FOREWORD
Sometimes a project takes on a life of its own.
If you are a new reader who has stumbled upon this severely out of fashion story (post-what? Jacen who?) then I feel somehow obligated to try and sell you on the words that follow. That is a fairly difficult proposition; believe me when I say that I am deeply aware of this. Still, let me try.
This is the story of Jacen Solo, eldest son of Han Solo and Leia Organa, two characters with whom I presuppose nominal familiarity—it is a small wonder of the age that one can probably take at least this much for granted. Jacen Solo is a creature of post-Return of the Jedi Star Wars novels. He remains quite controversial within the fanbase for a variety of reasons, even though I have been told that he was actually killed off some time ago. Some of these controversies are related to his time as a villain and many more are related to his time as a hero. He is an interesting problem on many fronts. This is a story that explores that problem in detail and endeavors to suggest a final reconciliation.
At the heart of all these controversies is this: the broad arc of Jacen Solo is probably as close as Star Wars will ever come to experiencing an epistemological crisis. There is a rich meta-plot in how authors have reacted to the character over time, and this meta-plot is at least as interesting to me as the strict history of the character.
The arc of that meta-plot seems to me to be this: Jacen Solo was a hero, and his philosophy was heroic, when the authors were most willing to defy Lucas fiat—or, at least, when the eye of Lucas was elsewhere. Jacen Solo became a villain, and his philosophy became villainous, when the leash was once again tightened. There is much more to be written about the use of the character as a vehicle for an ugly strain of anti-intellectualism among certain authors than I have space to go into here. Likewise for the utterly bizarre co-opting of the character as a vehicle for frustration against Tony Blair and George Bush.
In any case there has been a battle over the philosophical orientation of Star Wars carried out with Jacen Solo as the battlefield. In the canon the outcome was ultimately the most reactionary one imaginable. Jacen Solo—the doubter, the seeker, the wanderer and wonderer who questioned received dogma—suffered a reductio ad Hitlerum in everything but name.
In this story I make my attempt to elaborate a more robust understanding of the character and the meaning of the battle that was waged over him.
If you are not passingly familiar with the history of Jacen Solo then trying to understand what I have put down may be daunting. Toward the end of ameliorating this, and also as a general refresher for those who might only distantly recall the sum of events up through Inferno, the increasingly dated Troy Denning novel after which this story diverges from the accepted continuity of Star Wars, I have taken it upon myself to add a brief prologue that will help to ground you in the characters and events that lead up to my intrusion into the franchise in what I hope to be a useful way.
This story diverges from the canon, such as it is, around the point at which (in this humble nobody's opinion) the character of Jacen Solo went irrevocably off the rails in terms of characterization. I do not mean to say that what had been written of Jacen Solo in Legacy of the Force before my intrusion was at all consistent or even coherent. I only mean to suggest that what followed was not even salvageable. Some have argued the problems with the character are structural and endemic, and go all the way back to early New Jedi Order days. I am not in that camp, as one of the apparent few who read those books at a time in my life when I was deeply sympathetic to Jacen's philosophical struggle with choice and action. Some would say that the many problems with the character are seeded in the lurching changes undertaken during Denning's Dark Nest trilogy, and I do think that's a lot closer to the truth.
Full disclosure: I remain firmly convinced that Matthew Stover's Traitor is perhaps the single most piercing, redemptive, consummately promising Star Wars story ever put to pen aside from the original trilogy, and everything that has followed since its publication constitutes a rather tragic denial of that novel's enormous and unique potential for transformation. If you do happen to read this story and enjoy it without foreknowledge of the character and the novels, Traitor is easily my strongest recommendation to you. After all, this story is in large part rumination on and paean to that book, the publication of which still strikes me as frankly miraculous.
But if the vast majority of the previous paragraph is incomprehensible to you, then rest assured that you are probably better off for it. This is an area of expertise that I am deeply ambivalent about, and it is my meager hope that you may understand and even enjoy this story even if you know little about the decidedly intestinal labyrinth of the post Return of the Jedi canon.
