Star Wars - The New Jedi Order - Traitor Read online

  Some unknown time later, an unguessable distance away, in a region indistinguishable from the first save by the altered parallax of certain stellar groups, the same vessel performed a similar maneuver.

  On its long journey, the vessel might fall into the galaxy any number of times, and each time be swallowed once more by the nothing beyond.

  Jacen Solo hangs in the white, thinking. He has begun to riddle out the lesson of pain.

  The white drops him once in a while, as though the Embrace of Pain understands him somehow: as though it can read the limit of his strength. When another minute in the white might kill him, the Embrace of Pain eases enough to slide him back into the reality of the room, of the ship; when the pain has crackled so hot for so long that his overloaded nerves and brain have been scorched too numb to feel it, the Embrace of Pain lowers him entirely to the floor, where he can even sleep for a time, while other devices--or creatures, since he cannot tell the difference anymore, since he is no longer sure that there is any difference--bathe him and tend wounds scraped or torn or slashed into his flesh by the Embrace's grip, and still more creature-devices crawl over him like spider-roaches, injecting him with nutrients and enough water to maintain his life.

  Even without the Force, his Jedi training gives him ways to survive the pain; he can drive his mind through a meditative cycle that builds a wall of discipline between his consciousness and the white. Though his body still suffers, he can hold his mind outside the pain. But this wall of discipline doesn't last forever, and the Embrace of Pain is patient.

  It erodes his mental walls with the inanimate persistence of waves against a cliff; the Embrace's arcane perception somehow lets it know that he has defended himself, and its efforts slowly gather like a storm spinning up into a hurricane until it batters down his walls and slashes once more into everything Jacen is. Only then, only after it has pushed him to the uttermost limit of his tolerance then blasted him beyond that limit into whole new galaxies of pain, will the Embrace slowly relent.

  He feels as if the white is eating him--as if the Embrace eats his pain, but never so much that he can't recover to feed it again. He is being managed, tended like wander-kelp on a Chadian deepwater ranch. His existence has become a tidal rhythm of agony that sweeps in, reaches an infinite crest, then rolls out again just far enough that he might catch his breath; the Embrace is careful not to let him drown.

  Sometimes, when he slips down from the white, Vergere is there. Sometimes she crouches at his side with the unblinking predatory patience of a hawk-bat; sometimes she stalks around the chamber on her back-bent legs like a dactyl stork wading through a swamp. Often, she is incongruously kind to him, tending his raw flesh herself with oddly comforting efficiency; he sometimes wonders if she would do more, would say more, if not for the constant monitoring stares of the eyestalks that dangle from the ceiling.

  But mostly he sits, or lies, waiting. Naked, blood seeping from his wrists and ankles. More than naked: utterly hairless. The living machines that tend to his body also pluck out his hairs. All of them: head, arms, legs, pubis, armpits.

  Eyebrows. Eyelashes.

  Once he asked, in his thin, weakly croaking voice, "How long?"

  Her response was a blank stare. He tried again.

  "How long... have I been here?"

  She made the liquid ripple of her flexible arms that he usually took for a shrug. "How long you have been here is as irrelevant as where you are. Time and place belong to the living, little Solo. They have nothing to do with you, nor you with them."

  His questions always meet with answers like this one; eventually he stops asking. Questions require strength, and he has none to spare.

  "Our masters serve stern gods," she said, the second or fifth or tenth time he awoke to find her at his side. "The True Gods decree that life is suffering, and give us pain to demonstrate their truth. Some among our masters seek favor with the True Gods by seeking pain; Domain Shai was legendary for this. They used the Embrace of Pain the way you or I might take a bath. Perhaps they hoped that by punishing themselves, they might avert the punishments of the True Gods. In this, one must suppose they were... ah, disappointed. Or perhaps--as Domain Shai's detractors like to whisper--they grew to enjoy the pain. Pain can be a drug, Jacen Solo. Do you understand this yet?"

  Vergere seemed never to care if he didn't answer; she seemed perfectly content to prattle away endlessly on any random subject, as though interested in nothing beyond the sound of her own voice--but if he so much as lifted his head, as soon as he croaked an answer or murmured a question, the subject somehow turned to pain.

