Abyss (24 page)

Ryontarr let the sentence trail off, his voice having risen to such a level of disgust that Luke thought he might actually shout. Instead the Gotal sighed and shook his head.

“It’s nonsense, all of it,” he continued. “There is
one
Force,
the
Force … and many ways to see it.”

Luke looked back to his body. “Then my body is more substantial than my clothes because …?”

“It’s
not
.” Ryontarr pointed at it. “Touch it.”

Luke obeyed—or tried to. When he pressed his hand to the body’s face, it simply sank through the cheek. The body’s eyes widened in momentary alarm, but immediately grew vacant and glassy again.

“You haven’t
abandoned
your shadow body yet,” Ryontarr said. “There’s still a tiny part of you inside, because you aren’t ready to give it up entirely.”

“And that part is giving it form,” Luke surmised. He did not accept everything Ryontarr claimed, but he was here to learn why Jacen had fallen to the dark side—not argue Force theory. He pulled his hand out of his body’s face, then frowned at its sunken eyes and dry skin. “Will that vestige of me also keep my body hydrated and fed?”

“In the sense you mean … yes,” Ryontarr said, holding Luke’s gaze a little too steadily. “The Force will sustain your body for as long you remain attached to it.”

Luke cocked a brow and glanced around the chamber. “There are a lot of starving bodies in here.”

“What can I say? Many of us have lost our attachment to the shadow world.” Ryontarr looked to Luke’s body. “You have just arrived, and your attachment is still strong.”

“So, my body is safe.”

It was the Givin, Feryl, who answered. “If you are afraid, you can always return to your body just by seeing yourself inside.” He drifted around in front of Luke, his deep-set eyes gleaming orange in the depths of his skull-like face. “It is only
leaving
that is hard.”

It did not escape Luke that Feryl had not actually
said
that his body would be safe, and he felt fairly certain that Ryontarr had been trying a little
too
hard to appear truthful when he had claimed the Force would sustain his body.

“If you don’t believe me, just try,” Feryl urged. “What do you have to lose?”

“Nothing at all,” agreed Ryontarr. “Now that we’ve shown you how, you can return beyond shadows anytime you wish.”

“But you won’t be here to guide me,” Luke surmised. “I’ll have to retrace Jacen’s steps without your help.”

Ryontarr shook his head. “You have only to call us before you start.”

“We’ll be here waiting.” Feryl turned and began to rise into the ball of purple light. “Think on it all you like, Master Skywalker.”

“There is no hurry,” Ryontarr agreed, following. “Time is an illusion.”

Luke frowned and glanced down at his body’s sunken eyes. He could sense that the Mind Walkers weren’t telling him the whole truth, but it didn’t feel as though they wished him harm. And they were clearly willing to let him be certain of his body’s safety before proceeding. But time
did
still matter to Valin and all the other young Jedi who were losing their minds, and if he could discover whether Jacen’s visit here had something to do with their delusions, the sooner he did so the better. Too, there were those mysterious alarms flashing and blaring in the control room. When
any
alarm went active, he could not help feeling that time mattered very much.

“Wait.” Luke used the Force to pull his vac suit’s water tube free of its mounting clip so he could position the suck-nozzle between his body’s lips, then went to join the Mind Walkers. “Where are we heading?”

Ryontarr pivoted around, half facing him, then pointed toward the purple radiance crackling in the center of the chamber. “We are going into the light, Master Skywalker.”

Luke smiled. “Into the light?” he repeated. “That has an ominous ring to it.”

“Not at all,” Ryontarr said, also stopping to wait. “You have
already
gone into the light—just as you are still inside your body, about to begin the releasing meditation.”

“All is permanent,” Feryl added. “All things that
will
happen have
already
happened. All things that have
already
happened are
about
to happen.”

“Time passes inside
us
, Master Skywalker,” explained Ryontarr. “It is only
our
finite nature that parses the galaxy into seconds and eons.”

