A Certain Point of View

Chapter 14: Difficult To See

Sight in the Force was the essential heart of Soresu. Those disciplined in its ways were uncommonly gifted when it came to premonition, and the more certain an outcome was, the easier it was to foresee. Ben had long ago mastered the art of predicting blaster fire, of angling his lightsaber precisely to return it to its origins. Even how, saving his strength in dreamlike half-sleep, he knew that was the first lesson he would teach Luke. It was out of order, perhaps; but it had taken his entire life to see one of the final lessons Yoda had taught him: a lightsaber was a light first, and a saber second. It hummed not only with a cutting edge, but with the resonance of the Force itself. It was more wand than weapon, he reminded himself again, in the hands of the wise.

Ben was lying down again, conserving his strength, as soon as the danger of the Imperial blockade was past. He could not say if he was sleeping, if he was dreaming, or if the Living Force had carried him far away to another time, another place. The Millennium Falcon was every bit as fast as its captain had boasted—faster, maybe—but it had come at a cost. The ship stank of stellar-grade coolant, and the effort of lugging against the tractor beams had burned something out that stank of melted plasteel. The ship was a safety nightmare, and reminded him of the podracers he had seen cheating death atop Ben's Mesa, twenty years before. The Mesa, a sprawling desert plateau not far from Mos Espa, was named for Ben Neluenf, the legendary podracer from whom Ben had stolen his new name.

Ben Neluenf? Why not Ben Kenobi? It was a common name, a nobody's name, but also the name of a local hero. It had brought him acceptance early on.

Obi-Wan...

"Ben Kenobi," he insisted, though he did not know if he said it aloud. A fever took him away, though the Force directed his fall.

The leaking coolant of the Falcon was the same sort that sprayed from the damaged pipes in the Galactic Senate, a suspension of heat-sinking fluids that carried the unbearable warmth of the smog-choked core world to energy plants far from the Senate and the Temple. The slightest scent of it carried him back to the choking air that greeted him nineteen years earlier as he stepped onto the Jedi Temple's skybridge for nearly the last time.

The distress call had come out long hours ago, when the assault was still in its early stages. Caught by surprise, the defenders of Coruscant had held out for a time, but were overwhelmed in the end. Racing back to the Temple, Obi-Wan and Anakin met an all-out invasion already in progress: the Senate itself was breached by the Separatist forces and whole swaths of its grandeur lay in ruins. They had been separated in the fighting, but would find each other again soon enough. Anakin could take care of himself. He was not Obi-Wan's concern—not now.

With long, racing strides aided by the Force, he charged along the upper level of the skybridge connecting the Jedi Temple to the Senate. At first, he had deeply resented the construction of the skybridge: Ben remembered more clearly in his old age, now that Palpatine's veil was lifted, the installation of the direct conduit. It was the sort of thing Dooku had despised, the encroachment of political and military command on the monastic isolation of the Temple; he remembered many times as a boy hearing the old Master railing against the militarization of the Jedi and the corruption of their purity. In his own way, Dooku had been right where Yoda was wrong: such things were a truly rare occasion, and that made his fall all the harder to bear.

With the skybridge came greater traffic from the Senate as officials and advisors came and went at all hours of the day and night. The relationship of the Temple to the Senate was changing; that was unavoidable. No one in those days had imagined the Order's very existence was in jeopardy, but many were unhappy with the shape it was taking; these Jedi most of all made regular contact with the Senators and politicians in an attempt to influence that shape and preserve the Order's independence and integrity as peacekeepers. They came at all hours of the day and night, if the standard clock could even be so divided: the planet was an ecumenopolis, a massive sprawling global city; choked under clouds and mesospheric haze, lit by an incessant blanket of synthetic light, Coruscant was a realm of perpetual twilight, trapped forever halfway between day and night, between light and dark.