Pain can be power, too, Jacen realizes. Power to change things for the better. That’s how change happens: someone hurts, and sooner or later decides to do something about it.
Suffering is the fuel in the engine of civilization.
Now he begins to understand: because pain is a god—he has been in the grip of this cruel god ever since Anakin’s death. But it is also a teacher, and a bridge. It can be a slave master, and break you—and it can be the power that makes you unbreakable. It is all these things, and more.
At the same time.
What it is depends on who you are.
But who am I? he wonders. I’ve been running like Dad—like Anakin. I think they stopped, though; I think Dad was strong enough to turn back and face it, to use the pain to make himself stronger, like Mom and Uncle Luke. Anakin did, too, at the end. Am I that strong?
There’s only one way to find out.
For indefinite days, weeks, centuries, the white has been eating him.
Now, he begins to eat the white.
Executor Nom Anor toyed idly with a sacworm of dragweed broth while he waited for the shaper drone to finish its report. He sat human-style on a fleshy hump to one side of the unusually large villip to which the drone addressed its monotonous, singsong analysis of the Embrace chamber’s readings on the young Jedi, Jacen Solo.
Nom Anor had no need to pay attention. He knew already what the drone would say; he had composed the report himself. This particular Embrace chamber was equipped with an exceptionally sophisticated nerve-web of sensors, which could read the electrochemical output of Jacen Solo’s nerves down to each individual impulse and compare the pain they registered with its effect on his brain chemistry. The shaper drone mumbled on and on in its description of minute details of its data collection, and its deadly dull murmur was excruciating—
Perhaps that’s why we call them drones, Nom Anor thought with a humorless interior smile. He did not share this observation with the third occupant of the small, moist chamber. It wasn’t even a joke in any language but Basic, and it wasn’t that funny, anyway.
Instead he simply sat, sipping broth occasionally from the sacworm, watching the villip, waiting for Warmaster Tsavong Lah to lose his patience.
With vegetative accuracy, the villip conveyed the physical features of the warmaster: his tall narrow skull, bulging braincase, dangerously sharp teeth bristling within his lipless gash of a mouth, as well as the proud array of scars that defined his devotion to the True Way. Nom Anor reflected idly how well some of those intricately scarified designs would look on his own face. Not that he had any real interest in the True Way beyond its use as a political tool; from long experience, he knew that the appearance of piety was vastly more useful than its reality could ever be.
The villip also captured perfectly the frightening intensity of Tsavong Lah’s fanatic glare.
That gleam of faith’s power in his eye was the reflection of an inner conviction the like of which Nom Anor could only imagine: to know, beyond the possibility of doubt, that the True Gods stood at his shoulder, guiding his hand in Their service. To know that all truth, all justice, all right, shone from the True Gods like stellar wind, illuminating the universe.
The warmaster was a true believer.
To Nom Anor, faith was an extravagance. He knew too well how easily such true believers could be manipulated by those who believe in nothing but themselves.
This was, in fact, his specialty.
The moment he’d been waiting for came during the drone’s exhaustive point-by-point cross-species interpolation between Jacen Solo’s readings and those of three different control subjects, all Yuuzhan Vong: one warrior caste, one priest caste, and one shaper caste, each of whom had earlier undergone excruciation by the very same Embrace of Pain in which the young Jedi now hung. Anger gathered upon Tsavong Lah’s villip image like the ion peak that precedes a solar flare.
Finally, his patience broke. “Why is my time wasted with this babble?”
The shaper drone stiffened, glancing nervously at Nom Anor. “This data is extremely significant—”
“Not to me. Am I a shaper? I have no interest in raw data—tell me what it means!”
Nom Anor sat forward. “With the warmaster’s permission, I may perhaps be of some service here.”
The villip twisted fractionally to fix Nom Anor with the warmaster’s glare. “You had better,” he said. “My patience is limited—and you personally, Executor, have required too much of it already in recent days. You swing from a thin vine, Nom Anor, and it continues to fray.”
“All apologies to the warmaster,” Nom Anor said smoothly. He gestured dismissal to the drone, which made a hasty obeisance toward the villip, triggered the room’s hatch sphincter, and scuttled away. “I mean only to offer analysis; interpretation is my specialty.”
“Your specialty is propaganda and lies,” Tsavong Lah rasped.
As if there were a difference. Nom Anor shrugged and smiled amiably: gestures he had learned from his impersonations of the human species. He exchanged one quick glance with the other occcupant of the chamber—his partner in the Solo Project—then directed his gaze back to the villip. “The import of the Embrace chamber’s data is exactly this: Jacen Solo has become capable of not only accepting torment, but thriving on it. As the warmaster will recall, I predicted such a result. He has discovered resources within himself of the sort that we find only in our greatest warriors.”
“And?” The warmaster glared. “Make your point.”
“It will work,” Nom Anor said simply. “That is the point. The only point. Based on our current figures, Jacen Solo will inevitably—provided he lives—turn to the True Way with his whole
