The Fall of the Infinite Empire

Chapter 52

Zhed-Hai stood on the beach facing the ocean, watching the waves roll gently in and out. He could hear the guards escorting Myra down to him, as well as feel her presence through the Force.

"I remember the day I found you in the fields of glass. I sensed the spark, the hint of the Gift within you. No one else could feel it, but I could. Now there is not a Rakatan alive who could not sense your power," Zhed-Hai called out to her without turning around to look her way. "All except those like my guards here."

Myra did not respond, she simply walked the rest of the way down the sand dunes to Zhed-Hai, and stood behind him.

"You could have escaped when they brought you out of the facility. They could not have stopped you. You would not even have needed to hurt them. Why didn't you leave?" Zhed-Hai asked, still looking out over the sea.

"Where would I go?" she asked.

"Anywhere you want. You could have forced the guards to go with you, to pilot a ship for you. The whole galaxy, open to you," he answered.

"Without my family?" Myra replied, now stepping forward to stand next to Zhed-Hai, looking the same direction as him.

"You could have gone back, tried to sneak them out. You knew I wasn't there once the guards I sent reached you," he said. "You would have had trouble fighting all my remaining guards at once, but if you were careful, you could have made sure that didn't happen."

Myra did not answer, and after a few moments Zhed-Hai turned to her.

"But of course escape is not your plan," he said menacingly. "Not today anyway. Today your plan was something quite different."

"You have Halvor," she stated. She and Halvor had intended to overpower the guards escorting Myra to Zhed-Hai's office and then lay in wait for the Elder, who, they thought, would leave his office when she did not arrive on time, to go look for her. But then she had been told that the Elder was waiting for her outside the compound. Outside the compound where Myra had not been in all the time since arriving here from Tatooine.

"Yes, though he has not been very forthcoming," Zhed-Hai said. "His will, it will break in the end. It always does. He has endured more pain than normal though. You must have given him quite the enticement."

"I promised to give him what he wants," she said.

"Which is what?"

"Me," Myra said calmly.

"How wonderful of you to give me what I wished for," he said sarcastically. "The plan, I suppose, was to kill me, yes?"

"That was the plan."

"Did you tell him why you want to do that?" Zhed-Hai asked. He had spoken throughout of this attempt on his life with perfect equanimity. "You bribed him; I understand. But I know Halvor. He wants to feel like a partner, not a servant. He would want a reason."

"I gave him one," Myra said.

"Was it the truth?"

Myra shook her head and turned her back to Zhed-Hai. "He wouldn't have understood the truth. I gave him a reason he could understand."

"What was it?" Zhed-Hai asked.

"Why do you care what lie I told?" she replied.

"I think one is entitled to be curious about the planning of one's own death," he answered.

"I told him that you were going to make us into your slave army, and bind us to machines, like the Maps or the Forge, and use us to rule over your people after you took their power away," Myra said.

Zhed-Hai smiled ever so slightly as he nodded. "The best lies start with a truth. Halvor is not a subtle man; easy to manipulate. Still I am surprised you lied to him. You knew your plan would likely cost him his life, and you used him."

"It had to be done," she said.

"Why?" Zhed-Hai said, for the first time with any hint of anger.

"Because I know what you are going to do, what you are really going to do."

Zhed-Hai circled around Myra, so that he was looking at her face again before asking, "And what is that?"

"You're going to kill them," she said.

Zhed-Hai considered her answer for a moment before asking, "Who?"

"Your people," Myra said.

The two of them simply stood there for a while, just looking at one another. Myra's face spoke of sadness, and Zhed-Hai's spoke of relief. At last, after all the centuries of hiding behind lies and masks, the truth had found him.

"No, not all of them," he said eventually.

Hearing him admit to something so monstrous briefly made Myra's head swim. She felt her arms and legs tingle and thought for a moment she would fall down. It was not that she had been unsure about what he was doing. His plan to spread her people across the galaxy as a way to bring an end to some kind of cosmic cycle of recrimination and retribution made no sense if the Infinite Empire was still in place. And whatever the obstacles posed by their current civil war, the only way to destroy the Empire was to destroy its people, and the bodies in the tubes showed that he had developed a way to do this. But the mind rebels at something so horrific, it desperately clings to the possibility it is wrong, that nothing like that could be about to happen. And so even as Myra had planned Zhed-Hai's murder to prevent that genocide, she hoped, at some level, that she was wrong. She found she could not look at him and lowered her gaze to the sand.

Zhed-Hai grew uncomfortable with Myra's shocked silence and continued, "Most will die, just as most of the subjects you saw below died. But some will live, their Gift taken from them. Enough will live that my people will continue, but they will be powerless. They will trouble no one. They won't even be able to make their ships work. Our ships work," he corrected himself with an ironic smile before continuing. "Your people, all the other peoples of the galaxy will be able to grow, explore, with no fear of the Infinite Empire."