  They had plenty to talk about; Jacen had learned a great deal about pain.

  His first actual clue to the lesson of pain came once when he lay upon the corded floor, trembling with exhaustion. The branchlike grips of the Embrace of Pain still held him, but loosely, maintaining contact, no more.

  They hung in slack spirals overhead, dangling from bunched, knotted bundles of vegetative muscle that shifted and squirmed above the leather-barked ceiling of the chamber.

  These periods of rest hurt Jacen almost as much as the Embrace's torment: his body slowly but inexorably dragged itself back into shape, resocketing its joints and achingly releasing the overstretched tension of his muscles. And without the constant agony of the Embrace of Pain, he could think of nothing but Anakin, of the gaping wound that Anakin's death had opened in his life--and of what Anakin's death had begun to do to Jaina, driving her toward the dark--and of how his parents must be suffering, having lost both their sons...

  More to distract himself than out of any desire for conversation, he had rolled over to face Vergere and asked, "Why are you doing this to me?"

  "This?" Vergere gazed at him steadily. "What am I doing?"

  "No..." He closed his eyes, organizing pain-scattered thoughts, then opened them again. "No, I mean the Yuuzhan Vong. The Embrace of Pain. I've been through a breaking," he said. "The breaking makes a kind of sense, I guess. But this..."

  His voice broke despairingly, but he caught himself, and held his tongue until he could control it. Despair is of the dark side. "Why are they torturing me?" he asked, clearly and simply. "No one even asks me anything..."

  "Why is a question that is always deeper than its answer," Vergere said. "Perhaps you should ask instead: what? You say torture, you say breaking. To you, yes. To our masters?" She canted her head, and her crest splayed orange. "Who knows?"

  "This isn't torture? You should try it from my side," Jacen said with a feeble smile. "In fact, I really wish you would."

  Her chuckle chimed like a handful of glass bells. "Do you think I haven't?"

  Jacen stared, uncomprehending.

  "Perhaps you are not being tortured," she said cheerily. "Perhaps you are being taught."

  Jacen made a rusty hacking sound, halfway between a cough and a bitter laugh. "In the New Republic," he said, "education doesn't hurt this much."

  "No?" She canted her head to the opposite angle, and her crest shimmered to green. "That may be why your people are losing this war. The Yuuzhan Vong understand that no lesson is truly learned until it has been purchased with pain."

  "Oh, sure. What's this supposed to teach me?"

  "Is it what the teacher teaches," she countered. "Or what the student learns?"

  "What's the difference?"

  The arc of her lips and the angle of her head might have added up to a smile. "That is, itself, a question worth considering, yes?"

  There was another time... before, after, he could never be sure. He had found himself huddled against the leathery curve of the chamber's wall, the Embrace's grips trailing upward like slack feeder vines.

  Vergere crouched at his side, and as consciousness trickled through him he seemed to recall that she had been coaxing him to take a sip from the stem of an elongated, gourd-like drink bulb. Too exhausted for disobedience, he tried; but the liquid within--only water, cool and pure--savaged his parched throat until he gagged and
had to spit it out again. Patiently, Vergere had used the bulb to moisten a scrap of rag, then gave it to him to suck on until his throat loosened up enough that he could swallow.

  The vast desert inside his mouth absorbed the moisture instantly, and Vergere dampened the rag again. This went on for some considerable while.

  "What is pain for?" she murmured after a time. "Do you ever think about that, Jacen Solo? What is its function? Many of our more devout masters believe that pain is the lash of the True Gods: that suffering is how the True Gods teach us to disdain comfort, our bodies, even life itself. For myself, I say that pain is itself a god: the taskmaster of life. Pain cracks the whip, and all that lives will move. The most basic instinct of life is to retreat from pain. To hide from it. If going here hurts, even a granite slug will go over there; to live is to be a slave to pain. To be ‘beyond pain' is to be dead, yes?"

  "Not for me," Jacen answered dully, once his throat opened enough that he could speak. "No matter how dead you say I am, it still hurts."

