Part III
In short order our tiny vessel is brought aboard the Starcruiser, with its on-board docking facilities and a command center. And a detention bay, of course. Armored soldiers escort us out of the PellMell at blaster point. It's the first time I've been in Imperial custody, and normally I would be more curious than concerned. But I feel guilty about the trouble I've brought down onto my pilot's head. I didn't expect to meet with success so quickly, and I deeply regret having dragged the man into this situation with me. So my feelings, and behavior, are that of any other captive in the same circumstances. I'm nervous, and edgy, and looking around constantly for a way out. Without looking as though I'm looking, of course.
I don't suppose it matters what we do, or don't do, or how we feel. Our captors' impersonal efficiency is seamless. No one speaks to us, but it's plain enough where they want us to go, and not going there isn't any kind of an option. We are marched out of the huge docking bay into a along series of corridors that are identically lit and laid out, up in two different lifts, and then out into a small foyer that, we very quickly learn, leads to the Starcruiser's compact but efficient holding facility.
While we are being processed I glance at my pilot. I know what he's feeling without looking at him – how can I not? His face is in neutral, but I have no doubt that if I were standing in front of him and if his hands weren't manacled, he'd happily run me over in top gear, with or without a vehicle. Then he'd back up and do it again. But I look at him to catch his eye, and open my mouth to apologize.
"Don't even say it, yer daft son of a stinking Ta'an," he growls.
The words echo around the bright white chamber, making the soldiers look up at us. My mouth snaps shut.
"Quiet, Rebels!" one of them orders.
So it is as my pilot said – they are preoccupied with searching for Rebels. That's interesting. The Alliance must have scored a fairly notable victory nearby to generate this level of Imperial activity. Once more I glance at my companion, who is scowling at the floor. He lets out a soft string of heartfelt oaths before the Trooper beside him whacks him with the butt of his blaster, and silence reigns again. I feel his pain.
"Lord Vader wants them separated."
Cold shudders suddenly begin to run down my spine. It seems that I am not as sanguine about the coming encounter as I would like to believe. For the third time I glance toward my companion, but already he is being shoved toward a short corridor on one side of us, while I'm not allowed to move. Oddly enough, my last impression of him, as I watch his retreating back, is that of a slight relaxation in him; it almost reads like relief. I can only assume that he's happy to be rid of me, whatever awaits him.
I don't blame him one bit.
(A Jedi does no harm to others.)
Since now it's only a few Stormtroopers, and me, in the processing area, I turn my attention back to them and begin to take a few more risks. I want to know what's going on.
"What did the Rebels do, blow up a convoy or something?" I ask casually enough, but it's not a casual question at all.
"Quiet!" the Trooper by my side orders.
Good. I don't expect him to converse with me. I just need his attention for a moment. With that one word, I get it, and with a small gesture, despite the manacles, I use the Force to grasp his consciousness with ease.
"What is the reason for the increased security in this sector?" Momentarily infused with substantial power, my question locks onto the soldier's mind and demands a reply.
"We are searching for the Rebels who destroyed the Imperial Star-Killer Weapon," he answers promptly, before he has time to think.
What? The Rebels did what?
"TK-9993," The Trooper's superior snaps immediately. "Report to command control."
They destroyed it? He said they destroyed it. The Emperor's terror weapon. The Death Star. The instrument of Alderaan's destruction.
"Yes, Sir!" the hapless trooper replies smartly, and trots out of the holding area. Another immediately replaces him at my side.
How had it been possible to destroy something that vast? That deadly? That insurmountable? Something deep inside me begins to uncoil. It's as though along-forgotten part of me has awakened, but I can't pay attention to it now.
"Keep him quiet," the superior officer orders my new guard. "And take him to detention cell 4277."
Could a relatively small group of ordinary beings actually have accomplished something like that? I'd heard the Death Star was the size of a small moon.
The trooper beside me shoves me in the direction of the detention block and my feet begin to move automatically, as required.
Jedi could have pulled off something like that. Possibly.
(A Jedi trusts the Force, and finds a way.)
