its behalf, in the hope of either turning away the attack or delaying the next a.s.sault. Sekot a.s.sumed the personality of its dead Magister and communicated to the Yuuzhan Vong its wish to parley. The Yuuzhan Vong consented, feeling that they might gain through intimidation what they had failed to gain through violence.

The Ferroans gave me a shuttle and a brave pilot, and I went to speak to the Far Outsiders. They were led by Supreme Commander Zho Krazhmir-he died in his sleep years ago, you would not have heard of him.

Imagine the scene. The air lock dilating like a living membrane.

The air that reeked of organics. The chamber with its curves and half-melted resinous walls. The ma.s.s of Yuuzhan Vong, the commander with his staff, his priests, his intendant. In armor, bearing weapons. All in an angry group, a crowd ma.s.sed to intimidate. A group designed by Zho Krazhmir to shock an envoy into submission.

I did not face them quite alone. My seed-partners, the embryos of my future ship, were with me, clinging to the robes that I had worn since the ceremony.

But you can imagine what truly shocked me. All I had seen to that point was nothing compared to the realization, as I summoned the Force to my a.s.sistance, that I had brought the Force into a place that was alien to the Force itself.

I could not touch them with the Force. They were blank-they were worse than blank, they were an abyss into which the Force could drain forever, drain until it was all gone, until all existence, all life, had drained away . . .

At first I thought that they were all Force masters; that they had devised ways of shielding themselves from me. But as I tried again and again to pierce their defenses, I realized what the Yuuzhan Vong truly were.

A sacrilege. Everything a Jedi knows is based on the belief-on the absolute, unquestioned knowledge-that all life is a part of the Force, that the Force is life. But here were beings whose very existence denied this sacred truth. From the depths of my heart I hated them all, I wished them blotted out. A rage rose in me, an anger so complete that I almost attacked them then and there in the hope that I could obliterate them all from the face of the universe. Never had I been so close to surrendering to darkness.

My anger was not the only anger in that room. The Supreme Commander was furious because his attack had failed and he had lost face before his intendant. The priests were angry because I had flown to them in a machine they considered a blasphemy. The intendants were outraged because of the loss of scarce materiel, which they would have to justify to their own superiors. The Far Outsiders were eons away from their home, and Zonama Sekot had damaged their ability to survive here.

But one creature there was not angry. The mascot of the priestess Falung, a feathery birdlike thing, only semi-intelligent, long-legged, and orange-yellow.

That being was the key. For I could touch it with the Force! I could feel its mind, benign, witless as a child, too mindless to feel the anger that surged about it.

And it was discovering that creature that caused my rage to ebb.

Perhaps the realization that the Far Outsiders kept pets made me realize they were not so far removed from ourselves. I realized that within hours I had just encountered the two extremes of the Force. Zonama Sekot was a living embodiment of the Force, of its harmony and potential. The Far Outsiders, on the other hand, were creatures completely outside the Force, whom the Force could not touch. One was a contradiction of the other!

I wondered if it were possible for me to bring these two forces into balance.

But first I had to deal with the rage of the Yuuzhan Vong. Such was their fury that it was possible that these mad beings would obliterate me on the spot, parley or no parley.

Again the priestess's mascot was the key. Using the Force to influence its simple mind, I coaxed it forward. At my urging it warbled.

It crooned. It fell upon me as if I were a long-lost cousin, and put around me its many-jointed wings.

The Yuuzhan Vong stared.

We danced together, the mascot and I. In unison we stamped and thumped and caroled. The Yuuzhan Vong, I saw, had forgotten to be angry.

They began to be amused. Some even swayed back and forth, if only slightly, to the tempo of our dance.

And then I made them stare. With a push of my mind, I sent the alien mascot into the air. Singing, it spiraled toward the Yuuzhan Vong and orbited the commander. Singing, I joined it. The two of us continued our dance, sailing in a stately spiral about Supreme Commander Zho Krazhmir. The Yuuzhan Vong stared in utter wonder.

The Far Outsiders were capable of anger, of violence, of amus.e.m.e.nt, of awe. Were they then so very different from us? Was their very existence a blasphemy? I needed to know.

Before their wonder began to fade, I brought the dance to an end.

Zho Krazhmir grew suspicious. He demanded to know what trick I had just played.

No trick, I replied. What you have seen is the power of Zonama Sekot.

I told them I was not from Zonama Sekot; that I was a teacher who had come to the planet in order to learn of its wonders. I described what I could of the world, that it was a glory, covered with a single great organism that formed a single intelligent mind.

Then the Supreme Commander grew excited.

I did not know then that the Yuuzhan Vong, in their own way, revere life. Not as a Jedi reveres life, cherishing each individual as a component of the Force that is both life and greater than life, but in their own perverse way, the reverence for life mixed with their own ideas of pain and death. The Yuuzhan Vong revere life in the abstract but sacrifice their own lives without thought. Their veneration of life is as extreme as their other beliefs, so extreme that they believe nonliving tilings-droids, starships, even simple machines-are a blasphemy and an insult to Yun-Yuuzhan, their Creator.

