“I’ve heard they do not look favorably upon you. You criticize them too freely, Raith. When your present customers pass into history, have you considered subcontracting?” Tarkin asked with a slightly taunting air.
Sienar gestured with his spidery fingers. “I hope you recognize I am versatile. After all, we’ve known each other for ten years.”
Tarkin gave him an oh, please! glance. “I’m still a young man, Raith. Don’t make me feel old.” They advanced to the end of the parapet and along a suspended walkway leading to an octagonal, transparisteel-walled room suspended thirty meters above the center of the factory floor. “These, pardon me, look like advanced fighters to me. Very pretty they are, too.”
Sienar nodded. “Experimental models for protecting freight haulers on the fringe. The Republic no longer polices some of the most lucrative routes. I presume with the Trade Federation forces integrated, they will once more. At any rate, these ships have already been paid for.”
“They are storable?”
“Of course. Multistack in spare holds. All to spec. A true surprise for raiders. Now. Enough about my business worries. About our relationship—”
Tarkin rested his hands on the rail. “I’ve made new contacts,” he said. “Very useful contacts. I can tell you very little more.”
“You know I’m an ambitious man,” Sienar said with a look he hoped seemed both hungry and dignified. Tarkin would not be easy to fool. “I have plans, Tarkin, extraordinary plans, which will impress anyone with imagination.”
“I know plenty of people with imagination,” Tarkin said. “Perhaps too much imagination at times …” They continued walking. Assembly droids bustled beneath them, and a suspended crane hauled three fuselages in a nested carrier just meters away. “In truth, I’ve come to pick your brains, tell you a remarkable fairy tale, and enlist you in my cause, old friend. But not out here, not out in the open.”
Inside the transparisteel-walled design room, closed to all but Sienar and his special guests, Tarkin sat in a comfortable chair of inflatable plastic, one of Sienar’s design. Next to him a large dark gray holographic table hummed faintly.
Sienar dropped black security curtains all around the lighted center. The men were absorbed by an eerie silence.
Tarkin tried to speak, but no sound could be heard. Sienar handed him a small, nut-sized silver vocoder connected by a flexible wire to a beautifully machined plasteel mouthpiece. He showed Tarkin how to insert the button into his ear and allow the mouthpiece to float just in front of his lips.
Now they could hear each other.
“I do small favors for certain people,” Tarkin said. “I once balanced these favors between opposing sides. Lately, my efforts have become a bit more lopsided. Balance is no longer necessary.”
Sienar stood before his old friend and listened intently. His tall, cleanly muscled body seemed to reject repose.
“Some of these people have an appreciation for fingers—not tentacles, my friend, not palps, but human fingers—reaching into a great many stellar soup bowls, testing the temperature to see if they are ready for the eating.”
“Why the concern that they be human?”
“Humans are the future, Raith.”
“Some of my best designers are not even remotely human.”
“Yes, and we employ nonhumans wherever they are useful, for now. But mark my words, Raith. Humans are the future.”
Raith noted the tension in Tarkin’s voice. “So marked.”
“Now listen closely. I’m going to tell you a tale of intrigue, wonderfully ornate, yet at its heart very simple. It involves a kind of spacecraft rare and little-seen, very expensive, of unknown manufacture, supposedly a toy for the wealthy. It may ultimately lead to a lost planet covered by a peculiar kind of forest, very mysterious. And it may soon involve the Jedi.”
Sienar smiled in delight. “I adore stories about the Jedi. I’m quite the fan, you know.”
“I myself am intrigued by them,” Tarkin said with a smile. “One of my assignments—I will not tell you who does the assigning and how much they pay—is to keep track of all the Jedi on Coruscant. Keep track of them—and discourage any increase in their power.”
Sienar lifted an eyebrow. “The Jedi support the senate, Tarkin.”
