Anakin hadn't watched entertainment holomovies much in the past. Jedi were supposed to be above such frivolous entertainments, and as Darth Vader he had had neither the time nor the inclination. But occasionally he had watched holodramas with Padme, and had been amazed at how much more realistic the images looked, even on a small projector, than the crackly blue holograms of recorded messages or virtual conferences. And what appeared in the stone dish in front of him now, as his hover-chair hung beside the sofa in the living-room, was like the most vividly detailed hologram he had ever seen. This, Cheiron had explained to him, was a way of viewing memories – specifically, the memories of the red-haired lady he had already seen in Konstantine's memory – but viewing them from a distance, instead of intruding into someone's brain.

This story could well have been an adventure romance set on an exotic planet in the Outer Rim. Two starship captains – a woman from a Core planet, and a man from a Rim planet – met by chance when their crews had landed on the same newly discovered world and had fought each other and amongst themselves. Left to themselves, with only a badly injured crew member for company, of course Commander Cordelia Naismith of the Betan Astronomical Survey and Captain Aral Vorkosigan of the Barrayaran Imperial Service would have to work together to survive, and as they trekked across a landscape of gold and silver foliage beneath a turquoise sky, fending off attacks from the local animals, of course they would fall in love.

Anakin was reminded sharply of when he had been a child, looking up the stars and wanting to explore every world in the galaxy. Had Cordelia Naismith grown up with the same dream? Did she even come from the sort of planet where you could look up at the stars, the way you could from the deserts of Tattooine?

He wasn't sure why he identified Beta Colony with the Core and Barrayar with the Rim. He had no idea of the layout of this universe, and it certainly wasn't the accents that gave him the hint. If anything, Aral's accent sounded closer to Coruscanti and Cordelia's sounded closer to that of humans on Tattooine than the other way around. It was just something about the different cultures.

One way in which it differed from a holodrama was that the people didn't look so young and glamorous. In a holo, the heroes were usually impetuous young adults in their teens or early twenties: the sort of foolhardy youth than Anakin could just about remember being. It wasn't as if he had stayed a hero past that age, after all. Would Luke? Or was he doomed to grow up to repeat – well, probably not Anakin's mistakes, but Obi-Wan's, meaning that his padawan would repeat Anakin's mistakes, and so on, forever? No – Luke knew better than that. He was able to be a good person because he had even less of a conventional Jedi upbringing than Anakin had had, and was able to be a sane human being.

The first flask of memories lasted only a few minutes: up until the burial of the dead crew member, Reg Rosemont. Anakin wondered whether Konstantine had been the one to kill him, as well as shooting the other young man, Ensign Dubauer. Anakin could sense feelings of guilt from him, but that might have been about the helpless and convulsing Dubauer.

Apart from the one glimpse of Konstantine behind the muzzle of a lethal weapon, this didn't seem to be his story. Anakin wondered why Konstantine had thought it so important for Anakin to see this. A vainer man might have assumed that any story in which he featured even peripherally was really about him, but Konstantine was about as devoid of egotism as anyone could be while still conscious.

No, Anakin realised, this was the point. Konstantine wanted to show them this because it wasn't about him, because it was about the people he loved and looked up to, and he wanted to give Anakin the memory of what good mentors were like.

'Do you have any thoughts?' Cheiron asked, as the vision ended. 'Any questions, or something that struck you?'

'They're going to fall in love, aren't they?' said Wonder. 'Aral and Cordelia. When humans meet and immediately start arguing and insulting each other, it means they like each other.'

'Not always,' said Anakin. 'Sometimes it simply means they hate each other.' He remembered the Princess of Alderaan, and how, when taken prisoner, she had insulted him, Grand Moff Tarkin, and any other Imperials she could find, because words were the only weapon left to her. Cordelia, in the memory-vision, seemed in a similar mood, but, as an adult and officer rather than a teenager, her anger was tempered by practical considerations like how can I ensure survival for myself and my injured crewmate? 'And sometimes people meet and like each other, without quarrelling,' he added. He remembered the first time he had seen Padme. That Alderaanian princess had looked so much like her, but her mind had felt so different. Padme had never hated him like that, even when he was strangling her to death…

No. He couldn't think about that, not now. Think about something else, anything.

'Anakin? Was there something you noticed about the memory?' asked Cheiron.

'When Aral offered to cut that man's throat, to put him out of his suffering, and Cordelia refused,' said Anakin slowly, 'it reminded me of Obi-Wan. Chopping my limbs off and refusing to kill me, but leaving me to burn to death.'

