Kam's instruction can't be faulted at all in this regard be-cause he taught us well the three rings of defense. The outer-most ring consisted of four guard positions: upper right, upper left, lower right and lower left. The lightsaber's hilt would end up wide of the body, with the tip coming back toward the mid-dle to pick up the grand sweeping blows that are very powerful, but also take longer to deliver.

The middle ring also involved four guard positions: high, low, left and right. Whereas in the outer ring the blade tended to be held at a diagonal, in the middle ring up and down were paral-lel to the ground at head and knee height, while left and right were perpendicular to it. The idea with the middle ring was to pick up quicker blows and stop them before they could inter-sect with the body. Luke also noted that the middle ring was effective against picking off blaster bolts.

The inner ring involved parries instead of blocks and was proof against lunging attacks. For this third line of defense, the lightsaber was kept in close, with the hilt covering the navel. By angling the blade's tip and picking up attacks on the lower third of the blade, attacks could be shunted aside, and a riposte to the opponent's chest or stomach became a very real possibility. The inner ring was the last line of defense, dangerous to be defending from, and dangerous to be attacking from.

That afternoon saw me pitted against Gantoris in a basic sparring match.

Because he was taller than me, he had some-thing of a power and reach advantage. My only salvation would be quickness and the years I'd spent involved in rough and tumble battles as a CorSec officer. It also helped that, because of my CorSec experience, I knew I could beat someone as big as he was; whereas I doubted Gantoris ever had found himself in a real fight with someone like me.

We bowed to each other as we entered the circle described by our panting and sweating comrades. I turned to my right and saluted Master Skywalker, and then to my left and saluted Kam. Kam raised his right hand, then lowered it quickly and shouted, "Begin."

Expecting a charge, I took a step back. Gantoris' eyes blazed with triumph as if this concession of a meter's worth of territory was somehow a great victory. He gave me a cold smile, then slowly began to pace forward, much like a stintaril stalking a tree-tick. He kept his feet shoulder width apart as he came in, and his knees bent, but I knew the attack wasn't going to be coming until he rose on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet and set himself to strike.

My sense that he was going to do just that came nanoseconds before I saw him gather himself for the attack. I almost lost the impression in the violence of his attack, but I'd begun to react to the Force-sense before the attack came in. My blade rose up to the upper right guard while I slipped to the left. I picked up his attack and knocked it aside so quickly that I surprised my-self. Because I had moved out of the line of his attack and was already drifting past his left flank, with a flip of my wrists I could have brought the wooden blade down and across his stomach, but I didn't. Instead, trying to cling to the warning I'd been given, I danced past him and set myself for a new attack.

Another one came hard and fast. Gantoris' blade came up, around and down in a crowning blow that would have split me from skull to navel. I snapped my blade up into the high guard, bracing myself to pick up the blow, but it never landed. Proving himself far quicker than I expected, Gantoris whipped the wooden practice sword around in his left hand and slapped it across my right shin.

Despite the padding on the blade, the blow hurt a great deal. As pain jolted its way up my leg, I tried to remember some of the Jedi techniques for shunting aside pain that we'd been taught, but being in the middle of a fight wasn't the most con-ducive circ.u.mstance for meditative arts. As I reeled away, Gantoris slashed at me again, catching me across the back of my thighs, making me yelp aloud.

My face burned with shame. Here I was, someone who was helping instruct the others in self-defense, and Gantoris was slashing at me with impunity. He had me hurt and I was all turned around and vulnerable. My self-image imploded as I read the shock and horror and comical smiles on my friends' faces. In their minds I was victim and clown, and those two images succeeded in grinding the image I'd held of myself as Keiran Halcyon, Jedi Hero, into little tiny bits.

Then I got the very clear impression that the next blow would land on my right ear and do all it could to drive it into my brain. Without conscious thought, I dove forward on my belly, then scissored my legs and rolled over onto my back. My legs tangled themselves up with Gantoris'

legs and twisted the larger man to the ground. I brought my own stick around and smacked him across the b.u.t.tocks, then kicked his legs free of mine.

Gantoris got up, his eyes narrowed, while I just sat on the ground and drew my knees up to my chin. I resisted the urge to rub my shin and forced myself to think past the pain about what had just happened. At that moment when I had been the most vulnerable, when I had been beaten, I had known what he was going to do and I had been able to react to it.

