I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the First World War, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity.
1.
How refreshing it was to be in front of an audience that was hanging on to his every word. No more bored sideways glances or polite, absent-minded smiles; he saw only enthusiastic nods, wide-eyed open faces, and even the occasional stream of tears.
"We all love the same children, cry the same tears, hate the same war..."
It always puzzled him, the way clans of sentients all over the galaxy were wont to imagine their neighbors, microscopically different, as their opposites. He had, by now, learned to tell the difference among Ulth and Plessians but when he had first arrived it was far from easy to keep the distinctions straight in his mind.
"We cannot afford to let this let planet flow with blood and tears..."
He was interrupted by a round of raucous applause and paused to gather his breath.
He had been as surprised as anyone at how smoothly everything had turned out. He recalled his panic, on that fateful day, when he heard the blast in the garden and opened his eyes to see the temple dome cave in. He rushed back to what remained of the sanctuary and plunged straight into the cloud of smoke, only pausing briefly to repel the bilious particles of dust.
It was to no use, of course: they were all dead. Little identifiable remained, the bodies shredded by the explosion; a royal insignia here or there was all that was left. There must have been a bomb, but nothing seemed to remain of it either. Everything was lost.
Was this the danger he had been feeling all this time?
There was something else he suddenly sensed, a smoke-like whiff that streamed out of the large hole in the middle of the sanctuary. He walked over and, kneeling beside it, peered inside. There was no mistaking what it was.
Dark energy. Nimbo had only sensed it only once before, back in his days as a padawan, when, in the midst of a routine reconnaissance mission, he stumbled on an old Sith temple. It was entirely unplanned. Together with his master, he had demolished it with an improvised explosive that very day, but not before he felt the lure of the energy emanating within.
It had the feeling of unalloyed power, repulsive and intoxicating. He longed to get away from it, to be as far from that temple as possible; and, at the same time, he could barely steady his feet to stop himself from walking inside. It was as if some part of himself, hidden, was slowly coming to the surface. Wordlessly the temple spoke reprovingly of promises half-fulfilled, made promises of long-lost mysteries lying in the dark, ambitions consummated, doubts erased, chains broken. It took all the willpower he had to stand calmly beside his master as they constructed the explosive.
What he felt that day as he gazed into the hole in the midst of the collapsed sanctuary was much weaker. There was only a trace of it, barely detectable, and it did not rouse his being. Still, it was undeniably dark energy, and, as he probed it with the force, the inevitable conclusion came bearing down upon him like a weight. The Sith were alive and present in the galaxy.
No doubt, this bomb was an attempt to take out one of the order's most capable masters.
He would need to alert the council immediately. The implications were grave. For one thing, with the leadership of this planet dead, he was certain both sides would quickly descend into open warfare. More importantly, the Sith were not only present in the galaxy, but they were clearly not content to lie in the shadows. Urgently, the order would need to prepare for the coming war.
Months had passed since that day and, while he was still troubled by it all, he was happy to see his initial guesses were mistaken. The Sith attacks he imagined to be imminent did not come. Were they lying in wait after all, biding their time, waiting for an opportune moment?
The news that both royal families had been murdered by the Sith led to outpourings of grief throughout the planet. The towns began to be blanketed in funeral processions; he had thought it politic to be present at some of these himself, somber, mournful marches with the participants holding the pictures of the victims in the air as they walked. Often these had an unfortunate tendency to turn to violence; those first first few days were full of chaos as it was unclear who was in charge of either nation. Many cities degenerated into looting. Amid competing claims to power from a bevy of royal bastards on both sides, the militaries on both sides formed provisional governments and restored order.
At that point he had expected the two nations to find their way to open warfare. Viewing his mission as hopeless, he stayed on the planet largely out of inertia. Along with his padawans, he was housed in the upper reaches of the temple, rooms unharmed by the blast, and the priests made no efforts to evict them. He wondered each day if it was time to pack up and travel back to Coruscant to seek the council's guidance.
