Yoda by Sean Stewart Page B

the Jedi Temple. And never once, in a score of visions, had he found himself in a body much older than the one he had now.
    His death was coming. Soon.

3
    T he white walls of the Combat Training Chamber in the Jedi Temple had been newly cleaned, the white floor scrubbed, and new white mats laid down in preparation for the day’s tournament. Nervous Jedi apprentices in sparkling white tunics prepared for the upcoming test, each according to personality. In her mind, Jedi apprentice Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy—nicknamed Scout—had them loosely grouped into four categories:
    Talkers, who clumped together, murmuring in low voices to distract themselves from the mounting tension;
    Warm-ups, who stretched their muscles, or ligaments, or pulse-fibers; cracked various numbers of knuckles; and jogged, or hopped, or spun in place, according to their species-specific physiological needs;
    Meditators, whose usual approach to sinking into the deeper truth of the Force, in Tallisibeth’s opinion, mostly involved keeping their eyes shut and assuming an affected expression of smug serenity; and
    Prowlers.
    Scout was a prowler.
    Probably she should try a little meditation. Certainly her history suggested that getting too tense and excited was her worst problem. At the last tournament, back before the devastation on Honoghr and the Rendili Fleet Crisis, she had gone out in the first round, losing to a twelve-year-old boy she nearly always beat when they sparred. The defeat had been all the more humiliating because the boy was nursing
a broken leg
at the time, and had been fighting in a brace.
    She stalked past a little clump of Talkers, face flushing painfully at the memory. “Hey, Scout,” one of them said, but she ignored him. No time for talking today. Today was all business.
    Anyone with the brains of a Sevarcosan prickle-pig could figure she was out of chances to screw up. The fact was, the Force was weak in Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy. Oh, it was there, all right. Strong enough to make an impression on Jedi talent scouts when she was a toddler—although from something one of the Masters once said, her family had been dirt-poor, and her parents had begged the Jedi to take their daughter away from a life of grinding poverty. She was haunted by the idea that her mother and father, her brothers and sisters—if she had them—were all trapped in the slums of Vorzyd V while she alone had escaped. She alone had been given this one incredible chance to make good. It would be unbearable to fail.
    But somehow, as she grew in body, she had not grown in the ways of the Force. She did have a gift for anticipation. When she was sparring, for instance, and open to the Force, she would have flashes where she knew what opponents were going to do next even before they knew it themselves. Her habit of scoping out a situation and reading it just a little faster than everyone else had earned her her nickname. But even that could fade out on her if she was flustered or upset, and as for the rest of the Jedi’s traditional abilities with the Force…
    Some days she could pull a glass off a counter with her mind and bring it to her hand…but more often it would slip on the way and smash on the floor. Or explode as if squeezed. Or go rocketing into the ceiling and fall in a shower of blue milk and splinters. You didn’t have to be a Mrlssi to catch the way the Jedi Masters talked together in low voices when she went by. You didn’t have to be very smart—and Scout
was
smart—to notice how the other apprentices rolled their eyes at her, or laughed, or, worst of all, covered up for her mistakes.
    By the time she turned thirteen, she had all but given up hope of becoming a Jedi. When Master Yoda summoned her for a private talk in the Room of a Thousand Fountains, she had dragged up there with feet of permacrete, stomach churning, waiting to hear which branch of the Agricultural Corps they would