Chapter 8: Just a Dream

"Yes, I do think you are getting very close to the mark with this one," said Grievous, while examining a picture Nan had given him. It depicted a voluptuous opera singer in a feather boa and red dress.

Nan and the General had been playing a game for a while. It was called, "what did the General look like before he lost his peripheral nervous system?" Nan had fairly decent drawing skills and came up with all sorts of funny answers. So far she had drawn: a six-legged dog, a brain with legs, a toaster with a face, Count Dooku ("Nooo! I looked nothing like that turd!" Grievous had yelled), a box full of scissors and screws, a very cute miniature version of the General, and Humpty Dumpty.

"This is indeed close," continued Grievous. "I used to think I could play a very good tragic heroine. I used to imagine the lights, the applause, the stage…ah, those were but broken dreams!"

"Because you sound like you're talking out of your ass?" Suggested Nan.

"Now you're starting to walk a thin line. The only reason I sound this way is because I have a faulty voice simulator."

Count Dooku called. He wanted to know where Grievous was. Obviously he was right there, but he had bailed on going to a certain battle to stay with Nan and try to crack the Trade Federation's new codes. The codes were used to access the droid software Nan and Grievous kept tampering with to make droids worthless.

"He's sick," said Nan.

"What the hell is wrong with him?" Asked Dooku.

"He has scleropleuroatheroneurotangentialsequentialmyopathy," said Nan, making something up.

"What is that? How is it treated?"

"It's very hard to define. I'd have to get my long medical dictionary to say for sure. So far the only thing that's been making him better has been 10 cc's of whatsitosin and 0.5 mgs powdered somethingcyclin."

The fact that the Count accepted this obvious malarkey just goes to show that people will accept anything from somebody called Doctor, and Nan never even got a real degree!

Nan yawned after Dooku hung up and put her head down on the desk. She was getting tired and was afraid of making mistakes. She thought of the info she had recently leaked to the Republic (letting them think they had found it themselves) about the locations of certain Separatist supply ships.

"Oh shit," she said. "I may have revealed the location of the Despair!"

She had indeed. The Jedi Council was all a twitter over this bit of information. They had done some recon on the ship and discovered that it was General Grievous' hideout. They intended to attack. Ahsoka's warnings were not heeded. The Council did not believe her story about bad guys going good. They thought that if she wasn't straight out imagining things, then it was some plot of the Sith. It was decided that Obi Wan, Shaak Ti, and Mace Windu would lead the assault. Ahsoka could not go because of her weird story. Shaak Ti had a score to settle with Grievous. She had done a lot of searching into his past and found a transmission between Count Dooku and some hired bounty hunter that was very revealing. She intended to show it to the General.

Count Dooku arrived on the Despair with a bunch of battle droids. His spies had told him the Jedi were going to attack and he wanted to give them a warm welcome. He met up with Nan and Grievous on the bridge. He looked suspiciously at Grievous.

"You don't look sick," he said.

"He looks terrible every day. How can you tell?" Said Nan.

"True enough. Anyway, we will stick together and take on the Jedi as a unified force here in this auditorium. You can join, Dr. Specious, since I've seen you fight. Retreat if it gets tough for you. You can retreat as well, Grievous, since you've proved your ineptness against the Jedi many times."

They went downstairs. Everything went as expected. Within minutes stuff was blowing up and there was fighting everywhere. Nan and Grievous had not tampered with these droids. They weren't too sure what to do, actually. It would be great if the Jedi somehow killed Dooku, but how were they going to arrange that without Dooku discovering their deceit? They had no plan, basically. They also weren't sure if they should kill clones or not. Grievous had gotten pretty good at delivering non-fatal blows, which he'd used in many independent battles, but Dooku was his old teacher and would notice. Should he kill clones in order to preserve their objective? A moral dilemma indeed!

Nan decided it would be a good idea to just knock Grievous out of the battle as early as possible so he didn't have to make that decision. She asked him to follow her toward some clones that were shooting at droids on a balcony. Grievous saw her intentions and slowed down just enough that when the balcony came falling down, it landed on him. Nan pretended to listen for him in the pile of rubbish and ran back to the Count to say it seemed like Grievous was out for good.

"It's probably the scleropleuroatheroneurotangentialsequentialmyopathy that's weakening him," she said.

