Abyss (35 page)

“If you can’t tell
now,
” Feryl said, “then there is only one way to be sure.”

A stubby arm broke the surface of the pool and reached for Luke, the tentacle-fingers waving so close before his eyes that he could see the tiny slit-membranes in the bottom of their suction-cup tips. The hungry presence grew more familiar, somehow a
part
of Luke, and he wanted nothing more in that instant than to step forward into the pool and know the truth of her identity, to know whether
this
was where the afterlife began and the spirits of the dead began their journey back to the Force.

Luke wanted to know what had happened to Jacen and what had made him fall, and he wanted to know what would become of his son, whether Ben would make a good Grand Master and how long he had to prepare for that terrible burden. More than anything, Luke wanted to know whether he had succeeded in his own life, whether the spark he had struck in founding the new Jedi Order would endure and flourish, growing into the bright golden light that he had envisioned, the beacon that would always be there to guide the galaxy safely through the dark times.

And the hungry presence could give him all that knowledge and more. All Luke had to do was clasp the tentacle-hand before him and let it draw him into the warm silver waters with it, let it drown him in the liquid oblivion of absolute, infinite knowledge.

But what Luke
already
knew was this: the choice that Jacen had made here was his undoing. The future was not the province of the living, and no human mind could know all things and remain sane. Luke knew he was still Ben’s father and the founder of the Jedi Order, and he knew he was still needed by both. He knew that Mara was gone, that if the thing craving him now had ever been part of her, it had certainly not been the best part … that if this was all that remained of her, he would not be doing anyone a service by trying to hold on to it.

Luke backed away from the pool.

Luke
.

The voice sounded cold and half familiar inside Luke’s mind, the last whisper of a lost love. The hand slid back into the pool, the tentacle-fingers beckoning him to follow.

Come back
.

Luke shook his head and turned away. “I can’t.”

He found Ryontarr and Feryl in front of him, blocking the exit. The Gotal’s flat-nosed face was scowling, and the Givin was shaking his bony head in disappointment.

“Master Skywalker, you don’t strike me as the kind to leave without the answers you came for,” Ryontarr said. “I don’t believe you have seen what Jacen saw yet.”

“I’ve seen enough.” Luke started forward, already calling to mind the haggard image of himself that he had seen reflected in the pool’s surface. “I’m returning to my body.”

“
Before
you have seen what your nephew saw?” Feryl asked.

“If doing so means bathing in your pool, yes.” Luke reached the doorway and stopped half a pace from the pair. “I’m only willing to follow him so far. I won’t go over the brink with him.”

Ryontarr lifted his bushy brows, and Feryl tipped his bony head in disappointment.

“Going over the brink is hardly necessary, Master Skywalker,” Ryontarr said. “Jacen didn’t bathe in the pool, either.”

Luke frowned. “He
didn’t
?”

“Didn’t even consider it,” Feryl reported. “He said no mortal mind could know everything, and the last thing he wanted was to become a Celestial.”

Before Luke could ask what they knew about the Celestials, Ryontarr added, “But Jacen wasn’t afraid to stay at the pool until he had seen what he came to see.” The Gotal tipped his horns toward the water behind Luke. “Have another look.”

Luke shook his head. “I’m done with your delaying tactics,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re trying to accomplish, but I
do
know you’re trying to keep me here.”

Even without the shiver of guilt that rippled through the Force, Luke would have known by their furtive glances that he had struck at
the heart of the matter. Determined not to yield the advantage when he had it, he said, “Tell me what you expect to happen. And don’t claim you’re just trying to help me. I didn’t believe that in the habitat, and I won’t believe it now.”

Ryontarr looked to Feryl.

The Givin rasped, “What is there to lose?”

Ryontarr nodded. “What indeed?” He pointed toward the pool. “Perhaps she is hiding it from you. Perhaps she doesn’t want you to suffer the way Jacen did.”

“She?” Luke slowly turned to face the pool again. He did not see the thing that had reached for him earlier, only the silvery mirror of the water’s surface. “Who is this
she?
The phantasm I keep glimpsing?”

“The lady in the mists is no phantasm,” Feryl replied. “She’s as real as you or I.”

“Look for a throne,” Ryontarr advised. “It’s the Throne of Balance, upon which sits the course of the future.”

Luke hesitated, suspecting yet another delaying strategy. But what they were implying about Jacen, that he had been both more courageous than Luke and more wise, was too compelling to ignore. It was Luke’s duty to investigate what had happened to his nephew, whether it had led to his fall, and that meant that he simply had to do as Ryontarr suggested.

Luke peered into the water, looking for anything that resembled a throne, and soon he saw it, a simple white throne in a brightly lit chamber. There was no one in it, but it was surrounded by a hundred beings regal enough to belong in the seat. They were of all species, Bothans and Hutts, Ishi Tib and Mon Calamari, even Wookiees and Trandoshans—and they all had the easy bearing of old friends.

But what caught Luke’s eye, what drew him closer to the pool’s edge, was the tall, redheaded woman at the center of the crowd. She had Tenel Ka’s thin arcing brows and full-lipped mouth, but her nose was her grandmother’s, small and not too long, with just a hint of a button at the end.

Allana
.

Luke did not say the name aloud—he felt guilty for even thinking it—but there could be no doubt. He was looking at a vision of Jacen’s
daughter, perhaps thirty years in the future. And she was preparing to take a throne, surrounded not by the usual treachery and intrigue so common to Hapan politics, but by friends from all across the galaxy, in a time of unprecedented comradery and trust.

“I don’t understand,” Luke said, turning to Ryontarr. “Why would Jacen be troubled by a vision of his daughter assuming her throne?”

