Happy morning everyone! Happy to still be writing and training hard!
Onto the chapter.
Maya—Winner.
Time: 10.42:655.
Cadus could hardly believe his eyes. A girl's name and the words beside it were represented in Aurebesh lettering, suspended in the air above the computer console's holocomm. He'd found the data in an article that had recently been posted by a journalist and former Podracer pilot. Although Podracing remained illegal throughout the core galaxy, the far reaches were emboldened to write about the dangerous sport. The article was a history of the Boonta Eve Classic, a once-famous Podrace competition that had been held annually at the Mos Espa Arena on Tatooine for many years.
The same race where Anakin won the freedom of himself and his mother.
The article provided a list of Boonta winners and other participants. According to the data, Anakin Skywalker's victory had occurred roughly fourteen years earlier than Maya's, and Maya beat his time by five solid minutes. Cadus studied the article with amazement. He navigated through the article and found a holographic image and schematics of Maya's podracer, an open-cockpit repulsor-lift chariot reined with two long, sleek engines.
Fortunately, Holdfast had provided images of Maya. She was a moppet and clearly of a peasant birth.
Examining the schematics for Maya's podracer, Cadus wondered how a person could fit in that contraption. And then it hit him. Although the chariot was too small for an adult human, it could fit a child. He recalled what Qui Gon said, just before they left to confront the Trade Federation on Naboo. Qui Gon had said that Anakin was already a great pilot and was destined to be more. Cadus had known better than to assume anything. What Qui Gon could've meant by that statement was anyone's guess.
From personal experience, he knew Pod-racing was an incredibly dangerous sport. Shortly after a battle more than one hundred years ago, circumstances had led him to climb into the cockpit of a Podracer—it had previously belonged to a Muun—and compete in a Podrace on the planet Muunilinst. With Jedi Master reflexes, his life experiences, and the Force as his ally, it had taken some effort for Cadus to survive. Although he could imagine Maya fitting into a Podracer's cockpit given her ragamuffin appearance, however he couldn't think of any good reason why a child would have been allowed behind the controls of such a sleek and streamlined machine. He scanned through the data in the article. According to the article, Tatooine had become a haven for illegal swoop bike races, pod races, and something more seedy that wasn't explicitly mentioned. A few veteran pilots of the Boonta were currently employed as mechanics or overseen certain aspects of the race.
Cadus slowly sipped his coffee as he set out the breakfast, letting the article he was reading churn inside of him. He decided right then and there, that something was going on. There were too many distractions piling up on the Jedi, and they were going to lose sight of something huge if they weren't careful.
"Master!" Talisibeth said as she entered the kitchen. "I've been trying to meditate as you've instructed, but I can't."
"Looks like you are energetic. How is Aola doing?" Cadus was standing in front of a quaint oven that took up little room while pots and pans simmered with seasoning filling the room with a pleasant wafting aroma.
Talisibeth looked genuinely confused. "Sir...You know how to cook?"
"Indeed. You look baffled."
Planted in her spot, Talisibeth stared at Cadus.
"What is on your mind?" Cadus asked, his own gaze shifting into one of observation.
"We're going to Tatooine."
Cadus turned the heat down on the burners, carefully gauging Talisibeth and her posture. "We? We as in...?"
Talisibeth took a deep breath, trying to ease her anxiousness. "I can't say for sure. I just know it's we Jedi...There's something we need to investigate there."
"Did you forget that Master Yoda has requested that you and Aola not be placed in harm's way? He may be requesting my presence at some point or will be contacting me again."
"If you don't mind me asking...Why should we wait?"
"There's the tournament. There are several politicians that will be coming here to begin the peace talks as well. With all of this happening, plus our own problems that only we can handle..."
"So we're just...unavailable to do the right thing?" Talisibeth asked.
"We just have to sort some stuff out." Cadus said as he began to plate everything. "If something serious is happening there...We'll be going there."
"Emergency?"
"I hope it doesn't get that far. I can't imagine what the response will be at this point in time." As Cadus was washing the dirty dishes, Talisibeth bit her tongue to keep herself quiet.
"Go on." Cadus said.
