(4)
If I had to live on a ship like this I would slowly go mad. It's a dead thing, a spaceship, made of substances whose life force is long since gone. It generates no energy of its own, has no natural rhythm. It forms no relationships to anything around it. It neither gives nor takes. It doesn't speak through the Force. Even though this lifeless thing is heavily populated by living beings, their circumscribed world lacks variety. Diversity. Depth. To a Force-sensitive person it is a particularly painful form of isolation.
When I embarked on this quest of mine I thought I was prepared for anything, for any eventuality, even for the darkest and most terrible possibilities that my vivid imagination could conjure. I was wrong. I had not prepared myself for the possibility of being tossed away into a dark corner and then abandoned without any kind of contact and precious little sensory stimulation. In my worst moments it seems as though I might be left here forever.
I have spent a great deal of time in space vessels in my life – constant traveler that I was – but those passages were different. A journey from one place to another, however long, is a state to be endured for a limited time. It has a destination, a time frame, and most importantly, an end. The journey I am embarked on now provides me with none of those. I don't know where it is taking me, or when, or how it will end.
I miss my rucksack. I had to leave it behind on the PellMell when we were captured. It never contained much; but its contents were precious to me, especially the journals in which I recorded everything I had learned as a healer. A few odd mementos. That piece of polished obsidian I carry with me always. But they have left me with nothing. I have my cell, some food, and my conscious awareness. That's all.
Under the circumstances my conscious awareness has gone to work overtime, diving into whatever feedback is available to me through the Force. It is my only source of information; my constant, desperate attempt to set up my accustomed inner dialogue with my surroundings.
Shielding myself in the Force no longer seems necessary, since Vader has me in his grasp, so I use my Jedi skills at will.
Little by little I have become an expert on the regular phases of activity on this ship. I know when the shifts come and go, and by keeping track of them I have developed a rough measure of the length of a daily cycle. From my distant perch I have observed occasional bouts of activity that I attribute to a ship being intercepted. Now and then there is a skirmish during which the ship's large weapons are fired, but those confrontations never last long. Occasionally, judging by the shifts in the energy patterns aboard, beings are brought aboard, or others leave. My best guess, based on what I have been able to observe, is that I have been captive here for more than a standard week. I have worked out that, after capturing the PellMell, this small Imperial task force has continued its original mission uninterrupted. I also have come to realize that Vader is not on board her, as I originally had assumed.
Lord Vader wants them separated; the Trooper said when my pilot and I were being processed, as though Vader personally had overseen our capture. And yet, search as I might, I can't find anything aboard that might indicate that he is here. Even if he is shielded (and after all, why would he bother?) I'm certain that his is a presence that cannot be mistaken. Yet I'm also quite sure that the encompassing intelligence I encountered when we were captured is related to him. Once touched, an impression like that is never forgotten. But I can't find it here.
I'm also convinced that I am being observed. Since arriving on this ship I have felt a presence drift in and out, always at the edges of my awareness, and always to quick to evade me before I can lock in onto it. I think it is Vader. Who else could move as easily through the shadowy passageways of the mind as through the gangways of a ship? If he isn't right here, then he is somewhere nearby, and that probably amounts to the same thing.
If he is deliberately trying to torment me, it's working.
I trace a line on the cell wall with my finger. It is an invisible line, for my finger leaves no mark on the hard, dense material, but the contour of peaks and valleys is perfectly clear in my mind. I have been drawing the same line, over and over again, for quite a while. Only now do I realize what the shape means. I have been outlining the shape of the rock outcroppings that can be seen from the door of Kenobi's hut on Tatooine. When I first saw that place in the middle of the Jundland Wastes, I thought that it was the most lifeless, most barren place possible. Looking back now from my prison in space, I understand that it was a veritable symphony of sound and color and all the complex cadences of life. Lonely though it had seemed to me at the time, compared to this Imperial Starcruiser teeming with soldiers, Kenobi's little house was a haven for the heart and for the senses. Despite the harsh climate and the predators outside, it was a place of sanctuary. I just didn't appreciate it at the time.
There were a great many things I didn't appreciate at the time. I'm beginning to, now.
(Lessons come when the need for knowledge arises.)
