Disclaimer: This is a work of fan fiction. No monetary profit has been gained from its production and no copyright infringement is intended. The Star Wars characters and events used in this fan fiction are the property of George Lucas. This fanfic may not be republished in any way, shape or form without the consent of the author. Comments, suggestions and any grammatical errors found may be brought to the attention of the author at: sycamore@roguemail.net

Burden of Proof

“This just came in, Admiral,” Captain Gilad Pellaeon explained as he stepped past the current array of artwork in Grand Admiral Thrawn’s command room. “A report from one of the outlier worlds, some no-name planet. No indication of what it’s all about, but it’s marked urgent, and all the clearance codes are correct.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Thrawn answered, accepting the data card, his calm expression betraying no hint of whether he knew or suspected what the card’s contents might be. “That will be all.”

Pellaeon nodded and turned to go. Just before he reached the door, he glanced back to see the Grand Admiral inserting the card into a reader, scanning the report with a gradually tightening frown of concentration.

And suddenly Thrawn’s face was a blue several shades paler than Pellaeon had ever seen it before…

Pellaeon returned to the command room several hours later with other reports to bring to the Grand Admiral’s attention. He noticed as he entered that the gallery of artworks had changed, though he could not begin to identify where this new batch might have come from.

“Come in, Captain,” Thrawn called from his command chair. “What do you think of these?” He gestured at the holographs of statues, mosaics, even buildings surrounding him.

“They’re very interesting, sir,” Pellaeon answered. “Though perhaps a bit…primitive.”

“Yes,” Thrawn said musingly. “Yes, you might say that. Look there, now—” he directed the captain’s attention to a small-scale hologram of what must have been an enormous building, an imposing rotunda with a colonnaded entry. “A temple of the Roman gods. And there, the temple of the god of the Jews—” he indicated a tall, squarish building of white stone, surrounded by walls marking out rectangular courtyards.

“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon nodded, unsure what to make of the two temples. “Ah, if I may, sir—I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of the Romans or the Jews. Is this connected with our current campaign?”

“No, Captain, not directly,” Thrawn answered. “Yet indirectly, it may be connected with everything.”

“Sir?”

Thrawn held up a data card reader. “The report that came in earlier. Take a look, Captain. But to sum it up—it seems that a religious leader among the Jews, put to death by their own government with the aid of their Roman overlords, has come back to life.”

“What?” cried Pellaeon, scanning the report in disbelief. “But that can’t be possible.”

“So one would think,” Thrawn said quietly. “Such, at least, was my first reaction. But my agent has confirmed that the tomb was certainly found empty, on the third day after his execution.”

“Do you mean that you think it’s true?” Pellaeon frowned. “There must be an explanation. Perhaps it’s a clone of this religious leader, this, ah, Christ,” he suggested, finally spotting the name in the report.

“A clone? Interesting theory, Captain. However, as my agent notes in that report, the world on which these events took place is rather primitive in its technology—you yourself noted the primitive appearance of their artwork. I highly doubt that they would have access to any sort of cloning technology.”

“Well, then,” Pellaeon persisted, noting a point in the report, “what about the statement given here by the guards at his tomb? They say the body was stolen during the night by the Christ’s disciples.”

“Disciples who had formerly scattered in fear at the first hint of opposition,” Thrawn countered dryly, “and who apparently spent the days after their leader’s death behind locked doors for fear they’d be next. At any rate, Captain, consider the rest of the guards’ report. First, the tomb—some sort of chamber hollowed in the side of a rock, I gather—had been sealed with a large stone, rather too large for these disciples to move aside without considerable effort. And second, the guards say they were sleeping when this all happened.”

“Yes, sir, but—”

“Roman soldiers,” Thrawn continued, glancing significantly at certain statues represented among the artworks surrounding them, “do not sleep on duty. On pain of death. From what I can learn, they seem to be their world’s equivalent of our stormtroopers, the best available. If they were found to have slept while on guard, they would have died for it. Yet that has not happened. Curious, isn’t it, Captain?”

“It does cast a bit of suspicion on their statements, sir,” Pellaeon admitted reluctantly.

“More than a bit, Captain. After all, consider: if they were asleep—the whole squad at once, too, however likely that may be—how would they know it was the Christ’s disciples who took the body?”

“I, ah, hadn’t considered that,” Pellaeon frowned.

“I think it most likely that they are telling a story they’ve been taught to tell, no doubt in exchange for protection should this matter of sleeping on duty come to their superiors’ ears. No, Captain, I’m afraid we must throw out the guards’ evidence as far too unreliable.”

“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon allowed. “Still, there must be some other explanation. This Christ seems to have been a charismatic person; he even made references to his own death—and apparent resurrection—before the fact. Perhaps it was all staged, sir. He could have faked his death so that he could later turn up, claiming to have been resurrected.”

“A cunning trick that would be, Captain,” Thrawn said. “Not the sort of trick our Christ would pull, though, I suspect. Anyway, have a look at that.” He indicated the central image in his holographic art gallery. Pellaeon looked and saw a rough-hewn wooden post, longer than a man is tall, fixed perpendicularly to the ground. Another wooden beam was fastened perpendicularly to the upper portion of the first. The whole contraption seemed strangely ominous to Pellaeon.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Crux,” Thrawn replied. “The Roman cross—apparently their favored form of execution. Usually reserved for slaves, thieves, and other despicable types. Apparently they despised this Christ enough to condemn him to death by crucifixion.”

