trans_9 | Meet-n-Greet

"I mind not," Arha murmured. He would have asked eventually. "It is the Spice. No other Universe I have heard tell has it. Melange Spice is produced only on one planet in my Universe. We call it Arrakis, Dune. The Desert Planet, and my home, for all intents and purposes. My eyes are the result of my body being saturated with it, an addiction, a need, a Way. Unavoidable on Arrakis, for the air is full of it, the food, everything touched by it."

She moved closer so he could inspect her eyes more thoroughly to satisfy his curiosity, should he chose. The cinnamon scent still clung to her, sharply sweet and tangy as she leaned forward, her red hair swinging slightly to curl against her cheeks.

"It is a potent thing."

He could indeed smell this drug she described to him, as she leaned in--heady, cloying to his unaccustomed nose. As she did, he noticed things, her red hair that reminded him painfully of Mara. The eyes, though, the eyes broke any spell.

"If it has the ability to transmute aspects of the human body, it does seem that it would be very potent," Luke replied. "But surely you can break its hold? We have drugs at home--deathsticks, glitterstim--they poison the body and the mind..."

"Take the Spice away," she said gently, "and it is death. It is always death. Painful, long, and horrible. I would not be what and who I am without the Spice. Would you give up what you are? It is life, the ability to see, to grasp, to know beyond this moment, to preserve knowledge that might otherwise be lost."

Her fingers brushed his wrist gently, but not for more than a second, no longer than that. She felt a tingle of newness, a jolt of some sort of power that seemed to radiate up the two fingers she'd touched him with. It made her curious...and momentarily dizzy.

"I will live a long time and be of great assistance to many, so long as Stacy gives me the proper amount of Spice." She was quiet for a moment, her eyes closed, placidly attempting to find her balance again. The moments of prescience themselves were mere ripples, glimpses, a dizzy rush sometimes -- different than the thing she had felt moments ago. Her talent was dimmer in that than it was elsewhere, at least it was here. Back on Arrakis, it had helped her find water, to survive. Arha opened her eyes and pushed what weariness there was away.

She, too, was tired.

It had been a month since her arrival and her mothers-within were still loud. It took concentration to silence them, though a curious voice here and there stabbed out. What is he? Ask! What sort of creature? Does he hear? Does he see? What! She would not be a Reverend Mother if there was no Spice.

Or perhaps she would.

"Things are never as they seem," she said.

Luke stared at her with open curiously; to his eyes, she seemed young, and yet the impression he got through the Force was that she was old, older than the oldest records in the Archives. The Force whispered to him that she (They?) knew things beyond the years that Arha had physically, but that they were not so different, she and he, in some aspects at least. Both of them knew things they should not; both of them could do things that most others could not. But there the similarities stopped.

"You're right, partially," he said, calming himself so that his Force-presence didn't roil too much and give his feelings away. He had so far encountered many things that were like to the abilities of the Jedi (and the Sith, for that matter) but were, on the whole, quite different. "Things aren't always what they seem."

Hadn't he made that folly before, though? Jacen's face swam up to his consciousness, and Luke looked away from Arha's fascinatingly blue eyes for a moment. He'd been mistaken, thinking that Jacen had simply been confounded by an outside source and once that source was removed, he'd return to normal. Jacen had, by the time they figured out what was really going on, sunk too deeply in the darkness to ever be saved.

"But sometimes a Sith is still a Sith."

"These...Sith," she pondered, sensing the nuances of his words as she half studied his profile without really appearing to look at him at all, "they would be evil? Chaos? You say the word like it is an ancient trouble."

Arha folded her delicate hands contemplatively.

"Such things will always exist, cloaked and waiting, but yet the same. The paths of such things, they are laid out to challenge order and what one considers 'good'. Darkness," she mused, her words humming out, "may consume light, but there is always more light, is there not? I have always been amused that the dark is supposed to be wrong, evil, malignant. In the desert wastelands, darkness is your ally from the piercing heat of day. Someone, somewhere, set a fear in the darkness that reaches all Men in all places. The darkness has its uses. Your Sith, they have theirs, though it may be a hard thing to admit."