But from what I know of this Rebel Alliance, they are under funded and thinly scattered, and armed only with conventional weapons. They are fueled by an idealism the likes of which cannot be found anywhere else in this oppressed, cynical, fearful and defeated Galaxy. Like so many others, I've always secretly admired the Alliance, while shaking my head. Being a Rebel is contrary to the most basic survival instinct. It's little more than a quick and easy way to get killed.
The new feeling, this uncoiling thing in my gut, is spreading out. I feel it in my limbs, in my throat. I want to move, to strike out, to shout; to exult, and that's only the beginning of what is perilously surging to the surface. I force myself to remain calm and steady, and to put one foot in front of the other, over and over again, until we reach containment cell number 4277. The door slides open. I am pushed inside. The door slides closed behind me.
A quick glance around reveals that the space is little more than a box with a slab for a bunk. My eyes struggle to adjust to the change in light; as white and bright as the corridors outside are, the holding cell is black inside, with only a little illumination, which serves merely to add enough shine to the walls to play up their slick, hard surface. At the sight of them my stomach heaves. I am unable to resist the urge to stumble forward and place my palm flat against one of the walls, fingers splayed.
I have seen walls like this before. Night after night, and sometimes in bright daylight, my world goes cold and dark and a wall, as black, slick and dully reflective as hardened volcanic glass, rears up in front of me. It happens each time my dream returns to the boy in the marketplace. And each time, even though I ought to know better, I am irresistibly drawn to it, to reach out, to touch it. In that dream-state, the obsidian wall feels very much they way these cell walls do under my fingers.
I barely can keep from retching, and before I know it I'm on my knees, panting, but my hand won't leave the wall. All my elation about the demise of the Death Star recedes, leaving me alone in the old, familiar terrain of my personal nightmare.
(Visions are one way that the Force communicates with those who can listen and understand.)
Resigned, I wait in front of the wall for that part of the dream to unspool before my eyes.
But it doesn't. It's just a wall.
I don't understand. I never have. I don't know what the dream wants from me, why it plagues me so relentlessly, or why it comes when it does. I'm not a visionary. I'm not a Jedi Master. I'm making my life up as I go along.
And here, now, of all times, of all places, the torment leaves me alone.
Alone.
There is no telling how long I will be here, or what lies in store for me. The only thing I can do is to wait. And I know from long experience that the only possibility of waiting with any kind of serenity is to seek out a place of solace and rest in my memories; to retreat inward, away from my impregnable prison.
My Masters of long ago were right; the heart is a treacherous thing. Before I can choose a memory for myself, before I can stop her image from filling up my senses, I feel the lightest touch of Lila's deep brown hair brushing my cheek. I close my eyes. I know that I have the power to re-build that memory bit by bit, until it is almost indistinguishable from reality; but I also know that I mustn't. I've left her already, to go on my fool's errand, and I never will be able to return. Leaving behind a ragged wound of regret, I hide the memory of Lila away somewhere deep inside and move on instead to recalling another kind of miracle.
With all the fertile power of my considerable imagination I return to that glaringly bright and scorching hot marketplace on Tatooine and to my encounter with the boy. Because I am awake, and because it is my choice to remember this time and not a dream, I am free to move backward and forward among those images at will. Unhesitatingly I choose to re-live what happened next, after the boy left me behind.
I close my eyes and will the images to form. They become so vivid that I feel as though once again I am there in Mos Eisley, standing in the middle of those indifferent, jostling crowds, clutching my rucksack in my hands. I am fragile, drained, and a little disoriented inside of a universe that has been suddenly restructured since my meeting with the boy. Having lost all mastery over my awareness in the hot wash of feeling, I don't notice that someone is standing directly by my side. Slipping more deeply into the memory, I flinch physically while remembering how startled I was when the stranger spoke to me…
"You look tired, my friend. And thirsty. Let me invite you to a drink."
I struggle to focus. There is something odd about the figure in the deeply hooded cloak – something muffled. Try as I might, I can't read him. It has been a long time since my senses have failed me so profoundly, and it is horribly disturbing on top of the shock I have just suffered.
"Who are you?" I ask.
