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Splinter Of The Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster


Alan Dean Foster

Splinter Of The Mind's Eye

Based on the characters and situations created by George Lucas
Copyright ┬й 1978 by The Star Wars Corporation
ISBN 0-345-29659-1
Cover art by Ralph McQuarrie


For Dad & Mom Oxley, Louis & Ellie; with all my love, which would fill several universes.




I

HOW beautiful was the universe, Luke thought. How beautifully flowing, glorious and aglow like the
robe of a queen. Ice-black clean in its emptiness and solitude, so unlike the motley collage of spinning
dust motes men called their worlds, where the human bacteria throve and multiplied and slaughtered
one another. All so that one might say he stood a little higher than his fellows.
In depressed moments he felt sure there was no really happy living matter on any of those worlds.
Only a plethora of destructive human diseases which fought and raged constantly against one another,
a sequence of cancerous civilizations which fed on its own body, never healing yet somehow not quite
dying.
A particularly virulent strain of one of those cancers had killed his own mother and father, then his
Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen. It had also taken from him the man he had learned to respect more than
any other, the elderly Jedi knight Ben Kenobi.
Although he had seen Kenobi struck by the light-saber of Darth Vader on board the now obliterated
Imperial Deathstar battle station, he could not be certain the old wizard was truly dead. Vader's saber
had left only empty air in its wake. That Ben Kenobi had departed this plane of existence was
unarguable. What no one could tell was what level of existence he had passed into. Maybe death and...
Maybe not.
There were times when Luke experienced an agreeably crawly sensation, as if someone were lurking

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Splinter Of The Mind's Eye by Alan Dean Foster

just behind him. That unseen presence occasionally seemed to move arms and legs for him, or to
supply suggestions and thoughts when his own mind was helplessly blank. Blank as that of the former
farm boy of Tatooine's desert world.
Unseen spirits or not, Luke reflected grimly, if there was one thing he was sure of it was that the
callow youth he had once been was dead and dry as dust. In the Rebel Alliance of worlds struggling
against the corrupt rule of the Imperial government he held no formal title. But no one taunted him or
called him farm boyтАФnot since he had helped destroy the bloated battle station secretly built by
Governor Moff Tarkin and his henchman Darth Vader.
Luke had no experience with titles, hence no use for them. When the Rebel leaders offered him any