"Splinter Of The Minds Eye (Alan Dean Foster)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

Star Wars

Splinter Of The Mind's Eye

by Alan Dean Foster


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 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