the simple gomex mosses that broke down the minerals of unyielding rock into
soil that such plants as balcrabbian and brachniel could use. Without
careful cultivation, most of the intermediate growths of the artificial
ecosystems had died before they'd reached the stage of being
self-sufficient. Lichens and podhoy still grew everywhere around the walls,
as if the entire place had been dunked in a vat of crimson mud that had left
a rough scum; close to the broken pump housing, a little soil remained,
where hardy balcrabbian plants spread their leaves.
Luke sensed a human presence there moments before his danger-trained eye
picked out the dull metal of another speeder concealed in the shadows of a
broken foundation. He drew around himself the aura of advanced
inconspicuousness that Yoda had spoken about and that later Callista,
recalling her own training, had taught him Beyond a doubt the same means by
which old Ben had wandered around the Death Star utterly unnoticed by the
most highly trained troops of the Empire.
The owner of the speeder sat in the dappled shade of the balcrab-bian,
protected from the wind, where the long-ruptured pump dribbled a series of
tiny pools among the broken pavement. A young man, six or seven years junior
to Luke, Corellian or maybe Alderaan stock, to judge by the brown hair, the
medium build. He reminded Luke of any of the dozens of young farmers he'd
known on Tatooine, trying to wrest a living from an inhospitable world. The
duranex of his jumpsuit, though one of the toughest fabrics known, was
patched and frayed, and the leather of the utility belt and satchel he wore
much mended. He looked up quickly when Luke deliberately scraped the side of
his boot on a lump of old-style permacrete. The young man's hand flashed to
the long, primitive pellet gun at his side, but something about Luke seemed
to convince him that this wasn't the danger he'd been fearing. He put the
weapon down again and raised his hand with a grin.
"Where'd you drop out of, brother? Don't tell me you were on that B-wing
they brought down."
Luke grinned back ingenuously. "l just want the name of the guy who said
B-wings were too small to draw their fire, that's all. Owen Lars," he
introduced himself, holding out his hand.
The young man rose. "Arvid Scraf. Were you modified for cargo[ Trying to
make Hweg Shul?" Something the size of a B-wing usually can get through the
automatics. Smugglers use them sometimes, but I've heard they're tricky. The
Therans must have been in the base itself when the sensors picked you up.
They can take them off auto and fire themselves, if they want."
Luke knelt by the water, dipped his half-empty canteen. The harsh dryness of
the air, chilly as it was, filled him with a curious sense of having come
home.
"That's my luck. I once picked up half a crate of glitterstim for
twenty-five hundred credits, only the guy who sold it to me forgot to tell
me he'd stolen it and it had sensor relays in it. I hadn't even cleared the
atmosphere when I had fourteen revenue cruisers around me like buzz flies on
a ripe fruit." It hadn't happened to him, but it had to Han, and it gave him
credentials of a sort, and a persona. More than that, it let him size up
Arvid Scraf for a few moments more.
"l heard the Therans were savages--the ones who tried to put holes in me
sure looked like them. My cargo must have upped the ship's mass reading.
They can run a gun stationS."
"Don't sell them short." Scraf picked up his own canteen. Water splotched
his sand-beaten orange sleeves, and down the front of his suit.
"Where'd you come down? The Therans will have finished by now. I'll
help you haul whatever's left into Ruby Gulch. You can get cash for it
there."
A childhood on Tatooine had made Luke familiar with the economics of
salvage. They'd been severe enough on the desert world, which had an open
trade of sorts through Mos Eisley. On a planet with virtually no natural
resources and little access to imported goods, that much metal and
microchips would make him a wealthy man.
"Who are they, anyway?" he asked, settling himself on the rough wooden bench
that served Arvid Scraf's landspeeder as a seat. The speeder was a crumbling
Aratech 7t-Z Jawas wouldn't have touched.
The starboard buoyancy tanks were so low that the deck canted sharply, and
Arvid had built up a second deck on planks, with posts to level it up. He'd
rigged a retractable limb underneath as well, with a wheel to keep the whole
thing steady if too heavily laden. It gave the speeder the appearance of a
badly misshapen mushroom, balanced on a single stem that did not quite touch
the ground.
"She don't look like much, but she covers ground," the young man said,
half-proud and half-defensive, when Luke did a double-take. With Luke on the
bench, Arvid had had to shift the gravel sack ballast to compensate for his
weight.
But she did, in fact, cover ground. Like the Millennium Falcon, there was
marginally more to her than met the eye.
Now Arvid said, "Who, the Therans? There's little villages of them up the
canyons, or in caves, anyplace they can find a spring or an old pump still
working. But most of them just come out of the farms. Half the Oldtimers
were Therans at some time in their lives. Kids go out of the settlements and
ride with the bands for a couple-three seasons.
They sniff the smoke, they hear the voices, they dream the dreams, and they
meet people they wouldn't have met if they'd stayed around home, I guess.
