Chapter 5.

I had some information. Not much, but far more than I'd had before, and enough to get by on for now. Firstly, I was somehow in Star Wars. I couldn't decide whether it was more likely that I was really in another galaxy, or another universe entirely. Either way, it was unreal. Somewhere out there, there was an Obi-Wan, a Darth Vader, a Luke Skywalker, and so forth, all going about their daily lives as though the man I once believed was their creator never existed. Somewhere out in the endless void, invisible to me on this tiny world, the Empire and the Rebellion were at war, fighting for control over a piece of turf so huge that the idea of one entity controlling it all is almost incomprehensible. Even now, I realized, my fate might hinge on the wins and losses of two figments of a director's imagination. Meanwhile, whatever twist of fate had brought me into this world had also dragged along a Nazi soldier-- had brought him to the same city as me, as though he were attached to me somehow-- or vice versa. He'd arrived at the same time, in almost the same place. Ironically, he'd landed in a museum. Onduin was clearly convinced that I'd been dumped in this world for a reason. If that was so, then was the same true of the German? Why would he be needed here? I wondered what Onduin would say about his past. He'd clearly been involved with the Jedi somehow-- and he may have been one himself. Something about the fact that the alien plodding along in front of me was likely a Jedi struck me as significant, but I couldn't figure out why. These thoughts circled so aggressively in my mind, that they completely over-rode my impulse to sulk about being torn away from home. In fact, they'd become so dominant during the walk, that I nearly stopped seeing the world around me, and ended up tripping three or four times along the way.

"Here we are," Onduin said. He was giving me the strangest look, like he was studying me. I wasn't sure what to think of that.

This building was different. It wasn't made of the bright, golden wood and wicker construction that characterized the area. It was more like some cavernous maw. The entrance was fronted by irregularly-spaced, gray wood posts holding up the roof, which was thatched with straw so rotted it was nearly black, and really more dirt than straw. The walls were made of some weird combination of gray, weathered wicker and compacted earth and straw, and were the same color as the roof. The thatching on the roof was tied together into strange spires and round chimneys, some of which spewed thin steam; and some rocks dangled from strings over the entrance. I thought there was probably a reason for that, but I wasn't about to ask. The interior was completely invisible, except as a lightless void that seemed to leach into everything around it in strange ways. The building's saving grace was the smell of cooking food coming from inside. "That thing?" I asked dubiously. Onduin nodded casually, and started loping towards it. I followed a little reluctantly.

As it turned out, there was a short wall a few feet behind the entrance, that kept the interior out of view of the door-- which explained why the interior looked like a black hole. The walls put off a strong, earthy odor. Around the corner, I saw that this crescent-shaped wall was actually the back of a giant cook space. A huge earthen oven was built into the middle of the wall, and on either side the wall and a portion of the ceiling above it were covered in pitch or a dark adobe. Overhead several openings in the ceiling-- likely the strange spires I'd seen from the outside-- let out the steam that flowed up to them from the stoves and smaller ovens. The stoves were actually made out of steel, as were the ovens, which had a cylindrical design with cast-iron trim. It was kind of surprising to see metal of any kind in use, after everything else I'd seen of this area. The stoves had big, black pots and wok-like pans distributed across them, and some had the handles of ladles sticking out. On the left side of the room, as seen coming in from the entrance, there was a giant cupboard linked with what looked like a big brass sink. On the right, there was a pit about four feet deep and six feet wide, that followed the exterior wall in the shape of a boomerang for about twenty feet; a continuous platform about a foot and a half wide wrapped around the middle of the pit's wall, acting as a bench for a table that filled the remaining space in the pit. A few people were sitting at the far end of the snake-like table, eating and talking to each other. There were only two tiny square portholes to let sunlight in, but several yellow electric lights kept everything well-lit. Two women were working in the cook space, tossing steaming food in the pans and checking on whatever was simmering in the deep pots. It smelled good, but I fundamentally did not like the place. Onduin was giving me his odd, quizzical look again. This time he actually spoke his mind.