"I swear I'm going to hire a…a disreputable taxicab driver to replace him!" Said Dooku.

He attacked a group of clones. The Jedi rushed into the auditorium. Nan pretended to get hit by a laser beam and hid under the stage. Dooku and Windu faced off while Shaak Ti and Obi Wan took on the guard droids. Shaak Ti looked for Grievous. She sensed he was present. She honed in on the pile of rubble. Nan noticed her going toward it and ran out to intercept her. She leaped at Shaak Ti with two lightsabers out in front of her and they battled. Nan just wanted to get her away from the rubble. She retreated toward a bunch of droids while parrying the blows, hoping the droids would distract Shaak Ti enough. The Jedi predicted the move and used the Force to slam Nan back against the pile of rubble. Nan groaned. Her back had made contact with a sharp part. Shaak Ti destroyed the droids and turned back to her. Nan stood up but her legs gave out from under her. Shaak Ti advanced toward her.

Grievous had been watching from a crack among the rocks and decided it was time to intervene. He jumped out and scooped up Nan. Shaak Ti did not attack him. She jumped back onto another balcony and held up a disk.

"General, I have something you'd like to see here. I'll give it to you for free," she said.

Grievous couldn't care less at first, but it occurred to him that she might have discovered that he and Nan were responsible for some of the Separatists' failures. He said he'd like to see the information. Shaak Ti threw down the disk and jumped back into the battle to help Obi Wan with some droids. Windu and Dooku were still going at it like a pair of tanks, if tanks were not slow and cumbersome.

"Are you all right?" The General asked Nan.

"I'll be okay. What's on the disk?"

"Let's see."

He stepped back into the hallway with Nan in one hand and inserted the disk into a hologram player. Count Dooku appeared. He told somebody about his need of a new droid commander. He'd picked out just the person but what Dooku wanted most of all was somebody that could be trusted. That was why he planned to send the bounty hunter he was addressing to bomb Grievous' ship and blame it on the Jedi. He would save Grievous from the wreckage of the ship, help with whatever medical service was needed, and make him hate the Jedi enough to do whatever Dooku asked to satisfy his revenge.

"I wonder how this got lost on the Internet?" Said Nan.

The General set her down without a word and walked off into the battle. He knocked aside clones and droids alike as he headed toward Count Dooku. Shaak Ti waved to Windu and he jumped away from Dooku as the General approached. Dooku looked around with annoyance.

"So you're back up, aren't you?" He said. "There are too many Jedi still alive. You should be able to take Shaak Ti; you nearly did her in once before."

"You're the one I'm going to do in," said Grievous. "You've been lying to me. You caused the explosion that crippled me. You made me hate the Jedi, who had nothing to do with it!"

Dooku sighed and rolled his eyes.

"I wondered if you'd ever find out. Honestly, does it even matter? I gave you power you could never have achieved by yourself. I gave you an army and taught you to fight with lightsabers. I made you stronger than before and gave you a plain, clear goal of defeating the Jedi. What more do you need?"

"I do not want this power or this army! I've been living a lie and you're the cause of all my misfortunes. I murdered good people because you planted a crazy idea in my head. If it wasn't for you, I'd be dead already, killed before I could cause so much damage. You made me a bigger monster than I could ever have been by myself and I don't care, but I must make you pay!"

He attacked Dooku blindly and madly, swinging four lightsabers, clawing and slashing as if the Count was not a person but a wall or some object that needed to be torn down. Dooku fended him off, figuring this was just a temporary fit and maybe a result of that condition Nan had described so unsatisfactorily. But then Dooku recalled that the General had said "good people." That was unusual. Fine, it made sense for him to be somewhat pissed that Dooku caused his accident, but he wasn't giving the right reasons. "Killed before he could cause so much damage," he'd said. That almost sounded as if Grievous was remorseful. But that meant… Dooku connected the dots. He realized that the bird he and Sidious had been chasing for so long had been hiding right under their noses. His very own disciple had betrayed him, and for what? For good? Dooku noticed Nan watching from the sidelines and realized he should have been wary much earlier. Grievous hated everybody, yet he'd been hanging out with the scientist for many months. A necessity of great evil is that it has to be endured alone.

"You're the one who's been sabotaging my army!" Said Dooku.

