Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 20_ The Final Prophecy - J. Gregory Keyes [62]
Now he had to revise all of that. Zonama Sekot was real, and it seemed not at all impossible that it could be the planet of legend.
Of course, in the legends it was taboo. The legends forbade even entering the galaxy where such a planet was found. What did that mean? Had the Yuuzhan Vong battled with Zonama Sekot in the past, and lost? Had Shimrra known about the planet’s presence here even before the invasion began? There had been rumors that Quoreal had balked at invading. Then Quoreal was dead, and Shimrra ascended to the throne. Had the Supreme Overlord gone against prophecy, against the gods themselves?
Or was the legend somehow wrong? Zonama Sekot certainly did not feel taboo.
It didn’t matter. This was his moment. With his prophecy proven true, more and more Shamed Ones would flock to him. His army would grow, unstoppable, until Shimrra fell, and Nom Anor rose—
Yes. Rose to govern not the glorious Yuuzhan Vong, but a state of Shamed Ones.
Ah, well. Better than death, and better than nothing.
A gasp from Nen Yim cut short his reverie. He looked and saw her bent over yet another plant, one that consisted of long filamentlike fronds. Or perhaps it wasn’t a plant, for the fronds seemed to be moving of their own accord.
“What is it?” he asked.
“A lim tree,” she murmured. She looked stunned. “Or a very close relative.”
Nom Anor had never heard of a lim tree. Before he could ask what one was, and why she seemed so surprised, she turned to him, her eyes nearly ferocious.
“Do you truly believe this is the planet of your prophecy?”
“Of course,” Nom Anor replied. “Why else would I risk the perils involved in finding it?”
“From whence came this prophecy?” she demanded.
“From a vision I had—of this world, shining like a beacon, like a new star in the skies of Yuuzhan’tar.”
“In the skies of Yuuzhan’tar?”
“That was my vision,” he said. “But prophecy is not always literal. We are in the sky of Yuuzhan’tar, though at such a vast distance that even the star this planet orbits is probably unseen. I believe it meant that Zonama Sekot was here, in the stars, waiting only for us to find it and be worthy of it. And so we have.”
“And you believe it will redeem the Shamed Ones?”
“Yes. But not just the Shamed Ones. Once they are redeemed, all of us are.”
“But this vision,” she persisted. “Where did it come from?”
“I do not know the true source of my visions,” Nom Anor said carefully. “Only that they are always true. Perhaps the gods send them. Perhaps this planet itself sent them. What does it matter?”
“Because that is a lim tree,” she said.
“I do not understand you.”
“The lim tree was a plant of the homeworld. It has long been extinct except as a code in the Qang qahsa. I grew one for myself, to adorn my apartment at Shimrra’s court.”
“And now you find one here. Curious.”
“No, not curious, impossible.”
He waited for her to explain further.
“These other things,” she said, “these plants and creatures around us, they share much with our own biota at the cellular and molecular level. That is one thing I came here to confirm—the Sekotan ship might have been a fluke, a false similarity that arose from similar engineering. But this life you see all around us evolved naturally, or at least most of it did. It does not bear the mark of shaping. And though, as I said, there is reason to believe we are biologically related to all of this—no other species I have seen here corresponds on any one-to-one basis with the extinct life-forms of the homeworld.”
“And yet this lim tree is one of our species.”
“Yes. The differences between this tree and a lim are small enough that they must have shared a common ancestor only a few millennia ago.”
“I still don’t understand the significance.