Apocalypse (35 page)

A third panel depicted a high mountain peak that loomed over both
forests, with the barren forest lying to the left side of a dividing river and the forest in bloom to the right. Looking out over the scene from the balcony of a cliffside monastery was a gaunt old man, his arms spread so that one hand was suspended above the dark aspect of the forest and one over the luminous aspect. On the old fellow’s face was such an expression of weariness and sorrow that Raynar felt his own shoulders sag, weighed down by a burden as mysterious as it was ancient.

As Raynar stood contemplating the panels, a long Wookiee groan sounded behind him—Lowbacca, complaining that he was tired of having his time wasted and suggesting that they return to the
Long Trek
immediately. The Wookiee went on: they hadn’t seen anything
yet
that concerned Abeloth or the Celestials, and he was beginning to think the only connection between Thuruht and the Celestials was the name of their anthill.

Thuruht asked for a translation, and C-3PO said, “Jedi Lowbacca was wondering about the connection between these fine Bururru religious panels and Abeloth.” The droid’s tone grew confiding. “I’m sorry to say he has no appreciation of art for its own sake. He seems convinced that everything you show us should have some connection to Abeloth or the Celestials.”

Thuruht turned to Raynar and thrummed a sharp reply.
“You see? The other Jedi are not ready. They do not see what is in front of them!”

Raynar wasn’t sure that he saw, either. Maintaining a thoughtful silence, he stepped closer to the panels and contemplated the three scenes. The luminous woman and the craggy warrior were no doubt symbols of life and death. Since Thuruht clearly had an understanding of the Force, perhaps the pair even represented its light and dark aspects. And that would mean that the figure in the third panel—the old man with one hand over each aspect of the forest—was a symbol of the Balance.

But that did nothing to explain Abeloth.

Finally, Raynar turned back to Thuruht. “It’s not just Jedi Lowbacca who doesn’t see. I don’t, either.”

“Because you look only for what is in the stone,”
Thuruht replied.
“To find Abeloth, you must see what is missing.”

The Killik had barely spoken before Raynar understood.

“The mother, of course,” he said. “We have a Father, a Son, and a Daughter. But there isn’t a Mother.”

Thuruht droned approval

And Lowbacca growled in alarm.

Raynar turned to find both of his companions eyeing him. Lowbacca looked ready to snatch Raynar up and run for the
Long Trek
, while Tekli was watching him with narrowed eyes, clearly pondering whether Raynar was still in control of his own mind.

“Raynar,” she said, “it appears that you no longer need See-Threepio to communicate with Thuruht.”

There was no use denying the obvious. “I don’t,” Raynar admitted. “But I still have some time. I’m not in telepathic communication yet.”

Lowbacca rumbled the opinion that it was time to go. Thuruht was just stringing them along, trying to make them Joiners, and they weren’t learning anything.

“We are
now
, Lowie,” Raynar said. “Thuruht has offered to share everything the hive knows about Abeloth.”

“In exchange for what?” Tekli demanded.

“Buub,”
Thuruht replied, and C-3PO translated, “Nothing.”

“That’s right,” Raynar said.

He felt a bit guilty about deceiving his companions, but he did not want to risk undermining Thuruht’s willingness to discuss Abeloth by stopping to argue about the sacrifice he was making. Besides, Thuruht had actually
demanded
a promise from Raynar, so the statement was at least technically true.

Raynar turned to Thuruht. “What else do you have to show us?”

Using both left pincers to wave the Jedi after her, the Killik descended the corridor through several archways to another series of reliefs. The first depicted a jungle paradise, with a small clearing in the bottom of a shallow gorge that emptied into a vast swamp. In the center of the clearing was an erupting geyser, and in the vapor cloud above it floated three ghostly figures, so insubstantial it seemed their limbs had not yet finished coalescing. The trio appeared much younger than in the previous panels, but they were still recognizable as the Father, Son, and Daughter from the forest panels.

In the following two scenes, a walled pool had been built to catch the water from the geyser. In one panel, a fiendish-looking beast with
the Son’s head stood at the edge of the pool, drinking from it as the shocked faces of the Father and Daughter watched from the edge of the clearing. The next panel showed the Daughter swimming in a different pool, one located inside a grotto. The head on her shoulders was that of a luminous bird, and it was looking back toward the cave’s pillar-flanked entrance with its beak gaping wide in surprise.

