AFTER THREE WEEKS ON A WORLD where the insects had wingspans of three meters and eyes as big as my head, I was very glad to bring out my universal beacon and activate the call for a ride.

I was a young biology student trying to get some fieldwork done in the remote Agoliba-Tu system.

Agoliba-Tu had two life-supporting planets: warm, jungle-covered Agoliba-Ado (where I was) and icy, snowbound Agoliba-Ena (where I needed to go). The orbits of the two planets, with their divergent ecosystems and distinct fauna and flora, were separated by an asteroid belt. There was a debate between my professors over whether Agoliba-Ado or Agoliba-Ena had given birth to life first and colonized the other one, or if life had evolved independently on the two worlds. I was supposed to gather data that could help settle the debate.

Since there were no trade routes through the Agoliba-Tu system, and my university was far too budget constrained to maintain a dedicated research vessel, I had to rely on the kindness of strangers who occasionally jumped out of hyperspace in the system on their way to somewhere else. The universal beacon let anyone popping out of hyperspace know that I was interested in hitching a ride. Watching the flashing beacon and listening to its gentle beeps, I fell asleep.

The noise and turbulence of a spacecraft landing startled me awake.

The ship wasn’t something you saw every day: a two-seat starfighter with an A shape, a worn paint job, and plenty of marks and dents all over the hull. It was probably an old military surplus vehicle that had been converted to civilian use and patched and repaired so many times over the years that it was hard to say if any original components remained.

“Need a ride?” The pilot’s boyish, happy eyes twinkled. The lived-in state of the cockpit told me he had been traveling for a long time. “Hop in. I’m Luke.”

We chatted as Luke piloted the A-wing through the asteroid belt. He explained that he’d modified the cockpit in part to take on passengers on his long flights around the galaxy as a way to relieve some boredom.

I had a hard time figuring out who Luke was. Some of the things he said made it seem like he had been a fighter in the Rebellion against the Empire, but once he heard that I was an academic, he started peppering me with questions about the worlds I had visited and whether I had seen any signs of ancient ruins of the Jedi.

“Are you an archaeologist or something?” I asked.

He chuckled. “Something like that. I’m trying to learn as much as I can about the Jedi.”

Personally, I thought a lot of the legends about the Jedi were either exaggerations or simple tall tales. But many members of the public, who had little knowledge or interest in actual galactic history, seemed obsessed with these legends. Maybe this Luke was some kind of smuggler who specialized in Jedi-related “artifacts.” I didn’t want to pry. The galaxy was a large place, and it had room for all kinds of eccentric characters.

Regardless of what his real profession was, he was a heck of a pilot. The asteroid belt was packed with obstacles ranging from planetoids as large as cities to rocks barely bigger than my fist. Luke wove and dodged among them as naturally as a fish darting through a coral reef, and he squeezed through some cracks so narrow that I had to close my eyes and pray to every deity I knew in the universe.

“Ha, that’s interesting!” he said.

I opened my eyes and saw two bright dots of light flittering and dancing beyond a large asteroid. Their movement reminded me both of the food-signaling dance of Hrelan bees and the mating ritual of Awalian newts. It was so orderly that I couldn’t take my eyes away. Are they alive?

“Want a closer look?” Luke asked.

I nodded. No biologist would have said no to that.

Luke piloted the A-wing closer. As we approached, the two pinpricks of light suddenly froze, as if aware of our presence, and then zoomed about five hundred meters away, where they began to dance again.

“They’re playful!” we both exclaimed, and then we laughed together.

I felt like a kid going after Orowatan fireflies in the backyard. Luke nudged the A-wing to follow the retreating lights, and we began a new dance among the asteroids.

The “fireflies” led us on a merry chase, and Luke swerved and swooped through the dense space debris, nimbly following along. Eventually, the two bright sparks disappeared inside a large cave on an asteroid as big as a moon.

By that time, both of us were eager to track the new creatures to their home. Luke landed the A-wing right outside the mouth of the cave. We sealed our helmets for spacewalking and climbed out of the cockpit.

Gravity on the asteroid was light but sufficient to keep us securely rooted to the surface. Gingerly, we hop-walked to the cave, whose mouth was smoothly polished, as though it had been carved out by a river. I was baffled by the unusual geologic feature. An asteroid that small couldn’t have had flowing water.

We stepped into the cave, which was about twenty meters across and about as tall. We turned on our helmet lights and scanned the inside. The walls were covered by long, smooth grooves that again indicated the presence of flowing liquid sometime in the past.

“There!” Luke pointed deeper into the cave, and I saw the flickering lights of the fireflies far in the distance.

We hiked for about twenty minutes as the cave twisted and turned, going deeper and deeper into the interior of the asteroid. My head-up display showed that the temperature was rising steadily (though I still wouldn’t call it “warm”). Each time we got close to the lights, they flitted deeper into the cave. Eventually, we arrived at a smooth translucent membrane that barred our way like a frozen waterfall.

Luke reached out to touch the barrier. It gave a little and bounced back, like a rubber sheet.

