Any tale of pointless suffering and loss is sad, to me.
I would change them all if I could. Not just my own.
I would certainly change Kar's.
It seems that as a young man, Kar Vaster was fairly ordinary: more in touch with pelekotan than most, but not in any other way unsual. It was the Summertime War that changed him, as it has changed so much on this world.
When he was fourteen, he saw his whole family massacred by jungle prospectors: one of the casual atrocities that characterize this war.
I do not know how it is that he alone escaped; the stories Depa has heard from various Korunnai are contradictory. Kar himself, it seems, will not discuss it.
What we do know is that after witnessing the murders of his entire family, he was left alone in the jungle: without weapons, without grassers, without akks or people, food or supplies of any kind. And that he lived in the jungle-alone-for more than a standard year.
This is what he meant when he said he had survived tan pel'trokal.
The term has an irony that only now do I begin to appreciate.
The tan pel'trokal is a penalty devised by Korun culture, to punish crimes deserving death.
Knowing that human judgment is fallible, the Korunnai leave the final disposition of the sentence to the jungle itself; they consider it a mercy.
I would say: it is a mercy they grant themselves. Thus can they take life without the shame of bloodied hands.
In Kar's case, he faced his tan pel'trokal for the crime of being Korun. He was as innocent-and as guilty-as the Balawai children to whom he was planning to do the same.
Their crimes were identical: they were born into the wrong family.
He was, at the time, perhaps a year older than Keela.
But there was no Jedi nearby to save him, and so he had to save himself.
I believe that his ability to form human speech was part of the price he paid for his survival.
All Jedi know that power must be paid for; the Force maintains a balance that cannot be defied.
Pelekotan traded him power for his humanity.
I sometimes wonder if the Force does the same for Jedi.
He and his Akk Guards clearly have much in common with Jedi: they seem to be our reflections in a dark mirror. They rely on instinct; Jedi rely on training. They use anger and aggression as sources of power; our power is based upon serenity and defense. Even the weapon he and his Akk Guards carry is a twisted mirror image of ours.
I use my sword as a shield. They use their shields as swords.
Depa tells me that these 'vibroshields' are Kar's own design. Vibro-axes are common equipment among jungle prospectors, used for harvesting lumber and clearing paths through stands too thick for their steamcrawlers to crush through; since the sonic generators that power vibro-axes are fully sealed, they are remarkably resistant to the metal-eating molds and fungi.
And the metal itself. well, that's an interesting story of its own. It seems to be an alloy that the fungi don't attack. It is extremely hard, and never loses its edge. Nor does it rust, or even tarnish.
It also seems to be a superconductor.
This is why my blade could not cut it: the entire shield is always the same temperature throughout. Even the energy of a lightsaber is instantly conducted away. Hold a blade against it long enough and the whole thing will melt, but it cannot be cut. Not by an energy blade.
File the data.
When Kar accepts a man into his Akk Guards, the man builds his own weapons, not unlike the tradition in the spirit of which Jedi construct our lightsabers.
It strikes me now that Kar may have hit upon this idea from stories of Jedi training I shared with my long- lost friends in ghosh Windu, thirty-five years and more ago: Korunnai have a living oral tradition, and stories are passed through families as treasured possessions.
I have not shared this speculation with Depa.
And Depa swears that she did not teach Kar and his guards the Jedi skill of interception; she says Kar knew this already when she first met him. If what she says is true, he must have taught himself-and he probably got the idea from those same stories that I, in my thoughtless youth, innocently shared with my innocent friends.
And so: in some odd, circuitous way, Kar Vaster may be my fault.
The source of this metal is a mystery; though Kar never speaks of it to anyone, I believe I know what it is.
Starship armor.
Thousands of years ago-before the Sith War-when shield generators were so massive that only the largest capital ships could carry them, smaller starships were armored with a mirrorlike superconducting alloy, which was sufficient to resist the low-fire-rate laser cannons of the day.
I think Kar, somewhere out in the jungle of the Korunnai Highland, I