This story is many things to me. A friend of mine once called its genre post-Star Wars, in the sense that the post-modern is a reaction to the modern. Only Right is how I coped with the fact that a franchise that I had grown up with and followed slavishly had at some intangible moment turned from something I loved into something that I could no longer stand.
This story struggles with the seams that had started to fray in the comfortable and conservative assumptions of the Star Wars universe when I began, and were enormous, irrevocable tears—an utter alienation—by the time I finished.
This story struggles with many seeming paradoxes, not least of which being that Jacen Solo, as characterization catastrophe, as author soup, as indeterminate being lost in the mire of muddy motivation and inconsistent, faltering, futile action, is so profoundly human in a way that so many other characters in latter day Star Wars so rarely are. I discovered as I wrote, really, that I wanted ambiguity, complexity, lies of all kinds, and finally, above all, endings. I loathed—still loathe—the idea that Star Wars will almost certainly grind on in its staid state for my lifetime and then some. Because I am a very stubborn and foolish person, I made the undeniably ridiculous decision to have a go at resolving all of that myself.
But here is a truth that is not acknowledged enough in the era of sequel upon sequel, on into eternity: stories have to end. Among other things, this story I have written is about how people deal with the concept of infinity and the inevitability of ending. This is, among other things, the story of how I disengaged from the frustrating and fickle continuity of Star Wars. Full disclosure: I have long since ceased to follow the franchise in general. I haven't really looked back; what little I hear from friends who maintain casual interest gives me no temptation to return whatever. I have come to find my own fiction significantly more interesting than theirs. Certainly, I have come to strongly suspect that I thought about these characters and this scenario much more than certain authors ever did.
I think I shouldn't understate that for me, this is the final story in the Star Wars saga.
My goal when I set out on this fool's journey was simple: I'd write a three part story about the breaking of Ben Skywalker, son of Luke and Mara Jade, at the hands of Jacen Solo—this surely at no more than, say, eight thousand words, I find myself highly amused to recall in retrospect. By writer's fiat, I imagined what would happen if Jacen Solo woke up one day and became an effective villain. My job became to somehow take a character that had been fumbled in terms of characterization, effectiveness, consistency, and above all in power and reach, and congeal him into something convincing, seductive, and profoundly dangerous in an extremely and necessarily constricted space. I went in thinking I could make him coherent, but in the long term I think I abandoned that idea and embraced Jacen Solo as a man driven and defined by a complex constellation of totally contradictory ideas—not just because it was the only way to reconcile him with what had been written before, but because it was so much truer to the way people are.
At any rate I thought I would take this character who was supposed to be an enormous threat and write him as if he were an enormous threat, beginning from the very first, with the definitive act that sets this story into motion. I would take what I liked (and I should be clear on this: for better or for worse there were things I liked about the character all the way through Inferno) and emphasize that, and try to fill in the many blanks on the fly, with only the barest structure plotted out ahead of time. Even that structure warped radically as I went. Insofar as other characters were to enter into what I wrote, I thought that I would always be concerned centrally with their reactions and resistance to the encroaching influence of Jacen Solo and the entire mass of epistemological baggage he embodies.
I began all this with only the scarcest experience in actually moving these strange characters that were so much the accretion of so many other writers. All of it strikes me as quixotic in retrospect, and as evidence I offer the fact that years on I am writing a foreword to this supposedly long finished story trying to justify this very strange thing I have made. Everything I touched became more complicated, every structure I came into contact with shifted as I used it, and my reach necessarily expanded, and each character I used became part of my mission to reconcile a more coherent vision. Things spiraled out into the eighty-something thousand word testament to my own neuroses that is here offered for your perusal. I write a great deal, but for nothing so much as Only Right have I returned over and over to change it or mull over it or just parse it, line by line, making minuscule changes that madden me by way of absence when I look back at old versions of the story. The small triumphs of tweaking and tuning are, frankly, addictive to the point of becoming cause for concern. In some small way, I know how Lucas feels; it's a scary thing.
Sometimes I feel as if I cannot make myself understood. Maybe he does, too.