I trace the invisible line on the wall one more time. This rock. That cleft. There was a kind of plateau over here on this side, and then a wide gap through which you could see across the flatlands all the way to the horizon. I sat on the dry, grainy soil outside of Kenobi's doorway for a long time on my second day there, meditating a little, but mostly studying these landforms and looking out at the desert. I was still there at dusk, when Kenobi finally urged me to come inside.
"It isn't safe to be out at night, Poulin. The sand people are less timid in the darkness than in the daytime."
"It's all right," I protested. "I'll stay close to the house, and alert. I just want to be outside. I… I need the air."
Actually, I'd already been out in the desert air for hours. What I really needed was the space to think. The vastness of the desert beyond seemed to help, somehow.
Kenobi had let me be. He seemed to understand how lost and confused I was, now that I had been found. In the middle of my cautious, almost disbelieving joy at Kenobi's presence, I was also sadder than I had been in years. All the things I had tried to forget, all the things I thought I had had finished re-living, flooded back to me again. In some ways it was like starting all over with the grief over the ruination of a life – of all the lives – that had been torn away. Over riddles that never had been solved. Over terrible deeds that could not be undone. Ancient, futile questions like "why?" and "how?" surged back into the forefront of my thinking, although the answers were as obscure as they ever had been.
I was still stubbornly sitting there in the long shadows of the rocks whose shape I am now summoning on the wall of this faraway cell, when Kenobi finally came outside to fetch me. This time he snared me easily, by appealing to my baser impulses – hunger and curiosity – rather than to my reason.
"Come, now, Poulin. Supper is waiting, and after that I have something to show you. Something that you might recognize."
Immediately I was on my feet and following him inside, leaving the enduring rocks behind. I looked forward to our meal together; Kenobi's simple stew was good and filling, but it didn't hold a candle to the richness of his simple companionship. Even the silences that often fell between us were more satisfying than most conversations I'd had with others. For the first time since the onset of the dark times, sitting in that isolated hut in the middle of a wasteland, I was beginning to remember what it meant to be content.
All of a sudden I sit up straight, every sense on alert. Something has changed. The energies everywhere on the Starcruiser have changed. Everywhere I feel an electric sense of anticipation; the atmosphere is practically crackling with something I have never sensed before. The hairs on my arms and at the back of my neck are standing up.
All alone in my cell, I surge to my feet. Vader. It couldn't be anyone else. Of course he wasn't on the ship before. How absurd that I even would have speculated about it. This is what it feels like to be around Vader. This is what he does to the Force in his vicinity. I realize little by little that I am panting; my breath is coming in shallow gasps. There is nothing familiar about this new presence. Nothing.
What an irredeemable fool I was, to have thought – to have hoped – that there would be.
(The Dark Side is a treacherous path from which there is no return.)
I shouldn't have come here.
I coax my breathing into a more normal pattern and sink down to the floor again next to the invisible line of rocks on my cell wall, as though I could once again return to the shelter of Kenobi's hut.
Kenobi had been right about Vader, as he had been right about me. I understand now that our last conversation hadn't merely happened; he had initiated it to find out who I was. To take my measure. All he'd had to do to make me reveal all of my doubts, all of my …fantasies… was to retrieve a single object from an old trunk and place it in my hand.
I clutched the brilliantly engineered cylinder. I stared at it.
"This is Anakin's lightsaber, isn't it?"
Kenobi returned to his bench and sat with one arm draped along its back, looking deceptively relaxed, but I know that he watched me closely. "Yes," he said. "It was."
I gaped at the icon in my hand some more. "May I?"
He nodded.
The blade flared into life; pale blue fire in a darkening room. "You've had it all this time?"
"Yes. I have kept it since he died."
In the half-darkness of twilight the blue blade seemed to hang suspended in the air, an artifact of a long-lost time. A black shadow reared up in my mind's eye.
"He isn't dead."
"Anakin is dead," Kenobi admonished me softly.
"Do you really believe that?" I asked, unable to my eyes from the humming blade. I thought back to the dark shape that had accompanied me for twenty years, and tried to imagine it as an empty shell. I couldn't. A shell wouldn't haunt me. Vader did.
"There is nothing of Anakin left in Vader. His Master saw to that."