He watched Myra for her reaction, but she did not look up.

"Say something," he said, before whispering, "please."

"Don't do this," Myra said, looking up at him.

"Why?" he said.

"How can you ask that? They are your people…," she started.

"Does that matter?" he interrupted. "I should care more about them because they are mine? No. I will look at them as they are. I will not blind myself to what is true. And the truth is, objectively, my people are an intolerable danger to the galaxy. They have slaughtered billions across the stars, including your own people, who were guilty of nothing but wanting to live in peace in their own home."

"A whole species can't be guilty for something that happened hundreds of years ago. How many Rakatans are alive today that were alive back then? How many children are you about to murder, who've never hurt anyone?"

"They will. If left to themselves, they will do it again. Do you think I want to do this?" the calm started to leak from his voice. "That I decided on a whim? That I enjoy it? No! They will slaughter your people again if they find you, and they will find you."

"You don't know! You think you can see the future, like it's set in stone, but you can't. It's not," Myra said.

Zhed-Hai shook his head and replied, "I am not talking about premonitions Myra. I am not peering through the mists of time. I am talking about right now, what I know is true right now, because I can see it. I know what my people are, what we have become. And what they will be. I have spent my life learning to understand living things, and how they work. Finding the limits, the constraints on their potential. You can push on those limits, but in the end, you can't undo them. Killing is the nature of my people. What we don't kill we dominate. It is what we have always been. It is in our genetic code. We could no more stop being what we are than we could grow wings."

"Is that all we are to you? Nothing but bodies that you can study and pick apart?" Myra asked.

"What else would we be?" Zhed-Hai replied.

Myra shook her head and shrugged, unable to find the words, "More. More than just meat."

"Of course we are more than just meat. We are life," Zhed-Hai said, turning away from Myra and to the sea once more. "I have spent my whole life studying all the forms life can take. All the wondrous diversity. For every sentient species a different way of being in the world. Unique, and beautiful. And my people, we are beautiful in our own way I suppose. The way a well forged weapon can be beautiful in its simplicity, and its perfect relationship between form and function. But our way will one day kill every other way. One by one all other sentient species will die, or be changed by someone like me into something less than they were, into a tool for us to use."

"Why do you keep talking about your people like they can only be one thing? You talk about all the beautiful different ways to be, well your people could be different. You could help them be different. You know it's wrong, what they are doing. So help them understand," Myra pleaded.

"For centuries I have thought about what I planned to do. I have explored every aspect of the situation, and weighed every possibility. So please spare me these pieties," Zhed-Hai said sharply. "If my people could be turned from this path, I would have done it. We can't. It is built into us. Millions of years spent fighting each other, and then the Celestials. Whatever possibility there was for us to be different died in fire, a fire which left nothing else behind but the weapon."

"Then how do you explain the fact that you can sit here and recognize that what you are doing is wrong?" Myra demanded.

"There are always outliers. Millions of Rakatans, there are bound to be a handful every generation who are different. Not enough, not enough to make a difference though," Zhed-Hai said, thinking of Gran-Nock far away on Korriban, or Za-Hell here on Lehon. "Even I, as you know, am not averse to the cruelties that come so naturally to my people. This knowledge I have, I have it only because I am what my people need me to be, a creator of solutions to problems. The problems of Empire. My service to my people has been nothing but perverting the life we find and enslave so as to make marginally more useful slaves. Because that is what we are, slave masters. That is all we could be. We were slaves ourselves once. The Celestials were our masters. And the slaves always rebel, as we did. And for the rebellion to triumph the slaves have to become like the masters, as we became like the Celestials. I was trained to help us be more like them. They moved whole star systems to fit their needs, I rewrote the genetic code of species across the galaxy; yours included. But in the process I learned the truth. The cycle that never ends. Master makes slaves, who either die or become the new masters. That is the only future for your people if I don't do this, to die, or to become like us. Because that is the only way you will beat us. And that cycle gives us nothing but a future of ugliness, of death and violence with no purpose, until one day, someone wins. Some species finds a way to kill everything that threatens it. Maybe that's us. Maybe it will be you humans, or something species yet to develop. But that is what the future holds. Unless I can stop it, and your people can become whatever you wish to be. Perhaps to become something that leaves room for other ways to be."

"You keep talking in these grand abstractions. I am talking about the innocent people, who have never done anything," Myra said.

"You are so sure these innocents exist. I say if they are innocent, it is simply through lack of opportunities," Zhed-Hai snapped.

"You're wrong," she insisted.

"You are so sure you know more," Zhed-Hai said, shaking his head angrily. "I have lived a dozen of your lives; I have planned this all since before you were born! But please tell me more of what you know, and give me more of your petty moralism!"