The Supreme Commander had been tasked to locate habitable worlds for the increasing and increasingly discontented inhabitants of the rapidly deteriorating Yuuzhan Vong worldships. To find a living world was beyond his wildest dreams.

Then the intendant pointed out that the Yuuzhan Vong lacked the resources to launch another strike. If the Supreme Commander attacked and was defeated, then the Yuuzhan Vong would be without sufficient means to return to the great worldships that moved between the galaxies. If they conquered the planet but took losses, they would be stuck on the planet without the resources to defend it.

The Supreme Commander reluctantly submitted. He would return to the worldship convoy and inform the Supreme Overlord of his discovery. He gave the order to withdraw.

It was then that I had to make my decision. I had bought at least a temporary peace for Zonama Sekot, but the mystery of the origin and nature of the Far Outsiders had yet to be resolved. They were clearly a menace to the galaxy, to the Jedi, and perhaps to the Force itself. Yet they did not seem beyond understanding, and reacted in many ways as other sentients do. These beings were so extraordinary that my mind was dizzied with their strangeness.

Though I could now return to Zonama Sekot with much of my mission accomplished, I knew I could not leave the Yuuzhan Vong before I had answered my many questions. I approached the priestess Falling and asked whether I might stay on the ship with my "cousin"-by this I meant her pet-and she conceded. Perhaps Falung would be kind enough to instruct me on her doctrine. In return, I would tell her as much as she wished to know of our own galaxy.

The priestess agreed, and without reference to the Supreme Commander. I saw that she was powerful enough in her own right to make these decisions.

So I was committed to remain. I returned briefly to my shuttle, and contacted the spirit of Sekot, who was still a.s.suming the form of the planet's dead Magister. I told the planet that it was safe for now, but that it should prepare for another, stronger a.s.sault in the future.

And then-and this was very hard-I had to bid farewell to my seed-partners. They had dreamed with me of the great ship that would flash between the stars like the lightning that the boras drew from the skies, but this was not to be. I told the seed-partners that they had to return to the planet. I told them that a Jedi would be coming to Zonama-for I was certain that Jedi would follow in my footsteps when I did not return-and that they must hold themselves in readiness. I impressed upon them a message that was to be delivered to that Jedi, saying that an invading force was poised to overrun the galaxy, that the Force was useless in fighting these creatures.

If a Jedi came, I know not. If the message was delivered, I cannot tell. I did what seemed best, but in this I may have failed somehow.

Following this came the hardest task of all. I destroyed my lightsaber, the outward symbol of everything to which I had dedicated myself. I knew that the Yuuzhan Vong would not permit me to retain anything of a technological nature. My comlink and my few other metal objects I gave to the shuttle pilot who had brought me.

And so I bade farewell to everything I had known. I returned to the Yuuzhan Vong and the priestess Falung, and Zho Krazhmir's forces returned to that limitless s.p.a.ce between the stars where the Yuuzhan Vong worldships traveled.

From time to time, the Yuuzhan Vong asked to see me dance with the priestess's mascot. The mascot and I danced, and flew-but we flew less and less, the farther we traveled from Zonama Sekot. When we left the galaxy, I told Falung that we were at such a distance that the power of Sekot could no longer reach us, and from that point on we no longer danced.

I did not want the Yuuzhan Vong to know that it was my power, not Sekot's, that had created the aerial dance. I did nor want the Yuuzhan Vong even to consider the possibility that I had any power of my own.

For his action in discovering Zonama Sekot, Supreme Commander Zho Krazhmir was granted a new leg implant as a reward. He did not make a good recovery, and was dead in a few years.

Falung, priestess of Yun-Harla, instructed me in the religion of the Yuuzhan Vong and in particular the mythology of Yun-Harla herself.

Yun-Harla the Trickster is never visible. Her body is made of borrowed parts, and cloaked in borrowed skin. Over the borrowed skin are garments designed to deceive and deflect. Yun-Harla herself is never seen. Only her spirit is to be found working in the world, laying traps and deceiving the unwary.

As Yun-Harla is, so I became. I became cloaked, as it were, in borrowed garments, in my a.s.sumed ident.i.ty as a simple teacher eager to learn the True Way. My weapons were those I could borrow or adapt from my opponents, those and my own cunning. My Force abilities I learned to keep hidden, even from telepathic creatures such as yammosks. I meditated upon Yun-Harla every day-every day for fifty years.

I turned my true self completely inward. It required little effort to maintain my ident.i.ty as the familiar of Falung the priestess, in part because the Yuuzhan Vong expect so little from a familiar. But in my mind I built my home. There, I could consider the matter of the Yuuzhan Vong, and contemplate the Force. In my mind I learned true freedom.