What surprised me was that my access to the Force had come at a point when I had been forced to abandon the image I had been trying to present to the others. Once I got past pretense and had just been what I was, the Force flowed more freely. It was as if the role I had created for myself had inhibited the flow, whereas abandoning the role brought me closer to it.

Perhaps it is not for me to sculpt the Force's flow to my pur-poses, but for me to be sculpted into that which more easily works with the Force.

Gantoris pointed his practice sword at me. "Let us go again."

I tossed my wooden blade aside. "I'm ready. Come on."

"Take up your blade, Keiran."

I shook my head. "Whenever you want, I'm here."

Gantoris looked over at the Jedi Master. "Tell him to defend himself, Master Skywalker."

Luke's blue-eyed gaze flicked between Gantoris and me, and then back again. "It appears he is content with his defensive posture, Gantoris."

The taller man pulled his chin up. "It is dishonorable for me to strike someone who is defenseless."

Luke smiled. "Then, if you will not strike, he has won. Won without striking a blow. That is a lesson for you to learn, Gantoris."

"Yes, Master."

Luke gestured to my sword and it floated back over to me. "That, however, is not the lesson Keiran needs to learn. If you will, Keiran, defend yourself."

I plucked the sword out of the air and stood. I started to smile and offer a challenge to Gantoris, but I realized that would just be helping rebuild the illusion that choked off my access to the Force. I set myself and offered Gantoris a quick salute. "Whenever you want to start."

He approached cautiously, but as I watched him, bits and pieces of my visual perspective shifted. I saw a second and third image of him arise, with each of them moving to the right or the left, with arms coming up or around and only when his true form rose up to match it would I know where his attack was coming from. I realized the images I was seeing were a sense of his thought processes, a reflection of strategies weighed and rejected. When he made his choice, I'd already seen it and could sidestep it with ease.

Over the next ten minutes we continued to spar. My reading of his intention was far from foolproof, and I had the bruises to prove it. I did notice a pattern: after four or five successful evasions I would become confident and even c.o.c.ky, which is when the sense would fail me and I'd pay an agonizing price for my arrogance. By keeping myself calm and focused, by letting my senses project themselves beyond my mortal sh.e.l.l, I could feel Gantoris as well as see and hear and smell him. In the end I evaded him for a full minute with only the breeze from his blade hitting me.

His chest heaving and sweat staining his khaki robes, Gantoris leaned heavily forward on his sword. "This dodging and evading works well against sticks, but it will not protect you against a lightsaber."

Feeling similarly drained, I sat down on the gra.s.ses. "I don't expect to face many foes wielding lightsabers."

Gantoris' eyes sharpened. "But someday that will happen.

When it does, beware."

Luke entered the circle and dropped to one knee between the two of us.

"When that day comes, your progress in the Force will mean you'll have other, better tools to use in de-fense. Remember, today you are in your infancy in the Force. The lessons learned here are but the beginning."

If we were in our infancy in the Force, I was not proving myself to be a boy genius. The warnings I had been able to use, the dim sense of others grew slightly, then plateaued. If I was concentrating or if I wasn't thinking at all, I might notice someone approaching the doorway of my room. This definitely was an improvement over the split-second warnings I sometimes got when flying or back with CorSec, but not the sort of practical application of an ability that would allow me to find Mirax.

Measured against that goal, my progress seemed far too little, far too late.

That's not to say I found the training disappointing. I didn't, not at all. In fact, I found in it a great deal about myself that surprised me.

I didn't notice new talents or new sides of myself, but I recovered things I had long forgotten.

Master Skywalker took all of us through a series of exercises he said he'd learned from his teachers, Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi and Yoda. The exercises were typically little things that seemed, on the surface, to be child's play. Trying some of them seemed silly, but Tionne and Kirana Ti-the green-eyed witch from Dathomir-and even the hermit gas-prospector from Bespin, Streen, all approached these things with an open wonder and humor that made being silly a lot easier for me.

Master Skywalker stood before us, having arranged us in a semicircle on the gra.s.sy clearing near the Great Temple. "This is an exercise in two parts that will build on what we learned a week ago. What I showed you then was a simple technique for shunting aside pain. Its use is obvious.

That same skill also allows you to shut off sensory input. Why would you want to do that? Brakiss?"