To his surprise, neither side made any move to attack the other. On the contrary, he was soon approached by emissaries from both of them, asking him to preside over a restart of the negotiations. For a while, his role seemed to be that of a messenger, as both Ulth and Plessians had him relay their missives back and forth. Finally, suitable arrangements had been reached and and a series of in-person meetings arranged.
This time the negotiations were to be a private affair; in any case, all the diplomatic observers present for the last round left the planet long ago. They met in one of the small rooms with a view of the ruins of temple sanctuary. Again he expected the worst and again his expectations were confounded. On the very first day, he was startled to see the ambassadors cordially introduce each other and extend condolences, each dwelling at length on the tragedy experienced by the other. What a change from the previous round when his most pressing task was to police the contempt that flowed across the table.
Once the conversation had started, it quickly turned to bargaining and he found himself with little to do. He was shocked to see how quickly the issues were resolved: borders (each side would keep the territory it controlled and financially compensate all who would need to relocate), water resources, economic trade, prisoners of war. He sat there like a lump as the envoys made offers and counteroffers.
And now here he was, lecturing the new leaderships of both nations, just before the agreement was to be signed. Strictly speaking, they were signing not a peace treaty but a "memorandum of understanding" outlining the terms which would be fleshed out in yet another round of the negotiations. Apparently, as Nimbo discovered much to his surprise, treaties tended to be excruciatingly wordy, going into the thousands if not tens of thousands of pages. Today they would agree to an informal understanding which would only later be turned into a treaty. And yet everyone understood that all the important issues had been resolved, that all that remained was a job for the lawyers.
"You are destined to live together on the same soil, in the same land. You, the soldiers who have returned from battle stained with blood, you will say to each other: enough! Enough of the blood and tears…"
He was interrupted by another round of boisterous applause.
The ways of the force are beyond understanding, he reflected now as he looked over his joyful audience. The decimation of both royal families turned out to be for the greater good. Had it not happened the very people cheering now would be making grim preparations for the oncoming slaughter. He wondered if his true destiny was to act as a magnet for the Sith, to bring peace as the target of a failed assassination that, miraculously, made everything fall into place.
He entertained these thoughts for a few moments before dismissing them. Such speculations were futile and, besides, the order's traditions did not encourage them. Was it not the height of arrogance to imagine that he, a Zabrak male who had been alive for only a few decades, could divine the aims of the force, peer into the very mysteries which drove the universe? No, surely he would only fathom it at all when he was part of the force himself, when his body had turned to dust.
For now, all he could do was immerse himself in the Jedi practices, just as he had always done. He would stay on the planet a little longer while the full treaty was being negotiated; both sides had requested it and he had no other pending assignments from the council. Besides, he wanted to see things through. He felt no fear at the prospect of fighting the Sith and he considered the possibility of his own death without anxiety. His thoughts were steady, centered on the knowledge that he was fulfilling his destiny, that he stood firmly on the path that had been his own since the day he set foot in the Jedi temple.
2.
He ambled down the streets oblivious to the celebrations taking place all around him. The city was thronging with people, even at this late hour long after the sunsets; most were loitering on the sidewalks or clumping together at the street corners, sharing drinks and screaming loudly amid a general sense of mirth.
It was not so much that he missed her; after all, he hardly knew her. They had spent only a single evening together. Still, he had felt in her a kindred spirit, and the overwhelming emotion he felt now was an unbearable sense of sadness. The galaxy felt emptier, somehow lacking in color.
He had retraced the path the two of them had walked - starting from the noisy cantina, over the ancient bridges, and finally until the spot where they said their goodbyes. He walked slowly and though he began when the oppressive heat of the day was hard upon him, it was dark and frigid by the time he had finally finished. It was an act without any useful purpose and yet it made some knot in his chest unwind. What other weapon, besides memory, was there against the brutality of life and death?
