• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Vestara’s eyes flickered; it looked to Luke as though she was doing some calculation. “This would have been—what? Fifty, sixty years ago?”

Sel smiled again and offered a little shake of her head. “Much longer than that. Centuries ago.”

Vestara frowned. “But you look true human. You’d be dead.”

“I am true human. Of Alderaanian and Hapan descent. And not a prosthetic or replacement part in my body—except for my teeth, which were damaged beyond repair long ago by neglect.” She shrugged. “But even as my mind decayed and flaked away, my body was preserved. By the consumption of drochs.”

Ben’s eyebrows rose and he glanced, suspicious, at his father. “That wasn’t in your official report, either.”

“Do you imagine that I wanted anyone to think they could achieve quasi-immortality by coming here and becoming involved with the drochs?” Luke gave his son a shake of the head. Indeed, he felt as though there was considerable danger in Vestara discovering these facts. If her true loyalties remained with the Sith, if she did not gain a healthy respect and fear of the drochs and what they represented while she was here … “Besides, it’s not an issue of coming up with a dish, a recipe, that you can prepare for its health benefits.”

“No.” Sel’s voice took on a distant quality. “You have to eat them live. Pop them wiggling into your mouth. Sometimes they try to chew their way into your cheek or your tongue when you do so. You bite down on them, crunch crunch crunch.”

Ben tried to suppress a shudder. He wasn’t entirely successful.

Sel shook off the mood and looked at Ben again. “As you consume them in this way, they give off little bursts of Force energy, life energy they have consumed. These bursts, in conjunction with secretions from their exoskeletons, cause the body to perform little acts of regeneration and repair beyond what bodies normally do. Nerve tissue regenerates. Cells are replenished … But there are problems. The larger drochs, the ones with more energy, have also drained memories and thoughts from their victims. Consumption of these drochs causes you to absorb these memories in turn, fragmenting your own mind over time. And the drochs have achieved their growth in the first place by draining other living things. To benefit from them, you find yourself at the top of a pyramid scheme, staying alive at the expense of others, animals and people—dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe more over time.” She offered the slightest of shudders, matching Ben’s.

Luke, still wary because of the way he had been deceived by this woman all those years before, hoped she was telling the truth—hoped the sympathy growing within him for her had a basis in truth. “But you’ve given up consuming drochs.”

“Long ago.” Sel gestured at herself. “Look at me. Aging at a normal rate now. My life has a finite span again … but at least it is a life. Not a terrible, endless story told to frighten children.”

Ben knit his brows, still putting things together. “The HoloNet resources on Nam Chorios talk about the drochs as the source of the Death Seed plague, and talk about Nam Chorios’s new medical economy, but don’t link them. All this new development is from exploring medical by-products from study of the drochs, right?”

Sel brightened but shook her head. “No. The Theran Listeners also promote healing. They do it by convincing the patient’s body to heal itself. This is the basis of the new economy. Take someone who is ill, run a complete series of tests on his body chemistry. Then put him through a regimen of Listener healing. Run a comparison suite of tests. The patient’s body will have manifested chemicals that were not present before—for example, to diminish or eliminate a cancer. Newcomer doctors analyze those chemicals, trying to replicate them. Sometimes they can, resulting in new medicines. Not just for humans. Duros, Chadra-Fan, Gamorrean, Wookiee, Twi’lek … I’ve seen so many species helped.”

Vestara looked doubtful. “And that’s why you stay on this sad excuse for a world?