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

to elaborate; she might have been trying to guess what he had done. She might have been thinking of something else altogether. “And how did you manage to convince it?”

Jacen stared through her, remembering his savage private struggle against the slave seed and the dhuryam that controlled it, day after day of bitter agony. He wondered how much of that story she might know already; he was certain that she had some way of keeping him under observation.

The dhuryam was an intelligent creature; it had not taken long to discover that Jacen could not be moved by pain. But the dhuryam was itself stubborn by nature, and it had been specifically engineered to command. It was not accustomed to disobedience, nor inclined to tolerate it.

After days of straight, simple pain, the dhuryam had taken advantage of the slave seed’s growth; it had spent more than a week jerking Jacen’s limbs individually by remote control, using the slave seed to give him spasms and cramps that forced him to move, making him twitch and thrash like a holomonster controlled by a half-melted logic board.

The turning point had come when the dhuryam realized that it had been pouring so much energy and attention into its struggle with Jacen that it was neglecting its other slaves. Its domain in the Nursery was falling to ruin, becoming a wasteland among the lush domains of its sibling-rivals. It understood that breaking Jacen was an expensive undertaking: a project whose costs were counted in jobs that did not get done. And it soon began to discover that Jacen could be useful, even unbroken.

Jacen had taken every respite from the pain to minister to his fellow slaves. He didn’t have real medical training, but his exotic life-form collection had taught him some basics of exobiology, and in his adventures with the other young Jedi he had garnered a working knowledge of field surgery.

The dhuryam had eventually seemed to understand that healthy slaves can work harder, and soon its domain began to improve again. Jacen had discovered that the dhuryam would let him do pretty much whatever he wanted, so long as it advanced the dhuryam’s own interests.

I guess you could say, Jacen thought, I taught the dhuryam that sometimes partners are more useful than slaves.

But he said nothing of this.

He owed Vergere no answers.

“I told you before,” he muttered solidly. “You can kill me, but you can’t make me obey.”

Her inner eyelids slid upward again. “And that, Jacen Solo, is why you are a flower among the weeds.”

He looked into the bottomless black of her eyes, looked away at the scatter of slaves, resting among the Vongformed life of the Nursery, then down at his hands, which curled into white-knuckled fists; he relaxed them again, then looked back at her, and finally, after all, he couldn’t think of any reason not to just say it.

“You’re Sith, aren’t you?”

She went very, very still. “Am I?”

“I know a little about the dark side, Vergere. All this garbage about flowers and weeds—I know what you’re really talking about. You’re talking about believing you’re above people.”

“Everything I tell you is a—”

“Save it. You’re wasting your time. Jaina and I were kidnapped by the Shadow Academy. They tried to turn us both. It didn’t work.” He thought briefly of Jaina, of the darkness he’d felt in his last touch through their twin bond. His hands became fists again, and he shook the memory out of his head. He repeated, “It didn’t work. It won’t work for you, either.”

Her first motion: a faint curve at the corners of her lips. “Sith? Jedi?” she said. “Are these the only choices? Dark or light, good or evil? Is there no more to the Force than this? What is the screen on which light and dark cast their shapes and shadows? Where is the ground on which stands good and evil?”

“Save it. I’ve spent too much time wondering about those questions already. Years. I never got anywhere.”

Her eyes lit up merrily. “You got here, yes?” A sweep of her arm took in the Nursery. “Is this not somewhere?”

Jacen shook his head, tired of this. He pushed himself to his feet. “All the answers fall short of the truth.”

“Very good!” Vergere clapped her hands and bounced upright like a spring-loaded puppet. “Very good, Jacen Solo. Questions are more true than answers: this is the beginning of wisdom.”

“Your kind of wisdom—”

“Is there any other kind? Does truth come in breeds like nerfs?” She seemed elated; she shivered as though she struggled against an urge to break into dance. “Here’s a question of another kind—an easy kind, a friendly inquiry—to which there is an answer not only true, but useful.”

Jacen got up. “I don’t have time for this. They’ll turn on the sun in a few minutes.” He started walking toward the resting slaves. There were dressings to be changed before these slaves began their morning work.

Vergere spoke to his departing back. “If the Force is life, how can there be life without the Force?”

“What?” Jacen stopped. He looked over his shoulder. “What?”

“You are born to be a gardener,” she said. “Remember this: it is not only your right to choose flowers over weeds, it is your responsibility. Which are flowers? Which are weeds? The choice is yours.”

“What?”

With a lightning crackle and a wavefront blast of thunder, the Nursery’s sun kindled overhead. Jacen flinched, shading his eyes against the sudden flare, and by the time he could see again Vergere was far away, hopping from hummock to hummock across the vonduun crab bog.

He stared after her.

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

   He kept washing and clipping wounds, setting fractures, debriding septic flesh. The sun came on, the sun turned off. Some slaves got better. Some slaves died. Everybody kept working.

The dhuryam’s domain flourished. Trees wove into fantastic structures, draped in iridescent epiphytes. Lush grasses on upland hills rippled in the bellows breath pumped through ventilation veins. To Jacen’s eye, it seemed that