Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [40]
His chest heaving and sweat staining his khaki robes, Gantoris leaned heavily forward on his sword. “This dodging and evading works well against sticks, but it will not protect you against a lightsaber.”
Feeling similarly drained, I sat down on the grasses. “I don’t expect to face many foes wielding lightsabers.”
Gantoris’ eyes sharpened. “But someday that will happen. When it does, beware.”
Luke entered the circle and dropped to one knee between the two of us. “When that day comes, your progress in the Force will mean you’ll have other, better tools to use in defense. Remember, today you are in your infancy in the Force. The lessons learned here are but the beginning.”
TEN
If we were in our infancy in the Force, I was not proving myself to be a boy genius. The warnings I had been able to use, the dim sense of others grew slightly, then plateaued. If I was concentrating or if I wasn’t thinking at all, I might notice someone approaching the doorway of my room. This definitely was an improvement over the split-second warnings I sometimes got when flying or back with CorSec, but not the sort of practical application of an ability that would allow me to find Mirax. Measured against that goal, my progress seemed far too little, far too late.
That’s not to say I found the training disappointing. I didn’t, not at all. In fact, I found in it a great deal about myself that surprised me. I didn’t notice new talents or new sides of myself, but I recovered things I had long forgotten.
Master Skywalker took all of us through a series of exercises he said he’d learned from his teachers, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. The exercises were typically little things that seemed, on the surface, to be child’s play. Trying some of them seemed silly, but Tionne and Kirana Ti—the green-eyed witch from Dathomir—and even the hermit gas-prospector from Bespin, Streen, all approached these things with an open wonder and humor that made being silly a lot easier for me.
Master Skywalker stood before us, having arranged us in a semicircle on the grassy clearing near the Great Temple. “This is an exercise in two parts that will build on what we learned a week ago. What I showed you then was a simple technique for shunting aside pain. Its use is obvious. That same skill also allows you to shut off sensory input. Why would you want to do that? Brakiss?”
The blond man gave Luke a smirk. “Your roommate might snore, so you could cut off your hearing to sleep.”
The Jedi Master smiled. “Very good. I recall using it for that a couple of times myself. Another reason?”
Kirana Ti raised a hand. “Since we rely heavily on visual senses, a visual illusion might blind us to what is truly going on. Being able to cut down or cut out our vision would allow us to determine what is truly happening.”
Gantoris frowned. “But that would leave you blind.”
Kam disagreed. “You would rely upon your ability to sense things through the Force to make up for the lack. Without the visual confusion, this sense should come much more clearly.”
Luke raised a hand and nodded. “Good points, all. The key here is learning to control perceptions. First you need to make certain that the data coming in is correct. Filtering out distractions, or sharpening a sense to gather more information, will let you do that. We will work on that in this exercise. The second thing we will deal with, later, is determining the truth or falsehood of what you perceive.”
I scratched at the back of my neck. “Truth and falsehood seem pretty straightforward to me.”
“On the surface they are fairly clear, but truth can depend upon a certain point of view. As Obi-Wan Kenobi