They had plenty to talk about; Jacen had learned a great deal about pain.
His first actual clue to the lesson of pain came once when he lay upon the corded floor, trembling with exhaustion. The branchlike grips of the Embrace of Pain still held him, but loosely, maintaining contact, no more. They hung in slack spirals overhead, dangling from bunched, knotted bundles of vegetative muscle that shifted and squirmed above the leather-barked ceiling of the chamber.
These periods of rest hurt Jacen almost as much as the Embrace’s torment: his body slowly but inexorably dragged itself back into shape, resocketing his joints and achingly releasing the overstretched tension of his muscles. And without the constant agony of the Embrace of Pain, he could think of nothing but Anakin, of the gaping wound that Anakin’s death had opened in his life—and of what Anakin’s death had begun to do to Jaina, driving her toward the dark—and of how his parents must be suffering, having lost both their sons—
More to distract himself than out of any desire for conversation, he had rolled over to face Vergere and asked, “Why are you doing this to me?”
“This?” Vergere gazed at him steadily. “What am I doing?”
“No—” He closed his eyes, organizing pain-scattered thoughts, then opened them again. “No, I mean the Yuuzhan Vong. The Embrace of Pain. I’ve been through a breaking,” he said. “The breaking makes a kind of sense, I guess. But this …”
His voice broke despairingly, but he caught himself, and held his tongue until he could control it. Despair is of the dark side. “Why are they torturing me?” he asked, clearly and simply. “No one even asks me anything …”
“Why is a question that is always deeper than its answer,” Vergere said. “Perhaps you should ask instead: what? You say torture, you say breaking. To you, yes. To our masters?” She canted her head, and her crest splayed orange. “Who knows?”
“This isn’t torture? You should try it from my side,” Jacen said with a feeble smile. “In fact, I really wish you would.”
Her chuckle chimed like a handful of glass bells. “Do you think I haven’t?”
Jacen stared, uncomprehending.
“Perhaps you are not being tortured,” she said cheerily. “Perhaps you are being taught.”
Jacen made a rusty hacking sound, halfway between a cough and a bitter laugh. “In the New Republic,” he said, “education doesn’t hurt this much.”
“No?” She canted her head to the opposite angle, and her crest shimmered to green. “That may be why your people are losing this war. The Yuuzhan Vong understand that no lesson is truly learned until it has been purchased with pain.”
“Oh, sure. What’s this supposed to teach me?”
“Is it what the teacher teaches?” Vergere countered. “Or what the student learns?”
“What’s the difference?”
The arc of her lips and the angle of her head might have added up to a smile. “That is, itself, a question worth considering, yes?”
There was another time—before, after, he could never be sure. He had found himself huddled against the leathery curve of the chamber’s wall, the Embrace’s grips trailing upward like slack feeder vines. Vergere crouched at his side, and as consciousness trickled through him he seemed to recall that she had been coaxing him to take a sip from the stem of an elongated, gourdlike drink bulb. Too exhausted for disobedience, he tried; but the liquid within—only water, cool and pure—savaged his parched throat until he gagged and had to spit it out again. Patiently, Vergere had used the bulb to moisten a scrap of rag, then gave it to him to suck on until his throat loosened up enough that he could swallow.
The vast desert inside his mouth absorbed the moisture instantly, and Vergere dampened the rag again. This went on for some considerable while.
“What is pain for?” she murmured after a time. “Do you ever think about that, Jacen Solo? What is its function? Many of our more devout masters believe that pain is the lash of the True Gods: that suffering is how the True Gods teach us to disdain comfort, our bodies, even life itself. For myself, I say that pain is itself a god: the taskmaster of life. Pain cracks the whip, and all that lives will move. The most basic instinct of life is to retreat from pain. To hide from it. If going here hurts, even a granite slug will go over there; to live is to be a slave to pain. To be ‘beyond pain’ is to be dead, yes?”
“Not for me,” Jacen answered dully, once his throat opened enough that he could speak. “No matter how dead you say I am, it still hurts.”
“Oh, well, yes. That the dead are beyond pain is only an article of faith, isn’t it? We should say, we hope that the dead are beyond pain—but there’s only one way to find out for sure.” She winked at him, smiling. “Do you think that pain might be the ruling principle of death, as well?”
“I don’t think anything. I just want it to stop.”
She turned away, making an odd snuffling sound; for half a moment Jacen wondered if his suffering might have finally touched her somehow—wondered if she might take pity on him …
But when she turned back, her eyes were alight with mockery, not compassion. “I am such a fool,” she chimed. “All this time, I had thought I was speaking to an adult. Ah, self-deception is the cruelest trick of all, isn’t it? I let myself believe that you had once been a true Jedi, when in truth you are only a hatchling, shivering in the nest, squalling because your mother hasn’t fluttered up to feed you.”
“You—you—” Jacen stammered. “How can you—after what you’ve