Then they come back and get married and have kids of their own.
Sometimes they ride out again later, but mostly once seems to be enough."
He shrugged, clinging like a bantha-buster to the struggling levers, his
eyes moving constantly between the sand-scored gauges and the eroded jags
and zigs of the rising ground as the Aratech labored through the narrowing
steepness of those light-laden crystal rocks, to where Luke had left his
appropriated XP-38A.
"That's why we can't make headway against 'em," Arvid Scraf went on.
"Their Listeners tell them anything coming in or going out is bad, tell 'em
in their sleep, in their dreams. Then it's part of their dreams for all
time. It gets stuck in their heads so bad you can't make them see different.
They can't see what this world could be, if we could get any kind of trade
going. 'We don't want that,' they'll say, and you can talk to the edge of
anoxia, and they just look at you with those eyes and say, 'We don't want
that." We. Like they know what all the other Oldtimers think. Weird."
He shook his head. His big hands on the levers were callused and stained
with grease, as Luke's own had been, he remembered, back in his days of
trying to wring a living from a world not intended to support human life.
The two of them wrestled the XP-38A up wholesale and lashed it to the -74's
bed. Luke knew the reasoning well. In a world without native metal, without
timber, without imports, a rusty bucket was treasure.
The anemic sun was sinking fast, and harsh wind pounded them o
ut of the
west, making the repulsorlift vehicle jerk and wobble. As they were
wrassling the ropes, Luke caught the leg of his flightsuit on one of the
-74's makeshift struts, scratching the flesh underneath.
Reaching down to feel the scrape, his fingers encountered what felt like a
droplet of plastic, hard and smooth, on his flesh, and when he pulled up the
fabric and stripped the placket, he saw on his calf a very small swelling,
like a minute hill in the flesh. In its center bulged a tiny dome of hard,
purple-brown chiten, unmistakably the shell of some sort of pinhead-size
insect, which vanished into the flesh even as he watched.
With an exclamation of disgusted alarm, Luke pinched the flesh around the
swelling, forcing the thing back and out again. The swelling bubble of
blood-dark shell elongated into a repellent abdomen perhaps a centimeter
long, that ended in a hard little head and a ring of tiny, wriggling,
thorn-tipped legs. It immediately turned between his thumb
and firstfinger and tried to dig into the ball of his thumb. Luke flicked it
away hard, and heard it strike the flat facet of a nearby rock. It bounced
down to the slippery canyon floor and scuttered fast for the shadows of the
nearest stone.
Luke said, "Yuck!" and pulled his pant leg up farther. His calf was dotted
with tiny, reddened swellings, or fading pink patches where the bugs were
already burrowing down into the flesh.
"Don't waste your time on 'em," advised Arvid, from the other side of the
speeder. He tied down a final knot and clambered over the tailfins to Luke's
side. "You probably picked 'em up in the shade around the water." He pulled
up his own sleeve to show' at least four swellings on his forearm, one of
them with the hard little insect tail just vanishing into the flesh.
Casually he pinched the thing free and flicked it away against the deck,
grinding it to a little purple blotch with the heel of his boot when it
began to crawl toward his foot again.
"They're kind of gross but they just die and get absorbed. There's stories
of crystal hunters who run out of food in the barrens and stick their hands
into holes so they can absorb enough drochs to get energy to make it to a
settlement. Not something i'd care to do myself."
He made a face.
"Drochs?"
Arvid nodded. "They're everywhere on this planet, and I mean everywhere.
Their reproductive rate makes sand bunnies look like Elamposnian monks.
Everybody has bites. Sunlight kills 'em. You just keep as clean as you can
and don't worry about it."
Reflecting on some of the more loathsome--but quite harmless--denizens of
Dagobah who'd scavenged crumbs in the corners of Yoda's dwelling, Luke
supposed Arvid had a point.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, as the piggyback speeders turned from the
eye-aching crystal mazes to the plain where the burn marks of Luke's crash
landing could be seen, Luke pulled up his sleeve again.
Only a few pinkish splotches remained. He pinched the flesh around one
carefully, feeling for the hardness of a foreign body, and found nothing.
With his mind--with the techniques of the Force--he probed at the molecules,
water, life energy of the muscle tissue itself, and found only the few
vanishing traces of an alien energy field, which dissolved even as he
observed them, becoming first identical with his own body, then a part of
it.
Virtually nothing remained of the B-wing. Scuffmarks, charring, a huge slick
of fused gravel where the reactor core had ruptured--even the massive
cylinder of the reactor itself was gone. What Luke thought of as the "soft
parts" of the ship were scattered broadcast over the harsh ground the
upholstery of the seats, some fragmented plastic from broken couplers,
insulation that had been cooked brittle by the crash itself.
Everything else had been taken.