  "Oh, well, yes. That the dead are beyond pain is only an article of faith, isn't it? We should say, we hope that the dead are beyond pain--but there's only one way to find out for sure."

  She winked at him, smiling. "Do you think that pain might be the ruling principle of death, as well?"

  "I don't think anything. I just want it to stop."

  She turned away, making an odd snuffling sound; for half a moment Jacen wondered if his suffering might have finally touched her somehow--wondered if she might take pity on him...

  But when she turned back, her eyes were alight with mockery, not compassion.

  "I am such a fool," she chimed. "All this time, I had thought I was speaking to an adult. Ah, self-deception is the cruelest trick of all, isn't it? I let myself believe that you had once been a true Jedi, when in truth you are only a hatchling, shivering in the nest, squalling because your mother hasn't fluttered up to feed you."

  "You...you..." Jacen stammered. "How can you... after what you've done..."

  "What I have done? Oh, no no no, little Solo child. This is about what you have done."

  "I haven't done anything!"

  Vergere settled back against the chamber's wall a meter away. Slowly, she folded her back-bent knees beneath her, then laced her fingers together in front of her delicately whiskered mouth and stared at him over her knuckles.

  After a long, long silence, during which I haven't done anything! echoed in his mind until Jacen's face burned, Vergere said, "Exactly."

  She leaned close, as though to share an embarrassing secret. "Is that not the infant's tactic? To wail, and wail, and wail, to wriggle its fingers and kick its heels... hoping an adult will notice, and care for it?"

  Jacen lowered his head, struggling against sudden hot tears. "What can I do?"

  She sat back again and made more of that snuffling noise. "Certainly, among your options is continuing to hang in this room and suffer. And so long as you do that, do you know what will happen?"

  Jacen gave her a bruised look. "What?"

  "Nothing," she said cheerfully. She spread her hands. "Oh, eventually, you'll go mad, I suppose. If you're lucky. Someday you may even die." Her crest flattened beck and became blasterbore grey. "Of old age."

  Jacen stared, openmouthed. He couldn't face another hour in the Embrace of Pain--she was talking about years. About decades.

  About the rest of his life.

  He hugged his knees and buried his face against them, grinding his eye sockets against his kneecaps as though he could squeeze the horror out of his head. He remembered Uncle Luke in the doorway of the shed on Belkadan, remembered the sadness on his face as he cut through the Yuuzhan Vong warriors who had captured Jacen, remembered the swift sure pressure as Luke gouged the slave seed out of Jacen's face with his cybernetic thumb.

  He remembered that Uncle Luke wouldn't be coming for him this time.

  Nobody would.

  Because Jacen was dead.

  "Is that why you keep coming here?" he muttered into his folded arms. "To gloat? To humiliate a defeated enemy?"

  "Am I gloating? Are we enemies?" Vergere asked, sounding honestly puzzled. "Are you defeated?"

  Her suddenly sincere tone caught him; he raised his head, and could find no mockery now in her eyes. "I don't understand."

  "That, at least, is very clear," she sighed. "I give you a gift, Jacen Solo. I free you from hope of rescue. Can you not see how I am trying to help you?"

  "Help?" Jacen coughed a bitter chuckle. "You need to brush up on your Basic, Vergere. In Basic, when we talk about the kind of things you've done to me, help isn't the word we use."

  "No? Then perhaps you are correct: our difficulties may be linguistic."

  Vergere sighed again, and settled even lower, folding her arms on the floor in front of her and arranging herself on top of them in a way more feline than avian. Secondary inner lids shrouded her eyes.

  "When I was very young... younger than you, little Solo--I came upon a ringed moon shadowmoth at the end of its metamorphosis, still within its cocoon," she said distantly, a little sadly. "I had already some touch with the Force; I could feel the shadowmoth's pain, its panic, its claustrophobia, its hopelessly desperate struggle to free itself. It was as though this particular shadowmoth knew I was beside it, and screamed out to me for help. How could I refuse? Shadowmoth cocoons are polychained silicates--very, very tough--and shadowmoths are so delicate, so beautiful: gentle creature whose only purpose is to sing to the night sky. So I gave it what I think you mean by help: I used a small utility cutter to slice the cocoon, to help the shadowmoth get out."

