Star Wars_ Shatterpoint - Matthew Woodring Stover [83]
Black is the presence of every color.
He doesn't make the darkness, he only uses it. His inner darkness is a reflection of the darkness of his world; and it darkens the world around him in turn. Internal and external darkness create each other, just as do internal and external light: that is the underlying unity of the Force.
As Depa might say, he didn't start this war. He's just trying to win it.
And that was it, right there: my Jedi instincts had made a connection below the threshold of my consciousness. Vastor. The jungle. The akk dogs, and the humans who had been made into Vastor's pack. Depa. Darkness so deep it was like being blind. Nick's words: The jungle doesn't promise. It exists. Not because the jungle kills you. Because it is what it is.
The war itself.
Only later, when I would spend a full day riding alongside Depa's howdah on the dorsal shell of her immense ankkox, when I would have to lean close to the gauzy curtains to catch her half-whispered words, would I understand where my instincts were leading me.
There are times when her voice is strong and clear, and her arguments lucid, and if I close my eyes and ignore the rocking of the ankkox's gait, the insect stings and rich floral rot of the jungle, I can imagine us chatting over a couple of cups of rek tea in my meditation chamber at the Jedi Temple.
In those times, she makes a terrifying sense.
"You still think like a judicial," she told me once. "That's your fundamental error. You still think in terms of enforcing the law.
Upholding the rules. You were a great peace officer, Mace, but you're a terrible general. That's what cost so many lives at Geonosis: we went in like judi-cials. Trying to rescue hostages without loss of life. Trying to keep the peace. The Geonosians already knew we were at war-so only a few of us survived..."
"And if I thought like a general, what should I have done?" I asked her.
"Let Obi-Wan and Anakin die?"
"A general," murmured the shadow through the curtains, "would have dropped a baradium bomb on that arena."
"Depa, you can't be serious," I began, but she had stopped listening to me.
"Win the war," she went on. "Win at the cost of two Jedi, one Senator, and a few thousand of the enemy."
"At the cost of everything that makes jedi what we are."
"Instead, a hundred and more Jedi died, and you have a galaxy at war.
Millions will die, and millions more will end up like that boy Kar killed: twisted, angry, and evil. Gather a million corpses, and tell them your ethics outweighed their lives..."
To this I have no easy answer, even now.
But as Yoda says: There are questions for which we can never have answers. We can only be answers.
That is what I must try to be, for I know, now, what it means to be a keeper of the peace in the Galaxy of War.
That is: it means nothing at all.
There is no peace. What we thought was the Great Peace of the Republic was only a dream from which our galaxy has now awakened. I doubt we'll ever fall back into any dream like that again.
In the Galaxy of War, no one sleeps that well.
This understanding came later; at the time, as I sat in the grasser's saddle and looked down at Kar Vaster, the prisoners behind us and Depa's ankkox still unseen ahead, I had only a notion-a hunch-a mass of unprocessed feelings and unsorted ideas.
An instinct.
But somehow my instincts seemed to be working again... which is why I chose to send Vastor on without me. As I asked Depa a thousand times, when she was my Padawan-Is the true lesson what the teacher teaches, or what the student learns?
A few paces beyond where the Balawai prisoners stumbled along the jungle floor, Mace Windu reached past the grasser's nose and took its reins in one hand. "This is far enough. Leave me here."
Vastor stopped, looking back over his massive shoulder. Depa awaits.
"She's waited