Star Wars the Truce at Bakura - Kathy Tyers [75]
The moment of insight cheered him. It wasn’t wrong for a human to learn to use natural talents. If Gaeriel’s religion were carried to its logical end, everyone would have to be equal—even identical—in all respects, for fear of diminishing anyone else.
And his life was no longer his own.
He thought he could make out slow-moving pinpricks of light overhead that would be ships in the orbiting defense web. Locked in position with other ships, joined by common orders and a common enemy.
Many of those pilots had life mates to return to—or, at the last need, to grieve them. The stronger he became in the Force, the harder it might become to find a woman who’d have him.
He opened his empty hands. “Ben?” he whispered. “Ben, please come. I need to talk with someone.”
Not even a breeze answered. Along the wall’s surface, a black creature the size of his smallest finger humped on twenty legs. He concentrated on the rhythms of those legs, focusing his spirit. After it vanished into a crack, he called again. “Master Yoda? Are you near?”
Foolish question. Yoda was with the Force and therefore everywhere. But he did not answer.
“Father?” he called hesitantly, then repeated, “Father,” wondering if Anakin understood. He tried to imagine himself in Gaeri’s place. With her home world threatened and her life in peril, into the crisis came a man who frightened her. A Jedi.
He felt someone approach. Ben? he thought, but the intensity wasn’t that of a master, and it carried the restless striving of a living person. Light footfalls hurried down the path. Leia hesitated at the branching, her white gown glimmering between vine-shadowed white trees.
“I’m over here,” he called softly.
She hurried up beside him. “Are you all right?” She pulled a blue Bakuran knit shawl around her shoulders. “I heard—well, I thought I heard you call out through the Force.”
She’d tracked him this way at Cloud City, too. He sank down onto the bench. “It’s been a long, rough day. How was yours?”
“Uh,” she answered, “good. I left Artoo and Threepio with Prime Minister Captison.” A self-conscious excitement begged him not to notice. She tingled with eagerness.
Envious, he said, “Let it flow, Leia. He loves you.”
She glared. “No use hiding anything from you, is there? We went walking. We talked. We … it’s been hard to find time alone.”
Luke smiled, feeling bashful. “So this is what I missed. Growing up without siblings, I mean.”
Leia flicked the ends of her shawl. “It’s good to have a brother. Someone to talk to.”
“You also have Han. Someone ought to pass on the family strengths,” he added glumly. “It doesn’t look like I’ll get the chance any time soon.”
She laid a hand on his shoulder. “What’s wrong, Luke? Is it that senator?”
“A Jedi feels no passion.” Anyone who could manipulate his emotions could endanger him, making him unable to calm himself—unable to control. “But sometimes the Force obviously controls me, rather than the other way around. It favors life.”
“It is her. I was beginning to worry about you, Luke. You’ve been so … detached.”
Her insight made him squirm. The easiest way to distract her was to rile her. “You and Han,” he said. “Let me ask you something I’ve no right to ask. You’re not … opposed to having children some day, are you?”
“Hey!” She snatched back her hand. “That isn’t an issue.”
“Sorry. It’s just that I’ve thought so much about it lately.” He had? Amazing, what his subconscious would tell somebody else before it informed him. For a moment, he pictured himself as head of a clan of young Jedi apprentices with mismatched green, blue, and gray eyes. “But a child who’s strong in the Force will have a great potential for evil too.”
“Of course.” Leia sat down and flipped the ends of her shawl into her lap, then plucked a purple trumpet flower off a vine and sniffed it. “That’s a risk humans have always had to take. It’s perilous to bring