An Incident on Dantooine - What the Future may Hold

I fought to keep from flinching as my Keeper's fingers worked the red mehendi paste into my skin. Heavy on my nose and light on my lips and eyelids, the kmsah base was taking a terribly long time to finish. I could feel it, clumped and smeared and drying, cracking, on my face, little flecks catching in my eyelashes. It was irritating, but I kept from scratching through sheer force of will.

It started a few centimeters above my eyebrows, which had been thickly crusted already. It ended down past the point of my chin, where my Keeper's fingers were now working. In shape it was almost a point-down elongated triangle, following the line of my cheekbones.

"I still don't know why you're doing this," I told my Keeper conversationally. Finished with my chin, she started to scrape the dried paste from my forehead. I closed my eyes to protect them from falling flakes. My Keeper murmured something completely illegible in a soothing tone of voice. I didn't need to know the language to pick up on the fact that she would rather I held still.

It took perhaps two minutes before the base was scraped clean enough for her satisfaction. I knew full well that my face was now a dramatic darkish red-orange, like hers but without the little intricacies. It looked well enough on her and the other Dantari, but on me, I was certain, it looked foolish. I opened my eyes.

Wiping her hands on a dirty shred of animal skin, my Keeper set aside the gourd of red mehendi and picked up the smaller one of mashed huito berries. Only Nemo's classes about the uses of Dantooine's native flora allowed me even that much knowledge; some of the vainer Younglings painted themselves with compounds made of mehendi, and I knew from bitter experience that huito juice stained skin for weeks, making it painfully obvious who had been eating it. The memory made me smile a little, sardonic.

My Keeper's fingers were admirably steady as she drew a streak from temple to temple across my eyes, which I closed before hand. I imagined that I could feel the juice working through the mehendi into my skin, reacting by turning it into a dramatic blue-black bar. My Keeper then drew another, thinner streak from below my eyebrows at the center of the first bar. The second line went down the arch of my nose, between my nostrils, and across my lips, ending on the lower one. Visualizing it, I realized that she had made a "T" shape.

Like a Mandalorian, I thought to myself vaguely, and wondered where that thought had come from.

I dismissed it as my Keeper stood up and, tugging at my shoulder, made it clear that she wanted me to follow suit. I did so, and she started to walk away, beckoning.

Allowing myself a quiet sigh, I followed. I hate mysteries. It was dark again, but my eyes were good, so there was no trouble. I could feel myself being watched. The Dantari were expecting something, that much was obvious. This was the first time I had been allowed to venture more than a few hundred meters away from the speeder. Involuntarily I paused at the farthest point I had been allowed to go, as if some invisible leash kept me there. My Keeper uttered an impatient-sounding bark of a word, severing it. I followed.

She lead me down into a hole in the ground, the opening fringed with long grass. I hesitated a little - caves and tunnels in the sides of rocks and hills are bad enough. What if the roof collapsed? If it does, it does, I told myself firmly, and climbed down after her.

Inside, my eyes were reluctant to adjust further. It was very dark. I banged and scraped my knuckles and knees more than once, but it was a minor irritation, nothing more. This cave wasn't made of dissolveable rock like limestone; there were no stalactites dripping, no stalagmites reaching upwards. Instead, as my vision slowly adjusted, the little grotto's rough rock walls bore hundreds of small crystals, shaded from clear to ice-blue. None were larger than the first joint of my thumb, and they all glowed, very faintly. It was almost like an ghostlit geode. Master Nisi's speeder would barely have fit in the space.

Almost without my willing it to, my hand went to my lightsaber crystal, almost forgotten on its cord under my robes. I fished it out through my collar. It glowed as well, but even more faintly than the ones on the walls. I had to cup it in my hands to see the glow at all. After a puzzled moment I stowed it back under my clothes, not wanting to attract extra attention.

My Keeper was there besides Shaman, against one stretch of wall that was perhaps a meter square, which was almost perfectly flat and clear of even sand-sized crystals. The cave's floor was a combination of broken crystals and packed earth. I didn't think the crystals would be able to pierce even the thin soles of my current boots, but I still erred on the side of caution, picking my way over slowly.

