Yoda (4 page)

She gasped. “Oh, precious,” she whispered. She leaned over to stare more intently at the splotch, and her eyes, small and hard as little black marbles, went wet and shiny. “Oh,” she said. She sat slowly back on her haunches, rocking and rocking. “Oh, oh, oh!”

The fox looked up at her.

The old woman looked back with an expression of such savage triumph that the fox recoiled, baring its little yellow needle teeth. “Oh, such a day for Momma, sweetness! Which she's been waiting such a long time for this,” she whispered. She met the foxy eyes. “Can't you see, honeypot? Can't you smell it?
The Baby's coming home!
”

She stood up. Emotion made her hams shake, and the thick flesh of her upper arms. “Time to get ready,” she muttered. “Clean the Baby's room. Make his little bed.” She limped quickly back into the passageway.

The fox waited with pricked ears until the sound of her mutters dwindled slowly into the darkness. Then it bent its head to the bloodstained floor, and with its long pink tongue licked the tile clean.

Count Dooku's meeting with the Troxan delegation went well. He made a cold kind of game of it, trying to see how little he could say, letting them do all the lying for him. “There are new battle droids in production,” he had remarked. That was all it took; they did the rest.

“Surely you'll be sending them to our quadrant,” said the under-palatine for patriotic liaisons.

“Really, we're key to the entire region,” his assistant said.

“Of course, you understand our need,” another said.

“What other planets have fought so bravely for the cause?” a fourth asked.

Each of these fine hopes he reinforced with a smile and pushed into their minds with the Force, like a seal pressed into warm wax, so it felt like certainty. In fact, using the Force was hardly necessary. What man—or Troxan, either—would choose to believe that with every sentence he was betraying thousands of his fellows to death, when he could see himself as a hero instead? So much for the urge to Do Good, Dooku thought. Shown up again as just another illusion blinding creatures to the stark universe the dark side alone showed in all its bitter clarity.

What are we, Dooku?

Alone. Alone. Alone.

Watching the Troxans hang themselves was middling sport at best, too easy to take much pleasure in. Dooku moved rapidly to bring the meeting to a close and send them back to their slaughterhouse. “Anything else?” he asked.

The delegates looked at one another. “Actually, there was one other curious incident,” said the under-palatine, a portly middle-aged Troxan with a bulbous nose and purple gills. “As you may know, I was honored with the title of first diplomatic legatee, and sent to the second round of talks with Republican negotiators. Nothing came of it, of course; the Senate has dropped even the pretense of debate now, and it's all threats and bluster these days.” He rippled his throat gills dismissively. “It hardly alters the impression, as I mentioned to the Senatorial committee years before hostilities even
began
—”

“The curious incident,” Dooku said impatiently.

The flustered under-palatine sucked in his cheeks. “I was getting to that. At the end of the session, I was approached by Senator Amidala of Naboo, who asked me to deliver something to you.” With plump, nervous hands he brought out a small box, marked with the Jedi seal. “Let me assure you, we have taken every precaution here, used the most advanced scanning techniques—”

“We thought it might be a bomb,” his assistant volunteered.

“Or a bug,” another said.

“I still think it could be poisoned,” a fourth said.

“Believe me when I say, your safety, of course, has been
uppermost…
”

Dooku reached for the box. He found to his surprise that his hands were shaking. Odd. He had been almost as surprised as Ventress to see himself sparing the gaunt Jedi, Jai Maruk. It had been a sudden whim, sending him back. A hook dropped for Yoda, as he had told Sidious afterward. A hook baited with the pink squirm of an old memory.

Darth Sidious had given him a curious look, then, one that passed through him like a flush of fever, a weakness inside. “Do you still
love
him?” his Master said.

Dooku had laughed and braved it out. The idea was ridiculous.

“Ridiculous?” his Master had said, in that soft, terrible voice of his. “I hardly think so.” And then, his voice like honeyed poison, “A good student always loves his teacher.”

There was always a risk, talking with Sidious. Sometimes the conversation would go badly, and Dooku would fail to please somehow. It was a terrible thing, failing to please his Master.

He shook his head. These were a boy's weak fears. If Yoda had truly taken his lure, he would come, and if he did—what a gift for Sidious that would be, a nine-hundred-year-old head! That wheezing old half-crippled sage was stuck in the Republic like a cork; pull him out and, with a
pop,
the dark side would come rushing through. Then his Master would see how loyal a servant Dooku truly was.