  "Oh, you didn't, did you? Please say you didn't." Jacen let his eyes drift closed, sorry already, for how he knew this story would end.

  He'd had a shadowmoth in his collection for a short time; he remembered watching the larva grow, feeling its happy satisfaction through his empathic talent as it fed on stripped insulation and crumbled duracrete; he remembered the young shadowmoth that had emerged, spreading its dusky, beautifully striated wings against the crystalline polymer of its viewcage; he remembered the shadowmoth's thrilling whistle of moonsong, when he had released it from its viewcage and it had soared away under the mingled glows of Coruscant's four moons.

  He remembered the desperate panic that had beat in waves against him through the Force, the night the shadowmoth had fought free of its cocoon.

  He remembered his ache to help the helpless creature--and he remembered why he hadn't.

  “You can't help a shadowmoth by cutting its cocoon," he said. "It needs the effort; the struggle to break the cocoon forces ichor into its wing veins. If you cut the cocoon..."

  "The shadowmoth will be crippled," Vergere finished for him solemnly. "Yes. It was a tragic creature--never to fly, never to join its fellows in their nightdance under the moons. Even its wingflutes were stunted, and so it was as mute as it was planetbound. During that long summer, we sometimes heard moonsong through the window of my bedchamber, and from my shadowmoth I would feel always only sadness and bitter envy, that it could never soar beneath the stars, that its voice could never rise in song. I cared for it as best I could--but the life of a shadowmoth is short, you know; they spend years and years as larvae, storing strength for one single summer of dance and song. I robbed that shadowmoth; I stole its destiny... because I helped it."

  "That wasn't helping," Jacen said. "That's not what help means, either."

  "No? I saw a creature in agony, crying out its terror, and I undertook to ease its pain, to assuage its fear. If that is not what you mean by help, then my command of Basic is worse than I believed."

  "You didn't understand what was happening."

  Vergere shrugged. "Neither did the shadowmoth. But tell me this, Jacen Solo: if I had understood what was happening--if I had known what the larva was, and what it must do, and what it must suffer, to become the glorious creature that it could become--what should I have done that you would call, in your Basic, help?"


  Jacen thought for some time before answering. His Force empathy had enabled him to understand the exotic creatures in his collection with extraordinary depth and clarity; that understanding had left him with a profound respect for the intrinsic processes of nature.

  "I suppose," he said slowly, "the best help you could offer would be to keep the cocoon safe. Hawk-bats hunt shadowmoth larvae, and they especially like newly cocooned pupae: that's the stage where they have the most stored fat. So I guess the best help you could offer would be to keep watch over the larva, to protect it from predators--and leave it alone to fight its own battle."

  "And, perhaps," Vergere offered gently, "also to protect it from other well-intentioned folk--who might wish, in their ignorance, to ‘help' it with their own utility cutters."

  "Yes..." Jacen said, then he caught his breath, staring at Vergere as though she had suddenly grown an extra head. "Hey..." Comprehension began to dawn. "Hey..."

  "And also, perhaps," Vergere went on, "you might stop by from time to time, to let the struggling, desperate, suffering creature know that it is not alone. That someone cares. That its pain is in the service of its destiny."

  Jacen could barely breathe, but somehow he force out a whisper. "Yes..."

  Vergere said gravely, "Then, Jacen Solo, our definitions of help are identical."

  Jacen shifted forward, coming up onto his knees. "We're not really talking about shadowmoth larvae, are we?" he said, his heart suddenly pounding. "You're talking about me."

  She rose, legs unfolding like gantry cranes beneath her. "About you?"

  "About us." His throat clenched with impossible hope. "You and me."

  "I must go, now; the Embrace has become impatient for your return."

  "Vergere, wait...!" he said, struggling to his feet, the Embrace's branch-grips dangling from his wrists. "Wait, Vergere, come on, talk to me.... and, and, and shadowmoths..." he stammered. "Shadowmoths are indigenous! They're not a transported species... they're native to Coruscant! How could you have found a shadowmoth larva? Unless, unless you... I mean, did you... are you..."