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***
* After a year *
The old man has become my nightmare.
There's nothing I can't handle - that's what I thought before I saw the Old Man's tasks. To begin with, my strength level was underdeveloped in his opinion and I should have spent much more time on meditation and strength.
At first, he even often grumbled that I was growing on me too slowly. Strength forging was one of his dioceses. Suddenly my strength wasn't so strong - the old man could create a complete ship at once - with everything I needed. How could he do that, because it requires keeping countless different details in your head and knowing the structure of the ship down to the last molecule. But he did it, and I was left with my mouth open at this miracle of nature.
He trained other skills, too - for example, we spent a lot of time developing both my sensitivity to force and my ability to manipulate energy in subtle ways. The training lasted a whole year. It was a long time for me, and the old man didn't even notice, as if a couple of days had passed. So, he'd give me an assignment, give me a lecture, and off you go, young man!
It was hard. Especially at first. It was a common thing to go to the field to extract metal, minerals, purify, modify, build transport from them and return on it. By the quality of the transport thus produced the degree of training was determined. At first it was rather laughable - seriously, what kind of transport could I create from what I could manipulate at first?
And that was only a small part of the training. It was not enough to be able to work with force, you had to be able to work with your head - to memorise the structure of various multifunctional units, the principle of their operation, formulas and physical laws. But even this was not enough for the old man - to the four subjects, forging, engineering, maths, physics, a fifth subject was added - interaction of forces.
As far as I understood from the introductory lecture, a force can interact not so much with physical objects as with the force within them, that is, combine into one common and thus interact. Any direct influence with the help of force was an interaction of forces.
For example, suggestion. It seemed an easy thing to concentrate on an emotion and feed it to another. Toshi couldn't explain it to me, but the old man could. Transmission of emotions was still the easiest thing - it was difficult to interact with a particular emotion - to strengthen, weaken, remove, suppress at all... Many ways of influence were based on this principle. The most difficult of them - to influence indirectly - to influence something by force, so that this something would have a different perception. For example, to give soundness to your words, look, to concentrate attention on some detail, or vice versa, to influence something in such a way that it would not attract attention and would look quite ordinary and would be overlooked.
The old man mastered this technique perfectly, so that his lectures were firmly memorised and it was physically impossible to lose attention to them.
A year of training passed. I had learnt a lot, but there was still a lot to learn - the main thing I hadn't learnt was how to create a hyperdrive. I should have learnt from the old man's children before I started.
The architects were extremely entertaining people with an entertaining story, which the old man told me in the normal version. He himself asked me to call him "teacher", but I could not say it sincerely - although he taught me, the teacher for me was Tosi....
I was sad for her sometimes, but being cut off from the galaxy, I couldn't go back. And she must have taken on a new student.
Let's get back to the history of this fascinating and extremely interesting race, the Architects.
The first thing I learnt is that Architects are not celestials, although they are directly related to them. Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a small race from the planet Celestia. This race was anthropomorphic, but not human. A long time ago, before Rakata came along. Unlike the other races, the Celestians were fast-paced, all of them forsusers. They had no trouble foreseeing the not-too-distant future, and they didn't have as many problems as the others. There were wars, there were global problems, but many of them were solved by the Architects. Architects didn't have that name yet and were called by another word, but the fact was that Architects had been the rulers of the Celestians since time immemorial. Rarely, very rarely, were unicums born amongst ordinary Forsuiters who could sense power on a completely different level and in a completely different way than ordinary Forsuiters - these unicums could use their abilities with incredible efficiency. Gradually the unicums began to be groomed with their own programme, thanks to an unknown architect for that. Power forging, medicine, mind techniques... they excelled in everything, but it was in these arts that they could achieve special results. Thanks to force forging and literally seeing and feeling force fields, the architects became some of the first interstellar travellers - they were able to reach a sufficient level to create hyperspace gates and fly to unknown distances. Celestian society considered them rulers, saints, aristocracy, and so on down the list.
Soon enough, the Celestians found another race and were surprised by their lack of strength. Writing it off as a disease or a quirk of fate, they travelled on. They found that the galaxy was not desolate, and almost no one had the power. There were occasional members of other races who were capable of it, but they were the exception to the rule. The Celestians had a major difference between them and the rest of the race: Strength. Stronger than the other races, they quickly began their expansion, taking planet after planet, race after race. The Celestians became the basis for the initial globalisation of the galaxy - if before them there was no society - each planet was for itself - then after their appearance the races began a full-fledged interstellar life. Led by architects, the Celestians realised big and high-profile projects, such as building a 'balancer' station for hyperspace routing. This station could even move a star and planet off the route so that it didn't have to go round. The galaxy was becoming one big colony of Celestians. That's when the nickname "Celestians" came into being, as they didn't consider the religions of other races, firmly imposing their values. The worlds that are now called central were the main region of the Celestians' expansion - Coruscant, Alderaan, Moonlist, Correllia... they even created the Correllian sector themselves, with the help of the Balancer. The station could do more than that.