But listen. If you'll let me, I intend to make you unsure who is a hero and who is a villain. I intend to show you characters who can change in response to the things that happen to them—don't doubt that I will show you characters to whom things happen. I have been called overly cruel by those who have read this story in the past. I maintain that I am merciful insofar as I am willing to let these characters, so long bound in holding patterns, go free. I hope that this story will surprise you.
But I must let the words, if you choose to see them, make my case from here. I grow weary of returning time and time again to Jacen Solo and his garden, when I have so many other gardens to tend. I have been told that he is dead. I remain unconvinced. He lives in my memory not as the Jacen Solo of this story, though I have come to love that character in my way, nor as the Jacen Solo of Legacy of the Force, though I have come to accept him for what he is.
Jacen Solo still lives for me—lives in me—as the traitor who taught the World Brain of Yuuzhan'tar that that the galaxy was full of love.
Listen. Stories have to end. Let it be said that I have set this story down before you, supine, uprooted, and let the judgment come as it may. What more can a gardener do with a flower he has grown?
―
PROLOGUE
History would be wonderful thing—if it were only true.
Leo Tolstoy
―
Listen. There is a galaxy, and there is a war.
There is a Confederacy, and there is a Galactic Alliance, and there will be a reckoning between them.
There is the Force, and there are those who believe that it is of two minds, light and dark.
There are a few hundred Jedi who subscribe to that view. They are led by the greatest Jedi who ever lived, Luke Skywalker.
Luke Skywalker is an old man, now, a far cry from the naive boy who, wreathed with the auspices of destiny, led the rebellion that toppled Darth Vader's Empire. That rebellion, with time, overthrew Palpatine's Empire and became the New Republic. Years later, that New Republic withered and died under the weight of the most terrible war in galactic history.
Luke Skywalker has spent the better part of his life thus far patiently nurturing the Jedi back to life from out of the seed of himself, through each setback and each small triumph, teaching and leading and growing in the Force. The unprecedented power that has developed in him would be profoundly terrifying in the hands of anyone less calm, less even-tempered, less utterly in sync with the universe.
As he rebuilt the Jedi, Luke Skywalker rebuilt his family. He took a wife in the former Imperial assassin Mara Jade; together they had a son they named Ben Skywalker in tribute to Obi-Wan Kenobi, the only Jedi in the memory of the Order that could hold a candle to Luke himself for consummate greatness.
However, his wife is dead, and no power Luke Skywalker possesses will bring her back. His son is lost to him, though Luke Skywalker has yet to learn of it.
He will.
When he does, there will be a reckoning.
The death of Luke's wife and the loss of Luke's son are both the work of a single Sith, the first true Sith since the death of Anakin Skywalker broke the chain of the Rule of Two. He is Darth Caedus, but to the world outside he hides in the cloak of his old name, Jacen Solo.
It has not been so very long since Jacen Solo was considered one of the greatest hopes for the future of the Jedi, a visionary second only to Luke himself in understanding of the Force. It has not been so very long since those who had accepted his radical case for the true and profound one-ness of the Force, the internal rather than external nature of the dark side, constituted a significant minority within the Order. He is a war hero, instrumental in the triumph of the infant Galactic Alliance over the extragalactic invasion by the Yuuzhan Vong that destroyed the New Republic and came dangerously close to exterminating native galactic society entirely. Jacen Solo was the one who killed the true Supreme Overlord of the Yuuzhan Vong, Onimi, in single combat, in a moment of utter blazing transcendence in the Force that drove the young man—he was sixteen when the war began—to spend the next five years of his life devouring the lore of the galaxy's far-flung independent Force using groups. Even in those days he was very far from his childhood in the Jedi academy on Yavin IV, where he had loved to take care of animals, where his enormous empathy for all living things had been obvious to all those who knew him.
He is much farther now.
At present Jacen Solo is the only living son of Han Solo and Leia Organa. He has lately learned that his parents consider him to be dead to them. For his part, he has endeavored several times in recent months to make them dead to him in a more literal sense. He is estranged from his twin sister Jaina. They had begun to drift apart years previous, but the break was total when he saw to her court-martial and dishonorable discharge from the Galactic Alliance Navy after an incident where she refused his order to open fire on a ship full of civilians during an engagement early in the war between the Alliance and the Confederacy.
