• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

If he could make himself move his hand.

If there had been anything there to touch.

The despair that pinned him to his seat swelled into a black hole of hopelessness that sucked air from his chest. “Who else can I ask? What can I do? What am I supposed to do now?” He sagged, shaking. “I’ve completely lost it, haven’t I? Here I am, arguing with a hallucination. You don’t even exist!”

does it matter? you’re not that easy to get through to, big brother. i have to take any means available.

“How can it not matter?” Jacen suddenly shouted. “I need—I need—I don’t know what to believe! I don’t know what’s real anymore!”

on the seedship, i was a force projection. then i was telepathic bait. now i’m a hallucination. that doesn’t mean I’m not me. why does everything have to be one or the other?

“Because it does! Because things are either one thing, or something else! That’s the way it is! You can’t be fake and real at the same time!”

why not?

“Because—because you can’t, that’s all!”

the force is one, jacen. it encompasses all opposites. truth and lies, life and death, new republic and yuuzhan vong. light and dark and good and evil. they’re all each other, because each thing and everything is the same thing. the force is one.

“That’s a lie!”

yes. and it’s the truth.

“You’re not Anakin!” Jacen shouted. “You’re not! Anakin would never talk like that! Anakin would never believe that! You’re just a hallucination!”

okay. i’m a hallucination. that means you’re talking to yourself.

that means what i’m saying is what you believe.

Jacen wanted to howl, to rage, to leap from his chair and fight—something. Anything. But the black hole ate his breath, his strength, his anger; it swallowed even the universe of hate, and ended up emptier than it had begun. Where all his hope, all his love, all his certainty had ever been now gaped a cold void, filled only with the blank inanimate hunger of vacuum, and Jacen collapsed.

He didn’t even have the strength to cry.

He fell into the black hole.

Eons passed, or nanoseconds.

Within the black hole, there was no difference between the two.

Stars condensed from intergalactic hydrogen, ignited, fused, burned heavy metals, shrank to white dwarfs that faded to brown, all between one breath and the next.

Eternity within the dark.

Information infell across the event horizon: a voice.

He knew the voice, knew he should not listen—but he was not just in the black hole, he was the black hole, capturing everything, holding it forever.

“What is real? What is illusion? Where is the line between truth and lie? Between right and wrong? It’s a cold and lonely place, Jacen Solo: the void of not knowing.”

He didn’t answer. A black hole can’t reply. An event horizon is the ultimate valve: anything at all can pass through in one direction, nothing at all in the other.

But the infalling voice triggered this black hole into quantum decay. His personal event horizon shrank in an instant to a point mass in the middle of his chest—

And Jacen opened his eyes.

“Vergere,” he said dully. “How did you find me?”

She had settled felinelike upon the Solo dining table, arms and legs folded beneath her. She stared at him with interstellar eyes. “I do not share our masters’ prejudice against technology. Portions of the planetary database survive in memory cores. Discovering the home address of the former Chief of State was no great trick.”

“But how did you know? How did you know I’d come home?”

“It is an instinct of all pack animals: the mortally wounded crawl back to their own dens to die.”

“Wounded?”

“With the greatest wound a Jedi can suffer: freedom.”

Another riddle. He had no strength for riddles. “I don’t understand.”

“When you always know what is right, where is freedom? No one chooses the wrong, Jacen Solo. Uncertainty sets you free.”

Jacen thought about that for a long time. “Die at home,” he murmured. “Some home. Have you seen this place? Jaina’s room is full of some kind of plant that tried to eat me. The kitchen looks like a coral reef. My collection