"Big plans tonight, Anakin?" I glanced over at my
former master's apprentice with a smirk.
Anakin Skywalker studiously avoided my gaze,
preferring to scour the saucepan in his hands.
"Not ... um ... not
big plans, exactly." He
cleared his throat. "'Dala arrived today, so she
and I are just going to spend some time catching
up."
I raised an eyebrow. In the years since they'd
met, Anakin had grown from a chattery boy into a
fine young man, all blue eyes and fair hair and
easy smile. Amidala, already a pretty girl then,
was now a striking woman, alternately regal and
personable but never less than beautiful, dark
hair and eyes offset by her pale face. She and
Anakin always made time for each other when they
were on the same world, and if "catching up" was
what they were calling it now, then "catching up"
was what it was.
I suppressed my smile and carried on stacking
dishes and putting them away. "Master doesn't
need me here," Anakin insisted, "and she doesn't
have meetings with Chancellor Palpatine until
tomorrow." And once those meetings began, no
doubt, she'd be busy with them right up until her
departure.
"That's wonderful, Ani," I said. "You're so
rarely in the same place lately. It's good this
is working out. She's a nice girl."
Anakin's whole manner changed. He looked over at
me, a smitten smile on his face; his shoulders
relaxed; and I saw that I had found the magic
nerve. The reaction was so automatic that I hated
to think what would have happened if I'd had
something negative to say about Amidala. But
right now he was beaming. "She is, isn't she?"
"I've always thought so," I laughed. "And she's
always seemed as happy with you as you are with
her."
Anakin blushed and looked at the floor. "I'm
always afraid she still sees me as a little boy,"
he admitted. "I was nine when I met her and she's
twenty-one now."
"But you're older now than she was then," I
pointed out. "And that doesn't matter anyway,
Ani. Think about it -- does Qui-Gon think of me
as a child?" I leaned closer to the boy. "I'll
give you a hint: not a bit."
Anakin grinned, but quickly sobered. "Whoever I
marry, I hope we're as happy as you and Master
Qui-Gon."
"When you marry the love of your life, Anakin, you
will be." I ruffled the sandy hair -- not as
easily as I used to. Anakin had reached my height
and looked sure to grow nearly as tall as Qui-Gon
before he quit. "Now go on with you. I'll finish
up here. Don't keep that nice girl waiting."
Anakin blushed even deeper than before, bowed
briefly, and scurried out to meet Amidala. I
finished in the kitchen and returned to where Qui-
Gon and our guests still sat around the dining-
table.
The conversation over dinner had been friendly and
full of laughter. Master Windu, who had just
taken a new padawan, was feeling the unaccustomed
strain, and Qui-Gon had been enjoying teasing him
over it. Qui-Gon had been doing pretty well,
setting Master Windu in his place with comments
like "You wait until you're training your fourth
padawan in thirty years, and
then tell me you're
exhausted," when Master Yoda had reminded him that
he was not by a long way the most productive
master at the table in terms of training padawans.
Yoda himself, of course, had been directly
responsible for the education of at least fifty
knights -- none of whom, to my knowledge, had ever
failed -- and indirectly responsible for countless
more. He had been a master for over eight hundred
years, and had also risen to the Council and
supervised the training of others. Plus, age
hadn't slowed him down. Yoda had been my own
master's master, fifty years before, and had
trained Depa Billaba after him, who now sat with
him on the Council. His other surviving students
were similarly advanced in each of their own
fields.
Master Yoda had set all this out with an air of
weariness belied by the twinkle in his eye.
"Wait, you should, until your
thirtieth padawan
you have trained, young Jinn," he had said, "and
then tell me twenty more you shall train before
complaining of exhaustion." He had glanced at
Anakin and winked. "And tell me not that easier
my students have been to train than yours. No
picnic were you."
Everyone had laughed, and Anakin and I had begun
clearing up while Masters Yoda and Gallia regaled
a wide-eyed Sionnach with stories of Qui-Gon's
childhood and youth. This subject had apparently
segued neatly into the difficult main topic of the
meeting; when I returned to the table, judging
from the serious expressions on Joma's and Qui-
Gon's faces and the unchecked shock emanating from
Masters Windu, Gallia and Yoda, I guessed my
friend and my bondmate had shared their discovery
of the growing number of Adepts. Sionnach had
been sent to do her homework in Anakin's room. I
slid into a seat next to Qui-Gon.
"All of us here are responsible for Adepts -- or
we are Adepts ourselves," Qui-Gon was saying, with
a nod in Joma's direction. "Mace, now that you're
training young Morgesh, you and I are the only
ones with Adept padawans." Master Windu nodded.
