“Forgive me if I’m intruding, friend Skywalker,” she said, “but I noticed something unusual as you sat down—a flash only, obviously not meant to be seen, but so interesting that I cannot help but ask, at risk of giving offense. Are you perhaps carrying a lightsaber?”
I froze. My lightsaber was indeed concealed beneath my outer tunic, but clearly I had not taken enough care in dressing this morning to make sure it stayed hidden. I didn’t like to leave it lying around to be discovered when I was away and so kept it on my person at all times. Though it wasn’t a strictly prohibited weapon, its association with the Jedi would tend to make one guilty by association in the eyes of the Empire. The Chekkoo’s willingness to conduct some business on the side with the Rebellion might not extend to consorting with a sympathizer of the Jedi. We were stepping lightly on quicksand here.
“That’s an interesting question,” I replied carefully. “Let us suppose purely for argument’s sake that I am. Would you be offended or scandalized, or perhaps feel bound to report me to Imperial authorities?”
“Far from it, far from it,” she assured me. “I would have to confess that my views on the Jedi do not align with the official Imperial view.”
“Is that so? What are your views, then?”
“I can hardly give them words. I suppose I harbor doubts about the Empire’s version of recent events. The victors’ view of history rarely matches that of the vanquished, after all.”
“So you don’t believe that the Jedi betrayed the Emperor?”
“I believe they had a serious disagreement with him, no doubt, and I find it easy to believe that he personally felt betrayed. His public behavior and rhetoric paint him to be the sort of man who views any disagreement as a betrayal. But I don’t feel the Jedi were in the habit of betraying others. I believe they were more likely to keep oaths than break them. Of course, I have no proof of any of this. It is a feeling, nothing more.”
“That’s an extraordinary feeling, if you don’t mind me saying. How did you come to hold it?” I asked.
“A member of our clan was a Jedi Knight. He was my uncle, in fact, and though his devotion to the Order usually kept him far from Rodia, I saw him a few times when I was young. Of course, he was here on Jedi business—and of course the Jedi do not maintain their family ties—but I was told who he was and even had occasion to meet him once or twice. He seemed to me the very personification of honor.”
I could relate to that feeling, because Ben Kenobi had affected me the same way. He was in my life for only a short time, yet he earned my trust and respect immediately, even though from a logical standpoint I had little reason to trust a stranger. Now, meeting someone else who had personally known a Jedi Knight, I found it hard to hide my excitement, but instead of shouting No way! Tell me everything! I carefully schooled my expression into a polite smile and said, “That’s fascinating, Soonta. If you don’t mind me asking, what was he like, apart from honorable?”
“His name was Huulik. He was a good pilot—or at least fairly proud of his skills. But he used to talk about another Jedi who could fly like no other, and his name also happened to be Skywalker. That’s why that fleeting glimpse of a lightsaber piqued my interest. I don’t suppose you had any relatives among the Jedi?”
My heart pumped faster. “Yes. My father was a Jedi who fought in the Clone Wars.”
Soonta blinked and tilted her head. “A son of a Jedi Knight? I thought the Jedi weren’t allowed such relationships.”
That wrung an ironic half grin out of me. “Guess I’m not allowed, then.”
“It certainly explains the coincidence. It must have been your father of whom my uncle spoke. Apparently this Skywalker saved his life at the Battle of Sedratis. They were swarmed by droid fighters, and my uncle’s shields were depleted when Skywalker flew in between him and the next blast that would have killed him. Skywalker destroyed the immediate threat and gave Huulik’s shields a chance to recharge. They were eventually victorious that day, and I’m given to understand that they fought together on several occasions.”
That was the first specific exploit of my father’s career as a Jedi I’d ever heard. It was gratifying to hear of him saving the life of a friend.
“Thank you for sharing that.”
“Did your father survive the Clone Wars?” Soonta asked.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “He was betrayed by Darth Vader.”
“I am sorry to hear. But how do you know that, specifically?”
