Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

this dhuryam’s lands were more sophisticated, more elegant than those of its neighbors; when the mists would part enough that he could see the bowl of lands overhead, he thought that the domain where he lived was, in fact, the most developed in the whole Nursery. He was wryly aware, though, that his opinion might not be entirely objective; maybe he was just rooting for the home team.

If the Force is life, she had said, how can there be life without the Force?

He ached for the Force every day—every hour. Every minute. He was constantly, acutely aware of the gaping absence in his life: reminded every time he had to tie a tourniquet, reminded by each groan or squeal of pain that with the Force he could have eased.

Reminded when he had to amputate Trask’s foot with an amphistaff he had cautiously, laboriously lured out of the grove by feeding pieces of a dead slave to its polyp until it shed its amphistaffs and they wriggled into the grass in search of new fertile ground to plant themselves—

Reminded when the Bothan died in delirium a few days later.

If the Force is life, how can there be life without the Force?

The question haunted him. It throbbed in the back of his head like an abscessed tooth. Vergere could have been talking about his life: how could he live without the Force?

The answer was, of course, that he couldn’t. He didn’t. The Force was there.

He just couldn’t feel it.

Anakin used to say that the Force was a tool, like a hammer. If the Force is a hammer, Jacen decided, then he was a carpenter with his arms cut off. He couldn’t even see the hammer anymore. He couldn’t remember what it looked like.

But—

If I came of a species that had never had arms, I wouldn’t recognize a hammer—and I’d have no use for it, even if I somehow guessed what it was. A hammer would have nothing to do with me at all.

Like the Force has nothing to do with the Yuuzhan Vong.

That was half an answer—but the other half kept wriggling, chewing at the inside of his skull.

Because the Force was not just a tool.

If the Yuuzhan Vong existed outside it, the Force must be less than he had been taught it was. Less than he knew it was. Because he knew, bedrock knew, knew beyond even the possibility of doubt, that the Force was not less than he’d been taught. It was more.

It was everything.

If the Force was only about life, how could it be used to pick up a rock, or a lightsaber, or an X-wing star-fighter? To move something with the Force, you have to feel it. A piece of rock has more presence in the Force than a living Yuuzhan Vong.

There was a mystery here, one that nagged at him. Fortunately, he had plenty of time to think about it.

As the days blended one into the next, the dhuryam seemed to gain an understanding of what Jacen did; through the slave seed, the dhuryam had sent occasional small, almost affectionate twinges—more like a pinch from a playmate than the crack of a slave master’s whip—and Jacen discovered that if he followed where these twinges directed him, he might find, say, a type of moss with immunostimulant properties, or a secretion of the vonduun crabs that acted as a natural antiseptic.

Almost as though the dhuryam were trying to help …

Gradually, through these days, his idea of the dhuryam transformed. He had thought of it, through these bitter weeks, as a hideously alien monster that had reached inside his body with the slave seed, rasping his nerves with its loathsome, inescapable touch; now he discovered that when he thought of the dhuryam in unguarded moments, he felt no horror at all.

I guess you can get used to anything, eventually, he thought.

But it was more than that: he had begun to see the dhuryam as another life-form, an unfamiliar species, dangerous but not necessarily hostile. It had intelligence, will, intention; it was able to see that Jacen was doing more good than harm, and it had apparently consented to a working partnership.

If a species that had always been blind met a species that had always been deaf, how would they communicate? To Jacen, the answer was obvious: they would have to improvise a language based on a sense that they shared.

The pain from the slave seed was actually a form of communication, a primitive language that Jacen was slowly coming to comprehend, though he had not yet learned how to reply.

If the Force is life, how can there be life without the Force?

The realization did not come as a blinding revelation, but rather as a slow dawning of awareness, an incremental gathering of comprehension, so that on a steel-colored noon when he looked down from a hillock onto the dhuryam hive-island, he knew, and understood, and was neither suprised nor astonished at his new knowledge and understanding.

This was what he knew and understood: the answer for the Yuuzhan Vong was the same as the answer for himself.

There is no life without the Force.

The human eye does not register electromagnetic energy outside the tiny band of frequencies called visible light—but even though you can’t see them, those frequencies exist. The Yuuzhan Vong and their creations must participate in a part of the Force that is beyond the range of Jedi senses.

That’s all.

Jacen stood on the hillock, staring down at the dhuryam island with its ring of warrior-guards, and he thought, The Yuuzhan Vong aren’t the only ones who participate in a part of the Force that is outside the range of Jedi senses.

I do, too.

He had always had a particular gift for making friends with alien species. He used to call it empathy, but it had always been more than shared emotion—

It had been an improvised language that operated through a part of the Force that other Jedi didn’t seem able to sense.

That flash of empathy he’d gotten from Vergere—he had thought