I looked at the beautiful blue light and its maker seemed to spring from it into my mind's eye full-blown, as he once had been. Shining. Restless. Passionate. Impatient. He always looked for challenges, and completely ignored the fact that I was not as intrepid. How many times had he dragged me away from my studies into doing something new? Something daring? I never once had won a sparring match against that blue blade; nor did I ever expect to. But I came away from every one of those matches better, and stronger, and more prepared for the next time. I never have been able to understand how every last spark of that vibrant nature was extinguished. I imagine that is why I am obsessed with the creature that is Vader.
My brother.
A beautiful light. A deadly weapon. Abruptly I disengaged it.
"Do you think that what inhabits that armor is no longer a man, Master Kenobi? That he is nothing more than a glorified droid? He is powerful with the Force. And the Force does not love a machine."
Kenobi pursed is lips and looked faintly displeased. It might have been my question, or it might merely have been my stubborn insistence on using a name he had taken pains to discard. Either way, I would not be put off. He was the only person I would ever be able to discuss these things with.
"No, of course not. You misunderstand me. I mean that you must not think that a trace of the man you once knew remains in him." His diction became more clipped. More emphatic. "However much you may wish it were true."
I couldn't resist igniting the pale blue lightsaber once again, moving it lightly a pattern of gentle arcs. Was it true? Did I wish that Anakin were still there, behind Vader's mask? If I did, it was an appallingly vengeful wish. If I wished that any part of Anakin remained – that any of his original awareness, any memory, any conscience at all remained in him – then I wished on him an existence in which he lived minute by minute in the hellish knowledge of what he had done. Of what he had become.
(A Jedi knows only compassion.)
But I did wish it. In Kenobi's presence, I couldn't be less than completely honest. I wished it with all my heart.
Again I disengaged the weapon. This time I returned it to Kenobi, who took it without comment. Turning my back on his discerning gaze, I went to lean against the frame of the hut's door, where I could look outside into the gathering night.
I had spent my life as a healer. And in all that time, I never really healed anyone, no matter what they thought. They healed themselves. All I needed to do, even in the most severe cases, was to find the spark that remained. Sometimes that spark lay in the body, sometimes in the mind. I could often be something as simple – and yet as powerful – as hope. I found the spark and I directed the Force to it. I fanned the spark. I held their hands. I gave them some herbs or did a little dance if that was what they wanted. But if it was meant to be, they healed.
If it was meant to be.
"What if Anakin is still there?" I directed the deepest question of my heart to the growing darkness outside. "What if… what if he could be reached?"
Kenobi surged to his feet. I didn't see or hear him do it; I felt it. "Try not to be a fool, Brith! You of all people. You studied the Sith. You were quite the scholar, even as a Padawan. You should know better than anyone what he is now. He gave up his destiny."
"I didn't know one could give up one's destiny," I said absently to the last haze of light that glimmered on the horizon.
"His path was laid out for him," Kenobi said behind me. "He could have been a great Jedi – a very great one. Instead, he chose to destroy it all. And all of us with him."
Was that bitterness I heard in his voice? Surely not. Not Kenobi. I was hearing him through the filter of my own pain.
I stared out at the stars for a while. They seemed huge here in the desert, and as abundant as all the many and diverse Gods that people prayed to throughout the Galaxy. All the different faces of the Force. "When one becomes the instrument of the Gods, all free choice is gone," I quoted softly from an ancient text whose fragments were with me still.
"I know the intervening years have been difficult for you, Poulin," Kenobi said carefully. I couldn't help being amused, if only fleetingly. It seemed that he was charitably offering to overlook my imprudent, even heretical, ideas on the basis that suffering had left me with a less-than-sound mind.
I glanced back at Kenobi over my shoulder. "Wherever there is the Force, there is life," I insisted, brashly and unwisely daring to lecture the only Jedi Master in the room. "And wherever there is life, there is the possibility of change, of growth, of evolution. There is potential."
"You idolized him, I know that, Poulin. And I also know that those feelings clouded your judgment on more than one occasion. At least accept the idea they still are clouding your judgment."
