Chapter 35: Dead Zone
13 BBY – 11 Months – 29 Days
Welcome to Chapter 35! When I uploaded Chapter 34, this site had a glitch such that the link sent to subscribers may not have worked. If you have not yet read chapter 34 (wherein Ahsoka Tano enters the story), please read that first so that this chapter will make sense.
Rat-tat-tat-tat. Then, "Varda, are you awake?"
Varda opened her eyes and blinked into darkness.
She was lying on her side on a hard bed. Only a slit of blue-white light at the bottom of the door sliced through the black all around her.
She rubbed her sore eyes, registered that the voice was Ahsoka's and remembered that she was sleeping in the tight little bunk-room on Ahsoka's starship. It felt like an age had passed since the fight with the Inquisitors and yet her arms and legs were still sore.
Varda groaned and pushed herself up to sit on the edge of her bed. "I'm awake," she said, then coughed. Her voice sounded low and old-lady hoarse in her own ears.
"We'll be out of hyperspace in fifteen minutes," Ahsoka said.
"Thanks, I'll get up." Her limbs felt too leaden to move but Varda hated transitions in and out of hyperspace. It was worth losing a few more minutes in bed to be properly strapped in when that rapid whomp of deceleration hit her in the stomach. And so she pushed herself off the bed and shuffled over to the door, feeling for the button to activate the lights, then hobbled over to the adjacent lavatory to quickly freshen up.
More than the fight with the Inquisitors, reading over the files Bail Organa had given her proved to be exhausting.
It hadn't actually taken that long to read the information on the disc Bail had given her. The document on Imperial Agricultural Policy was mostly a long version of what Devin had already told her. The dossier on the economic and social challenges on planets affected by the soil contamination problem was depressingly long, but was easy enough to skim. The information file on the offending agricultural chemicals themselves, complete with trade names and chemical structure diagrams, as well as intended use and known side-effects, did not daunt a woman who had once taught upper-level chemistry to Jedi younglings.
The problem was that after she finished reading the files, she just sat there, staring into the back-lit screen until her eyes turned blurry, her mind lost in vivid fantasy: she could feel the slight resistance of a lightsabre as it meets skin and cleaves bone, smell the singed hair and watch grey matter ooze from the cross-section of Ry Kyver's skull.
The files only mentioned Ry Kyver by name once, yet as Varda read and read, the more and more she could feel Ry in her work, both the haughty girl she had once taught in the Temple and the Dark Jedi she had become, the one Varda had seen in the vision the owl showed her on Iwaki. All of this soil contamination that Bail had asked Varda to help undo, this was Ry Kyver's work and in it, she was still at large in the galaxy, wrecking havoc by these chemicals she had designed, wherever she herself might be now.
Varda had expected to meet Ry Kyver's energies still out there in the Force, present in the harm she had done, yet it took her by surprise just how potent and visceral a sense she felt of Ry just in reading about the effects of her work. Not everyone's work carried this Force-presence of the person who had done it; many people went through life with no strong focus whatsoever and so left little impression in the Force around them. But in Ry Kyver's work Varda caught a visceral sense of the Dark Jedi herself: her careful consideration for how to best exalt herself, her ability to understand the damage this would do and her capacity to simply not care.
To feel that, to be in the presence of that, if only in the Force and not in the flesh, for Varda that was intolerable.
Perhaps Varda might have realized for herself that she was sitting there staring at the computer monitor, seeing only her own violent imaginings, but it was Ahsoka who startled her out of it, putting a gentle hand on her shoulder and saying, "Varda, you must be tired. Do you want to lie down for awhile before we get to Yemer?"
She let Ahsoka lead her to the little guest-room and show her the convenient machine for dry-washing her clothes and tidy little lavatory nearby, but when her host was gone and she was alone again, Varda knew she had to take herself in hand so that she would not remain in those fantasies.
She sat for a long time on the edge of the narrow bed and tried to meditate her way into some semblance of Jedi dispassion. It took two hours to calm her mind and when she did, she felt not dispassion but depression, a dead place where the thought of attempting the soil decontamination project or anything whatsoever felt utterly daunting, like looking up the path to the top of a big hill with a boulder strapped to her back. She fell asleep bitterly wishing she could turn back time and go back to Hokto, only this time she would let Eo stay behind with her instead of sending her away.
Sleep did not bring much rest, but Varda did wake with a return to sober realism: she could not unmake the choices that had put Eo in harm's way, but she could live with some degree of dignity if she squarely faced her responsibility to serve as a Jedi.
And there was more than one way to do that. If she really had to, she knew she could tell Bail and Ahsoka that she couldn't wisely choose work that brought that visceral sense of Ry around her. In the days of the Temple, she would never have been assigned or allowed to undertake this project, given her attachments. Surely there was other work she could put her hands and mind to.
In the lavatory there was no comb – a Togruta had no need for such an item – but Ahsoka had kindly left new toothbrush and a clean towel. Varda did not look at herself too hard in the mirror as she set about washing her face and brushing her teeth. She didn't need to see the purple bags under her eyes or the wrinkles that creased her face or the way the skin sagged on her bare arms. She knew that she looked and felt far older than she should at, what? Seventy? She had lost track.