I could feel them in the Force, "see" them as a little brighter than usual as they called on it. It was still weak compared to the demonstrations that were commonplace in the Enclave; far more obvious was the reverence and awe that practically radiated off of them. My Keeper was using her small Force talent to suspend a dish-shaped disk of some kind of dark metal, hovering it just over her hands. This was the first time I had seen the nomadic Dantari with any kind of metal. They were not nearly advanced enough to mine or work it, so this was probably very old.

I picked closer, feeling other Dantari climbing down into the cave behind me, lining the walls. As if the two in front of me had set a startlingly powerful compulsion in my mind, I could not look away.

Something round and nonreflective, like a set of dead coals, left Shaman's hands to settle into the metal dish. He said something, one word. It sounded like "afarghe" or "afarje", but I could have been mistaken.

The bowl's contents lit, briefly becoming a thin tower of hissing yellow fire, blinding me. Blinking rapidly, my eyes tearing, I sensed rather than saw the flame die as quickly as it had started, smoldering and creating a great quantity of thick pale smoke. It spread rapidly.

I didn't know it was possible to use the Force to set things on fire. Wow. I frowned a little, sniffing, as reflexive tears fought out from behind my eyelids. Hey, I know that smell... That's baby moonrose being burned, isn't it? Isn't that- isn't that a hallucinogenic? Two years after Malak and I had first come to Dantooine, several Temple servants from the Service Corps had been shipped away in disgrace after smoking baby moonrose. I remembered the smell from the chamber they had used before all the smoky residue had been scoured away.

Nemo talked about the plant... yes, the chemicals in it were fairly common, appearing in many different drugs. I had entered into and passed the "Immunities and Tolerances" course a year or two ago, raising my tolerance levels and making me as resistant as possible to all of the better-known recreational drugs. So I shouldn't feel anything. I hope.

The Dantari were certainly feeling something. The hazy smoke and the effect it had on my eyes, combined with the faint glow of the crystals, made it hard to see anything, but I could hear a few of them moaning in ecstasy. Great. This is either an important religious ritual or a drug den. Maybe both. If a Master saw me now...

My Keeper, I sensed, had dropped to her knees, still using the Force to hold the metal dish level above her palms. Shaman had sank down when the first wash of smoke boiled over him, but now he lurched back to his feet and stumbled towards me. I didn't feel any intent to harm. As a matter of principle, I would have sidestepped and avoided him anyway, but it seemed that I wasn't as immune as I had hoped; my own legs were sluggish and clumsy.

One of Shaman's hands closed over my upper arm; the other grasped my painted forehead. I could have pulled away, but I felt him in the Force, much stronger than I had ever felt him before. That's right, I remembered, startled. Hallucinogenics and psychedelics are supposed to heighten a Sensitive's connection to the Force, temporarily. At the expense of a few other important things.

Shaman shoved his way through my mental barriers and presented me with a question in the form of an image-concept. He showed me myself as part of the tribe, as one of the Dantari. The image-concept expanded, maybe helped along by my minor new precog talent. I knew that it wasn't a reliable image, tainted as it was by what Shaman wanted, but it rolled through me anyway.

I saw myself learning the language, being accepted, teaching what I knew of the Force and simple technology. The tribe, made stronger, impressed other tribes. Some warred with us, others allied or joined us, swelling our numbers. We became strong, vital, and roamed widely. I grew up and was courted, bearing children and gaining status. The tribe's times of plenty started to outnumber its times of hunger. At my suggestion, we domesticated the bol and the kath hound and discovered the wheel, further strengthening us. Eventually the Dantari were united, one people, stronger for my guidance. My leadership. Life was hard, but worth it. After years and years, I died as an old, old woman surrounded by my descendants, and by the time spreading settlers found the Dantari, they had become quite formidable in their culture and the Force. I was remembered as a god and a hero.

But-

What about my friends? Ranas and Olocc and some of the others would be fine with or without me, but who would keep Nareax from being devoured by his visions? Who would remind Arin that his ghosts were only a part of life, rather than the whole of it? Who would Laury turn to when the unfairness of the galaxy became too much? Who would raise Cimo? Who would be Malak's friend and guide when he was lost? Probably not each other. I knew that without me, none of them would have been more than friendly acquaintances.