He was right, of course. I had followed Anakin into all kinds of waywardness, from the minor to the indefensible. In the end I had defied a direct order from Master Kenobi himself to help Anakin beat his own path. The thing was… the thing was… each time I'd made that choice I had believed that I was following the light. Anakin's uncanny, overwhelming light.
How the Force had loved him.
Finally I turned away from the glittering night sky and faced Kenobi head on. "I know what Anakin was," I said carefully. "He was both light and dark. He held the light and the darkness within him as we all do – only brighter, and deeper. He could move between them so quickly that it took your breath away. You never know how he would act, or react to something – except in a very few things. In those he was very consistent."
"He is certainly consistent now," Kenobi retorted. "Unswerving in his task of spreading undreamed of evil everywhere he goes."
"He was consistently loyal to those whom he loved," I insisted stubbornly.
Kenobi looked away, his mouth set in a hard line.
"That might have been true of Anakin," he said again, as slowly and clearly as one speaks to a slow-learning child. "Although I dispute that assertion, too. But that is not Vader. Vader is another creature entirely."
I didn't believe him. Deep down in my darkest heart, I thought I knew better. Kenobi had understood this about me better that I had. Now, having experienced Vader's presence first hand, even once, even at a distance, I bitterly regret my stubborn refusal to listen to someone who was so much wiser than I."If Anakin truly is gone, then what do you want with his son? Why have you guarded him so closely?" I asked after a while.
"He is the only one who can defeat Vader and bring an end to the Galaxy's suffering."
I stared at him. "You're serious! You are planning to train the boy so that he can kill his father?"
"If that is his destiny."
What a terrible burden Kenobi had in mind for an innocent boy who didn't even know enough to hide his light. The audacity of the idea – the calculation behind it – gave me a chill despite the still-warm night air.
"Oh, please," I said, turning back to the vast, pitiless desert wasteland outside. Suddenly I noticed that from a certain vantage point in the doorway, the looming rocks blotted out many of the stars, leaving only black silhouettes. "Your view on destiny seems to change with the circumstances. First you say that Vader gave up his destiny, and now you expect to hand the boy a destiny of your choice. Whatever happened to the will of the Force?"
When he didn't answer I looked back over my shoulder into the dim room. Kenobi hadn't sat down again after the first of my ill-advised comments had brought him to his feet. He stood quietly behind his low bench, gripping its back with both hands, his face only partially illuminated by the soft light of a single glowlamp. He wasn't looking at me. He seemed to be somewhere far away.
"Vader is not the only one who makes the Galaxy suffer," I pointed out after the silence had continued for a while.
"Without Vader, the Emperor would be seriously weakened. Vader is his rod and his staff."
As Anakin was mine…Angrily I pushed away the un-wished-for thought. Kenobi looked at me, and I realized that he had sensed my anger. It showed me once again just how far I had drifted from my Jedi training. I wondered how he had survived, all these years in this place – alone, forgotten, and yet unfailingly a Jedi. It was almost beyond my imagination to picture the discipline, the self-mastery, the… the self-sacrifice that it must have required.
The man was deadly serious, and not to be taken lightly, whatever I thought of his plan. He was magnificent. He was everything I was not, and never would be.
"And so this has been your duty, " I mused. "All of these years."
"Yes." The weight of ages was in that word.
A soul-deep silence fell between us, and the familiar shadows of loneliness, of emptiness began to circle my heart. However isolated it might look to a casual observer, Kenobi's life was as replete with purpose and meaning as mine was empty. Whatever dreams I might have nurtured about what it would be like if I ever found another Jedi – whatever imaginings about brotherhood and community and finding a home that I had harbored all through the dark times, ended in reality there and then.
Kenobi had been kind and generous and would not, I thought, push me away. But I was a burden for him. A complication. I couldn't help him with his mission; my presence would only hinder it.
I had to say goodbye. Again.
"I will never betray you," I said.
He smiled. I didn't have to explain my decision to go. He already knew. And it wasn't the only thing he knew.
"Stay away from Vader," he advised me. "Put him out of your heart. Let him go. He can only bring you harm."
And that was it, I remember, as I huddle on the floor of my cell on the Starcruiser, waiting for some kind of an end. After that, after I left Kenobi, the dreams began.
(Jedi don't dream.)
So of course, I did.
(still more to come...)