"The Sith represent half of the balance," Luke said. Given his family history, the idea of the balance of light and darkness, the role the Sith played in the galaxy and amongst the Jedi themselves often entered into his thoughts. It was even more prominent now, in the aftermath of what had happened with his nephew.

"But their very nature," he continued, "Disrupts the balance, and in truth nature doesn't exist in perfect equilibrium. Even night and day aren't always the same length. Perspective may have a bearing on how you view good and evil, light and dark, but it doesn't change that the darkness consumes and twists those who touch it."

Perhaps that was what had happened with Jacen, Luke thought. On his five-year sojourn through the galaxy, learning the ways of the Force from other races who had learned its secrets, perhaps he had tapped the darkness within himself that had put his feet on the path that Lumiya had only widened and smoothed for him. They could never know; Jacen was dead, and his path was perhaps long cold.

"This is what we teach Jedi younglings when they are brought to us," he said. "Light will always triumph over darkness in the end."

Arha quirked a smooth, thoughtful smile, listening even as she calculated, measured, weighed each idea set forth. This was an old concept, an old battle. Greed, lust, power, corrupting forces -- all were held in check by some form of good, which was defined as order. Her eyes settled back on his face, blue-within-blue bright, almost glowing.

"It is a sound system of thought," she said softly. "The place from whence I came was in the middle of a power struggle. My Arrakis. I have since found out from another that the world I love is no longer there. Five thousand years of struggle, a changed Universe, a misled Messiah, darkness and light circling each other. The Universe is what it is in any place. Tyrants and Saviors, life and death. You do what you can, live, stir the worlds, shape the future, keep moving, keep fighting if you must. If you are in the right place, in the right time, perhaps then you may see the fruits of your labor. It is not often seen in one's own lifetime. I will have died long before I see such a thing as light triumphing over darkness."

Her fingers curled idly against her arm as she peered up at him.

"Come," she murmured, "if you are to wait, Philospher Jed-Eye, you should do so with a modicum of comfort. It is no easy thing to find yourself among strange company on a Thinking Machine. Walk with me. I shall show you a quiet place to recover."

Quiet; that sounded like a good idea right about now. With a last look at the slowly dispersing crowd in the Observation Deck, at the strange statue and the bright lights that reminded him of a trip through hyperspace, Luke nodded his assent. A little sit-down and something to eat, maybe. And then a solid eight hours of sleep.

"It sure must get chaotic around here when people emerge from their pods, if this is any indication."

"Choas is the best description of this madness," Arha said, gliding away with a rueful smile. Her feet made no sound as she wandered away, leading them from the noise and confusion, until it was nothing more than a dull, distant sound. It was to the Sensoriums she lead them, resigned about the use of the thing. It helped when the noise of the ship became too much for her. Now, she had the hang of creating anything, and it was her cave with its cache of water lapping in the distance that formed. Two pallets as well, simple, comfortable, appeared.

It was preferable to the the claustrophobic mess Stacy had in store for them elsewhere.

The sound of the desert wind rushing and the familiar sweet sharp scent of cinnamon were comforting things of a world that no longer was. Somewhere in the distance there was the distant roar of Shai-Hulud. The spice cakes were not truly spice cakes, but they were better to look at than the things the ship gave them. With familiar ease, she moved to dip a small bowl into the water. This she offered to him and then gestured to a pallet.

"Rest. I shall remain watchful," Arha said, her tone solemn, but soft. "There is no quieter place than in the arms of my desert."

Luke's eyes widened as they apparently walked into a desert. He could taste the dry, dusty tang in his mouth that had been so familiar back on Tatooine, and that he was sure would follow him for the rest of his life. The air had that desert stillness, too; every sound he made, every scrape of foot on stone or sand, seemed oddly magnified to him. It made him miss Tatooine (purely for its familiarity) intensely.

"This is your home planet, then?" he asked, accepting the bowl with a soft word of thanks and drinking it. "This is where you are from?" He sat on the pallet, looking up at her with his own very blue eyes. It had to be; it smelled the same as she did.

"It is," she said, her voice echoing, though hushed. One of them. Chapterhouse had been her own for sixteen years, though she lived in the desert environs that were a mimic of Arrakis as close as possible. Arha counted the desert her home and nothing ever felt more of a thing than Dune. It was truth.