“This is probably their hive,” I said into the helmet microphone, drawing on what little I knew of the biology of near-vacuum ecosystems. “There are some social insects and brinyvores that live in airless environments such as ocean-bottom trenches or shielded moons, subsisting on radiation and other sources of energy. Maybe this barrier is something they’ve built to protect their home.”

I was about to suggest that we turn back—almost any animal would get quite hostile when intruders invaded its home—when Luke held up a hand for me to be quiet. He pressed his helmet’s visor up against the barrier and looked through.

“There’s writing on the other side,” he said, the excitement in his voice palpable.

I pressed my visor up against the barrier, too. The cave continued beyond the membrane and then made a wide turn to the left a few meters in. With the dim light from our helmets, I could just make out letter-like markings on the wall on the other side of the barrier.

Before I could stop him, Luke took out a utility knife and cut a slit through the membrane. He pressed his way inside, and I followed.

Once we were through, the two sides of the slit joined back together and the membrane resealed itself. I pressed my hands against the barrier. The rubber-like sheet seemed to have healed completely, leaving no sign of our surgery.

“I don’t understand…” Luke’s puzzled voice came over the comm.

I turned to find Luke already at the wall examining the writing. I joined him and saw the source of his puzzlement. The markings were regular and resembled writing, but they didn’t belong to any script or alphabet I had ever seen.

Up close, I realized that the letters seemed to be carved in relief in the cave wall, and they gave off a faint glow. Luke ran his hands over the letters.

“These…look alive,” Luke muttered.

I had to agree. The markings pulsed and brightened momentarily as his gloved hands ran over them.

“I wish Threepio were here,” he muttered. “He’d know how to read this. All I can make out is ‘mist.’”

“Mist?” I asked.

He shook his head, frustrated. “Could be related to the Jedi…but I’m just guessing. Looks like someone was here before us. I wonder if this is a warning or an invitation.”

It was true that some social insects, though individually not very intelligent, possessed sentience collectively as colonies. But I had never heard of any that communicated by writing inside their hives.

A growing unease filled my heart. “I have a bad feeling about this,” I muttered.

As if in response, the floor of the cave lurched and we fell down. A faint glow lit the cave walls in pulsing rings. We felt a bone-rattling rumble that came from somewhere deep down, and the floor and walls shook some more.

“Let’s get out of here,” Luke said, and he pulled me up. We sliced through the membrane again, and hop-ran for the cave opening.

In the low gravity, our footing was already unstable, but our escape was made even more difficult by the constant jostling and buckling of the ground as the asteroid quakes continued. Like stumbling grasshoppers on Agoliba-Ado, we finally made our way to the last turn in the cave, and I expected to see the stars as we bounced around the last bend….

And we did, except that the oval slice of the heavens was shrinking, like a great eye closing.

“Run!” Luke yelled into his helmet mike. “This must be a cave-in!” We redoubled our pace.

Just then the ground buckled violently again, and I was tossed off my feet and slammed against the cave wall. I tried to get up, but my right leg would not support my weight. I almost blacked out from the pain.

Luke had gone on running about twenty meters before realizing that I wasn’t following. Because of the light gravity, it took him several skidding attempts before he could stop and turn around.

“Go on! Go!” I screamed. I could see that the cave opening was now just a narrow slit. “You have to get out!”

“I’m not going to leave you behind,” he said, his voice determined. He bounded back, slung my arm over his shoulder, and began to hop-run for the opening again. My right leg hung uselessly, either broken or badly sprained. At least the light gravity made it possible for him to carry me.

But the ground continued to contort and shake violently, which slowed our pace. We watched helplessly as the starry sky narrowed to a slit and then disappeared completely.

By the time we made it to what used to be the cave opening, we found a solid wall in our faces. Tracing the jagged line in the wall, I realized that the wall seemed to be made from a giant pair of jaws fused together, and we were on the wrong side of the mouth.

All of a sudden, everything made sense.

I slumped to the floor and hung my head between my knees. “We’re inside an exogorth,” I said.

“Ah…” Luke let out a held breath. “A giant space slug. Han would have—Never mind.”

I didn’t bother correcting him for using the nontechnical name. Scientific terminology could wait until we weren’t dinner for an asteroid-sized predator.

Luke looked at me. “You’re the biologist here, so tell me: are we in danger?”

I shrugged. “Not immediately.”

The truth is, even today we don’t know a lot about exogorths: giant, silicon-based creatures that live on asteroids and can grow large enough to swallow starships. It’s not even clear how many species of these slugs there are, much less what their individual biology is like.

What is known is that they tend to live in environments where opportunities to feed are few and far between, and the exogorths have an extremely slow metabolism (they aren’t called space slugs for nothing).

“So we could just wait here until it feeds again and escape when it opens its mouth?”

“In theory, yes. But…”

I explained that an exogorth rarely moved, and when it did move, it could do so only in quick bursts that exhausted its entire supply of energy. After that exertion to swallow us, it probably wasn’t going to move again for years.

“Years?”

“Maybe decades. Probably takes that long to fully digest us.”

“This is like being in the belly of a sarlacc,” Luke muttered. He pounded on the rock walls around him.

“If I were you, I’d stop moving around so much. You’ll use up your oxygen supply in no time.”

