'There is fighting to be done. Can a Jedi walk away?' Her voice was muffled, coming through the curtains. She did not invite me inside this morning, and I did not ask why.
I'm afraid that she was in a state that neither of us wanted me to see.
'To fight on after the battle is done-Depa, that is not Jedi,' I told her. 'That's the dark.' 'War is not about light or dark. It is about winning. Or dying.' 'But here you've already won.' I thought back to the words of my strange waking dream.
Her words, or the Force's, I did not know.
'Perhaps I have. But look around you: is what you see a victorious army? Or are they ragged fugitives, spending the last of their strength to stay a step ahead of the gallows?' I have enormous sympathy for them: for their suffering and their desperate struggle. It is never far from my thoughts that only chance-a whim of Jedi anthropologists and the choice of some elders of ghosh Windu-separates their fate from my own.
I could too easily have grown to become Kar Vaster myself.
But I said none of this to Depa; my purpose here was not to muse upon the twists in the endless river that is the Force.
'I understand their war,' I told her. 'It's very clear to me why they fight. My question is: Why are you still fighting?' 'Can't you feel it?' And when she spoke, I could: in the Force, a relentless pulse of fear and hatred, like what I had felt from Nick and Chalk and Besh and. Lesh in the groundcar, but here amplified as though the jungle had become a planetwide resonance chamber. It was hate that kept the Korunnai fighting on, as though this whole people shared a single dream: that all Balawai might have a single skull, bent for a Korun mace.
She said: 'Yes: our battle is won. Theirs goes on. It will never be over, not while one of them still lives. The Balawai will never stop coming. We used these people for our own purposes- and we got what we wanted. Should I now throw them away? Abandon them to genocide, because they are no longer useful? Is that what the Council orders me to do?' 'You prefer to stay and fight a war that is not yours?' Her voice gathered heat. 'They need me, Mace. I am their only hope.' That heat quickly faded, though, and she went back to her exhausted mumble. 'I've done. things. Questionable things. I know. But I have seen. Mace, you cannot imagine what I have seen. As bad as it is-as bad as I am. Search the Force. You can feel how much worse everything could be. How much worse it will be.' With this, I could not argue.
'Look around you.' Her mumble took on a bitter edge. 'Think about everything you've seen.
This is a little war, Mace. A little sputtering on-again, off-again series of inconclusive skirmishes. Until the Republic and the Confederacy mixed into it, it was practically a sporting event. But look at what it's done to these people. Imagine what war will do to those who've never known it. Imagine infantry battles in the fields of Alderaan. DOKAWs striking spacescrapers on Coruscant. Imagine what the galaxy will be if the Clone War turns serious.' I told her it was already serious, and she laughed at me. 'You haven't seen serious yet.' I told her I was looking at it.
And I think, now, of the clone troopers on the Halleck, and how their clean crisp unquestioning bravery and discipline under fire is as far from these ragged murderers as it is possible to be for members of the same species. and I remember that the Grand Army of the Republic numbers 1.2 million clone troopers-just enough to station a single trooper-one lone man-on each planet of the Republic, and have a handful of thousands left over.
If this Clone War escalates the way Depa seems to think it will, it will be fought not by clones and Jedi and battle droids, but by ordinary people. Ordinary people who will face one stark choice: to die, or to become like these Korunnai. Ordinary people who will have to leave forever the Galaxy of Peace.
I can only hope that war is easier on those who cannot touch the Force.
Though I suspect the truth is exactly opposite.
There were hours, too, when we did not speak. I sat beside the how-dah while she dozed in the afternoon heat, drowsy myself with the ankkox's rocking gait and the unchanging flow of the trees and vines and flowers, and I listened to her dream-mumbles, and was shocked, sometimes, by her sudden nightmare shrieks, or the agonized moans that her migraines might pull from her lips.
She seems to suffer from an intermittent fever. Sometimes her speech becomes a disjointed ramble through imaginary conversations that shift from subject to subject with hallucinatory randomness. Sometimes her pronouncements have an eerie sibylline quality, as though she prophesied a future that had no past. I've occasionally tried to record these on this datapad, but somehow her voice never comes through.
As though our talks are my own hallucination.
And if so- Does it matter?
Even a lie of the Force is more true than any reality we can comprehend.
FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU Much of the day we spent talking about Kar Vaster. Depa has spared me many of the less savory details, but she has told me enough.
More than enough.
For example: when he calls me doshalo, it's not just an expression. If what he has told Depa is the truth, Kar Vaster and I are the last of the Windu.
The ghosh into which I was born-and with which I lived for those months in my teens, while I returned to learn some of the Korun Force skills-has apparently been destroyed piecemeal over the past thirty years. Not in any great massacre, or climactic last stand, but by the simple, brutal mathematics of attrition: my ghosh is just another statistical casualty of a simmering guerrilla war against an enemy more numerous, better armed, and equally ruthless.
Depa told me this hesitantly, as though it were horrible news that must be broken gently.
And perhaps it is. I cannot say. She seems to think it should matter a great deal to me. And perhaps it should.
But I am more thoroughly Jedi than I am Korun.
When I think of my doshallai dead and scattered, Windu heritage and traditions perishing in blood and darkness, I feel only abstract sadness.