The blond man gave Luke a smirk. "Your roommate might snore, so you could cut off your hearing to sleep."

The Jedi Master smiled. "Very good. I recall using it for that a couple of times myself. Another reason?"

Kirana Ti raised a hand. "Since we rely heavily on visual senses, a visual illusion might blind us to what is truly going on. Being able to cut down or cut out our vision would allow us to determine what is truly happening."

Gantoris frowned. "But that would leave you blind."

Kam disagreed. "You would rely upon your ability to sense things through the Force to make up for the lack. Without the visual confusion, this sense should come much more clearly."

Luke raised a hand and nodded. "Good points, all. The key here is learning to control perceptions. First you need to make certain that the data coming in is correct. Filtering out distrac-tions, or sharpening a sense to gather more information, will let you do that. We will work on that in this exercise. The second thing we will deal with, later, is determining truth or falsehood of what you perceive."

I scratched at the back of my neck. "Truth and falsehood seem pretty straightforward to me."

"On the surface they are fairly clear, but truth can depend upon a certain point of view. As Obi-Wan Ken.o.bi said to me, 'Many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.'" Luke smiled indulgently at me. "You would like an example to show this?"

I nodded. "I work better with duracrete than I do vapor."

"Good." Luke's blue eyes narrowed until they became chips of ice in shadowed wells. "You all know of Darth Vader as the most vile creature that ever lived. He became a symbol of the Emperor's evil. He personified evil in the minds of many, in-cluding all of you."

Luke's voice dropped to a harsh whisper, forcing us to strain to hear him. "But I tell you this, he was good."

My jaw dropped open in complete disbelief. "That's some point of view."

The Jedi Master nodded. "Please understand this: there was, inside Darth Vader, the core of the man he had once been. Though wrapped in layers of evil, this man still existed. In Va-der's final moments, he won out. He rejected the evil that had become his life. He rejected his master, the Emperor, and killed him."

Brakiss' head came up. "I thought you killed the Emperor?" Luke shook his head. "I caused the Emperor to be destroyed by reaching out to the good in Darth Vader and making him change his heart. I was just the instrument of change that al-lowed Darth Vader to redeem himself."

I dimly recalled Luke having said that he had been turned back from the dark side by the love of his sister and friends. "You must have made a powerful appeal to him."

"I did. Love is a powerful tool to employ against the dark side. My sister's love saved me." Luke hesitated for a moment. "And the love of a son for his father is what saved Darth Va-der."

I would like to claim that I instantly tracked the full import of what Luke said because I had been trained as a detective to a.n.a.lyze confessions and figure out what people were truly say-ing. The fact is, however, that with his words came beams of pride and compa.s.sion and just a hint of fear that played over me like an ion blast. My flesh puckered and I suppressed a shudder when the realization that Luke Skywalker was Darth Vader's son finally exploded in my brain.

I nodded again. "Quite a perspective there." Knowing how much I revered my father and his memory, I could have nothing but sympathy for Luke. I had been lucky enough to know my father, to have him guide me. Even as we worked our way through these simple exercises, I recall watching my father do some of them when I was a child. As any child will, I imitated him, and he instructed me, telling me it was our private game, and that I should reveal it to no one. He taught me nothing that, in a display of youthful enthusiasm, could have revealed my Jedi proclivities to any of the Emperor's Jedi-hunters. Even so. they formed a foundation for my current training without which I would have been utterly useless.

I had a million questions I wanted to ask him about when and where he learned about his father. I wanted to know every-thing to fill in the background of the familiar "orphaned hero from a desert world" biography we'd all heard countless times about him. The Vader revelation suddenly added depth to what we had been told. At the moment of his greatest victory, he lost the goal he sought. He redeemed his father and lost him at the same time. At least in my case, though I lost my father, I had all the good things about him to remember and cherish.

Luke looked down at the ground, almost penitent. "I have told you this to provide Keiran his example, and to lower a barrier between us. I want you to know that no decision is final. If you are to avoid the lures of the dark side, you must be constantly vigilant. If you fall to the dark side, you can be brought back. I have been redeemed. I have been a redeemer.

Now I wish to guide you so that you will never have to fall. You have the last of my secrets now. I trust you with it and look forward to when you will trust me with whatever secrets trouble you."

