Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [70]
Luke’s admonition about the dark side when he saw Gantoris’ body made me wonder if, somehow, Gantoris had managed to dig up, decipher and study some Sith artifacts or manuals. Somewhere he had learned to make a lightsaber. I didn’t want to think one of the Emperor’s Dark Jedi had managed to slip onto Yavin 4 and was tutoring students. Figuring that Gantoris had gotten himself in trouble was a more pleasant alternative theory.
Unfortunately for my peace of mind, the idea of Gantoris’ body being a taunt and a challenge fit all too well patterns I had seen before. My father had always told me to follow my gut. He’d really been encouraging my reliance in the Force, so I started with the assumption that an active intelligence had instructed Gantoris and then killed him.
The problem with that assumption remained the same as it had always been: if such a person existed, Master Skywalker should have detected him. A droid doing the teaching would explain why we didn’t detect him in the network of life on Yavin 4. A droid might even have the knowledge to teach Gantoris, but since it could not manipulate the Force, the lessons learned would be relatively useless.
Off the other edge of the scale we had the possibility of someone so powerful in the Force that he could remain undetected even by a Master. Gantoris’ “dark man” and the person in Master Luke’s nightmare could fit that profile. Putting Exar Kun at the top of the list of suspects was easy. He’d certainly not have balked at roasting Gantoris alive, but he’d been dead for four thousand years. Master Luke had alluded to the idea that he had seen and spoken with Obi-Wan Kenobi after the Jedi Master had been killed, but within a decade after his death, Obi-Wan had gone away forever. A Dark Lord of the Sith might have more staying power than that, but four millennia?
In addition to working with Tionne to uncover more data about the Jedi, I got to spend more time with Kam learning how to use a lightsaber. We managed to expand my sphere of responsibility up to sixteen meters for fine control, which meant I could pretty much own a city block. If I focused in one direction I was good up to two hundred fifty meters for fine control on picking off blaster bolts, or line of sight for sensing presence. In one experiment, I implanted a vision of dinner being served in Dorsk 81’s mind, summoning him and Kyp back from one of their hikes though they were still half a kilometer away.
I tried to get into Kyp’s mind on that occasion, but I didn’t know him well enough to break through. That confirmed one of my theories about who I could and could not influence. The better I knew someone, the more receptive they seemed to be to my projections. If they were hostile or unknown to me and/or the image was terribly complex, I had a lot of trouble making them see anything.
After a particularly grueling day I ended up lounging around with the rest of the students in the early evening. We’d spent half the day listening to one of the auxiliary Holocron gatekeepers spin stories of court intrigues in the Old Republic—intrigues that must have been fascinating when you knew who he was talking about, but the gatekeeper’s stunning inability to characterize anyone meant that I lost track of what was going on almost immediately. After that another gatekeeper told the story of how Yoda had become a Jedi. That story was actually pretty good and undoubtedly saved my life because a minute more of the Old Republic stories and I’d have slipped into a coma. After that I went out on a ten-kilometer run just to convince myself I was, in fact, alive.
The academy personnel had all gathered in one of the larger