[Legacy Of The Force] - 04(8)

“All right, I will.” All humor gone, Wedge fixed Jacen with a stare. “You’re dealing with a coalition government that hasn’t settled in place yet. Thrackan Sal-Solo hasn’t been dead very long, and the larvae are still wriggling our from under his rock. We need time to stamp them out. You don’t need to hurry. You don’t need our answer today, tomorrow, or next week, and any answer you provoke in a short time frame is an answer that will make everyone unhappy. Sit back, be patient, negotiate in good faith, and I have every reason to believe that Corellia will rejoin the GA. “

“So you’ll go back and recommend that Corellia surrender to us.”

Wedge shook his head. “Never in a thousand years.”

“What are you talking about, then?”

“I’ll recommend that Corellia rejoin the GA. Full acceptance of standard GA planetary admission terms, but no reparations. No punitive measures, no extra tariffs, no under-the-table activity against Corellians, and a genuine attempt to undo the effort to undermine the general Corellian reputation that has been taking place in the GA population. Can you negotiate toward that sort of resolution?”

“I … could. But if we suffer any more catastrophes like the bombing on Coruscant, all bets could be off.”

“Understood.” Wedge relented just a bit, some of the stiffness leaving his face, his posture. “So what are you going to do when the excitement’s all done? Stay on with your planetary police force, or go back to wandering the galaxy and rescuing cubs from trees? You used to be pretty good at that.”

Jacen masked a twitch of annoyance by shrugging. “Some combination of the Galactic Alliance Guard work and resuming my studies, I expect.”

“Hmmm. Has the political bug bitten you, then? Or do you just like the way you look in the uniform?”

Jacen sighed, exasperated. “Now you’re joking again. And I think we’ve done all we can with this meeting.”

“I think so, too.” Serious again, Wedge stood. “Jacen, may I say something to you not as an officer or negotiator, but as an old friend of the family?”

Jacen rose, too. “Something off the record, you mean? Of course.”

“No, no. On the record, off the record, it doesn’t matter. As an old friend of the family. Can you listen as an old friend?”

Still a trifle confused, Jacen nodded.

“Another old friend of mine, Wes Janson, the galaxy’s least serious man, except when he’s killing the enemy or trying to make a point, once said this to me. `The real sign that someone has become a fanatic,’ he said, `is that he completely loses his sense of humor about some important facet of his life. When humor goes, it means he’s lost his perspective.’ Jacen, you’ve lost your sense of humor about, well, everything, and you’re doing things you never would have done when you were younger. What does it mean?”

Jacen shook his head. “It doesn’t mean that I’m suddenly a fanatic. It just means that I’ve grown up.”

“I wonder.”

“Ebbak is waiting outside. She’ll take you back to your shuttle.”

When Wedge was gone, Jacen sat again and stared at the office doors, not seeing them.

Blast Wedge, he thought. As if losing an adolescent sense of humor has anything to do with fanaticism. As if…

There was a thought circling around the periphery of his awareness. It was something Captain Lavint had sparked into existence, something Wedge had fanned into a live flame. But he couldn’t quite bring it into focus.

Well then, he needed to look more closely.

Captain Lavint thought Jacen used to be a hero. Clearly, if such things were measured by numbers of admirers, he was now a greater hero than he ever had been, and yet she thought he no longer constituted one. Why? Because he’d passed judgment on her? Perhaps. Maybe it was because the sentence he’d passed on her was one that would have broken his father’s heart, or the heart of any smuggler. Perhaps it was because he’d hurt her where she was most vulnerable. It wasn’t necessarily a heroic thing to do, he conceded, but it was fair. So let’s dismiss that for now.



Wedge thought the loss of his sense of humor meant that he’d become a fanatic of some sort. Whether it had or not, Jacen had to admit, it did mark a change in him.

Both Lavint and Wedge had addressed changes Jacen had experienced, and that recognition bothered him at some level.

For a moment, he tried to recapture a sense of what he had been as a teenager, before the war against the Yuuzhan Vong: gawky, happy, usually in the company of his twin sister, Jaina, and younger brother, Anakin, all too infrequently in the company of his parents … His sense of humor, always present, had usually manifested itself in the form of awful jokes learned in the four corners of the galaxy.