"Adi, the rest are in the creche. And Master, of
course you're here representing the Council, as
governor of Knight Phrel and Master Ral."
"I was always told," said Joma, "that in the whole
galaxy an Adept was born perhaps twice in a
generation. Now I'm counting more than ten in a
fifteen-year period, with the density at the young
end -- this can't just be a quirk of chance, much
as I wish it were. And Adept-ness isn't genetic,
like Force-sensitivity, is it?"
"It's congenital," Mace said, clearing his throat.
"You're born that way -- it's coded in your genes
-- but it isn't hereditary." He rubbed his eyes.
"It seems to select randomly, independent of the
parents' status."
"Meaning," said Qui-Gon, "that we can rule out the
possibility of this being an evolutionary phase."
"Thank goodness," Joma cut in. "No, I think
you're right. It's far too inconvenient a trait
to become the norm. Can you imagine -- a whole
population of me? Ugh." She shuddered.
"Joma," I warned. Her tendency toward self-
deprecation was almost as sore a subject with us
as her tendency toward ego. She had it in her
head that she herself was undesirable, but that
her skills and output were far superior to most
others', and I'd spent years trying to nudge both
misconceptions in a more central direction.
"No, Kenobi, give it a rest. It's not low self-
esteem; it's high self-awareness. I know I'm
difficult to live around." She winked. "That's
not a value judgment; it's a statement of fact.
Several thousand beings hypersensitive to the
Force -- it would be exponential. The migraines.
The mood swings. Nobody would ever get anything
done."
"Fair enough," I laughed. She had me on the mood
swings.
"Our only conclusion," Qui-Gon went on, glancing
at me, "is that the Force itself is choosing these
children and leading them to us -- or us to them."
I smiled to myself. Finally, after seven years,
it seemed that he had been
proven, rather than
just demonstrated, to have been right. Finding
Anakin had been the will of the Force. There
remained little question on that point. I made a
mental note to find something else to needle him
about. "But the question is why?"
"I spent this morning in the archives," I offered,
"and in the past five hundred years or so I
couldn't find anything remotely similar."
"Far enough back you did not search." We all
looked to Master Yoda, who, I belatedly realized,
had been silent until now. Mace Windu stopped
staring into his wine glass, and Joma quit tapping
her spoon on the table. But Master Yoda didn't go
into detail on what I might have found if I had
reviewed older records. He turned, instead, to
Master Gallia. "Why until now was this not
mentioned?" he demanded.
For all her usual calm, Master Gallia seemed very
flustered. "I -- I don't think I even noticed it,
Master Yoda," she stammered. "It's -- we're
always delighted to get an Adept; I must not have
realized how many there were."
"Don't blame her for that," Joma said before Yoda
could speak again. "I only caught it today, when
I saw the four of them together, and I'm the one
interviewing these kids when their parents bring
them in. Plus -- well, if anybody should have
seen it, it'd be me."
"Sooner I wish we had known," Yoda said, and I saw
that he wasn't angry. In place of the anger,
though, was something I had never seen before,
something far more terrible. Master Yoda was
afraid. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Qui-
Gon rub at his scar with the knuckle of his thumb.
I reached over absently and pulled his hand away,
not noticing until it curled around mine that I
had done so, just as we used to pull Sionnach's
thumb from her mouth when she was a baby. Our
eyes met for an instant and when he smiled at me,
I almost forgot the others and the meeting and the
growing sense of unease.
Almost. "So we're not just fortunate to have this
many Adepts," Mace said, bringing the discussion
back on point. "Any idea why the Force has
blessed us?" His tone won a weak smile from
Master Gallia.
"Happened before, this has," Master Yoda said.
"Many generations ago. Hmm. A thousand years,
perhaps. Or more." A knot of nausea crept into
my stomach. "Many Adepts, then. Strong were they
with the Force. Needed, to battle powerful
adversary." I saw Adi Gallia sit back against her
chair, her eyes closed. Qui-Gon squeezed my hand.
"What do you mean?" Mace asked.
"The Sith," Adi said, her voice hollow. "The last
time the Force started concentrating Adepts was in
time for the last Sith war."
"So you're saying --"
"Danger, there will be. That is what I am
saying," Master Yoda declared.
The silence that followed was uncomfortable but
brief. "If that's the case," Qui-Gon said, "I'd
almost rather it
were an evolutionary phase.
Migraines and all."
"But here's what I don't understand," said Joma --
on her feet, now, and pacing behind her chair.
"The Force makes more Adepts when it knows a
powerful adversary is on the rise. But why does
it let the adversary rise in the first place? Why
let it get to a point where we have to arm
ourselves this way?"
