I do. I keep telling you people, but nobody listens to me!
And the history of the triluminary.
Trilumin
aries. Plural. There are three of them.
(though I seem to recall Episilon 3 only being there for what? 500 years, so 1,000 years in the past may be too far back.)
Everybody gets confused on this point. Varn says he has been the guardian of the Great Machine for 500 years. He tells Sinclair that his people are long dead, except for "The Outcasts" who were rejected by his people and exiled. The captain of the Outcast ship, Tarkan, says his people have been
searching for Epsilon 3 and the Great Machine for 500 years. Why everybody misremembers this as somebody saying the Great Machine is 500 years old is one of the great mysteries of
B5. If the Outcasts have been searching for the GM for 500 years, it has obviously been around for
longer the 500 years. Also, if they've been
searching for it, I have to assume that Epsilon 3 is not their home planet, since presumably somebody in their party would have known where that was. My theory is that somebody (probably the Volrons) bult the GM on Epsilon 3 where they knew they would eventually need it. They started work on it 1,000 years ago, when the Shadows were at their lowest ebb and unlikely to stumble across it. They built it where Sinclair told them they'd have to build it, and no doubt influenced the construction decisions on B4 and B5 (via the Minbari) to make sure they were built where they needed to be as well.
Once it was in place they recruited some of Varn's people to act as guardians and keep the secret. The Outcasts probably wanted to seized the Machine for themselves, and were thus exiled from their homeworld without knowing the location of the GM. The beacon it sent out finally gave its position away. Perhaps it included a message in the language of their people, or some code or pattern they recognized.
In any event, there is nothing in the series to suggest that the GM is only 500 years old, or that Varn's people had anything to do with creating it.
I doubt Sinclair had anything to do directly with creating the Triluminaries, which were presumably beyond any technology he knew, and that of the Minbari of 1,000 years ago. (And probably of the Minbari of today.) He probably gave one of the working models he had with him to Kosh and Ulkesh and they took it from there - either incorporating something from Sinclair's (now useless) link or not. Then they went off the create the set that would sit on Epsilon 3 for 500 to 1000 years waiting for Sinclair, while Valen gave the "other" three to the Minbari. (Remembering always that there are only actually 3 of the things, but that two different versions of that set of three exist simultanteous for about 1,000 years because of Sinclair's time jaunt.)
Valen makes sure the Minbari know that it's one of their most sacred artifacts and that it will be around when he's captured in the future.
Well, he certainly doesn't make sure that they know he's going to be captured in the future. The three triluminaries are certainly semi-sacred objects, but they also have other uses. The fact that they "scan" the Human captives at The Line with one of them indicates that they've been used that way before. On the other hand the fact that the GC who gives a triluminary to Delenn tells her it won't be missed because there are two other tells us that they don't get used very
often. It also suggests that they're considered interchangable, since the GC didn't seem to care which of the three he grabbed for Delenn.
*Whew!*
Joe
