Terrified and confused, young Ben pulled away, simultaneously drawing in on himself and yanking his hand from the grasp of the silver- haired lady who was holding it.
Then suddenly he was back in the cockpit of the Jade Shadow,staring into the
fire- rimmed voids ahead.
Scattered around their perimeter were the smaller whorls of half a dozen more distant rings, their fiery light burning bright and steady against the starless murk of the deep Maw.
“Well?” his father asked. “Anything feel familiar?”
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Ben swallowed. He wasn’t sure why, but he found himself wanting to withdraw from the Force all over again. “Are we sure we need to find these guys?”
Luke raised a brow. “So it isfamiliar.”
“Maybe.” Ben couldn’t say whether the two feelings were related, and at the moment he didn’t care. There was something hungry in the Maw, something that would still be there waiting for him. “I mean, the Aing-Tii call them Mind Drinkers. That can’t be good.”
“Ben, you’re changing the subject.” Luke’s tone was more interested than disapproving, as though Ben’s behavior were only one part of a much larger puzzle.
“Is there something you don’t want to talk about?”
“I wish.” Ben told his father about the dark tentacle that had reached out to him after the Shadowdeparted Shelter so many years ago. “I guess what we’re feeling now might be related. There was definitely some . . . thingkeeping tabs on me at Shelter.”
Luke considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “You were pretty attached to your mother.
Maybe you were just feeling abandoned and made up a
‘friend’ to take her place.”
“A tentaclefriend?”
“You said it was a darktentacle,” Luke continued thoughtfully, “and guilt is a dark emotion. Maybe you were feeling guilty about replacing us with an imagi-nary friend.”
“And maybe youdon’t want to believe the tentacle was real because it would mean you left your two- year-old son someplace really dangerous,” Ben countered.
He caught his father’s eye in the mirrored section again.
“I hope you’re not going to try to psychoanalyze this away, because there’s a big hole in your theory.”
Luke frowned. “And that would be?”
“I was two,” Ben reminded him. “And by all accounts, I didn’t feel guilty about anythingat that age.”
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Luke grinned. “Good point, but I still don’t think we should worry too much about this tentacle monster of yours.”
“It’s not mytentacle monster,” Ben retorted, miffed at having his concerns mocked. “You’re the one who made me dredge it up.”
Luke’s expression hardened into admonishment.
“But you’rethe one who’s still afraid of it.”
The observation struck home. Whether or not the dark presence he remembered was real, he had emerged from Shelter wary of abandonment and frightened of the Force. And it had been those fears that had allowed Jacen to lead him into darkness.
Ben sighed. “Right. Whatever this thing is, I’ve got to face it.” After a moment, he asked, “So how do we find these Mind Drinkers?”
“ ‘The Path of True Enlightenment runs through the Chasm of Perfect Darkness.’ ” Luke was quoting Tadar’Ro, the Aing- Tii monk who had told them that Jacen had left the Kathol Rift to search out the Mind Drinkers. “ ‘The way is narrow and treacherous, but if you can follow it, you will find what you seek.’ ”
Ben swung his gaze toward the black holes ahead. The brilliant whorls of their accretion disks were burning hottest and brightest along their inner rims, where a mix-ture of in- falling gas and dust was being compressed to unimaginable densities as it vanished into the sharp-edged darkness of twin event horizons.
“Wait. Tadar’Ro said perfectdarkness, right?” Ben started to have a bad feeling about the monk’s instructions. “Like, beyond an event horizon?”
“Actually, it’s probably very bright on the way down a black hole,” Luke pointed out. “Just because gravity is too strong for light to escape doesn’t mean it can’t exist, and there’s all that gas compressing and glowing as it’s sucked deeper and deeper.”
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“Yeah, but you’re dead,” Ben said, “and everything is dark when you’re dead. Still, I see what you mean. I doubt Tadar’Ro expects us to fly down a black hole.”
“No, not downone.”
There was just enough anxiety in Luke’s voice to make Ben glance into the mirrored section again. His father was frowning out at the two black holes, staring into the fiery cloud between them and looking just worried enough to twist Ben’s stomach into a cold knot.
“ Betweenthem?” Ben could see what his father was thinking, and it didn’t make him happy. In any system of two large bodies, there were five areas where the centrifugal and gravitational forces would neutralize each other and hold a smaller body—such as a satellite or asteroid—in perpetual equilibrium. Of those five locations, only one was directly betweenthe two bodies. “You mean Stable Zone One?”
Luke nodded. “The Chasm of Perfect Darkness is an ancient Ashla parable referring to the twin perils of ego and ignorance,” he explained. “The Tythonians spoke of it as a deep dark canyon flanked by high, ever-crumbling cliffs.”
“So life is the chasm, darkness is falling all around,”
Ben said, taking an educated guess as to the parable’s meaning, “and the only way to stay in the light is to go down the middle.”
Luke smiled. “You’ve got a real feeling for mystic guidance.” He lifted his hands away from the yoke.
“You have the ship, son.”
“Me? Now?”Ben considered pointing out that his father was by far the better pilot—but that wasn’t the issue, of course. If Ben was going to face his fears, he needed to handle the flying himself. He swallowed hard, squared his shoulders, then confirmed, “I have the ship.”
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Ben deactivated the mirror panel and accelerated toward the black holes. As the Shadowdrew closer, their dark orbs rapidly began to swell and drift toward opposite sides of the cockpit, until all that could be seen of them were tall slivers of darkness hanging along the rear edges of the canopy. Ahead lay a fiery confluence of superheated gas, swirling in from two different directions and so bright it hurt Ben’s eyes even through the Shadow’s blast- tinting.