"You are angry at me?" Myra asked, genuinely shocked. "You are a monster, and you are angry with me for not thanking you for your butchery?"

"I do not expect gratitude!" Zhed-Hai yelled. "I expect you to use your mind, to try to understand!"

"Why did you even show me this? What was the point of giving me this knowledge, if you're just going to do it no matter what I think?" she shouted back, trying to restrain her tears.

"I just…I wanted someone to understand what I had done. To know why I did it, to know there was a purpose, a point to it all," Zhed-Hai said unsteadily. Myra's question was one he had asked himself before and always pushed away to avoid answering. All showing her the truth, or the clues necessary to figure out the truth, had done was destabilize things. But every time he had considered keeping all his secrets, taking them with him to the grave he had prepared for himself and all the rest of his people, his mind rebelled. He knew his work and its effects would live on, whether or not anyone knew it was his work, and he wanted to be the kind of person who could be content with that. But the thought that no one would ever know him, know what he had done and why, scared him more than the death he knew was bearing down on him.

"No, you want me to agree with you. You want me to tell you that it is ok. But it is not, and I am not going to tell you that it is to quiet your doubts or be a balm for your guilt…"

"Do not dare condescend to me!" he yelled.

"Wouldn't do for a slave to question her master I guess," Myra spat.

"Slave? You think yourself a slave? I have given you everything! You would not exist if not for me. Your people would have gone extinct long ago but for me. Your life, your power, your future, they are all yours by my choice. And when I tell you I will eliminate the one threat to your future, to the future of your children and their children, when I tell you that I will give the whole galaxy to your people, that I will sacrifice my own people to see this done, you dare claim I treat you like a slave?"

"I did not ask for this!" Myra yelled back. "None of us did! You didn't do this for us. You did it for your own reasons. You decide our future for us, you tie that future to atrocity, all without asking us. You leave us no choice but to live the galaxy you are making. I don't want to live in that galaxy. I want to live in one where we have peace without killing everyone else first."

"This is why I showed you, this is why you had to know. All I have done will be worth nothing if you do not understand what you have to do, what those who follow you have to do. I had to know whether your vision was clear, and it isn't. It is clouded by this foolishness. There are decisions you will have to make for your people to survive. And your people have to survive. If they don't all this will have been for nothing," Zhed-Hai said, unable to keep the desperation and fear out of his voice.

"I will never agree with this. I will never be like you. I will not let my people become like you."

Zhed-Hai felt increasingly weary as their discussion continued. There was no time to make her understand. It was the risk he always knew he would face. The leader of the Gifted humans would have to lack the kind of aggression so common in Rakatans, or else they would lead the humans to be no better than those they replaced. But that same peacefulness could conceal a weakness, an unwillingness to fight in one's own defense, in which case the humans would not survive. The realization that it all might be for nothing, that the fate of all his plans was no longer in his hands, but in hers, and that there was nothing he could do about it made him feel the years he had devoted to this plan, and he was tired.

And so it was with a much quieter voice that he finally answered Myra, saying, "Good. There is no place for beings like me in the world I am creating. That is the point of creating it."

Myra watched in silence as Zhed-Hai turned away and looked out again over the ocean. She looked around at the beach where he had summoned her. It was a rocky cove with white sand beaches. The path she had come down with the guards led up the hills to the plateau and the city beyond, though she had of course not come from the city, but rather from the compound, which had its own footpath up the side of the plateau. When she looked out over the water, she saw nothing but a few islands on the horizon. She stepped forward until her feet were almost in the water, but when the next wave came it stopped short of her, which left her puzzled.

"It's the tide," Zhed-Hai said. "The water comes in an out, several times a day. It's the moons above us. Their gravity pulls on the water."

"Tatooine had water like this once," Myra said, remembering the stories she had been told.

"Yes, once."

"What is this place?" she asked him. She could think of nothing else to say about the matter of his plan, nothing that could convince him, so she asked the question that had occurred to her as she walked down onto the beach.

"This is mine. It is part of the stretch of shoreline that was ceded to me for my research. I built the compound on the other side of that rock formation. I didn't really have any use for this, so I just come out here sometimes," he said. "To think."

"To think about your plan?" Myra asked.

"There is, there has always been more to my plan than just that. But yes, to plan."

"Do you ever see anyone else out here? Anyone else come out here to think?" She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice as she continued, "Do you see your people while you plan to kill them?"

"Access to this beach is restricted," Zhed-Hai said. He was feeling ever more tired and so he decided to sit down on the sand. Myra looked down on him, and for the first time thought he looked like the nickname everyone seemed to give him, the Old Man.

"I suppose it's easier that way," she said.

