“Do you actually think giving me more lifetimes can make up for all the lives you stole?” Gurion said in disbelief. “You’re even more demented than I thought.”
Rover was now only meters behind the crouching man. The creature began to hump up higher, its stalks shifting forward to strike out.
In the tiny mirrors of Evazan’s eyes Gurion saw the Meduza’s twin reflections as a brighter lightning flare gleamed from its surface. He sprang upright, wheeling around to see the thing nearly on him.
Rover struck just as he jumped back away from it. Only a single bulb’s tip managed to graze Gurion’s knee with a sharp crackle of power.
The man cried out at the stinging pain and staggered. The arm holding the bomb dropped down.
Evazan leaped instantly for the arm. His two hands clenched tight on Gurion’s wrist and he shook hard. The untriggered detonator came loose and bounced away across the flat roof, coming to rest before the door.
With his captor disarmed, Evazan tried to break away to let Rover finish things. But Gurion grappled tight with him, his hands going for the doctor’s throat.
“I’ll kill you with my bare hands!” he snarled.
Evazan stumbled backward as he fought wildly to break loose. Gurion hung on with a strength born of his rage.
The back of the doctor’s foot hit the roof’s edge. Desperately he swung about, dragging Gurion off balance and out into space. The man fell.
Gurion’s own weight tore his hands free from the doctor’s throat. But the last downward jerk overbalanced Evazan also.
For a moment the doctor teetered on the brink, flailing out with his arms for balance. When that failed, he twisted his body violently around, grabbing out for the roof’s edge as he went over it.
His agility saved him. He hung on fiercely, dangling at arm’s length against the sheer stone face. Below him, Gurion’s form plunged downward, striking the jagged cliffs at several spots.
Evazan glanced down to see the body make the final crash into a surging wave. He then turned his attention to ensuring his own safety, but he quickly found this was not so easy a task. His arms alone weren’t strong enough to pull him up. His scrabbling feet could find no holds in the smooth stone.
A noise came from above him. He looked up as the toes of boots appeared over the edge just inches from his face. His gaze moved on up the body to see that it was Ponda Baba who stood there, staring down at him.
“P-Ponda!” he gasped out, at first with great relief. But a new realization swiftly turned relief to surprise. “But … how! You here? The—the transfer … it didn’t work?”
“Oh, it worked, Doctor,” came a voice no longer like that of his old friend. “But it worked backward.”
“Backward?” he echoed.
“That’s right. And so you’ve condemned me to the loathsome form of one of my people’s lowest breed of scum.” The Aqualish lifted the hairy arm that marked him as a social pariah on his own planet. “You’ve destroyed my life as a senator, Doctor. So now I am going to destroy yours!”
The mechanical arm lifted. In its jointed fingers was clutched the thermal detonator. The metal thumb rested on the triggering button.
“No!” cried Evazan. “No, no, wait! You can’t!”
“Good-bye, Doc!” the new Ponda Baba said simply.
He pushed the button, dropped the bomb, turned, and strode away.
“No, no!” Evazan screamed out as the bomb’s timer ticked down.
With the strength of desperation he hauled himself up. His eyes cleared the edge. He glimpsed the ticking bomb, and just beyond it the Meduza’s form.
“Rover!” he shouted to it. “Hellllp meeee!”
Far above, a small shuttle skimmed down through the atmosphere, flashing high across the waves. The rocky isle with the towering castle lay straight ahead. Two men of Gurion’s lean build and swarthy complexion sat at the controls.
“There it is,” one said. He looked to his companion. “Get ready to hover above the roof, while I get out the boarding—”
A great flash of light from ahead interrupted him. An explosion enveloped the entire castle top.
Both men stared with astonishment as the upper half of the structure disintegrated in the initial blast. A cloud of fine debris billowed up while larger pieces showered out and down. Then the lower half of the shattered castle collapsed inward, becoming in seconds a vast rubble pile.
