Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

right?” he said. “So go ahead and guide. Show me the way out of here.”

She smiled down upon him fondly.

“Of course,” she said. “I was only waiting for you to ask.”

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