“Because that’s not what he saw.” It was the Givin, Feryl, who rasped this answer. “
He
saw a dark man in dark armor, sitting on a golden throne and surrounded by acolytes in dark robes.”

Luke went cold inside. “A dark man?” he asked, thinking of the visions of the dark man he had experienced as Jacen was rising to become a Sith Lord. “Himself?”

Ryontarr scowled over at Luke. “I doubt a vision of his
own
future would have sent him fleeing back to the galaxy,” he said. “It had to be someone
else’s
face your nephew saw.”

A terrible thought occurred to Luke, as painful as a vibrodagger to the gut and just as frightening.
“Me
?”

Ryontarr shrugged. “Who can say?”

“We didn’t see the face behind the mask,” Feryl added. “But
Jacen
did, and he turned as pale as my exoskeleton.”

“Then
what?” Luke demanded. “Did he return to the Font of Power? Did he change his mind and bathe in the Pool of Knowledge?”

The two Mind Walkers looked to each other and shook their heads in disgust, as though Luke’s obtuseness were a great disappointment. Then Ryontarr said, “He left.”

“He left the Pool?” Luke asked, still struggling to see what had pushed his nephew toward the dark side. “Or do you mean Jacen returned to his body?”

“He left the
Maw,
” Ryontarr explained. “He said that he had to finish his training.”

“He
said
he had to change what he had seen in the pool,” Feryl added. “He
said
it was probably going to kill him.”

The alert strobing, Ben could take. And the chirping and wailing of the alarms, he had already silenced with a few well-placed blaster bolts. But the acrid smoke rising out of the equipment cabinets—that he could not stop. No matter how poorly the control room’s air exchangers worked, no matter how badly the fumes stung his eyes or burned his throat, he did not dare tamper with such alien technology. There was no telling what he might blow up: himself, the entire habitat … even the Maw itself.

And there were some things a good Jedi just did not risk.

Deciding he had made every preparation possible, Ben turned back to the entry hatch. He made one last inspection of his spot-welds, then nodded in satisfaction and shut off the energy feed to his plasma torch. No one would be sneaking through that door when he wasn’t watching.

Tossing the welding mask and gloves aside as he walked, Ben descended to the front of the trilevel control room. There, bathed in the flickering purple light from the writhing radiance beyond the view-port,
his emaciated father lay strapped to a hovergurney from the
Shadow’
s medbay. Both arms had fresh IV catheters in them, one delivering hydration and the other nutrients, but Ben did not know how much longer the fluid drips could keep his father alive. Both of the guides had died more than a week ago, the Givin because Ben had no idea how to insert an intravenous catheter through an exoskeleton, the other one because the
Shadow
simply did not carry the saline-free drips necessary to avoid poisoning a Gotal.

Several meters away sat Rhondi Tremaine, looking human again with fairly clean yellow hair and cheeks that were only slightly hollow. A pair of stun cuffs from the
Shadow’
s security stores connected her wrist to a metal floor beam that Ben had exposed for the purpose. Her brows were arched in fear, and her eyes were rimmed in red from weeping.

“Ben,
please,
” she said. “What are you doing?”

Ben did not answer because he wasn’t sure yet. His father’s orders had been clear: under no circumstances was Ben to go beyond shadows. If something went wrong, he was to report back to the Masters and make sure the Jedi knew about the dark power hiding in the Maw.

But that had been
before
Ben had started to go barvy.

He knew the symptoms of paranoid delusional disorder, and he realized he was suffering from most of them: the unshakable belief that his life and his father’s were in danger, the all-consuming fear that haunted his every thought, the reasons he could always find to dismiss any fact that did not support his own convictions. And yet the Mind Walkers
were
trying to kill him. While he might doubt his own sanity,
that
Ben did not doubt at all.

No one had attacked him directly, of course. The Mind Walkers were too clever for that. Instead, they had depleted the
Shadow’
s medbay to the point that he could no longer treat even a simple infection. They had consumed so much nutripaste that Ben had been reduced to foraging old dehydros from other vessels in the hangar. And the
Shadow’
s recycling system had lost so much water to the people who drank and left that it was having trouble purifying itself.

“Ben,” Rhondi said. “You can’t leave Rolund in that little room to die. That’s just … sick.”

Though Ben did not say so, he thought Rhondi was probably right. It was certainly not normal to leave a man welded inside a sleeping cabin. It wasn’t normal to trap the door with a thermite tamper guard, either.

But it
was
necessary, should Ben decide to go through with his plan. And he was beginning to realize he probably had no choice. As bad as it was that both of Master Horn’s children had lost their minds, to have Ben
Skywalker
return to Coruscant alone, delusional, and paranoid would be a catastrophe for the Jedi Order matched only by
Luke
Skywalker’s death. And it could easily get worse. In Ben’s demented state, he might fail to report what he and his father had found in the Maw … or he might not be believed.

Rhondi seemed to take Ben’s silence as a statement of intention. “Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “If Rolund starves in there, he’ll be lost until his presence disperses into the Force. At least bring him in here, where he can see the meditation chamber and find his way back beyond shadows.”

Ben frowned and asked, “Didn’t I explain this to you earlier?”

Despite the cynical edge, Ben’s question was sincere. He had been under a lot of stress lately, trying everything he could think of to bring his father back to his body, and it just seemed possible that he had forgotten to execute this critical part of his plan.

Instead of replying, Rhondi started to cry. Ben decided he needed to phrase his question a little more gently. He reached out with the Force and turned her head toward him.

“Did
I explain this to you?” he asked.

Rhondi nodded and began to cry harder. Her tears made him feel a little hollow and guilty about what he was doing to her and to her brother … but she
was
one of the people trying to kill him.