“Poor Gurion,” the first man said, looking down at the broken remains as they soared overhead.
“That blast probably attracted Andoan security,” said the other. “We’d better get well away from here.”
He turned the ship, heading upward again.
“At least Gurion got his revenge on that lunatic Evazan,” the first man said as they left the ruins behind …
Far below, halfway down one rugged side of the castle’s high cliffs, a large bile-green mound of goo lay motionless on a ledge. From its splattered edges a thick yellow oil ran, dripping in greasy, fat globules over the edge.
Then the gellike mass heaved and quivered, bulging upward. Out of the largest lump of its center an arm suddenly shot forth, followed by another, and then by the head of Dr. Evazan. He took a great shuddering breath as he broke the surface, like a swimmer who’d been long under the sea.
With some difficulty he extricated himself from the blob that had once been his pet. Though the loyal creature had saved him by cushioning his fall, their hard impact together had squashed the Meduza’s life from it.
“Thanks, Rover,” he said, plucking a last clinging streamer of the slime off his shirt. He bent and patted the ruptured mass. “Sorry, boy.”
He looked upward to the blasted castle.
“Backward,” he said regretfully. “Damn!” Then he shrugged. “Oh, well. Maybe I’ll get it right next time.”
And with that he began the long climb downward to the sea.
Drawing the Maps of
Peace:
The Moisture Farmer’s
Tale
by M. Shayne Bell
Day 1: A New Calendar
I thought: This is it. I won’t get out of this one. I topped a dune in my landspeeder—going fast, always fast—and saw eight Sand People standing around the vaporator I’d come out to fix. I had seconds, then, to decide what to do: Plunge ahead over the last dunes to save a malfunctioning vaporator whose output I needed, or turn around and speed back to the defenses of my house and two droids. I gunned the speeder ahead.
The Sand People scattered and ran, and I watched where they ran so I’d know where they might attack from. All for .5 liter of water, I thought. I was risking my life for .5 liters of water. The vaporator’s production was down thirty percent to maybe one liter a day, and I had to get its production up to the standard 1.5 and keep it there, the farm was that close to the edge, so close that every vaporator had to work at maximum or I’d lose the farm.
In seconds I was at the vaporator, stopped in a cloud of dust and sand my speeder raised. I couldn’t see the Sand People, though their musky scent lingered around the vaporator in the heat at the end of the day. The shadows of the canyon walls were lengthening across the dunes on the valley floor.
It would soon be dark, and I was in a canyon where Sand People had come, far from home.
Human technology scared the Sand People—my speeder certainly had—but they wouldn’t stay scared for long. I grabbed my blaster and jumped out of the speeder to see what damage they had done to the vaporator.
A smashed power indicator. One cracked solar cell. Scratches around the door to the water reservoir, as if they had been trying to get to the water. The damage was minimal.
But what to do now? I couldn’t guard all of my far-flung vaporators. I had ten of them, each placed in a half kilometer of sand and rock, not the standard quarter kilometer—I was so close to the Dune Sea that a vaporator needed twice the land to pull the 1.5 liters of water worth harvesting out of the air. If the Sand People had figured
out that vaporators held water and if they were determined to get into them, my farm would be ruined. I could replace power displays and solar cells. I couldn’t guard vaporators kilometers apart from Sand People who wanted water.
I heard a low grunt over a dune to the north, and I immediately crouched down against the vaporator and scanned the horizon. The grunt sounded like a wild bantha waking from the heat of day, but I knew it wasn’t bantha. The Sand People were coming back.
They were determined to get this water.
And why shouldn’t they, I suddenly wondered? Before I came, the water collected inside my vaporator would have been their water, distilled out of the air in the morning dew, not pulled out at all hours of the day by a machine. They must have been desperate for water to have come up to a human machine, to have touched it, to have tried to open it. What were they suffering to drive them to this?