"Took you long enough to figure it out!" Said Grievous.

"You've been disabling droids and selling us out to the Republic!"

"Nothing you don't deserve! And I came up with that Jabba thing the droids have been saying!"

This was too much for Dooku. He had suffered a lot on account of the Jabba thing. He attacked his former disciple and pushed him back toward the Jedi.

"What do you think you are now, a good guy?" Asked Dooku. "Let's see what they have to say about it! You've been killing them for years. Let them judge!"

He blasted Grievous into Windu and Obi Wan with the Force. The ship was falling apart. Dooku ran off to a shuttle. The Jedi gathered around Grievous and Nan.

"You really fucked up," whispered Nan.

"I know."

"I mean, this is the fuck-up to top off all fuck-ups."

"I know! But you're the one who revealed our location, so you fucked up too!"

"Not as much as you!"

"It doesn't matter who fucked up more," said Obi Wan, so tired and annoyed that a curse escaped his lips. "You two are under arrest."

They could have fought their way out, but with Dooku aware of their treachery it was best to try and make peace with the Republic. Grievous and Nan allowed themselves to be disarmed and handcuffed. Shaak Ti had run off to check on the cruiser the Jedi had arrived in. She returned to report that it was completely busted. They ran to the main hanger as stuff exploded everywhere. Nan pointed at a certain shuttle and, seeing that it was secure, the Jedi led their prisoners into it. Grievous recognized it as the shuttle he and Nan had used months ago to transport her equipment from Taia. Most of the stuff had never been unloaded.

Windu pushed them into the back and guarded them with his lightsaber out. Nan turned toward the window and looked at the burning wreck of the Despair. She suddenly felt its loss like the loss of a true home. Nothing would ever be the same. Grievous felt its loss too, but he was too angry at himself to be melancholy. He had given in to a momentary passion and revealed their plans to Dooku. If he had just pretended the transmission meant nothing to him until the battle was over and Dooku gone, he could have raged as much as he wanted alone. Now it was too late. Their strategic position was lost. They couldn't help anyone anymore and would be sent to jail on Corusant.

Sooner or later they arrived at a large Republic battleship. They were shoved into separate cells. Nan whined that she wanted them to be together but Obi Wan refused.

"You two could cause way too much trouble together."

"But we're good guys now!" Said Nan. "Just look closely. You'll find the signs of our handiwork all over the place, I'm sure."

"We will investigate."

"Fine, then I want food!"

Grievous did not try to defend himself. He paced his cell, kicking the walls, unable to forgive himself. Nan watched anxiously. He ripped apart the cot and the bench. He ripped his claws against the walls. Several clone troopers ran over to make him stop. They jabbed him with an electric stick. He was so incensed that he grabbed it with the claws of his foot and tried to pull the trooper in, heedless of the shock. More troopers ran over. Nan yelled at him to quit it. Anakin came over.

"What's the matter?" He asked.

"This monster is causing trouble," said a clone.

"If you'll just let me into his cell, I'll calm him down," said Nan.

"He'll rip you apart!" Said Anakin.

"Let me try, please!"

Anakin shrugged and took Nan from her cell. He turned the force field off on Grievous' cell while the clones pointed blasters at him and pushed Nan in. She whacked Grievous with a piece of wood from the cot and called him names. Anakin found it funny to watch. He got an order from Obi Wan to watch them and settled down on a bench not far from their cell.

Making sure that Anakin couldn't hear, Nan said, "G, you need to relax. Our cover is busted. Stop breaking shit and settle down."

"It's my fault."

"I'm not arguing with that. I'm just saying there's nothing you can do."

They sat on the floor for a while. Nan muttered that Obi Wan hadn't brought any food after all.

"I want to sleep," she said. "Can you keep watch?"

"I want to sleep too."

"What if Dumbass tries something funny?"

"He can't. Jedi have no sense of humor."

Anakin heard and snapped, "I have a great sense of humor."

"You're not the one who came up with, 'Count Dooku was jacking off to a hologram of Jabba the Hutt,'" said Grievous.

Anakin realized they had come up with those statements and recalled the one about himself.

"What do you two know about me?" He asked.

"That you're stupid, ugly, and you fight like a little bitch," said Nan.

"That about sums it up," said Grievous.

