Lit A Cynical Walk Through the NJO

I have no idea how Leia got brought into this conversation.

 

It's more that, in Leia's situation - feeling some responsibility - even if that feeling is wrong - is to be expected.

Same with Corran.

Corran's still acting - as demonstrated in Edge of Victory.

 

I think Corran is right to be worried that his own vengefulness toward Shai might have led him some way into the Dark Side - and that he's sensible to take steps to make sure it doesn't lead him any further.

 

There's nothing Corran is really capable of doing now that he's a galactic pariah, blamed for the destruction of Ithor.

Although that reminds me, his commission was reactivated at the start of the book, but when he talks to Borsk at Ithor, he acts like he's no longer a part of the New Republic military. More evidence of the Siege/Ruin combination, IMO. But the New Republic definitely wants nothing to do with Corran after Ithor. Even men like Kre'fey know it's simply impossible due to politics.

 

A planet was completely destroyed. I think Corran is allowed a freakout. Even though it was beyond his control since the aide destroyed the planet, after Shedao agreed to terms that if Corran won, Ithor would be saved.

 

Corran doesn't really have a freak out. He puts Shedao's mask in front of Elegos' bones and confesses that he purposely hesitated before killing Shedao so he'd know he was dead. Then he tells Luke et al. that he's going to go back to Corellia for a while, "resign" from the Jedi to take blame off of them so Borsk can't use Corran as a political weapon against the Jedi. This convinces Luke but not Jacen, who thinks Corran should stick around, but Corran tells Jacen he's too idealistic, and that he would really do more good for the Jedi by "resigning" and taking the fallout on himself rather than dispersing it among the order, than he would do by actively participating in the war.

And he says if things get bad enough, he can always come back to help, but he hopes things don't get that bad. But they do!

 

I'm doing Traitor damnit.



PROLOGUE

THE EMBRACE OF PAIN

Outside the universe, there is nothing.
This nothing is called hyperspace.
A tiny bubble of existence hangs in the nothing. This bubble is called a ship.
The bubble has neither motion nor stillness, nor even orientation, since the nothing has no distance or direction. It hangs there forever, or for less than an instant, because in the nothing there is also no time. Time, distance, and direction have meaning only inside the bubble, and the bubble maintains the existence of these things only by an absolute separation of what is within from what is without.
The bubble is its own universe.
Outside the universe, there is nothing.

The beginning of the prologue more or less explains the central or founding premise on which the novel is built, explains why there's "no dark side," explains why everything Vergere says is a lie (and the truth!), explains everything. We'll revisit it in the epilogue.

Jacen Solo hangs in the white, exploring the spectrum of pain. He's bothered by the physical pain of the Embrace of Pain, by the pain of betrayal by Vergere, by the pain of Anakin's death. He feels Jaina giving into her darkness in response to both Anakin's and Jacen's apparent death.
Eventually, he feels the caress of Vergere's hand under his jaw. Jacen says he trusted her, and she asks why. Jacen notes how alien Vergere is to him, and attempting to read her body language...

Long bright eyes the shape of teardrops, a spray of whiskers curving around a wide, expressive mouth . . . but expressive of what? How could he know what the arc of her lips truly signified?
It resembled a human smile, but she was nothing resembling human.
Perhaps her species used the crest of iridescent feathers along her cranial ridge for nonverbal signals: right now, as he stared, feathers near the rounded rear of her oblate skull lifted and turned so that their color shifted from starlight silver to red as a blaster bolt.
Was that what corresponded to a smile? Or a human's deadpan shrug? Or a predator's threat display?
How could he possibly know?
How could he have ever trusted her?

Jacen falls into an endless pit of epistemology, which I suspect would please Vergere could she read his mind. In response to her question, he mentions that her tears healed Mara.

"I did? And if I did, what significance do you attach to this?"

Vergere there rattles off a variety of possible motives she could have.

"Which -- which was it?"
"What do you think it was?"
"I -- I don't know . . . how can I know?"
"Why ask me? Should I presume to instruct a Jedi in the mysteries of epistemology?"
"What do you want from me? Why have you done this? Why are you here?"
"Deep questions, little Solo."

Vergere then tells Jacen he's dead. Rigor mortis, habeas corpus. Jacen tries to reach into the Force...

"The Force is life; what has life to do with you?" Vergere strips Jacen of the Force. Jacen is not happy!

