Yoda by Sean Stewart Page A

nothing—
nothing
—worse than the horrible feeling of being buried alive in his own body. Sometimes the panic was so intense he woke himself up, but other times it would be hours before he jerked upright in bed, weeping and gasping with relief at the sound of an alarm, or the touch of a friend’s hand.
    This time he fell through the true dream and landed in a strange room, richly furnished. He was standing on a deep, soft rug embroidered with a tangled woodland pattern, thorn-trees and thorn-vines and venomous green moss; in the shadows, the glinting eyes of evil birds. The rug was spattered with blood. From the burning pain in his left arm and the slow dull ache in his ribs, he guessed some of the blood was his.
    An ancient chrono, hanging in a metal case crafted to look like a tangle of thorns and brambles, ticked dully in the corner of the room. The beats seemed slow and erratic, like the beating of a dying heart.
    There were at least two other people in the room. One was a bald woman with stripes painted on her skull and lips the color of fresh blood. He could smell the dark side on her like wood smoke, like something burning on a wet night. She scared him.
    The other was another Jedi apprentice, a red-haired girl named Scout. In waking life she was a year older than Whie, bossy and loud, and had never paid much attention to him. In the dream, blood was dripping down her face from a cut on her scalp. She was staring at him. “Kiss her,” the bald woman whispered. Voice soft. Red teardrops crept from the girl’s cuts, spilling by her mouth. Blood trickled in a red line down her throat to soak into the lapels of her tunic just above the tops of her small breasts. “Kiss her, Whie.”
    The dreaming Whie recoiled.
    The waking Whie wanted to kiss her. He was angry and sick and ashamed, but he wanted to.
    Blood dripped. The chrono ticked. The bald woman grinned at him. “Welcome home,” she said.

    â€œWhie!”
    â€œHnn?”
    â€œWake up! Whie, wake up. It’s me, Master Leem.” Her kind face was looming over him in the darkened dormitory, all three eyes worried. “We felt a disturbance in the Force.”
    He blinked, gasping, trying to hold on to a
now
that still felt slippery as a bar of wet soap.
    The boys who roomed in the dorm with him were clustering around his bed. “Were you having one of those dreams again?”
    He thought of the girl, Scout—another Jedi apprentice!—the trickle of blood along her throat. His guilty desire.
    Master Leem laid her six fingers on his hand. “Whie?”
    â€œIt was nothing,” he managed to croak. “Just a bad dream, that’s all.”
    The boys around the bed began to drift off, disappointed and disbelieving. They were still young enough to want to see miracles. They thought having visions would be
fun.
They couldn’t understand how terrible it was, to see a moment loom out of the future like a pillar suddenly revealed on a foggy road, and no way to keep from hitting it.
    Who had the bald woman in the vision been? She stank of the dark side, and yet he hadn’t been fighting her. Would some strange fate make them allies? And the girl, Scout—how would blood come to spill red onto her red lips, and why would she—someday—look at him with such intensity? Perhaps Scout would become an ally of the evil bald woman. Perhaps she would give in to her desires, her anger, her lust. Maybe she would try to trap him, too; seduce him; deliver him to the dark side.
    â€œWhie?” Master Leem said.
    He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze, trying to sound more normal. “Just a bad dream,” he said again. He kept insisting, politely and gratefully, that he would be fine, just fine, until she finally left the dorm.

    Another interesting thing about the true dreams: they had haunted Whie like a curse all his life, but this was the first time he had ever woken into a place other than