Yoda (5 page)

Yoda's face, dark in reflection, looked up at him from out of the pond. “Some believe it possible to enter completely into the Force after death.”

“Surely we all do, Master.”

“Ah—but perhaps one can remain unique and individual. Can remain oneself.”

“You are thinking of Jang Li-Li,” the Gran said with a sad smile. “I would love to believe she is safe and free and laughing still, somewhere in the Force. I would love to, but I cannot. Every people longs for the hope of something after death. These hands and eyes have been knit into a shape by the universe, will hold it for a few score years, then lose it again. That must be enough. To enter more completely into the Force: one would dissolve, like honey mixed into hot stimcaf.”

Yoda shrugged, looking down at poor Jang Li-Li's lightsaber handle. “Perhaps you are right. But I wonder…” He picked a pebble from a crack in the rock on which he was sitting. “If I drop this pebble into the pond, what will happen?”

“It will sink.”

“And after?”

“Well,” Master Leem said, feeling out of her depth. “There will be ripples, I suppose, spreading out.”

Yoda's ears perked up. “Yes! The pebble strikes the water, and a wave carries out until…?”

“It reaches the shore.”

“Just so. But is the water in the wave where the pebble drops the same as the water in the wave that touches the shore?”

“No…”

“And yet the wave is the same wave?”

“You think we can become…
waves
in the Force, holding our shape?”

Yoda shrugged. “Speak of this once, Qui-Gon did.”

“I miss him,” Maks Leem said sadly. She had never really approved of Qui-Gon Jinn; he was too quick to rebel against the Order, too ready to oppose his solitary will to the good of the group. And yet he had been a brave and noble man, and kind to her when she was young.

She turned her attention back to Jang's broken lightsaber. “Who sent it, Master?”

Maks wasn't sure Yoda had heard her question. For a long time he was silent, stroking the handle with his blunt old fingers. “Have you now a Padawan, Master Leem?” She nodded. “Your second?”

“Third. Rees Alrix was my first. She is fighting with the clone troops at Sullust. My second…my second was Eremin Tarn,” she said reluctantly. Eremin had become a follower of Jeisel, one of the more outspoken of the dissident Jedi, who believed the Republic had lost the moral authority to rule. Eremin had always resisted authority—including hers when she was his Master—but he was fiercely principled. Intellectually, Maks could understand his decision to withdraw from the Order, but it had torn a hole in her Gran heart to see her very own Padawan, one she had taught from thirteen years to the status of a full Jedi Knight, deliberately cut himself out of the Order.

As if reading her mind, Yoda asked, “Does he fill that empty place in your heart, this new Padawan?”

Maks flushed and looked away.

“No shame in this, there is. Think you the relationship between Master and Padawan is only to help
them
?” Yoda cocked his head to one side and looked at her with ancient, knowing eyes. “Oh, this is what we let them believe, yes! But when the day comes that even old Yoda does not learn something from his students—then truly, he shall be a teacher no more.” He reached up to give her hand a little squeeze, his three fingers around her six. “No greater gift there is, than a generous heart.”

Tears came to Maks Leem, and she let them come. “Attachment is not the Jedi way, I know. But…”

Yoda gave her hand another squeeze, and then returned to considering the handle of the lightsaber. For a moment she saw his finger stop on a little piece of metal, surprisingly clean and fresh looking, as if it had escaped the blast or been added afterward. Yoda frowned. “This Padawan of yours—ready for the wide galaxy, is he?”

“Whie? No! And yes,” she said. “He is young. They are all so young. But if any of them are ready, he is. The Force is strong in him. Not so strong as in young Skywalker, but in the next level down: and between you and me, he carries it better than Anakin ever has. Such calm. Such serenity and poise; truly it is incredible in one so young.”

“Truly.”

Something in Yoda's voice caught her ear. “You think it impossible?”

“I think he wishes to please you very much,” the old Master said carefully.

Before she could ask him what he meant, a gong sounded the hour. “Ah—my class!” Maks said, slapping one hand against her forehead horns. “I am supposed to be teaching hyperspace navigation in Tower Three.”