"You're uncomfortable," he said, matter-of-factly. I nodded. That was a good word for it.

"Why?" he asked.

"I feel like I'm in a haunted house, or a voodoo apothecary or something."

"Why?" he repeated.

"It's... It's just the dark, and the roof-- the entrance looks like a mouth or something; and then there are those rocks hanging over the door... It's just weird. I get a bad feeling."

He smiled, looking a little mischievous. "Good," he said simply. "Now what are you going to do about it?"

I just blinked at him. I hadn't thought any farther ahead than how I didn't like the place. The thought of doing something about it hadn't occurred to me.

"No matter how much evil has seeped into a building, it can't hurt you unless you allow it. I'm not out to make every day a lesson, but this is the closest place to get food, and the people who work here are decent enough. The building, however, has its... issues."

"What do you mean, issues?"

"To be honest, I don't know. They're living things, they're intelligent, and they're completely evil. They sometimes appear in dark rooms as even darker, humanoid shadows. Other times, I'm almost certain, they can appear in dreams as anything from a hissing voice to an innocent-looking child. I don't know what they are, but they are a part of my history. I'll tell you more after we get some food."

"What... like, ghosts or demons or something?"

"They're not ghosts," Onduin said with an air of certainty. "I've seen ghosts, and these are different."

He looked like he was about to say something else, when one of the women cooking turned and saw us.

"Onduin!" she shouted, smiling. She had caramel skin and dark hair and eyes; and her accent was heavy, and sounded like an odd mix of Hispanic and Russian. "Hey, you're not alone! What's wrong?" she said, grinning. Onduin smiled back.

"Nothing yet. This is Andrea, who I imagine will be around for awhile, under the circumstances," he said, looking back at me towards the end. I waved, and quietly said hi.

The woman nodded. "I'm Girous," she said. "So how'd you get here? Were you on Agonis?"

"Yeah."

"Oh. Hey, I heard about you. The emergency loaders were sweeping Aman one last time, and they picked up a girl and a man. What happened to him?"

"He went to the refugee center," Onduin said.

The woman suddenly furrowed her brows. "Really? Why? You're not friends?" she asked, looking at me.

"No," I growled.

"Oh," she said slowly, nodding. "I see. Then, why were you together?"

"Well-- I didn't want to be with him. But when the hazmat people came down they asked me if there were any other survivors, and I told them about him, so I guess they went looking for him. We just ended up on the same loader." I used the word "loader" a little hesitantly, not quite sure if it meant what I thought it did.

Girous nodded. "Okay. Hey, you two, sit down somewhere, and then I can ask questions!" she said. She turned to one of the deep pots and stirred it rapidly. "We get about one new person a century here, you should know." She smiled. "It's always a good day when someone visits."

Onduin walked over to the table set in the floor, and kind of slithered under it, coming up on the other side and resting his elbows on the edge of the table. A human would never have gotten away with that move, but the alien's rapid, serpentine movements made it look graceful, if not proper. I sat down across from him a little stiffly. I still didn't like the place-- I felt like I was being watched. Girous set a steaming plate and a short, sharp knife in front of us, followed by two bowls. My plate had some kind of steamed vegetable, which looked like a cross between kale and fiddlesticks, along with a dark roll of some kind. Onduin had what looked like a piece of meat folded over on itself, and barely cooked, with some kind of marinade. The bowls were both full of a pale, yellowish chowder. Everything smelled good. Girous sat down a couple feet away from me, smiling. The other woman shot her a sour look, but she ignored it.

She asked me all about where I was from, what I was doing on Agonis, how I survived, and so forth. Onduin seemed interested in the story too, and every now and then he'd pitch in where I had trouble figuring out how to answer a question. There was definitely a small-town mentality here, and my presence seemed to draw a lot of attention. The people sitting at the opposite end of the table, who'd long since finished eating, gradually edged closer to us, and by the end had joined in and were asking questions of their own. Everyone seemed very friendly, and most everyone offered to help if they could. I felt really grateful to have landed in a place like this. I was informed that drinking directly out of the soup bowl was both accepted and normal here, as was eating with a knife and fingers. Onduin didn't seem to chew his food, but when he bit it those barracuda incisors seemed to melt through the meat in an almost unnatural way. Eventually I decided to ask Girous about what Onduin had called this building's "issues."

