Yoda (6 page)

The other was another Jedi apprentice, a red-haired girl named Scout. In waking life she was a year older than Whie, bossy and loud, and had never paid much attention to him. In the dream, blood was dripping down her face from a cut on her scalp. She was staring at him. “Kiss her,” the bald woman whispered. Voice soft. Red teardrops crept from the girl's cuts, spilling by her mouth. Blood trickled in a red line down her throat to soak into the lapels of her tunic just above the tops of her small breasts. “Kiss her, Whie.”

The dreaming Whie recoiled.

The waking Whie wanted to kiss her. He was angry and sick and ashamed, but he wanted to.

Blood dripped. The chrono ticked. The bald woman grinned at him. “Welcome home,” she said.

“Whie!”

“Hnn?”

“Wake up! Whie, wake up. It's me, Master Leem.” Her kind face was looming over him in the darkened dormitory, all three eyes worried. “We felt a disturbance in the Force.”

He blinked, gasping, trying to hold on to a
now
that still felt slippery as a bar of wet soap.

The boys who roomed in the dorm with him were clustering around his bed. “Were you having one of those dreams again?”

He thought of the girl, Scout—another Jedi apprentice!—the trickle of blood along her throat. His guilty desire.

Master Leem laid her six fingers on his hand. “Whie?”

“It was nothing,” he managed to croak. “Just a bad dream, that's all.”

The boys around the bed began to drift off, disappointed and disbelieving. They were still young enough to want to see miracles. They thought having visions would be
fun.
They couldn't understand how terrible it was, to see a moment loom out of the future like a pillar suddenly revealed on a foggy road, and no way to keep from hitting it.

Who had the bald woman in the vision been? She stank of the dark side, and yet he hadn't been fighting her. Would some strange fate make them allies? And the girl, Scout—how would blood come to spill red onto her red lips, and why would she—someday—look at him with such intensity? Perhaps Scout would become an ally of the evil bald woman. Perhaps she would give in to her desires, her anger, her lust. Maybe she would try to trap him, too; seduce him; deliver him to the dark side.

“Whie?” Master Leem said.

He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, trying to sound more normal. “Just a bad dream,” he said again. He kept insisting, politely and gratefully, that he would be fine, just fine, until she finally left the dorm.

Another interesting thing about the true dreams: they had haunted Whie like a curse all his life, but this was the first time he had ever woken into a place other than the Jedi Temple. And never once, in a score of visions, had he found himself in a body much older than the one he had now.

His death was coming. Soon.

3

T
he white walls of the Combat Training Chamber in the Jedi Temple had been newly cleaned, the white floor scrubbed, and new white mats laid down in preparation for the day's tournament. Nervous Jedi apprentices in sparkling white tunics prepared for the upcoming test, each according to personality. In her mind, Jedi apprentice Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy—nicknamed Scout—had them loosely grouped into four categories:

Talkers, who clumped together, murmuring in low voices to distract themselves from the mounting tension;

Warm-ups, who stretched their muscles, or ligaments, or pulse-fibers; cracked various numbers of knuckles; and jogged, or hopped, or spun in place, according to their species-specific physiological needs;

Meditators, whose usual approach to sinking into the deeper truth of the Force, in Tallisibeth's opinion, mostly involved keeping their eyes shut and assuming an affected expression of smug serenity; and

Prowlers.

Scout was a prowler.

Probably she should try a little meditation. Certainly her history suggested that getting too tense and excited was her worst problem. At the last tournament, back before the devastation on Honoghr and the Rendili Fleet Crisis, she had gone out in the first round, losing to a twelve-year-old boy she nearly always beat when they sparred. The defeat had been all the more humiliating because the boy was nursing
a broken leg
at the time, and had been fighting in a brace.

She stalked past a little clump of Talkers, face flushing painfully at the memory. “Hey, Scout,” one of them said, but she ignored him. No time for talking today. Today was all business.

Anyone with the brains of a Sevarcosan prickle-pig could figure she was out of chances to screw up. The fact was, the Force was weak in Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy. Oh, it was there, all right. Strong enough to make an impression on Jedi talent scouts when she was a toddler—although from something one of the Masters once said, her family had been dirt-poor, and her parents had begged the Jedi to take their daughter away from a life of grinding poverty. She was haunted by the idea that her mother and father, her brothers and sisters—if she had them—were all trapped in the slums of Vorzyd V while she alone had escaped. She alone had been given this one incredible chance to make good. It would be unbearable to fail.