His head came up and his face brightened, shattering the dull mood that had settled over us. "Brooding over this will waste the day, so I want to return to the exercise. You will choose a partner and each of you will bare a forearm. You will close your eyes and use what you have been taught to block feeling to that forearm. Then each of you will take a small stone and grasp it between the thumb and forefinger of the non-numbed arm. Using your remaining senses-and concentrating on the other person's senses through the Force-you are to bring that stone as close as possible to touching the other person's flesh as you can. Once you sense the touch of the stone through the Force, gently reach up and tap your partner's arm. The goal is to come as close as possible to touching without actually doing so, and to react only when a touch is sensed, but not felt."

I partnered up with Tionne and knelt knee to knee with her. We both drew our sleeves back from our left forearms and presented them, wrists upward, to the other. Fairly easily we located small pebbles with our free hands and held them poised above the other's forearm. Giving her a brave smile, I closed my eyes and shut off the feeling to my left forearm. Then I tried to sense Tionne's presence.

To say that I stretched out with my senses is really an exag-geration. I wanted to produce a field effect, allowing my senses to spread out and encompa.s.s Tionne, but I found the effort as difficult and painful as trying to will my flesh to split so my muscles could expand outward. I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, focusing on it to regain my concentration.

I wondered what to do for a moment, then realized I was really trying to spread myself too thin. First of all, I needed to be able to sense Tionne's arms, not her whole body and pres-ence. Narrowing the task before me made it far more manage-able, and I immediately felt a burst of self-confidence pump more energy into me. Then, following along the same lines of thought, I realized I didn't need to sense to the micron where her hand or arm was, since both were fairly large. I shifted my thinking around to a new paradigm in which I saw the hairs on my arm exuding little Force tendrils that wove themselves into a glowing mesh. When I felt a contact, I made the mesh even more fine beneath it, and added depth to it, so as her pebble approached my skin I watched it penetrating layers of my screen.

A smile blossomed on my face. The difference between con-tact and non-contact was just a layer, a layer defined as a mi-cron, but a layer that was easy to perceive when I was able to focus. As her stone touched my skin and the last layer parted beneath it, I poked a finger up and tapped her elbow. That brought a little gasp from her and I smiled a bit more.

Then I shifted my concentration to my right hand. I pro-jected similar tendrils from my fingers, forming them into a capsule that surrounded my stone. I shaped it using what I could feel of it with my fingers. The resolution at the point of my fleshy contact with it became very fine, but remained indis-tinct where I imagined the point of stone to be.

Regardless, I lowered the stone toward her arm, and began to inject color into my sensory capsule. At the point of contact with her skin I made the capsule turn green. As the stone got closer and closer to her flesh, the color shifted to yellow. Then the final layer flashed red and I halted my movement without touching her. Then she tapped me on the elbow.

I jerked back and my sensory capsule vanished for a moment. I reestablished it and redefined the shape of the rock. Again I made an approach and stopped before what I thought was con-tact, but it wasn't until the sixth time that I had managed to define the rock's shape with enough precision that I stopped before I touched her.

We continued the exercise and quick laughs and triumphant cries soon echoed from the pairs. We became almost playful in what we were doing, teasing each other. As it became more of a game, I found it easier to project my screen and push it out further. Part of me wanted to try to use it to read the contours of Tionne's face, to see when she was smiling and to see her brow knitted in concentration but I held back.

My unwillingness to gain a greater sense of Tionne surprised me because I found myself reacting to her as if she were a danger. She certainly was beautiful and decidedly attractive, though her coloration set her outside what I'd previously seen as my "type." Her physical beauty was less a danger, it occurred to me, than her very open and friendly way of dealing with everyone. If, at this stage, it was possible to identify someone who would form the heart of the group, I would have picked her. As such, if she knew who I was and my reasons for being at the academy, she would have offered me comfort.

Comfort I would relish.

Comfort that would cost me.

I wasn't worried about being seduced by her-my a.s.sumption was that Tionne had no interest in me, and I had no interest in anyone besides my wife.

What worried me was accepting the sympathy she would offer. I had, since the time of my father's death, held myself closed to all but a very few good friends. With Mirax I had opened myself even more and while I could be very open with friends, joking with them and accepting their jibes; vulnerability still scared me.