Seventy-something was not so terribly old for a human, but regret made Varda feel old, old and sad and tired and angry. She wasn't sure she had the energy to deal with that Force-feel of Ry without losing herself to either anger or depression. And yet Varda knew she had skills that would make her a great asset on the soil decontamination project. Even more than teaching, environmental rehabilitation was the type of work she felt most called to do as a Jedi. It was maddening to think of not fighting back against at least one dimension of the harm Ry Kyver had done.
From the cockpit, Varda heard the noises of the computer-assisted navigation system beeping to signal the approaching drop out of hyperspace. Whether or not she was mentally ready for a project that tied her so closely to Ry Kyver, the answer would have to wait. Varda quickly scraped her greying hair back from her face with her fingers and tied it in a tight bun behind her head, stump-stepped back into the bunk-room and pulled on her clothes. As a Jedi, it was unnerving not to be able to pull herself together as easily.
Soon she would be at the monastery. A talk with one of the Siluan Elders, the quiet of the desert, Varda still hoped these would somehow heal her. But the ache of her loss would always be there. She knew.
When Varda reached the flight deck, Ahsoka was sitting in the pilot's seat, wearing an oil-splotched pair of blue mechanic's coveralls and smelling of hydraulic fluid. She was looking at something on a datapad with a puzzled scowl on her face.
"Was there trouble with the starship?" Varda asked, doing up the three buckles to strap herself into the seat beside Ahsoka, and glad for a reason not to talk about herself.
"It's under control now," Ahsoka said. "I'm just trying to find that monastery you were talking about and I can't find coordinates for it in any of the charts. Do you know where you're supposed to be landing?"
"When I used to come more often, I usually read the planet's surface once I dropped out of hyperspace," Varda said.
Ahsoka raised a brow at that but she put the datapad down. "Well, just tell me where to let you off," she said.
Varda nodded, then looked down. She wasn't sure how Ahsoka would feel about organized religion after her departure from the Jedi Order, but it seemed polite to offer at least. "If you like, you're welcome to join me. They usually have several guest rooms available at the monastery. It's very peaceful there."
Ahsoka shrugged. "Thanks, but maybe not," she said. "We're near the Wheel and I need some stuff for the starship, so I was thinking I'd go take care of some things there. When do you want me to pick you up?"
Varda glanced at the chronometer on the dashboard, and did a quick double-check of her earlier calculations. "I think that if you pick me up in about sixty hours from now, we should still be able to get back to Nechako in time. But I don't expect that any of the chronometers at the monastery will be correctly synced to standard time. Might you have one I could borrow?"
"Definitely," Ahsoka said. "I was actually thinking you should have a full comm unit on you, so I pulled out one you can borrow."
Ahsoka handed Varda a fat black wristband with a microcomputer on one side. Varda tried not to scowl at it; it reminded her a little too much of the sort of gear she had to carry around during the war. But Ahsoka looked rather pleased with herself for being able to provide it and so Varda thanked her and put it on.
The computer beeped. "It's time," Ahsoka said, and pulled back the motion control lever. All at once the writhing blue swirls of hyperspace hardened into white and red and yellow stars against the black of space and a big dun planet hung before them, three-quarters in the light and one-quarter a crescent of shadow.
"Desert planet?" Ahsoka said.
"Much of it. But the monastery is on the other side."
Ahsoka's starship Essence was only a converted shuttle, but it was converted to be fast. Within an hour they were looking down at the other side of the planet, this side three-quarters in night with a quarter-crescent of day.
"That dark area there is a mountain range," Varda said, pointing to a smudge on the lighted area. "If you go down and follow it along the equatorial side to where it crosses the day-night border, I'll know the place when I see it."
Ahsoka steered her starship into a quick dive to the planet's surface, and soon they were flying over bare, craggy mountains glowing red-orange in the light of the massive sun that was rising behind them. To their right the mountains seemed to go on forever; to their left a great desert plain stretched out to the horizon.
The sunrise-reddened greys and browns and duns gradually gave way to the blues and purples of dusk as they followed the edge of the mountain range towards the day-night border, overtaking the sun's slow progress as they sped towards lands still under the cover of night.
When there was no longer enough light for navigation, Ahsoka switched on her radar, which was displayed as a warped-grid topographical rendering on one of her many computer screens. "Do you need me to switch on the floodlight, or can you recognize the place from the radar image?" she asked.
Varda instinctively looked out the dark viewport before looking at the radar output, which still showed only the undulating foothills beneath them. "We'll be looking for a sharp break in the landscape, a box-canyon, about four hundred meters deep and three hundred across. The monastery was built in the sides of an old quarry actually. It should be visible soon."
Ahsoka glanced at the radar output again. A sharp change in topography did indeed flit across the screen. "I think we just overshot it," she said, swooping back around and double-checking the radar image before expertly landing in the dark beside the lower end of the small canyon.
