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That was one of the mysteries of Thrawn: how, without being taciturn, he managed to tell almost nothing about himself. Everyone, of course, was terribly curious; some were idle about it, some were not, but in any case it was a doomed enterprise to get a bit more out of Thrawn than he thought necessary.
To draw out a story not directly related to him was another matter.
It was one of those late shifts aboard the Chimera, when everyone could afford to relax a little. Faro was slumped in her chair, looking up at the ceiling; Lieutenant Commander Vanto, on the contrary, leaned two elbows on the table, resting his head on his fists; his pad was, for once, laid aside. Even Thrawn sat imposingly, almost melancholic. Faro wondered if he was overtaken by nostalgia now. She could not say for sure — only Vanto could guess Thrawn's mood — but anyway, Faro decided to try her luck.
“What is the most abnormal work of art you have ever seen, sir?” she asked.
“Is abnormal in the sense of incredible, or in the sense of macabre?” Thrawn replied immediately. So Faro was lucky enough: he was in the mood.
“Either one, sir.”
Thrawn thought for a moment.
“I suppose I know what would satisfy both meanings," he said leisurely.
Now everyone was looking at him. Some of the officers seated off to the side came closer.
“First of all, I should say that I never saw it with my own eyes. But I was in contact with a Chiss who had more luck than I did. She was part of a... let's call it a reconnaissance party. They were exploring planets that were deemed potentially interesting to the Chiss. On one of the planets, she and her colleagues discovered traces of an ancient extinct civilization.
“It was a race similar to the Chiss," Thrawn continued “Here in the Empire, you would call it humanoid. Their remains could not be found in great numbers because of the landscape of the planet, but what attracted the attention of the reconnaissance probes was visible even from orbit: huge well-ordered structures on an extraordinary-sized plateau near the equator. Incredibly ancient but perfectly preserved structures.”
Thrawn rested his chin on his interlocked fingers.
“My companion described them as spaceships, with the bulkheads stripped away, so that you could see the skeleton from inside. Incredible, bizarre structures, huge in both height and circumference, so that anyone inside felt tiny. She said she had never seen anything like it, before or since: a floor that passed into walls and then into a huge multi-chambered dome — and all covered with delicate, veil-like, non-repeating patterns. In some places the walls were so thin that they let in light; somewhere they had already deteriorated with time, but both the outer shell and the massive inner support were almost intact. And everything, everything was covered by this mysterious pattern. The research team took samples of the material and set about examining it.”
“But the strangeness just kept on coming. By circumstantial evidence, it became clear that these grand sanctuaries — most likely, they were sanctuaries — were preserved so well because they had been buried for a long time. Someone had erected colossal mounds of stone and sand over them. Then over the millennia, the winds on the plateau blew these mounds away bit by bit until they exposed again what was hidden inside.”
“Sounds like a job for a lot of people. Was there a large city located nearby?” Vanto suggested.
Thrawn smiled subtly.
“It was what everyone expected. But no. Not the slightest trace of a city nearby; if there were any settlements, they were insignificant. However, a large city had indeed been found... on the other side of the plateau.”
“It doesn't make sense," someone in the audience interjected.
Faro could tell that Thrawn was squinting his eyes a little.
“Yes, it was a long way to the shrines. All the more strange that, with so much space, they positioned their temples as far away from themselves as possible... and then, as if in terror, they hastily buried them.”
“Researchers went on to conclude that the burial of the sanctuaries and the extinction of this city occurred almost simultaneously by archaeological standards. Perhaps the death of the city was separated from the death of the sanctuaries by only a couple of generations. Perhaps someday the reasons for what happened will become clear... Why an entire civilization, with technology the likes of which no one had ever seen before, first raised these Cyclops on the edge of their oecumene, and then destroyed - and immediately disappeared after them.
Faro and Vanto looked at each other.
“Cyclops...?” Vanto asked.
“Isn't that the name of the giant in your mythology? And does Cyclopean mean gigantic in a figurative sense?”
“Yes, that's right…”
“But I see no point in dragging out the intrigue any longer," Thrawn shrugs. “Analysis of the material from which the shrines were created yielded results quickly. The thin pattern that covered all the surfaces proved to be the imprint of a network of vessels, nerves, tendons... Everything that is an integral part of a living organism. So were the bones, which were the material of these "buildings". They were not artificially made structures, not in the full sense of the word. They were living creatures, grown to incredible sizes, and all that remained of them were their enormous skeletons.”
“You said the buildings had a dome…” after a long pause, Faro said.
"Indeed" Thrawn confirmed.
“Does that mean that they had... had a head, and a... brain?”
“Quite likely," Thrawn agreed again.
And then, after another pause, he added:
“Were they intelligent? I asked my companion that at one time. And she didn't answer me.”