“Well, I have no intention of waiting around to be digested.”

“We don’t have many options,” I said. “This thing is basically made from kilometers-thick layers of rocks. I didn’t bring any asteroid mining equipment. Did you?”

“I’ve been in plenty of hopeless situations,” he said. “Let’s look around. Maybe there’s another way out. After all, we know someone has been here before.”

I very much doubted that there was another way out, but something in his voice made me think, Why not?

We got up and, with him supporting my weight, limped deeper into the beast.

As we slashed our way back through the rubbery film, Luke and I speculated on how our host lived.

“This is clearly a sophisticated predator,” I said.

“A sophisticated space slug? How?”

I explained that the space slug—it was just easier to use the common term—had probably developed those “fireflies” as lures to attract prey.

“Like an opee sea killer or a deep-sea finned-fry-trap,” Luke said, catching on.

“Exactly.” I was glad to be talking to someone with a quick mind.

Abruptly, Luke stopped and held up a hand. We were now about a hundred meters beyond the point where we had first seen those letters on the wall.

A piece of wreckage barred our way. It was so old and deformed that it was hard to tell what kind of spacecraft or ground-based vehicle it had once been.

With Luke supporting me and carefully pointing out every foothold, we made our way over the wreck. Many of the components had dissolved away, leaving behind a mostly metal skeleton. I got the sense that it had been there for centuries, maybe even longer. We didn’t see any bodies.

“I think whoever wrote the glowing sign near the entrance came on this,” Luke said.

A chill went down my spine. “Why do you say that?”

Luke pointed to a few carved markings on the wreckage. “They’re in the same style.”

I couldn’t really tell, but I trusted that Luke knew what he was talking about. “But…if the wreck is here, doesn’t that mean they came but never left?”

Instead of answering, Luke pressed ahead determinedly.

The cave around us grew even more sinister in my eyes.

The rubbery film that we had encountered earlier turned out to be only the first of several similar barriers. The barriers got thicker as we went deeper into the exogorth, though all shared the same quality of self-sealing after we went through. We also passed by a few other signs of past victims: the metal remains of a helmet; a piece of some kind of erosion-resistant fabric; a pile of twisted electronic components, long decayed beyond use. I wondered how many others had followed the playful “fireflies” in here over the millennia and never returned.

Luke stopped again and let out a long whistle. Standing next to him, I was also rendered speechless by the sight.

We had emerged into an enormous cavern that was at least fifty meters tall and maybe half a kilometer in length and width. A few meters in from the entrance was the shore of a lake that filled the rest of the cavern.

The beams from our weak helmet lights should never have been enough to illuminate that vast space, and yet I could see the outlines of the distant walls on the other shore of the lake quite distinctly. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the entire cavern was lit by a faint blue glow that came from the walls. Bright spots of light pulsed in the ceiling, and as they were reflected in the placid surface of the lake, it seemed as if we were floating in space, surrounded by stars.

A loud series of screeches pierced the absolute silence in the cavern, and the bright pulsing lights in the ceiling began to move. They dropped down, gathered into small groups, and headed straight for us.

Luke pushed me into a nook in the wall next to us. He ducked into it right after me and, standing with his back to me, got into a defensive crouch.

A lightsaber came to life in his hands.

In the bright glow of that torch, I saw monsters swooping out of the dark in swarms. Long, triangular wings; elongated heads, half of which were taken up with jaws filled with sharp fangs that glowed bright blue; loud shrieks that merged into one continuous blood-curdling howl.

I shuddered. They reminded me of the bat-like predators that hunted in swarms on the planet Touksingal, where my dissertation advisor had lost an arm to the bloodthirsty creatures. I was sure I was looking at a variety of mynocks that hadn’t been studied before.

(The scientific part of my mind realized that the presence of wings meant that the cavern was filled with air. I filed that information away to make use of later, when we weren’t under attack.)

Luke stood at the opening of our hideout and spun his lightsaber into a brilliant, impenetrable wheel of deadly beauty. I saw wings, heads, torsos being severed by the humming blade of that weapon, and though it seemed as if thousands of monsters were attacking us, not a single one made it through.

In the glow from the lightsaber, I was surprised to see no frown of rage or grimace of terror on Luke’s face; instead, his features were set in an expression of calm…sorrow, as though he was mourning the deaths of the monsters attacking us, as though he was reluctantly doing what had to be done, unswayed by anger, hatred, or fear.

As though they could sense Luke’s skill, the monsters suddenly changed tactics. Turning as one, the swarm swerved away from our nook and skimmed over the surface of the lake. Crisscrossing ripples from flying creatures dipping into the water disturbed the tranquil mirror.

What is the purpose of a lake in the middle of an exogorth? My mind churned in search of a solution.

Luke, taking advantage of the temporary relief, deactivated his lightsaber and stood at the opening to the nook, panting and watching our attackers. I crawled up next to him.

“Turn off your helmet light,” I whispered urgently.

“What?”

“They’re drawn to it!”

He hesitated. Even though the light from our helmets was weak, there was a psychological comfort in its presence that was hard to let go.

