Yoda by Sean Stewart

out beneath his mind like rotten ice, setting past and present free to mix together. That proud boy in the garden sixty years ago who murmured,
Every Jedi is a child his parents decided they could live without.
    Little Jang Li-Li, eight years old, misting the orchids in the Room of a Thousand Fountains. A bright day, sunlight pouring through transparisteel panels, Li-Li making puffs of water with her mister and shrieking with laughter as every little cloud she made broke a sunbeam into colors, fugitive bars of red and violet and green.
Master, Master, I’m making rainbows!
Those colors hadn’t come to mean military signals, yet, or starship navigating lights, or lightsaber blades. Just a girl making rainbows.
    Dooku newly brought from Serenno, grave-eyed, old enough to know his mother had given him away. Old enough to learn one can always be betrayed.
    Water bubbled and seeped and trickled around Yoda, time past and time present, liquid and elusive: and then Qui-Gon was beside him. It would be wrong to say the dead Jedi
came
to Yoda; truer would it be to say Qui-Gon had always been there, in the still point around which time wheels. Qui-Gon waiting for Yoda to find his way down the untaken path and pass through the unopened door into the garden at the still heart of things.
    Yoda opened his eyes. The feel of Qui-Gon in the Force was the same as always: stern and energetic, like a hank of good rope pulled into a fine sailor’s knot.
Become a wave he has,
Yoda thought.
A wave without a shore.
    Yoda tapped the handle of Jang Li-Li’s lightsaber. “You saw?”
    I did.
    â€œCunning, it is. If I move to see him, I must keep any Republic ships away from the Hydian Way. Deny the chance of peace utterly, must I, or else give him extra months unharried in his lair.”
    He is a fencer,
Qui-Gon agreed.
Leverage, position, advantage—they are as natural to him as breathing.
    â€œMy old student—your old Master, Qui-Gon. The truth he is telling?”
    He thinks he is lying.
    Yoda’s ears pricked up. “Hmm?”
    He
thinks
he is lying.
    A slow smile began to light Yoda’s round face. “Yessssss!” he murmured.
    A moment later Yoda felt a vibration in the Force, a ripple rolling out from the student dormitories far below, like the faint sound of distant thunder. Qui-Gon shivered and was gone, as if the Force were a pool of water and he a reflection on its surface, broken up by the splash of whatever disturbance had just struck the Temple.

    They didn’t happen often, the true dreams. To be honest, Whie tried not to have them.
    They weren’t like regular nightmares at all. He had plenty of those, too—almost every night for the last year. Rambling, confused affairs, and in them he was always failing: there was something he should have done, a class he was supposed to attend, a package he had meant to deliver. Often he was pursued. Sometimes he was naked. Most of these dreams ended with him clinging desperately to a high place and then falling, falling: from the spires of the Temple, from a bridge, from a starship, down a flight of steps, from a tree in the gardens. Always falling, and down below, waiting, a murmuring crowd of the disappointed, the ones he had failed.
    The true dreams were different. In those he came unstuck in time. He would go to sleep on his dormitory cot, and then wake up with a jerk in the future, as if he had fallen through a trapdoor and landed in his own body.
    Once, going to sleep when he was eight, he had woken to find himself eleven years old and building his first lightsaber. He worked on it for more than an hour before another boy entered the workshop and said, “Rhad Tarn is dead!” He tried to ask, “Who is Rhad Tarn?” but heard his own voice say something quite different. Only then did he realize that he wasn’t the Whie building the lightsaber—he was just riding around in his head like a ghost.
    There was