Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [99]
“It’s funny,” he said softly. “I always hated Tatooine, always hated the farm. Now in a way I think I was lucky. It cost me nothing to leave. Even if my family hadn’t been killed, it would have cost me nothing to get out of there.”
>The Force was like the pull of the tide. Like the deep-ocean currents that carry the herds on their backs. From the time I was a child I knew there was something there; when I learned what it was, I couldn’t not seek the Jedi<
“But you also couldn’t explain.” Any more than he could explain to Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru the inner tide pulling at him, almost before he knew how to speak.
“They’re dead, you know,” he said softly. “The Jedi.”
Another long darkness, like a hollow in her heart. Then, >I know. I felt … the emptiness in the Force. I knew what it meant, without knowing<
He took a deep breath. “Obi-Wan Kenobi hid out for years on Tatooine; he was my first teacher. After he—was killed—I went to Dagobah, to study with Yoda. Yoda died … about seven years ago.”
After I left him. The old grief, the old bitterness, rose in him like a faded ghost. His last pupil … And I left him, only to return too late.
He thought about Kyp Durron, his own finest student; about Streen and Clighal and the rest of the tiny group in the jungles of Yavin. About Teneniel of Dathomir, and Cray and Nichos, and Jacen and Jaina and Anakin and all he’d gone through; the hellish forge of the dark side, the Emperor’s secret fortress on Wayland and all that had happened there … Exar Kun, and the melted Holocron, Gantoris’s ashes smoking on the stones of Yavin and the destruction of worlds.
His heart was the diamond heart of a Jedi, forged and hard and powerful, but the pain he felt inside him was no less for that. Almost to himself, he whispered something he hadn’t even said to Leia, who was like the other half of his soul. “Sometimes it seems like there’s just such a long way to go.”
“Master Luke …” Threepio appeared once more in the doorway. “Master Luke, it appears that the Jawas wish to speak with you.” He sounded as if he disapproved in advance of whatever it was they might have to say. “They’re asking what you have to trade for wire, power cells, and blasters.”
———
“You know,” said Luke, angling a palm-sized diagnostic mirror to see the delicate fastenings of the voder box as he hooked it to the tracker droid’s gutted casing, “if somebody had offered me odds on which group of my fellow guests on this little tour had taken the rooms next to the transport shuttles, I’d have bet my boots and lightsaber on it being the Sand People. It had to be them, didn’t it?”
>It’s something even the Masters don’t reveal about the inner nature of the secret heart of the universe<
The words appeared, minuscule, in the voder’s monitor screen. Luke hadn’t been aware he’d glanced there automatically for a reply.
>The deepest and darkest secret of all that the Force lets you see<
“What?”
She made a whisper by reducing the letters to the tiniest readable specks.
>The universe has a sense of humor<
Luke shuddered. “I’ll have to be a lot higher-level Jedi than I am before I even want to think about that.”
And he felt her rare laughter like a shimmering of the dark air.
Working on the tracker he’d gotten from the Jawas—it was the one Cray had disabled on Pzob, and at the cost of considerable pain he had used the strength of the Force to heal one of their number of the headache and nausea left over from a bad stunblast, and another of electrical burns on its hands—he’d talked: about Tatooine, and Obi-Wan, and Yoda; about the fall of the Empire and the struggles of the New Republic; about Bakura, and Gaeriel Capiston; about Leia and Han and Chewie and Artoo. About the Academy on Yavin, and the dangers to the unfledged, untried, untaught adepts whose power was growing without any sure knowledge of what to do with it or how to guide it. About Exar Kun.
About his father.
And hesitantly, a sentence or two at a time, on the tiny monitor screen or the larger diagnostic—whichever