Cheiron said nothing, but Anakin could feel his sympathy, and encouragement to continue.

'It is not exactly the same,' Anakin admitted. 'They are caring for Dubauer, not abandoning him to die slowly or fall into the hands of enemies. But – "No man could wish to live on like that," – that is how I felt.'

'How you felt,' repeated Cheiron. 'Do you now? Do you regret that you survived as long as you did?'

Anakin considered. 'No,' he admitted at last. 'Not any more.'

'Why not?'

'Because I finally met my son. I died looking into his eyes.' Anakin sensed a spark of recognition-memory-sympathy-sadness from Severus, who hadn't seemed to be showing more than cat-like emotions up until now.

It occurred to Anakin that this was a thoroughly selfish reason, and certainly did not make up for the harm he had wreaked on so many people, including Luke, in the twenty-three years leading up to that moment. 'And because I finally killed Palpatine,' he added. Another pulse of fellow-feeling from Severus.

'How do you feel about being here now, and still being disabled and needing other people to look after you?' asked Cheiron. 'Do you feel that your life here, now, is worth living?'

'Yes.' Anakin was surprised how clear he was about that.

'What makes the difference?'

'When Hephaestus has built my new hands, I will be able to do useful work.'

'I'm sure you can,' said Cheiron. 'But you're welcome here whether you are able to work or not – or whatever sort of work you can or can't do. You're valuable because you're a person, just as Konstantine is, or Severus – never mind that he's a person who is currently a cat…'

'And me?' put in Wonder sharply. 'Or don't robots count, since we are built only to perform a function?'

'Of course you do,' said Cheiron. 'You obviously are a person, or you wouldn't be asking me that question. How many robots do you and Hephaestus repair whose original purpose no longer exists, and who need to decide what to do next, just as much as organics do?'

'Some,' Wonder admitted. 'We still don't know what to do about that one who keeps complaining that because he has a brain the size of a planet, everyone around him is depressingly stupid.'

'No, he needs to find the answer to that for himself,' said Cheiron. 'But, going back to you, Anakin – I asked you, is your life now worth living? Or suppose you were as disabled as you are now for the rest of your stay here, until you reincarnated. Would your life still have meaning?'

'Yes.'

'Why?'

'Because – I have friends now. And because the problems I need to solve are nothing to do with having arms and legs.'

Cheiron poured in the second bottle of memories, which covered three days of walking and three nights of camping in the space of a few more minutes. Anakin could track the time not just by the interludes of sharing revolting-looking rations (or whatever they could hunt) and taking turns to keep watch through the night, but by how the three walkers became steadily grubbier and, in the case of the two men, more bearded as the trip wore on, and how much more Aral was limping as the leg wound he had taken in the opening memory got worse. Watching, Anakin could smell everything from stale sweat to roasting meat to incontinent brain-damaged man: another feature of memories that didn't normally appear in holograms. The scenery, too, looked more varied than in most holofilms that weren't travelogues, as the characters walked from mountains to plains and from forest to sparsely vegetated near-desert.

And yet – the rock-strewn badlands, prowled by hungry animals and nasty stinging minibeasts (of which poor Dubauer was getting the worst) might not look as idyllic as frolicking with Padme in a flowering meadow, but Cordelia's laughter, or Aral's joyous smile when Cordelia was impressed at his hunting skills, weren't far different from Anakin's memories of Naboo. He laughed himself, especially when the camping trip involved explosions. Beside him, he could feel Konstantine's spirits rise with the same boyish enthusiasm at using explosives to light a campfire or setting fire to the hovering hydrogen-beasts to scare off predators. He could also feel a mental snort of amused derision from Severus that, if the cat had been thinking in human words, would probably have translated as 'Gryffindor show-off!'

The third memory covered only one day of walking, and more of the conversation as the travellers trudged on:

"You have the competence one would look for in a mother of warriors."

"Save me from that! To pour your life into sons for eighteen or twenty years, and then have the government take them away and waste them in cleaning up after some failure of politics – no thanks."

Except, Anakin reflected, it was easier to get away with when the soldiers were either droids who had no parents, clones whose progenitor didn't need to care about all however many hundred thousand of them as long as he had one child he could call his own, or Jedi who had been taken from their parents as toddlers and had long forgotten them. Apart from him, of course.

Onstage, the conversation cycled round, through family background, bereavement, the horror of seeing family members murdered in a civil war, and so back to war:

"At a distance, in space, there's the illusion of a clean and glorious fight. It might be a simulation, or a game. Murder – murder is different. That day at Komarr, when I killed my Political Officer – I was angrier that day than the day I – than another time. But close up, you see your own death in the face of your victim."