Many hours later, Anakin was told to bring the prisoners up to the conference room. He woke them up. Apparently unconcerned, Nan stretched luxuriantly from tail-tip to paws.

"One of the things I miss about having a real body is being able to stretch after a nice nap," said Grievous.

"Stretch your axons," said Nan unsympathetically.

"If I could stretch them to strangle you, I would."

Anakin took them to the conference room with a group of clone troopers. The room was occupied by the entire Jedi Council, in person or as a hologram, and some others. Ahsoka was there. They had finally listened to her.

Obi Wan spoke for the Council. He explained that they had been searching all over the internet and had found definite proof that a lot of their recent victories against the Separatists were due to information obtained from peculiar sources. It had all been done cunningly but a few snippets could be traced back to the Despair. Clone troopers had testified that Grievous had injured but not killed them in battle, though he could have easily. There was Ahsoka's statement and Count Dooku's words from the recent battle. Everything seemed to point to Grievous and Nan being traitors to the Separatists, but to what end? Shaak Ti refused to believe the General had anything but malice on his mind and insisted it was all a grand scheme of Dooku's. Obi Wan himself didn't trust the ex-droid commander. Anakin sided with Ahsoka. It was put to a vote.

By only a few members, the Jedi decided Grievous and Nan were sincere. Their handcuffs were removed. Of course, this was only the Jedi's decision. The Senate would give them a real trial. The ship would be going back to Corusant in a few days, when their real fate would be decided.

A lot of the Jedi were unhappy about this and left the conference room, disgusted. Ahsoka and Anakin stayed and showed Nan where the cafeteria was. After a while Nan and Grievous were left to their own devices. Nan lost no time in sneaking back to the shuttle in which they had arrived. Clone troopers watched them suspiciously. Nan said she wanted to get some luggage from the shuttle. They checked that the stuff she wanted was not bombs. It was just a computer with some wires and what looked like a potentiostat. Grievous carried the stuff to the room they'd been shown to and set it down on a table.

"So what is all this junk? I knew you had a plan involving that shuttle," he asked.

"This is my dream machine. It can allow you to watch and control people's dreams. It actually works, as far as I can tell, only there was nobody to test it with on the Despair. I never got around to taking it to Serreno to test it on Count Dooku."

"Why didn't you try it on me?"

"I just forgot, what with you yelling at me after you discovered my gambling problem. Personally, I don't remember any of my dreams. None at all."

"Interesting. Everybody dreams, of course. Wouldn't you like to know what you dream about? What if you solve crazy math problems or mysteries of the universe? What if you've discovered the cure to many fatal illnesses in your dreams but you can't remember?"

"You're right! I'm a genius so my dreams must be genius too. Let's try the machine on me. You'll be the controller. It's quite easy to operate. You sort of just think what you want and it happens. That's the beauty of dreams. Let me turn on this computer. Oh crap, I haven't turned it on in four years and it wants to install 656 updates."

Nan and Grievous didn't want to think about the reality of their situation so they pretended it wasn't happening. Nan's chances of ending up in Republic prison were high. Nan doubted she'd make it there without hanging herself with her tail. Grievous probably faced the death penalty. The Jedi's decision to give them a momentary reprieve was a small blessing.

Nan got the machine booted up and checked the hardware and software. It seemed to be working fine but one couldn't really know until one tried it. Grievous didn't really care, but he asked what the risks were.

"You can get stuck in a dream forever, I guess. You shouldn't contact the person whose dream you're observing because that increases the chances of getting your mind lost. I don't know what happens next. I guess you just kick around in a dream until your body dies."

"Oh. Okay."

Nan got the machine ready and locked their door. She picked up a probe and said she needed to attach it to some bare skin.

"I'll attach it to your eyelid."

"That's my eyeball. Ouch."

"My bad."

She dug a probe into the fur on her forehead and curled up on the bed. Grievous sat in a chair.

"What if I can't get to sleep?" He asked. "We just took a nap."

"I'm going to send a pulse that will put us to sleep simultaneously."

