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 ha
d 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.
BENEVOLENCE OF TROXAR
BUREAU OF DIPLOMATIC LIAISON
Incendiary Packet
MOST CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION FOR:
YODA,
"Grand Master of the Jedi Order"
Military Attaché to the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Senate
WARNING!
Listed Recipient Only!
This Diplomatic Pouch Is Actively Enabled:
Without Positive Identification
Contents Will Plasmate on Packet Rupture!
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.
*Gill Pattern: Not Applicable
Fingerprint Identification: Negative
Retinal Scan: Negative
Current Bearer cannot be identified as the intended recipient of this Bureau
of Diplomatic Liaison Incendiary Packet.
WARNING!
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.
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 light-saber. "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