"Yes, it is," he said slowly.

Myra sat down as well, close enough to Zhed-Hai that he could reach out and touch her if he chose. She dragged a hand through the sand, moving from the wet, compact sand to the dry, loose sand, which stuck to her damp skin. She held her hand up and in the late afternoon sunlight the grains of sand twinkled.

"This is what all Tatooine will be one day, right? That's what you told me. It seems like a long time ago," she said.

"Yes," he answered. "You know, my plan means that one day soon, there will be no more Rakatans on Tatooine. Your people will be able to come up, out of their caves, and down out of the mountains in the north. They will, some of them, move across the open surface. If they are lucky enough to live long enough to adapt, then they might survive."

"Why some of them? Why not all?" she asked.

"Some of your people have already begun to adapt to the caves. You adapt so quickly, more quickly than any other species I have encountered. That was the key. Without that adaptability I would never have figured out how to give you the Force."

"How did you figure out how to kill your people?" Myra said, shaking her head. Everything with him was a puzzle, even the horrors.

Zhed-Hai grimaced. He had so wanted her to understand, to agree. She was right. He wanted someone to tell him it was alright, to tell him that they too thought it had to be done. The Celestial had agreed, but that was no comfort. There was no one else he could tell. He might as well, he thought, tell her the rest.

"It's the same thing," he said. "The way I gave the Force to you, that's the same way I take it from my people. And usually, when they lose it, they die. It's really the taking of their power that was the goal. That's what the Kwa and I worked on. They wanted to be involved so they could use it on their own people, or use the insights we gained to come up with a different solution, which is what happened in the end. But it all fell into place together, raising your people up, and bringing mine down."

"So it's…it's already happening?" Myra said, looking at her own body, slightly horrified at the thought that the death of this world was already within her.

"What? No. You have the germ within you, but it's not communicable on its own. It took a long time to figure out a delivery mechanism that would work for as many species as possible. I tried to make it work on the Sith. I had hoped that I could take them with us, but their physiology is peculiar. It will infect any human, giving them and their descendants the potential to use the Force. It will work the same way on most species. And it will infect Rakatans, taking the Force away.

"So it won't just be us?" Myra asked. "Humans won't be the only ones with your Gift?"

"No, though it doesn't quite work as well on other species."

"That's good at least, good that we won't be alone," she said. After that they both looked out at the water for a while before Myra spoke again. "You could let us try. If there are going to be lots of species with the Force, we will find a way to include them, to work together. We could do that with your people. Let us try. Let me try."

"It's not worth the risk," he said.

"Of course it is. If we can do it, of course it will be worth it," she said, allowing herself to hope, just a little.

"You won't stand a chance against them. You are strong Myra, stronger than most Rakatans, but your strength will be rare. If my people find you before you have had time to grow, and to expand, they will crush you."

"Maybe they won't find us. Maybe we will have time, and when they do find us, maybe we will be strong enough that they won't attack. And then we can try to learn to live together, or at least alongside each other."

"I think they will find you, quickly. They will go looking for you, if I leave them able to do so."

"You think! You don't know," Myra said, her calm slipping away.

"Of course I don't know," he said. "Biological necessity, that I know. But such contingencies? The future is a dark land."

"So?" Myra blurted out.

"What?" Zhed-Hai replied, puzzled.

"So it's dark, so what? I lived in the dark my whole life. You just have to set out, hope you find the path through. I know that you are trying to reduce the danger to us, but I am willing to accept the danger."

"And trust to hope?" Zhed-Hai said sarcastically.

"Yes," Myra said, with earnestness to match.

"I will not. I have not sacrificed so much, given so much, to risk it all," he said. He stood up, and extended his hand to Myra, who refused it and stood up on her own.

"Why did we meet here?" she asked him.

"You had your little assassination plot. It seemed safer."

"If you knew about it already, you could have stopped it without leaving the compound," she insisted.

"I suppose I wanted to see this place again. Some recent events have made me think of it more, and I wanted to be here, at least once more."

Myra looked at him quizzically before saying, "I just assumed you had a way to save yourself from whatever you've made."

Myra's words, and their suggestion that he lacked the strength of will to sacrifice himself, stung Zhed-Hai. But he much preferred the less confrontational tone their conversation had settled into, so he did his best to respond without defensiveness.

"There is no cure for what I have created Myra. If there was, then someone could figure out a way to take the Gift from you. There are treatments that can increase the odds of survival for my people. I have prepared those treatments for some loyal supporters. It is beyond my resources, beyond the resources of the whole Empire to provide it for everyone. But I won't be needing them. I will not die of my plague."

"Sorry," she said. "It just sounded like you meant you were going to die soon."

"I am," he said.

"Why?" she asked.

"I have trapped a god. Now I am going to deal with the demon."