They could take care of themselves. Nareaux had a good Master, an Iktotchi who knew more about precognitive dream-visions than I could imagine. Arin... well, Arin would just have to handle it with his Master's help. He might never become a proper Jedi, but he could still be an asset to the Order. Laury had other friends who knew her temper and could stay with her. Cimo would turn to someone else. I wasn't her mother, after all, just a playmate. Malak... Malak would find a better Master or get by on his own. He would have to stand on his own. Life would be harder on them, but they would be fine.

They would all die before they could turn forty.

All of them. One right after the other; not gradually over time but as a vain last stand against something vast and implacable. I saw it in a stream of terrible colorshapes that whipped in and out of my grasp, appearing and fading from my mind. Only a few stayed. An armored boot coming down, crushing ferngrass. A richly-garbed young man falling with his face charred half-off. A table-hologram with four Republic points clustered in a sea of hostiles. A planet, seen from orbit, seething red and orange and black as ships fled in a stream. A red lightsaber with a blackened, cracked hilt clutched in a hand that looked human but for the gray shade of the skin. I had no idea what they meant, or even if they were real or metaphors. But they were terrible, and I knew, somehow, that they were linked to my absence.

The Dantari would remember me as a god and a hero. But only for a few generations. Not long after colonists found them, they too were gone, along with just about everything that I wanted to stand for.

No, I told Shaman wordlessly. I have to go back. Returning to the Enclave would mean vastly more stress and pain for me, but there really was no question about my choice. I am a Jedi.

I sensed, as he pulled away, that he was not surprised. The Dantari stumbled through the smoke back to the burning dish, bending to snatch a charcoal stick from the cave floor. In the blurred smoke and the dim glow he was a shadow, nothing more. I followed. The smoke seemed, somehow, to veil around me and behind my head like a cloak, isolating me.

Shaman brought his arm and the charcoal in his fist up and, slashing, drew a rough circle on the flat section of wall above the burning plant. On either side and behind the circle he slashed a long vertical line. The lines on the sides were then made into long obtuse triangles that bracketed the circle like close-held wings.

My vision blurred further and cleared, slowly. The circle-in-triangles kept its shape but became solid and textured and gray. It hung in space, dark and silent; the stars that appeared to be around it were not in any pattern I recognized. Below it was a sun, seething and flaring, far larger than the circle-in-triangles, but not nearly as large as it should be. This meant that the sun was either very, very small, a neutron star that had somehow retained the appearance and activity of a yellow main-sequence star - unlikely - or the circle-in-triangles was far vaster than even the largest space station known to the Republic.

It was beautiful. It was terrifying. It was awesome in the old sense of the word, inspiring wonder and fear in equal measures.

Even that sight went dark, though it stayed burned into my eyelids like spots do after I've glanced at a bright light. Someday, I decided as it faded slowly, this will be pretty damn important. I realized, though, as it at last became indistinct, that "someday" was not today. My body had had enough. I passed out.

When I woke, I was back under the overturned speeder I had stolen, and it was afternoon. If I had been rising with the dawn and sleeping through the night, my internal clock would have been messed up, what with traveling from the Enclave on one side of Dantooine to here on the other, but I'd been keeping very irregular hours, and so thankfully I hadn't been bothered by that condition called "shuttle lag". My training was supposed to make me proof against the exhaustion and the headaches and such, but I already knew that it wouldn't save me from the irritability.

I got up and looked for my Keeper. She was nowhere to be found. Neither were any of the other Dantari. I couldn't even feel their eyes watching me as I went through my morning rituals; collecting water from my moisture vaporator, cleaning my skin and clothes, and eating some of the packaged rations that I'd brought with me. It had rained during the night. The grass was vigorous. After a time I found my way to the place where the Dantari had set a cooking fire almost every night. I had not yet been allowed there, but I wanted to see them.

There was nothing but a bit of wetted gray ash, long dried. No burned sticks or charcoal, no bones or gourds or little things in the grass. The grass and the dirt had been trod on somewhat, but not as much as I would have expected, and there were no clear footprints. I couldn't help thinking back to the last week. It seemed... unreal. Fuzzy at the edges. Certainly the... urgency I had felt last night was gone. I knew, logically and emotionally, that I was only one person. What great difference could I possibly make in the Republic or the Jedi? I was a good student who sometimes caused minor trouble, not a fantastic prodigy like Exar Kun or the Quel-Dromas or the Sunriders or Sylvar. Kreia saw something in me, yes, but not enough to actually teach me.