His plan went off without a hitch. He had guessed that once the explosion removed the royal families and their blood feud out of the picture, peace would emerge. Not only would the explosion eliminate the major driver of the conflict - the desire for honor and revenge that drove the royals on both sides - but the two nations would be given a common foe by the supposed Sith attack, and the governments that emerged would be weak, insecure, unlikely to go against popular sentiment, which favored peace on both sides.
It was a significant gamble. Still, doing nothing would have led to certain war, and this plan seemed to at least have a chance of averting it. Besides, Nerra told him a solution existed, and she seemed to think it was within his power to find it. What other possibility could she have had in mind?
All his calculations came true. Perhaps, he thought, he should be feeling proud of the lives he had saved. But he found himself unable to entertain any thoughts in that direction. His mind automatically turned to Eeso, and he remembered her as she was, sharp, reflective, struggling against the bonds which reined her in.
He kept on standing at the spot where the two of them had parted, looking around uncertain of what to do next. His thoughts drifted to Reena, and he thought of her too as she was in their early days at the academy, questioning, incisive, with a lively spirit so opposed to the stoic demeanor of the masters. Much like Eeso, in fact.
What a contrast, he thought bitterly, to the letters he had been exchanging with Reena over the past months. He had sought hard to engage her in an attempt to rekindle their friendship; but her letters seemed to lack any discernible feeling, being largely composed of variations on the familiar Jedi platitudes. She always wrote at length of her archaeological work with master Shayn, the manual labor that was supposedly good for her spirit. Slowly, their correspondence dwindled into nothingness. The old Reena seemed to be gone.
Noval felt as if he had aged decades in the past months. How much of all that transpired, he wondered, had been foreseen or even engineered by Nerra? It was impossible to answer. But one thing was certain: her future rested in his hands. He could choose to never activate the holocron again. For all of her bluster - ``throw me down the nearest trash chute,'' she had said - it was within his power to derail her plans, whatever they might be. He had no idea how to destroy a holocron, but supposing he bound it to a stone and found an ocean to throw it in?
It was something to consider.
He turned the idea over in his mind. If he threw Nerra and her damned holocron into the ocean, what would he do with the rest of his life? He felt less desire to be a Jedi than ever. But what else was there? If he kept on at his current path, one day he might become a middling Jedi, which was, in the end, perhaps not so bad. For all its flaws, the order surely did more good than harm.
It was a perfectly acceptable way to spend the remainder of his days in the galaxy.
He looked in the direction Eeso set off after they parted. Perhaps, he said to himself, he would confront Nerra one last time. In any case, he felt a violent desire to be somewhere else, anywhere else. He turned back in the direction of the temple. Maybe he would seek out his master for some meetings. He would certainly require much guidance from the man if he set himself down the path to becoming a mediocre Jedi.
3.
"I will tell you a story," Nerra said as soon as the rays coming from the holocron cohered into a shape. "It is the story of my homeworld, the planet where I spent a happy childhood before the order became deplorably aware of my existence."
Noval tried to speak but she paid him no heed.
"Almost a hundred years before I was born a general named Valoris staged a popular and successful coup. The king he deposed was young and inexperienced and had plunged our planet into many deadly wars; he had no patience for detail, little interest in managing the treasury or delving into policy matters. War and hunting were his chief pleasures."
Noval's further attempts to get a word in met with a similar lack of response. He sighed. It seemed he would have to listen to the story.
"Still, despite his faults, to many the king was something of a sacred being. Many would have gladly laid down their lives for him. Valoris understood this. He knew that, though his soldiers were perfectly loyal, they would hesitate to murder the king. And so he did it himself."
"Valoris strangled him in the throne room," Nerra continued, "supposedly with his bare hands. Once the king was dead, Valoris brought his sword down upon the king's wailing wife. It is said that her death was...messy."