He grabbed the box. He could feel Yoda's touch still lingering on the edges like a distant echo. Vividly his mind went back to their last meeting, on Geonosis: swords drawn at last, and finally
equal.
What a bittersweet moment—to see Yoda again, and be a match, or more than a match for him…but not to be seen by him. No, they had gone their separate ways, and Yoda had newer Jedi to look after. Kenobi and, worse yet, young Skywalker.

Oh, yes, and wasn't everyone watching
him.
Even Darth Sidious, with a gleam in his eye, mentioned the boy as one strong in the Force. “Just a little piece in a great game,” his Master had said; but a stab of jealousy had gone through Dooku when Sidious lingered over the name.
Skywalker, yes…The Force is strong in him.

The same Anakin Skywalker who, he had learned, had recently killed a clone of Count Dooku of Serenno. Poor foolish clone. Another changeling, another Dooku abandoned by his parents, left to be chopped up by some upstart Jedi butcher in the name of a corrupt Republic.

Dooku rather thought that if he weren't so old and wise, he would probably hate this Anakin Skywalker. At least a little.

His flipped back the clasps on the box. Strange that his hands should still be shaking so.

The under-palatine for the Bureau of Patriotic Defense looked over his shoulder. “We studied it exhaustively,” the diplomat said, flapping his gills in puzzlement, “but all our experts agree it's nothing more than a plain wax candle.”

2

O
n the top of a dilapidated skyrise in the Temple district of Coruscant, two droids were playing dejarik in the rain. They played extremely fast, moving each piece with blinding speed and precision; their fingers fell and rose like sewing-machine needles plunging through reams of syncloth.

The two droids were built to an identical design, humanoid and tall, but there the resemblance ended, as if they had been twins separated at birth, one to live in a palace, while the other was doomed to be an outcast, scraping out a hardscrabble existence in alleyways and gutters. The first droid was immaculately painted in an ornate livery, cream with crimson piping on his limbs, the blood-and-ivory colors repeated in a formal checker on his torso. The red was somewhat light and shaded with brown, like the color of fox fur, or dried blood. The cream was tinged with yellow; the color swatch at the store where the droid had last retouched his paint had called the tint “animal teeth.”

The outcast droid had long since worn down to bare metal, and never been repainted. His scratched face was gray, scuffed as if from countless years of hard service. He paused to look up into the rain. He was careful to scour himself every night, but still the rust crept into his joints and scratches, and his face was pocked where flakes and patches of metal had started to rust and been ruthlessly rubbed away.

The droids sat at the edge of the roof. The scuffed one kept his visual receptors on the game, but his richly painted partner was constantly glancing up, looking out onto the canyon between buildings, the busy slidewalks and the constant flow of fliers humming by, and, farther off, the wide entrance and towering spire of the Jedi Temple.

Of course, from this little terrace, it would be very difficult to observe much of anything happening at the Temple. At such a distance, and with the rain falling, too, it would have required the eyes of a Horansi to see a bedraggled figure come splashing up to the Temple's front doors. To resolve that figure as an angry Troxan diplomat carrying a curious-looking diplomatic pouch would have taken something far beyond biological sight: something on the order of the legendary Tau/Zeiss telescopic sniperscope—etched transparisteel or neural implant reticle available on request—whose ability to hold its zero through a full range of adjustment from X1 to X100 had never been matched in the four hundred standard years since the last T/Z production line fell silent.

The cream-and-crimson droid paused, its fingers motionless over the board. Several kilometers away, through a shifting curtain of rain, the Troxan diplomat was arguing with the young Jedi standing sentry duty at the Temple doors. The packet changed hands.

“What are you doing?” his drab, gray partner asked.

The diplomat splashed back through the rain to a waiting flier. The youngster disappeared into the Temple.

The liveried droid's fingers bent down through the holographic warriors on the circular gameboard to move a piece. “Waiting,” he said.

The xeno-ethnologists of Coruscant have estimated the number of sentient species in the universe at around twenty million, give or take a standard deviation or two depending on just what
sentient
means at any given time. One might ask, for instance, if the
Bivalva contemplativa,
the so-called thinking clams of Perilix, are really “thinking” in the usual sense, or if their multigenerational narrative semaphores reflect something less like conversation and more like hive building. Still, twenty million is the usual number.