"As close to it as this place will allow, at any rate. This cave was my home for a year. Beyond, the deep desert with many creatures." It came again, the roar. "That is Shai-Hulud, a Great Maker. A Maker of Spice. It is not real, though, but I hear them once and awhile. They are sensitive to motion and are quite territorial, but we have an understanding, Shai-Hulud and I."

It was not something she could explain, it just was.

"A Maker of Spice? It sounds like a krayt dragon to me." Luke lay back on the pallet, staring up at the dark ceiling of the cave and listening to the silence. "This place--the desert--reminds me a little of where I grew up."

"You are a little desert rat, too, then?" Arha said, her eyes sparkling with good humor. "Desert creatures find desert creatures. It is fact, so say we Fremen. I know not of your dragons, but the worms are bigger than any creature I have seen. The biggest I've seen make a man look like a grain of sand. Rows and rows of teeth and deep down nothing but heat and fire. Little will hurt a worm, save water. Water, that is poison."

"Krayt dragons aren't that big, but they make a racket." Luke smiled, remembering how Obi-Wan Kenobi had used the roar of a krayt dragon to scare the sandpeople off him, and how that had begun everything. He felt like a different person. "Not much in the deserts of Tatooine will mess with one."

He pondered what she'd said about water for a little while though, that it was anathema to the worms. It was an unusual thing, because he knew that the body was made up mostly of water; for something so essential to be a poison went against what Luke had come to accept as a rule of nature. "Water is poison to a sandworm? How can that be?"

"All the water on Arrakis lies beneath its surface in caches. Some are large, some small. Think of a world where there has not been a drop of rain for thousands and thousands of years. Think of the ecology changing to fit that moment after moment, generation after generation. The desert sands are merciless, the storms fierce enough to pick a man clean to the bone, to rend metal from the sky. The only thing that does not fear a sandstorm is Shai-Hulud...and perhaps me, but even I will not walk into one. I am, sadly, flesh and bone. But yes. Water is poison and water is life."

She held out her hand, palm up.

"Let me show you a glimpse of my desert sands. This cave is well enough, but dusk and wormsign? It is a sight."

Luke looked at her steadily a moment, then swung his legs over and took her hand. It was warm and strong, as he somehow knew it would be--the desert didn't allow weakness to survive very long. It wore away or buried everything that stood still for too long or wasn't sturdy enough to stand up to it; he'd dug enough sand from around the moisture collectors to know.

"Sure," he said, and stood, keeping hold of her hand for a moment longer. "Lead the way."

Her palm was suffused with the same lingering buzz she'd felt before and she flashed a neat smile that wasted as little water as possible wih the action, and lead him out into the darkening world. The sky was a blaze of red and gold, cloudless and crystal clear. Out here, her eyes were ever more alien, almost a solid blue-white. Her fingertips brushed his as the wind rose and whipped at her hair.

"Stay to the rocks," she hummed, leaning to be heard above the wind. "Move as I do."

Nimble as a mountain goat and far smoother, she moved among the rocks without dislodging a single grain of windblown sand. When she got to a flat expanse, she found a place to sit near the edge. The whole area was lit in the dying glow of the fierce sun and the sand glittered from dark tan dunes, to cinnamon red, to pristine whites.

She leaned back, covering her mouth with her hand as she laughed; moisture preservation.

"Wormsign!" she called.

Luke followed her, using the Force to aid his movements and move almost without touching the cliff face. The whole place had the smell of cinnamon strongly about it, moreso out here than in the cave. It was a place of stark beauty that only someone raised in a place like it could appreciate, the way the sand dunes fair glowed in the dying sunlight and the heat that radiated from the rock beneath his feet.

"What's wormsign?" he asked, sitting neatly beside her as though meditating.

"Do you see the way the sand is shifting in a long ripple?" She pointed at the surface of the sand where it was, indeed, rippling and dust was bleeding into the air. "When the workers of a spice harvester are out on the sand, their spotter looks for such disturbances. Shai-Hulud is very territorial about Spice. The harvesting must be done as quickly as possible. It is hazardous, many have died doing that work. When a worm comes like that, there is little chance for escape."

She canted her head slightly.