"I mean you no harm." He is human, that much I know, and no longer young. I catch a glimpse of white hair under the hood, and the tip of a neatly trimmed white beard. But he doesn't "read" like a human. His Force signature is unaccountably obscure, as though clouds keep slipping in front of it. I can't get hold of it, somehow. I am wary.
My companion takes me by the shoulder cordially enough and with his other hand indicates a low doorway across the busy and dusty thoroughfare that passes for a main road in this shabby market town.
"There is a tavern over there, if you don't mind what kind of company you keep."
"I m-mind whom I drink with," I say through the vestige of a stammer that still plagues me on rare occasions. I wonder why this would be one of them. "I asked who you are."
His cowl falls back further and I see him smile a little.
"Yes, of course," he says, and closes his eyes briefly.
Instantly the clouds lift and my mind and heart fill with pure light, overwhelming me all over again. When that light takes shape and I understand what I perceive, I am agonizingly torn between disbelief, and joy, and pain.
He had been shielding his powerful, highly trained Force-signature. That is why I couldn't read him. Although I have spent my life under similar shielding, I did not immediately recognize it in another, because there were no others…
When he looks at me again I no longer can see through the shocked tears that have filled my dry, burning eyes.
"Master Kenobi," I whisper.
The hand on my arm grips me more tightly.
"Ben," he says, his voice low and gentle. "Call me Ben."
I can't speak.
"Will you have a drink with me, then?"
"I… yes." I blink back the blur and stare at his still-shadowed face hungrily, as my eyes try to confirm what the Force already has shown me to be true.
The man whom I am supposed to call Ben guides me firmly across the busy thoroughfare. I let him lead me. I stumble across the road in a kind of altered reality; like a child I let myself be pulled into a noisy cantina whose stench is the byproduct of a wildly mixed clientele. It is surprisingly large, considering its modest exterior, and we wend our way carefully through the restless crowds into a remote corner of the establishment. I sit down at a small, sticky table and wait there as fixedly as a rusted bolt on a floating wreck while Master Obi-Wan Kenobi, Jedi Knight, General, and one of the brightest lights ever beloved of the Force, struggles his way to the bar to buy me a drink.
To my eyes, the dark, smoky interior of that cantina is a glowing landscape lit by a sun that suddenly, unexpectedly, has come out from behind the clouds. Once again, only a short time after my encounter with the boy in the marketplace, I am struck blind, and deaf and dumb by feelings over which I have no dominion.
(A Jedi is master of his feelings.)
I am so lost in a sea of emotion that my companion slips into the seat opposite before I become aware of his return.
"It is a great pleasure to see you alive, Poulin Brith," he says warmly, in those precise, cultured accents I remember so well. The drink he pushes towards me is an unidentifiable concoction that I stare at without really seeing it.
"Until n-now, it was n-not a such a great p-pleasure to be alive," I answer, once I feel I can speak. Between Jedi there is no dissembling.
"Yes," he says. "I know."
He must know. He does know. Of all the souls in the Galaxy, he is the one who would know. I sit quietly, unwilling for that single, longed-for moment of understanding, of acknowledgement, to pass. He looks me over carefully, and I know that he sees much that I don't need to explain in words.
"Have… have you b-been here long?" I manage.
"The entire time," Kenobi says simply. Again, no explanation is necessary. Time, in our universe, ended and began again with a few events. The birth of Vader and the death of the Order upended the hourglass, and our lives have been measured ever afterwards by the slow, inexorable trickle of sand into a new vessel.
"Here," I murmur. "On Tatooine. Of all p-places."
Kenobi smiles a little, and shrugs. "My duty is here."
"Your duty." I stare at him openly for a long time while I sort things that I have observed and things I know into a pattern that makes sense. He allows it, patiently and quietly.
I notice his clothing – the simple robes of an earlier time, threadbare, but clean. I notice his neatly groomed exterior. The way he carries himself. His mastery over his surroundings. I contrast these things with my own shabby, haphazard clothing. With the long braid of hair that hangs down my back. With the quicksilver tugs of emotion and impulse that constantly toy with my undisciplined heart.