"So... I hear this place is haunted or something," I said, as casually as possible.

"Oh, yes," she said, nodding. "No one wants to be here at night, not with the lights off. Things move, bang, you hear these awful voices... it's not a friendly place." She lowered her voice, leaning closer. "Binidet there," she said, pointing at the other cook, "thinks she can scare them off by hanging rocks over the door. She says it's some kind of magic her mother taught her to keep evil spirits out. In my opinion, they don't care about the rocks. It's absurd."

"Why not just burn the building or something?" I said.

She looked appalled. "We can't burn these houses! These places are very old, and we value even the corrupted ones. Besides, just because you burn the building doesn't mean the spirits will move. They'll just stay on the foundation, and keep banging things and making voices. That's why we put that wall there," she said, pointing at the wall that blocked the view inside from the entrance. "It muffles some of the sounds they make, so they don't frighten people on the street who have to go by it at night. Nobody wants them here, but no one knows how to make them go away. Not even our local wise man." She smiled a little, looking at Onduin. He shook his head, acknowledging his helplessness.

"Where I'm from, they'd just get someone to exorcise the place," I said. Everyone looked at me like I'd been speaking Greek.

"What's that?" Onduin finally said.

"Um..." Yet another question I wasn't used to being asked. Even primitive cultures knew about this. Right? "Well, usually like a priest or someone goes in with holy water and a cross, and tells them to get out or something. I don't actually know that much about it."

There was a lot of hmm-ing and huh-ing, but nobody had anything to say. Everyone had finished eating, though. The food was good, although the vegetables on my plate seemed very oily as vegetables go. Everything had a rich, slightly metallic flavor. I politely announced I was ready to go, so Onduin and I said goodbye to Girous and the other people there, and started walking back to his house. It was already almost dark out. Days here really were short.

I realized on the way back to Onduin's place that, before now, I'd never really thought of ghosts or anything of the like as something I might actually run into. The people in the restaurant had all agreed that something haunted the place, and considering how it felt to be there I wasn't about to argue with them. In the midst of all this, I was now on my way back to Onduin's house, so he could tell me how he'd been involved with the Jedi-- yet another group I'd never thought I'd actually run into. I was starting to get used to this routine of running into constant weirdness. My concentration on the events around me finally relaxed enough for me to start missing home again. If you've ever been out of the country for a few weeks, you might know the feeling-- a longing to return to your homeland, back to America, or England, or China, or wherever you may be from. It's different from just going out of state, or out of town, because there's a nagging, gut-level understanding that you are not on your home turf, that you belong somewhere else. Every now and then a distinct loneliness pulses through it all, lighting up the absence of the people you love and making it a Polaris around which all other emotions rotate. If your mind isn't kept occupied elsewhere, and you haven't got a way of going home, then this is probably where your mind will be. It certainly was for me. Once again, I found myself so preoccupied, I could hardly see where I was walking.

I followed Onduin inside his house, where we sat down at the table again. It was completely dark outside now, so the big lamp overhead was lit, casting irregular rings of yellow light on the expansive room. Onduin had just sat down across from me, where an area of brighter light highlighted his eyes, and made his snout and his forehead look darker. I thought it was funny for some reason.

"Alright then," he said, with a happy expression. "I suppose it's time I fill out my end of the agreement."

I nodded. "Yeah."

He sighed, biting his lip briefly. "How I was involved with the Jedi..." He let it trail off for a few seconds. "I'm not really sure where to start. It's not a story I'm accustomed to telling people." He paused. "Well, I was a so-called knight, before the Purge. You know what that is?"

I shook my head. I thought it was odd he seemed to disdain his old position.