As they came down, Varda scowled to herself. Despite the relief she felt to have finally reached the monastery, something twisted in her gut and she remembered what Devin said about trouble on Yemer. She tried to focus in on what the Force in this place had to tell her, but it felt disturbingly quiet. Perhaps, she thought, all the buzzing and whirring and electromagnetic-radiation-emitting of the starship and its many computers was making it hard for her to focus.
It was still pitch-black night outside and so they waited, Ahsoka mulling over something on her datapad, Varda carefully watching the sky for change, until a blue dusk grew around the starship. Normally, one of the monastics would soon ring the bell to signal the coming sunrise and call everyone to morning prayer.
But the bell didn't ring. Minutes wore on. Varda shifted uneasily in her seat. Ahsoka, seeing this, gave her a quizzical look.
"Something feels wrong here, doesn't it?" she said.
"Yes," Varda said simply, then got up to open the hatch. Ahsoka followed close behind.
As they stepped out onto the rocky ground at the mouth of the canyon under a sky bright with the light that comes before sunrise, Varda's skin prickled with foreboding. The place still looked more or less the same: the walls of the canyon were lined with dark openings to cells hollowed out of the rock where nearly a hundred monastics lived out their quest for inner Light. Yet the Force felt dry and shrivelled somehow and the air itself felt wrong. Her throat clenched nearly shut against it.
Ahsoka made a face and coughed.
Varda bent down to the ground. The little tufts of vegetation on the rock and sand were in fact brown. They crumbled at her touch. She walked a little further and saw that the little leaves on the long, slender branches of the broom trees were also crisp dead. The cacti that should have been swollen with their own stored-up water were mere exoskeletons of their outer spines, still holding the same shape but hollow within. She looked around. There was no sign of animal life besides herself and Ahsoka, even at the monastery. She looked up at the bell tower, where the three slender metal bells hung silhouetted against the pale sky. By this time, she should have been able to hear voices rise and fall in the song with which the Siluans greeted the dawn.
"Something happened here," Ahsoka said. "Look!"
Varda went back to where Ahsoka was pointing. It was a mummified rat, limbs splayed out, frozen in death's final spasms.
Varda looked and then quickly looked away, but her eye caught a dead snake not far away. Even the ants and beetles that normally came to chew away at corpses like this must be dead, she realized, because both the rat and the snake were untouched even though their death felt years old in the Force.
Who did this? she wondered. The Force around her whispered two things: one was that yes, the Siluans who had lived here held on to their Light and died without giving up their will for peace; for that, she was grateful. The other was that someone had done this deliberately, in a cool and calculated sort of way, not like the hot and hasty anger that crushed Ava Kirrin's house and ripped through the forest on Iwaki.
It felt no different from what she had sensed in the files she read on the way here. Something about it felt like Ry Kyver.
As soon as the thought came, Varda slammed up a wall against it within her. She didn't care that this violent thrusting away was not true Jedi dispassion. Whether Ry had in fact done this or not, she was not going to allow that fallen Jedi into her mind right now, nor was she going to be crushed by yet one more loss piled on another.
"I was here at the start of the War," she told Ahsoka. "This can only have happened within the last several years. Will you help me to search the area to see if anyone from the monastery is left?"
"Wait a sec," Ahsoka said, and went back up the gangway into her starship. She came back with her eyes glued to a handheld device. "This wasn't a nuclear blast," she said. "Nothing unusual about the background radiation." She flipped a switch on the device and twisted a knob. Her eyes went wide. "Yikes," she said, "we better not stay here too long. There's some kind of pollutant in the air, organic molecules of some kind."
Varda looked towards the growing dawn. A sliver of gold was coming up over low hills on the horizon far beyond the desert plain. But another light caught the corner of her eye, a small prick of blue-white at the far end of the monastery canyon. She turned towards it. The little light bobbed like a someone wearing a headlamp and then winked out.
"Someone is there," Varda told Ahsoka and pointed.
Ahsoka angled her device to point up the canyon towards where Varda had seen the little light. "Whatever it is isn't very warm, but it's alive. It looks...reptilian maybe?" She turned the device off and clipped it to her belt, then unclipped a compact pair of macrobinoculars and peered up the canyon through them. "It's getting into a cargo-speeder or something," she said.
A small vehicle indeed came speeding towards them. Varda simply stood with her arms at her sides and watched it come, a hooded figure at the steering console of a clunky speeder with a tarp thrown over a load in the back. Whether it was a scavenger collecting things to sell or a monastic saving what could be saved from the monastery, she waited to find out.
The speeder pulled to an abrupt halt when it reached them and the little figure got out, hooded and cloaked like a Jawa but trailing a long Yemerian lizard-tail. It gestured emphatically at them, as if to push them back into their starship.
Varda raised her hands to show that she held no weapon. "Please," she said, "we came to visit the monastery. Do you know where we can find the Elders?"
The little person threw back their hood and Varda could see that they were wearing a life-mask, shaped to fit the point of the lizard's face. They pointed emphatically to the mask, then motioned as if writing something.
Ahsoka disappeared into her starship again, re-emerging this time with a pair of life masks and a datapad. She passed Varda one mask and gave the datapad to the Yemerian. While Ahsoka and Varda pulled on their masks, the Yemerian unclipped the stylus and furiously scribbled something on the datapad, then held it up for Varda to read.