“I was told so by another Jedi, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
“Kenobi! I know that name! He came to Rodia during the Clone Wars to help return a kidnapped child from another clan. Am I to understand he’s still alive?”
For a moment I felt my throat close up, but then I was able to say, “Not anymore. He died at the Battle of Yavin.”
“Ah! So a Jedi was involved in the destruction of the Death Star. The Alliance’s victory there makes much more sense now. The Jedi have a way of turning daunting tasks into routine ones.”
I decided not to mention that I’d been the one who’d delivered the fatal shot to the exhaust port. Besides, Obi-Wan had helped me. “So what happened to your uncle?” I asked.
“Like your father, he was betrayed. He was shot by clone troopers who were supposed to be on his side. He made it into his ship, recorded a brief message about what happened to him with his astromech, and gave it orders to bring him back here. He could not think of anyplace safer in the entire galaxy, which I thought was sad. This has never been a safe planet. But he was already dead when his ship landed, his wounds too severe to survive the journey.”
“That’s terrible. I’m sorry,” I said. “Did his astromech survive the trip?”
“Only in the physical sense. The clan wiped its memory to prevent it falling into the wrong hands and putting us at risk. We scuttled his ship and built my uncle a small tomb out in the jungle, not knowing what else to do.”
“Oh. I don’t suppose it would be … well, look, Soonta, that was a lightsaber you saw on my belt, one left for me by my father, and I’d like to be a Jedi myself someday if I can. If it’s not rude of me to ask, do you think I could go pay my respects to your uncle?”
The antennae on top of Soonta’s head—they looked like suction cups on short stalks—drew back in what I thought must be surprise. Or maybe it was shock and a certain sense of outrage. I’m not well schooled in Rodian body language, and my shoulders tensed, bracing for an angry retort. Instead, Soonta sounded pleased.
“That would be most thoughtful of you. I should pay my own, in any case.” Soonta took a sip from her caf cup and then said, “You’re a prospective customer. We can borrow a couple of speeders by way of a test drive and visit now, if you’d like. The tomb isn’t far from here.”
“That sounds great,” I said. “I’m actually not hungry. We can go now if you’re willing.”
“So be it.”
Leaving the quiet solarium and crossing the length of Utheel Outfitters was at once refreshing and uncomfortable. It was nice to walk in open surroundings instead of in subterranean tunnels or the close confines of a ship, but manufacturing facilities are not renowned for their peace and quiet. Welding and the whir of machinery assailed our ears and the vibrations of shearing metal shook our bones to the point that I began to miss the silence of space.
Taneetch Soonta spoke to the warehouse supervisor and secured two brightly colored demo speeder bikes for a day trip. We shot north into the tangle of the jungle, slicing through the wet air as if we were waterskiing. I followed Soonta’s lead, weaving through trees just below the canopy and above the undergrowth. The humidity was truly ridiculous, and I felt the close pressure of it even with the wind of the ride. Sweat trickled down my neck and back, my clothes stuck to my skin, and I resigned myself to marinating. The dry heat on Tatooine felt like being in an oven sometimes, but this was more like bathing in a stew pot. After we flew over the canyon I recognized as the one that led to the smuggling bay,
we descended for a klick until the trees stopped growing so close and poor drainage maintained a swamp of dark water frosted with green algae. It wasn’t an endless expanse of water, however. Small islands of spongy loam peeked out of the swamp, providing places for trees and bushes to take root, and Soonta led me to one that boasted some solid rock on it. Only a little bit was available on the edge—the island was so choked with trees and thick undergrowth, there was truly nowhere else to land. I didn’t see the mausoleum until we set down on a moss-covered stone shelf a mere half a meter above the swamp. It was a small stone structure hidden under the canopy of a thinekk tree and further camouflaged by creeping vines. Before the whir of our speeder repulsors faded, Soonta urged me to dismount quickly. The stress in her voice jarred against the languid croaking of frogs and the bored conversation of alien birds.
