Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [42]
I partnered up with Tionne and knelt knee to knee with her. We both drew our sleeves back from our left forearms and presented them, wrists upward, to the other. Fairly easily we located small pebbles with our free hands and held them poised above the other’s forearm. Giving her a brave smile, I closed my eyes and shut off the feeling to my left forearm. Then I tried to sense Tionne’s presence.
To say that I stretched out with my senses is really an exaggeration. I wanted to produce a field effect, allowing my senses to spread out and encompass Tionne, but I found the effort as difficult and painful as trying to will my flesh to split so my muscles could expand outward. I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, focusing on it to regain my concentration.
I wondered what to do for a moment, then realized I was really trying to spread myself too thin. First of all, I needed to be able to sense Tionne’s arms, not her whole body and presence. Narrowing the task before me made it far more manageable, and I immediately felt a burst of self-confidence pump more energy into me. Then, following along the same lines of thought, I realized I didn’t need to sense to the micron where her hand or arm was, since both were fairly large. I shifted my thinking around to a new paradigm in which I saw the hairs on my arm exuding little Force tendrils that wove themselves into a glowing mesh. When I felt a contact, I made the mesh even more fine beneath it, and added depth to it, so as her pebble approached my skin I watched it penetrating layers of my screen.
A smile blossomed on my face. The difference between contact and non-contact was just a layer, a layer defined as a micron, but a layer that was easy to perceive when I was able to focus. As her stone touched my skin and the last layer parted beneath it, I poked a finger up and tapped her elbow. That brought a little gasp from her and I smiled a bit more.
Then I shifted my concentration to my right hand. I projected similar tendrils from my fingers, forming them into a capsule that surrounded my stone. I shaped it using what I could feel of it with my fingers. The resolution at the point of my fleshy contact with it became very fine, but remained indistinct where I imagined the point of stone to be. Regardless, I lowered the stone toward her arm, and began to inject color into my sensory capsule. At the point of contact with her skin I made the capsule turn green. As the stone got closer and closer to her flesh, the color shifted to yellow. Then the final layer flashed red and I halted my movement without touching her.
Then she tapped me on the elbow.
I jerked back and my sensory capsule vanished for a moment. I reestablished it and redefined the shape of the rock. Again I made an approach and stopped before what I thought was contact, but it wasn’t until the sixth time that I had managed to define the rock’s shape with enough precision that I stopped before I touched her.
We continued the exercise and quick laughs and triumphant cries soon echoed from the pairs. We became almost playful in what we were doing, teasing each other. As it became more of a game, I found it easier to project my screen and push it out further. Part of me wanted to try to use it to read the contours of Tionne’s face, to see when she was smiling and to see her brow knitted in concentration, but I held back.
My unwillingness