Star Wars_ Shatterpoint - Matthew Woodring Stover [112]
As though our talks are my own hallucination.
And if so-Does it matter?
Even a lie of the Force is more true than any reality we can comprehend.
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU
Much of the day we spent talking about Kar Vaster. Depa has spared me many of the less savory details, but she has told me enough.
More than enough.
For example: when he calls me doshalo, it's not just an expression. If what he has told Depa is the truth, Kar Vaster and I are the last of the Windu.
The ghosh into which I was born-and with which I lived for those months in my teens, while I returned to learn some of the Korun Force skills-has apparently been destroyed piecemeal over the past thirty years. Not in any great massacre, or climactic last stand, but by the simple, brutal mathematics of attrition: my ghosh is just another statistical casualty of a simmering guerrilla war against an enemy more numerous, better armed, and equally ruthless.
Depa told me this hesitantly, as though it were horrible news that must be broken gently. And perhaps it is. I cannot say. She seems to think it should matter a great deal to me. And perhaps it should.
But I am more thoroughly Jedi than I am Korun.
When I think of my doshallai dead and scattered, Windu heritage and traditions perishing in blood and darkness, I feel only abstract sadness.
Any tale of pointless suffering and loss is sad, to me.
I would change them all if I could. Not just my own.
I would certainly change Kar's.
It seems that as a young man, Kar Vaster was fairly ordinary: more in touch with pelekotan than most, but not in any other way unsual. It was the Summertime War that changed him, as it has changed so much on this world.
When he was fourteen, he saw his whole family massacred by jungle prospectors: one of the casual atrocities that characterize this war.
I do not know how it is that he alone escaped; the stories Depa has heard from various Korunnai are contradictory. Kar himself, it seems, will not discuss it.
What we do know is that after witnessing the murders of his entire family, he was left alone in the jungle: without weapons, without grassers, without akks or people, food or supplies of any kind. And that he lived in the jungle-alone-for more than a standard year.
This is what he meant when he said he had survived tan pel'trokal.
The term has an irony that only now do I begin to appreciate.
The tan pel'trokal is a penalty devised by Korun culture, to punish crimes deserving death. Knowing that human judgment is fallible, the Korunnai leave the final disposition of the sentence to the jungle itself; they consider it a mercy.
I would say: it is a mercy they grant themselves. Thus can they take life without the shame of bloodied hands.
In Kar's case, he faced his tan pel'trokal for the crime of being Korun.
He was as innocent-and as guilty-as the Balawai children to whom he was planning to do the same. Their crimes were identical: they were born into the wrong family.
He was, at the time, perhaps a year older than Keela.
But there was no Jedi nearby to save him, and so he had to save himself.
I believe that his ability to form human speech was part of the price he paid for his survival. All Jedi know that power must be paid for; the Force maintains a balance that cannot be defied. Pelekotan traded him power for his humanity.
I sometimes wonder if the Force does the same for Jedi.
He and his Akk Guards clearly have much in common with Jedi: they seem to be our reflections in a dark mirror. They rely on instinct; Jedi rely on training. They use anger and aggression as sources of power; our power is based upon serenity and defense. Even the weapon he and