Anakin trembled, remembering the day he had massacred that Tusken village, even the Uli-ah, the younglings. Aral Vorkosigan was not, Anakin was sure, a man who would kill non-combatants, and certainly not children. But he was a troubled man with hurt and anger in his soul, a man who had, at any rate, balanced precariously on the edge of the Dark Side. Not an insufferably perfect Jedi like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

More conversation, about Konstantine – as Aral finally pieced together how Konstantine must have saved his life by pretending to side with the mutineers, pretending to murder him, and hiding his unconscious body out of sight – and then about weapons:

"Why can't you people use civilised weapons, anyway? I'd as soon give a disruptor to a chimpanzee as a Barrayaran. Trigger-happy goons." [Anakin wasn't sure what a chimpanzee was, but decided to assume it was some sort of beast, probably something like a wampa.]

"I have an aversion to stunners. Nobody hesitates to rush one, and if there are enough of them then they can always get it away from you in the end. A disruptor has real authority."

"On the other hand, nobody hesitates to fire a stunner. And it gives you a margin for error."

Cordelia's voice sounded oddly like, and unlike, Obi-Wan's lectures about how lightsabres were honourable, civilised weapons, not like crude blasters. Betans had a different definition of 'civilised', evidently. Anakin tried to recall whether Obi-Wan had ever given him a lesson on incapacitating opponents without harming them. As far as he could recall, Jedi methods of dealing with confrontation seemed to go from mind-tricking adversaries to chopping off a limb, at the very least.

By evening, the conversation had turned to Barrayarans' tendency to abuse prisoners:

"It's an infection of the imagination. It's worst when it goes from the top down. I hate most how it affects the younger officers, when they encounter it in the men they should be molding themselves on. They haven't the weight of experience, to fight it in their own minds, nor distinguish when a man is stealing the Emperor's authority to cloak his own appetites. And so they are corrupted almost before they know what is happening."

Anakin could feel Konstantine's mind suddenly sharply wrenched by guilt, much more painfully than over having maimed Dubauer. Evidently, he was one of those soldiers who had been corrupted into mistreating prisoners. Not that he was young and inexperienced, but equally, he wasn't an officer. Anakin remembered the snatch of Konstantine's own memory that he had caught, of the young woman with long black hair, her expression glassy-eyed with terror.

He wished he could reach out through a proper Force bond to reassure, but telepathy could only be one-way with non-Sensitives. Instead, he stretched out his telekinesis to give Konstantine's hand a reassuring squeeze, before he spoke.

'I have done terrible things,' he said. 'To my wife, my son, and' (the woman who is almost certainly my daughter) 'his closest friends.'

To his surprise, he realised he could also feel Severus's mind spiking with guilt. Cheiron caught sight of him glancing curiously at the cat, who sat at the far end of the sofa from Anakin, with Konstantine between them. 'If you're wondering whether Severus was a war criminal who tortured prisoners, then no, he wasn't,' the centaur said. 'But he had been nominally in charge of a school where he had no real power to stop some of the teachers from torturing children, or even forcing children to torture each other. They were outside his command, rather like the Political Officers Aral had to deal with. Was that what you were remembering, Severus?'

The cat miaowed mournfully. No.

'About Lily?' Cheiron asked gently. Severus nodded faintly. 'I know that was a mistake, Severus. I know you meant to protect her. And I know that doesn't help.'

Severus stood up, and for a moment Anakin thought he was going to run out of the room. Instead, he padded across the sofa, and climbed over Konstantine's lap and into Anakin's, but close enough that Konstantine could also reach to stroke his soft fur.

Aral and Cordelia were telling thinly disguised confessions about past relationships, Aral describing how his marriage when he was much younger had ended in violence and tragedy, when he had found out that his wife was having affairs, had murdered her lovers, and then…

"He stopped at his wife's apartment, to tell her what he'd done, and returned to his ship, to wait for arrest. She was enraged, full of wounded pride, and she killed herself. Shot herself in the head, with his service plasma arc. He went through that whole afternoon like a sleepwalker, or an actor, saying the expected lines, and at the end his honor was no better for it. Nothing was served, no point was proved. It was all as false as her love affairs, except for the deaths. They were real."

Yes, this was someone who was sometimes perilously close to the Dark Side, and yet had managed to be a mostly honourable man, most of the time. Perhaps this was as much as any of them could manage.

Sorry to go over the same territory - I'd meant to get further into the vials of memory than just the first three flasks' worth that Konstantine had been previewing the previous day. But there's so much to take in that they need to take things slowly.