"That's when Vader and the Emperor tried to wipe out the Jedi. They did a decent job of it, too. If I hadn't been so outspoken, I might not be here. I know, I just said something else ridiculously mysterious. Hmm... well, let's see. I was pretty average, as Jedi go. They had my parents sign consent, and took me from home so they could raise me in the Temple when I was a baby. That's typical practice, by the way."

"What's the Temple?" I asked.

"That was the hub of Jedi activity on Coruscant. Our capitol within the capitol, as it were."

"Um... what's Coruscant?"

"That's the capitol of the galaxy."

"Oh."

Onduin smiled. "Well... I spent a lot of my life in the Archives at the Jedi Temple. I always liked history a lot; it was sort of my calling. My master was a Rodian woman named Ayoolna."

"What's a Rodian?" I asked.

Onduin's expression changed a little. I'm guessing that's when he realized he was going to have to explain more than just his history. "A humanoid species. They have rough, green skin, large eyes, a sort of short trump mouth... they have a pair of stiff, rudimentary tentacles protruding from their foreheads, that each end in a sucker..." He let it trail off, probably hoping I'd gotten the idea by then. I had a general picture.

"Okay," I said.

Onduin nodded acknowledgement. "Well, her name was Ayoolna. She had an encyclopedic knowledge of Jedi dogma, and absolutely no idea what any of it really meant. She was a good person, though. I suppose being brought up and trained by her taught me to seek out information myself, because people don't always have it to give you-- and sometimes they hold back for one or another reason. Anyway... So I began developing a theory, when I was fairly young, say... seventeen or eighteen standard years-- about your age, actually, that the Jedi dogma was simply ridiculous. There were just too many logical holes and strange ideas, and the deeper I looked into it the more I discovered that most all of our reverently-recited codes and mantras and so forth weren't supposed to stick around for that long. Most of them were created to keep Jedi from joining the Sith during times of war; and of course that conversion happens more often than any well-trained Jedi would dare admit, so more and more of these measures ended up being put in place. Oh, and the creatures I mentioned earlier, in the restaurant-- everyone runs across a few in their time, if you're a Jedi at least. Part of my theory was that the Force doesn't actually have a dark side, that the evil in the world really has to do with those creatures somehow. It was a very loose idea, but it felt right. Well, early on, my seniors would have me doing local work on Coruscant, maintaining order, watching children, things like that. Then it moved to negotiating local conflicts on other nearby planets." A wry smile built on his face. "Then, it changed to having me negotiate land conflicts on planets that were a little farther away. You see, the more I talked about what I'd found out about the Jedi Code, the farther away they sent me. In fact, by the time the Purge started, they'd more or less forgotten I existed. Actually, I was right here when it all kicked off. For the first few years I waited for the Empire to come and grab me, but the truth is they never even showed up. Most everyone here probably knows exactly who and what I am, but the Imperials never bothered asking them. I'd be worried if they did; the people here can't seem to stop gossiping. Small town. Well, that's most of my story. Oh-- I did have an apprentice, actually. He knew everything I knew, so my superiors had me sending him to distant locations as well. His last mission was to an old set of ruins on Dantooine. He's probably still there. I know he's not dead, at least. I wonder where he is."

Onduin finished with a dreamy look on his face. I'd sort of known what he was, but hearing him tell it was still a little surprising. It was all a lot to take in, but at least it was more manageable than everything else. There was a long silence after Onduin finished, which was only broken when I decided I was curious about Onduin's apprentice.

"So... what was on... " I couldn't remember the name he'd mentioned. "Dan-"

"Dantooine?" he said. I nodded. "Ah. Well, it was mostly an archaeological mission. Dantooine has a set of ruins several thousand years old that are attributed to the Jedi of the time, and I, like many people, was convinced that if we dug through enough ancient ruins, eventually we'd find enough clues to lead us to the Jedi planet of origin. You see, we don't actually know where we came from, which is really kind of embarrassing."

"So you sent him there to look for artifacts?"