The sun was up past the horizon now, and so it was more than bright enough to read the screen even though the backlight wasn't on, but it took her a moment to parse the Yemerian's scratchy handwriting.
Poison, she made out. Not safe. No monastery.
She looked at the Yemerian, trying to gage if they were just scared of her or if there really was no one left. "The monastics, where are they now? I very much need to speak with an Elder. And if something is wrong, perhaps I can help." Her voice came out higher than normal through the mask's vocabulator.
The Yemerian eyed her warily, then scribbled on the datapad. Who are you?
Varda weighed this person in her mind and made a decision. "My name is Varda Wahi," she said, "and I am a friend of the late Lu Mang. I am one of the last of the Jedi."
Whether at the mention of the Jedi or at Varda's dropping of the name Lu Mang, the Yemerian's eyes went wide, but then narrowed. Show me, it scribbled on the datapad.
Show me. Varda glanced up at the bell tower. Show me you are really a Jedi, and she could make the bell ring without touching it. But what would that prove? A Sith or a Dark Jedi could do the same. Show me that you really knew Lu Mang... Showing that she really had known the famous Yemerian Jedi was impossible, unless this person had not only heard of him but known him closely, which she doubted. Show me that I can trust you...most Yemerians were quite simple, and she could, if she wished, mind-control this one into believing her, but that hardly seemed right.
Varda glanced up at the bell tower again. The first rays of sunlight gleamed gold off the silent metal. She could remember those bells ringing out over the monastery, calling monastics and visitors alike to sing the morning chant: Come receive the Light...
"This place was very dear to me," Varda began, facing the Yemerian now. "I first came here in with the Jedi who responded to the crash of the starship Nexus VX not far from here, but I had a stroke and was taken to the monastery hospital, down on the west side of the canyon," she pointed to the place not far in the distance and as she spoke, she opened a little window to her heart and mind, not forcing the Yemerian to yield but inviting them to see beyond her words to know what this place meant to her. "Ava Zenais was the chief physician there at the time, and I credit her with my recovery. I came to stay in the monastery many times after that, whenever I needed to find renewal. Ava Evgeni was the abbot at the time, and we studied The Sayings of Ava Mannath together. Once when I was here, I helped the monastics to plant the new grove of Vitalis at the foot of the bell tower, and by the last time I came, we were able to drink from the juice of their leaves, and I brought some with me to share when I went back to the Temple on Coruscant," Varda pointed again, but her words trailed off. Her stomach twisted at the thought of all that had been lost here: the monastics of many species and many walks of life, the rare plants carefully tended in walled gardens right there in the teeth of the desert's wind and heat.
But she didn't need to continue any further. As she spoke, something in the Yemerian's posture yielded, though they looked up at the bulk of Ahsoka's starship before writing on the datapad again. Don't bring starship. Come with me.
"Thank you," Varda said, and bowed. She turned to Ahsoka, who was standing at attention beside her.
"How do you feel about this?" Ahsoka asked.
"I think I'll be fine," Varda said. "But would you be willing to wait a while and I'll send you a message when I get there safely?"
"Sure," Ahsoka said. "I won't take off til I hear from you."
The Yemerian climbed into their speeder and beckoned for Varda to follow. She climbed into the left-hand passenger seat and off they went, the low morning sun to their left now shining down on the open-topped vehicle.
In the new light of day Varda could see the same deadness all around them as at the monastery, the muted grey-greens of the living desert all turned to tan and brown. The sight of it pressed a great weight to her chest and made it hard to breath despite the life-mask.
But within about an hour of driving a thin layer of green grew before them, and soon they were in the midst of normal desert again: dark creosote bushes, grey-green sagebrush with white wool all over its tiny leaves, dusty blue-green cacti with pink and yellow spines as big as Varda's little finger. The Yemerian pulled off their mask and made a No sign with their hand while saying something in the shrill whistles and sharp clicks that made up the Yemerian language.
Varda nodded. Many Yemerians could understand Basic but preferred not to speak it. "I understand," she said, and expected no further conversation
It took another two hours of driving in silence before they pulled up beside a long, low building, a domed oval structure made entirely of pale tan adobe. The area immediately around it was clear of the natural vegetation, but some of the same cacti as well as a tall plant made of huge fleshy blue-grey spikes arranged themselves in a geometric pattern along the upward curve of the building's wall. A series of little windows covered the upper edge of the long dome and two short pillars flanked a series of steps going down into the entrance.
Varda turned to the Yemerian. "Thank you," she said, and gave a kind of half-bow.
The Yemerian nodded. As soon as she had gotten safely out, they turned the speeder around and sped off back the way they came.
Cool shade enveloped Varda as she went down the steps into the building. To her surprise, the pleasant scent of desert vegetation gave way to the sharp smell of cheap alcohol-based disinfectant.
At the bottom of the stairs, she could see why. She found herself in a small curtained-off room with a low bench around the edge. Twelve of so Yemerians sat, one rubbing swollen knuckles, another with a crutch across its knees, one with a listless child in a back-pack carrier at its feet. At the end of the room, a one-sign written in the lines and dots of the Yemerian language hung above a curtain-door. She couldn't pronounce that word for the life of her, but her very limited Yemerian told her the sign read Intake.
