Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [183]
The core of the Jedi ritual for creating a lightsaber came down to charging the power cell that first time. My grandfather ridiculed the popular superstition stating a Jedi channeled the Force through his lightsaber. He suggested that this was a misunderstanding of what it took to charge it initially and tie it to the rest of the weapon. The Jedi, carefully manipulating the Force, bound the components together—linking them on something more than a mechanical or material level, so they worked with unimagined efficiency. Without this careful seasoning and conditioning of the lightsaber, the blade would be flawed and would fail the Jedi.
Before I could figure out how to put Tavira off for another month, Elegos decoded an annotation to the instructions for constructing lightsabers. It turned out that during the Clone Wars, Jedi Masters developed a way to create a lightsaber in two days. Nejaa included this method, noting it was to be used only in times of pressing need, but not in haste. I read it over and felt a certain peace settle upon me. I knew the words had not been written for me, but they sank deep into my core. Urgency without panic, action without thoughtlessness.
I began by calming myself and simplifying my lifestyle. I drank only water and ate noodles that were all but unflavored. I cleared Tavira’s gifts from my bedroom, or hid them away in closets. I sat in the middle of the floor, with the parts for the blade laid out in a semicircle around me. I studied each one and used the Force to enfold it and take a sense of it into myself. My hands would fit the pieces together, but I wanted the parts to mesh as if they had been grown together. The lightsaber would be more than just a jumble of hardware, and to make it I had to see the parts as belonging together.
I fitted the activation button into its place on the handlebar shaft and snapped the connectors into the right spots on the dimetris circuit board. I worked that into the shaft itself, then inserted a strip of shielding to protect it from even the slightest leakage from the superconductor. Next I snapped into place the gemstones I was using to focus and define the blade. At the center, to work as my continuous energy lens, I used the Durindfire. That same stone gave my grandfather’s blade its distinctive silver sheen. I used a diamond and an emerald in the other two slots. I wasn’t certain what I would get in the way of color tints from the emerald, and with the diamond I hoped for a coruscation effect.
Onto the end of the hilt where the blade would appear I screwed the high-energy flux aperture. It would carry a negative charge which would stabilize the positively charged blade and provide it a solid base without allowing it to eat its way back through to my hands. Controlling a lightsaber blade was difficult enough without having it nibbling away at fingers.
I clipped the discharged energy cell in place, then connected the leads to the recharging socket. I screwed the recharging socket into the bottom of the hilt but didn’t fasten on the handlebar’s original butt cap that would protect it because I needed to charge the power cell for the very first time. I reached over and took the charging cord from the small transformer I’d borrowed from our tech bay, and plugged the lightsaber in.
With my finger poised on the transformer button that would start the energy flowing, I drew in a deep breath and lowered myself into a trance. I knew that manipulating matter sufficiently to meld the part and forge the weapon would have been all but impossible for anyone but a Jedi Master like Yoda, but doing just that as part of the construction of a lightsaber had been studied and ritualized so even a student could manage it. It was very much a lost art, a link to a past that had been all but wiped out, and by performing it I completed my inheritance of my Jedi legacy.