"Master...May I ask why we have to wait? Why can't we act on our own?"
There were some Jedi that had expressed no interest in learning more about the lives of the bygone era, Revan, Hoth, Malak, Ajunta Pall, and he knew that some would only get upset if they learned how emotional and determined their predecessors had been. Even going as far as to not touch on the Ruusan Reformation in full detail during lessons plans.
As evidenced by Talisibeth's question.
"It really comes down to politics and autonomy. But don't worry about that. We shouldn't be here longer than a few standard weeks. Whoever tried to distract us so much went through a lot of trouble."
"Don't worry? We're Jedi."
Cadus sighed softly. "You're a new generation. That's certain."
She looked at her Master. "I just have a feeling for stuff sometimes...It's how I got my nickname. Scout."
Cadus nodded. "You caused some trouble at times."
As he arranged the bowls and plates of food, he said the obvious. "Breakfast is done. Get Aola."
Talisibeth bowed her head slightly, doing as she was told. "Of course, Master.
On the top of a dilapidated skyrise in the Temple district of Coruscant, two droids were playing dejarik in the rain. They played extremely fast, moving each piece with blinding speed and precision; their fingers fell and rose like sewing-machine needles plunging through reams of syncloth.
The two droids were built to an identical design, humanoid and tall, but there the resemblance ended, as if they had been twins separated at birth, one to live in a palace, while the other was doomed to be an outcast, scraping out a hardscrabble existence in alleyways and gutters.
The first droid was immaculately painted in an ornate livery, cream with crimson piping on his limbs, the blood-and-ivory colors repeated in a formal checker on his torso. The red was somewhat light and shaded with brown, like the color of fox fur, or dried blood. The cream was tinged with yellow; the color swatch at the store where the droid had last retouched his paint had called the tint "animal teeth."
The outcast droid had long since worn down to bare metal, and never been repainted. His scratched face was gray, scuffed as if from countless years of hard service. He paused to look up into the rain. He was careful to scour himself every night, but still the rust crept into his joints and scratches, and his face was pocked where flakes and patches of metal had started to rust and been ruthlessly rubbed away.
The droids sat at the edge of the roof.
The scuffed one kept his visual receptors on the game, but his richly painted partner was constantly glancing up, looking out onto the canyon between buildings, the busy slidewalks and the constant flow of fliers humming by, and, farther off, the wide entrance and towering spire of the Jedi Temple.
Of course, from this little terrace, it would be very difficult to observe much of anything happening at the Temple . At such a distance, and with the rain falling, too, it would have required the eyes of a Horansi to see a bedraggled figure come splashing up to the Temple 's front doors.
To resolve that figure as an angry Troxan diplomat carrying a curious-looking diplomatic pouch would have taken something far beyond biological sight: something on the order of the legendary Tau/Zeiss telescopic sniperscope—etched transparisteel or neural implant reticle available on request—whose ability to hold its zero through a full range of adjustment from X1 to X100 had never been matched in the four hundred standard years since the last T/Z production line fell silent.
The cream-and-crimson droid paused, its fingers motionless over the board. Several kilometers away, through a shifting curtain of rain, the Troxan diplomat was arguing with the young Jedi standing sentry duty at the Temple doors. The packet changed hands.
"What are you doing?" his drab, gray partner asked. The diplomat splashed back through the rain to a waiting flier. The youngster disappeared into the Temple.
The liveried droid's fingers bent down through the holographic warriors on the circular gameboard to move a piece.
"Waiting," he said.
Jedi Master Maks Leem lifted the hem of her robe and hurried through the Jedi Temple, late in the evening some thirty nine months after the First Battle of Geonosis. The three shaggy brows above Master Leem's anxious eyes were tensely furrowed. Her jaw was long and narrow, even by Gran standards, and when she was anxious she had a tendency to grind her teeth, a ghostly holdover from the Gran's cud-chewing ruminant past. Master Leem was not normally of a nervous disposition.
