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“Well, you know the answer to that. What's one of the first things you learned in training to be a Jedi?”

“Don't cut off your own head with your lightsaber.”

“After that.”

“Your eyes can deceive you. Be mindful of your feelings. Girls are fun but dangerous. Lando has extra cards up his sleeve.”

“Well, the truth is in there somewhere … Tell you what, if you think it's wrong for you to think of them as ugly, just think of how you look to them.” Luke made a sweeping gesture, taking in his son from head to foot. “Short, squat, unlined skin, a nose that puffs up like a rodent, tiny little mouth with jagged white things in it, a horrible shrublike growth on your head.”

Ben laughed. “This, from the man who's worn a bowl-cut hairstyle almost all his adult life.”

“You're young, Ben. You'll learn to see with wiser eyes. And if you deliberately set out to do that, it'll be faster.”

The stretch of the city between the spaceport and their destination had been thick with smaller buildings, the exterior signs in the Kel Dor language suggesting that most were businesses. Now the buildings were larger, some set within walled enclosures. Ben checked his data-pad, using a comfortingly familiar planetary positioning system to compare their location with the maps, and found they were only forty meters from their objective. He pointed ahead and across the street. “There.”

What he was looking at was clearly an estate—one large ziggurat-shaped building, each of its four levels darker than the ones below it, graduating from thundercloud gray-black down to sky blue, surrounded by two-story outbuildings in similar colors, all within a wall made up of black wrought-durasteel posts with transparisteel sheets laid across them. The transparisteel was smooth and a little uneven, and Ben could visualize, perhaps as a tiny vision in the Force, Baran Do apprentices polishing it over the years, removing minute scratches, that had caused the transparent material to become slightly worn and misshapen. Through it, as he and Luke advanced, the buildings seemed to distort and sway.

They stopped before the gates, which were ajar and undefended. A path of red-orange flagstones led from there to the steps rising into the main building. The double front doors were also open, with light streaming out from the interior.

Luke looked at the approach and grinned.

“What's so funny?”

“Tradition. You'll see. C'mon.” Luke put on his serene Grand Master face, made sure his robes were smoothed into presentability, and headed in. With a quick check of his own hair, Ben followed, a pace back and to the right.

The entrance chamber of the temple of the Baran Do Sages was large and imposing. Black stone walls reached up more than six meters. White stone columns against those walls, rounded and slightly narrower at the base than the top, not only suggested that the ceiling would be kept at a distance but helped offset the darkness of the décor. The ceiling was of a blue-black stone and sparkled like a starry sky, while the floor was a brown permacrete polished smooth, perhaps even waxed. It was all dimly lit by blue glow rods at floor level against the walls.

Ben nodded, instantly grasping the intent of the decorative style. Sky above, ground below, darkness of the black holes to either side, columns suggesting the constructions or intents of living beings keeping those nightmarish celestial anomalies at bay.

Immediately opposite the main entrance was a raised platform with steps leading up to it. It was only a meter higher than the floor itself, and there was no furniture on it. Ben had half expected a throne of some sort, or a circle of seats like in the Masters' Chamber at the Jedi Temple. There was a Kel Dor woman standing on the platform, her robes white with curved dotted-line decorations in red and black; she was staring off at the left wall as Luke and Ben entered, and did not react to their arrival.

No other doors or hallways seemed to exit this chamber, but the square sheets of black stone on the walls, fitting together almost seamlessly,