It was a hospital, perhaps, or a doctor's office. Hoping the Yemerian she met by the monastery hadn't misunderstood her, Varda sat down and waited.
It wasn't long before the curtain under the Intake sign swished open and a tall black human in green medical scrubs came out with a stethoscope and a stone amulet both hanging around his neck. He looked surprised when he saw Varda, but smiled and nodded to her. "I'll be with you as soon as I can," he said, then spoke in clicks and whistles to the Yemerian with the swollen knuckles. "She'll show you our system," he said to Varda in Basic, then said something brief in Yemerian to the rest of the waiting room, and the person with the child in the carrier got up and followed him back under the Intake sign.
The Yemerian with the swollen knuckles handed Varda a smooth stone with a red diamond on it, then showed her that they themselves carried one with a blue rhombus. A call number system of some kind, Varda decided. With the stone amulet around his neck, the doctor was evidently a Siluan, if not an Elder at least a junior monastic. She texted Ahsoka that she had arrived safely and settled in to wait.
It was quite some time of waiting and watching patients come and go from the consultation room before the tall doctor came out and when he spoke, none of the Yemerians looked up. "Red diamond?" he said in Basic, and Varda got up and followed him into his office.
He motioned for her to take a seat across from him in the little cubicle. "It's not often we see humans around here. What brings you?"
"I went to the monastery, hoping to speak with an Elder, but I found the site deserted. A Yemerian I met brought me here."
The doctor didn't exactly narrow his eyes, but he looked at her carefully, weighing her. "How did you know about the monastery?"
"I first came here with my friend Lu Mang," Varda said, opting for the simpler-but-also-true version of the story, but paused when the doctor gave her a blank look. "A Jedi friend of mine was a Yemerian and he introduced me to this place and after that I came many times. But I've been away for several years now and I didn't know the monastery had been destroyed. If any of the Elders are left, I would be very grateful to speak with one of them."
The doctor's posture relaxed slightly. "There is one Elder still, our abbot, Ava Gerges. He lives about an hour drive from here."
Varda's shoulders slumped. When she was younger, she would have loved a long walk through the desert flora, but not now with her sore hip, and not in the desert heat. She wished she had asked Ahsoka to wait a little longer.
From Varda's pause, the doctor seemed to read her problem. "If you don't mind waiting until later in the day, I can take you there when the clinic's intake is closed."
Varda thanked him.
"I am Ane Gabran," the doctor said. "Or Dr. Gunma, as you prefer."
"My name is Varda."
"Pleased to meet you," Dr. Gunma said. He glanced at the chronometer on his wrist. "If you come back in four standard hours, I will take you to see Ava Gerges."
They both stood up and Varda went out into the waiting room as the next patient was called in. She decided there was no point sitting in the waiting room all day and set a four-hour timer on her comm so that she could be back on time.
Climbing up the stone stairs, Varda felt light with relief. The monastery was not wholly lost, and she would indeed be able to speak with an Elder. When she got outside, she took a fresh look around. To one side of the hospital building, she could see rows of stone cairns, which she took to be a graveyard. To the other, shallow hollows in the desert floor held young seedlings of the same blue-grey spiky Vitalis plants that flanked the entrance. The beginnings of an orchard. This plant was prized for the healing sap within its leaves, a cornerstone of their monastic life both in gardening and in healing. It would be years before the plants would grow enough to harvest but the Siluans, she could see, were looking to the future, even in the face of great devastation.
The sun itself was so high in the sky that Varda wondered if it might be at its zenith. The ground itself radiated heat. She decided to seek out shade, and made her way through the Vitalis plantings towards the far side of the building. There she found a little awning that extended shade from the side of the building.
Beneath it, Varda sat down on a low wooden bench that stuck out from the side of the building and leaned back against the wall, pleasantly cool in the midday heat.
The wall, she could tell, was relatively new, not only by the look of it, but in the Force it still carried strong echoes of the ground from which the sand and clay were taken, dug out to form the underground part of the building. It carried echoes from the hearts and minds of the builders also: sadness, loss, devastation, but also courage, pulling together, hope for the future and the intent to heal.
Varda closed her eyes and took a deep breath of the warm desert air. This would certainly not be the monastery visit she had envisioned, staying in a little cell in the wall of the canyon, joining in the prayers appointed for morning, noon and evening, sharing in simple meals at the long table in the refectory, taking comfort in the soft noise of monastics going about their quiet lives. But with at least one Elder still living, there was still the chance to receive something of what she had come for: to heal, yes, but also to acknowledge her failing, her loss, her grief in a way she simply couldn't do with Devin or Ahsoka.
And there were others here besides the Elder whose help she had longed for: the chirp of one unseen insect race punctuated the drone of another in the still air, where sun-baked ground and the smell of sagebrush mingled. All these, and all the flat expanse of desert stretching out before her, were inviting her into their stillness.