He nodded. "That I did. He used to report back to me once every few weeks, to let me know what he'd found, if anything. Now and then, if it was especially interesting, he'd give it to me for safekeeping. Here, I want to show you some things in that outbuilding," he said, looking ferret-like as he leapt off the bench and beckoned for me to follow him out the door-- which I did. I was riveted.

He led me across the swinging bridge, which didn't bother me so much anymore. He stopped in front of the shelves inside the building, next to the door. I stood next to him. He was smiling, probably happy to finally have someone to talk to.

"Well, this is most everything related to that endeavor," he said, looking over the shelves. "Everything here is important, in its own little way, apart from the mirror. The pottery shards and figurines were from what we think were the enclave's archives, so they are of interest because they probably predate the ruins themselves, which are four thousand years old. Dadaro, my apprentice, said he'd found what was once a room of some kind, filled with bucketloads of junk like that. Now, what's really interesting about the animals, is that those animals don't exist anywhere that we know of. So, either they're completely mythological, or they're from some planet we know nothing about."

I looked a little more closely at the figurines. There were three of them, and the head and front legs of a fourth. They were glazed in bright reds, blues, greens, and yellows. One of them looked like a red horse with a blue and yellow saddle, all very curved and stylized; the others were similar. One looked like a dog, one looked like a deer, and the broken one looked like an eagle or a gryphon. "That one looks like a horse," I said, pointing at the piece.

"I wouldn't know," Onduin said, "but perhaps you're right. Now, most people will tell you that the ruins were long since looted of anything related directly to the Jedi who lived there, but Dadaro found these three lightsaber components within four square feet of each other." He gestured at the chunky components sitting on the second shelf. "And those faceted crystals there were probably intended for use in lightsabers as well. We traced their origin to a cavern only a few minute's walk from the old enclave. That's where Dadaro found that," he said, pointing at the rusted chunk of metal that looked like part of a gun. "That used to be the hilt of a Mandalorian blaster, and it's about four thousand years old-- the same age as the ruined enclave. Oh-- the Mandalorians still exist too. They're a community of wealthy bounty hunters who hoard money and resources, but don't use it except when buying equipment. And if they're not busy chasing down desperate people, they'll try to make their own lives harder, I suppose to pass the time or something." He was wearing a wry smile. "Hmm... there was more to that blaster. Dadaro said he'd felt something odd about it, like it was connected to someone important, but he couldn't place who, or even how, for that matter. What else... that piece of crystal." He pointed towards the chunk of blue crystal with the swirly writing on it. "That's a real mystery. Dadaro found it in what would have been the basement, and it's the only piece of its kind. It wouldn't be so interesting if not for the fact that we think we know where it came from, and those ruins are closer to ten thousand years old, and are loosely associated with the Jedi as well. Now, those ruins are really mysterious. That's about all I have here, though. The notes tacked to the back are just Dadaro's notes about the artifacts. That belt was mine, twenty years ago. And the medal... Someone gave that to me years ago after they won it. Don't really remember what it was."

"So-- are the older ruins on the same planet as the enclave?" I asked.

"No-- the ruins that came from, if it's what I think it is, are more or less from the other side of the galaxy. Back in the day, I did a little research, and found that the Jedi had no official record of ever having a city there, but all the local legends say they did. That writing is what really interests me, though. No one seems to be able to trace its origin, and it seems to be connected with ancient Jedi artifacts, which would suggest that the first Jedi brought it with them and used it on their monuments, but not in their official documents."

"Why would they do that?"

"I don't know. My guess would be that that writing was used more ceremonially than anything else, and that's why it died out in the end. Of course, that begs the question of why it was used in the first place, and the most logical answer I can think of is that this was the native written language of the Jedi. Heh, it's almost like the ancient Jedi were trying to cover their tracks."

"So what, you think the Jedi were trying to forget their past or something?"

"I doubt it. Losses like this just... happen when a culture's been around for 20,000 years."

