[Legacy Of The Force] - 05(28)

Luke realized he wasn’t sure he knew what a good person was when he saw one, or at which point they turned bad. He was painfully aware of Mara’s gaze boring into him, green and icy like a river frozen in its flood.

“You’re a good person, Ben.” If he doing anything I didn’t’? “You think about what you do.”

“Thanks. And I’m not leaving the GAG, Dad. You’ll have to make me, either physically or through the courts, and none of us wants that. Leave me where I can do some good.”

Fights could be had without raised voices or angry words. Ben had fought and given his parents an ultimatum. Luke knew he would have to tackle this another way.

And blast it, Ben was actually right. The GAG couldn’t be abandoned to the bullyboys.

“Just look out for Lumiya,” Luke said. “You told him, Mara?”

“I told him.”

“So are you going to stay for something to eat, son?” he asked, feeling Mara’s gaze thaw a little.

“I’d like that,” said Ben, fourteen going on forty.

It was hard to have a family conversation over a meal without mentioning the war. Ben wanted to know how Han and Leia were doing. Mara shunted vegetables around her plate as if trying to sweep them under a carpet.

“Things aren’t too good between Jacen and your aunt and uncle at the moment, sweetheart,” she said. “But whatever he tells you, they still care about him and want him to be okay.”

“It’s not personal,” Ben said. “Hey, I tried to arrest Uncle Han because it was my job. I didn’t mean him any harm.”

Luke thought about Jacen’s haste to abandon his parents during the attack on the resort satellite. He couldn’t see Ben doing the same thing. If he could, he didn’t want to see it.

“Dad, was the Empire really a reign of terror?”

“Just a bit …”

“I know you and Uncle Han and Aunt Leia had a rough time of it, but what about ordinary people?”

Mara chewed with slow deliberation, her gaze in slight defocus on a point in the mid-distance. “You might want to ask Alderaan. No, wait—it’s gone, isn’t it? Oops. That’s what happened to ordinary people, and I know better than most.”

Because you did some of it. Luke faced up to the fact that he couldn’t expect Ben to believe a word either of them said to him. They’d both done things that they were telling him he couldn’t do now.

“But most people didn’t really notice, did they?” Ben seemed to be fixed on course. “Their lives went on as before. Maybe a few people who were political got a midnight visit from a few stormies, but most folks got on with their lives, right?”

“Right,” Mara conceded. “But living in fear isn’t living at all.”

“It’s better than dead.”

“You think the Empire was okay, Ben?” Luke asked.

“I don’t know. It just seems that a handful of people can think they have the duty—the right—to change things for everybody else. It’s a big decision, rebellion, isn’t it? But most decisions that affect trillions of beings get made by a few people.”

Luke and Mara looked at each other discreetly and then at Ben. He’d acquired political curiosity somewhere along the line. Whatever mission Jacen had sent him on—and he had, Luke was certain—it had made the boy think.

Or maybe Luke was just losing touch with the fact that his kid was a young man now, and changing fast. When he left, though, Mara still helped him on with his jacket. Luke almost expected her to ask him if he was brushing his teeth every day. But, being Mara, she did her maternal fretting in more pragmatic ways and pressed a matte-gray object into Ben’s hand.

“Humor me,” she said, and kissed his forehead. “Carry this. You never know.”

Ben stared into his palm. “Wow.”

“That,” she said, “was the best vibroblade the Empire could buy. It saved me more than once. A lightsaber is great, but a lightsaber and a vibroblade is even better.”

“Plus a blaster,” Ben said. He grinned. “That’s better still. The triple whammy.”

“That’s my boy.”

After Ben had left, Mara cleared the plates. “When did we produce a communally minded political analyst?”

“Too many Gorog buddies, maybe.”

“Does that look like an out-of-control, screwed-up boy to you?”

“No,” Luke said, “but it’s not Jacen’s influence that’s making a man of him, even if he’s the only one who seems to be able to handle Ben.”

“Luke, we still have to do something.”

“Oh, now we have to do something? What happened to ‘Leave him with Jacen, he’s good for the boy …’?” Luke almost had to bite his lip to avoid saying that he’d told her so, which he’d always thought was the mark of someone who wasn’t looking for a solution to the problem, just points to score. “Besides, he doesn’t seem to be getting corrupted by what’s happening. Maybe he is that good man on the inside. Maybe you were right to make me let our kid join the secret police—”