Gentle, motherly, and placidly competent, she was a great favorite of the younger trainees, and very difficult to rattle. A Mace Windu, Cadus, or an Anakin Skywalker might grow restless at the Jedi's essentially defensive posture, but not Maks Leem. The Gran were a deeply social, community-oriented folk, and she had gladly given her life in service to the ideal of peacemaker. What she hated was that now, by slow but seemingly relentless degrees, she and the Jedi were turning, contemptibly, into soldiers. She thought the Republic's civil war was the worst thing that could ever happen. Then came the slaughter on Geonosis, claiming the flower of a Jedi generation in a single day.
The flash of plasma bolts, the taste of sand in one's mouth, the whine and shriek of battle droids—it seemed like a nightmare now, a confused blur of grief and pain. She had lost more than a dozen comrades, all closer to her than sisters. On the way back to Coruscant, Master Yoda had spoken of healing and recovery, but for Maks Leem the last thirty nine months had been hard, too hard. For her, it was easier to face memories of the battle than to cope with the terrible emptiness in the Temple. Sixty places set for dinner in a hall made to hold three hundred.
The west block of the kitchen gardens left fallow.
The rhythms of Temple life cut away due to lack of time. There was no time for gardening now, or mending robes by hand, or games. Now it was hand-to-hand combat, small-unit tactical training, military infiltration exercises. Food made in a hurry from ingredients bought in the city, and grave-eyed children of twelve, fourteen, and even younger suddenly monitoring comm transmissions, running courier routes, or researching battle plans.
The children worried Leem the most.
The Temple, now filling back up with adults, felt like a school the teachers had abandoned. Suddenly orphaned Padawans, with too few teachers and too many responsibilities.
Maks Leem feared for them.
As hard as Yoda and the other teachers tried to instill the ancient Jedi virtues, this generation could not help but be marked by violence.
It was as if they had been weaned on poisoned milk, she always thought.
For the first time since the Sith War one thousand years ago, there would be a generation of Jedi Knights who grew up surrounded by a Force clouded by the dark side, and be enshrouded in conflict. They were learning to feel with hearts made too old, too hard, far too soon. It was one of these children, a gentle, graceful boy named Whie whom she had taken as her Padawan, who had called her to the Temple entrance.
Maks had arrived to find the boy remaining remarkably serene, while enduring a good deal of moist bluster from a pompous, overbearing, and furious Muun diplomat, who could not believe he was to be stopped at the Temple doors by a mere boy. This Muun upon further observation, wasn't the usual greedy corporate of his kind, but the member of the CIS Council, San Hill.
Maks came to Whie's rescue at once, using the Force in the way that came most naturally to her, trying to soothe the Muun.
"And furthermore, you are a rude little boy! You sit there trying to play the serene listener like your seniors, but they are Palpatine's hitmen!"
Whie could have made the boisterous politician back down—the Force was strong in him—but Padawans were not encouraged to use their powers lightly. The boy's gifts had always been great...And, for this reason perhaps in consequence, he always took special care not to abuse them. There was also the rule of not meddling with politicians by using Force abilities. Whie looked towards her, then back to San Hill.
"You!" San Hill pointed a long finger at the Jedi Master. "Is this pompous little boy you're learner?"
"Whie, what have you done to upset him?"
"I've denied him entrance into the Temple. He requested to speak with Master Yoda and Master Windu. I cannot allow him in, regardless of what his political affiliations may be."
San Hill clenched his teeth, growing more and more agitated. He had never dealt directly with Jedi, preferring to leave that to the people he paid to handle them, and now he understood why he kept his distance. Dealing with this sanctimonious lot who believed they mattered so much that they could take control of galactic affairs was tedious at best. "I have a video that needs to be handed in Master Yoda's hands directly. The person who sent me wills it so."
Maks narrowed her three eyes, giving San Hill a careful look. "I can make sure it is delivered into Master Yoda's hand. I hope this will suffice, San Hill. As you know we do have rules forbidding anyone who isn't a Jedi into certain parts of our Temple."
"Yes, you continue to isolate yourselves. Is it a wonder why most of the galaxy hates you Jedi and accuses you of amassing great wealth while remaining exclusive? I am to deliver this to Master Yoda personally."
"You can't." Whie said calmly, a serene expression on his face.