“Hurry! We have to move away as soon as you turn off your light. We can’t stay here.”

“But there’s no better cover—”

“We’ll die if we stay here!” I slowed down, articulating each word. “You have to trust me.”

We locked gazes, and the doubt in his eyes was replaced after a moment by resolution. He nodded and turned off the helmet light. Then he grabbed mine, flicked it on, and tossed it on the ground, right in front of the nook.

“What are you doing?” I hissed. “Give it back!”

“You have to trust me.”

Ducking down, he indicated that I should get on his back. I complied without complaining. Then he looked at the sheer cave wall to our right and jumped.

My heart leapt into my throat, but I bit down on my bottom lip to keep from screaming. In the light gravity, his jump took us up about four meters before he grabbed on to a ledge. Then, hand over hand, he shuffled to the right about twenty meters before he found another narrow ledge under his feet, where he set me down. I pushed back from the edge and pressed my back against the cave wall.

The bright swarm, which had skimmed all the way to the other side of the lake, turned around and headed back for the spot where we had been hiding.

I found the wall I was leaning against covered by a layer of slimy mud. I grabbed handfuls of it and began to slather the mud over Luke’s suit. After a moment, he understood what I was after and began to slather the mud over mine. Soon we were both completely covered by the slime, which hopefully masked our smells and heat signatures.

Something wriggled in my fist as I dug for another handful of mud. Without thinking, I tossed whatever it was into the lake below. With a gentle hiss, I watched as a white, larva-like creature the size of my forearm writhed in the water, its skin bubbling and dissolving. A few seconds later, it was completely gone.

“Probably strong acid,” I whispered into the comm. “Could also be filled with aggressive microorganisms.”

The bright glowing swarm had arrived at the nook, still illuminated by my left-behind helmet light. Wave after wave of the winged monsters dove at where Luke had been standing but a moment earlier, and we heard spitting noises and splashes, as though it were raining in the cave.

After a few seconds, the helmet light went out.

Luke pressed his helmet visor against mine. We both nodded, finally understanding each other.

“We’re in the stomach of the slug,” I whispered.

The monsters had moved away into the lake to fill their mouths and bellies with the deadly corrosive liquid, which they spat out as a kind of venom. If we had remained where we were, no matter how skillfully Luke wielded his weapon, he couldn’t possibly have protected both of us from a pouring acid rain. My realization that we were inside the digestive organ of the space slug had prompted me to insist on moving away.

“I didn’t want us to be killed,” Luke said, “but I also didn’t want to keep on killing them.” There was a compassionate strength in his voice that felt comforting. “I had to leave a lure in place so they wouldn’t keep on looking for us.”

Learning from the trick the slug had used against us, he had left my helmet light behind to draw the attention of the mynocks so we could save ourselves—as well as save them.

We drifted across the deadly lake. I gazed by turns up at the pulsing lights on the ceiling—the monsters had gone back to sleep after failing to find us—and down at dim shadows swimming in the depths below.

Our macabre raft was made from the skulls and wings of the mynocks Luke had killed earlier. The hollow skulls provided buoyancy, and the wings, tied together into a large sheet laid on top, made a platform on which we huddled. Since we couldn’t be sure that any other material we had with us would withstand the acid in the lake, using the bodies of creatures who lived and hunted with the acid seemed the best choice.

“Who knew there would be a whole other world in here?” said Luke. He was oaring us across the lake, using a paddle made from the bones and wings of the flying monsters.

I said nothing. The stress and excitement from the attack of the killer mynocks had made me forget the reality of our situation for a moment. But now that the crisis was past, I was feeling despondent. My right leg throbbed. I was trapped in the belly of a monster.

“I’m getting used to the smells,” said Luke. “Wonder if we can tell if something is edible by our noses.”

Even seemingly good news about our situation could not cheer me up. Since finding out that the inside of the slug’s stomach was filled with air and life, Luke and I had cautiously taken off our helmets; it was also an experiment partly driven by desperation, as our suits’ air supplies couldn’t have lasted much longer. The self-sealing barriers we had passed through evidently acted as airlocks. The air was indeed breathable, though it was filled with strange, fetid smells. It was also quite cold, and I shivered as our breath misted.

“I really wish I knew more about biology,” Luke said. “Maybe you could give me some lessons as long as we’re in here.”

I wanted to scream at him to shut up. His relentless patter was driving me crazy. We were going to die, and he was talking about eating and biology lessons!

“You should stop the raft here, and I’ll just roll into the lake,” I said. My voice sounded dull, already dead. “Would be quicker to go that way rather than waiting to starve slowly after days of wandering around in this place.”

“Sure,” Luke’s voice was calm, as if my suggestion was perfectly reasonable. “But you should probably strip off your suit first. I’m not sure that the synthetic materials would be healthy for our host. Might give it indigestion.”

I was outraged at this suggestion. “I’m sure it wouldn’t be bothered by something like that—”

“Why would there be all these creatures living in here?” Luke asked. “They’re parasites, aren’t they? That can’t be healthy. Maybe it’s having stomach trouble.”