"But I'm a Jedi . . ."
"You were a Jedi."
"I don't . . . I don't understand anything . . . Nothing makes sense to me anymore . . ."
"Jacen Solo. Listen well. Everything I tell you is a lie. Every question I ask is a trick. You will find no truth in me. Though you believe nothing else, you may rest your faith on this."
"What are you?"
"I am Vergere. What are you?"

Vergere's first lesson seems to rest on epistemology. There's some hint at the reason why this is the lesson toward the end -- specifically, now that Jacen is dead, he is no longer a Jedi. This ties back into what we saw in Ruin, with Jacen seeking an identity for himself as a Jedi in the same way that Jaina had one as a pilot for Rogue Squadron. Vergere is taking "Jedi" off the table for Jacen as an identity. "What are you?" She's making epistemology the first subject because Jacen can't look to without to find the answer to that question, he can only look within. But he won't realize this for quite some time...

 

PART ONE: DESCENT

ONE: COCOON

Jacen is hanging in the Embrace of Pain, trying to solve the Riddle of Pain, because he'll be taken to Yun-Yuuzhan when he dies and will need to solve the riddle to enter the afterlife. When he reaches his breaking point, the Embrace of Pain will temporarily release him, allowing him to sleep. Despite his inability to use the Force, the meditative techniques he learned as a Jedi help Jacen cope with the pain. Vergere is there on occasion when he's released from the embrace. She lectures him about pain and the True Gods of the Yuuzhan Vong -- as opposed to the false gods, you see.

"Why are you doing this to me?"
"This? What am I doing?"
"No -- No, I mean the Yuuzhan Vong. The Embrace of Pain. I've been through a breaking. The breaking makes a kind of sense, I guess. But this . . . Why are they torturing me? No one even asks me anything . . ."
"Why is a question that is always deeper than its answer. Perhaps you should ask instead: what? You say torture, you say breaking. To you, yes. To our masters? Who knows?" ... Perhaps you are not being tortured. Perhaps you are being taught."
"Oh, sure. What's this supposed to teach me?"
"Is it what the teacher teaches? Or what the student learns?"
"What's the difference?"
"That is, itself, a question worth considering, yes?"

I think this exchange is pretty self-explanatory. We later learn that the Yuuzhan Vong are trying to convert Jacen to the True Way -- he needs to develop the ability to withstand this torment to do so in their eyes. To Jacen, he's simply being tortured and broken without reason. Vergere is teaching Jacen. But she doesn't teach Jacen through instruction. What Jacen needs to learn, he needs to learn through self-enlightenment. Vergere lecturing him won't help him learn who he is. She can only show him the door, but he must walk through it.


She does this through kōan, questions, statements, and stories intended to provoke doubt in Jacen, to make him question his preconceptions, to make him think. But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

"What is pain for? Do you ever think about that, Jacen Solo? What is its function?"

Vergere lectures Jacen at length about possibilities.

"I don't think anything. I just want it to stop."
"I am such a fool. 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 -- How can you -- after what you've done --"
"What I have done? Oh, no no no, little Solo child. This is about what you have done."
"I haven't done anything!"
"Exactly."

"I give you a gift, Jacen Solo. I free you from hope of rescue. Can you not see how I am trying to help you?"
"Help? You need to brush up on your Basic, Vergere. In Basic, when we talk about things you've done to me, help isn't a word we use."
"No? Then perhaps you are correct: our difficulties may be linguistic. When I was very young -- younger than you, little Solo -- I came upon a ringed moon shadowmoth at the end of its metamorphosis, still within its cocoon. I had already some touch with the Force; I could feel the shadowmoth's pain, its panic, its claustrophobia, its hopelessly desperate struggle to free itself. It was as though this particular shadowmoth knew I was beside it, and screamed out to me for help. How could I refuse? Shadowmoth cocoons are polychained silicates -- very, very tough -- and shadowmoths are so delicate, so beatufiul: gentle creatures whose only purpose is to sing to the night sky. So I gave it what I think you mean by help: I used a small utility cutter to slice the cocoon, to help the shadowmoth get out.
"You cant help a shadowmoth by cutting its cocoon. It needs the effort, the struggle to break the cocoon forces ichor into its wing veins. If you cut the cocoon --"
"The shadowmoth will be crippled. Yes, it was a tragiccreature -- never to fly, never to join its fellows in their nightdance under the moons. Even its wingflutes were stunted, and so it was as mute as it was planetbound. During that long summer, we sometimes heard moonsong through the window of my bedchamber, and from my shadowmoth I would feel always only sadness and bitter envy, that it could never soar beneath the stars, that its voice could never rise in song. I cared for it as best I could -- but the life of a shadowmoth is short, you know; they spend years and years as larvae, storing strength for one single summer of dance and song. I robbed that shadowmoth; I stole its destiny -- because I helped it."