"Make sure only Master Yoda receives this. If anyone else tries to get into the contents, they will not be alive for the remainder of the day." San Hill handed her the packet.
Just as he said, it was a high security diplomatic correspondence pouch, of a type in common usage by many Trade Federation worlds. A mesh of woven meta-ceramic and computational monofilaments, the pouch was both a container and a computer, whose surface was its own display. Most of that surface was presently covered with a bristling array of letters, the same message repeated in a few languages and Basic.
BUREAU OF DIPLOMATIC LIAISON Incendiary Packet MOST CONFIDENTIAL COMMUNICATION FOR: YODA.
Grand Master of the Jedi Order, Military Attaché to the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Senate.
WARNING! Listed Recipient Only! This Diplomatic Pouch Is Actively Enabled: Without Positive Identification Contents Will Plasmate on Packet Rupture!
The bag seethed in her hand, not unpleasantly, as computational monofilaments shifted and flowed under her touch until they cradled the palps of her fingers. It was rather like standing on the shore at the seaside and feeling the outflow of each wave pulling the sand gradually out from under her feet. A brief topographic map of her fingerprints appeared on the packet's surface. Another part of the packet cleared to a small mirror surface, with the ideogram for "eye" marked neatly above it.
Master Leem blinked at her own reflection, then blinked again as the packet flashed briefly with light.
Gill Pattern: Not Applicable Fingerprint Identification: Negative Retinal Scan: Negative Current Bearer cannot be identified as the intended recipient of this Bureau of Diplomatic Liaison Incendiary Packet. WARNING! CONTENTS WILL PLASMATE ON PACKET RUPTURE!
Maks and her Padawan exchanged looks.
"Might not be a good idea to drop that." Whie said, deadpan.
Maks rolled her eyes—another remarkably expressive gesture among the three-eyed Gran—and padded back into the Temple, looking for Master Yoda. She found him in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. He was perched on a boulder of black limestone that jutted out of a small pond. Approaching him from behind, she was shocked by how small he looked, sitting there, dumpy and awkward in his shapeless robe.
Like a sad swamp toad, she thought.
When she was younger, she would have suppressed the thought at once, shocked at herself. With age she had learned to watch her thoughts come and go with detachment, and some amusement, too. What an odd, quirky, unruly thing a mind was, after all! Even a Jedi mind. And really, with that great round green head and those drooping ears, a sad swamp toad was exactly right.
Then he turned around and smiled at her, and even beneath Yoda's weariness and his worry she felt the deep springs of joy within him, a thousand fountains of it, inexhaustible, as if he were a crack in the mantle of the world, and the living Force itself bubbled through him. The shaggy brows over Master Leem's three warm brown eyes relaxed, and her teeth stopped grinding. She picked her way down to the edge of the pond, gently brushing aside long fronds of fern.
The sound of water was all around, rushing over pebbled stream beds, bubbling up through the rock, or dripping into small clear pools: and always from the far side of the enormous chamber, the distant roar of the waterfall.
"I thought I would find you here, Master."
"Like the outdoor gardens better, do I."
"I know. But they aren't nearly so close to the Jedi Council Chamber as this room up here."
He smiled tiredly. "Truth, speak you."
His ears, which had pricked up at the sight of her, drooped again. "Meetings and more meetings. Sad talk and serious, war, war, and always war." He waved his three-fingered hand around the Room of a Thousand Fountains. "A place of great beauty, this is. And yet . . . we made it. Tired I am of all this . . . making. Where is the time for being, Maks Leem?"
"Somewhere that isn't Coruscant," she answered frankly. The old Master nodded forcefully. "Truer than you know, speak you. Sometimes I think the Temple we should move far away from Coruscant." Master Leem's mouth dropped open. She had only been joking, but Yoda seemed completely serious. "Only on a planet such as Coruscant, with no forests left, no mountains unleveled, no streams left to run their own course, could the Force have become so clouded."
Maks blinked all three eyes. "Where would you move the Temple?"
Yoda shrugged.
"Somewhere wet. Somewhere wild. Not so much making. Not so many machines."