The Architects got their name precisely because they were engaged in the architecture of the galaxy - changing the position of planets, laying hyperspace routes, creating a home for the future twenty million intelligent races.
What happened next is the fate of myths and legends, as the Celestians, aka celestials, fought amongst themselves. After a small civil war, stopped by the architects, there was a great schism and rebellion. For every cunning Celestian, there was a slave with a rifle.
In pride and confidence in their own superiority, the Celestians came to believe that they were the Celestials, the elite of the galaxy and masters of the other, power-starved races. The Architects could not change the fact that the Celestians wielded power, and were just as dissatisfied with their followers, but by then the opinion had become too entrenched. A civil war broke out, during which the inhabitants of previously oppressed or simply enslaved races took up arms and rose up against their "masters". There were about a trillion Celestians and a hundred times as many opponents. Though they fought selflessly, there was no chance - the Architects had turned their backs on them. Having reaped the fruits of their pride, the "celestials" were destroyed every last one of them. However, there were still architects living at that time, who decided never to interfere in the life of the galaxy again and left for another galaxy. Not all of them, though. The old man, who was still young at that time, was left in this galaxy for observation - the architects did not want to leave the galaxy to the fate of the galactic community.
Since then, the old man and his children had lived on a planet hidden behind a hyperspace gate, in complete isolation, although they had their own ways of finding out the news - access to the holonet, access to communication lines.
The only time the Architects had intervened in the fate of the galaxy was the destruction of the Rakata race. A relatively young race that decided to repeat the feat of the Celestials and take over the entire galaxy. Either way, it promised a gigantic war and either Rakatan hegemony or mutual annihilation. The Architects intervened and developed a virus from which the Rakatans could not escape - they lost their connection to the Force. Without the Force, the chances of keeping their slave empire in obedience were nil, and as soon as the epidemic reached sufficient scale, a new war of liberation broke out. The destruction of the Rakata who had enslaved entire nations went into flux and in three years the remnants of the endless empire were gone. After that there were other wars, but they were no longer a danger to the whole galaxy, so the old man did not think to interfere.
After the victory over the Rakatans, the other races wanted to learn what power was and master it at the level of the past masters. For this purpose, a group of scientists and forsusers were gathered, who retreated to the planet Tython and began to study the abilities of the force. They could not achieve their former greatness without the Architects, and no more Architects had ever been born. I was the first.
Since the past masters were exclusively dark, there was a strict ban on attempting to master the dark side of the force. The Rakatans' cruelty and ruthless, senseless lust for power and wealth was still fresh in my mind, as was their contempt for anyone else. This was not even a wolf pack, but a gladiatorial arena where the strongest ruled and the weakest were slaves. Mastery of the dark side hypertrophises the most negative traits of the rational - selfishness, lust for power, greed, dulls the few virtues that the rational has. The supporter of the dark side cannot live in any society - for him there is only his own self. Understandably, such a being can only live until he meets another dark one stronger than himself and is enslaved or killed. Actually, it turned out that way - despite the fact that among the users of the force there were most dark ones, the refusal of social perfection, discipline, self-centredness, played a bad joke with them. They had been beaten, were being beaten, and the old man had no doubt they would be beaten hard and often. No matter how hard they try, they're not destined to be rulers-the galaxy has already been ruled twice by dark personalities, and twice it ended in civil war and mass slaughter of the regime's supporters.
I remembered Palpatine. Yes, he was hyper-egoistic and stepped on the same rake - a politician can't be egoistic, a politician is someone who influences events, not forces others to kneel. You cannot achieve greatness by barbaric methods.
At least the story is very instructive. The old man even compared the dark side to degradation in a child. All, or most children are selfish, self-centred, cruel. Because children are not developed enough to understand the basics of life and interaction of reasonable people, to be included in society. For a child there is only his own self, everything else is secondary. Cruelty? It's the same thing - little brains and a lot of feelings, instincts. That is why the main and most dangerous age for a young Jedi is childhood and adolescence. During this period his worldview may partially coincide with the Sith one and the desire to put his "I" at the top of his priorities too. That is why the Sith seem so cool to children and teenagers - because it is the child who cannot see the ugliness of their souls. The humour of the situation is that there are often people who say they are for the Sith - "proud and implacable, not like those stupid Jedi monks", but in reality turn out to be just teenagers-maximalists, who lose all their zest when they meet something real, not just waving a red blade and cool speeches. It will be necessary to slaughter a child for business - a Sith will not think twice - "I want to, so I have the right", and "loyalists" will start humouring, trying to turn away, saying something about the fact that they are certainly in favour, but....
There are many people in the galaxy who can be referred to such individuals - often those who have not faced the harsh realities of life in the galaxy before. I was truly disgusted by such examples - these are even worse than just Sith or any other dark ones, they are, excuse me, a bunch of bulls trying to take the side of the strong. There were enough of them in Palpatine's Empire, you could say that human values hadn't been beaten out yet, but the "new order" had already polluted their brains.
