Star Wars_ Traitor Part 6

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 coa.r.s.e sc.r.a.pe 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, instead 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."

"Nothing you have said is a question, or a request." Vergere blinked once, slowly, then again. "Ask."

Jacen clenched his fists, and opened them again, and placed one against the bandage she had tied around his ribs.

"Your tears, Vergere. You could save so many lives."

"Yes, I could."

"Please, Vergere. Will you?"

"No."

"Please..."

"No, Jacen Solo. I will not. Why should I? They are slaves."

"They're people..." She shrugged.

"You helped me," Jacen said, desperation and anger starting to gather behind his voice. "Why would you do this for me, and not for any of them?"

"Why is a question deeper than its answer." She settled back onto the mossy ground. Her crest lay flat along the curve of her skull. "Tell me this, Jacen Solo: what distinguishes a flower from a weed?"

"Vergere..."

"This is not a riddle. What distinguishes a flower from a weed is only--and exactly--this: the choice of the gardener."

"I'm not a gardener," Jacen said, biting down on his temper. He leaned toward her, blood surging into his face. "And these are not weeds!"

She shrugged.

"Again, our difficulties may be linguistic. To me, a gardener is one who chooses what to cultivate, and what to uproot; who decides which lives must end so that the lives he cherishes may flourish."

She lowered her head as though shy, or embarra.s.sed, sighing; she opened her hand toward the headless sh.e.l.ls of the clip beetles. "Is that not what you have done?"

He kept his eyes on her, hanging on to his anger.

"Those are bugs, Vergere."

"So is a shadowmoth."

"I'm talking about people..."

"Were the beetles less alive than the slave? Is not a life a life, whatever form it takes?" Jacen lowered his head. "You can't make me say I was wrong to do it. It wasn't wrong. He's a sentient being. Those were insects."

She gave out a wind-chime spray of laughter. "I did not say it was wrong, Jacen Solo. Am I a moralist? I only point out that you make the gardener's choice."

Jacen had always been stubborn; he was far from ready to give up.

"You're the gardener," he muttered sullenly, staring at his hands.

"I'm just one of the weeds."

She placed her hand on his arm, her long flexible fingers warm and gentle; her touch was so clearly friendly, even affectionate, that Jacen for one moment felt as though his Force empathy had not deserted him. He knew, absolutely and without question, that Vergere meant him no harm.

That she cared for him, and regretted his anger, his hostility, and his suffering. But that doesn't mean she's on my side, he reminded himself.

"How is it," she asked slowly, "that you have come to be the medical droid for your slave gang? Of all the jobs that all the slaves do, how did this one fall to you?"

"There's no one else who can do it."

"No one who can set a bone? No one who can wash clean a cut? No one who can twist the head off a clip beetle? "

Jacen shrugged. "No one who can tell the dhuryam to blow itself out an air lock."

"Ah." That translucent inner lid slid down her eye. "The dhuryam disapproves?"

"Let's say it took some convincing."

"Convincing? "

"Yeah." She said nothing for a long time. She might have been waiting for him to elaborate; she might have been trying to guess what he had done.

She might have been thinking of something else altogether.

"And how did you manage to convince it?" Jacen stared through her, remembering his savage private struggle against the slave seed and the dhuryam that controlled it, day after day of bitter agony. He wondered how much of that story she might know already; he was certain that she had some way of keeping him under observation.

The dhuryam was an intelligent creature; it had not taken long to discover that Jacen could not be moved by pain. But the dhuryam was itself stubborn by nature, and it had been specifically engineered to command. It was not accustomed to disobedience, nor inclined to tolerate it. After days of straight, simple pain, the dhuryam had taken advantage of the slave seed's growth; it had spent more than a week jerking Jacen's limbs individually by remote control, using the slave seed to give him spasms and cramps that forced him to move, making him twitch and thrash like a holomonster controlled by a half-melted logic board. The turning point had come when the dhuryam realized that it had been pouring so much energy and attention into its struggle with Jacen that it was neglecting its other slaves.

Its domain in the Nursery was falling to ruin, becoming a wasteland among the lush domains of its sibling-rivals. It understood that's breaking Jacen was an expensive undertaking: a project whose costs were counted in jobs that did not get done. And it soon began to discover that Jacen could be useful, even unbroken. Jacen had taken every respite from the pain to minister to his fellow slaves. He didn't have real medical training, but his exotic life-form collection had taught him some basics of exobiology, and in his adventures with the other young Jedi he had garnered a working knowledge of field surgery.

The dhuryam had eventually seemed to understand that healthy slaves can work harder, and soon its domain began to improve again. Jacen had discovered that the dhuryam would let him do pretty much whatever he wanted, so long as it advanced the dhuryam's own interests.

I guess you could say, Jacen thought, I taught the dhuryam that sometimes partners are more useful than slaves. But he said nothing of this. He owed Vergere no answers.

"I told you before," he muttered solidly. "You can kill me, but you can't make me obey."

Her inner eyelids slid upward again. "And that, Jacen Solo, is why you are a flower among the weeds." He looked into the bottomless black of her eyes, looked away at the scatter of slaves, resting among the Vongformed life of the Nursery, then down at his hands, which curled into white-knuckled fists; he relaxed them again, then looked back at hey and finally, after all, he couldn't think of any reason not to just say it.

"You're Sith, aren't you?"

She went very, very still.

"Am I?"

"I know a little about the dark side, Vergere. All this garbage about flowers and weeds... I know what you're really talking about.

You're talking about believing you're above people."

"Everything I tell you is a..."

"Save it. You're wasting your time. Jaina and I were kidnapped by the Shadow Academy. They tried to turn us both. It didn't work." He thought briefly of Jaina, of the darkness he'd felt in his last touch through their twin bond. His hands became fists again, and he shook the memory out of his head. He repeated, "It didn't work. It won't work for you, either." Her first motion: a faint curve at the corners of her lips.

