Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

Liquid gems gathered at the corners of her eyes and rolled down her muzzle, gleaming in the misty green twilight. Vergere’s tears … He remembered the little vial of tears, and Mara’s sudden recovery from the coomb-spore infection that everyone had privately expected would take her life.

Vergere mopped tears from her face with the crusted bandage, then applied that bandage once more to Jacen’s wound.

His pain vanished.

“Hold this in place,” she said, and when Jacen put his hand on the bandage she began to tear strips from the lower edge of his robeskin.

Jacen couldn’t stop himself from lifting the bandage. He had to see.

The inflammation was gone. The skin around his wound was pink and healthy, and the wound itself dripped blood that looked and smelled normal, instead of the thick death-reeking ooze of infection that had leaked from it these many days.

“How—?” he gasped. “How could you possibly—”

“Didn’t I tell you to keep that in place?” Vergere slapped the bandage flat again, then briskly tied it down with the strips she’d torn from Jacen’s robeskin.

“Those tears—what are they?” Jacen asked, awed.

“Whatever I choose them to be.”

“I don’t understand.”

“If you still had the Force, it would be obvious. Females of my species have very sophisticated lachrymal glands; even the Force-blind can—could—alter their tears to produce a wide range of pheromonal signals and chemical intoxicants for use on our males. Using the Force, my control is very precise: I can match the molecular structure of my tears to my desire, whether that desire be a systemic cure for coomb-spore infection—or merely a potent topical antibiotic with instant steroidal properties.”

“Wow,” Jacen breathed. His heart stung with sudden hope. “I mean, wow. Vergere, do you think—I mean, would you, uh—could I—?”

She gazed at him steadily. “Ask.”

“There are so many—” he began. “There’s a slave—a Bothan, Trask—he shattered his ankle. Compound fracture, and it’s septic. I’ll have to take off his foot. And that’ll probably kill him anyway. Pillon Miner, he’s human—he was the first one to find out that the amphistaff polyps in that grove over there are mature enough to attack. Peritonitis. He’s dying. I have dozens of slaves carrying cuts and slashes, most of them infected—every time a slave goes by there, the amphistaffs attack. We’re just lucky their venom glands aren’t mature, or none of the slaves would survive at all. The oogliths budding on those hummocks, the ones you came by just now? Two of them got hold of a Twi’lek, across her back, but they’re immature, too, and they don’t have the antibacterial enzymes of the adults; when their feeder filaments stabbed through her pores, they carried who knows what kind of germs. That’s her over there—the one who’s moaning. There’s nothing I can do for her. I don’t think she’ll live until morning.”

“Nothing you have said is a question, or a request.” Vergere blinked once, slowly, then again. “Ask.”

Jacen clenched his fists, and opened them again, and placed one against the bandage she had tied around his ribs. “Your tears, Vergere. You could save so many lives.”

“Yes, I could.”

“Please, Vergere. Will you?”

“No.”

“Please—”

“No, Jacen Solo. I will not. Why should I? They are slaves.”

“They’re people—”

She shrugged.

“You helped me,” Jacen said, desperation and anger starting to gather behind his voice. “Why would you do this for me, and not for any of them?”

“Why is a question deeper than its answer.” She settled back onto the mossy ground. Her crest lay flat along the curve of her skull. “Tell me this, Jacen Solo: what distinguishes a flower from a weed?”

“Vergere—”

“This is not a riddle. What distinguishes a flower from a weed is only—and exactly—this: the choice of the gardener.”

“I’m not a gardener,” Jacen said, biting down on his temper. He leaned toward her, blood surging into his face. “And these are not weeds!”

She shrugged. “Again, our difficulties may be linguistic. To me, a gardener is one who chooses what to cultivate, and what to uproot; who decides which lives must end so that the lives he cherishes may flourish.” She lowered her head as though shy, or embarrassed, sighing; she opened her hand toward the headless shells of the clip beetles. “Is that not what you have done?”

He kept his eyes on her, hanging on to his anger. “Those are bugs, Vergere.”

“So is a shadowmoth.”

“I’m talking about people—”

“Were the beetles less alive than the slave? Is not a life a life, whatever form it takes?”

Jacen lowered his head. “You can’t make me say I was wrong to do it. It wasn’t wrong. He’s a sentient being. Those were insects.”

She gave out a wind-chime spray of laughter. “I did not say it was wrong, Jacen Solo. Am I a moralist? I only point out that you make the gardener’s choice.”

Jacen had always been stubborn; he was far from ready to give up. “You’re the gardener,” he muttered sullenly, staring at his hands. “I’m just one of the weeds.”

She placed her hand on his arm, her long flexible fingers warm and gentle; her touch was so clearly friendly, even affectionate, that Jacen for one moment felt as though his Force empathy had not deserted him. He knew, absolutely and without question, that Vergere meant him no harm. That she cared for him, and regretted his anger, his hostility, and his suffering.

But that doesn’t mean she’s on my side, he reminded himself.

“How is it,” she asked slowly, “that you have come to be the medical droid for your slave gang? Of all the jobs that all the slaves do, how did this one fall to you?”

“There’s no one else who can do it.”

“No one who can set a bone? No one who can wash clean a cut? No one who can twist the head off a clip beetle?”

Jacen shrugged. “No one who can tell the dhuryam to blow itself out an air lock.”

“Ah.” That translucent inner lid slid down her eye. “The dhuryam disapproves?”

“Let’s say it took some convincing.”

“Convincing?”

“Yeah.”

She said nothing for a long time. She might have been waiting for him