Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (38 page)

Luke whispered, “I have felt it.”

"Like me she was a wanderer, wanting to know what lay beyond the stars.

Like me she was adept with machines and tools. A bit of a cynic, like me, but with a passionate heart.

“But she had her own road,” he said. “I don't think she ever loved me less, but it was a road that I could not follow. I did try. But sometimes . . . you have to let them go.”

“Not this.”

Not Callista.

Not the one thing in his life that he'd wanted That he'd ever wanted this badly. The words came hard. “I can't.”

“Well, every case is different.” Liegeus's deep voice was so thin that Luke risked illuminating the glowrod on his torn and ragged flightsuit, so that he could check the philosopher's fingertips and eyelids. His pulse was weak but steady, his breathing shallow and slow.

“I went after her.” Under the discolored lids his eyes moved, as if he could still see her face. The brows pinched. “Like a fool I thought I was the only person who could ever teach her what I thought it was she had to learn in this life, that I was the only person who could give her what she needed for all that long and winding road of the human span. And all I managed to do, in clinging to her as I did, was hurt her terribly.”

Luke said nothing. Callista's face came back to him in the morning light of Yavin Four's temple tower, and the voices of the adepts playing with the image tank that she herself had instructed them in.

“In the end,” said Liegeus, “I understood that the most truly loving thing that I could do would be to let her go, to seek her own road. I suppose it was vain of me to believe myself the only guide she would ever have or need. Or to believe that she was the only one I would ever love.”

Luke was silent for a time, his whole soul crying out against the darkness of the past eight months. At last he whispered, “Was she?”

Liegeus smiled, and touched his wrist. “I think the human capacity for loving is too great for a single loss, however enormous, to blight. At least I hope that's the case. You do not believe me now , but I have walked this road, Luke. I can tell you, if you keep walking, you do come out of the dark at last. The love I have for your sister is no less for the love I felt for both my wives, bless their long-suffering hearts. There is always love.”

Not like this, thought Luke. Not like this.

He had meant to stay awake, to fight the drag of weariness that seemed to be pulling him to the edge of a bottomless dark well. In any case it seemed impossible to sleep with the itching crawl of electricity tingling in his flesh, cleansing the vile energies of the drochs, and with the night's unplumbed cold.

But he found himself nodding, dragged himself awake with all his strength only to nod again. As darkness gathered him in the voices that had, it seemed, all this time been whispering in his mind stepped to the fore again, like men and women stepping out of shadows, and as he drifted from the mooring anchors of his consciousness he could hear what they said.

They spoke of time and of still, tideless waters imbued with life and heat. They spoke of the heartbeat of the moonless world, and of the stars. This was a deep-colored background on which the bright flashes of closer consciousness moved like ephemeral dayflies amusement and concern at the flutrying little creatures come to live in their minute enclaves of soil and water and vegetative fluff. Worry about danger, some terrible danger.

And then anger. Deep, burning, violent anger, the anger of those who have seen their friends and family members raped and murdered and enslaved before their eyes, the memory of voices outcrying in pain as their minds were stripped from them, helpless fury and pain.

Don't let them. Don't let them. Why did he think they were standing all around him, looming shadows in the canyons' rocks, looking down at him while he slept. We can still hear their voices. Still they cry to us.

Still they are part of us.

Luke shook his head. I don't understand.

He was on Tatooine. He was standing in the courtyard of his old home, restored, no longer just a subsidence half-filled with sand, as the stormtroopers had left it so many years ago. There were stormtroopers in the courtyard, and out of the kitchen doorway that led into the court they were dragging Jawas--shrieking, pleading, kicking, jabbering. Aunt Beru, of course, would never have permitted a Jawa into her clean kitchen, but dimly Luke realized that this wasn't the point. Someone standing just beside and behind him, someone he couldn't see, was making these images, someone very old and very patient and very angry, trying to make him understand.