Had I imagined it all? Hallucinated it, perhaps partly because of that concussion? I might have been delirious. I could have made the campfire myself. My hair and clothes stank more of suspicious brushfire than baby moonrose. My face felt oily enough for almost a week of open air and inadequate washing; it didn't feel the way I imagined that red mehendi markings would feel. What I could see of my lips and my nose didn't look any redder than normal after I've spent a few hours out in the sun.

Trudging back to Master Nisi's speeder, I searched for a reflective surface. The outside had been painted a dull gray and a matte blue-purple. The cracked windscreen showed me only the vaguest of shadows; nothing in my packs or the speeder's compartments were mirrorlike, although I did find a dispenser of pill-shaped emergency rations. The airspeeder's side and rear-view mirrors were missing. It looked as if they had been unscrewed rather than scraped off. They might have been the reason why it had been so easy to steal, if the airspeeder had been in for repairs or something.

I considered dismantling my moisture vaporator. I knew that there were some silvery metal components in it that were either already highly reflective or could be polished until they were. But I stopped myself. I didn't really want to know if the Dantari had been real or not. If they were, that meant I was probably a good deal more important than I felt comfortable being. If they weren't, then I... wasn't. But what if I found out that they were? It was better to put it off.

For the same reason, I decided not to reach out in the Force again, trying to find the Enclave. Even if I found no Dantari nearby, and I did not want to look, the Enclave was too far away, far enough that a straight line from me to it would plunge through Dantooine's crust and even the core. I wasn't one of the Great Talents that Younglings whispered about to each other. Trying would do me more harm than good. I would wait, either to give the Dantari time to get away or to build myself up so that I wouldn't hurt myself reaching.

Instead, I came to the dismaying realization that I had completely skipped both exercise and meditation, and I was getting out of shape with both. For several days after that I did a great deal of running up and down the hills. I lost track of time while trying to make up for my idleness, but I found a spring to bathe in. This part of Dantooine was caught between spring and summer, so although I found no fruits there were greens to chew. I also found several colonies of the small mammals called "pig coneys", and started hunting and trapping the things. Just as well, really; I was starting to run low on food, and had to ration myself and forage.

Now that my self-inflicted injuries had more-or-less healed, I felt very much as if I was taking part in one of Nemo's survival courses. One of the more advanced tests, when we were taken by shuttles alone or in groups and dropped off deep in the howling wilderness. The difference here was that I was completely and utterly alone. No friends, no classmates, no teachers, no watcher several klicks away to save my hide if I got into trouble. Or to mark me down for wasting heat and energy.

At first, it was a liberating thought. I was responsible for myself and only myself. No need to help get food into a classmate, no stigma attached to picking a direction at random and running like a maniac, no guilt for lazing around in the grass or weaving it into mats just because I could. I didn't feel the need to seek out anyone's anguish and lessen it. There was plenty of time to watch herds of iriaz bounding about on the hills, to watch the huge rayfishlike brith flap languidly high overhead.

I thought I understood why hermits and recluses lived the way they did, avoiding others. For a time it was bliss. Solitude was freedom.

But it seems that it wasn't for me. The novelty wore off and I started to feel empty. Lost. Anxious. Hollow, as if I was comforting someone who was in mourning. I kept checking over my shoulder for something that was never there, scanning the horizon as if it would take pity on me and point me in the right direction.

The silence which had been so welcoming became almost hungry. Unbearable. I started to long for another presence, a voice, even if it belonged to someone like Kreia or Bolook. I was free, but for what? To be nothing, to live and die alone. It took a while, I lost track of the days, before I realized what I felt. Something I had seen before in others, less strongly, but had never really felt myself.

Loneliness.

After I recognized it, I did my best to stave it off. I trapped one of the pig coneys that I had been eating and kept it in a makeshift pen, naming it "Wheek" after its frightened calls and feeding it on grass. But unlike the pet pig coneys which were moderately popular with Younglings at the Enclave, Wheek was a wild animal. He escaped, and I just couldn't stand the thought of trying again and failing. Besides, the pig coney colonies were wary of me by that time, and it took enough effort just to catch one for food. I could have sought them out with the Force, but I was hungry, not starving. It would be too much like cheating to use the Force to hunt when my life didn't depend on it.