Jacen Solo has a daughter, lately seven years of age. Her name is Allana, and she does not know who her father is. He has a wife. Her name is Tenel Ka, and she does not know what her husband has become—she knows he is a monster, but she does not know that the monster is named Sith. Tenel Ka, too, has declared Jacen Solo dead; she abandoned him in the middle of a pitched battle over Kashyyyk, a world that was preparing to secede from the Galactic Alliance and join the Confederacy. Jacen had given the order to firebomb it from orbit.
Only a few weeks ago, he murdered Luke Skywalker's wife, Jedi Master Mara Jade Skywalker. She discovered what he was becoming and she endeavored to stop him, and she narrowly failed. His triumph over her was the crowning sacrifice, out of which came the epiphany of his true name, the beginning of real Sith mastery. But he has sacrificed many others. There was Nelani Dinn, a Jedi who had witnessed Jacen acquiesce to the offer of apprenticeship to Lumiya, the Sith acolyte in waiting and longtime enemy of Luke Skywalker who set him on his current path. There have been untold hundreds of thousands among the diaspora of Correllia and Bothawui, first among the seceded worlds of the Confederacy, who he has seen consigned to internment camps. There are as of yet no concrete figures about how many have died in his no-tolerance actions against the civilian populations of seceding worlds, let alone the actions he has taken against enemy combatants. Estimates of the former alone easily run into the millions.
That is not common knowledge. Darth Caedus is very much in the business of information control. For all his waxing power, his position is nonetheless precarious, even ignoring the fact that the Jedi are coming for his life—and will be coming much faster when they find out that Ben Skywalker is gone. He is not only a Sith, he is the co-Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance, lately propped up in a bloodless coup that expelled the previous and elected occupant of the position, Cal Omas, from office on falsified charges of high treason. He is as vulnerable to attack from the back as he is from the front—his co-conspirator and opposite, Admiral Cha Niathal of the Galactic Alliance Navy, would happily see him eliminated at the earliest convenience. The feeling is mutual. Their uneasy armistice is sustained only by the fact that if their profoundly illegal contrivances to gain high office were to be revealed, both would fall far and fast.
But he is also not so vulnerable as she thinks. He leads the secret police, the Galactic Alliance Guard, which is ultimately loyal to him alone and exists in a state of operational freedom tantamount in all but name to immunity from the law. It is in this capacity that Jacen Solo has earned the rank of Colonel, and in this capacity that he commands the Star Destroyer Anakin Solo, named in tribute to his deceased younger brother, who died fighting the Yuuzhan Vong. Darth Caedus has lately discovered his prodigious faculty for politics. He has constructed an impenetrable shield of bylaw and amendment around himself and his true allies in the Guard and in the Senate that few even realize exists. And he remains unflaggingly popular with his core constituency in the wealthy, urbanized galactic core. On Coruscant, the capital world-city of the Galactic Alliance, he is adored by the vast majority of the trillion-plus sentient population. To them he is a stalwart defender of the planet's safety and interests against the Confederacy, which has frequently resorted to acts of terrorism against the populations of Alliance worlds and plainly intends to create a new map of galactic power that would break the vice grip of the core on galactic society. It has been Confederate terrorism, and even more so the specter of acts of Confederate terrorism, that has enabled Jacen to claim emergency powers in leaps and bounds and entrench himself still deeper in nominally democratic Galactic Alliance politics.
The capitol system of the Confederacy, Corellia, is home to the galaxy's last superweapon, the ancient and massive gravity well manipulator known as Centerpoint, which is capable of annihilating entire worlds. Jacen himself led a commando mission at the war's outset—then still a loyal and well-regarded Jedi—to disable it, but the sabotage was not permanent. Centerpoint's inevitable return to operational status hangs over the entire conflict like an executioner's axe. The leadership of the Confederacy has equivocated about their progress in repairing the weapon and their willingness to utilize it to turn the tide of the conflict. It remains unclear whether that has scared more away from Solo's web than it has driven in.