Two stormtroopers seized a Jawa by the arms. A third one raised up a huge hand drill of the kind used for taking water rock samples, and drove the spinning bit down into the Jawa's head. Horribly, the Jawa continued to kick, continued to struggle, as the drillmaster set aside his drill and withdrew from a tub at his side a brain, naked and gray and dripping clear fluid, and packed the stuff into the opening in the Jawa's head like a sapper packing explosive into a hole. Then the Jawa ceased to struggle and remained standing passively while the two storm-troopers released it, picked up white stormtrooper armor from a giant pile in front of the workshop door, and stuffed the Jawa inside it, closing up the armor like a trooper-shaped box and locking it along one side.

Though the suit was rigid while it was being manipulated, once the hapless Jawa was inside it, it became articulated, like regular armor.

Though it was impossible that anything as small as a Jawa would be able to fill it out, it seemed, within, to have grown to size.

It saluted the others and walked smoothly up the steps and out of sight, just as if there were a man inside.

A second Jawa was brought out of the kitchen (Aunt Beru must be havinG a fit. It had its head drilled and packed with brains, and was in its turn packed into armor--given a weapon, he now saw, an Atgar-4X blaster rifle, and sent on its way.

I don't understand. He turned, to try to get an explanation out of the one who had invented the vision, but found himself back in the canyon with Liegeus. He was standing over his own body and that of the engineer, and though he could have sworn that the one who had shown him the images, the one who was trying to communicate with him, had returned to this reality with him, he saw nothing behind him by the dull-gleaming facets of the rock wall.

Callista's voice said to him, “It's their world, Luke. It's their world.”

He saw' her walking away from him, her long brown hair hanging in a tail down the back of her jacket of leather and nerf wool that, though it was black in the starlight, he knew was red.

Walking away down her own road in the starlight, toward a destination that he could not see.

Around her, Leia was conscious that the glittering walls of crystal had changed. When she had entered the cave, a crevice far up the canyons above the Theran camp, she had been dazzled by the lights thrown from the thick encrustation of gems. But as she extinguished her lamp, as she had been instructed, and walked farther into the dimly radiant chamber, she was aware that somehow the deep-buried geode had been transformed, morphed into something familiar, a room she knew...

Dark pillars ascended to the striated greemand-gold glass of the vaults. Shadows chased one another across the dull gold intricacy of the floor.

Palpatine's audience hall. Why did she dimly hear the funky jizz-wailing of that horrible band Jabba the Hutt had kept to play in his palace? Why did she smell, behind the perfumes and incense and subtle hurlothrumbic gas with which the Emperor had flooded his court hall, the rank stink of Hutt, the greasy odor of meres and soldiers of fortuneS.

She walked farther. The fear that came over her she attributed to the gas. Her father had warned her about it, the first time she'd had an audience with the Emperor, when she was a youngster. “Don't be afraid,” Bail Organa had murmured as he opened the door for her. “It's just a trick he's playing on you, to make you think he's more dangerous than he is.”

She had been afraid, but had known it wasn't real. That memory remained with her, that knowledge, whenever afterward she felt fear.

There was someone on Palpatine's throne.

Leia stepped clear of the pillars. A robed figure, stooped forward, face in the shadow of a hood. She saw the gleam of eyes. At the foot of the throne huddled a woman, nearly naked in scraps of gold and silk, long chestnut hair braided down her back and a chain collar around her neck.

Herself, eight years ago. Eyes downcast, beaten, submissive as she had never been, not even in Jabba's awful palace. Hopeless, knowing that this time there would be no rescue.

Her hand went to the lightsaber at her belt, but she remembered what Callista had said, that it was better not to use a weapon until she knew against whom to use it. Leia stood still, but her heart hammered in her chest.

“Draw it,” drawled a deep voice, a woman's voice, like smoke and honey, and she recognized the voice as her own. The robed figure on the throne put back her hood. Leia saw' herself, matured and beautiful, beautiful beyond description nearly six feet tall, with the attenuated, slender grace she had always envied Mon Mothma and Callista. Though there was maturity and wisdom in her face the crow's-feet around the eyes were erased, the mouth was fuller and stronger and redder, the hair a cinnamon cloud. Every beauty idealized and raised to terrifying perfection.

“Draw it. You must give it to one of us.”