"'Let them' rise the Force does not," Yoda
reminded her. "
Use the Force, they do, like a
thing. Like a tool. Different, we are.
Feel
the Force, we do. Our ally, it is. As it helps
us, so we help it. Defend it, we must, against
those who would harness it only for their gain."
"Did you say there were families who chose to keep
their Adept children?" Adi Gallia asked quietly
after a moment. Joma nodded. I felt a prick of
something awful in my mind, an idea that initially
had no form, but unleashed an abstract dread. "We
should contact them."
"Yes," Qui-Gon agreed. "Keep an eye on those
children, wherever they are." I could feel my
heart pounding in my chest. The pin-prick of a
thought had bled through my consciousness, and a
horrible truth was becoming clear.
"And find out from the branch temples how many
Adepts they see," Mace added, "if they don't all
end up here."
My stomach turned. I hated what I was about to
say. Joma looked at me sharply, uncertainly. "We
need to go searching for them ourselves," I said.
Nobody answered me, but the thunder of that
realization had settled to a dull, grey ache. "We
can't wait for the parents to bring them to us."
"We can't do that," Qui-Gon said. "We can't and
we mustn't." I could see Mace nodding his
agreement. "It goes against --"
"Obi-Wan is right," Joma interrupted. She was in
rare form tonight, I noted in some distant part of
my mind; she'd stood up to Master Yoda and cut
Qui-Gon off in mid-sentence. But she'd never been
much interested in deferring to her seniors.
"We'll have no choice."
"The Jedi have never, in a thousand generations,
sought new recruits," Qui-Gon said. "It --" he
held up a hand against further interruption when I
would have spoken. "It flies in the face of
everything we believe. You heard Master Yoda --
we follow the Force, we do its bidding, and it
rewards us with strength and wisdom and
temperance. We must trust the Force to bring us
its Adepts; seeking them for ourselves would make
us no better than the Sith."
"I don't like the idea myself," I said, "but
you're exactly right: we can be sure the Sith
will be hunting these children. Do we have any
option but to stay one step ahead of them?"
"I don't want us to be the ones who decide that a
child belongs with us rather than with his
family," Qui-Gon insisted. "The parents must make
that decision."
"Or the Force makes that decision," Joma muttered
under her breath.
"Yes, the Force. We are merely --"
"Don't say we're merely instruments of the Force,
Qui-Gon Jinn," she shot back, her voice rising.
"Don't you dare. You'd have us believe the Force
manipulates us the same way the Sith manipulate
the Force? Not me. It's our ally; we work
with
it. You heard Master Yoda." This last was flung
at him in the same tone he'd used just a moment
before, but there was a glint in her eye that,
naturally, Qui-Gon had to answer.
"I don't say we're instruments of the Force,
Knight Phrel," he said. Nobody missed his use of
her title; it spoke volumes. Adept you might be,
it said, but don't misunderstand what that
implies; I am twice your age, I am a Master of
this order, and I know what my own master means
when he speaks. It was the verbal equivalent of
drawing himself up to his full height -- which, of
course, was considerable. "I say that we have no
power to seize a child whose family does not wish
to grant us custody. When their minds are made up
--"
"If I'm Adept in order to fight the Sith, isn't
that a pretty clear signal? Aren't we pretty sure
what the Force wants from me? Wouldn't the Force
have compelled my parents to leave me here with
you?"
"It doesn't
compel," Qui-Gon said, growing
impatient. "It
guides. And if the Force does
not guide a child to us, Adept or otherwise, that
child was not meant for us to raise. Perhaps it
has other plans for him. We must not presume that
every Force-sensitive or even every Adept child is
so because he's destined to be ours. And seeking
Adept children is that presumptuous."
"It's not for our gain," I cut in, "not
using
the Force for our own benefit, but letting it
guide us, as you say, Master, to where we can
protect these children from those who abuse it.
When I say we'll need to look for these children,
I do not mean we'll do so with an eye toward
taking them as initiates. I simply mean we can't
afford not to know where they are. If their
parents decide to give them to us, fine, but if
not, at least we won't be surprised to learn they
exist. We may even warn them of the Sith."
"Yes. What if those two families I met have
already been influenced, but by the Dark Side?"
Joma said.
"Exactly. That's why we need to
find those two
children. Not because we want their parents to
change their minds and give them to us, but
because we need to know what sort of enemy we'll
be up against, and if he's recruiting from the
same pool as we are."
"But once we find them, will we look for other
Adepts as well?" Qui-Gon seemed to be cautiously
considering giving some ground.