Yoda bugged out his eyes and made little shooing motions with his hands. “Then engage your hyperdrive you must!” He watched, chuckling, as she ran from the chamber with the hem of her robe flapping excitedly around her hairy ankles and her boots thudding into the distance.

When he was sure he was alone, he tabbed the power switch on what had once been Jang Li-Li's lightsaber. As he had suspected, the weapon had been modified; instead of Jang's blue blade humming to life, a hologram appeared: Count Dooku, ten centimeters tall, as if standing on the lightsaber handle. He looked old…much older than he had on Geonosis. Careworn. He was sitting at an elegantly appointed desk. There was a window behind him spattered with rain; behind it, a cheerless gray sky. Before him on the desk lay the candle Yoda had sent.

“We should talk,” Dooku said. He did not look at the holocam, as if, even across weeks of time and the endless black chasm of space, he was afraid to look his old Master in the eye.

“There is a cloud around me now. Around all of us. I felt it growing in the Republic years ago. I fled it then, and tried to bring the Order with me. You wouldn't come. Cowardice, I thought then. Or corruption. Now…” He rubbed his face wearily. “Now I don't know. Perhaps you were right. Perhaps the Temple was the only lantern to keep the darkness at bay, and I was wrong to step outside, into the night. Or perhaps the darkness was inside me all the time.”

For the first time he looked up. His eyes were steady, except for a faint flicker of pure anguish, like the sound of weeping from a locked room. “It's like a sickness,” he whispered. “A fever in the blood. War everywhere. Cruelty. Killing, and some in my name. Blood like rain. I feel it all the time, the cries of the dying in the Force, beating in me like a vein about to burst.” He gathered himself; shrugged; went on. “I have come to the end of myself. I don't know what is right anymore. I am tired, Master. So tired. And like any old man, as the end nears, I long to go home.”

The tiny hologrammic Dooku touched the candle Yoda had sent, turning it over in his old fingers. “I want to meet. But nobody outside the Temple must know. I am always watched, and you are betrayed more profoundly than you guess, Master. Come to me; Jai will show you the way. We will talk. I promise nothing more. I cannot think you corrupt, but even you, Master, are snared beyond your understanding. If word reaches my allies of your coming, they will stop at nothing to kill you. If they guess
why
you are coming, they will stop at nothing to destroy me.”

His eyes came fully back into the present: shrewd and practical. “I would be disappointed if you took my invitation as a tactical opportunity. If I see even the slightest sign of new forces deploying in the direction of the Hydian Way, I will abandon my current location, and carry the war forward until droid battle cruisers burn the life out of Coruscant with a rain of plasma fire. Bring none but Jedi with you.” He gave a sad, crooked smile. “There are some things that should be kept inside the family…”

Count Dooku of Serenno, warlord of a mighty army, among the richest beings in the galaxy, legendary sword-master, former student, notorious traitor, lost son, flickered in front of Yoda's ancient eyes, and went out.

Yoda tabbed the lightsaber's power switch and watched the recording again, three more times. He clambered back onto his favorite rock, deep in thought. Somewhere above him, in his private quarters, messages from the Republic would be piling up: dispatches from military commanders, questions from far-flung Jedi about their various assignments and commands, perhaps a summons from the Senate or a meeting request from the Chancellor's office. He had come to know the weight of all those anxious eyes far too well. Today they would have to wait. Today, Yoda needed Yoda's wisdom more than anyone else.

He breathed deeply, trying to clear his mind in meditation, letting thoughts rise up before him.

Dooku's hands on that candle, the hum of emotion like a current, making his fingertips tremble.

Jai Maruk giving his clipped report in the Council Chamber with the charred welt of a lightsaber burn on his gaunt cheek.

Farther back, he and Dooku in a cave on Geonosis. The hiss and flash of humming lightsabers, darkly beautiful, like dragonflies, and Dooku still a boy of twenty, not the old man whispering on top of poor dead Jang's blade. Yoda's ears slowly drooped as he sank deeper into the Force, time melting out beneath his mind like rotten ice, setting past and present free to mix together. That proud boy in the garden sixty years ago who murmured,
Every Jedi is a child his parents decided they could live without.