In that stillness, sadness mingled with relief and even a touch of joy now, and anger was mercifully held at bay. This Varda had longed for. She leaned back against the wall and let her eyes fall shut. As she fell asleep, she could feel the border between her and the many lives around her dissolve, and the desert began its work of healing.
"I know who you are now." That was the first thing Dr. Gunma said when he and Varda were on their way in the bulky hover-van converted to serve as an ambulance. "Do remember a woman called Nami Unayat who used to visit the monastery? Twilek, light purple, in her sixties at the time, an osteopath," he added when Varda shook her head.
"I might remember her if I saw her," Varda said.
"She is a novice of the monastery now and she's serving as a doctor in the hospital with me. I told her about you and she said that she remembered you coming here with the Jedi Lu Mang. And...she says you were a Jedi too." He glanced over at Varda, his eyebrows rather than his voice making it a question.
"Yes," Varda said.
"She said she remembered you being with the AgriCorps?"
"I wish I had been," Varda said, "but my work overlapped in many ways. My friend Lu Mang served in the AgriCorps for much of his life and we carried out a number of missions together."
Varda looked over at Dr. Gunma in time to see his face brighten when she said this. But then his expression turned serious. "If it's not too much to ask, I wonder if you could help us with something."
"Of course!" Varda said, her mind still floating on the bliss of her afternoon nap. "I was meaning to ask if there was anything I could do."
The doctor took a deep breath. "Well," he said, "you mentioned that you had been to the old monastery site…"
Varda looked out the window at the living desert speeding past them, hoping for a moment to stay in a better state of mind, but what she had seen that morning and the troubling impressions it had given her came quickly flooding back. "Yes," she said. "I had only a brief look before I met the Yemerian who brought me to the hospital. They said something about poison, but it was a little hard to converse so I didn't ask for any details."
"That was probably Cheethwet," Dr. Gunma said. "Perhaps I could tell you a little more about what happened."
The doctor paused, and Varda scowled into the view of low mountains on the horizon. Whatever had happened, she was almost certain she knew who had done it. She wasn't sure that learning the details would do her any good, but she wanted to know all the same. "Yes, please tell me."
"I wasn't here at the time, so I can't speak to the event itself, but some of the Yemerians who live on the outskirts of the Dead Zone tell me that about four standard years ago two large spray-rigs passed over the area and within a day everything, and I mean everything, in the area was dead." As he spoke, Varda could see the tendons under his skin as he gripped the steering console more tightly.
"It was Dr. Unayat, actually, who found the monastery like that," the doctor continued. "She messaged me and asked me to come and help her set up the hospital here. Since the attack, the Yemerians near the Dead Zone have had most of their young hatch out with various skeletal and neurological abnormalities, and so I did some investigating as to what might be causing it. It turns out that one of the chemicals left in the ground after the attack is a chemical analog of other known disruptors of reptilian physiology."
"What exactly did the attackers spray?" Varda asked.
A muscle in the doctor's jaw twitched. "We only sort of know," he said. "I had a soil sample from the Dead Zone analyzed last year and the results show a mix of chemicals, mostly aromatic and poly-aromatic hydrocarbons. It's hard to tell from the results what all of them are. But the ones that were identifiable turned out to be agricultural chemicals, but at far higher concentrations than any farmer would ever use. I don't know if that trade names would mean anything to you, but Azopel and Matrazine are two of the main ones."
An unpleasant jolt zapped through Varda's body. She knew those names from the disc Bail had given her. "Do you have any idea who did this?" she asked with narrowed eyes.
The doctor made a helpless gesture with one hand. "The people who saw the aircraft said there were no markings of any kind that could identify who it was." He sounded tired, exasperated. But then he gave a huff and pulled himself up in his seat and spoke in a more level tone. "But even if we knew, how would it matter? We have the same problem in front of us regardless."
Varda scowled. That was the Siluan answer and for all that she had come to consult the Siluans, she wasn't in the mood for a Siluan answer to that question at the moment. "So then what are you hoping to do?" she asked, more pointedly that she meant to, but the doctor wasn't phased by her tone.
"Somehow," Dr. Gunma said. "I want to somehow restore plant life to the Dead Zone. When the wind storms come, they sweep up the dust and dead plants from the Dead Zone and bring it out into surrounding areas. Every year I hear of Yemerians further and further away having the same problems. But if something could cover the surface of the soil, perhaps the poison would at least stay in place and fewer people would be affected by it. I was wondering, if it isn't too much to ask, since you know something of the Jedi AgriCorps, could you help us find a way for plants to grow there again?"
For a minute Varda just looked out the bug-spattered windshield and blinked, her annoyance pushed out of the way. Of course, Varda thought: with the thin film of microflora on the desert surface dead, the sand and silt of the desert floor would blow far and wide in the wind. Of course, it was only natural that the Siluans would want to bring life back to that dead place and protect the people who remained here.
This gave Varda the strangest sensation, as if in her mind someone had rung a gong to summon her and then called for her by name. If she were to do any work whatsoever as a Jedi, she wanted the healing of Yemer to be part of it.
But there was that sense she'd had back at the old monastery site, that Force-echo that reminded her so much of Ry.
"Perhaps," Varda said slowly, "I could take a look and get a better impression and then let you know what I think."