Of all of these species, an observer watching Jedi Master Maks Leem lift the hem of her robe and go hurrying through the Jedi Temple, late in the evening some thirty months after the Battle of Geonosis, might argue that it was the three-eyed, goat-headed Gran whose faces were most particularly suited to expressing
worry.
The three shaggy brows above Master Leem's anxious eyes were tensely furrowed. Her jaw was long and narrow, even by Gran standards, and when she was anxious she had a tendency to grind her teeth, a ghostly holdover from the Gran's cud-chewing ruminant past.

Master Leem was not normally of a nervous disposition. Gentle, motherly, and placidly competent, she was a great favorite of the younger acolytes, and very difficult to rattle. A Mace Windu or an Anakin Skywalker might grow restless at the Jedi's essentially defensive posture, but not so Maks Leem. The Gran were a deeply social, community-oriented folk, and she had gladly given her life in service to the ideal of
peacemaker.
What she hated was that now, by slow but seemingly relentless degrees, she and the Jedi were turning, contemptibly, into
soldiers.

She had thought the Republic's civil war was the worst thing that could happen. Then came the slaughter on Geonosis, claiming the flower of a Jedi generation in a single day. The flash of plasma bolts, the taste of sand in one's mouth, the whine and shriek of battle droids—it seemed like a nightmare now, a confused blur of grief and pain. She had lost more than a dozen comrades, all closer to her than sisters. That had brought the war home as no distant newsvid could.

On the way back to Coruscant, Master Yoda had spoken of healing and recovery, but for Maks Leem the last thirty months had been hard, hard. For her, it was easier to face memories of the battle than to cope with the terrible
emptiness
in the Temple. Forty places set for dinner in a hall made to hold a hundred. The west block of the kitchen gardens left fallow. The rhythms of Temple life cut away for lack of time; no time for gardening now, or mending robes by hand, or games. Now it was hand-to-hand combat, small-unit tactical training, military infiltration exercises. Food made in a hurry from ingredients bought in the city, and grave-eyed children of twelve and fourteen suddenly monitoring comm transmissions, running courier routes, or researching battle plans.

The children worried Leem the most. The Temple, nearly empty of adults, felt like a school the teachers had abandoned. Suddenly orphaned Padawans, acolytes with too few teachers and too many responsibilities: Maks Leem feared for them. As hard as Yoda and the other teachers tried to instill the ancient Jedi virtues, this generation could not help but be marked by violence. As if they had been weaned on poisoned milk, she always thought. For the first time since the Sith War, there would be a generation of Jedi Knights who grew up surrounded by a Force clouded by the dark side. They were learning to feel with hearts made too old, too hard, too soon.

It was one of these children, the gentle, graceful boy named Whie whom she had taken as her Padawan, who had called her to the Temple entrance. Maks had arrived to find the boy remaining (as always) remarkably serene, while enduring a good deal of moist bluster from a pompous, overbearing, and furious Troxan diplomat, who could not believe he was to be stopped at the Temple doors by a mere boy. This purple-faced being with furiously vibrating gills claimed to have a dispatch to be delivered to Master Yoda personally.

Maks came to Whie's rescue at once, using the Force in the way that came most naturally to her, soothing the Troxan until his gills lay still, pink, and moist, and seeing him off with the promise that she would personally deliver the package to Master Yoda. Whie could have done the same—the Force was strong in him—but Padawans were not encouraged to use their powers lightly. The boy's gifts had always been great; perhaps in consequence, he always took special care not to abuse them.

Whie handed her the packet. It was a high-security diplomatic correspondence pouch, of a type in common usage by many Trade Federation worlds. A mesh of woven meta-ceramic and computational monofilaments, the pouch was both a container and a computer, whose surface was its own display. Most of that surface was presently covered with a bristling array of letters, the same message repeated in Troxan and Basic.

The bag seethed in her hand, not unpleasantly, as computational monofilaments shifted and flowed under her touch until they cradled the palps of her fingers. It was rather like standing on the shore at the seaside and feeling the outflow of each wave pulling the sand gradually out from under her feet. A brief topographic map of her fingerprints appeared on the packet's surface. Another part of the packet cleared to a small mirror surface, with the ideogram for “eye” marked neatly above it. Master Leem blinked at her own reflection, then blinked again as the packet flashed briefly with light.

Current Bearer cannot be identified as the intended recipient of this Bureau of Diplomatic Liaison Incendiary Packet.

CONTENTS WILL PLASMATE ON PACKET RUPTURE!

Maks and her Padawan exchanged looks. “Better not drop it,” the boy said, deadpan. Maks rolled her eyes—another remarkably expressive gesture among the three-eyed Gran—and padded back into the Temple, looking for Master Yoda.

