Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [80]
She now understood how it was that the greatest Jedi Masters could sense things even parsecs away, information gained far faster than by subspace packet; she had now the knowledge—the certainty—that the universe was of an entire piece, each part connected to all the others, webbed together by vibrating strands of the Force that stretched through dimensions utterly beyond the ken of her senses—and she knew her place in it, and that all things, great and small, were precisely in position. As they had always been, and as they always would be, worlds without end.
There was a temptation to rush out and harvest bota by the bale, render it into fluid, and install a constant-feed pump on her arm to trickle it into her system continuously. She wondered if that was the desire of a seeker, or an addict.
She wondered if there was any difference.
In any event, she could take this new knowledge back to the Jedi Council, and with it the Jedi could become more powerful than anyone could possibly imagine. They could stop this war, as well as prevent others from starting. They could abolish slavery, transform barren worlds into lush paradises, chase evil to the ends of the galaxy and strike it down! Nothing would be beyond their capabilities—the power was that immense!
It all swam in Barriss, overwhelming in its intensity. Even now, she could barely contain the memory of it.
But first, before she went too far into the void, she had to deal with the camp situation. That would be easily accomplished. Then, she could address the larger issues…
Den hurried through the camp to the launch platform, hoping that he wasn’t too late. Milking fool, he thought, of all the days to oversleep—!
He hardly ever bothered with alarm chronos—like most of his kind, Den had an inner timekeeper that went along with his keen sense of direction. Usually it adjusted to the day-and-night cycles of whatever world he was on fairly quickly, taking no more than a standard week at most, and he’d been on this planet a lot longer than that.
But on the one day he needed it the most, wouldn’t you just know it would kick out on him, and he’d sleep just long enough to maybe miss the transport departure of the HNE folk, including Eyar?
After the proposal she had made and he had accepted, he couldn’t let her leave without saying good-bye. It was hard to know just when he would see her again. And when he did, it would be as part of the extended family that would include, by all accounts, a truly staggering number of younglings.
He was to be a patriarch, a hoary old dispenser of wisdom. To sit somewhere deep in the warren and dole out nuggets of sage advice to the young and foolish.
The whole thing didn’t seem quite as appealing now as it had when Eyar had described it to him.
The entertainers were being ferried up to MedStar, where their own transport was docked. Eyar had been scheduled for the first lift up.
Den came around the corner of the launch facility’s main building in time to see the few members of the troupe moving up the ramp. Eyar was one of them.
He ran forward, pushing his way through the taller beings that surrounded him, mostly techs and other workers. “Hey!” he shouted. “Eyar! Wait!” Blast it, he couldn’t see anything but legs—legs covered with clothing, fur, or scales; digitigrade legs, plantigrade legs; a veritable forest of supporting limbs. At last he reached the gate.
“Eyar!”
She was walking sadly up the ramp, the last to leave. At his cry she whirled, and when she saw him, her eyes, her face, her whole body lit up.
“Den-la!”
He was so relieved she hadn’t left yet that he didn’t care that she’d attached the familiar-suffix to his name in public. They embraced.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come! What happened?”
To tell her he’d overslept would be a bad idea—this he knew almost instinctively. She’d be offended that he’d nearly missed her