In light of the dismal political situation the Jedi have concluded that reform from within the Alliance is impossible for the time being. And so they have chosen to abandon the Galactic Alliance, which the extended Skywalker clan was instrumental in founding, so long as Jacen Solo remains in power. As a consequence of mass desertion on the field of battle and stated intent to assassinate a nominally legally appointed head of state, the Jedi have been labeled a terrorist organization by the Alliance and are actively hunted for high treason. Captured Jedi face stark fates—most simply disappear, wiped from the face of the galaxy as if they had never existed but as a name in the Jedi archive. The Jedi strike quickly and secretly from extremely clandestine refuge worlds and try not to acknowledge the full precariousness of their position. Fundamentally, they hope to cut the problem off at its head with Jacen and spearhead armistice between the two sides afterwards. A few among the Jedi are beginning to realize that things are not even remotely so simple.
One agent of discord in all this is Alema Rar, a fallen Jedi thought dead at Leia Organa's hands during the Dark Nest Crisis five years previous. In truth she survived her terrible injuries, if enormously scarred physically and profoundly broken mentally, and has returned to the galaxy at large with an all-consuming vendetta against the Skywalker clan which crippled her and so nearly killed her. She is among the very few who have any real inkling of what Jacen Solo has become, having inadvertently discovered Solo's apprenticeship to Lumiya in the course of a failed attempt on his life. Owing to Mara Jade's death by Alema's signature weapon, a poisoned blowdart, she remains the prime suspect in the murder case. She has motive and ability, after all. She is the one who rescued Jacen from the disastrous Battle of Kashyyyk, and she is the one who informed him of the existence of a shadowy group of Sith heretics based out of the Sith tomb-world of Korriban who upheld a Rule of One great Sith over untold numbers of lesser apprentices. She lives and continues in her solitary quest for reprisal by virtue of her knowledge of Allana, Solo's daughter, whose parentage she has contrived to reveal in the case of her death.
This would put Allana in mortal danger. Allana's mother, Tenel Ka, is a Jedi and childhood friend of Jacen who has inherited the queenship of the Hapes Cluster, a wealthy and powerful bloc of worlds with politics characterized by ruthless intrigue among a class of bloodthirsty nobles. If Allana's parentage were to become common knowledge, then both mother and daughter would be in mortal danger; hatred of Jedi within the Hapes Cluster is omnipresent, and the knowledge that the heir to the throne is progeny of the Jedi's most infamous clan would topple her rule in a bloody coup. Jacen Solo tells himself that even after Tenel Ka's betrayal, there is one thing he will not compromise, one dream he will not give up in his journey into an ambiguous universe, the reason redeeming all the awful things he has done: it is all to create a galactic government that can guarantee their safety.
Jacen Solo believes that he is Sith and also something more than Sith, the genesis of a new and better way within the ancient line of masters and apprentices. He hopes to synthesize the teachings of Skywalker and the Jedi, Sith learning from Lumiya, and the vast array of arcane Force lore he has picked up in his long journeys to the remotest Force-using groups of the galaxy into a greater truth, a truth that encompasses the totality of the Force.
But the teachings closest to his heart have always been those imparted to him by Vergere. Vergere, a Jedi of the Old Republic, was spared Order 66 only by a sixty year period of captivity among the Yuuzhan Vong, who took her during one of their first scouting expeditions into the known galaxy. In turn she took Jacen, shattered by the death of his brother Anakin at the hands of the invaders, and tortured him, and taught him. She was the one who introduced him to the Embrace of Pain, a living Yuuzhan Vong torture device to end all torture devices. On Yuuzhan Vong occupied Coruscant, rechristened and reshaped by the invaders into the ferociously beautiful world-jungle of Yuuzhan'tar, she presided over his transformation from boy into man. Under her, he learned about flowers and weeds and gardens, choice and action, all within a labyrinth of riddles and lies and truths run together.
