their great empathic and telepathic abilities. The male half of the pair, name unknown, committed suicide upon realizing his intended purpose. The female, Lahaylia Selei, killed her captors and escaped. Lahaylia then founded the Skolian Imperialate. Later she discovered a natural Rhon from a nearly dead race of Ruby colonists, named Jarac Skolia, and took him as her consort. However, since this history is rather unnoble, the story as told in the Skolian Empire omits the involvement of the Aristos in creating the Rhon psions. Kyle Web The Kyle Web, also known as the psiberweb, is an instantaneous interstellar communication network powered by Locks. The psiberweb can be thought of as similar to the Internet. Unlike the Internet, the psiberweb, rather than existing in real physical form, transmits information through "Kyle space", also known as "psiberspace". A theoretical physicist by training, Asaro uses the concepts of the Hilbert space described by the harmonics to create the universe called Kyle space. Spherical harmonics (see also Spherical Harmonic) are an orthonormal set of eigenfunctions used in many areas of math and physics, including quantum mechanics and electromagnetics. By directly applying the rules that define Hilbert spaces described by the angular wave functions that solve the Laplace Equation, the author invents a universe where "location" is based on quantum wave functions rather than position and time, and where a psion's thoughts determined their location in Kyle space. Lock The Locks are three powerful sentient machines created by the ancient Ruby Empire. They are located at points of disruption in normal spacetime caused by an intersection with Kyle space, which manifests as a great column of light called a "Kyle singularity". The ancient technology which created the Locks has been lost, but the Skolian Empire has deduced some of its functioning. Their three known remaining Locks are located on the Orbiter space habitat (headquarters of the Skolian military), the planet Raylicon (origin of the Ruby Empire), and on the Onyx platform. The psiberweb is crucial to the defence of the Skolian Empire. Access and control of the psiberweb is what gives the Skolian Empire its equal strength to the more powerful and more numerous Trader empire. Only the Rhon psions have sufficient Kyle Rating to interface with the Locks. In exceptional cases Rhon can even receive emotions over big distances (even through space), mostly when they are closely related to the sender. Less powerful