A Certain Point of View

Chapter 1: Patience

There are three cornerstones to classical Soresu: defense, insight, and patience.

He had learned the first two as a young man, when he understood the art to be something like a combat style. Soresu, then, was a way of swinging your lightsaber, a way of catching attacks, even blaster bolts, and repositioning them with surgical precision. To a young man, Soresu was a blade art, a school of fencing that took the already strong defenses of a young body, and through the introduction of mystic insight made them impenetrable.

The patience, though, came only with time. Like a synstone hut in the desert, cured to perfect hardness over long years of exposure under twin suns, patience had to be hard-baked. But patience was the old man's virtue, the master's virtue. And only in its completion did the hermit understand that the lightsaber was merely a wand—a shimmering finger of enlightenment that pointed always to the truth, but held no truth within itself. Soresu—and all the classical forms, he imagined—were at their most advanced levels not fighting styles at all, but paths of living. Take away the saber, the tool of killing, and the art was not crippled, but perfected.

When the Great Drought came, the saber wouldn't even ignite anymore. The sand here had a way of getting into everything—even mechanisms long sealed by a master's hands. They'd been the hands of a younger master, who built his weapon with no great patience. The edges were flush, they were precise, but they were not perfect. There was always a flaw somewhere. And after eighteen years of waiting, the sand found its way in. It gets everywhere, a sulking Anakin had once told him. The boy had been right.

It was hubris to think that it wouldn't get everywhere, in the end. The sand knew patience. Tatooine was a very old world, even as far as planets went. He had thought Master Yoda to be patient, once. But the sand had waited for billions of years. It had waited since before the Grand Master was born. It had waited since even before Yoda's entire homeworld had formed from cosmic stardust. Before that, there was this sand, drifting on ancient winds, waiting to fulfill its ten-billion-year destiny, to creep into the mechanisms of one imperfect lightsaber and grind down a few key parts of the emitter array.

It was a good place, Tatooine, for studying Soresu. It was a good place for learning about patience.

When the Great Drought came, patience was all there was. It outlasted the sandstorms. It outlasted the spare parts. It outlasted the water. It outlasted whole settler encampments—then outlasted whole tribes of Tusken Raiders out on the Jundland Wastes, who had grown too dependent on their moisture raids. They, too, were lost to the sand. Perhaps, in another billion years, everything here would be swallowed up by the long-suffering desert.

When the Great Drought came, so did the true mastery of Soresu that had eluded him for most of his life. Already overtaxed by the barren, empty air, the hut's little vaporator was destroyed in the first of the Jundland sandstorms. After that, there was only the water in the tanks; after that, there were only the stray droplets that could be brushed out of the condensers. When they were gone, if he rose from his hibernation in the coldest hour of night, there were the traces of condensation he licked off the sandy walls of the cellar with the relish of a Galactic Senator at a high feast.

When that, too, was gone, there was only the Force. And the Force would sustain him, for a time, but it would not prevent a mortal man from dying. The Force was, in its essence, a perfection of the natural truths of the universe—not a denial of them.

The storms had been quick to shut down all travel. Only the Jawa sandcrawlers, those ungainly shapeless behemoths of Outer Rim determination, still roamed the Wastes unchecked. When even the dewback had died of thirst, there was nothing to do but wait. And so, when the water was gone, he waited, and then waited. And then he learned what waiting was.

He began hearing voices in the second or third week—voices of doubt, guilt, sadness that seemed to whisper from the Dark Side. Trained as he was in the rudiments of medicine, he knew that delirium would set in, sooner or later. Perhaps that was all this was. In tune with the Force, spending more and more of his days in hibernation, he felt keenly the ruin of his body—the aging, the invisible war on his joints and organs as they became those of a dying man.

On the edge of the Jundland Wastes, a world twelve billion years old waited for a man to die. And that man waited out the immense patience of the world, until the presence of life came again to the rocky terrain—until he felt the stirring of life in the dead landscape as the scavengers came, eager to sort through the leavings of the dead—and perhaps, if they were lucky, to sell the supplies at cutthroat prices to what few survivors they could find.

He had sat down, nineteen days ago, as a vigorous man well into middle age. He rose now as a very old one. His clumsy animal body was filled with the heaviness of death, and he felt within him the lightness of his spirit rebel against it. With a mind to his purpose, and an old master's calm, he walked out on dessicated joints to meet the scavengers.

"Hello there," said Ben Kenobi.