Jacen tells Vergere she's dumb and she wasn't helping the shadowmoth at all. Vergere asks how he would have helped the shadowmoth:

"I suppose the best help you could offer would be to keep the cocoon safe. Hawk-bats hunt shadowmoth larvae, and they especially like newly cocooned pupae: that's the stage where they have the most stored fat. So I guess the best help you could offer would be to keep watch over the larva, to protect it from predators -- and leave it alone to fight its own battle."
"And, perhaps, also to protect it from other well-intentioned folk -- who might wish, in their ignorance, to `help' it with their own utility cutters."
"Yes..."
"And also, perhaps, you might stop by from time to time, to let the struggling, desperate, suffering creature know that it is not alone. That someone cares. That its pain is in the service of its destiny."
"Yes..."
"Then, Jacen Solo, our definitions of help are identical."

Jacen's mind is blown. But that's not the important part. The important part is:

Jacen Solo hangs in the white, thinking.
For an infinite instant, he is merely amazed that he can think; the white has scoured his conciousness for days, or weeks, or centures, and he is astonished now to discover that he can not only think, but think clearly.
He spends a white eon, marveling.
Then he goes to work on the lesson of pain.

This is it, he thinks. This is what Vergere was talking about. This is the help she gave me, that I didn't know how to accept.
She has freed him from his own trap: the trap of childhood. The trap of waiting for someone else. Waiting for Dad, or Mother, Uncle Luke, Jaina, Zekk or Lowie or Tenel Ka or any of the others whom he could always count on to fly to his resque.
He is not helpless. He is only alone.
It's not the same thing.
He doesn't have to simply hang here and suffer. He can do something.

Her shadowmoth tale may have been a lie, but within the lie was a truth he could not have comprehended without it. Was that what she had meant when she said, Everything I tell you is a lie?
Did it matter?
Pain is itself a god: the taskmaster of life. Pain cracks the whip, and all that lives will move. To live is to be a slave to pain.
He knows the truth of this, not only from his own life but from watching Dad and Anakin, after Chewie's death. He watched pain crack its whip over his father, and watched Han run from that pain halfway across the galaxy. He watched Anakin turn hard, watched him drive himself like a loadlifter, always pushing himself to be stronger, faster, more effective, to do more -- this was the only answer he had to the pain of having survived to watch his rescuer die.
Jacen always thought of Anakin as being a lot like Uncle Luke: his mechanical aptitude, his piloting and fighting skills, his stark warrior's courage. He can see now that in one important way, Anakin was more like his father. His only answer to pain was to keep too busy to notice it.

Running from the taskmaster.
To live is to be a slave to pain.
But that is only half true; pain can also be a teacher. Jacen can remember hour after hour of dragging his aching muscles through one more repetition of his lightsaber training routines. He remembers practicing the more advanced stances, how much it hurt to work his body in ways he'd never worked it before, to lower his center of gravity, loosen his hips, train his legs to coil and spring like a sand panther's. He remembers Uncle Luke saying, if it doesn't hurt, you're not doing it right. Even the stinger bolts of a practice remote -- sure, his goal had been always to intercept or dodge the stingers, but the easiest way to avoid that pain would have been to quit training.
Sometimes pain is the only bridge to where you want to go.

And the worst pains are the ones you can't run away from, anyway. He knows his mother's tale so well that he has seen it in his dreams: standing on the bridge of the Death Star, forced to watch while the battle station's main weapon destroyed her entire planet. He has felt her all-devouring horror, denial, and blistering helpless rage, and he has some clue how much of her relentless dedication to the peace of the galaxy is driven by the memory of those billions of lives wiped from existence before her eyes.
And Uncle Luke: if he hadn't faced the pain of finding his foster parents brutally murdered by Imperial stormtroopers, he might have spent his whole life as an unhappy moisture farmer, deep in the Tatooine sand-wastes, dreaming of adventures he would never have -- and the galaxy might groan under Imperial rule to this very day.