In part it came with the jobs I'd had. In CorSec the last thing you want to let a criminal see is that he can get to you and can hurt you emotionally. To combat that you tend to deaden your feelings and deal with the people you meet professionally as "them." They are not part of your family or your organization. They are not as real and therefore what the), think and say can't get to you. It is a dehumanization of people that allows for detachment; a detachment you need if you are going to survive while dealing with grand tragedies and cruelties.

Even in Rogue Squadron I fell prey to this distancing. When friends died, it hurt a lot, so I held myself back from becoming engaged with the new pilots. I didn't really even realize I was doing that until Wedge called me on it one day. He sort of smiled and told me he'd caught himself doing the same thing, but that by overcoming that natural tendency, he found he could reach out to pilots, help make them better, so he wouldn't lose them.

The sense of Tionne as a danger set itself up as another wall around my heart. I suspected it would interfere with my acces-sing and feeling the Force much as my inflated self-conception had previously. The fear of vulnerability was really just another aspect of my core personality. To reach my full potential as a Jedi I knew I would have to work around it or blast past it, but I didn't feel ready to decide on how I wanted to do that yet.

The sound of Luke's voice brought me out of my introspec-tion. "Without opening your eyes or shifting away from your partner, I want you to place your pebble in the palm of your partner's hand. I want you then to reach out, to find that peb-ble, and use the Force to make it move. This is a big step. Up to now you have used the Force in a pa.s.sive sense, to enhance your perceptions. Now you will apply the Force more directly and use its energy to make the stone move. If you can lift it clear of your partner's palm, so much the better."

I felt Tionne's stone land in my hand. "This will be fantastic, Keiran.

Stories of Jedi levitating all sorts of things abound."

"I'm certain." I dropped my stone in her hand and immedi-ately lost all sense of it. This boded ill for me. I reached down and just touched it with a finger, hoping to kindle echoes of my tactile sense of it.

Nothing.

"You touched it with your finger, Keiran."

"I know. Sorry."

I drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. I gathered my thoughts and reconstructed my sensory screen. I projected it out and down toward her palm and mapped her hand. I could feel her flesh and how the Force flowed through her. Between us I could feel a resonance and I could even detect a dead spot in the middle of it. The stone, it had to be the stone. I smiled and bent my will to shifting the stone. Nothing.

It did not help at all that at this moment her stone danced in my palm as if a groundquake was shaking the planet. Her sharp giggle-half shriek, half laugh-let me know that she'd sensed the rock's movement. I felt pure joy wash out from her and couldn't help but smile, even though my rock lay as still as the Great Temple's foundation stones.

I tried to push and make it move again, but got nothing.

I opened my eyes and looked up at Master Skywalker. "I think nothing's happening."

He smiled. "Don't think, feel it. It will happen."

I shrugged. "I'm not even moving the dust on this rock."

"You don't believe, which is why you fail." Luke opened his arms to take in the other students. As I looked around I saw that the short hops Tionne's stone had taken were insignificant compared to what others had accomplished. Worst of all, Gantoris had a halo of pebbles whirling at different speeds around his head. "You see, size matters not, numbers matter not. If you believe, you open the way for the Force to come through you."

I shook my head. "I believe, but apparently not well enough."

Gantoris' eyes opened and he stared at me past Streen's head. "You believe in failure, Keiran, which is why you fail. It is a never-ending cycle."

Luke gestured toward Gantoris and the stones he'd had orbiting his head flew up into the air. They wove themselves through an intricate pattern almost too fast for the eye to fol-low. It would have been all but impossible to watch, but Luke struck one stone off another, creating sparks at this point and that. Then, like a swarm of piranha-beetles on the hunt, the stones flew off and vanished into the rainforest.

"There is only one cycle that is without end, Gantoris. That cycle is life and life is what creates the Force. Success comes with feeling, understanding and controlling the Force." He smiled. "The pace may be different, but the progression is the same for all of you. Setbacks are expected. Success and failure will always be part of your training."

"Not for me." Gantoris shook his head adamantly. "I do not choose to fail."

Gantoris' declaration sent a chill down my spine. I'd heard that tone many times before, though the words had been differ-ent. "You'll never take me alive, CorSec," was how it always came out, and disaster almost always followed it. Here, at the Jedi academy, where we were learning to manipulate the en-ergy that bound the universe together, I didn't even want to think about what sort of tragedy Gantoris' comment could sp.a.w.n.