She found him in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. He was perched on a boulder of black limestone that jutted out of a small pond. Approaching him from behind, she was shocked by how small he looked, sitting there, dumpy and awkward in his shapeless robe. Like a sad swamp toad, she thought. When she was younger, she would have suppressed the thought at once, shocked at herself. With age she had learned to watch her thoughts come and go with detachment, and some amusement, too. What an odd, quirky, unruly thing a mind was, after all! Even a Jedi mind. And really, with that great round green head and those drooping ears, a sad swamp toad was exactly right.

Then he turned around and smiled at her, and even beneath Yoda's weariness and his worry she felt the deep springs of joy within him, a thousand fountains of it, inexhaustible, as if he were a crack in the mantle of the world, and the living Force itself bubbled through him.

The shaggy brows over Master Leem's three warm brown eyes relaxed, and her teeth stopped grinding. She picked her way down to the edge of the pond, gently brushing aside long fronds of fern. The sound of water was all around, rushing over pebbled streambeds, bubbling up through the rock, or dripping into small clear pools: and always from the far side of the enormous chamber, the distant roar of the waterfall. “I thought I would find you here, Master.”

“Like the outdoor gardens better, do I.”

“I know. But they aren't nearly so close to the Jedi Council Chamber as this room up here.”

He smiled tiredly. “Truth, speak you.” His ears, which had pricked up at the sight of her, drooped again. “Meetings and more meetings. Sad talk and serious, war, war, and always war.” He waved his three-fingered hand around the Room of a Thousand Fountains. “A place of great beauty, this is. And yet…we made it. Tired I am of all this…
making.
Where is the time for
being,
Maks Leem?”

“Somewhere that isn't Coruscant,” she answered frankly.

The old Master nodded forcefully. “Truer than you know, speak you. Sometimes I think the Temple we should move far away from Coruscant.”

Master Leem's mouth dropped open. She had only been joking, but Yoda seemed completely serious. “Only on a planet such as Coruscant, with no forests left, no mountains unleveled, no streams left to run their own course, could the Force have become so clouded.”

Maks blinked all three eyes. “Where would you move the Temple?”

Yoda shrugged. “Somewhere wet. Somewhere wild. Not so much
making.
Not so many machines.” He straightened and snuffed in a deep breath. “Good! Decided it is! We will move the Temple at once. You shall be in charge. Find a new home and report to me tomorrow!”

Master Leem's teeth began to grind at double speed. “You must be joking! We can't possibly do such a thing now, in the middle of a war! Who could we find to—” She stopped, and the three eyes that had been so very wide went narrow. “You're teasing me.”

The old gnome snickered.

She had half a mind to pitch the Troxan packet at Yoda's smirking face but, remembering all the scary legal warnings on the side, she held her hand. “I promised I would give this to you.”

Yoda scrunched up his nose in distaste. He gathered the hem of his robe up above his wizened knees and slid off the rock with a splash. It was an indoor garden near the top of a mighty artificial spire, after all, and the water in the pond was only shin-deep. He stumped to the shore and took the packet. Wrinkles climbed up his forehead and his ears twirled in surprise as the Incendiary Packet took its fingerprint scan.

Fingerprint Identification:
Positive

The reflective mirror appeared on the packet's surface. Yoda stuck his tongue out at it and made a face.

Retinal Scan:
Inconclusive

Please present intended recipient's face or equivalent bodily communication interface to the reflective surface.

“Machines,” Yoda grumbled, but he stared glumly into the packet.

Retinal Scan:
Positive

Current bearer has been identified as the intended recipient of this Bureau of Diplomatic Liaison Incendiary Packet. Destruct device disabled.

A microperforation appeared around the edges of the packet and then the pouch peeled back, revealing the charred and battered handle of a Jedi lightsaber. Yoda's stubby green fingers curled lightly around it, and he sighed.

“Master?”

“Jang Li-Li,” he said. “All that is left of her, this is.”

Water dripped and whispered all around them in the garden.

“Thinking of the dead, have I been.”

“The list grows longer every day,” Master Leem said bitterly. She was thinking of the last time she had seen Jang Li-Li. They had shared dinner duty not long before she left, and the two of them had gone down to the gardens to pick vegetables for the evening meal. She remembered sitting on an upturned bucket, Jang making a droll face at her and asking if Maks thought using the Force to shell Antarian peas was an abuse of power. Laugh lines around her almond eyes.