"Didn't think we'd find much." Arvid scuffed with his toe at the cracked
corner of what had been a console housing, and held it up.
Even the screws were gone. "They use everything. Why notgt;. Everybody
does." A dry twist of wind flipped his brown hair across his eyes.
"I'm really sorry, Owen."
The sun was sinking. Everywhere the orange and rose and cinnabar of its
changing lights glanced and glared off the gravel, rocks, the towering
crystal chimneys, so that Luke felt as if he were trapped in the midst of a
limitless, heatless lava flow that stretched to the ends of the world.
The wind had swelled to a torrent, and the temperature was plunging fast.
"At least you got one of their speeders. That's something." Arvid lowered
his voice. "Uh--you didn't owe anything on that cargo, did yougt;." He
worked his fingers into clumsy hand-knitted gloves, and tossed Luke a
disreputable coat he'd pulled from beneath the speeder's seat. His breath
was already a cloud of mist. "That was on your craft?" I mean, to people
who'd make trouble for you?"
Luke was about to disclaim further interest in his fictitious cargo, but
another thought crossed his mind. He lowered his voice also, although it was
patently obvious there was no one and nothing to hear them for hundreds of
kilometers, and said, "Well, I'd sure rather a couple of individuals thought
I bought it in the crash until I can come up with a little working capital
again, if you know what I mean."
Arvid nodded, with a prompt understanding that made Luke wonder how often
made sense.
"You can put up with me at my aunt's in Ruby Gulch tonight,"
Arvid said. "You'll freeze, out of doors. Aunt Gin'll give you top price for
the speeder, too, if you want to sell, and that should be enough to get you
a launch off planet when you get to Hweg Shul."
"Thank you," said Luke, and pulled closer about him the ragged, too-big
jacket. "I appreciate it."
"Well, we don't get a lot of strangers." Arvid looked a little shy as they
clambered back into the Aratech. "The Oldtimers are all each others'
cousins, but those of us who've come here in the last ten years or so, we
sort of like to hear how things are going, back toward the Core. You know?"
Luke knew. For the next hour and a half, while Arvid fought the evening wind
across the sea floor plains by the light of a couple of wavery chemical
lamps, he entertained the young man with smuggler stories gleaned secondhand
from Mara and Han and Lando, with tales of the Rebellion edited together
from his own adventures and those of Leia and Winter and Wedge. To these he
added news and gossip and hints enough to imply that he was a minor-league
planet-hopper making his living as best he could in the chaos without giving
allegiance to either side, much as Han had been, once upon a time.
And, as he himself would have been, ten or twelve years and several
lifetimes ago, Arvid was enchanted.
The young man had gone many hours out of his way to help Luke.
Though Luke was tired and would rather have dozed, or asked questions about
this eerie world of light and ungiving glass, he knew that
such
entertainment as he could provide was payment for Arvid's trouble.
There would be time later, he thought, to learn what he had come here to
learn.
Against the darkness, far-off light speared the sky.
"What the . . . ?"
"That'll be the gun station!" Arvid braced his feet against a ballast bag
and threw his weight on the steering lever. "Big one--over by Bleak Point .
. ."
The speeder sagged heavily, the hot flares of its lamplight sparkling on the
facets below them. The wind had fallen with full darkness, and in the
stillness the cold deepened until Luke's ears and teeth ached.
"There's a couple blaster rifles under the seat, Owen, if you'd be so kind."
Luke fished out a Seinar proton blaster and a venerable Merr-Sonn Standard
Four.
"You take the proton," offered Arvid generously, as he tromped the
accelerator and the scattered boulders and chimneys flashed and whirled past
them with horrifying speed. "The Four's got her ways--I better handle her."
"Uh--you probably better." Luke checked out the Seinar. The geriatric weapon
had been refitted repeatedly, like every other piece of equipment he'd seen
on the planet, but it was spotlessly clean and the charges were topped.
"What's going on?" The fitful blasts of light ahead were coming from ground
level, not pointed at the sky. Luke balanced himself on a stanchion and
stood up, wind slapping his gray flightsuit, focusing his mind through the
darkness, reaching toward the source of the intermittent glare.
Anger. Violence. A great, swirling turmoil in the Force.
"It isn't that--that ground lightning I saw earlier, is it."
Braced against the seat, Arvid shook his head. "Looks like an attack on the
station."
The gun station was a squat, dark complex of permacrete shapes seemingly
fused into the black shoulder bones of the hills. By the flare and smolder
of laser light, Luke made out the massive cylinder of the outer wall,
featureless and sculled by time and sand storms No gate, no postern, no
door, no windows. The upperworks of the station, where the cannon's gleaming
black snout pointed at the sky, were crowned with a ragged, thorny palisade
of projecting buttonwood poles, planks, and what looked like the whole
twisted trunks of scrub-loaks, pointing like spears in all directions and