"Sith? Jedi?" she said. "Are these the only choices? Dark or light, good or evil? Is there no more to the Force than this? What is the screen on which light and dark cast their shapes and shadows? Where is the ground on which stands good and evil?"

"Save it. I've spent too much time wondering about those questions already. Years. I never got anywhere."

Her eyes lit up merrily. "You got here, yes?" A sweep of her arm took in the Nursery. "Is this not somewhere?"

Jacen shook his head, tired of this. He pushed himself to his feet.

"All the answers fall short of the truth."

"Very good!" Vergere clapped her hands and bounced upright like a spring-loaded puppet. "Very good, Jacen Solo. Questions are more true than answers: this is the beginning of wisdom."

"Your kind of wisdom..."

"Is there any other kind? Does truth come in breeds like nerfs?"

She seemed elated; she shivered as though she struggled against an urge to break into dance. "Here's a question of another kind--an easy kind, a friendly inquiry to which there is an answer not only true, but useful."

Jacen got up. "I don't have time for this. They'll turn on the sun in a few minutes." He started walking toward the resting slaves.

There were dressings to be changed before these slaves began their morning work.

Vergere spoke to his departing back. "If the Force is life, how can there be life without the Force?"

"What?" Jacen stopped. He looked over his shoulder. "What?"

"You are born to be a gardener," she said. "Remember this: it is not only your right to choose flowers over weeds, it is your responsibility.

Which are flowers? Which are weeds? The choice is yours."

"What?" With a lightning crackle and a wavefront blast of thunder, the Nursery's sun kindled overhead. Jacen flinched, shading his eyes against the sudden flare, and by the time he could see again Vergere was far away, hopping from hummock to hummock across the vonduun crab bog. He stared after her. If the Force is life, how can there be life without the Force?

He kept washing and clipping wounds, setting fractures, debriding septic flesh. The sun came on, the sun turned off. Some slaves got better. Some slaves died. Everybody kept working. The dhuryam's domain flourished. Trees wove into fantastic structures, draped in iridescent epiphytes. Lush gra.s.ses on upland hills rippled in the bellows breath pumped through ventilation veins. To Jacen's eye, it seemed that this dhuryam's lands were more sophisticated, more elegant than those of its neighbors; when the mists would part enough that he could see the bowl of lands overhead, he thought that the domain where he lived was, in fact, the most developed in the whole Nursery. He was wryly aware, though, that his opinion might not be entirely objective; maybe he was just rooting for the home team.

If the Force is life, she had said, how can there be life without the Force? He ached for the Force every day--every hour. Every minute. He was constantly, acutely aware of the gaping absence in his life: reminded every time he had to tie a tourniquet, reminded by each groan or squeal of pain that with the Force he could have eased. Reminded when he had to amputate Trask's foot with an amphistaff he had cautiously, laboriously lured out of the grove by feeding pieces of a dead slave to its polyp until it shed its amphistaffs and they wriggled into the gra.s.s in search of new fertile ground to plant themselves--Reminded when the Bothan died in delirium a few days later.

If the Force is life, how can there be life without the Force? The question haunted him. It throbbed in the back of his head like an abscessed tooth. Vergere could have been talking about his life: how could he live without the Force? The answer was, of course, that he couldn't. He didn't.

The Force was there. He just couldn't feel it. Anakin used to say that the Force was a tool, like a hammer. If the Force is a hammer, Jacen decided, then he was a carpenter with his arms cut off. He couldn't even see the hammer anymore. He couldn't remember what it looked like. But...

If I came of a species that had never had arms, I wouldn't recognize a hammer... and I'd have no use for it, even if I somehow guessed what it was. A hammer would have nothing to do with me at all. Like the Force has nothing to do with the Yuuzhan Vong.

That was half an answer... but the other half kept wriggling, chewing at the inside of his skull. Because the Force was not just a tool. If the Yuuzhan Vong existed outside it, the Force must be less than he had been taught it was. Less than he knew it was. Because he knew, bedrock knew, knew beyond even the possibility of doubt, that the Force was not less than he'd been taught. It was more. It was everything. If the Force was only about life, how could it be used to pick up a rock, or a lightsaber, or an X-wing starfighter? To move something with the Force, you have to feel it. A piece of rock has more presence in the Force than a living Yuuzhan Vong. There was a mystery here, one that nagged at him.

Fortunately, he had plenty of time to think about it. As the days blended one into the next, the dhuryam seemed to gain an understanding of what Jacen did; through the slave seed, the dhuryam had sent occasional small, almost affectionate twinges--more like a pinch from a playmate than the crack of a slave master's whip--and Jacen discovered that if he followed where these twinges directed him, he might find, say, a type of moss with immunostimulant properties, or a secretion of the vonduun crabs that acted as a natural antiseptic. Almost as though the dhuryam were trying to help...

Gradually, through these days, his idea of the dhuryam transformed.

He had thought of it, through these bitter weeks, as a hideously alien monster that had reached inside his body with the slave seed, rasping his nerves with its loathsome, inescapable touch; now he discovered that when he thought of the dhuryam in unguarded moments, he felt no horror at all.

I guess you can get used to anything, eventually, he thought. But it was more than that: he had begun to see the dhuryam as another life-form, an unfamiliar species, dangerous but not necessarily hostile. It had intelligence, will, intention; it was able to see that Jacen was doing more good than harm, and it had apparently consented to a working partnership.

If a species that had always been blind met a species that had always been deaf, how would they communicate? To Jacen, the answer was obvious: they would have to improvise a language based on a sense that they shared.