He straightened and snuffed in a deep breath.
"Good! Decided it is! We will move the Temple at once. You shall be in charge. Find a new home and report to me tomorrow!"
Master Leem's teeth began to grind at double speed. "You must be joking! We can't possibly do such a thing now, in the middle of a war! Who could we find to—"
She stopped, and the three eyes that had been so very wide went narrow. "You're teasing me."
The old gnome snickered. She had half a mind to pitch the CIS packet at Yoda's smirking face but, remembering all the scary legal warnings on the side, she held her hand. "I promised I would give this to you."
Yoda scrunched up his nose in distaste. He gathered the hem of his robe up above his wizened knees and slid off the rock with a splash. It was an indoor garden near the top of a mighty artificial spire, after all, and the water in the pond was only shin-deep. He stumped to the shore and took the packet. Wrinkles climbed up his forehead and his ears twirled in surprise as the Incendiary Packet took its fingerprint scan.
Fingerprint Identification: Positive The reflective mirror appeared on the packet's surface.
Yoda stuck his tongue out at it and made a face.
Retinal Scan: Inconclusive Please present intended recipient's face or equivalent bodily communication interface to the reflective surface.
"Machines," Yoda grumbled, but he stared glumly into the packet. Retinal Scan: Positive Current bearer has been identified as the intended recipient of this Bureau of Diplomatic Liaison Incendiary Packet. Destruct device disabled.
A microperforation appeared around the edges of the packet and then the pouch peeled back, revealing the charred and battered handle of Jedi light-sabers and stubby finger like appendages. Yoda's own stubby green fingers curled lightly around them, and he sighed sadly.
"Master?"
"Pain there is. All that is left of them, this is."
Water dripped and whispered all around them in the garden.
"Of who, Master?"
"Thinking of the dead, have I been."
"The list hasn't been growing thanks to the recent diplomacy in the Senate. Too many were still lost and are still off world." Master Leem said bitterly. She was thinking of the last time she had seen these fallen Jedi. They had certainly shared dinner duty not long before they left, and some of them had gone down to the gardens to pick vegetables for the evening meal.
Yoda's face, dark in reflection, looked up at him from out of the pond. "More than just our fellow Jedi were killed. These appendages belong to creatures, and pain, they felt when these were removed...Some believe it possible to enter completely into the Force after death. Some have tried to tamper with certain things, using the spirits of the dead as power-in essence vanquishing it for their own greed."
"Surely...Nobody would ever..."
"Perhaps one can remain unique and individual. Can remain oneself. Does it not make sense..." Yoda held the stubby appendages in his hands, for some reason, unable to shake the grief that struck him.
"I would love to believe they are safe and free and laughing still, somewhere in the Force. I would love to, but I cannot. Every people longs for the hope of something after death. These hands and eyes have been knit into a shape by the universe, will hold it for a few score years, then lose it again. That must be enough. To enter more completely into the Force...One would have dissolve, like a fog or mist."
Yoda shrugged, looking down at the light-saber handles. "I wonder...Many do believe that suffering continues, and many believe in Nirvana."
He picked a pebble from a crack in the rock on which he was sitting. He smiled briefly, thinking back to his conversation with Cadus years prior. "If I drop this pebble into the pond, what will happen?"
"It will sink of course."
"And after?"
"Well, Master..." Maks paused. "There will be ripples, I suppose, spreading out."
Yoda's ears perked up. "Yes...The pebble strikes the water, and a wave carries out until ..."
"It reaches the shore."
"Just so. But is the water in the wave where the pebble drops the same as the water in the wave that touches the shore?"
"No . . ."
"And yet the wave is the same wave?"
"You think we can become . . . waves in the Force, holding our shape? And to go further, one can be destroyed while in this shape?"
Yoda shrugged. "Speak of this many times Jedi did in the past...Most recent, it was, Qui-Gon, Sifo Dyas, Cadus, Tahl, and few others have."
"I miss them so much. Tahl had a kind heart and had a profound understanding." Maks said sadly.
She had never really approved of them despite their noble views and intentions. They were too quick to rebel against the Order, too ready to oppose their solitary will to the good of the group. And yet they were brave and noble, and they were always kind to her when she was young.