Tarkin dismissed this with a wave. “There is a youngster among the Jedi with a curiosity for droids and all sorts of machinery, a junk collector, though with some talent, I understand. I have placed a small, very expensive, very broken droid in the way of this youngster, and he has taken it into the Jedi Temple and made it mobile again, as I suspected he would. And it has been listening to some curious private conferences.”
Sienar listened with growing interest, but also growing puzzlement. The Jedi had not once, in his lifetime of designing and constructing fine ships and machines, ever shown an interest in contracting for spacecraft. They had always seemed content to hitch rides. As far as Sienar was concerned, for all their gallantry and discipline, the Jedi were technological ignoramuses—but for their light-sabers, of course. Yes, those were of interest …
“Please pay attention, Raith.” Tarkin jerked him out of his reverie. “I’m getting to the good part.”
* * *
Half an hour later, Sienar replaced the security vocoders in their box and lifted the curtains. He was pale, and his hands shook slightly. He tried to hide his anger.
Tarkin’s moving in on what could have been mine!
But he quelled his chagrin. The secret was out. The rules had changed.
Absently, and to create a distraction from his reaction to Tarkin’s story, he switched on the hologram display, and millions of tiny curves and lines assembled in the air over the dark gray table. They formed a slowly rotating sphere with a wide slice removed from the side. Two smaller spheres appeared above and below the poles, linked by thick necks bristling with spiky details.
With a contentedly prim expression, Tarkin turned to the hologram. His thin, cruel lips pressed tightly together, revealing thousands of years of aristocratic breeding. He bent over to examine the scale bars, and his eyebrow lifted.
Sienar was pleased by his reaction.
“Impossibly huge,” Tarkin commented dryly. “A schoolboy fancy?”
“Not at all,” Sienar said. “Quite doable, though expensive.”
“You’ve piqued my curiosity,” Tarkin said. “What is it?”
“One of my show projects, to impress those few contractors with a taste for the grandiose,” Sienar said. “Tarkin, why have these … people … chosen me?”
“You haven’t forgotten you’re human?”
“That couldn’t be their main criteria.”
“You’d be surprised, Raith. But no, likely at this stage it is not crucial. It’s your position and your intelligence. It’s your engineering expertise, far greater than my own, though, dear friend, I do exceed you in military skills. And, of course, I do have some influence. Stick with me, and you’ll go places. Fascinating places.”
Tarkin could not take his eyes off the slowly rotating sphere, with its massive core-powered turbolaser now revealed. “Ah.” He smiled. “Always a weapon. Have you shown this to anybody?”
Sienar shook his head sadly. He could see the enticement was working. “The Trade Federation knows precisely what it needs and shows no interest in anything else. A deplorable lack of imagination.”
“Explain it to me.”
“It’s a dream, but an achievable dream, given certain advances in hypermatter technology. An implosion core with a plasma about a kilometer in diameter could power an artificial construct the size of a small moon. A couple of large ice asteroids for fuel … common enough still in the outer fringe systems …”
“A small crew could police an entire system with one vessel,” Tarkin mused.
“Well, not so small a crew, but one vessel, certainly.” Sienar walked around the display and made large, vaguely designing sweeps of his hands. “I’m considering removing the e
xtraneous spheres, sticking with one large ball, ninety or a hundred kilometers in diameter. A more wieldy design for transport.”
Tarkin smiled proudly. “I knew I picked the right man for this job, Raith.” He admired the design with brows tightly knit. “What a sense of scale! What unutterable power!”
“I’m not sure I have any free time,” Sienar said with a frown. “Despite my lack of connections, I still manage to keep very busy.”
Tarkin waved his hand dismissively. “Forget these shadows of a past life and focus on the future. What a future it will be, Raith, if you satisfy the right people!”
The Jedi Temple was a massive structure, centuries old, well and beautifully made, but like much on Coruscant, the exterior had of late suffered from neglect. Below the five spotless and gleaming minarets, at the level of the dormitories and the staff entrances, paint flaked and bronze gutters dripped long green streaks down broad curved roofs. Molded metal sheets had lost their buffers of insulation and were beginning to electrically corrode, creating fantastic rainbow patterns on their surfaces where they touched.