Kenobi is still a Jedi – as much a Jedi as he ever was. For me, just being in his presence is enlivening, and ancient and long-forgotten capacities seem to awaken in me moment by moment. My dreamlike state disappears, and I become aware.
In his presence, I grow wise.
"The boy," I venture finally. "Who is he?" I think I know the answer, but I need to hear the truth, and I need to hear it from him.
"He is Anakin's son," Kenobi confirms plainly, giving me the immeasurable gift of equality and trust. Years of self-doubt fall away, and once again I become calm, and centered, and strong.
"You have watched over him."
"Yes."
"For what purpose?" Many of my questions seemed to be contained within this one.
Now Kenobi pauses. He pauses, and he observes me intensely, and while he does so all that I have speculated about and all that I know coalesces into a sharp point of understanding.
This isn't over. We aren't over. For years the seed of the future has been nurtured in that dazzling boy whom I encountered in the marketplace.
"You saw him," Kenobi says carefully. "He… stands out."
"Oh, yes," I breathe.
"It would be unfortunate if he were to attract the… attention… of those who know what he is. What he can become."
Vader doesn't know that his son is alive. I am suddenly sure of it, but I have to confirm it. More pieces are coming together. "He doesn't know!"
Kenobi knows instantly whom I mean. Neither one of us is going to say Vader's name out loud. Not in this place.
"No." He looks down into his drink.
"Nor does the boy."
Kenobi glances at me sharply. "Certainly not."
Caution prickles my neck and flutters in my veins. I look around the cantina surreptitiously.
"Are there any others left?" I whisper, leaning forward slightly. Any others like us, I mean. Jedi.
Again, he understands me. "You are the only one I have encountered since I arrived on Tatooine seventeen years ago," he says steadily, looking into my eyes.
"So you are alone in this."
He smiles. "We are never alone. The Force is with us, always."
I agree with him about the Force, but not about being alone. But I'm going to argue about it right now.
"Yes," I agree impatiently. "But you know what I mean. Are there only the two of us?"
Kenobi takes a long, deliberate drink. "If you and I have been unaware of one another so long, it is possible that there are others." He looks at me appraisingly. "I have not searched for survivors, but it seems that you have."
I look down. It seems that you have. In five words he has summarized half a lifetime of struggle and futility and despair.
"And it appears that you have not found any," he finishes, when I don't reply.
I shake my head.
"I am sorry," he says gently.
I start to ask something more about the boy but Kenobi glances at me quickly, indicating that I should not. I subside instantly; my obedience is a reflex, even a relief. I think I would do anything he asked.
Kenobi looks around. "We should go."
I leave behind my untouched drink and follow him through the shifting crowds in the Cantina. For once I don't wince at the sudden onslaught of the midday light outside; the light in my heart is equally bright. I am in balance.
"Are you free for a time?" he asks me, as though I am a man of business, of obligation, of time constraints. As though there might be other things in my life that are more important.
I smile for the first time and nod.
"Then perhaps you would like to stay with me for a while. It's a journey of many hours, and a dangerous one at that, but once there, we will have peace and privacy."
I nod again. Of course I will go with him. I would follow him anywhere.
"Are you armed?" he asks as I fell into step with him. He is heading away from the marketplace.
"No. I have not carried a weapon since…" I stop.
"It's all right," he says. "Just keep your wits about you and be prepared for a long walk."
Yes, Master Kenobi. My mind settles into an ancient but familiar track just as my rucksack settles into its familiar place on my shoulder. It is as though the years in between have collapsed into nothing and have blown away like sand in the desert wind. My step is light. I am prepared for anything.
I no longer am alone…
The luminous memory fades, taking all warmth and harmony with it. I become aware of cold against my cheek and the numbness in my hand where I have been pressing it against the unyielding surface of my cell. I am on my knees, on the floor, crumpled against the indifferent wall.
No, I am not alone. Something icy, crystalline, lurks around the very furthest edge of my consciousness. It's elusive, but it is there.
I really ought to guard my thoughts now.
I pull myself into a sitting position there on the cell floor, wrap my arms around my knees, and settle down to wait.
(still more to come….)