"Yes!" Dr. Gunma said brightly. "I was hoping we could stop and take a look together and maybe gather some more samples. It won't take long, it's a short cut, actually. I usually go around the Dead Zone to get to Ava Gerges' place, but if we go through it instead, we'll get there faster even if we stop to take a look."
"Good," Varda said, and decided to try something.
The doctor made a hard left, then pressed a button to close the open windows of the vehicle. "Under your seat, you can find a life-mask and a pair of nitrile gloves," he said, and without taking his eyes off the way in front of him he reached under the seat for his own.
Masks in place, they drove in silence for another fifteen minutes before the grey-green of the living desert gave way to sickly dead brown, with bare patches of reddish-tan rock and sand. In that fifteen minutes without conversation, Varda closed her eyes and focused all her powers on creating a shield around her mind, like a transparasteel barrier that allowed her to see the world around her but wouldn't let in what she didn't want to feel.
Dr. Gunma drove the vehicle what felt like several kilometres into the Dead Zone before he stopped beside a thicket of bare and blackened dead broom plants. They both double-checked their masks, pulled on their bright pink nitrile gloves and got out.
The mask covered all of Varda's face but against her ears she could both feel and hear the wind, warm and dry. She smelled nothing but she could hear the sound of fine grit blowing against her mask as the wind picked up dust from the ground. Varda walked a few paces forward, feet crunching dead vegetation and then stopped to look at the broom plants more carefully. Their wiry branches, usually dark green, were charcoal black now and the fine white spines that covered the plant stood stark against their dark background. The fine leaves were mostly gone, some shattered on the ground, the rest long since swept away by the wind.
Beneath the dead broom tree was the remains of a small barrel cactus, just an exoskeleton of dead spines now, crumbled on the ground, but in its crown it still bore the white fuzz in which the mother plant nestled her young. Varda bent down, slowly for her sore hip, and gently dug one of the seeds out of its protective fuzz. The black seed coat was crackled, as if it had absorbed water and then dried out again. She could see the remains of a tiny root. When the rains came, it must have swelled with water and begun to germinate, but the chemical residue killed it.
The odd thing was, Varda could feel nothing. Her shield had worked a little too well. She felt vaguely angry with herself for that but was not in the headspace to fine-tune her psychic shields now.
Her mind was, however, in information-gathering mode both physically and in the Force, and she set about making the most of that. She did not have the gift of extrasensory chemo-perception that would allow some Jedi to note details of the chemicals present in their environment, but she could tell plainly that there was no life apart from her and Dr. Gunma. She had never realized just how used she was to sensing the hum of life even in the soil itself, even in the permaplast of urban sidewalks. Here there was nothing. The Force itself felt hollow. She could feel all around her the lingering echoes of thousands of seeds that had tried to sprout in the last rainy season, only to be thwarted.
What would it take to bring life back to this place? The soil, such as it was in the desert, was itself blowing away. In the living desert, a thin layer of filamentous algae and fibrous moulds, surviving on the barest of rainfall, wove a mat over the surface of the sandy soil. Here in the Dead Zone, the weave of it was broken; blackened and crumbling bits of that thin biofilm peeled off and blew away in the wind even as she watched.
Just then she felt Dr. Gunma tap her shoulder. She stood up and turned around to see him holding out a pair of sterile plastic containers.
"Do you want to get some samples?" he mumbled through his mask.
Varda nodded and took the two containers. One she filled with the sandy soil, the other she filled with dead plant matter: twigs and a few withered seed pods from the broom plant, seeds and dried spines from what was left of the cactus.
She looked carefully at the plastic container of yellowish-tan soil in her hand and decided to sit with this later and meditate.
The wind was picking up. It drove a fierce onslaught of dust and dead cactus spines against Varda's face. Despite the mask, she turned to go and saw Dr. Gunma do the same. Every particle bore with it that accursed poison and her hair was still bare to it.
"What do you think?" the doctor asked as soon as they had peeled their masks off, the vehicle bumping along in the living desert again.
"I'll have to look at the soil test readouts for myself, but I suspect the concentration of chemical residue is still too high for most plants to handle. I plan sit with this for awhile," she said, gesturing with the soil sample she still held in one hand. "It's possible that I may have some perception regarding what sort of organism, plant or otherwise, might be able to help us, and whether there is anything I can do to enhance its ability to do so. But I have to warn you. I've worked with contaminated sites before, and there are some things even a Force-user can't make a plant do."
"I know," the doctor said quickly, "but I know someone at an enviro-consulting lab on Corellia. They have multiple genetic lines of kudzura that you could work with, and some are already resistant to multiple agrochemicals of the same type. I thought perhaps if you started with one of those, it would be easier to get it to work here."
Varda digested this for a moment. She had seen places that had used this plant with its purple-green ten-metre-long vines and hooked red spines. Wherever it grew, the whole landscape smelled of it, a heady, chemically aroma from the essential oils that made the plant almost indestructible by disease or insect or animal herbivore.
"Kudzura is a very effective ground-cover," she said, "but it's also highly aggressive. Many of the planets that imported the seed for erosion control are still fighting its spread decades later. Are you sure it's wise to try that here?"