“They’re not necessarily ‘parasites.’ I’m not completely surprised that there’s a whole ecosystem in here. You have a whole ecosystem of microorganisms living inside you, too, some of them helping you with digestion, others necessary for regulating your body chemistry.”

“I have monsters living inside me?”

“If you swallowed something small and foreign, it would probably think so,” I said. Luke’s questions had triggered the professorial side of me. “The slug has to digest carbon-based prey as well as silicon-based food, and the creatures who live in here probably exist in symbiosis with their host. Over time, they help break down the bodies of prey and intruders into forms that can be more easily absorbed by the host.”

“So each of us is as complicated as this slug,” he said. “We’re entire systems living in balance, not self-contained individuals.”

I nodded.

“The universe is full of wonders,” he said, his voice full of…joy.

I looked around me, and everything appeared in a new light. I was no longer in a hopeless tale of terror but being given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I could probably devote my career to studying the ecosystem in there, an environment no other scientist had explored.

I saw the grin on Luke’s face, and suddenly I understood. He had seen the despair in me, and reminding me of what I loved and why I had become a biologist was how he gave me hope again.

“Thank you,” I said.

“We’re going to get out of here,” he said. “Just learn as much as you can while you’re still inside. I certainly want to learn all I can about those glowing letters—” He pointed to the wall we were approaching.

I was squinting to make out what he was pointing at when something massive bumped at us from below, hard. Everything exploded into chaos: Luke and I rolled off the raft; a massive tentacle broke through the surface and slammed down, breaking the raft apart; a bright glow lit the length of the tentacle looming over us like a spacecraft from some unknown world; the pulsing lights of the flying monsters hanging on the ceiling scattered, screeching all the while.

The cold solvent chilled me instantly, and then, a second later, a burning sensation covered every inch of my face. I closed my eyes and mouth, but I had already swallowed some of the deadly liquid, and I could feel my throat burn as I struggled to suppress the desire to scream and swallow more. The burning liquid seeped into my cuffs and collar, and pain like I had never felt before burned my hands and neck, traveling up my arms and down my chest.

I wasn’t going to make it out after all.

A powerful arm grabbed me around my waist and pushed me through the icy lake.

I blacked out.

“You’ll be all right.…We’re past the stomach now….”

Luke’s visage floated in and out of focus. His face was full of scars, and the deadly digestive juices of the space slug had eaten away his beard. Our suits had offered some protection for the rest of our bodies, but the exposed parts were burned. He looked haggard, worn, but still unbowed.

“Water…” I croaked. But the pain was so overwhelming that my feverish brain shut down again.

When I regained consciousness, I felt something sweet and refreshing being poured into my mouth. I forced my parched tongue to separate from the roof of my mouth and swallowed the life-giving water gratefully.

After I finally stopped drinking, Luke fed me bite-size pieces of something soft and cream-colored. It tasted like roasted flesh. I felt strength returning to my limbs. Even my right leg, which was tied to a splint, seemed to throb less.

“What…what am I eating?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know,” Luke said, chuckling. “There are fungi growing in the gut of the space slug, along with small creatures that I’ve never even seen pictures of. I tried to eat small pieces of each and see how my body reacted. There were a few that made me sick, but this is safe.”

“And the water? How did you get the water?”

“I was once a moisture farmer,” he said. “I can get water out of anything.”

Somehow his smile and upbeat tone, despite the fact that we were both injured, made me feel as though being trapped inside a space slug wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

“I guess we keep on going?” I asked. “I want to see what’s in this thing’s gut before I die.”

“Of course,” Luke said. “And I’m going to find out who wrote those glowing messages. Oh, and we’re not going to die. I don’t have a bad feeling about this.”

Time inside the exogorth didn’t work the same way it did outside. Without a spinning planet under our feet or automatically synced chronos on a spaceship, our circadian rhythms soon went awry. We slept when we were tired, ate when we were hungry, drank when we were thirsty, and explored every path open to us. I had no idea how many days we spent inside the slug, whose interior offered a whole universe to explore.

Perpetually feverish, racked with pain and discomfort, and facing danger at every turn, Luke and I nonetheless managed to map out practically every square meter of space that we could reach. The exogorth was a maze of tunnels and interconnecting chambers. Some of the chambers were mired in perpetual darkness, while others were lit with various kinds of luminescence, biologically generated and otherwise.

The glowing signs appeared several more times. Sometimes they consisted of writing that Luke pored over for hours, trying to decipher its mystery. Other times they were paintings, abstract curlicues and starbursts and crosshatching woven together to present awe-inspiring scenes that took up a whole wall. We gazed at them as though looking at the swirling, churning galaxy itself. These tapestries of light were both map and territory.

“Whoever they were, they were fantastic artists,” said Luke.

I had to agree. But I was admiring a great artist myself: the laws of nature that made the exogorth possible.

The chambers presented a variety of climates and fauna and flora, as though they were individual worlds connected by hyperspace jumps. We passed through mist-filled chambers populated by silicon animal-plants that seemed to ooze as well as walk; we crawled through wet, almost tropical tunnels that were densely carpeted by mosslike fungi that tasted of spices and gave us lurid dreams; we trudged through swampy caverns where giant serpentlike creatures peeked out of the muck from time to time, gazing at us with glowing eyes on top of stalks.

