"Master Nu," Windu said, with a smile. "It's nice to see you in the Council Chambers once more."
"Thank you," the librarian replied, inclining her head. "Unfortunately, I bring dire news."
"...you do?" Windu asked, worried now. "What kind of dire news?"
"Dire news coming out of the library is usually either trivial or an absolute disaster," Ki-Adi-Mundi contributed. "Which is it, so we can decide how worried to be?"
"Quite possibly, both," Nu told him. "To summarize… Masters, two years ago we discovered that the Sith were not extinct. With this in mind, I have been engaged on a long-term project – I evaluated data about the discovery, admittance, tenure and ultimate loss of every single Jedi for which we have data. Every one in our archives."
"Now I understand why it took so long," Even Piell said. "In fact, I credit your skills for taking so little time. That must have been… what, a thousand years… there are ten thousand knights now… hundreds of thousands of Jedi total?"
"Around that," Nu confirmed. "But the problem is… this. This is the number of active Jedi at any one time, during the first hundred years after Ruusan."
Her holoprojector activated, showing a kind of flow diagram made out of strands of light. Light yellow marked those newly discovered and accepted as initiates, green padawans, blue for knights and purple marked those who were masters. The tiny Order, wounded but triumphant in the years immediately after Ruusan, was reborn and swelled as it gained more members and those members it had reached greater degrees of Mastery.
"Two hundred years," Nu went on, as the diagram swelled and zoomed out. The growth was slower now, harder to see on the same scale, but the Order pulsed in colours of green and blue and purple as the Golden Age of the Republic continued.
"...you said this was dire?" Adi Gallia asked.
"We'll get there," Nu said, accelerating the projection a little.
As it ran forwards, decade after decade passing by until it approached the present, Master Yaddle leaned forwards in her seat.
She wasn't the only one. It was subtle, almost imperceptible, but the Jedi Order – which had swelled to enormous, triumphant scale during the Golden Age – had begun to contract again.
By the time it reached the present day, it still possessed deep reserves of strength, but the colouring was… just a little different. The purple of Mastery was less common, though the blues and greens of Knighthood and Padawan were still fully present, and Nu manipulated her controls a bit more.
A second strand appeared, this one much thinner and more intermittent. And, as time tracked towards the present, it went from a shading of mostly blue hundreds of years ago to shades that were a little more green.
"This is the members of our Order who left our ranks due to their death," Nu explained. "While the differences year-to-year are so minor that I would hesitate to describe them as meaningful, when given the long view and looked at in aggregate the effect is clear."
She folded her arms. "The Sith faced by Knight Kenobi is the anomaly – an open Sith attack which makes no pretensions as to what they are. This is what I would call a true threat, Councillors. Not a single Sith who seeks to kill individual Jedi in a duel, but a centuries-long program of gradual, subtle, pervasive damage to the Jedi Order, chiefly through the loss of Padawans before they become Knights."
"You think the Sith are behind this?" Ki-Adi-Mundi asked.
"Behind any given casualty?" Nu asked. "...no. I have no proof I could offer, though a detailed examination of the loss of any given Padawan may conclude that there was some other factor behind their death. Behind the whole pattern? I think it's quite possible, Master Mundi. We know the Sith can plot and plan for something for a thousand years, and there are only two targets for such a plot that make any sense – ourselves, and the Republic."
She met the gaze of each councillor in turn. "If this is not due to the Sith, my friends, then we must ask ourselves – what is? They have been doing something for ten centuries and we know nothing about it."
After a slightly dismayed silence, Yoda tapped his gimmer stick on the floor.
"Much to think about, we have," he said. "Master Nu – more to say, have you?"
"Yes," Nu replied. "My presentation, I hope, serves as a reminder that the Sith did not appear out of nowhere two years ago. They have been doing things over the last thousand years, and it is quite possible that we have run into their machinations without identifying them as such… it would be a great mistake to generalize from the Sith defeated by Knight Kenobi."
"...hmm," Windu said, frowning. "During the interrogations of Nute Gunray. He said that his actions were based on a shadowy figure pressing him to get a treaty signed by Queen Amidala of the Naboo. That treaty would have benefitted the Trade Federation, but nobody else."
"The wording of the treaty, benefit the Trade Federation, it would," Yaddle said. "The existence of the treaty – benefit someone else, perhaps?"
In his office, Sheev Palpatine paused halfway through reading a law.
He had the strange feeling that he'd just been betrayed by his greatest ally. But that was nonsense, since the closest thing he had left to a true ally was paperwork…
AN:
If you have Big Data, you can solve a lot of problems.