She stood up from her throne, shrugged aside Palpatine's robe so that it folded down her back in dark curtains. Leia saw that she, too, wore the gold slave harness, jeweled and flashing, but she wore it like an Imperial gown. The Empress Leia leaned back her head and laughed and stretched forth her hands to the shadows of the ceiling. Force lightning rained from her fingers, crawled up the pillars, illuminated the perfect cheekbones, and cold auburn eyes. Behind her, as in Jabba's palace, Leia could see on the wall a man frozen in carbonite, but the contorted face was Luke's, not Han's.

She didn't know where Han was. Dead, she thought.

Dead of the Death Seed, somewhere in Meridian sector. And she, the Empress, was free of him at last.

“Which of us will you give it to, Leia?” The Empress jerked the golden chain, pulling the slave Leia sprawling. The wretched girl buried her face in her arm and wept, as Leia had sometimes longed to do at that time, in that place, in her life. “Draw your lightsaber, and give it to one of us. This is what you must do.”

Leia unhooked the weapon from her belt. She held it in her hands, slender and silvery, the weapon she had made under Luke's tutelage and later feared to use. The hands of the slave Leia, clutched into fists of frustration and hopelessness, were nerveless and weak.

Those of the Empress before her throne were large, strong as a man's, long-fingered, and white as Leia had always wished her hands could be.

Behind the throne she could see Jacen and Jaina, smiling, lightsabers in their hands, and just visible was the corner of her father's white robe, the one he had been wearing in her other dream, when Anakin had cut him dead.

There was no sound but the slave girl's sobbing.

The Empress walked toward her, Palpatine's robe billowing around her like wings of smoke containing the flame of her golden harness.

“Give it to one of us,” she commanded. “Give it to me.”

Leia backed away, frightened of the woman's power. Even as bad as I am with this, i could kill her here. She deserves it, for what she did to my father. She wasn't sure why she thought this or of whom she actually spoke. If she gave it to the slave, the Empress would only take it from her. Besides, the slave was a crawling weakling, sobbing miserably, not raising her face. Leia felt a stab of shame and embarrassment, knowing that, too, was her.

I could kill her. i could kill them both.

She backed farther, holding the lightsaber in both hands, her breath coming fast. The auburn eyes--her own eyes, raised to the glory of suns--stared into hers, compelling her, as Palpatine could compel. On the dais, the slave girl groveled and wept. Leia clutched the weapon's hilt, not willing to surrender it, yet feeling she must. She was almost panting with fear, and the thin choke of gas in her throat was what brought her to her senses.

It isn't real. Her father--her true father, the father of her heart--had said. It's just something he wants you to feel.

She stepped sideways, out of the Empress's path.

“I don't have to give it to anyone,” she said. “It's mine, to do with as I choose.”

And turning her back on them, she walked out of the palace, out of the cave.

“Luke was able to confront Vader,” said Callista. "To be defeated by him--to cut off his hand, as his own had been cut off to accept that this was his father. To surrender that fact, and go on from there.

You never had that chance."

“It's not an experience I'd stand in line for,” remarked Leia drily.

“I knew Vader. I saw him tagging after Palpatine every time I went to Court. Believe me, I'll never accept that he was my father.”

“Then you'll always be the slave to his shadow.”

Anger sprang to Leia's eyes. For a long moment they met the other woman's gray gaze in the campfire's wavering glow, the chilly flare of sodium lamps set here and there around the Theran camp. Most of the cultists had lain down around the mouth of the largest of the glittering caves, when the aftermath of the Force storm had blown itself out. Save for a few mounting guard farther up the canyon, they had given themselves up to sleep. Be had disappeared, to commune with the night, someone said. Apparently this was what Listeners commonly did, because everyone just nodded.

Leia and Callista, apart from the others, were virtually alone.

It was Leia who looked aside first. Her nightmares came back to her, the shape and face of her fears. She recalled the rage that came over her, the need to prove herself other than Anakin Skywalker's daughter.

She had taken and used his weapon, the Noghri, for her safety and that of her children and to repair the damage that he had done them; but she flinched from the thought of standing up and saying, I am Lord Vader's daughter.