EPILOGUE
LESSONS
Jacen reclined on a couch beast in the coralcraft’s cargo stomach, staring through the clear curve of a corneal port at the vast noncolor of hyperspace. Vergere sat curled up in feline repose on the other side of the room. She might have been napping, but Jacen doubted it.
He still hadn’t seen her sleep.
Every time he looked at her, he remembered coming to the coralcraft hidden below the Well, remembered finding Nom Anor tied up like a field-dressed nerf. He remembered how the Yuuzhan Vong executor had begged to be taken along. “Leaving me here—that’s the same as murder!”
Jacen had turned his back and walked onto the coralcraft, stone-faced. “Don’t think of it as murder,” he’d said. “Think of it as your Blessed Release.”
Once Nom Anor had understood that no plea would help, his pleading had turned to curses. He’d insisted that only his protection had allowed either of them to live this long. “Take her with you, yes, you vile little traitor,” he spat at Jacen. “One traitor deserves another.”
Vergere had answered cheerfully, “And what did you expect? How was I to teach treason, had I not learned it already myself?”
And yet, Jacen reflected, there was truth in the epithet traitor. She and he had both lied, had both deceived, had both pretended loyalty to serve their own ends.
Funny how when Vergere was around, even straightforward concepts like treason became slippery.
Every once in a while he took another sip from his sacworm of dragweed broth or thoughtfully scooped the flesh from another clip beetle. He wondered idly how his stomach would react to regular old synthsteak and protato. He couldn’t remember what regular food tasted like.
He wondered what Jaina might be eating right now, and for an instant he was tempted to open himself to their twin bond—
But he didn’t. He couldn’t. Not yet.
He wasn’t ready.
What could he possibly tell her? What information could pass through the bond that would even hint at who he had become? And more than that: he was afraid to find out what she might have become.
He didn’t know what he was going to tell people once he got back to New Republic space. He couldn’t imagine facing his mother. Or his father. Or Uncle Luke.
He couldn’t imagine trying to explain how Ganner Rhysode had died.
He had brooded about Ganner quite a bit during the first few days of their voyage. He couldn’t reconcile the pompous, arrogant, slightly silly Ganner he’d known most of his life with the transcendent power and profound joy he’d felt through the Force. How had Ganner gone from the one to the other? It didn’t make sense. He couldn’t even really understand why Ganner had chosen to sacrifice himself.
“He didn’t even like me,” Jacen had told Vergere. “I didn’t like him.”
Vergere had regarded him from one corner of her bottomless eyes. “You need not like someone to love him. Love is nothing more than the recognition that two are one. That all is one.”
Jacen had thought of the dhuryam that had become the World Brain, and he’d nodded.
“Ganner knew that, at the end, more fully than even you do,” Vergere said. “That knowledge is the seed of greatness.”
Jacen shook his head, smiling ruefully. “I still have a hard time putting ‘greatness’ and ‘Ganner Rhysode’ in the same sentence.”
“He was born to be a legend.”
“Maybe he was.” Jacen sighed. “Ganner’s Last Stand. Too bad nobody saw it.”
“Nobody? You mean, nobody from the New Republic. Let me tell you of a vision I have had,” she said. “An image of the far future. It came to me through the Force some time ago, but only now have I come to understand it. In that vision, I saw a new figure in the mythology of the Yuuzhan Vong. Not a god, not a demon, but an invincible giant called ‘the Ganner.’ ”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Not at all. They will come to believe that the Ganner, the Jedi Giant, is the Guardian who stands before the Gate to the Lands of the Dead. It is the Ganner—and his forever-blazing blade of light—who stands eternal guard to prevent the shades of the dead from passing back through the Gate, to trouble the living. The curious part of the vision”—she chuckled a little—“as if it could be any more curious than it is already—is the words engraved on the stone of the Gate, in an arc above the great head of the Ganner: they’re in Basic.”
“In Basic? Why would they be in Basic?”
“Who can say? Such visions are enigmatic, and rarely come equipped with footnotes.”
“What does it say?”
Vergere spread her hands, palms up, a shrug of helpless incomprehension. “In deep-carved block letters, it reads: NONE SHALL PASS.”
Days passed, each much the same as the last.
Jacen had plenty of time to think.
He thought about being a student. About being a teacher.
Being a Jedi.
Being a traitor.
Being a shadowmoth.