"No," Mace said.
"Yes, of course," Joma argued.
"Yes," I said, "but for the same reasons. We must
trust the Force to guide us toward its Adepts,
rather than waiting for them to come to us, only
so we may learn where and how many they are.
Maybe they're unable to come to us, Qui-Gon.
Think of Anakin. You found him."
"I found him by accident," Qui-Gon said quickly,
"and his mother gave him to me."
"And her decision was completely unaffected by you
or the Force," Joma scoffed.
"Not if the --"
"And she
gave him to you, to us, so now we
own
him, of course."
"Knock it off, Joma. She gave Qui-Gon the care of
Anakin, not the boy himself, and maybe the Force
did influence her decision, but Qui-Gon did not."
I surprised myself with how defensive I had become
on Qui-Gon's behalf. Truly, I couldn't know what
had happened at Mos Espa with any more certainty
than Joma could; only Qui-Gon and Anakin had been
there, and Anakin hadn't been present when Qui-Gon
had spoken to his mother. "But if we'd just
stayed home and waited for the Skywalkers to come
to their nearest temple, we'd never even have
known of Anakin." I waited a moment, expecting
either Qui-Gon or Joma to interrupt me, but
neither did. "If Shmi hadn't asked you to take
him away with you, you wouldn't have," I
continued. "That's not what we do. But we can
and should seek the
knowledge, if not the
power." That did it. Joma and Qui-Gon and Mace
looked very, very unhappy, but did not argue
further.
"Discover, we must, where this danger lies," Yoda
said. "Terrible, it will be, when it comes."
I felt a tug from the direction of the second
bedroom. Glancing at Qui-Gon, who nodded, I
excused myself from the table and moved to the
door. I knocked softly to alert Sionnach that I
was there, then slipped inside. She was standing,
looking at the door, wringing her little hands;
her homework lay forgotten on Anakin's desk.
"What is it, sweeting?" I asked, crouching at her
side.
"Ki's unhappy," she said with a frown. "And you
too. I couldn't concentrate." She gestured
toward her homework.
"Sion, love, you are the sweetest child ever for
being concerned for us," I said, pulling her into
my arms. "But you mustn't worry. Qui-Gon will be
just fine. And me too. We can take good care of
ourselves, can't we?"
She pushed herself far enough away that she could
see my face. "Not before." Her lower lip
trembled. That was strange. I knew she was
talking about Naboo, about her infant ability to
reach over the light-years and heal Qui-Gon when
he was injured and on the brink of death -- but
normally that incident was a point of pride for
her, not of anxiety.
"That's true," I admitted, "but do you feel how
different this is?" I brushed a curl back from
her forehead, and she buried her face in my
shoulder. "We were a bit unhappy, but now we're
fine, both of us, and you can carry on as you
were. All right?"
"Can I come sit with you and be sure?"
"Oh, I'm afraid not, firefly," I said, and I felt
her arms tighten around my neck. "It's grown-ups
out there, and we need to talk about some things,
and you need to finish your homework, don't you?
But Qui-Gon and I will come and tuck you in once
all the grown-ups leave. All right?" Her grip
did not loosen. I picked her up and deposited her
back in the desk chair. "Come along now. We'll
be fine, and we'll be back to tuck you in. I
promise."
She looked up at me. "Promise?"
"I promise," I repeated, and kissed the top of her
head. When she was determinedly focused on her
homework again, I stole out of the room and back
to Qui-Gon's side.
"Everything all right?" he whispered.
"It will be," I answered. "She could feel the
tension when you and Joma were arguing, and it
upset her. We'll talk later."
"Will you present this issue to the Council,
Master Yoda?" Adi Gallia was asking.
"Hmm. Not yet."
"What?" Mace Windu's eyes were wide. "Master
Yoda, I must respectfully disagree. The Council
must be made aware of the danger that --"
"Not yet, I said," Master Yoda interrupted, "not
no, never. Too soon, it is, to know what is best
course of action."
I didn't understand, and said so. Qui-Gon reached
for my hand and locked his fingers into mine. "If
I may, Master?" Master Yoda nodded. "All we know
at the moment is that we have a concentration of
Adept children in the creche. We're fairly
certain, based on precedent, that this is an
indication of danger to come. But what we don't
know is how many more Adepts will come to us --
how substantial that concentration will become.