She turned her attention back to broken light-sabers and sliced stubby finger-like appendages.
Was it just like them?
"A Muun who works for San Hill delivered this. We didn't detain him as to avoid any unnecessary quarreling all things considered...But who sent it to San Hill is the question?"
Maks wasn't sure Yoda had heard her question. For a long time he was silent, stroking the handles and appendages with his old fingers. "Have you a Padawan, Master Leem?"
She nodded.
"Your second?"
"Third. Rees Alrix was my first. She is still stationed somewhere between the mid-rim and outer-rim with the clone troops. My second was Eremin Tarn." She said reluctantly.
Eremin had become a follower of one of the more outspoken of the dissident Jedi, who believed the Republic had lost the moral authority to rule. Eremin had always resisted authority—including her authority when she was his Master, but he was fiercely principled. Intellectually, Maks could understand his decision to withdraw from the Order, but it had torn a hole in her Gran heart to see her very own Padawan, one she had taught from thirteen years to the status of a full Jedi Knight, deliberately cut himself out of the Order.
As if reading her mind, Yoda spoke.
"Does he fill that empty place in your heart, this new Padawan?"
Maks flushed and looked away.
"No shame in this, there is. Think you the relationship between Master and Padawan is only to help them?" Yoda cocked his head to one side and looked at her with ancient, knowing eyes.
"When the day comes that even I not learn something from the students—then truly, I shall be a Grand Master no more." He reached up to give her hand a little squeeze, his three fingers around her six.
"No greater gift there is, than a generous heart."
Tears came to Maks Leem, and she let them come. "Attachment is not the Jedi way, I know. But . . ."
Yoda gave her hand another squeeze, and then returned to considering the handles of the light-sabers and what creatures the appendages could have belonged to. For a moment she saw his finger stop on a little piece of metal, surprisingly clean and fresh looking, as if it had escaped the blast or been added afterward.
Yoda frowned.
"This Padawan of yours—ready for the wide galaxy, is he?"
"Whie? Well...No And yes. He is young. They are all so young. But if any of them are ready for the task...I believe he is. The Force is strong in him. Not so strong as in young Aola, Cadus, or Skywalker, but in the next few levels down...And between you and I, he carries it better than those three ever have. Whie is always calm. Such serenity and poise...Truly it is incredible in one so young."
"Truly...Intensity is something that is inborn. Not all possess it. Often, misunderstood, those are that possess this. Even I know..." Something in Yoda's voice caught her ear.
"You think it impossible for him being as he is?"
"I think he wishes to please you very much and enjoys being here in the Temple. I don't think he'll be suited to what happens out there. Especially during this time." The old Master said carefully.
Before she could ask him what he meant, a gong sounded the hour.
"I forgot...I have my class!" Maks said, slapping one hand against her forehead horns. "I am supposed to be teaching hyperspace navigation in Tower Three."
Yoda bugged out his eyes and made little shooing motions with his hands. "Then engage your hyperdrive you must!"
He watched as she ran from the chamber with the hem of her robe flapping excitedly around her hairy ankles and her boots thudding into the distance. When he was sure he was alone, he tapped the power switch on what had once been a light-saber. As he had suspected, the weapon had been modified; instead of Jang's blue blade humming to life, a hologram appeared.
What he didn't expect to see was Count Dooku, ten centimeters tall, as if standing on the lightsaber handle.
He was sitting at an elegantly appointed desk. There was a window behind him spattered with rain; behind it, a cheerless gray sky. Before him on the desk lay the candle Yoda had sent.
"We should talk since we've not had the chance since you seen me last being taken into custody." Dooku said.
Yoda's ears flattened and his eyes narrowed. Dooku did not look at the holocam, as if, even across weeks of time and the endless black chasm of space, he was afraid to look his old Master in the eye.
"There is a dark cloud over me now more than ever. I felt it growing in the Republic years ago. I fled it then, and tried to bring the Order with me. That same cloud is consuming me..." He rubbed his face wearily.