Noval made a face. Why was she telling him this?
"It was only then that the soldiers who had fought to get to the throne room with Valoris joined in the slaughter. They understood that their fates were sealed, that there was no turning back. The king's brothers and nephews were next, then still more distant relatives."
"Many stories are told about the rivers of blood that ran from the palace that day." Nerra paused. "Probably vastly exaggerated. But let me get to the point. Valoris made a mistake, a terrible, horrible mistake for which his name will be forever cursed on my lips. Can you guess what it was?"
Noval stared at her blankly.
"It was the king's niece," Nerra went on, ignoring his glare, "a small girl of four with, I am told, delightful blond curls. She was playing with her dollhouse when Valoris chanced upon her in the palace."
She hesitated. "How can I explain this? You have to imagine the scene. Imagine the general, a savvy man, not unused to brutality, who knows what needs to be done. But he is also an educated man, far from being a simple monster. Not only has he murdered the king and queen, but he has ran his sword through many relatives, men, women, children. Yes, there were children among them."
"Every decent part of him cried out in horror, revolted at what he was doing. And yet he pressed on until he was finished, until he could finally breathe a sigh of relief. The task had been completed. The coup was over and he would be free now - free to take over the business of governing. There was so much to do."
"Or so he thought. Then he runs into this adorable child with her big brown eyes who looks at him innocently and trembles."
Nerra paused for effect. Noval did not seem as disinterested as he did when she started, though he kept on glaring at her maliciously.
"Well, he hadn't the heart to do it. The story goes that he raised his sword but could not bring it down. He passed the girl on to one of his servants with instructions to smuggle her off-world, to give her to an orphanage on a distant planet under an assumed name. He thought the girl would be as good as dead."
"But events took an an all too predictable form. Valoris' deception was revealed in some years time. The servant to whom he had entrusted the girl had, on his deathbed, revealed the secret to his wife, who in turn told others. Plenty supporters of the monarchy remained, for there were many whose fortunes were diminished under the new regime."
"It was not easy to find the girl, for records were not widely kept at that time and reconstructing the servant's journey across the galaxy required much guesswork. And yet, a few decades later, the girl was found after all. The old monarchists filled her head with enchanting fairy tales, stories of how she could be queen. The girl eventually mounted a challenge to the parliamentary system Valoris set up, backed by disgruntled supporters of the old regime and foreign powers eager to sow seeds of conflict."
"I was born ninety years after Valoris spared her, by which time both Valoris and the girl were long dead. And yet the planet had been mired in a civil war for decades. The conflict they started outlived them both. Can you guess how it ended?"
Noval shrugged.
"Once again, events took an all too predictable turn. The two sides fought each other viciously. When the planet had exhausted itself, a neighboring system conquered us with little resistance. Many had even welcomed the invaders. They turned out to be harsh tyrants, indeed - but we would find that out much later, when there was little that could be done about it. At the time, most people were simply glad the fighting seemed to be over. "
"Our culture and language were obliterated," Nerra continued, a note of desperation creeping into her voice, "Our planet was assimilated into the empire our invaders were building. Our distinctiveness disappeared, just like that of the countless planets out there where cultures are born and die out as the galaxy twists and turns in perpetual warfare."
She paused. "Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?"
The question caught Noval by surprise. "It is obvious enough," he sighed. "You seek to justify the murder I have committed."
"To kill a child is wrong. Normally." She put strong emphasis on the last word. "But that kind of thinking is inapplicable when you make decisions that pivot the world. When Valoris failed to kill that girl, he committed a supremely immoral act. Perhaps the most immoral act in the history of my world."
"He made an inaccurate calculation," Noval said, furrowing his brow. "What if he was able to hide the girl successfully?"
"If there was the smallest chance his deception would be found out, he should not have done it. When you play with the fate of worlds - when your acts determine whether your culture will preserved or swallowed up - there is no room for these kinds of gambles, not for the sake of one child."
