Traitor - Matthew Stover (iphone ebook reader .txt) 📗

peer pressure, and the final, unthinkable, inarguable unfairness of existence—that some are smarter, others stronger or faster, and no force at your command can make you better than your gifts.”

Her gesture encompassed the entire sphere. “What you see around you is the work of powerful, undisciplined infants … playing with their toys.”

“These aren’t toys,” Jacen blurted, appalled. “These are living beings—humans, Bothans—”

“I will not argue names with you, Jacen Solo. Call them what you will. Their use remains the same.”

“What use? What possible value could anybody get out of this—this pointless suffering?”

Vergere shook her head pityingly. “Do you think a process so complex as re-creating an entire planetary ecology can be entrusted to chance? Oh, no no no, Jacen Solo. There is learning involved. Education. Trial and error—more error than not, of course. And practice. Practice, practice, practice.”

She opened a hand like a service droid offering a table in a fancy restaurant, indicating a large pond not far from the base of the hill where they stood. An island bulged from the pond’s middle, a huge hulking mound of slick, waxy hexagonal blocks like sealed birth chambers in a hive of Corellian wine-bees—except each of these chambers was large enough to swallow the Millennium Falcon.

A ring of Yuuzhan Vong warriors circled the pond, facing outward with weapons at the ready as though to defend it against unexpected attack; another ring of warriors held the shore of the central island itself. Dozens or hundreds of shapers clambered among the blocks, bearing bundles and implements and jiggling sacs of liquid. Occasionally one of the shapers would use an implement to pierce the plug at the end of one of the blocks, passing either a bundle or a liquid-filled sac within before sealing the block again, and Jacen realized that his wine-bee analogy had been unexpectedly apt. Those huge hexagonal blocks must contain some sort of living creatures—something already huge, perhaps the pupal forms of unimaginable giants—

“What are they?” he breathed.

“The real issue is not so much what they are, as what the single one that survives to maturity will become.”

Again she smiled, and her crest bloomed vivid orange. “Like all complex creatures,” she said, “the Yuuzhan Vong homeworld will require a brain.”

   The creatures were called dhuryams.

Related to yammosks, dhuryams are fully as specialized as the giant war coordinators, but bred for a different, much more complex type of telepathic coordination. Bigger, stronger, vastly more powerful, dhuryams are capable of mentally melding many, many more disparate elements than the greatest yammosk that ever lived. A dhuryam will be responsible for integrating the activities of the Vongforming organomachines. The dhuryam will be less a servant than a partner: fully intelligent, fully aware, capable of making decisions based on a constant data flow streaming in from the entire planetwide network of telepathically linked creatures, to guide the planet’s transformation flawlessly, without any of the chaotic-system fragility that plagues natural ecologies.

When Vergere had finished describing them, Jacen said slowly, “These slave gangs—you’re saying they’re being mentally controlled?”

Vergere nodded. “You may have noticed the lack of guards, with the exception of the dhuryam hive itself. And those are there only to prevent the dhuryams from using their slaves to murder their siblings.”

“Murder—?”

“Oh, yes. Behaviors can be bred, but skills must be learned. Much of what the dhuryams are doing here is learning play—not unlike a pilot training in a flight simulator. Here they hone their skills, of mental mastery and the coordination of many disparate life-forms, that one of them will later use as the World Brain.”

“One of them …” Jacen echoed.

“Only one. The games these children play are more than serious. They are deadly. These infant dhuryams know already the basic truth of existence: win or die.”

“It’s so—” Jacen’s fists clenched helplessly. “—so horrible.”

“I would call it honest.” She smiled up at him, friendly, cheerful, untouched by the horror around them. “Life is struggle, Jacen Solo. It has always been so: an unending savage battle, red in tooth and claw. This is perhaps the greatest strength of the Yuuzhan Vong; our masters—unlike the Jedi, unlike the New Republic—never delude themselves. They never waste their energy pretending that this is not so.”

“You keep saying ‘our masters.’ ” Jacen’s knuckles whitened. “You mean your masters. This—this perversion—this has nothing to do with me.”

“You will be astonished, I think, when you discover just how wrong you are.”

“No,” Jacen said, stronger. “No. The only master I’ve ever had is Master Skywalker. I serve only the Force. The Yuuzhan Vong can kill me, but they can’t make me obey.”

“Poor little Solo.” Her arms rippled in another of her liquid shrugs. “Do you ever get embarrassed at being so thoroughly and consistently mistaken?”

Jacen looked away. “You’re wasting your time, Vergere. I have nothing to learn from this place.”

“You see? Doubly mistaken: my time is not wasted, nor is this your schoolroom.” She lifted her hand—a flickering, blurred gesture—and the two warriors at Jacen’s back seized his arms in grips hard as hull metal. Then the blur in her hand resolved into that wicked hook of bone.

The Force, he thought, panic surging into his heart. She Force-blurred it—she’s been carrying it all along!

“This is your new home,” she said, and stabbed him in the chest.

THREE

THE GARDEN

Just within the fringe of the galactic event horizon—that battlement of gravity where even infinite hyperspace finds its limit—the seedship fell beyond the reality of the universe for the last time. It became, for the last time, its own universe.

This seed-universe, like the larger one it had left, continued to evolve. Over time that had meaning only within its bubble, the seed-universe differentiated and complexified. The flesh between the radiating fins altered, becoming thicker and harder here, softer and more billowy there, as fetal creature-devices coalesced inside wombs that grew themselves just within its thin skin of reality.

In the directionless nonlocation of hyperspace, this seed-universe began its long, long, slow fall toward the center of the galaxy.

   Jacen saw Vergere coming: a small agile silhouette in the misty