To break the silence, I started talking. First to Wheek, and then, after he ran away, to Malak and Laury and other friends and teacher and, occasionally, to random people I had seen but had little interaction with. I told myself that because I wasn't talking to myself, it wasn't a sign of insanity. That you were crazy only if you were certain that you were sane.

I just couldn't stand a world without voices any longer. I daydreamed constantly about people and about speaking with them, I talked to them and paused to hear answers that never came, and I wished, incessantly, that I had some communications talent or a working communicator that would let me speak, just once, with someone who would respond. I missed... everyone.

When it got to the point where I was trying to bargain with the Twi'lek who had a tech shop at the little spaceport that was part of the Enclave - my right leg for ten minutes at a ground-based comm laser - I knew that I had gone too far. But I still had no real desire to try and reach the enclave with my mind, not when I might brush against others.

There was one thing left to do. Fortunately I had all the parts and the tools for it; the hilt and all of the components and the little tools to tune and fiddle with it were in one of my packs, and I had taken them with me on a whim. The little tuning crystals, synthetic diamonds of the correct size and shape that I had bought, were also there, and the primary crystal was around my neck, waiting to be cut. It would be difficult, particularly out here and alone, but I could do it.

Build a lightsaber.

I had quite a shock when I first took hammer and chisel to the rough yellowed surface of my primary crystal. I found a flaw, and after some persistent hammering the thing cracked along this flaw and a slice fell off, just as Nemo had taught me. I had practiced a great deal on the freshly made "blanks", the crystals that every Enclave stocked up on, just in case someone needed a replacement in a hurry. I knew what to do and how to do it.

The surprise here was the color. It was red. Not even the rosy or pale or brownish or purplish red which had showed up in my blanks. Red. I fell into it, it filled my eyes and my mind for what felt like hours. Red as a laigrek's eye, red as the blood in my arteries, deep red, glowing red as a fiery sunset, as a hazard symbol, as the flag of Grosnik, red as the space around Dantooine's sun when I looked at it through closed eyes. Red as bloodshine; red as Ulic Quel-Droma's saber after he killed his brother, ruby red, red shading from bright to dark. I did not know what I had expected, but it wasn't this. Red.

Of course, I reminded myself when I could think again, Sylvar's lightsaber was red. Despite the fact that she was a Cathar with all of her species' legendary temperament, despite the well-known fact that Exar Kun had hated her and vice versa, despite the fact that she had actually taken a mate among the other apprentices and this mate had followed Kun... no one had ever questioned her loyalty to the Jedi. In fact, Sylvar was considered one of the greatest Jedi of her age. Our age; she was still alive, after all. A synthetic crystal's color meant nothing except, perhaps, that the forger had been focused while it was being made.

So I cut the crystal down to the best shape and size, faceting it some places and leaving it round in others, and then polished it until it wouldn't have been out of place in a collection of precious gemstones. Then came the process of fitting it and all the other pieces together.

Traditionally a lightsaber takes about a month to make "from scratch" out of individual pieces; most of this month is spent collecting and meditating over the various components, tuning them to you and to each other, getting everything aligned. The process can be sped up and completed in two days.

I was not starting from scratch. Another tradition is that a Padawan starts making the weapon while still a Youngling, still training with small pink weakened 'sabers. Mine already had all of its pieces. I had practiced assembling it, oh, hundreds of times. My Master was supposed to watch over me as I put it together in its entirety for the first time. But Kreia wasn't here, was she?

I have no idea how long it took to build my lightsaber. My world narrowed to my hands, the tools, the pieces, and the Force. I must have fasted, no small feat for someone as ever-hungry as me. I must have been in a trance. Building it seemed to take a lifespan at least, particularly since I kept making little mistakes, but the Force seemed to guide my hands.

My sense of time had become hopelessly distorted, but after a period that was far longer and yet far, far shorter than I could stand, I was finished. It was as complete as I could get it, given the materials and the tools. My lightsaber was rough. Its hilt was too shiny and smooth. It would slip out of sweaty hands in a fight. It was also very narrow; I had not been able to build the shock absorbers which might protect the delicate contents. The blade was too noisy and bright, burning too much power, and not as efficient as it should be. I would definitely have to rebuild.

In its way, it was perfect.

The only problem now was this: how was I going to get back?

[thanks Charamei for beta work]