Traitor by Matthew Stover (chrome ebook reader txt) 📕

would either kill the World Brain, or yourself. The third possibility—that you would go ahead and sacrifice Ganner—I didn’t think likely.”

“But not impossible.”

“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.

MATTHEW STOVER is the New York Times best-selling author of the Star Wars novels Revenge of the Sith, Shatterpoint, and The New Jedi Order: Traitor, as well as Caine Black Knife, The Blade of Tyshalle, and Heroes Die. He is an expert in several martial arts. Stover lives outside Chicago.

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STAR WARS—LEGENDS

What is a legend? According to the Random House Dictionary, a legend is “a nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times and popularly accepted as historical.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “a story from the past that is believed by many people but cannot be proved to be true.” And Wikipedia says, “Legends are tales that, because of the tie to a historical event or location, are believable, though not necessarily believed.” Because of this inherent believability, legends tend to live on in a culture, told and retold even though they are generally regarded as fiction.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a legend was born: The story of Luke Skywalker and his fellow heroes, Princess Leia and Han Solo. Three blockbuster movies introduced these characters and their stories to millions of people who embraced these tales and began to build upon them, as is done with myths everywhere. And thus novels, short stories, and comic books were published, expanding the Star Wars universe introduced in the original trilogy and later enhanced by the prequel movies and the animated TV series The Clone Wars. The enormous body of work that grew around the films and The Clone Wars came to be known as The Expanded Universe.

Now, as new movies, television shows, and books move into the realm of the official canon, The Expanded Universe must take its place firmly in the realm of legends. But,