Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [73]
And with the cold came silence.
Physical silence, deeper than a living creature can truly experience: not just the absence of external sound, but the absence of all concept of sound. No whisper of breath, no hush of blood coursing through arteries, no faintest beat of his heart. Not even the vaguest sensation of vibration, or pressure, or friction on his skin.
But the cold and the silence went deeper than the merely physical. They were in his dreams.
These dreams were glacially slow, actionless, featureless hours of empty staring into empty space, hours becoming years that stretched into numberless millennia, as one by one the stars went out. He could do nothing, for there was nothing to do.
Except watch the stars die.
And in their place was left nothing. Not even absence. Only him.
Floating. Empty of everything. Without thought, without sensation. Forever.
Almost.
His first thought in a million years trickled into his brain over the course of decades. Sleep. This is the end of everything. Nothing left but sleep.
The second thought, by contrast, followed instantly upon the second. Wait … somebody else is thinking with my mind.
Which meant he wasn’t alone at the end of the universe.
Even in frozen dreams of eternity, the Force was strong with him. He opened himself to the Sleep Thought and drew it into the center of his being, where with the Force to guide and sustain him, he could examine the thought, turn it this way and that like an unfamiliar stone.
It had weight, this thought, and texture: like a hunk of volcanic basalt around a uranium core, it was unreasonably dense, and its surface was pebbled, as though it had once been soft and sticky and somebody had rolled it across a field of fine gravel. As he let the Force take his perception into greater and greater focus and detail, he came to understand that each of these pebbles was a person—human or near-human, every single one, bound into an aggregate matrix of frozen stone.
As the Force took him deeper, he came to understand that this stone he held was also holding him; even as he turned it in his hand, it also surrounded and enclosed him—that it was a prison for every one of these pebble-lives, and that these imprisoned lives were also imprisoning him.
He was the stone himself, he discovered: the very matrix of dark frozen stone that bound them all. He trapped them and they trapped him, and neither could let go. They were bound together by the very structure of the universe.
Frozen by the Dark.
And here was another strangeness: Since when did he think of the structure of the universe as capital-D Dark? Even if there might be some trace of truth in that bleak perception, when had he become the kind of man who would surrender to it? If the Dark wanted to drag him into eternal emptiness, it was going to have to fight him for every millimeter.
He started looking for the way out. Which was also, due to the curious paradox inherent in his Force perception, the way in.
The imaginary thought-stone in his imaginary hand was a metaphor, he understood—even as was the frozen stone he had become—but it was also real on a level deeper than nonimaginary eyes could ever see. He was the stone … and so he did not need to reach out to touch the lives represented by the pebbles. He was touching them already.
He only had to pay attention.
But each life-pebble on which he focused gave back no hint of light. No perception even of the human being it represented, only a featureless nonreflective surface like a smoothed and rounded spheroid of powdered graphite. Each one he touched gave back no hope,