"Matthew Woodring Stover - Clone Wars - Shatterpoint" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stover Matthew Woodring)

stare reminded Mace not to speak of the shadow that had darkened Jedi perception of the Force. This
was not discussed outside the Temple. Not even here. "Member of the Jedi Council, she is. Powerful
Jedi. Brilliant warrior-" 'She'd better be." Mace tried to smile. "I trained her." 'But worry you do. Too
much. Not only for Depa, but for all the Jedi. Ever since Geonosis." The smile wasn't working. He
stopped trying. "I don't want to talk about Geonosis." 'Known this for months, I have." Yoda poked him
again, and Mace looked up. The ancient Master leaned toward him, ears curled forward, and his huge
green eyes glimmered softly. "But when, finally, to talk you want. listen, I will." Mace accepted this with a
silent inclination of his head. He'd never doubted it. But still, he preferred to discuss something else.

Anything else.

'Look at this place," he murmured, nodding at the expanse of the Supreme Chancellor's office. "Even
after ten years, the difference between Palpatine and Valorum. How this office was, in those days-"
Yoda lifted his head in that reverse nod of his. "Remember Finis Valorum well, I do. Last of a great line,
he was." Some vast distance drifted through his gaae: he might have been looking back along his nine
hundred years as a Jedi.

It was unsettling to contemplate that the Republic, seemingly eternal in its millennium-long reign, was not
much older than Yoda himself. Sometimes, in the tales Yoda told of his long- vanished younger days, a
Jedi might have heard the youth of the Republic itself: brash, confident, bursting with vitality as it
expanded across the galaxy, bringing peace and justice to cluster after cluster, system after system, world
after world.

For Mace, it was even more unsettling to contemplate the contrast Yoda was seeing.

'Connected with the past, Valorum was. Rooted deep in tradition's soil." In the wave of his hand, Yoda
seemed to summon Finis Valorum's dazzling array of antique furniture gleaming with exotic oils, his
artworks and sculptures and treasures from a thousand worlds. Legacies of thirty generations of House
Valorum had once rilled this office. "Perhaps too deep: a man of history, was Valorum. Palpatine."
Yoda's eyes drifted closed. "A man of today, Pal-patine is." 'You say that as though it pains you."
'Perhaps it does. Or perhaps: my pain is only of this day, not its man.

'I prefer the office like this." Mace half nodded around the sweep of open floor. Austere.

Unpretentious and uncompromising. To Mace, it was a window into Palpatine's character: the Supreme
Chancellor lived entirely for the Republic. Simple in dress. Direct in speech.

Unconcerned with ornamentation or physical comfort. "A shame he can't touch the Force. He might have
made a fine Jedi." 'But then, another Supreme Chancellor would we need." Yoda smiled gently. "Better
this way, perhaps it is." Mace acknowledged the point with a slight bow.

'Admire him, you do." Mace frowned. He'd never thought about it. His adult life had been spent at the
orders of the Supreme Chancellor. but he served the office, not the man. What did he think of the
Supreme Chancellor as a person? What difference coukl that make?

'I suppose I do." Mace vividly recalled what the Force had shown him while he watched Palpatine sworn
in as Supreme Chancellor, ten years before: Palpatine was himself a shatterpoint on which the future of
the Republic-perhaps even the whole galaxy-depended.

"The only other person I can imagine leading the Republic through this dark hour is. well-" He opened a