Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

chair and fight—something. Anything. But the black hole ate his breath, his strength, his anger; it swallowed even the universe of hate, and ended up emptier than it had begun. Where all his hope, all his love, all his certainty had ever been now gaped a cold void, filled only with the blank inanimate hunger of vacuum, and Jacen collapsed.

He didn’t even have the strength to cry.

He fell into the black hole.

   Eons passed, or nanoseconds.

Within the black hole, there was no difference between the two.

Stars condensed from intergalactic hydrogen, ignited, fused, burned heavy metals, shrank to white dwarfs that faded to brown, all between one breath and the next.

Eternity within the dark.

Information infell across the event horizon: a voice.

He knew the voice, knew he should not listen—but he was not just in the black hole, he was the black hole, capturing everything, holding it forever.

“What is real? What is illusion? Where is the line between truth and lie? Between right and wrong? It’s a cold and lonely place, Jacen Solo: the void of not knowing.”

He didn’t answer. A black hole can’t reply. An event horizon is the ultimate valve: anything at all can pass through in one direction, nothing at all in the other.

But the infalling voice triggered this black hole into quantum decay. His personal event horizon shrank in an instant to a point mass in the middle of his chest—

And Jacen opened his eyes.

“Vergere,” he said dully. “How did you find me?”

She had settled felinelike upon the Solo dining table, arms and legs folded beneath her. She stared at him with interstellar eyes. “I do not share our masters’ prejudice against technology. Portions of the planetary database survive in memory cores. Discovering the home address of the former Chief of State was no great trick.”

“But how did you know? How did you know I’d come home?”

“It is an instinct of all pack animals: the mortally wounded crawl back to their own dens to die.”

“Wounded?”

“With the greatest wound a Jedi can suffer: freedom.”

Another riddle. He had no strength for riddles. “I don’t understand.”

“When you always know what is right, where is freedom? No one chooses the wrong, Jacen Solo. Uncertainty sets you free.”

Jacen thought about that for a long time. “Die at home,” he murmured. “Some home. Have you seen this place? Jaina’s room is full of some kind of plant that tried to eat me. The kitchen looks like a coral reef. My collection—” He could only shake his head. “This isn’t my home.”

“Neither are you going to die,” she said cheerfully. “Have you forgotten? You’re dead already. You have been these many months; you have nearly completed your passage through the lands of the dead. Now is time not for death, but for new life. You are healed, Jacen Solo. Arise and walk!”

Jacen sank lower in the chair, staring blindly up through the tangle of arachnoid cables. “Why should I?”

“Because you can, of course. Why else would anyone bother to get up?”

“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes again. “It doesn’t matter whether I get up or sit here until I starve. Nothing matters. Nothing means anything.”

“Not even your brother’s death?”

He shrugged listlessly. Life, death—all was one. One with the Force. He said, “The Force doesn’t care.”

“Don’t you care?”

He opened his eyes. Her gaze had the peculiar, almost humorous intensity he’d seen in the Embrace chamber, in the Nursery, at the crater. But he was too tired, too broken, to puzzle through whatever she might want him to discover. “Whether I care doesn’t matter, either.”

Corners of her mouth tricked up and down. “Does it matter to you?”

He stared at his hands.

After a long, long silence, he sighed. “Yes. Yes, it does.” It never occurred to him to lie to her. “But so what? Sure, I care—but who am I?”

She gave a shrug so subtle it was almost a shiver. “That’s always been the question, yes?”

“But you never have an answer—”

“I do have an answer,” she said kindly. “But it’s my answer, not yours. You will find no truth in me.”

“You keep telling me that.” Bitter ashes rasped in the back of his throat. “Or in anybody else, either, I guess.”

She said, “Exactly.”

A high buzzing whine rose in his ears, skirling around his head like an angry sparkbee trapped inside his skull. “Then where is the truth supposed to be?” he asked blurrily. “Where? Tell me. Please.” He could barely hear his own voice over the buzz in his ears. It grew to a roar.

She leaned forward, smiling, and the roar drowned what she said, but he could read the words from her lips.

Ask yourself where else can one look.

“What?” he gasped faintly. “What?”

As the roar became a storm inside his head, pounding away all words, all hope of sense, she gathered her four opposable fingers into a point and lightly tapped his chest—right on the center, right over the void left by the slave seed, right over the point mass of his own personal event horizon—as though knocking on a door.

Down in that void, there was quiet. There was calm: the eye of the storm inside him. He threw his mind into the calm, quiet void, let the quiet calm swell to envelop everything he was.

The storm blew away.

The black hole swallowed itself.

He was not alone in the quiet calm. Here was the Force: the living connection that bound him to everything that is, that ever has been, that ever will be. Here too was the Vonglife: from the dim satisfaction of the blue puffball basking in the warmth of his and Vergere’s body heat, to the industrious concentration of the arachnoids that skittered through their growing web … to the balanced readiness for instant violence of twelve Yuuzhan Vong warriors who now filed into the room—

And the breathless anticipation of triumph that shone through Nom Anor, as he entered behind them.

Yuuzhan Vong warriors. Twelve of them. Armed.

And Nom Anor.

The warriors spread out in a shallow arc.

Jacen regarded them steadily, without alarm. Here in the quiet calm of