Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 08_ Edge of Victory 01_ Conquest - J. Gregory Keyes [87]
“Then you accept what I told you about the Force?”
“Of course not. As I said before, I can admit that what my senses tell me is true without believing your delirious justification of it. Your weapon may be acceptable to the gods; your heresy is not. Build your blade.”
With that, Rapuung stalked off into the darkness.
“And you say I don’t make any sense,” Anakin sighed.
Disappointment edged at Anakin, but he fought it back.
He could feel the lambent, but not in the Force, not the way he could feel everything else about his weapon. Everything was in place, fitted, ready to work. But what he had told Rapuung was the truth; the real moment a lightsaber became a Jedi’s weapon was when the first amperes of power trickled through it, when each piece became a part of the other and a part of the Jedi building it.
But the lambent was resisting that. Well, not resisting actually, but not going along with the whole scheme, either.
And time was passing, each moment bringing Tahiri closer to something terrible.
Concentrate, he thought. There is no try.
But there was failure, especially here. Master Yoda’s words, his entire philosophy, required the presence of the Force in everything.
But the Force wasn’t in the Yuuzhan Vong. It wasn’t in their biotech. They could be fought only indirectly, with things that could be sensed in the Force.
Something slapped him, then, something that had been cocking its hand back for a long time.
Master Yoda was wrong.
The Jedi were wrong, and Vua Rapuung was right. If the Jedi stood for nothing but seeking balance in the Force, then he did have no business fighting the Yuuzhan Vong. Oh, he could rescue Tahiri; after all, preventing her from becoming a dark Jedi was at the core of the philosophy. But were actions—however bad or evil they seemed—were the actions of the Yuuzhan Vong in and of themselves worth opposing if they had no effect on the Force?
To be sure, the aliens were killing people, which always disturbed the Force. But did it unbalance it? The Yuuzhan Vong weren’t gathering dark energy about themselves. If anyone ran the risk of doing that, it was Jedi like Kyp and maybe even himself. Seen like that, fighting the Yuuzhan Vong was more likely to unbalance the Force than any action they themselves might take.
Sure, that all made sense. It almost sounded like something Jacen or Uncle Luke would say. But that was all predicated on the certainty that the Force was in everything.
And it wasn’t. And while the facts of the matter were staring them all in the face, no Jedi had had the guts to confront the new reality. Instead they were acting like spoiled children, complaining that the Yuuzhan Vong didn’t play fair, weren’t following those black-and-white rules. So Kyp went out to shoot them, to try to make the problem go away by killing it. Jacen huddled away in indecision. Maybe he was right.
No. It wasn’t right for the Yuuzhan Vong to kill whole planets. It wasn’t right for them to enslave people. Those actions were evil, they were wrong, and they had to be fought. If the Force did not draw that line and set great dark-side alarms wailing, then maybe Anakin didn’t serve the Force. Or to put it more precisely, he served something more fundamental than the Force, something of which the Force was a manifestation, an emanation—a tool. Not Rapuung’s gods, or any god, but some fundamental truth built into the universe at a subatomic level. In his galaxy, the Force was the servant of that truth. Wherever the Yuuzhan Vong were from, some other manifestation must prevail. But light remained light, and dark, dark. And whatever had happened to the Yuuzhan Vong, they had turned to the dark side long ago. If the Empire of Palpatine had prevailed and traveled to another galaxy on an errand of conquest, a galaxy where the Force was not known, what evidence would the people there