Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [111]
“Such as?”
“You see everything in black and white—cleanly defined absolutes. I think, whatever they had intended at first, Obi-Wan and Yoda decided they needed to shape you into a weapon they could use against Vader and the Emperor. Why didn’t they tell you Vader was your father? They knew, as an orphan, you wanted to know who your father was. They didn’t let you see him that way so you would not be vulnerable. When he told you who he was, he blunted their strategy, but he didn’t count on your strength. You saw his admission to you as a covert cry for help, a bid for salvation. From what you’ve said, your mentors doubted it, as did the Emperor. You fooled them all and succeeded. Now you’ve turned that success into a validation of everything you were taught, even though what you were taught doesn’t support the results you got.”
Luke stared hard at me. “You do not think there is only light and dark? If you leave here with that thought in your mind, you will be vulnerable to the dark side. You will be seduced by it.”
I shook my head slowly. “I’ve nothing to fear from the dark side.”
Luke’s voice became cold. “You’re as good as lost to it, then. You know nothing of its power, its draw. You know nothing of its temptations.”
I stood abruptly, tipping my chair over backward and I poked a finger toward his chest. “No, Master Skywalker, you know nothing of what I have been through in my life. I’ve been eyeball to eyeball with the dark side more than you will ever know. You stand back and see good and evil on a grand and cosmic scale, but I’ve been right down there, right at the point where light meets dark. I know that border intimately and while I’ve toed the terminator line, I’ve not strayed as much as a micron over it.”
I tried to tamp down my anger, but I found it very difficult to do. “I’ve been called out to a domestic disturbance and walked into an apartment where the woman of the house is lying there on the floor, in a pool of blood and vomit. Her nose has been pulverized. Her eyes have been blacked and are swollen shut. Her throat has bruises that show a hand and fingers, and fading bruises cover the rest of her body. Standing over her are two teary-eyed toddlers the age of your niece and nephew. And lying there, on the couch a room away, is her glitbiting husband, his fists still raw and bloody from the beating, his clothes spattered with her blood. His snores are enough to cover her sobs. I’ve seen that and had every fiber of my being wanting me to give that animal the rudest wake-up he’s ever had. I’ve wanted to beat him so badly he’d look like a rancor’s chew-toy, but I didn’t. I pulled back.
“I’ve walked into a warehouse and arrested a spicelord in his office. He opened a case and it had over a million credits in it. A million—more money than I’ll ever see in my lifetime. It was mine, he said, if I’d just take it and walk away. No one would ever know.” I narrowed my eyes. “But I’d know, and I didn’t do it.”
He started to say something, but I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “My father died in my arms, his life leaking out of him. I had no good-bye. I had no chance to tell him I loved him. I had to hold him, feeling his life fade, hoping for a response, anything to let me know I’d not failed him, and I didn’t get it.
“I went out and I found the bounty hunter scum that killed my father, and I arrested him. There wasn’t a person in CorSec that would have whispered in protest if I’d shot him ‘resisting arrest.’ I could have marched Bossk into One CorSec Plaza, right there in the lobby, and blown his head off in front of hundreds of witnesses, and they’d have all said