For the first time he looked up. His eyes were steady, except for a faint flicker of pure hatred, like the sound of howling typhoon.
"It's like a sickness. A fever in the blood. War and carnage are everywhere. Cruelty. Murder and killing, and some in my name. Some in your name. Blood like rain. I feel it all the time, the cries of the dying in the Force, beating in me like a vein about to burst."
He gathered himself.
"I have come to the end of myself. I am tired, Master. I feel as if I am truly on the razor's edge and whether I go one way or the next...I will not know if my head is to fly. I want to meet. But nobody outside the Temple must know. I am always watched in this cursed prison, and you are betrayed more profoundly than you will ever know, Master. Come to me when you understand...Jai will show you the way. We will talk. I promise nothing more. I think you not corrupt, but even you, Master, are deceived beyond your understanding."
His eyes came fully back into the present: shrewd and practical.
"I would be disappointed if you took my prison sentence as a tactical opportunity. If I see even the slightest sign of new forces deploying in the direction of the Hydian Way, I will abandon my current location, and carry the war forward until droid battle cruisers burn the life out of Coruscant with a rain of plasma fire. Bring none but Jedi with you."
He gave a sad, crooked smile.
"There are some things that should be kept inside the family . . ."
Count Dooku of Serenno, former warlord of a mighty army, among the richest beings in the galaxy, legendary sword-master, former student, notorious traitor, lost son, flickered in front of Yoda's ancient eyes, and went out. Yoda tabbed the lightsaber's power switch and watched the recording again, three more times.
He looked at the stubby appendages with burn marks cloven in. It was a clear indicator that whatever attack caused this amputation, it was the first rotation of movement.
It was only the beginning of the attack.
Shiim to Mou Kei in an instant taking them swiftly or...
A transitioning...
He clambered back onto his favorite rock, deep in thought. Somewhere above him, in his private quarters, messages from the Republic would be piling up. Messages from Palpatine would be coming through. Dispatches from military commanders, questions from far-flung Jedi about their various assignments and commands, when they would be coming home, or perhaps a summons from the Senate, a meeting request from the Chancellor's office itself.
He had come to know the weight of all those anxious eyes far too well.
Today they would have to wait. Today, Yoda needed his wisdom more than anyone else. He breathed deeply, trying to clear his mind of the anxiousness in meditation, letting thoughts rise up before him. Dooku's hands on that table, the hum of emotion like a current, making his fingertips tremble. Jai Maruk giving his clipped report in the cafeteria with everyone else, with the charred wounds of light-sabers fresh.
Farther back, he and Dooku in a cave on Geonosis. The hiss and flash of humming lightsabers, darkly beautiful, like dragonflies, and Dooku still a boy of twenty, not the old man whispering on top of a dead Jedi's blade. Yoda's ears slowly drooped as he sank deeper into the Force, time melting out beneath his mind like ice, setting past and present free to mix together.
That proud boy in the garden sixty years ago who murmured, Every Jedi is a child his parents decided they could live without. At one point they were all misting the orchids in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. It would always be bright days, with sunlight pouring through transparisteel panels, the students making puffs of water with and shrieking with laughter as every little cloud they made broke a sunbeam into colors, fugitive bars of red, blue, green, indigo, and violet.
Master! The colors are wonderful! Look it is light!
Those colors hadn't come to mean military signals, yet, or starship navigating lights, or lightsaber blades. Just boys and girls making rainbows. Dooku newly brought from Serenno, grave-eyed, old enough to know his mother had given him away. Old enough to learn one can always be betrayed.
And, there were others just like him-grave eyed, who knew far too much at too young of an age.
Water bubbled and seeped and trickled around Yoda, time past and time present, liquid and elusive: and then Qui-Gon was beside him. It would be wrong to say the dead Jedi came to Yoda; truer would it be to say Qui-Gon had always been there, in the still point around which time wheels.
Qui-Gon waiting for Yoda to find his way down the untaken path and pass through the unopened door into the garden at the still heart of things.
Yoda opened his eyes.
The feel of Qui-Gon in the Force was the same as always: stern and energetic, like a hank of good rope pulled into a fine sailor's knot.