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.

***

Frankly, this puts the point of the chapter better than I could, and seems pretty damn self-explanatory to me. But who is Jacen Solo? Vergere speaks to Jacen in kōan, and he eventually pieces together the truth.

Afterward, there's a scene with Nom Anor and Vergere talking to Tsavong Lah about the Solo Project. Nom Anor is trying to sell it, and the stinger at the end is that Vergere is his partner in this, so we're meant to question her sincerity. I've noticed that this commentary is likely going to consist of a lot of quotes from the book, because they simply speak to the meaning better than I could by paraphrasing, but I will supply additional meaning if necessary.

 

"Life is pain, Highness. Everyone who says different is selling something."

 

Can you expand on this? What is it the problem the common troops have with Jaina?

Should I take this as meaning that Jacon don't see Tionne and Cilghal as jedi since they are more scholars the warriors?

You can deflect stun bolts?

I agree on that they are a elite, after all when you are a wuxia kensei wizard marshal diplomat it is rather hard not to be elite, but I would not say that they had segregate themselves from society, at least not more then any other group.

Yes it's a pity, I guess the Shakespeare and Sherlock Holms fans don't have this problem

You better be joking

This is the same Jacon that just accept the circle of life in the YJK books?

This scene seems really artificial and heavy handed.

Why is Fey'lya doing this?

Jacon you really need to come up with better comparisons.

Fixed

Is not Vereger 'who' she is? Or maybe we have been wrong about Vereger being her name, maybe it is the name of her species or some kind of title?

Why is he unable to use the Force?

Why are they trying to convert Jacon?

I guess that human adult of 16 years age are nut unheard of but how often do we see them?

 

Jacen's eighteen in Traitor. Not that his age is the point.

 

Thanks, did not know that. I take back my comment, but it is still a bit young.

 

Jacen is unable to use the force mostly because of the level of pain, but i am assuming part of it is force use by Vergere. Jacen does the same thing to Ben years later. As far why they are breaking him that is a difficult question. As much as people hate to think about it, it makes the most sense if Vergere is indeed a Sith.

 

The way I see it so is feeling the Force is not the same as using the Force. The way I understand it so can everybody feel the Force in SW, there is just some who have a stronger Force sense then other, just like some have better sight, touch or balance. Those with good Force sense are what we call Force sensitive.
As feeling the Force is something you do unconsciously just like when you daily use you other five senses (or more or lees depending on your species), I have hard to understand how pain would make you unable to sense it. Focusing it, yeas; but sensing it, not really.

But that is just my two cents.

 

'Cause he's a xenophobic arse!

 

His political base doesn't like the Jedi.

 

Can you expand?

 

I think I have already asked about what their problem with the jedi was but I can only remember that they disliked that the jedi did their job and that thy could not just order them around, was there any other reason?

Also what about the political faction that like the jedi? Maybe I am just romantic but to me it feels like they should actually be stronger.

 

You've read how he is in in X-Wing, with Gavin and Asyr's relationship? He's an amoral bastard who uses cultural values to excuse all manner of bigotry towards humans and anyone else he blames for the Empire. He's also terribly insecure in his authority and it shows. NJO eventually had Fey'lya realise his errors in riding the tiger that he did, it only took the fall of Coruscant and the death of trillions.

 

No, the X-wing books are on my to read list.

Oh, dear. I guess that I got a to positive impression of him from the TTT books, were I thought him as a rather competent carrier politician who was heavily suffering from a culture class. I thought that he could have been a rather good chancellor when he had learned how the system worked and would have expertly balance the different fractions against each other and used the jedi to keep peace, since war is rather bad for business.


So his problem is that he thinks humans control the jedi order?
Also do we know what happened to all those non-human jedi student who was in the background in the YJK-series?

 

Gamiel, his problem is not that he thinks humans control the Jedi Order. His problem is that he doesn't like humans period–and he isn't a fan of the Jedi, either. They're two separate opinions. Though later in the series he does grow to accept the Jedi (if only to boost his political standing), at first he seems to treat them almost the opposite of how Daala does in FOTJ–whereas she wants them to exist under the heel of the government, he wants them to either not exist, or at least not be involved in the New Republic in the slightest.