“So I’ve heard,” Luke said, recognizing some of the philosophical
underpinnings of the assertion. There was a definite Aing-Tii influence, with a bit of the Potentium unity doctrine and perhaps even a hint of Heresiarchian determinism thrown in. He found himself wondering just how the Mind Walkers had melded together so many different Force traditions. “A finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite galaxy.”

“You
will
.” Feryl motioned Luke after him, then started toward the purple glow again. “Come into the light with us.”

As Luke followed the pair toward the crackling radiance above, he began to understand the origins of the term
Mind Walking
. Every time he started to swing a foot forward, he simply found himself a pace ahead of where he had been the moment before, as though he were teleporting ahead one step at a time. Eventually, he realized that he merely had to
think
about moving to discover that he had already done it.

The trio was still three meters away from the purple glow when a tentacle of light crackled down to touch Luke’s chest. His entire presence immediately turned as purple as the ball of light itself, and he was filled with a bone-shivering joy a thousand times more intense than anything he had ever before experienced. He felt as though he had become the Force and the Force had become him, and he was flooded with a calming bliss that seemed as deep as space. Pain, fear, anguish—even the
memory
of such suffering—vanished. He knew only the pure, eternal joy of existence, a song as vast and ageless as the universe itself.

Luke remained in the song more than a year, and less than a second. He did not remember because the past was yet to come; he did not desire because the future was already gone. He saw the galaxy, the universe, the Force itself in its beautiful infinite entirety, a thing both within and without, limitless and sublime and wholly beyond comprehension.

A raspy voice said, “
Walk
.”

Then Luke was standing in a shadowy arcade, looking out on an ancient courtyard overgrown with tree ferns, club mosses, and pillars of scaled fungi. In the center of the courtyard sat the curving basin of a formal fountain, the water jet gurgling somewhere inside a pall of steam so filled with sulfur that it was more brown than yellow.

“The Font of Power,” said the raspy voice.

Luke turned his head toward the speaker. He saw a skull-faced Givin—
Feryl
, he recalled—next to him, and he began to remember where he was … or rather, to remember the quest that had led him here, since he had no idea where
here
actually was. Luke was on a mission. He needed to find out why Jacen had fallen prey to the dark side. He needed to determine whether his nephew’s sojourn had anything to do with the psychoses troubling so many young Jedi Knights.

Luke was still reorienting himself when a second voice—this one deep and refined—said, “If you have the courage to drink of it, you will have the power to achieve anything.”

“
Anything
?” Luke glanced over to find the flat-faced Gotal, Ryontarr, standing to his other side. “That’s a big promise.”

“There is no limit to the strength that can be drawn from the Font of Power,” Ryontarr replied. “You can drink as deeply as you wish.”

“
Can
I?”

Luke turned back toward the courtyard. The tree ferns pushing up through its disarrayed cobblestones seemed as substantial and normal as his own form, as did the rest of the plant life, the mosses hanging from the arcade pillars and the line of fungi ringing the fountain’s basin. But like the walls back in the station’s meditation chamber, the ornate stonework was shadowy and incorporeal, with edges just distinct enough to suggest sculpted decoration that was both sinuous and grotesque.

“Seek, before we left the station, you told me that my body still appeared substantial not because it was filled with the living Force, but only because I remained attached to it.” Luke pointed at a hairy yellow club moss as tall as he was. “But the plant life here appears substantial, too—and I’m not attached to
it
at all.”

“But another presence
is,
” agreed Ryontarr. “Go on. You will see.”

Luke stepped out of the arcade into the light of a harsh blue sun. As he grew accustomed to its glare, he saw that the courtyard sat in the bottom of a deep jungle valley, with steep walls blanketed in alien plant life rising to all sides. The highest wall, located at the far end of the courtyard, ascended more than a kilometer to the dipping rim of a volcano crater.

Luke continued forward and slowly came to realize that the whole courtyard was filled with the acrid stench of sulfur. The fumes weren’t burning his throat or nose, since he did not actually seem to be breathing them. But they
were
making him queasy, and as he drew closer to the fountain, something inside him protested so violently that he felt as though he might retch.