“Nobody is going to believe any of this,” I said. “No one ever thought to look inside an exogorth for life.”

“Nobody believed me when I set out to recover the knowledge of the Jedi, either,” said Luke.

“Aren’t the Jedi mostly a myth?” I asked.

“As much as new worlds waiting inside space slugs,” he said.

“But magic isn’t the same as science.”

He laughed at that. “Real magic is always knowledge. The galaxy is knowable, and that’s what makes it wondrous.”

Time after time, we fell into traps or monsters came after us. Whether the creatures we encountered were parasites or simply semi-independent organs of the space slug, Luke always managed to get us out of those scrapes. The space slug must have been so sick of the stomachache we were giving it as we continuously defied its attempts to kill and digest us.

I took copious notes and drew sketches. Luke and I discussed my biological theories and speculations about all the mini-ecosystems we encountered along the way. We also talked about the luminous writing and drawings, and Luke explained to me that he thought they were related to the Jedi religion. The gathering of knowledge in the face of our certain doom kept us sane and gave us the drive to go on, step after step, fight after fight.

Then one day we took a new turn and emerged in a chamber we had not been to before.

The semispherical cavern was covered by a soft carpet of grasslike vegetation, and the entire roof glowed with a pearlescent luster that made it brighter than all the other places we had been to. An altar-like structure constructed from neatly stacked rocks dominated the far wall. Despite all the wonders we had already seen, that chamber took our breaths away.

“I think…this was built by them,” Luke said. He did not need to explain who he meant.

We approached the altar and saw a group of life-size sculptures on top. There were three of them: one human and two from an insectoid species. All three were dressed in flowing robes, and the carving of the folds in the clothing was so intricate that they seemed to be flapping in a breeze.

“No sign of erosion,” Luke said. “It’s as if they were carved yesterday. I can’t even imagine how this was possible.”

The three figures stood in a circle and were all looking up at the glowing ceiling of the dome. Though I couldn’t read the insectoid expressions, the woman’s face was in a state of calm rapture, as though praying. There was more glowing writing near the feet of the figures, though we still couldn’t read it except for the symbol that Luke thought meant “mist.”

“Beauty is a language of its own,” Luke said. He sat down before the altar, leaned back, and admired the statues. I sat down next to him and did the same.

“They probably made these before they died,” I said. “This was their last defiant gesture to the universe, to proclaim that they were here.”

“That’s not a bad last message.”

A sense of peace came over us. The weariness from days of hiking through the maze inside the space slug, always having to stay vigilant, lifted. Somehow, I could tell that we would be safe there. It was a spiritual place, a refuge.

We fell asleep.

“Wake up! Wake up!”

I woke up, still confused and groggy. Luke was shaking my shoulders and pointing at the statues. I looked, and then all drowsiness left me as my heart pounded wildly.

The three statues had moved while we were asleep, and they were looking down at us. The compound eyes of the two insectoids appeared like honeycombs while the woman’s gaze was placid and warm, the light of life shining in those silicate eyes. She was leaning toward us, her hands outstretched.

“I…don’t understand,” I said.

Luke took a few steps closer to the statues.

“Don’t!” I shouted. Visions of how we had come to be inside the space slug haunted me. What if it was another trap? What if we were simply seeing what we most wanted to see? Wasn’t hope also the greatest lure and bait?

But Luke’s face looked rapturous. “It’s safe. I can hear them.”

“Hear them? What are you talking about?”

He waved at me to be quiet and walked all the way up to the altar. He bowed to the three figures and then raised his supplicating hands to the woman, grasping her stone fingers.

Luke shuddered as though struck by lightning.

I ran over and tried to pull him off but couldn’t. His body grew stiff as his movements slowed. He seemed to have become a part of the statue as life drained out of him. I screamed in despair.

Then he let go and fell back onto the ground, gasping. I rushed up to him and cradled his limp figure in my lap. Sweat drenched his face, and he looked as exhausted as if he had been physically exerting himself. But there was a look of pure wonder on his face.

“I heard them. I heard them.”

It has been a long time….

Once, the galaxy was a different place. The stars were younger and closer to each other, and some of the spinning globes around them were still raw, unformed. But the wanderlust was just as strong and the sense of wonder as insatiable.

The three of us, Shareen, Awglk, and Wkk’e, were master weavers of the Luminous Mist. Our art was to knot and entwine the strings of Mist that cradled all the sentient species and connected the far-flung worlds to one another to create glowing portraits of the Mist’s all-encompassing magnificence. The Mist connects all of us and grows from all of us; it endows birdsong and cwilikdance with joy; it uplifts the downtrodden with laughter; it comforts the left behind when their loved ones fuse into the Mist-Beyond; it’s the bright essence that pulses within each cell of our being, far more important than the superficiality of our rough material shells.

We traveled around the galaxy seeking out new wonders to be depicted on our loom, to give the ineffable form and color.

One day, we landed in a belt of stones strung out in space like a trail of crumbs in a dark forest. The sense of foreboding was palpable.