Within the Temple, the domain of the Jedi Knights and their Padawans, the chambers were cool, with lighting at a minimum, except in the private quarters, which were spare enough, but provided with glow lamps for reading the texts taken from the huge library. Each cubicle was also equipped with a computer and holoprojector for accessing the later works of science and history and philosophy.
The overall effect, to an outsider, might have been one of studious gloom, but to a Jedi, the Temple was a center of learning, chivalry, and tradition unparalleled in the known universe.
It was meant to be a place of peace and reflection, commingled with periods of rigorous training. Increasingly, however, the Jedi Council devoted its time to troublesome matters of politics and the large-scale repercussions of a decades-long economic collapse.
The Republic could not afford too much reflection, however, nor too much study. This was soon to be an age of action and counteraction, with many forces arrayed against freedom and the principles that had guided the Jedi in their zealous guardianship of the senate and the Republic.
That explained why so many of the Masters were away from the Temple, scattered around the crumbling fringes of the Republic.
It did not explain why Mace Windu maintained a bemused smile even as he presided over the distressing case of Anakin Skywalker.
In truth, Obi-Wan Kenobi had never quite gotten the range of Mace Windu. Many declared that Yoda was the most enigmatic of the Jedi Knights, habitually teaching by trick rather than example, conundrum rather than pointed fact. Mace Windu, in Obi-Wan’s experience, seemed to lead by rigorous example, using concrete guidelines and steady discipline rather than startled revelation. Yet of all the Jedi, he was quickest to appreciate a joke, and often to spring a devious philosophical trap during debates.
In physical training, he was among the toughest to best, because his moves could be so unexpected. Whatever he seemed to propose, or to oppose, might in fact be a ploy to encourage quite a different result.
There was a creative whimsy to the man that defied intellectual analysis. And that was one reason why Mace Windu was ranked a Jedi Master.
Decadent cynics in the Senate District who knew little about the Jedi regarded them as somber, stuffy preservers of a fusty old religion, like shreds of an aging fabric soon to give way to a gleaming new garment, an age of surgical precision and cold, hard facts. Mace Windu reminded all who came in contact with him that the Jedi Knights were a vibrant, living order, rich in contradictions, possessing a vitality very difficult—some said impossible—to extinguish.
Obi-Wan and Anakin, as soon as they had scrubbed and showered away the silicone and stench, climbed the steps and took an ancient but beautifully maintained turbolift to the heights of the gleaming Council Tower. Late-afternoon sun poured through the broad windows in the Council chamber. The circular room was suffused by an antique golden glow, but this glow did not fall upon Anakin, whose slight form was obscured by the shadow of a tall and vacant chair.
The Padawan looked more than a little bewildered.
Obi-Wan stood beside him, as a Master must when his apprentice is in peril of dismissal.
Four Masters were present. The other chairs were empty. Mace Windu presided. Obi-Wan remembered several disciplinary hearings for his own Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, yet none had been held in such a charged atmosphere as this, no matter Mace Windu’s amused expression.
“Anakin Skywalker has been with us three years now, and has shown himself a capable student,” Mace began. “More than capable. Brilliant, with abilities and strengths we have all hoped to see developed and controlled.”
Mace rose and walked around the pair, his robes swishing faintly with the movement of his long legs. “Strength of character is a challenge to be overcome by a Padawan, for it may be a mask for careless will lacking center and purpose. What seems bright in youth tarnishes in maturity, and crumbles in age. A Jedi is allowed no such weakness.” He stopped in front of the boy. “Anakin Skywalker, what is your error?”
Obi-Wan stepped forward to speak, but Mace’s hand shot up, and his eyes sparked with warning. Though a Master must defend his Padawan, it was clear the Council was beyond that here.
Obi-Wan suspected the worst: that a judgment had already been rendered, and that Anakin was to be released from the Temple.
Anakin watched Mace with large eyes, uncharacteristically subdued.
