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“Then you’ve been corrupted,” Nelani said.

Brisha gave her a pitying look. “You’re so young. Nelani, wielders of the Force all face possible corruption, and many of them give in. It’s just the form that the corruption takes from dark side to light side that differs. The corrupt light-siders become hidebound, so governed by regulation and custom that they can no longer think, no longer feel, no longer adapt—it’s what destroyed the Jedi at the end of the Old Republic.”

“There’s something to that,” Jacen admitted. “You’re not the first person I’ve heard suggest a sort of light-side ossification. But that doesn’t prove that prolonged use of the dark side doesn’t inevitably lead to corruption.”

Brisha sighed, exasperated, and crossed her arms before her. “What is corruption, Jacen? A hard-line light-sider will say that any use of the Force for personal gain is ‘corrupt.’ But someone who mixes altruism with self-interest in very human measures, across a span of decades, isn’t corrupt; he or she is just behaving according to the nature of the species.”

Now she, rather than the items on the shelves, had Jacen’s attention. He moved over to stand before her. “Explain that.”

“I’d love to. But first, some context.”

Jacen heard Ben sigh. Jacen grinned, and Brisha’s smile matched his. Ben was as well behaved as anyone could expect, but his impatience with adult concerns such as providing context for a complicated issue matched that of any adolescent.

“This planetoid,” Brisha said, “was populated long before the miners came. A species of creature settled here. Desiccated bodies I’ve found in the deep places, and signs I’ve seen through the Force, indicate that they were akin to mynocks—silicon-based, invertebrate, subsisting on stellar radiation and silicate materials. The ones here evolved or mutated into a sapient species, over how many millennia I can’t speculate, and developed a society involving cultural hierarchies, stratification as we see in human cultures.”

Jacen nodded. “And the remnant Force energies I’m feeling originated with them?”

“Yes. Their records—for they invented a form of record keeping, a sort of information-imbued sculpture, some forms of which I’ve learned to translate—”

“One of the tassels?”

“Yes, one your expert probably couldn’t read. These creatures’ records indicate that at one point a ruling class exiled a whole subsociety, sealing them within caves and caverns of this asteroid, cutting them off from the stellar energies that sustained them. They lived there, slowly dying of starvation, sustaining themselves poorly off the mineral content of the stones within the asteroid. And it was there that one of their number learned to detect, and then manipulate, the Force. That one eventually became leader of the other exiles, then led them to break out of the asteroid interior and conquer the others.”

“So why aren’t all mynocks now Force-wielding star travelers ruling the galaxy?” Nelani asked.

Brisha shrugged. “I can only guess. In their writing, there’s a reference for the Home, this asteroid, plus mentions of the Return, suggesting that they could not spawn—or divide, as the mynocks do—anywhere but here. If that’s true, then they couldn’t spread too far through the galaxy, and a fatal contagion or similar disaster here could wipe out the entire species within a matter of years. The point, though, is that for quite a while they were a species led by a caste of Force-users, who eventually became a caste of dark side Force-users. They learned techniques related to their mynock natures, such as the ability to leach energy from living beings, including their own kind, at great distances, and associated skills with communicating instantaneously at those distances, a phenomenon the Jedi sometimes experience. They wielded tremendous amounts of dark side energy, and a lot of that energy was eventually radiated into the cavern system that had been their home during the exile, and which had subsequently become a sacred place to