She advanced a simple but phenomenally important argument: what the Jedi called the dark side was not an external entity but an internal one, that the Force was unified and did not take sides. There was no devil in the Force making men like Darth Vader dance; good and evil began in the individual, not in the Force, which was never anything more or less than the collective mass of all living energy. Vergere would sacrifice her life for Jacen at the Battle of Ebaq 9, turning point of the war, not long after they escaped together from Yuuzhan'tar. Lumiya would later tell him that Vergere was Sith, and that claim would give him one more reason to turn away from all that he had known. Jacen in truth remains unconvinced, but he cannot deny the possibility. Lumiya, for her part, now tells him nothing at all. She, too, died for him, in a battle with Luke Skywalker she had contrived to buy the newly born Darth Caedus time.
With her death, he is finally truly alone with his name and his task. But he is one Sith, bound in the Rule of Two, and he is now a master without an apprentice. Were he to die in the near future—a possibility that he recognizes is rapidly becoming more likely—there would be no one to take up his cause. Lately, in his long nights of insomnia-fueled Force haze, scrying and plotting all run together, he has seen a solution to the problem of the galactic noose tightening around his neck. His thoughts have turned once more to Ben Skywalker.
Ben Skywalker, lately fourteen years old, knows all too little about the immense scale of Jacen's sojourn in the dark, but a shadow of the full complexity of the act. Ben was conceived by Luke and Mara Jade during the darkest days of the Yuuzhan Vong war, and his exposure in the womb to the immense scale of death and suffering made him reluctant to develop his enormous potential in the Force as a young child. He was lured out of his shell by Jacen Solo, and their relationship evolved into Jacen's first formal Jedi apprenticeship. They became inseparable. Ben was there when Jacen murdered Nelani Dinn. He was there when Jacen Solo induced a brain hemorrhage in Tenel Ka's grandmother, who had threatened to reveal Allana's identity. Jacen has closed those events and others off from Ben's memory. And that is but the merest sleight of hand in the scope of what he has become capable of doing using the Force.
It has not been so very long since Jacen was Ben's idol, second only to his father as consummate role model. This, like the rest of the relationships in Jacen's life, has collapsed in spectacular fashion. Luke Skywalker terminated the apprenticeship after Jacen made Ben participate in a Galactic Alliance Guard operation wherein Ben had been forced to kill an enemy combatant—his first. That was calamitous for the boy, but it is his mother's death that has pushed Ben to the breaking point. He has no proof, but he knows—the Force itself screams it out to him, not to mention the keen intuition that Jacen nurtured in him—that Jacen Solo himself, not Alema Rar, was his mother's murderer. He could prove it, and he could take that proof to the Jedi, or take that proof to either of the belligerent governments, but Ben Skywalker in fact has something much simpler in mind. Ben Skywalker is in a dark place. He is tired, and afraid, and mourning, and he is also terribly naive. Ben Skywalker has made every effort to empty himself of all save the intent to kill the man who murdered his mother.
It is for nothing more or less than this reason that Ben Skywalker has escaped his father's care, escaped from the Jedi's great caravan in its passage to yet another remote and secret refuge world. This is why he has found his way back to Jacen Solo, in his black uniform, on his black ship, in a cold chamber where the shadows writhe with alien life. For all that, he has not realized that he is the lamb delivering himself to the lion.
So it has come to pass that the Dark Lord of the Sith finds himself staring down his former apprentice, a boy who can not imagine what he is about to set into motion. Ben Skywalker knows that he may die, but he does not realize that this secret chamber is no tomb and no arena. It is nothing more or less than a prison, awaiting a prisoner. They stand opposite one another, lit by a single floodlight, casting long harsh shadows. Between them and above them, like judge presiding over trial, the Embrace of Pain awaits, blindly grasping towards both with barb-lined appendages. Darth Caedus is taciturn. Ben Skywalker can barely contain his fury.
The accusation comes. Darth Caedus is unsurprised. Like any good dejarik player, he is thinking several steps ahead. Ben Skywalker's voice comes out not at all as Ben expected it—it is hollow, empty of anger, like it is waiting to be filled—echoing with the enormity of his loss.
"You killed mom," Ben Skywalker says. It's not a question.
"Yes," Darth Caedus replies. But that's not even close to the answer.
Listen.
There is a garden, and there is a gardener.
There will be a reckoning between them.