Little Jang Li-Li, eight years old, misting the orchids in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. A bright day, sunlight pouring through transparisteel panels, Li-Li making puffs of water with her mister and shrieking with laughter as every little cloud she made broke a sunbeam into colors, fugitive bars of red and violet and green.
Master, Master, I'm making rainbows!
Those colors hadn't come to mean military signals, yet, or starship navigating lights, or lightsaber blades. Just a girl making rainbows.

Dooku newly brought from Serenno, grave-eyed, old enough to know his mother had given him away. Old enough to learn one can always be betrayed.

Water bubbled and seeped and trickled around Yoda, time past and time present, liquid and elusive: and then Qui-Gon was beside him. It would be wrong to say the dead Jedi
came
to Yoda; truer would it be to say Qui-Gon had always been there, in the still point around which time wheels. Qui-Gon waiting for Yoda to find his way down the untaken path and pass through the unopened door into the garden at the still heart of things.

Yoda opened his eyes. The feel of Qui-Gon in the Force was the same as always: stern and energetic, like a hank of good rope pulled into a fine sailor's knot.
Become a wave he has,
Yoda thought.
A wave without a shore.

Yoda tapped the handle of Jang Li-Li's lightsaber. “You saw?”

I did.

“Cunning, it is. If I move to see him, I must keep any Republic ships away from the Hydian Way. Deny the chance of peace utterly, must I, or else give him extra months unharried in his lair.”

He is a fencer,
Qui-Gon agreed.
Leverage, position, advantage—they are as natural to him as breathing.

“My old student—your old Master, Qui-Gon. The truth he is telling?”

He thinks he is lying.

Yoda's ears pricked up. “Hmm?”

He
thinks
he is lying.

A slow smile began to light Yoda's round face. “Yessssss!” he murmured.

A moment later Yoda felt a vibration in the Force, a ripple rolling out from the student dormitories far below, like the faint sound of distant thunder. Qui-Gon shivered and was gone, as if the Force were a pool of water and he a reflection on its surface, broken up by the splash of whatever disturbance had just struck the Temple.

They didn't happen often, the true dreams. To be honest, Whie tried not to have them.

They weren't like regular nightmares at all. He had plenty of those, too—almost every night for the last year. Rambling, confused affairs, and in them he was always failing: there was something he should have done, a class he was supposed to attend, a package he had meant to deliver. Often he was pursued. Sometimes he was naked. Most of these dreams ended with him clinging desperately to a high place and then falling, falling: from the spires of the Temple, from a bridge, from a starship, down a flight of steps, from a tree in the gardens. Always falling, and down below, waiting, a murmuring crowd of the disappointed, the ones he had failed.

The true dreams were different. In those he came unstuck in time. He would go to sleep on his dormitory cot, and then wake up with a jerk in the future, as if he had fallen through a trapdoor and landed in his own body.

Once, going to sleep when he was eight, he had woken to find himself eleven years old and building his first lightsaber. He worked on it for more than an hour before another boy entered the workshop and said, “Rhad Tarn is dead!” He tried to ask, “Who is Rhad Tarn?” but heard his own voice say something quite different. Only then did he realize that he wasn't the Whie building the lightsaber—he was just riding around in his head like a ghost.

There was nothing—
nothing
—worse than the horrible feeling of being buried alive in his own body. Sometimes the panic was so intense he woke himself up, but other times it would be hours before he jerked upright in bed, weeping and gasping with relief at the sound of an alarm, or the touch of a friend's hand.

This time he fell through the true dream and landed in a strange room, richly furnished. He was standing on a deep, soft rug embroidered with a tangled woodland pattern, thorn-trees and thorn-vines and venomous green moss; in the shadows, the glinting eyes of evil birds. The rug was spattered with blood. From the burning pain in his left arm and the slow dull ache in his ribs, he guessed some of the blood was his.

An ancient chrono, hanging in a metal case crafted to look like a tangle of thorns and brambles, ticked dully in the corner of the room. The beats seemed slow and erratic, like the beating of a dying heart.

There were at least two other people in the room. One was a bald woman with stripes painted on her skull and lips the color of fresh blood. He could smell the dark side on her like wood smoke, like something burning on a wet night. She scared him.