Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [18]
Leia sprang back from the toppling pieces of the corpse, screaming—Why couldn’t she scream through the clogging weight of sleep? Her father’s body lay in pieces in the shadow, cauterized where the blade had severed thorax from pelvis, only a trickle of brownish fluid worming across the marble floor toward her feet. She cried something, she didn’t know what. Anakin, Jacen, and Jaina all turned to gaze at her.
All three had drawn lightsabers. Three blades gleamed, red and shining columns of power, the light making six red flames in three pairs of demon eyes.
“We’re Jedi, Mother,” Jaina said. “There’s no Law for us. We can do whatever we want.”
Anakin said, “That’s your gift to us. We’re Jedi because you’re Jedi, too. We are what you are.” He turned to look back at the pieces of Bail Organa’s body, the eyes open and staring in shock, the outstretched hand with its golden ring. “And anyway he wasn’t really your father.”
Leia screamed “No! No!”
The images blurred to darkness and she heard Luke’s voice. “Learn to use the Force, Leia. You have to.”
“Never!”
You have to.
She couldn’t swear then that it was Luke’s voice. The warmth of the Force touched her, comforting, but it seemed that she could see it only through a viewport or a doorway. She lay in shadow, and the shadow was cold.
She heard movement behind her head, and opened her eyes.
For a time there’d been a man named Greglik who’d piloted a reconditioned ore hauler for the Rebel forces, back when they’d been moving from planet to planet ahead of Admiral Piett’s fleet. Greglik had been a good pilot but an addict, whose addictions had deepened until he’d gotten himself and seventeen Rebel fighters killed in a stupid collision with an asteroid.
She remembered him now. One night in a temporary HQ on Kidron, when they were watching for an attack, he’d told her about being an addict, about mixing drugs to achieve the exact rainbow of mental damage to match any mood he sought to erase.
“Glitterstim’s all right if you’re blue,” he had said, his brown eyes dreamy, like a man recalling the great love of his life. “Everything takes on a rise, a buzz, a life, as if your whole body had been made new and your whole future with it. And for those nights when you’ve got an itchy anger in your soul against all the people who’ve robbed you or jeered at you, there’s pyrepenol. Two shots of pyrep and you’ll spit on the Fates that spin your life thread. When you’re hurting for the girl who could have saved you if-only, Santherian tenho-root extract’s your poison: gentle, gentle, like the sun breaking clouds at the end of day.”
He’d smiled, and Leia’s contempt for the man had transmuted to pity, as she comprehended for the first time all that he had done himself out of for the sake of those easy illusions. He had been a handsome man, bronzed and fair like a charming god, but sexless, as most addicts quickly became, and without the courage to face a relationship or hold an opinion of his own.
“But sometimes there’s nothing that’ll do it but sweetblossom. It’s a good thing the blossom’s not addictive,” he’d added with a grin. “It could grind galactic civilization to a halt in a week flat.”
“It’s that deadly?” Leia had asked.
Greglik had laughed. “My darling child, few drugs are that deadly. It’s what they get you to do to yourself that destroys you. Blossom is exactly like sleep. A little of it—two drops, maybe—and it’s like you’ve just woken up, before your mind is in gear to do anything: You just sit around in your pajamas saying, I’ll take care of business when I’m feeling a bit more the thing. But, of course, you never do. Five drops is good for endless sitting, curled up, comfortable, thinking nothing, watching addercops spin webs or dust motes make