Raynar motioned at the two creatures, first the brutish-looking man-beast, then the luminous bird-woman. “They seem to be changing from one form to another,” he said. “Are they the same beings?”

“Do you think the Ones are made of crude matter?”
Thuruht replied.
“The Ones are beings of the Force. The Ones take any form they desire.”

As Raynar considered this—and whether that meant the Daughter or another figure might be Abeloth—Tekli stepped forward.

She pointed at the pool in the grotto. “Does that remind you of anything?”

“It’s the Pool of Knowledge that Master Skywalker described in his report,” Raynar said.

Lowbacca pointed at the previous scene and moaned the opinion that it matched the description of the Font of Power that Master Skywalker and Ben had visited on Abeloth’s home planet.

“It does.” Raynar turned back to Thuruht and asked, “What are these three beings? Celestials?”

Thuruht shivered her antennae.
“Celestials are in the Force,”
she said.
“The Ones are what Celestials
become.
”

“Become?” Raynar asked. He thought back to the scene that showed the Ones coalescing out of the Font of Power. “When they emerge from the Force, you mean?”

“The Force is all around us, in us … the Force
is
us,”
Thuruht said.
“How can a being emerge from what she is?”

Raynar fell silent, allowing C-3PO to catch up with the translation while he tried to puzzle through Thuruht’s bewildering explanation. He felt sure that she was telling him what she
believed
to be the truth, but it was impossible to know how accurate those beliefs were. A Killik memory could come from any number of sources—their own experience, something that once happened to a Joiner, even a holo-drama enjoyed by someone before becoming a member of the hive. It was all the same to the Killik hive-mind. In time, the hive’s collective
memory became a random jumble of recollections, with fact and fiction and myth all intermingled in a single unreliable “truth.” Raynar pointed at the first panel in the series, the one that showed the trio coalescing out of the vapors above the geyser. “This is how the Ones first arrived?”

“That is how they
became,
yes,”
Thuruht clarified.
“That is precisely how we remember it.”

Well aware that the Killik’s “precise” memory could be nothing more than some species’ creation myth, Raynar groaned.

“We are sorry,”
Thuruht said.
“We do not know how to explain the Celestials any better. They are beyond the understanding of mortals.”

“There’s no need to apologize,” Raynar said. “But we have seen enough about the Celestials for now. Take us to the panels showing the history of Abeloth.”

“But this
is
the history of Abeloth,”
Thuruht protested.
“Her story is long and complicated. You will see.”

Waving them to follow, Thuruht ascended the corridor to another set of reliefs. At first, it appeared that Thuruht was showing them more of the same. The first two panels portrayed a horrified Father trying to keep the peace between the Son and the Daughter as they struggled to claim larger parts of the forest for themselves. But the third panel contained a new figure—a young woman who looked barely older than the Daughter, with a wide smile and twinkling eyes.

At first, Raynar took the newcomer to be a servant. The Son and the Daughter were raising their glasses, obviously expecting them to be filled from an ewer in the woman’s hands. Meanwhile, the Father was looking on her with obvious warmth, returning her smile as she poured.

Thuruht tapped a pincer against the woman’s foot.
“Abeloth.”

Raynar studied the figure more closely, comparing the figure in the relief with the Abeloth in the Skywalkers’ report. The twinkling eyes weren’t exactly the star-like points they had described, and while her smile was wide, it hardly stretched from ear to ear. It seemed to Raynar that he was looking not at Abeloth, but at the seed that would
become
Abeloth.

“Why didn’t we see her emerging from the fountain mists?” Raynar asked. “Isn’t she like the rest of the Ones?”

Thuruht spread all four arms.
“A servant appeared in the courtyard one day. We do not remember how she arrived.”

Once C-3PO had translated, Tekli asked, “But this
is
Abeloth? The Servant, not the Mother?”

“Abeloth is the Servant who became the Mother,”
Thuruht replied.
“You will see.”

With that, Thuruht walked up the corridor.