Once he brought it up to Vergere. “Can you tell me, now, what you’ve been after all this time? What it was you wanted me to be?”
“Of course,” she said easily. “I wanted you to be exactly what you are.”
“That’s not a very helpful answer.”
“It’s the only answer there is.”
“But what am I—? No, don’t say it, I already know: ‘That’s always been the question, hasn’t it?’ If you only knew how aggravating that gets after a while—”
“Forgive my curiosity,” she interrupted with an air of changing the subject, “but I have been wondering: just what, exactly, did you do in the Well of the World Brain?”
Jacen settled into himself then, and moved around on the couch beast into a more comfortable position. “What were you expecting me to do?”
Her crest flared green. “We know each other too well, you and I. Very well, I confess it: I did not know what to expect. I guessed you would either kill the World Brain, or yourself. The third possibility—that you would go ahead and sacrifice Ganner—I didn’t think likely.”
“No,” she said. “Not impossible.”
“I chose a different option,” Jacen said. “I seduced it.”
Vergere’s crest flickered to orange. “Indeed?”
“I’m using the dhuryam to teach the Yuuzhan Vong a lesson. A real lesson. Kind of like the ones you taught me.” Jacen smiled, but it was a hard smile, a cold one, that glinted like pack ice in his eyes. “The World Brain’s on our side, now.”
“It’s going to fight the Yuuzhan Vong? Work for the New Republic?” Vergere asked skeptically. “A genengineered double agent?”
“No. Not the New Republic’s side. Our side. Yours and mine.”
“Oh.” Now she settled into her feline repose, and her black eyes gleamed. “We have a side of our own, do we?”
“I think we do,” Jacen said. “The dhuryam isn’t going to fight them. The Yuuzhan Vong are fanatics. For them, everything is Right or Wrong, Honorable or Evil, Truth or Blasphemy. When you fight fanatics, all you do is make them even more fanatic than they were when they started. Instead, my friend the World Brain is going to teach them something.”
He sat upright. “They are about to discover that the Vongforming of Yuuzhan’tar is not going exactly to plan. In fact, everything is going to go just a little bit wrong for them from now on. No matter how hard they try, nothing will happen quite the way they want it to.”
Vergere’s crest flickered quizzically. “And this teaches them what?”
“It’s that fanatic thing,” Jacen said. “That’s most of what’s wrong with the Yuuzhan Vong. Instead of working with what is, they keep trying to force everything to be what they think it should be. That’s not going to work on Yuuzhan’tar. They’ll either have to murder the dhuryam and start over from scratch—which they have neither the time nor the resources for—or they’re going to have to learn to compromise. Get it?”
“I do,” Vergere said appreciatively. “This is the most valuable lesson one can teach a fanatic: that fanaticism is self-defeating.”
“Yeah.” Jacen looked back out the corneal port into the infinite nothing of hyperspace. “I can think of a few Jedi who could stand to learn that one, too.”
Suddenly Vergere was on her feet, and her arms encircled Jacen’s shoulders in a surprisingly warm hug. When she drew back, her eyes glistened—not with their customary mockery, but with tears.
“Jacen, I am so proud of you,” she whispered. “This is the greatest moment of a teacher’s life: when she is surpassed by her student.”
Jacen found himself blinking back tears of his own. “So is that what you are, finally? My teacher?”
“And your student, for the two are one.”
He lowered his head. His chest ached with a hard, cold solidity that wouldn’t let him meet her eyes. “Hard lessons.”
“It is a hard universe,” she said from beside him. “No lesson is truly learned until it has been purchased with pain.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Jacen sighed. “But there has to be an easier way.”
She joined him at the port, and stared with him out into the space outside the universe.
“Perhaps there is,” she said at long last. “Perhaps that is what you will have to teach me.”
Outside the universe, there is nothing.
This nothing is called hyperspace.
A tiny bubble of existence hangs in the nothing. This bubble is called a ship.
The bubble has neither motion nor stillness, nor even orientation, since the nothing has no distance or direction. It hangs there forever, or for less than an instant, because in the nothing there is also no time. Time, distance, and direction have meaning only inside the bubble, and the bubble maintains the existence of these things only by an absolute separation of what is within from what is without.
The bubble is its own universe.
Within this universe, there are traitors. One is a teacher, and a student; another is a student, and a teacher.
One is a gardener.
This universe falls toward another, wider universe: a universe that is a garden—
Which is still full of weeds.