Philosophy, as it was easy to guess, we were also studying philosophy.
The second year of my studies and the first year of Mortis was difficult. The old man kept saying that it was the hardest at first, and then I wouldn't even notice how time flew by.
The old man was right - the first year was the most memorable, the year of discoveries and experiments. After that, as promised, it got much more boring.
We stopped working with the old man after two years of training - that's how long it took to learn how to create a hyperdrive.
I could not complain about the rest - my knowledge was enough to build a spaceship from scratch, with only elementary materials that I could pull from the surface of the planet. My own factory and my own designer.
Whatever daring experiments I made to create new ships, the old man inexorably destroyed them and everything started again. By the end of the training we reached the main thing - the creation of a hyperdrive, capable of transporting me to the future. But the training was not over, we still had to visit his two children - a son and a daughter. They lived separately, each in his own place and, like all supporters of the opposite sides of the force, feuded.
I met them at the very end of my apprenticeship with the old man - the son, a rather strange-looking man, came to see his father. I didn't expect anything good from the dark one, but as the old man said, no one knows better than him how to do harm.
He came in quickly and examined me with a sceptical sneer:
- How old are you, kid?
- Ten years on Tatooine, another year in space, then two years on Alderaan, a year on Shili, two years on Mortis... I was biologically sixteen years old, and given that I was going through puberty too fast because of the nature and the constant use of power, I could add a couple of years.
- Ugh," he spat, "you'll be a 'baby.
I wasn't offended-it probably was, compared to him. With a smirk, he jerked his head toward the exit:
- "You're coming with me. We're going to teach you, spanker. You can solve your problems with your father later - he won't mind waiting a year or two.
So the old man's apprenticeship ended and his son's began.
Actually, the old man was a pacifist, especially compared to his son. He travelled in an ancient speeder of Rakatan design. It took him about twenty minutes to get back to the place where his son lived, though his speed was... very fast.
It was hard to call the Son's dwelling Spartan - a large mansion, with equally large, glamorous halls and a beautiful garden in front of it. You can't stop living beautifully, especially for an architect....
- So, what you should know," he twitched his eye, "the class goes from dawn to dusk. You won't get any slack. We'll train you for exactly one year. You'll choose your own weapon of choice. Do you understand?
- That's right! - I nodded.
The speeder under the control of the Son flew into the landing pad and the new teacher, climbing out, asked:
- What do you use in combat?
- Lightsaber. Juyo style and the rest of the Jedi style.
- What joy! - he said playfully. - Jedi architect. What an oxymoron. Come on downstairs quickly, you can choose your room to your liking. We'll start at dawn tomorrow.
The son was right. At dawn we started training. He roused me and sent me off to prepare for my future endeavours. It was hard to find him, as the whole house was saturated with the emanations of the dark side, but I managed - he was downstairs in the great hall.
When I got downstairs, I stumbled into the lecture:
- You're taking a long time. Come on, quickly into the circle. Let's see what you're good for.....
I stood up, and then my opponent simply disappeared, even to my perception. I found him behind me with a weapon. A lightsaber, who'd have thought?
- I didn't notice anything.
- So you're doing worse than I thought," he disappeared, and then, moving without acceleration, began the fight. He was still moving fast, and my ability to see the future didn't help - the teacher's blows were too unpredictable for me.
His first combination knocked the weapon out of my hands. He must have used something on my hands too, or I wouldn't have let go of the weapon.
Rolling his eyes miserably, he started at the bottom. No, we weren't learning a style, he was just teaching me to move fast, to strike accurately, to anticipate the battlefield, and to position myself for defence or attack.
The speed at which Son moved was too fast for a non-architect. After three months of training, he showed me this trick. Force can be used to move, not only as an increase in grip and leg strength, but also to reduce or increase pressure. If you reduce the atmospheric pressure in front of you while travelling, you can move at theoretically any speed. True, you will have to strengthen your body to avoid barotrauma. But that's another matter...
A year of work with Son flew by much faster - as he did not give rest, except for one day off a month, all training was reduced to one big training with constantly increasing level of complexity. I had to endure constant abuse from this sadist. I myself did not notice how after a year an old man came to our training and informed his son that his time was up. The joy on my part could be felt with my hands. The son, however, ended the training session easily with a nod of goodbye to me. Didn't even say a word.
The old man stepped closer:
- Anakin? How are you feeling?
- Fine, Master," I bowed briefly. - Is it really over?
- I suppose it is," the old man nodded. - Now you have to go to my daughter, I think you can use her skills.
I, tired of being in a place where dark power was concentrated, followed the Old Man and smiled at him tiredly:
- I hope we'll get along.
- Who knows," the old man raised his eyebrows and smiled into his moustache. - We'll see. Just don't try... well you know what I mean. I don't think she'll be interested.
- Who knows," I smiled back. - We'll see.
The old man laughed, though I'd been warned to stay away from the girl, and I took it seriously. I wasn't even going to, to be honest, but now I was thinking about it. But that's another matter entirely...