I heard more “bantha” grunting south of me, over the dunes, then to the east and west, and finally to the north again. I was surrounded, and an attack would come in minutes.
Suddenly I realized what I had to do. “Go ahead and waste your profits,” Eyvind, who owned the farm closest to mine three valleys over, would say, “waste your profits so I can buy your farm cheap from your creditors when they force you off the land.” But I wouldn’t listen to Eyvind’s voice in my head, and I wouldn’t have listened to him if he’d been with me then. I spoke to the vaporator, and a panel slid back from in front of the controls. I punched in the number sequence I’d programmed, and I heard the vaporator sealing the pouch of water in the reservoir. When it finished, the door in front of the reservoir slid open. I pulled out the pouch and set it on the sand west of the vaporator, in shade out of the light from the second setting sun. I took out my knife and made a tiny slit in the top, where the air was, so the Sand People could smell the water and get to it.
I punched in the command to close the door to the reservoir, then told the vaporator to close the door over its controls, ran to my speeder, and flew it to the top of a dune southwest of the vaporator. I could see no Sand People, but I knew they were masters at blending into a terrain and surprising the unwary. I’d heard plenty of stories about just how quick—and deadly—they could be with their gaffi sticks, the double-bladed axlike weapons they made from scavenged metal off the Tatooine wastes. I sat low in my speeder and tried to watch for any movement—I did not dare fly farther away: They were all around me and they would surely throw their axes if I tried to run, and I did not fancy being beheaded in my own landspeeder. Besides, I hoped they would recognize what I had done: that I had given them water. I did not know, then, if I could hope it would buy my life and their trust and thus my farm.
I saw movement: one of the Sand People, coming from the north, slowly, low over the sand toward the vaporator and the water. When he reached the water pouch in the shadow of the vaporator, he knelt in the sand and smelled the bag: smelled the water inside it. He lifted his head slowly and gave out one keening cry that echoed through the canyon. Soon I counted eight Sand People—no, ten—hurrying toward the water, from all directions, four making a wide berth around my speeder.
Only one of them, a small one—young?—took a drink. Two others poured the rest of the water in a thin pouch of animal skin to take with them, and they did not spill any water. When they finished, the one who had first smelled the water looked at me. Then they all looked at me. They did not speak or make any noise, and they did not run. The one who had smelled the water suddenly raised his right arm and held up a clenched fist.
I jumped from the speeder, walked a few steps from it, and raised my right arm and clenched my fist in return. We stood like that, looking at each other, for some time. I had never been so close to them before. I wondered if they had ever been so close to a human. A light breeze from the east down the canyon blew over us and cooled us, and abruptly all the Sand People turned and disappeared in the dunes.
They did not destroy my vaporator. They did not try to kill me. They left the vaporator alone after I gave them the water, and they left me alone. They had accepted my gift.
I pledged, then, to leave them the water from this vaporator. I would miss selling the water, I knew that—I needed to sell it—but it seemed a small price to pay if by giving them a few liters they would then not ruin my vaporators. I could make do with the output of the other nine vaporators for a short time—and meanwhile buy two of Eyvind’s old second-generation vaporators to fix. When they came on-line, my output would be back to the minimum I’d need to survive.
All this effort seemed a small price to pay to be able to live near the Sand People in peace.
I counted the days of my farm from that day.
Day 2: A Farm on the Edge
Eyvind had told me I was crazy to come out this far. “No one has gone that far,” he said. “I can’t believe the moisture patterns consistently flow up those canyons—you’re only a handful of kilometers from the Dune Sea!”
But I had tested the moisture patterns: There was water to be had there. Not a lot. It would not be a rich farm, like those outside Bestine, but one morning when I was camped in what I thought of then as a far canyon, I woke on the blanket I’d laid out on the sand, and it was damp from the dew. My clothes were damp. My hair was damp. I pulled the instruments from my speeder and set them up and they all read one thing: water. Harvestable water. Somehow it blew over the mountains and settled here before evaporating in the wastes of the Dune Sea farther west, and it did it day after day for the two weeks I spent in that canyon running tests. Over the course of a year, I tested that canyon and the surrounding canyons twenty-nine more times—I had to have that much detailed data to prove that this farm could work so I could borrow the startup money. But I’d known from that first day when I woke up with damp hair that I could have a farm here.
