Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [141]
He made a crooked grin. “I guess the trick is learning when those times are.”
“Djinn Altis used to teach us that,” said Callista softly. “We have been for ten thousand years the guardians of peace and justice in the galaxy. He always used to preface his stories, and his teaching, with that. But sometimes justice is best served by knowing when to fold one’s hands. And he’d come up with some illustrative story from the archives and the oral tradition of the Jedi about some incident where what appeared to be going on wasn’t actually what was going on.”
He felt the rueful chuckle of her laughter.
“It used to drive me crazy. But he said, Every student is obliged to make one thousand eighty major mistakes. The sooner you make them, the sooner you will not have to make them anymore. I asked him for a list. He said, Thinking there’s a list is mistake number four.”
“How long were you with him?”
“Five years. Not nearly long enough.”
“No,” said Luke, thinking about the few weeks he’d spent on Dagobah. He sighed again. “I just wish some of those one thousand eighty mistakes didn’t involve teaching students. Teaching Jedi. Transmitting power, or the ability to use the Force. My ignorance—my own inexperience—cost one of my students his life already, and threw another one into the arms of the dark side and caused havoc in the galaxy I don’t even want to think about. The whole thing—the Academy, and bringing back the skills of the Jedi—is too important for … for ‘Learn While You Teach.’ That’s …” He hesitated, hating to say it of his teacher but knowing he had to. “That’s the mistake Ben made, when he taught my father.”
There was silence again, though she was as near to him as she had been in the landspeeder on the canyon rim, passing binocs back and forth while they watched for Sand People …
“If Ben hadn’t taught your father,” said Callista softly, “your father probably wouldn’t have been strong enough to kill Palpatine … nor would he have been in a position to do so. You couldn’t have done it,” she added.
“Not then, no.” He’d never thought of it that way.
She went on, “I’m recording everything I remember about Djinn’s teaching.” Her voice was very quiet, like the offer of a gift she wasn’t sure would be well received. “I’ve been working on this, on and off, since you first told me about what you’re doing. Techniques, exercises, meditations, theories—sometimes just the stories he’d tell. Everything I remember. Things that I don’t think should be lost. Things that will help you. I understand that a lot of the techniques, a lot of the … the mental powers, the ways to use the Force … can’t be described, can only be shown, one person to another, but … they may be able to help you, after you leave here.”
“Callista …,” he began desperately, and her voice continued resolutely over his.
“I’m not a Master, and my perception of them isn’t a Master’s perception … But it’s all the formal training that you didn’t have the chance to receive. I’ll make sure you have the wafers of as much of it as I can finish, before you leave.”
“Callista, I can’t …”
He felt her gaze on him, rain-gray and steady, as she had looked at Geith; and he couldn’t go on.
“You can’t let this battle station fall into the hands of whoever it is who’s learned to use the Force to move electronic minds,” she said. She was so real—she had come back so far along the road—that he would have sworn he felt the touch of her hand on his. “I traded my life for it thirty years ago, and I’d trade yours and Cray’s and whoever else is on this battle station if I—if we—have to. Where did you send the others?”
He recognized it as a shift of topic, a deliberate looking away from the realization that he would have to destroy her; or perhaps, he thought, it was just that she knew—as he knew—that time was too short to waste words when they both