In my conversations with Falung I tried to suggest the key Jedi principle of the unity of life, and somewhat to my surprise she agreed with me. All life, she explained, was a part of Yun-Yuuzhan, who created it through his own sacrifice, tearing himself into bits and flinging himself through the universe to sp.a.w.n all existence.

Though the reverence for life was real, it was not possible to separate it from the Yuuzhan Vong obsession with pain and death.

Others than Falung questioned me, but not about philosophical matters-as far as they were concerned we were all infidels, and our beliefs were of no possible interest. The information that truly interested them was of a military and political nature.

I agonized over what I would tell them. Should I tell them the Republic was unprepared, in the hope that the Yuuzhan Vong would attack prematurely, carelessly, and with overconfidence? Or should I suggest that the Republic's defenses were invincible, and force the Yuuzhan Vong to make elaborate, thorough preparations that I hoped other Jedi, following in my footsteps and warned by my message, would detect?

In the end I dared not lie to them. I knew not what other sources of information were available to them. But I could feign ignorance-I had a.s.sured them I was a simple teacher, no authority on the defenses of the Republic.

I was not in a position to influence the Yuuzhan Vong for good or ill. Falung died, and I became the property of her junior, Elan, who was not in a position to affect policy.

And so the war began, and it began the way it did because of the decisions I made fifty years ago, at Zonama Sekot. Because I danced in the air, and proclaimed my power the power of a world.

Was I wrong to do so? Right? And if it was wrong, should I have spent the last fifty years in sadness and recrimination, fearing to act in the event that I made another mistake?

I chose. I acted. And then I resolved to face the consequences.

Tell me then, young Jedi-was I wrong?

Chapter 8.

Jacen heard Vergere's story in silence as he squatted on his heels on the resinous floor of the coral ship. He did not answer her question, but instead asked a question of his own.

"Where is Zonama Sekot? I've never heard of a living planet."

Vergere shrugged her narrow shoulders. "It left," she said simply.

Jacen stared at her.

"I felt Sekot's good-bye. I had saved it once, but I sensed it was under a new threat. The planet had hyperdrive engines-it was capable of going into hypers.p.a.ce. So it fled."

Jacen blinked. "Where did it go?"

"I remind you that I have been away for a number of years. I will not venture to guess."

Jacen rubbed his chin. "One hears stories of planets that move. But usually in the same tapcafs, and from the same people, who tell you of the Cursed Palace of Zabba Two, or old Admiral Fancy's ghost ship that plies the Daragon Trail."

Vergere gave a sniff. "I do not venture into tapcafs. I would not hear such stories."

Jacen gave a quiet smile. "No. You venture into more dangerous places than bars."

Vergere's crest feathers rippled. "You did not answer my question.

Did I do wrong on Zonama Sekot? Or did I not?"

"What I think," Jacen said, "is that I'm still worried about my sister." He knew perfectly well that Vergere had told her story at this moment partly in order to distract him from his anxiety over Jaina.

Vergere made a sound somewhere between a snort and a sneeze. She straightened her legs and reared to her full height of slightly over a meter. "You haven't been paying attention!"

"I have. I'm still thinking about it. But I'm also still concerned about Jaina."

Vergere made the noise again. Jacen's thoughts returned to the mystery of the vanished planet.

"I've never heard of Zonama Sekot by that name. And if your warning ever reached the Jedi Council, I haven't heard of it-but then it's not likely I would have. We haven't had a Jedi Council in more than a generation."

"What became of it, then?" Vergere paced back and forth before Jacen, the patchy feathers on her frame fluffing and then smoothing again. "Perhaps you can tell me what has happened to the Republic in my absence. Tell me why the thousands of Jedi Knights I expected to contact on my return no longer exist, why there are only a few score half-trained young Jedi in their place, and what all of this has to do with this Sith Lord you mentioned on Coruscant, this Vader, your grandfather, whom I remember as that turbulent little Padawan, Anakin Skywalker."

Crouching, Jacen watched Vergere's agitated pacing. He shook his head and gave a laugh. "Well," he said, "you'd better sit down again, because this is a very long story."

This time Vergere sat in silence while Jacen spoke. When he was done with his bare narrative, she asked questions, and Jacen replied as completely as he could. At the end, they were both silent for a long, long moment.

Finally Jacen broke the silence. "May I worry about Jaina now?"

"No, you may not."

"Why not?"

Vergere straightened and approached the coral ship's little control station. "Best to worry for ourselves," she said. "We're about to fall out of hypers.p.a.ce. When we arrive in reals.p.a.ce, we'll be near a well-defended world of the New Republic, guarded by fighters very jumpy after the fall of Coruscant. We are in a Yuuzhan Vong vessel, with no means of contacting these trigger-happy defenders, and we have no defenses and no weapons."

Jacen looked at her. "What do you suggest we do?"

Vergere's feathery crest gave a little flutter. "Foolish question,"