Noval said nothing to this.
"I passed your test," he said finally. "What now? What was it all for?"
"Need you ask?" She raised her eyebrows. "Peace in the galaxy, of course. One step at a time."
"I know you lost someone you were beginning to care about," she continued, seeming to hesitate slightly, "but great goals require fitting sacrifices. Use this experience, learn from it, make the grief a part of yourself. I tell you, it will make you stronger."
"What is your plan?" Noval asked glumly. "How exactly do you imagine I will bring peace to the galaxy? I tire of your stalling."
"Then," Nerra said, "I will tell you. There will be no more secrets between us. We shall be as master and apprentice."
4.
"Let us start with the easier part," Nerra began, smiling for the first time. "The galaxy must be unified under one rule. The nature of that rule is of secondary importance. We could do far worse than set up an empire with yourself as emperor."
Noval let the suggestion pass without comment. It sounded silly to even consider it.
"You think accomplishing this will be easy?" he asked incredulously.
"Easier, padawan. I am certain we will accomplish the empire stuff without too much difficulty if we only put our minds to it. No, the true difficulty lies elsewhere."
"And where is that?"
Nerra looked at him contemplatively. "Tell me, padawan: do you think peace is possible while Sith are at large?"
"Doubtful. It goes without saying we must eradicate any Sith present in the galaxy."
"Do you think that will be easy?" Nerra asked condescendingly. "The Sith tradition is perpetuated via holocrons, hidden among the far corners of the galaxy. Every Sith lord makes one. These holocrons have a habit of being found by those who can learn from them."
With some amusement, she watched as he processed her statements.
"Oh, worry not, have I not already told you that I am not Sith? I tire of repeating myself. What I am getting at is this: how do you propose to find and destroy these holocrons? The Jedi order has been at this for millenia, you know."
"I don't know," Noval said. "Perhaps some way of locating them can be found? Something unknown to the Jedi?"
"Perhaps," she said in a tone that suggested she knew more than she let on, "though it sounds a bit like wishful thinking, does it not?"
"In any case," she continued, "let us drop that matter as well, for there is a greater obstacle still. I put to you - as long as there are Jedi, there will be Sith."
Noval furrowed his brow. "Is that really true?"
"Of course it is. Do you imagine it coincidence that so many Sith are former Jedi? Did you know that there have been dozens of Jedi splinter groups which developed some variant of the Sith philosophy?"
Noval shook his head.
"It is not something the order likes to advertise. I was a historian, back in my time, and I was at my post many years I before I was deemed trustworthy enough to know this. And is it any wonder?"
Her voice took on a condescending inflection again.
"The Jedi path is not an easy one. Many will find themselves barely human after decades of suppressing all worldly attachments. I assure you it does not take much to...twist them in a new direction. "
"Then," Noval said thoughtfully, "you propose we exterminate the Jedi?"
"In a manner of speaking. I propose something more radical." She paused. "Can you guess?"
"Not really, no."
"I put to you: as long as the force exists, the Jedi will exist."
"Not necessarily," Noval decided this was a good moment to play the devil's advocate. "Suppose that the order was destroyed, along with all records of its philosophy..."
"It would be reborn soon enough. One grows strong in the force either through self-abnegation and discipline or via paroxysms of rage. That is a fact about our universe and one that cannot be changed. We can no more hide the Jedi philosophy than we can erase the stars from the sky."
"This simple fact about the force," she went on, sounding passionate for the first time, "binds our universe to perpetual conflict. The two factions which control the force in such opposite ways will always be at odds. Neither faction has ever prevailed for long.''
"Then I take it," Noval smiled, "you want to destroy the force itself?"
But Nerra looked at him without any trace of amusement.
"Yes, padawan," she said wistfully, "that is exactly what I wish."
5.
"You can't be serious."
"Can't I?"
"But... you use the force yourself," Noval said skeptically.