“We should move away from the water’s edge,” Soonta said. “Just in case there may be ghests nearby.”
“Ghests?”
“Yes,” she said, putting her hand on the small of my back and gently ushering me away from the speeders and into a thicket of bushes that dared me to pass through without getting stabbed and scratched by thorns. “They’re large creatures that like to move quietly in the water before erupting to pluck food off the shorelines, especially herbivores and birds, and we just flew down from the sky to land at the shore—”
Soonta’s sentence was cut off as an enormous scaled figure splashed out of the swamp and pounced on my speeder bike, wrapping it up with clawed hands and biting down into the front steering vanes with a mouthful of sharp teeth. We scrambled back as the ghest roared, frustrated to find it had ambushed something that was not meat, and it slammed the speeder into the rock shelf with its powerful arms, destroying the vanes in the process and effectively totaling the vehicle. The ghest turned its pale round eyes on us and hissed as it slipped back into the water, disappearing completely, leaving us with thudding hearts in our chests and a single working speeder.
“Your point is well taken,” I said. “Will it try again?”
“When we try to leave, yes. There is no doubt,” Soonta said. “It prefers ambush. It knows the speeders are not food now but that we are. It will be watching.” I noticed that there was no way for us to watch the ghest in return. The swamp water revealed nothing of what moved underneath the surface.
“Can we shoot it?” I asked.
“Yes. But it is notoriously difficult to get off a lethal shot before a ghest bites you in half. They are not hunted so often as they used to be, but when they are, they are hunted in teams, and those teams often return with a dead ghest and at least one dead Rodian.”
“Hmm. It won’t come after us on the land?”
“It’s technically possible but highly doubtful. Ghests are much slower on land and perceive that as a weakness. They prefer the quick strike.”
We stood in silence for a couple of minutes, looking for any signs of movement in the dark waters. The surface remained still and gave no hint that something stalked us from below. During that time it occurred to me that this had been horrible planning on Soonta’s part.
“Why did we land so close to shore?”
“There was no place else to land. You saw that for yourself as we came in.”
“So you risk an attack like that every time you visit your uncle’s final resting place?”
“Hardly ever. Someone in the family clears a path and landing area each time we visit. But the jungle is robust, new growth shoots up, and it’s been too long since anyone visited. I might have been the last one to visit, and that was almost a standard year ago.”
“So how are we getting back?”
“We’ll have to double up on my speeder.”
I gestured at the still waters where the ghest waited. “But that thing would never let us get off the ground. You can’t call for someone to come get us?”
“I know from experience that my comm won’t reach anyone from this place.”
“What about an emergency beacon?”
The Rodian gave that single twitch of her head to the left that meant no. “These demonstration models are stripped down, built for speed rather than safety. Our clients always want a demonstration of speed but never ask for a demonstration of emergency services.”
I sighed in frustration. “Well, let’s do what we came to do, and worry about getting out of here afterward,” I said.
“Agreed,” Soonta said, and we turned to the mausoleum. Soonta produced a handheld sonic cutter to clear a path through the undergrowth, which allowed us to reach it in a few minutes while saving our clothes and skin from tears and perhaps puncture wounds.
The mausoleum didn’t have a marker on it or any engraving explaining who was entombed there. Soonta knelt in the soft dirt before the gray stone door and I joined her, bowing my head. She said a few things in her native language that I didn’t understand, but they sounded solemn and respectful and I hoped my silence would be taken in the same spirit. But I could not help wondering what might lie inside the tomb. I know that Soonta said her uncle’s body had been found inside his ship once it landed, but was it truly still there now? I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of Obi-Wan’s empty robe. That method of dying still didn’t seem plausible to me—and I had seen it with my own eyes. I wondered if perhaps this Huulik had eventually faded to nothingness in the same way.
When Soonta had finished her oblations I asked, “Forgive me if it’s rude to ask, but … might we see him?”