When he reached the basin, Luke could finally see through the curtain of steam to the font itself. It was a jet of water about as thick as his leg, so filled with sulfur and iron that it was as brown as a tree trunk—and so permeated with Force energy that it literally sent him stumbling back, his head spinning and his stomach churning. The fountain was not just
tainted
with dark side power, it was
imbued
with it—as if it were rising up from some deep-buried reservoir of dark side energy that had been building, preparing to blow for not just millennia, but since the beginning of time itself.

Luke resisted the temptation to start hurling accusations. The Font of Power was clearly a dark side nexus, and Ryontarr, at least, would understand what that meant. Such nexuses arose as a result of any number of events—all of them bad. Perhaps a powerful user of the dark side had once lived in the valley—or merely been killed there. The Valley of Dark Lords on Korriban had become a dark side nexus because it had been inhabited by Sith Lords for so long, and a nexus had formed in orbit over Endor after Palpatine died there.

Whatever the case, as a former Jedi Knight, Ryontarr would have known better than to think Luke would actually drink from the fountain without noticing the nexus. The Gotal had to have brought him here for another reason—some less obvious form of corruption, or perhaps just to test him.

When Luke finally felt calm enough, he turned to Ryontarr and asked, “What happened here?”

Ryontarr spread his hands to indicate that he didn’t know. “It’s as much a mystery as the Maw itself,” he said. “But does it matter? If you drink of the fountain, you will have the power to save the Jedi Order from extinction.”

“From
extinction
?” Luke felt like he had been hit in the stomach with a Stokhli spray stick. Was
that
how their problems with Daala
were going to end? Or were the delusions going to wipe them out? “Have you seen that?”

Ryontarr nodded. “I’m sorry.”

Luke turned toward the fountain, wondering if drinking of its waters truly
was
the only way to save the Jedi Order—if
that
had been enough to convince Jacen.

“How does it happen?” Luke asked. “The extinction, I mean.”

“It has
already
happened,” Feryl said. He pointed a bony finger past Luke, toward the fountain. “Drink. It is the only way to save your Order.”

Luke frowned in confusion—until he recalled that time did not exist beyond shadows. Of course, that didn’t mean that the Jedi were safe. Far from it, with young Jedi going mad and Daala determined to bring the Order itself to heel. Given all that, extinction seemed like a real possibility sooner rather than later.

Luke turned to study the fountain. He could feel its dark power swirling around him, inviting him to use
it
to save what he had spent a lifetime building, what he loved more than life itself. And he was tempted, just as every man was when he saw an easy way out of a desperate situation. All he need do was return to the basin, stick his head into the dark geyser, and drink of those poison waters.

But even if Luke were willing to corrupt himself, he wouldn’t be saving the Order. He would only be making it dependent on his own strength, and that was no more a formula for building a strong organization than it was for raising a healthy child. If he wanted the Order to survive him, he had to let it strengthen itself by going through this struggle without him—just as he had to let Ben make his own mistakes, if Ben was going to develop the wisdom to lead the Order after Luke was gone.

When Luke did not return to the fountain, Ryontarr asked, “What are you waiting for, Master Skywalker? Surely you want to save the Jedi Order?”

“Of course I do,” Luke said, spinning on the Gotal. “But you and I both know I
won’t
do that by drinking from this fountain.”

“Then how will you save it?” Feryl pressed.

“
I
won’t,” Luke said. “The Order is strong enough to save itself.”

Ryontarr and Feryl exchanged glances, obviously disappointed in Luke’s decision.

“Stop playing with me,” Luke ordered. He fixed his glare on Ryontarr. “You
knew
I’d never drink from that fountain. So why bring me here?”

“Why indeed?” A thin smile came to Ryontarr’s lips, then his gaze shifted away from Luke back toward the fountain’s yellow smoke. “Because you asked us to.”

“There is no need to be angry with us, Master Skywalker,” added Feryl. “If you are afraid to see what you came seeking, it’s no fault of ours.”

Luke frowned. “
Afraid
?”

He turned back toward the Font of Power—and felt a chill of danger sense race down his back.