But somehow, as she grew in body, she had not grown in the ways of the Force. She did have a gift for anticipation. When she was sparring, for instance, and open to the Force, she would have flashes where she knew what opponents were going to do next even before they knew it themselves. Her habit of scoping out a situation and reading it just a little faster than everyone else had earned her her nickname. But even that could fade out on her if she was flustered or upset, and as for the rest of the Jedi's traditional abilities with the Force…

Some days she could pull a glass off a counter with her mind and bring it to her hand…but more often it would slip on the way and smash on the floor. Or explode as if squeezed. Or go rocketing into the ceiling and fall in a shower of blue milk and splinters. You didn't have to be a Mrlssi to catch the way the Jedi Masters talked together in low voices when she went by. You didn't have to be very smart—and Scout
was
smart—to notice how the other apprentices rolled their eyes at her, or laughed, or, worst of all, covered up for her mistakes.

By the time she turned thirteen, she had all but given up hope of becoming a Jedi. When Master Yoda summoned her for a private talk in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, she had dragged up there with feet of permacrete, stomach churning, waiting to hear which branch of the Agricultural Corps they would assign her to. “Worthy work,” people always said. “Honorable work.” The hypocrisy of it made her furious. As if it weren't humiliating enough to fail at the only thing she'd ever wanted, they had to make it worse by pretending a hoe was the same as a lightsaber, and the mud of a potato field was as exciting as the dust of a hundred planets beneath her feet.

By the time she'd entered the room, her face had been slimy with tears and there was a big wet splotch on the arm of her tunic where she kept wiping her sniveling nose. Master Yoda had looked at her, his wizened, round face wrinkled with concern, and asked why she was weeping. “Only Jedi have to strive for nonattachment,” she'd said defiantly between snuffles. “Farmers can cry all they want.”

Then he'd told her that Chankar Kim had asked that she be her new Padawan, and Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy, known as Scout to her friends, was left with what she later decided was the classic post-Yoda feeling: breathtakingly stupid, heartbreakingly happy.

Three months later Chankar Kim was dead.

If her whole life hadn't been a struggle, Scout thought, that would have broken her. It was sheer will that kept her going, sheer bloody-minded un-Jedi-like rage, against the Trade Federation, against Fate, against herself. “I'll let you come along on the next mission,” Master Kim had said with a smile. “Let's polish off a few more of those rough edges first. You can come next time, I promise.” Only here was the joke: Chankar Kim bled her life out on a distant planet, and
next time
was never going to come.

And so Scout was an orphan, an aging apprentice with no Master anymore. The only way she could become a Jedi was to be made a Padawan, taken on missions, given a chance to prove that she could make a difference. And the only way to do that was to gain the other Jedi's trust.

She drove herself to the top of class after class, practiced joint locks on herself until her wrists were numb, went sleepless late into every night until star maps danced before her aching eyes. She trained harder than she had ever trained in her life—astrocartography, unarmed combat, hyperdrive math, comm installation tech, lightsaber technique. She was slightly built, and her girl's body was agonizingly slow to gain muscle, but she worked out until the sweat ran in rivers down her back because she
had
to, she had to: she couldn't rely on the little cheat the rest of them had, the Force.

And still every day there was the torment of classes in using the Force; Scout grouped together with the eight-and nine-year-olds, looming among them, an awkward bumbling giant: and every day, as hard as she tried to fight back despair, her footsteps came more heavily, as if she were already slogging through the muddy potato fields that were her destiny.

“Hey, Scout—relax!” The voice pulled Scout's attention back to the here and now: combat chamber. Tournament day. It was Lena Missa calling, a good-natured Chagrian girl Scout's age. “You're wound so tight I can hear you squeak when you walk.”

Easy for Lena to say—she, too, had lost a Master in the last year, but Lena was witty and well liked, and her touch with the Force was deft; Jedi Masters had been lining up for the right to choose her as their Padawan as soon as an appropriate grieving period was up. Scout forced a tight smile. “Thanks. I'll try,” she said.

Lena leaned in confidentially, so her forked tongue flickered between her blue lips, and her soft lower horns swung forward. “Scout, don't worry. You're really good at combat. Just relax and use—” She hesitated. “Just trust your ability.”

Scout forced a smile. “You're only being nice to me in case you end up in my bracket.”

Lena grinned back. “You bet. My elbow is still tingling from that arm bar you put on me last week. You wouldn't hurt a friend, right?”

There were thirty-two apprentices entered in the tournament. An apprentice had to be at least ten years old to enter, with the majority of entrants in the eleven- to twelve-year-old range. The younger kids weren't quite ready to encounter the big kids in full-contact sparring, and the older ones who had made Padawan were mostly busy with their duties. Lena hadn't originally meant to enter, but they had needed one more to make an even number.

The apprentices had been given the choice of a layered tournament or a sudden-death elimination format, in which the first loss meant you were done. Scout had been strongly in favor of single eliminations. In the real world, she had argued, no enemy offered to go best three matches out of five. Privately, she also felt the winor-go-home format would play to her strengths. As good as she was at the physical elements of combat, the Force was weaker in her than in anyone else in the field. For her to do well, she would need to out-think her opponents. Trickery was usually most effective the first time you tried it; the fewer matches she had to fight, the better her chances of winning.