"I use it as I would use a poison, in the hopes of understanding it. I wield it, but it uses us all, and that is revolting to me."
"Are you really so certain it uses us?" Noval persisted. "I am surprised to hear that coming from you. It is usually the Jedi who blabber on about the will of the force."
"It has a will," Nerra said firmly, "a malignant one. That is no article of faith."
"Think of all the coincidences," she continued, "the utterly improbable events that cause galactic politics to twist and turn whenever the state of the galaxy seems to settle down a bit."
"Think of all it took to bring you to this point. You finding me on Nar Mantell, before any of your masters did, and being the rare sort of initiate receptive to my teachings. Running into that girl on your night in the cantina, and what she told you about inevitable failure of the negotiations. Insights that gelled with what you had observed on your own and led to the... solution you put in motion."
"Nicely done, by the way." She looked at him with palpable pride. "You are truly my padawan."
She paused before returning to her theme. "You have been steered onto a path designed to bring you into conflict with the order. A path that I am proposing we hijack.''
"I imagined you had engineered some of those coincidences."
She laughed. "You must think me powerful indeed, to make such things happen from the confines of my little prison."
"But if the force arranged all this…" Noval was thinking out loud, "...is it not madness to try to destroy it? We will not get very far against an enemy as powerful as that."
"A valid point," Nerra said. "Indeed, we may not. But nonetheless we must try. For what it's worth, I see no evidence that the force is intelligent, that it has any desire for self-preservation. I see only instinct, reaction."
"When the Jedi predominate, the force ensures that some poor soul comes across a Sith holocron and grows powerful enough to challenge the supremacy of the order. When the Sith rule, chance coincidences bring success to the Jedi. That is the way it has always been. Is it intelligence or instinct?"
"We shall find out," she said, "when we attempt to destroy it. It is the galaxy's only way out of the cycle of conflict."
"Is such a thing even possible?" Noval was still astonished. "How would we go about destroying the force?"
"I will tell you soon enough," Nerra said. "I do not know for certain, but have guesses, conjectures at how it might be done."
Noval let that pass by. "Even so," he persisted, "it seems like quite the desperate plan. To slaughter all Jedi and then to kill the force itself..."
"We need not slaughter all Jedi, at least not literally. Once the force has ceased to be, they will be powerless. Of course, so will we, and we will need to plan carefully for it."
"In any case," she said patiently, "if you have any better ideas by means of which peace in the galaxy might be effected, please, I am happy to hear them."
He said nothing for a while.
"It is as I thought," she smiled to herself. "It would be something of an understatement to say I've had a lot of time to think things through."
"Perhaps we can strengthen the Republic..." Noval began.
"Bah," she interrupted. "The Republic is a stagnant beast that labors for breath and has for centuries. But that is beside the point. If it is truly the force that causes strife in the galaxy, nothing will be achieved by supporting one faction or the other."
He lapsed into silence again.
"You need not go through with this, you know. I will say it again: you can simply throw me down the nearest trash chute. You need not continue with the order either. I'm sure you can have a perfectly happy life as a farmer or a dentist."
"But if you are serious about bringing peace - " she started to say something before changing tack in mid-sentence. "I know you have sacrificed someone recently, not of your own will, but still you mourn her passing. You will be called to take many more lives if we are to have any chance of success. And our victory is the most important thing of all, worthy of all the sacrifices we will be called to make."
Noval breathed in uneasily. Warnings of inevitable massacres did not sit well with him; and yet, in the wake of Eeso's death, his feelings of outrage were a shell of what they might have once been. Still, he did not like the self-assured way Nerra had said all this, as if she were revealing an inevitable truth to someone who had not been bright enough to discover it on his own. He searched for something to say that would put her off-balance.
"Shall I view you as disposable, then?"
But this did not have the anticipated effect. "Ah," she said, and her voice unmistakably tinged with pleasure, "now you are learning."