Mace was unrelenting. “I ask again, what was your error?”
“I brought shame upon the order and the Temple,” Anakin responded quickly now, his voice high and soft.
“That is hardly precise. Again, your error?”
“To break the laws of the municipality, and … and …”
“No!” Mace declared, and his smile vanished, replaced by a stern expression, like the dark underside of a cloud heretofore painted by sun.
Anakin flinched.
“Obi-Wan, explain to your Padawan his error. It does, after all, arise from the same roots as your own.” Mace regarded Obi-Wan with a lifted brow.
Obi-Wan considered this intently for a long moment before answering. Nobody tried to rush him. Inner truth was a perilous journey, even for a Jedi.
“I see it,” he said. “We both want certainty.”
Anakin stared at his master with a puzzled frown.
“Explain to us all how you have failed your Padawan,” Mace said, gently enough, considering the turnabout in the proceedings.
“He and I are far too young for the luxury of certainty,” Obi-Wan began. “Our experience is insufficient to earn us even momentary peace. As well, I have been more concerned with his growth than my own, distracted by his obvious flaws, rather than using his mirror to guide me, so that I may in turn guide him.”
“A good beginning,” Mace allowed. “Now, young Skywalker, explain to the Council how you can find peace by seeking cheap thrills among the most deluded occupants of this planet.”
Anakin’s frown deepened.
“You are defensive,” Mace warned.
“What I did, I did to fill a lack in my training,” Anakin shot back testily.
Mace’s expression turned stolid, and his eyes became heavy lidded, languid, as he placed his arms behind his back. “And who is responsible for this lack?”
“I am, Master.”
Mace nodded, his rugged face like ancient hewn stone. No trickster here, no humor now. Behind that face, if one knew how to sense it, burned an unbearably brilliant flame of concentration, easily worthy of the legendary Masters of past millennia.
“I seek to escape pain,” Anakin said. “My mother—”
Mace lifted his hand, and Anakin instantly fell silent. “Pain can be our greatest teacher,” Mace said, barely above a whisper. “Why turn away from pain?”
“It … it is my strength. This I see.”
“That is not correct,” Obi-Wan said, placing his hand on Anakin’s s
houlder. The boy looked between them, confused.
“How is it wrong, teacher?” Mace asked Obi-Wan.
“Lean upon pain like a crutch and you create anger and a dark fear of truth,” Obi-Wan said. “Pain guides, but it does not support.”
Anakin cocked his head to one side. He seemed slight and even insubstantial among these Jedi Knights, all this overwhelming experience. His face collapsed in misery. “My most useful talents are not those of a Jedi.”
“Indeed, you throw your spirit and your anguish into machines and useless competitions, rather than directly confronting your feelings,” Mace said. “You have cluttered our Temple halls with droids. I stumble over them. But we are away from the crux of our present matter. Try again to explain your error.”
Anakin shook his head, caught between stubbornness and tears. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
Mace took a shallow breath and closed his eyes. “Look inward, Anakin.”
“I don’t want to,” Anakin said breathlessly, his voice jerking. “I don’t like what I see.”
“Is it possible you see nothing more than the tensions of approaching adulthood?” Mace asked.
“No!” Anakin cried. “I see … too much, too much.”
“Too much what?”
“I burn like a sun inside!” The boy’s voice rang out in the chamber like a bell.
A moment of silence.
“Remarkable,” Mace Windu admitted. Curiously, a smile flickered on his lips. “And?”
“And I don’t know what to do with it. I want to run. It makes me reckless, so I seek sensation. I don’t blame any of you for—” He could not finish that sentence.
Obi-Wan felt the boy’s anguish like a small knife in his own gut.
“My own mother didn’t know what to do with me,” Anakin murmured.
The door in the far wall swung open slowly. Mace and Obi-Wan looked up to see who was there.
A small female figure clad in Temple robes stepped into the circle, and a clear voice sang through the chamber. “Just as I thought. A little inquisition going on here, eh?”