She pressed a button on the computer and they went to sleep. As the controller, Grievous kept his wits about him (such as they were) and observed Nan's dream from the side. It began on a dusty road through a dusty plain with vague mountains in the distance. Nan walked along the road and picked up golden pocket watches. She attached them to a chain. The sky darkened and she approached a dark wall of impenetrable blackness, or maybe it was an ocean. Four little creatures were assembling an airplane out of feathers and construction paper. Suddenly, a monster appeared. It was a sort of troll with a bone through its nostrils and grubby, stumpy hands and feet. The creatures scattered but Nan stood her ground and tossed what had been a chain of pocket watches at the troll. It was now a little roulette wheel on a string, however, it felled the troll. Nan somehow really quickly buried the body. The little creatures ran over and started sniffing at the dirt.

"Do not stand there!" Warned Nan. "That foul beast may dig himself out with his claws again!"

The creatures jumped back and turned into Nan's children. They looked at her with uncomprehending, animal faces. She tried to cajole them into coming back but they ran off. She turned toward the airplane they had built, but it was gone and so was the wall of blackness. Now there was a mansion. Nan went in. There were people sitting at a table in the lobby, but their faces were too foggy to reveal any identities.

"What do you want in here? Why have you come?" They asked.

"I am looking for my lost love," said Nan.

She went past the people down a hallway that was a nightmare of unopened packages and carts. It ended in three small doors. Nan opened the first door but it led to blackness. The second door led to a room occupied by an NMR machine. The third door had some pamphlets attached to it that presumably described the places it led to. None of the place names were familiar to Grievous. They included New York City, St. Louis, Babylon, and Helsinki. Unreal cities. Nan let the pamphlets drop and went through the door. She ended up on a beach. For some reason there was a rotary evaporator on the beach and Nan started searching for a bump trap and flask.

Grievous got tired of this nonsense. Where were the life-changing formulas and equations? Nan just dreamt the same sort of crap as him and was lucky enough not to remember it. Grievous tested his power as controller and made a round bottom flask appear. Nan picked it up. Grievous looked down at himself and realized that this was a freaking dream. He could be whatever he wanted to be. He turned into a silver-furred cat-monkey thing and jumped onto the beach. Nan looked up, saw him, and recognized his yellow eyes. She also realized this was a dream and Grievous had broken the only rule.

"You idiot! Crap only knows what will happen now!" She said.

"I don't care. Let our minds burn out, at least we perish together."

They hugged each other. The sky seemed to catch fire. Red and orange flashes dashed around like flaming comets. The ground heaved and the ocean boiled. Sand turned to glass. The leaves were whipped off the palm trees and turned into bullets. A noise started up in the distance, a beeping and a wailing. Darkness started to inundate the scene. The destruction of the beach, the trees, and even of the love and pain the two friends felt for each other, was imminent.

Some circuit in the old computer came to life and it woke them up with a zap of electricity to the brain. Nan jumped toward the garbage can, ignoring the probe that yanked out some of her fur, and hurled in it. Grievous could not hurl but he felt quite lousy too. Nan knelt over the bin for a while until her stomach settled. Then she started to laugh.

"What's so funny?" Asked the General.

"That was epic. You totally disobeyed the only instruction I gave you and we nearly died or something. Did you really want us to perish in a dream together?"

"It seemed like a lofty idea at the time."

"You need to stop getting these ideas. Last time you let Dooku discover our plans."

"Do you regret this time?"

"No, of course not. You make a cute rat, you know! But let's not die until we need to, eh?"

"Certainly. We who were dying are now living, with a lot of perseverance."[1]

"Let's use the machine on somebody else. I think I can get the probe to work wirelessly. A Jedi will notice if we attach it to him or her but there's got to be someone dumber on this ship."

The next day, Anakin and Ahsoka met up with Nan and Grievous in the cafeteria. Jar Jar Binks showed up too after a while. He looked rather upset. Anakin urged Ahsoka not to engage him in conversation, but she did so anyway. Jar Jar explained that he had an awful recurring nightmare that repeated ten times. Each time, he got a knock at the door and went to open it. There was something burning on the doormat so he stomped out the fire with his foot, only to realize that it was a burning bag of crap.

"Jar Jar, did you remember in each subsequent dream what the bag contained?" Asked Anakin.

"Meesa did so."

"Then why the hell did you keep stomping on it?"

Footnote

[2] This is the flipside (if I may even dare to say so!) of a quote from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, "We who were living are now dying / With a little patience."