The Rodian tilted her head ever so slightly in my direction and regarded me with her giant black eyes. “Did you speak the truth earlier? Do you wish to become a Jedi yourself one day, or was that merely an idle fantasy?”
“Yes, I truly wish it. More than anything.”
“Then we should enter.”
I helped her open the door, and the smell inside was every bit as damp and moldy as the outside. Assorted slugs and a snake wriggled away from the sudden glare of sunlight. A sarcophagus squatted in the middle of the room, almost covered in a carpet of lichen.
“There’s something in there for you,” Soonta said, pointing with a green finger.
“I … there is? What?”
“Help me move the lid.”
I didn’t argue since it was what I wanted anyway, but her eagerness puzzled me. I supposed I didn’t know much about Rodian cultural taboos regarding the dead and decided to go with it. We hefted a corner of the slab together and shoved it aside until the top half of Huulik’s remains lay revealed. There wasn’t much left, but clearly he hadn’t passed on to some other state of existence like Obi-Wan. Apart from the bones there were still fragments of the robe left, a few curling clumps of hardy threads that had survived this long against the elements and denizens of the swamp. Soonta leaned over and thrust her hand into the sarcophagus, obstructing my view. She emerged holding a thick black cylinder.
“This is Huulik’s lightsaber, I believe. We buried it with him since we didn’t know what else to do with it.”
“Does it still work?”
“I don’t know.” She handed it to me. “Try it and see. It’s yours.”
I blinked. “You’re giving this to me? Wouldn’t someone else in your family object?”
Soonta shrugged her antennae. “At this point I suspect I am the only member of my family who still comes to visit him. And it is not doing any good sealed away like that. I think it’s an inheritance better suited to you than me. Perhaps you can learn something from it and one day become a Jedi like your father and my uncle. It would be good to have the Jedi return, I think.”
It was a stupefying gift and I had difficulty mustering a response. “Thank you,” I managed after a time, though the words were inadequate. “I’m honored.”
Huulik’s lightsaber was designed for a Rodian hand and wasn’t quite comfortable in my fist. It had a matte-black finish to it and an odd slick feeling—I didn’t know if that was its original state or if some kind of biological ooze coated it
. Pointing it carefully away from both of us, I thumbed it on, expecting the power cell to be long depleted by now. But it ripped into life and thrummed with energy, a brilliant amethyst blade.
“Now something like that,” Soonta said, “might allow you to survive a direct attack from a ghest.”
It took a moment for me to process her meaning, but when I did I stared at her. “You mean walk out there as bait, holding a lightsaber in front of me?”
“You have two now, correct? Your odds of ensuring the ghest has to eat a lightsaber before it eats you are pretty good.”
I grinned. Soonta had a strange sense of humor, but she also had a point. I’d be better off protecting myself from a quick attack with two lightsabers than with a single blaster that I’d have to aim and fire in a fraction of a second before I got chomped. I thumbed off the Rodian lightsaber and asked, “I don’t suppose Huulik brought anything else home with him, like a handy step-by-step manual on how to train yourself to become a Jedi?”
“No, nothing like that, unfortunately. I would have attempted it myself had that been the case, even though I can’t feel the Force.”
“Well, I’m very grateful for this much.” I turned the lightsaber hilt over in my hands, thinking. “You said he was shot by his own clone troopers?”
“That was what his recording said. We, of course, had no way to confirm it. Asking the local garrison of troopers if someone may have shot a Rodian Jedi Knight offplanet would attract the wrong sort of attention. But it’s stunning in its implications, isn’t it? Looked at in that light, it might have been the Jedi who were betrayed, not the Emperor.”
Not for the first time, I wished I’d had more time with Ben. Not only could he have taught me about the Force, but he could have filled in many giant gaps in my knowledge regarding the history of the Clone Wars. The Empire’s version of events was undoubtedly self-serving, but there was no alternative version of events available. My aunt and uncle would never talk to me about it no matter how much I begged them. I felt handicapped by my ignorance.