"Wow. I guess it would." 20,000 years is a very long time. No civilization on Earth, with the possible exception of small African tribes, has continuously persisted that long. The idea that the Jedi had been around for that long was unbelievable. The idea that any trace of the structures left over from ancient Jedi still existed was mind-boggling. There, not two feet from me, were a collection of such traces. The gun, or blaster, as Onduin had called it, was four thousand years old. The pottery was at least that old. The chunk of blue crystal was more than twice that old. It occurred to me that Onduin must've trusted me to put me within arm's reach of all these valuables, each of which was likely priceless. I was glad I hadn't been tempted to pick anything up earlier.

Onduin had little else to say about the things on his shelves. After this discussion ended, we turned to discussing the essentials of modern life: money, politics, and geography. Money, it turned out, was quite simple. Everyone, except at the outermost reaches of the galaxy, recognized and traded in Imperial credits, each of which was probably the rough equivalent of the British pound. Fractions of credits were rounded to one decimal place, which made the math easy, and all money was kept on electric cards like credit cards that had varying capacities for holding money. Everything was digital, which also meant that if a credchip, as these cards were called, were destroyed, all the money in it would be effectively destroyed too. Apparently the process for recovering destroyed cash was usually not worth whatever money you'd get back. Politics weren't complicated either: if you openly support the Empire and its Emperor, you get bonuses. If you openly disdain it, you at best get taxed more than everyone else, and at worse get jailed for "uncivil conduct." The Empire did have a Senate left over from the republic that once ruled the galaxy, but with the Emperor in place it was little more than a figurehead. In reality, politics were virtually non-existent due to the presence of a totalitarian government. Geography, however, made up for all the simplicity of the other two subjects.

A little offset from the center of the galaxy was its capitol-- Coruscant. Coruscant was a planet that had been entirely converted into a massive city, so not even the tops of mountains could be seen poking through the sea of steel and glass. From space, Onduin said the planet's night side put off a nearly uniform yellowish glow from the city lights, while the day side shone like a massive silver sphere. The Imperial Senate met on this planet, and twenty years ago it had also been the seat of the Jedi order, where their Temple had stood within clear sight of the senate building. What had become of that temple since then, he didn't know. Across the center of the galaxy from Coruscant, and not far from it, was Corellia, where the Empire's largest shipyard lay. Then, around the arc of the galaxy's spiral strode a myriad of other solar systems, growing more and more uninhabited and uncivilized the farther they were from the Core, as the galaxy's bright center was called. On the outskirts, where the galaxy's spiral dissolved into vaporous tendrils of stars lashing out into space, the Empire was virtually nonexistent. This area was called the Outer Rim. Beyond that, only an occasional lonely sun stood sentinel in the darkness of space, and in those areas lay planets that had not even been explored. The planet I was on now, called Kovnyett, lay near the edge of the Outer Rim, bordering on the Undesignated Territory, the void beyond the edge of the galaxy where not even the Empire set foot. Dantooine, it turned out, was also in the Outer Rim, but was roughly on the other side of the galaxy from Kovnyett. Its sister planet and polar opposite, called Tatooine, was next door. While Dantooine had rolling grassy hills and was splattered with lakes, Tatooine was almost devoid of water and had dune seas reaching for thousands of miles across its surface. Neither planet had any tectonic activity, so there were no mountains on either and few earthquakes. According to Onduin, most planets of historical interest had their home in the Outer Rim.

Eventually the conversation drifted back to money. Onduin couldn't support me forever, and one way or another I was going to have to step out into the world and get a life. After some talking, we made an agreement: Onduin would help me find a job, and possibly a place I could lease out for awhile to live in, and would support me in the meantime. He'd teach me what I needed to know to get by in this world-- what paperwork I could expect to face, what technologies I should learn to use, even the basics of what food I was likely to eat on this planet and elsewhere in the galaxy, and how to tell when it had gone bad. Then, when I had an income of my own, I could begin to pay him back, bit by bit. It was more than reasonable, and it would help me get both feet on the ground in a big way.