Become a wave he has like they'd always discuss, Yoda thought.
A wave without a shore.
A ripple without a beginning nor end.
Yoda tapped the handle of the lightsaber. "You saw?"
I did.
"Cunning, it is. If I move to see him now, I must keep any of the Republic away from the Prison. Deny the chance of Palpatine or his officials to be around, must I, or else..."
He is a fencer, Qui-Gon agreed. Leverage, position, advantage—they are as natural to him as breathing.
"My old student—your old Master, Qui-Gon. The truth he is telling and what of...?"
There could be more to what he has to say.
Yoda's ears pricked up. "Hmm?"
He thinks he will lie to you.
A slow smile began to light Yoda's round face.
"To Dooku I must go." He murmured.
A moment later Yoda felt a vibration in the Force, a ripple rolling out from the student dormitories far below, or could it be from some far off place in the galaxy, like the faint sound of distant thunder or a distant cry for help.
Could it be the cry of the fellows who were losing appendages just like this?
Qui-Gon shivered and was gone, as if the Force were a pool of water and he a reflection on its surface, broken up by the splash of whatever disturbance had just struck.
"Look at this place..." murmured, nodding at the expanse of the Supreme Chancellor's office. "Even after ten years, the difference between Palpatine and Valorum. How this office was, in those days-"
Yoda lifted his head in that reverse nod of his. "Remember Finis Valorum well, I do. Last of a great line, he was."
Some vast distance drifted through his gaze. He might have been looking back along his nine hundred years as a Jedi. It was unsettling to contemplate that the Republic, seemingly eternal in its millennium-long reign, was not much older than Yoda himself. Sometimes, in the tales Yoda told of his long- vanished younger days, a Jedi might have heard the youth of the Republic itself.
Brash, confident, bursting with vitality as it expanded across the galaxy, bringing peace and justice to cluster after cluster, system after system, world after world.
For Mace, it was even more unsettling to contemplate the contrast Yoda was seeing.
"Connected with the past, Valorum was. Rooted deep in tradition's soil." In the wave of his hand, Yoda seemed to summon Finis Valorum's dazzling array of antique furniture gleaming with exotic oils, his artworks and sculptures and treasures from a thousand worlds. Legacies of thirty generations of House Valorum had once filled this office.
"Perhaps too deep: a man of history, was Valorum. Palpatine is a man of today."
'You say that as though it pains you."
'Perhaps it does. Or perhaps: my pain is only of this day, not its man.
'I prefer the office like this." Mace half nodded around the sweep of open floor.
Austere. Unpretentious and uncompromising. To Mace, it was a window into Palpatine's character: the Supreme Chancellor lived entirely for the Republic. Simple in dress. Direct in speech. Unconcerned with ornamentation or physical comfort.
"A shame he can't touch the Force. He might have made a fine Jedi."
'But then, another Supreme Chancellor would we need." Yoda smiled gently.
"Better this way, perhaps it is." Mace acknowledged the point with a slight bow.
'Admire him, you do."
Mace frowned. He'd never thought about it. His adult life had been spent at the orders of the Supreme Chancellor. but he served the office, not the man. What did he think of the Supreme Chancellor as a person? What difference coukl that make?
'I suppose I do." Mace vividly recalled what the Force had shown him while he watched Palpatine sworn in as Supreme Chancellor, ten years before.
Palpatine was himself a shatterpoint on which the future of the Republic-perhaps even the whole galaxy-depended.
"The only other person I can imagine leading the Republic through this dark hour is. well..." He opened a hand. "Only you, Master Yoda."
Yoda rocked back on his hover chair and made the rustling snuffle that served him for a laugh. "No politician am I, foolish one."
He still occasionally spoke as though Mace were a student. Mace didn't mind. It made him feel young. Everything else these days made him feel old.
Yoda's laughter faded.
"And no fit leader for this Republic would I be." He lowered his voice even further, to barely above a whisper. "Clouded by darkness are my eyes; the Force shows me only suffering, and destruction, and the rise of a long, long night. Better off without the Force, leaders perhaps are; able to see well enough, young Palpatine seems."