"I've thought about this for a long time," the doctor said, "and done a lot of reading. I have yet to come up with anything else."
"What about some other form of bioremediation?"
Dr. Gunma scowled into the dirty windshield. "You mean using bacteria?"
"Or fungi," Varda said, "or a combination, to break down the toxins before reintroducing plant life."
Dr. Gunma chewed on this for awhile. "I've read up on that a bit," he said, "and from what I can find you can't make much progress with bacteria unless there is enough water. We're here in the desert. I doubt anything could work fast enough to make a difference, even if we could find a microbe that can break down all those toxins. Kudzura is strong. It can grow even in desert climates and stabilize the soil. If we can find all genes to make it resistant to all those chemicals," he added quickly.
Varda nodded reluctantly, seeing his logic yet unwilling to concede the point. "My main concern is that kudzura could create other problems once it grows beyond the Dead Zone. Imagine a plant like that overrunning the whole desert, choking out all other life. Where it's been introduced, whole ecosystems have been reduced to a fraction of their original diversity."
Deftly steering, the doctor turned his full face to give Varda a hard look. "One day," he said, "come to the hospital and see. Come and see children who can't breathe without a machine. Come and see children hatched out with bones too bent to ever learn to walk. Come and see children in constant pain because their nerves can't stop signalling. Every day the wind blows, it blows more sand from the Dead Zone into the surrounding areas. The longer we wait to stabilize the soil, the more children will be born like that."
Varda shut her eyes but she could still see the scene he was painting.
"Forgive me, I see too much of this from day to day," the doctor said. "I don't mean to disparage your suggestion. If you can help us find a way to carry out some form of bioremediation here, by all means, I am with you. But perhaps now you can see why I want to create a resistant plant that can simply cover this up and keep the poison from spreading any further, whatever else the consequences may be."
"You have a point," Varda said, "we need to keep our minds open to many possibilities."
"And so you'll help us?"
Varda opened her mouth to speak and shut it again. The mental shield she had constructed for herself was starting to crack; she could almost see Ry Kyver smirk, hear her scornful laugh. With that, anger came rising again like a flash flood within her.
But it was the kind of anger that quickened her mind and did not dull her reasoning. Reasoning told her: justice is not revenge. If only for the sake of justice, she would not let Ry Kyver's work persist unchallenged.
"I can guarantee nothing," she said slowly, "but you will have my best effort to find a solution."
"Thank you," the doctor said, bowing slightly over the steering console. "You have no idea how much it means to us."
"Sadly you aren't the only ones," Varda said. "Others have been asking me too: farmers have had trouble with the same residues in their soils. Not as high a concentration, of course, but enough to cause problems. Perhaps by working on both problems at once, both will find a way."
Dr. Gunma was on the cusp of saying something in reply when his comm beeped. He jerked the stop lever back and the ramshackle ambulance came to a violent halt that left Varda clutching her stomach.
"Sorry," he said, "this is from the hospital and it might be an emergency. I'd better take it while we still have reception."
The doctor plunged into a rapid-fire conversation, all in Yemerian. As it wore on, Varda turned inward to her own thoughts. Her mental shield was completely gone now and her feelings were like quicksand, shifting yet again: anger, sadness, overwhelm. With more than sixty years of Jedi practice behind her, that instability itself unsettled Varda. She was in no way inclined to pull back now from either this new dimension of the project here on Yemer or from the problems Devin and Bail had asked her to work on solving. Yet she had a sinking feeling that dealing with the Ry factor would demand more of her than she could yet imagine.
She looked at her wrinkled hands still holding the samples in her lap, then glanced out the window beside her. They were in the living desert now, and outside the window was a multi-lobed cactus, yellow-green with rings of white fuzz around each of its short yellow spines. It looked a little sickly somehow, its surface freckled with little spots, each a red ring around a dead brown centre.
This, she knew, was a plant's way to fight disease: wherever it sensed the presence of a virus, the plant would deliberately kill the cells around it. Trapped in a little dead zone, the virus too would die, unable to spread. At least, when this method worked, that was what happened. Sometimes the virus still managed to get around, and then there would be many little dead zones like that. But as long as the plant could grow faster than it killed off its own infected cells, it would live.
Perhaps that was how she would manage too, her days dotted with dead zones where she had shielded herself from all feeling in order to get her work done, ringed with the hot red of anger or the red-rimmed eyes of sadness at the edges. But like the plant, she would go on and accomplish her work.
"OK, I have just enough time," Dr. Gunma said, and Varda was almost a little startled to hear him speak Basic again. "I was able to talk the nurse through what they need to do, but I should get back soon after I drop you off."
They fell into an easy conversation after that, about the work of the hospital and Dr. Gunma's hopes for the renewal of the monastery until their vehicle came out from a narrow passage through rocky outcroppings to a flat place again where a low mound stood out from the desert scrub around it. A very tall skinny figure in black robes stood beside it, one long arm raised, shielding their eyes with a long hand as they watched the approaching ambulance.
"That's Ava Gerges," Dr. Gunma said. "We're here."