"If he were a real worm, I would sense him." Arha laugh again, the old habit of covering her mouth still deeply ingrained. "In fact, I would be able to call out to him, though whether he would come is another matter entirely. The big ones generally do not." She watched the worm's progress for awhile and then lay back against the hot rock. This had been her favorite nighttime spot.

Well into the darkness before the first cold hit, she could lay back and watch the stars. The sun was disappearing, now, moment by moment, and the brightest stars had just begun to show. It made her miss Arrakis fiercely, though Sheeana assured her the desert planet was gone.

"Why would you call out to a sandworm?" He watched how she slipped into habits that must have developed on this world. "I thought you said they were territorial. I thought that they might kill people who disturb them."

On instinct--or perhaps a nudge from the Force, he could rarely tell the two apart anymore--Luke stretched out on the warm rock, folding his hands behind his head and feeling the suit shifting against his skin. It seemed to normalize the temperature of the rock, even though he knew none of their surroundings were real. If he thought about it, he could feel smooth floor under him--but it was so much more relaxing to think that he was on a shelf of rock in a place that reminded him greatly of Tatooine.

"I like them," Arha said absently. "I grew up with one, a younger, smaller one." This room made pretty lights of things, but it was not real, she knew this. Still, it was close to being home. "He was not where he was supposed to be, trapped, alone, far from his own kind and begged me to free him. I did so, but at a great cost to myself. I slept for a week after I used my hands on him, so I was told. He gave me desert knowledge and a safe passage of sorts. He also gave me a tooth from which I made two crysknives. They cannot be sheathed unless they draw blood. One must not draw one's weapon lightly."

Her fingers rested against her stomach and she breathed slowly.

"I have never been attacked by Shai-Hulud. I suppose, as the Fremen have said, I am a...worm-friend. I do not command them, but should they choose, they listen to me."

"They're sentient and can communicate, then?" Luke asked, turning his head to look at Arha. She was now little more than a silhouette against the growing darkness. Soon enough his eyes would adjust to the nighttime; so for the present Luke stared up at the emerging stars, ones that he didn't know. Was it possible, he thought idly, that the galaxy containing his home was somewhere out in that void? Or was it completely separate from the real version of this place?

His head spun with those questions; and Luke sensed that if he weren't careful he could get into a very sticky place in philosophy and astronomy, and he really wasn't either, not even a philosopher. In any case, he didn't need the Force eddying around in his mind to know that soon enough he would have many more questions of greater import than this.

"To some degree," she said softly. "It's all image and...and song. Like the wind, the land. Scents. It's an art to interpret, really. I grew up with it, I know the language, so to speak. It's a different sort of communication."

Her smile was a soft curl, now almost lost to the night. She was silent for a long while, tracing familiar constellations that were nothing but Thinking Machine generated.

"Nothing is familiar outside," Arha said, closing her eyes wearily. "I think we are between between realities. I think this is truth because there are so many who come from different places with different rules in their Universes."

Luke nodded in understanding. He couldn't hear these sandworms 'speaking'; Arha couldn't hear the Force as he could. In this strange place where every universe seemed thrown together and told to survive, it made sense.

"It seems that way," he replied. "I've met people who know me but who aren't from any planet in the galaxy that I know, and there are others with abilities that I've never seen. Then there are some that seem to have powers that are similar enough to the Force for me to feel--but it's like yelling down Beggar's Canyon to the other end, I can tell that someone's speaking but I can't make out the words. It doesn't make any sense."

He sighed; he could feel the frustration mounting in him and worked to calm it. That wouldn't do for the Grandmaster of the Order to lose himself.

"I feel it, too," Arha said, letting her fingers curl against his arm. "It is frustrating to feel and not interpret, to be aware and unknowing when all you wish to do is understand." Her thumb brushed out soothingly, absently. For no reason she could understand, she felt a surge build, the kind that came when she was healing. It was prickly, buzzing like the thing she sensed coming from him. She could almost touch it, now, the effect stronger with touch.

Arha could sense frustration and knew it was not her own. The prickling that shot up her arms smoothed and became a flow, soft, reassuring as it flowed through her fingers. Calming, easing, kneading the emotional knots away like her fingers would have done to muscle. She was meant to help.

This was the way of things.

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