The next series of reliefs showed Abeloth turning the Ones into something that resembled a happy family. She kept the Son and the Daughter busy with games and chores, and she doted on the Father. She even stepped in to channel the Son’s destructive energies into something useful, having him use his Force lightning to blast cozy little rooms into the sides of the gorge. By the third panel, she seemed to be a full member of the family, eating at the Father’s side and holding her glass out for the Son to fill.

Once the Jedi had finished there, Thuruht ascended the corridor and paused in front of a scene depicting a much older Abeloth. Now Abeloth seemed old enough to be a wife to the Father—and a Mother to the Son and Daughter. In this panel, she was standing in front of a long arcade that had been carved from the wall of the gorge, leaning on the Son’s shoulder in front of a stack of paving stones. Meanwhile, a weary-looking Daughter was working on hands and knees to pave the courtyard. In the background, the Father sat in a contented slumber, his hands resting across his stomach.

In the next scene, Abeloth was elderly. She was standing at one end of the courtyard, apart from the others. In the center, near the Font of Power, the Father was having a heated argument with the Son and the Daughter. All three were gesturing wildly, and in the air around them whirled uprooted tree ferns, boulders, and even a couple of six-legged lizards the size of rancors.

To Raynar’s surprise, Thuruht moved on without giving him and the others much time to contemplate the panel. Immediately suspicious, he signaled Tekli and Lowbacca to remain where they were.

“Is there something you don’t wish us to see here?” he demanded.

Thuruht stopped and spun around, her antennae erect with irritation.
“Linger if you wish,”
she said.
“It is nothing to the hive. But you are the one who said the Jedi needed to know about Abeloth quickly.”

Lowbacca moaned his agreement, urging Raynar to keep moving—before he became a full Joiner.

“That is an excellent suggestion,” C-3PO said. “I am recording each panel in full holographic resolution. When we return to Coruscant, the Masters will be able to analyze every detail.”

Thuruht gave a smug rumble, then hurried to the next set of images. When Raynar caught up, a chill raced up his spine.

The first panel showed an aged Abeloth sneaking a drink from the Font of Power, while the Father hurled Force lightning at both the Son and Daughter. In the second panel, a much younger-looking Abeloth swam in the Pool of Knowledge, looking sly and defiant as she smiled up at the Father, who stood at the edge of the basin. His hands were raised and extended toward Abeloth, as though he were using the Force to pull her from the pool, and his expression was as sorrowful as it was angry. Behind him stood the Daughter, using a Force shield to prevent the Son’s fiend aspect from leaping on the Father’s back.

The third panel depicted the arcade complex again, this time with a much-changed Abeloth standing in the heart of a stormy courtyard. Her hair had grown coarse and long, her nose had flattened until it was practically gone, and her sparkling eyes had grown so sunken and dark that all that could be seen of them were the twinkles. She was raising her arms toward a cowering Daughter and a glowering Son, with long tentacles lashing from where her fingers should have been. Stepping forward to shield them was a furious Father, one hand pointing toward the swamp at the open end of the temple, the other reaching out to intercept her tentacled fingers.

“I am beginning to believe Abeloth
can’t
be a Celestial,” Tekli observed. “She is too different from the others. She grew old when they did not—and she was being changed by the Font and the Pool, while the Son and the Daughter were unaffected.”

“It is Abeloth’s nature to seek what is beyond her grasp,”
Thuruht said.
“That is why she is the Bringer of Chaos.”

“Then Abeloth
is
a Celestial?” Raynar asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Thuruht clacked her mandibles in the Killik equivalent of a shrug.
“Is Abeloth the Bringer of Chaos because that is the wish of the Celestials?
Or is she the Bringer of Chaos because she
defied
the wish of the Celestials?”
She spread her four arms, then let them drop.
“We can never know the will of those who are beyond us to comprehend.”

With that, Thuruht turned to ascend the corridor again. Leaving C-3PO to translate the exchange for the others, Raynar followed close on her heels. He could feel a fundamental shift in Thuruht’s attitude toward him and his companions, a marked confidence that suggested she already considered them members of the hive. And yet he had not noticed any stray thoughts or flashes of unexpected insight that would suggest the Joining was complete.