Master Iron Hand adjusted her tunic and picked her way to the center of the combat room, passing the Talkers and the Warm-ups sprinkled around the white chamber.
We look like so many weevils wiggling in a box of flour,
Scout thought. Where the Master passed, the apprentices fell silent. In the center of the room she announced that the first two rounds of the tournament would take place here, but when they were down to the Round of Eight, the remaining matches would be moved to less artificial environments. Students looked at one another, eyebrows raised. “You wanted lifelike,” Iron Hand said dryly. “We decided you should get it. Now—to determine the first-round matches.” She consulted her datapad. “Atresh Pikil and Gumbrak Hoxz.”

Atresh, a lithe black-skinned girl of twelve, stepped forward, along with Gumbrak, a thirteen-year-old Mon Calamari boy whose salmon-colored skin was already speckled with excitement. The Mon Calamari was stronger, but he had grown a lot in the last year and still had a tendency to stumble over his webbed feet. If Atresh used her quickness to keep dancing out of range until he tripped, she should be fine. Of course, Atresh wasn't a very calculating fighter. Like many of the more gifted apprentices, she tended to trust to her own strengths instead of doing the kind of detailed preliminary observations that had earned Scout her nickname. The other kids used to laugh at her relentless calculation, but then, they could afford to. Scout needed to do her homework. She had spent many hours over the last six weeks watching the other combatants spar, sometimes openly and sometimes in secret. She had a plan for tackling each of them, and, if not confident, she was at least
prepared.

“Flerp, Zrim,” Master Xan called. “Page, Gilp. Horororibb, Boofer.”

Scout wondered if the matches had been assigned by computer simulations designed to find the most even contests, or by some other criteria known only by the Masters, designed to test each student's weaknesses.

“Chizzik, Enwandung-Esterhazy.”

Scout's heart sank. Pax Chizzik was an eleven-year-old boy of enormous spirit and charm. As a fighter he was strong in the Force, smart, a little chunky, and without the best footwork, but with exceptionally quick wrists. He had a very fast parry, and most kids his age with that gift scored their points on the counterattack, but Pax was also imaginative on the attack, with the hand speed and creativity to launch complex and rather beautiful feint-and-cut sequences. High-spirited and good-natured, he was a natural leader, born to play a dashing prince in some romantic epic of the last age. Everybody liked Pax. Scout liked him enough that she had taken time out of her relentless study to help him practice the Twelve Intermediate Knots when he was having trouble in Master Bear's Climbing and Ropework class. She had several ideas for how to beat him in the tournament, but some of them weren't very nice things to do to a kid, and she had really been hoping she wouldn't have to face him.

Which is probably why they'd been paired, she thought sourly. She shot a suspicious glance at Iron Hand. The Master met her eyes blandly and went on with her list.

The matches were open combat, no holds barred, with sparring to continue until one person surrendered by tapping the floor three times or took three burns from the training lightsabers, which were dialed to their lowest power settings. Even at low power a cut from a training lightsaber was no joke. The touch of the blade was shockingly painful, a searing kiss that made one's muscles jerk and one's nerves howl, and it left a red welt that took days to heal. Scout knew because every day for the last three weeks she had gone to a private spot in the unused kitchen gardens and touched herself on the flank or shoulder or leg with her own lightsaber at low power. Pain, as Master Iron Hand was fond of pointing out, was extremely distracting, and Scout, knowing she was likely to get hit, was determined not to let the pain make her lose focus.

She couldn't afford to lose.

The first matches began. Scout tried to pay attention, watching for any obvious weaknesses in case she met the winner in a later round, but the cramping anxiety in her stomach made it hard to focus, and after a couple of bouts she joined the ranks of the Meditators, thinking only of her breath, of silence, of the deep calm of blood washing through her body like a hidden tide. She could feel the Force there, too, filling the room like a fat electric charge. Twice it jumped like a spark from one fighter to another, leaving the victor and the vanquished both blinking as if struck by lightning. Scout didn't even try to open herself to it. The Force was not an ally she could trust, not when so much depended on this.

Her lips were dry and there was a bitter, metallic taste in her mouth.
Get a grip,
she told herself.
Come on, Scout. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Suddenly it was time. Her palms were sweaty and her legs felt like jelly underneath her as she walked into the center of the chamber. Her lightsaber handle dangled from a loop on her tunic, bumping against a welt on her thigh. She went through the opening rituals, bowing to Master Xan and presenting her lightsaber for inspection. The Master checked the power settings and handed it back to her. Pax bowed deeply in his turn, then presented his weapon with a theatrical flourish. As Iron Hand looked it over, he shot a merry glance at Scout and tipped her the slightest wink. It was impossible not to smile.
I'm glad it's you,
he mouthed.