“I don’t see how this—thing—could serve as an instrument of execution,” Pellaeon said uncertainly.

“It’s rather like an exotic form of hanging, actually,” said Thrawn. He touched a control somewhere, and suddenly the image of the bare wooden cross was replaced by another cross. This new one was, apparently, in use, with the naked body of a man—or what had once been a man—hanging from it. Pellaeon’s stomach tightened, making him glad that the hologram was only a still image, with no holovid of the agonies this man must have gone through, no audio feed replaying his screams of anguish.

“Is that him?” Pellaeon asked. “The Christ?”

“What? Oh, no,” Thrawn answered, “I don’t know who the victim is on that one. Some slave, most likely. Anyhow, Captain, you see how the arms are nailed to the crossbeam so that the condemned man hangs there, practically helpless. To breathe he must push himself up by those nails—but eventually his strength will give out. The crucified man dies of asphyxiation in the end, but not before his executioners have played him for every possible degree of pain. See the lacerations there—before crucifixion, he would have been whipped extensively, losing much of his blood before he ever got to the cross. And if the prisoner is strong enough to stay alive on that cross longer than is convenient for the executioners, they simply break his legs to make breathing even harder. He can’t last long after that.”

“Incredible,” Pellaeon murmured, unable to avert his eyes from the ghastly image of the crucified man.

“Yes,” Thrawn said casually, “somewhat barbaric, in keeping with the primitive nature of their society, but still a rather impressive form of torture. It appears to have made an excellent deterrent to crime, as well, especially since the Romans are accustomed to hang these things in public places—and they have been hanging them there rather frequently in past years, especially in their occupied territories, including the land of these Jews. Our own interrogation methods are hardly more thorough than Roman crucifixion,” he finished with clear fascination.

“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon gulped. “I take it, Admiral, you’ve concluded from this that the Christ’s death could not have easily been faked.”

“Exactly,” Thrawn nodded. “For one thing, the Romans never broke his legs. And it’s clear what that means.”

“He died quickly enough that they didn’t need to,” Pellaeon nodded.

“And anyway, even if he had survived the cross, he’d hardly have been in any condition to roll back that stone sealing the tomb.”

“No, I suppose not. So we can confirm that he died. Still, sir, his death doesn’t prove his resurrection. The report says that some of his followers went to tend to the body according to their funeral customs and found the tomb empty. Couldn’t it have been a simple mistake? They must have gone to the wrong tomb, an empty one, and leaped to the conclusion that the man was alive again,” Pellaeon suggested hopefully.

“If the empty tomb were the only evidence for his resurrection,” Thrawn mused, “we might make good use of such an explanation. Unfortunately, Captain, you’ll see if you read on that there’s more to it than that. The tomb was empty, but the graveclothes were there—strips of cloth that they had wrapped the body in before burial. If it was an unused tomb, it would make no sense to find graveclothes there. And what’s more, it seems they found the strips lying just as they would have been wrapped on the body—but with no body in them. They weren’t piled as one might expect them to be if someone had unwrapped the body—rather, as if the body itself had disappeared from within the wrappings without disturbing them.”

“Disappeared?” Pellaeon frowned. “I’ve heard of Jedi disappearing after death. Do you think—”

“Our Christ, a Jedi? Unlikely,” Thrawn shook his head. “However, that’s of little concern now. Read on, Captain. It wasn’t just the empty tomb and the undisturbed graveclothes that the disciples saw. They saw the resurrected man himself.”

Pellaeon skimmed the reports of eyewitness encounters with the resurrected Christ. “Surely, sir, they must have been mistaken. A hallucination of some sort—”

“All of them at once? He appeared several times to groups of them. On one occasion they saw him eat and drink, something no Jedi’s shade has ever been known to do. And he was, to all appearances, a fully corporeal being, save for a curious lack of physical limitation—note the part about the locked doors, Captain. He was seen by the head of his disciples, one called Peter, and later by the twelve lieutenants he called apostles. At one point it seems more than five hundred of his followers saw him all at once—that could hardly be a hallucination. One man called Thomas even reports touching the wounds made by the crucifixion nails. There is no doubt, I’m afraid. What they saw—and touched—was not the spirit of a Jedi, nor a clone, nor an imposter—these witnesses, of all beings, would be the last to mistake another for their beloved Christ.”

“Then it’s true?” asked Pellaeon, dumbfounded.

“There is no other conclusion,” Thrawn said. “And now, Captain, I will leave it to you to see that this data card, and any other copies of the report, are destroyed.”

“Sir?”

“We can’t let this become known, Captain Pellaeon. Not in the midst of our campaign against the Rebellion. If news of this got out—I fear it would change the world. And we simply can’t have that—there is no telling what the effect would be on the Empire I mean to restore.”

“Yes, sir,” Pellaeon nodded. He turned to go carry out the Admiral’s command and conceal any evidence of this impossibly true Resurrection. But he could not help one last glance back at the image of the unknown man on the cross.

5/19/2001 Rebecca J. Bush sycamore@roguemail.net

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