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If a species that had always been blind met a species that had always been deaf, how would they communicate? To Jacen, the answer was obvious: they would have to improvise a language based on a sense that they shared.

The pain from the slave seed was actually a form of communication, a primitive language that Jacen was slowly coming to comprehend, though he had not yet learned how to reply.

If the Force is life, how can there be life without the Force?

The realization did not come as a blinding revelation, but rather as a slow dawning of awareness, an incremental gathering of comprehension, so that on a steel-colored noon when he looked down from a hillock onto the dhuryam hive-island, he knew, and understood, and was neither suprised nor astonished at his new knowledge and understanding.

This was what he knew and understood: the answer for the Yuuzhan Vong was the same as the answer for himself.

There is no life without the Force.

The human eye does not register electromagnetic energy outside the tiny band of frequencies called visible light—but even though you can’t see them, those frequencies exist. The Yuuzhan Vong and their creations must participate in a part of the Force that is beyond the range of Jedi senses.

That’s all.

Jacen stood on the hillock, staring down at the dhuryam island with its ring of warrior-guards, and he thought, The Yuuzhan Vong aren’t the only ones who participate in a part of the Force that is outside the range of Jedi senses.

I do, too.

He had always had a particular gift for making friends with alien species. He used to call it empathy, but it had always been more than shared emotion—

It had been an improvised language that operated through a part of the Force that other Jedi didn’t seem able to sense.

That flash of empathy he’d gotten from Vergere—he had thought that was something she had projected, something she had done. What if it wasn’t? What if his empathy came from part of the Force that he could still touch?

Standing on the hillock under the blue-white fusionball noon, Jacen began a cycle of breath that would ease his mind into Jedi focus. He reached down inside himself, feeling for the presence of the slave seed that was the dhuryam’s link to him—and his link to the dhuryam.

He felt it, where it coiled along his nerves: an alien animal, sharing his body.

Hey there, little guy, he said inside himself. Let’s be friends.

The viewspider stood on a spray of nine slim jointed legs that arched high from its central hub before curving down to support its weight on grip-clawed feet. Below its central hub hung a transparent sac large enough to hold a Wookiee, filled to bulging with optical jelly. The central hub also held the viewspider’s brain, which integrated telepathic signals channeled from a variety of the slave seeds that drove the creatures in the Nursery. It integrated these signals into a holographic image, created within the jelly medium by the intersection of phased electromagnetic pulses from a cluster of glands where the jelly sac attached to the brain hub.

Nom Anor studied this image with a certain satisfaction, as did Vergere, who crouched on the chamber floor beyond the viewspider. Though he was not inclined to the doctrinaire fanaticism of, say, a Tsavong Lah, the executor had to admit that there were some ways in which Yuuzhan Vong bioformed creatures truly were far superior to their mechanical counterparts in the New Republic. The viewspider itself, for example. Though not very intelligent, it did at least understand that its task was to maintain a real-time image of the Nursery centered on one specific subject, and to follow that subject wherever he might go. This it did very well.

The subject in question was Jacen Solo.

Nom Anor stretched onto his toes to stroke the viewspider’s hub in a specific way, so that Jacen’s image shrank, bringing into view more and more of the Nursery around him: the slaves who toiled in the wheel of domains that radiated from the dhuryam hive-island. Jacen