Bright sparks flashed among the stones and danced away. Excitement. Thrills. Adventure.

I know, a Mist-Weaver is not supposed to crave these things.

But the heart wants what the heart wants. We followed the sparks.

Into the trap we fell, like ships tumbling down a gravity well. We were sealed inside the belly of the beast. No crumb trails led to the way out. In circles we turned, twisting, winding, gyrating, like a shuttle caught in an endless back-and-forth that led to no new pattern, no advancement, no way through.

We sat down, ready to die.

Wkk’e was the one who would not give up. It was the nature of members of her species to pass from the larval stage to the adult stage by enclosing themselves inside cocoons in which the children slept and dreamed the Long Dream.

“What if we built cocoons for ourselves out of the Luminous Mist?” she asked.

So we wove our masterpiece, the most beautiful weaving in the history of Mist-Weavers. We spun the formless form of the Luminous Mist into resilient silk strands that contained the hidden dimensions of the universe; we twisted them into yarn that was strong enough to bind time; we wove them into a sheath that we wrapped around ourselves to slow time to a crawl—a shroud and a birth caul at once.

Inside this cocoon, the three of us waited. We stretched one lifetime into thousands. While an eon passed in the grand universe, but a second had ticked by within. We waited as the beast that swallowed us grew. We waited as more adventurers came after us and died after their brief sojourns. We waited as we forgot what else to do, content to let time devour us, even as we sought to stop its passage.

Once in a while, when visitors came, we pulled aside a few strands in the cocoon and let a bit of time slip in. We liked to watch the strangers.

“This one is unusual,” said Wkk’e.

“Yes, I sense it, too,” said Awglk. “I’ve never seen such a bright Mist Heart. It’s more brilliant than a thousand suns.”

We admired the Bright-Heart for a while, and then I noticed something else.

“I sense a rot in the Mist,” I said. It had been millennia since we last gazed outside the cocoon into the grand, Mist-filled universe. “There are…so many holes in the Mist. A darkness has come and corrupted it.”

The pain of watching our beloved Mist so debased was wrenching.

“Bright-Heart means to restore the beauty of the Mist,” I said.

“How do you know this?” asked Wkk’e.

“Bright-Heart wants what all bright hearts want,” I said.

“But he’s trapped here, just as we are,” said Awglk.

Trapped. I thought we had found a way to escape death, but we had only been lured by the fear of death into imprisoning ourselves in stasis. I hadn’t realized how much I missed the turbulent flow of time, the violent palpitations of hope. Until Bright-Heart had come.

“We must offer him our help,” I said.

And I explained how.

Wkk’e and Awglk were silent for a while.

Awglk asked, “Are you sure?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not sure. Were we sure of the future on the day we fell in? None of us can ever be sure of the future. But we can hope. And without hope, we’ll never know.”

Wkk’e and Awglk responded in the way I knew they would, from the Book of Luminous Mist: “Hope is the knowing heart of Eternity.”

“Time flows incredibly slowly for them. Even as they sped up the flow with a small slit in their cocoon, it took them all the days we’ve been trapped in the exogorth to have that short conversation.”

Luke tried to explain the Mist-Weavers’ offer to me. He spoke of how much we still didn’t understand about the Force, of ancient wisdom and lost arts; he described the way time could be converted into energy and vice versa; he drew pictures with a stick in the mossy ground to show me how cocoons could be unwound in an instant to unleash eons of pent-up time, like a massive flood held back by a dam until released with an explosion.

I didn’t understand most of it, to be honest. All I knew was that the Mist-Weavers had figured out a way to save us.

“You mean there’s a way out?” I exclaimed. “That’s wonderful!”

“They can’t unwind the cocoons themselves,” Luke said. His voice trembled, and I sensed that something terrible and momentous was being unveiled to me, even if I didn’t understand the full import of his words. “I have to cut the cocoons open with my lightsaber.”

“Then let’s do it!” I said. The heat of hope filled my chest, drowning out the vague sense of dread.

“You don’t understand,” Luke said. “They’ll die.”

His words pounded against my heart, as heavy as stones. I stumbled back. “Oh.” I tried to find something more appropriate to say, but my mind was blank, overwhelmed by the revelation.

I looked at Luke and took stock of our situation. There were lesions on our faces, and our wounds had never fully healed. The food we were eating inside the exogorth was deficient in certain nutrients and not fully compatible with our metabolism. Though we had tried to keep a positive attitude, our bodies were slowly, inexorably failing. The cocoon of decay was tightening around us, and I knew that we were growing weaker and sicker with each passing day. We weren’t going to last much longer.

Luke’s eyes were locked on to the statues. He sat there, unmoving, as though he had turned to stone himself.

It was one thing to sacrifice yourself for something you believed in, but how much heavier was the burden of accepting someone else’s sacrifice?

I watched Luke’s face go through a range of emotions: sorrow, regret, terror, anger.

I watched him pace around the chamber and remonstrate with the statues, pleading for another way.

I watched him sinking to the ground in despair, cradling his head between his hands.

He muttered to himself, and I caught only fragments of sentences.