I spent months filling out Homestead Act forms and waiting for a grant of land, then months filling out loan applications and waiting for replies, all the while listening to other farmers tell me I was crazy. But I had the undeniable facts of my readings to hand anyone who could authorize my homestead or loan me the start-up money or even just listen and offer advice, and finally the manager at the Zygian branch bank did listen—and he read my reports, checked my background to see whether I knew anything about moisture farming, which I did, and whether I would keep my word, which I would. He loaned me the money.
He gave me ten thousand days to pay him back.
Ten thousand days was enough time to make any dream come true, I thought.
I lay on my bed in the dark at the end of a hard day, after leaving the Sand People the water I’d pledged them, remembering all this, remembering how badly I’d wanted to come out here, how hard I’d worked to get my homestead and the loan and then to set up my farm. Not once had I thought about who might already be out here, depending on this land I called my farm.
I rolled over and asked the computer to display the holomap I’d made of my farm and this region.
“The files you have requested can only be accessed after a user-specified security clearance,” it said. “Please prepare for retinal scan.”
I stared for a few seconds into a bright, white light that suddenly shone out of the monitor. I had to guard my map. I’d made the map myself—after a year of surveying and taking photographs that I fed into the computer and working from notes and memory—and if the wrong people knew I was making maps it could be dangerous. I programmed the computer to display the maps only to me and to never reference them when working with other files; they were not cross-referenced or indexed. When asked if such files existed, it would say no to anyone’s voice but my own. If asked to access them, it would respond and proceed with the security clearance only if it heard my voice.
“Retinal scan complete,” the computer said. “Hello, Ariq Joanson. I will display the requested files.”
Part of the wall I kept blank and white just for this projection suddenly became the canyons of my farm seen from the
air: my house, marked in blue; the vaporators, smaller dots of green, widely separated; the canyons and mountains and dunes all in natural colors. A red dot far up Bildor’s Canyon northeast of my farm marked a Jawa fortress. White dots marked the houses of the farms closest to mine—and none of those dots were very close. “You’ll be three canyons and kilometers away from me—and I’ve been the farthest one out for two years!” Eyvind had warned. Over all the canyons and mountains and dunes I’d had the computer draw in black lines for the boundaries of the farms. The land lay spread out over my wall in the darkness, and the dots for houses and vaporators gleamed like jewels behind their black lines. Except for the red Jawa dot, all of them represented human houses or machines. I’d never thought of putting in dots for the nomadic Sand People—or of drawing boundaries for them and the Jawas.
“Computer,” I said. “Draw in a boundary line from the northeast border of my farm in Bildor’s Canyon, along the ridges on both sides of the canyon to a distance of one kilometer above the Jawa fortress.”
“Drawn as requested,” the computer responded, and it was. The lines appeared.
“Label the space inside those new lines ‘Jawa Preserve.’ ”
“Labeled as requested.”
The words appeared, but I didn’t like them. “Relabel the Jawa Preserve, the ‘Jawa—” What? Land? Reservation? Protectorate? “Just label it ‘Jawa,’ ” I said.
“Labeled as requested.”
The word “Preserve” disappeared from the map, and the word “Jawa” centered below the red dot.
“Now draw borders west from the northwest boundary of my farm to the Dune Sea and west from the northernmost boundary of the Jawa land also to the Dune Sea.”
“Drawn as requested.”
“Label that ‘Sand People.’ ”
The words appeared over the land. “Have the Jawas and Sand People acquired rights to this land?” the computer asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m only daydreaming.”
Star Wars: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina Page 33