It's possible that these several children are the
beginning of a great wave; it's also possible that
they're all we'll get. In either event, with the
current majority of Adepts being under the age of
ten, it's safe to assume that the danger, whatever
it is, won't manifest for ten years at the very
least. The Force wouldn't expect us to fight the
Sith with an army of toddlers." Adi Gallia nodded
absently. "So. If, in the next few months to a
year, we find still more, younger, Adepts in the
creche -- or on our searches --" he cleared his
throat -- "then we can reasonably push back the
expected date of need for them. Right? But if we
conclude that this bunch is what we've got,
then
we'll be able to report to the Council with
something more than a hunch."
"But the conflict won't just
happen ten years
from today, or whenever," Mace Windu said. "It
will grow, and develop, and fester."
"Prevent that we cannot," Master Yoda told him.
"Only prepare."
"Telling the Council too soon could create an
order-wide panic," Adi Gallia pointed out. "And
it's not just the Adepts who will be called upon
to fight when the time comes. I suggest we all
continue to make sure that all our children get
the best training we can give them, and keep an
eye on the Adepts just as a sort of timer." Qui-
Gon and I agreed; Joma did not disagree, and Mace
conceded the point. "How many Adepts do we know
we have now?"
Qui-Gon began counting on his fingers. "Master
Ral. Knight Phrel. Padawan Skywalker. Padawan
Kwahl. And, in the creche, apVess-Norill, Tiran,
Gelter, Dues, Welk, and Uinja."
"And Rhyi'nak," Joma added. "That Porgatian
family decided today to leave their daughter with
us."
"That's eleven," Qui-Gon said, "seven of them
children. And there are, at a minimum, two more
out there somewhere. For now, I recommend that we
seek these two children, keep our eyes open for
any more, and look closely at any children we
happen to meet if we're away from the temple
anyway. I recommend that we not make special
expeditions to locate Adept children, even if it
is for knowledge rather than power."
"I agree," Adi Gallia and I said together.
"I, also," Mace Windu said.
"I agree for now," Joma hedged, "but once they
stop coming to us, we'll have to purposefully go
and find the rest. Just so we know where they
are."
"Agreed," Master Yoda said. "And keep quiet, we
must. Fret needlessly our children should not."
He looked pointedly at me as everyone murmured
assent.
Quietly, soberly, our guests thanked us and took
their leave. Qui-Gon and I silently put away the
last of the dishes before checking on Sionnach.
She had fallen asleep with a storybook clutched in
her hands, waiting for us to come tuck her in; we
marked her page and put the book on the
nightstand, tucked her in, kissed her good night
and turned off the lamp. She didn't wake --
didn't even stir when we lifted her to put her
under her blankets. That was unusual; the fact
that she was asleep at all was a surprise -- we'd
expected to have found her waiting up for us, and
to have had to chide her for it -- but the
soundness of that sleep, particularly at this
early hour, was unsettling. Qui-Gon looked at me,
then back at our girl. I could feel his
unwillingness to admit how anxious he felt at her
non-responsiveness.
All three of us, Qui-Gon and Anakin and I, adored
Sionnach as though she really had been our own
daughter and sister, but Qui-Gon's devotion to her
occasionally surprised even him. Perhaps it was
due to the long standing of his friendship with
her father; I'd known Dorim apNorill for only a
few years when he and M'Liskatha Vess had been
killed, and Anakin of course had never met them,
but Dorim and Qui-Gon had been close friends and
sometime lovers since I was a child. Or perhaps
it was due to the fact that he'd spent little time
with small children, and quite long ago; I'd been
a regular on 'pee patrol' as a senior padawan, and
Anakin had known friends with much younger
siblings back on Tatooine, but Qui-Gon was at such
a remove from those days in his own life that the
whole business was less familiar to him. Whatever
the reason, there were times when his occupation
with her was in a separate category from mine and
Anakin's; he never supposed that he loved her more
than we did, or even differently, but he often
took her successes and failures, her advances and
setbacks, much more to heart.
He said nothing now, as we looked at her fast
asleep, but reached down to brush her hair out of
her face, and in the process to lay the back of
his hand against her cheek. Apparently satisfied
that her temperature wasn't elevated -- which we
would have noticed, of course, both of us, when
we'd kissed her forehead a moment before -- he
tucked the blanket closer under her chin and
turned back to me. "It must have been the
stress," he whispered. "The tension of the
argument. When it eased, the relief must have
been exhausting."
"Yes," I agreed. "We should mention that to Adi.
Keep future discussions away from the littler
ones."
We watched Sionnach sleep for another several
minutes. Back in the living room, we set bedding
out for Anakin, who had moved out to the couch for
the few days that Sion would be with us. We
quickly got ourselves ready for bed, and as we
huddled together under the blankets, the full
implications of the evening's conversation hit me.
"Soon it's gonna rain," I said -- and though Qui-
Gon was warm and held me close, I shivered.
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