“I’ve seen too many sacrifices.…Obi-Wan…If only Master Yoda could have taught…I can’t…useless…”

I left him alone with his thoughts and went away to collect food and water. I couldn’t stand to watch him struggle with an unbearable weight, and I didn’t know how to help him.

When I returned, I saw that Luke was again holding hands with the statue of the woman. His body was shaking violently.

Alarmed, I ran up to help him, but he let go and stumbled back. I caught him and held him up.

“I once watched a dear friend, who was also my teacher, face the very embodiment of evil in a duel,” he whispered.

I listened, knowing that no response was required.

“He knew that he couldn’t overcome his opponent by force, and yet he needed to save me and our friends. So when he saw that I was near the ship that would take us to safety, he stopped fighting and allowed his opponent to cut him down. But in fact, he had released himself from this world and become part of the Force. What the enemy had cut down was only an empty cloak.”

I could only imagine what an awe-inspiring scene was summarized by those simple words.

“Surprised, the enemy focused all his attention on the discarded cloak, forgetting about me and my friends. That was my teacher’s intent: to use himself as a lure to distract the monster. We escaped, and I have never been able to forget the look my teacher gave me before he died.”

Luke’s voice was growing stronger. He had emerged from the wrenching struggle within his heart.

“It was a look of pure peace and contentment. No fear, no anger, no regret, no sorrow. He became stronger than his enemy could possibly imagine because he knew it was time to let go. He trusted the Force. It was a lesson I still have a hard time accepting….”

He pointed at the statues. “Do you see her face? That’s the exact same expression my friend and teacher had before he faded into the Force.”

Luke turned on his lightsaber and gently plunged it into the opening between the three statues. Sizzling arcs of energy connected the lightsaber with Luke and with the Mist-Weavers.

There was no fear in his eyes, or regret, or anger. Only a deep, abiding reverence.

The statues glowed brighter and brighter. I could feel the heat emanating from them. I pulled back instinctively and tried to pull Luke after me.

“No,” he said. “It’s all right. Let go of your fears.” His voice was suffused with utter faith and trust.

He gestured that I should pull down the visor of my helmet, and I did so.

The statues appeared to be made of molten iron. They were so bright and gave off so much heat that I had to shield my face. And still they glowed even brighter.

With a quick, agile side step, Luke slashed the lightsaber down, as though cutting through a sheath shimmering between the glowing figures.

Turning off his lightsaber, he stepped back and bowed deeply to the statues before pulling down his visor.

I risked peeking through the cracks between my fingers. The statues were coming to life, as though they were melting wax figures. The woman embraced her companions, and I could not tell if her expression was one of sorrow or joy.

Then her face settled into a tranquil smile, and I saw nothing in her eyes but resolution.

Now, she seemed to say.

Luke spread his arms to shelter me.

And the world disappeared around me with the light of a thousand newborn stars.

There was a new, gigantic crater in the side of the asteroid. We lay on its rim, gasping in our suits, like two fish that had been tossed onto the beach by the tide.

Later, after we stumbled back to the safety of the A-wing and Luke took off his helmet, I saw wet streaks on his face.

“There are patterns in the Force, like the rise and fall of the tide,” he said. Maybe he was talking to himself; maybe he was talking to me. “Deeds from the past echo in the present. The Mist-Weavers were lured here eons ago by bright sparks; we were lured here by the same lights. My teacher once acted as a lure to save me; we saved ourselves from the flock of monsters with another lure. My teacher freed himself from fear and doubt to save me; the Mist-Weavers freed themselves from fear and stasis to save us. I once watched as my teacher died, feeling helpless; only now do I understand that accepting the sacrifice of those who love us and share our ideals is the first step to becoming more powerful than we can possibly imagine.”

It was, in truth, a speech too mystical for me to fully grasp. I was never well versed in the tenets of the ancient religion of the Force.

But I thought back to the way Luke had kept the flames of hope in me alive; the way he had protected me and rescued me, even when it put him in harm’s way; the way he had made sure that I didn’t stop admiring the wonders around me. He was my friend, and I was grateful that his sacrifices had freed me from the trap of despair and the lure of dejection to love the galaxy more.

I understood enough.

“I’m sorry all your notes were destroyed during the escape,” Luke said.

We were on an ice-covered lake on Agoliba-Ena, where I was determined to complete the study.

“There will be other chances,” I said. “I’m thinking of switching to exogorths as my specialty.”

“You haven’t had enough of being inside one?”

“It will take a long time to digest everything I’ve seen, and who knows what wonders are hidden inside others?”

“There is always more knowledge to seek in the galaxy,” he said, a grin of understanding on his face.

I nodded and stepped back.

The A-wing took off, leaving behind a melted, slushy trail on the lake. I watched it disappear into the sky, knowing that I would have to face an uphill battle for the rest of my life to get people to believe what I had seen. The inside of the space slug was big—really, really big, like the universe hidden inside each of us, like the eternity curled inside each second.

The galaxy is knowable, and that’s what makes it wondrous.

But it didn’t matter. It was enough to have glimpsed what no one else had seen. It was enough to have witnessed the Mist that suffused the universe parting for one second to reveal the bright heart of wonder and hope underneath.