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 go ne 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 setded 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 ma
chines. I'd never thought of putting in dots for the nomadic Sand
People-or of drawing boundaries for them and thejawas.
"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."
"Do you wish these changes saved?"
I considered that. "No," I said finally. "It is a fiction.
Erase the changes and shut down."
It did so.
I lay back on my bed. What I had told the computer to draw was
worse than a fiction. I had asked two successive Imperial
Governors to commission a mapping project of this region, with the
same response "We just don't have the money." Translate that "We
have too many people here who don't want accurate maps made of
what lies beyond the known settlements and farms, and if you want
to live to bring your next water harvest to Mos Eisley, quit
asking for such things."
So I'd quit asking for them. But it wasn't criminals who needed
to hide places of illegal activity who t
hreatened my life or
livelihood, yet. It was Sand People violence and Jawa dishonesty
and manipulation-all caused in part, I was coming to realize, by
constant encroachments into what had no doubt been traditional
Jawa and Sand People territories. Maps would be the first step to
a secure peace for the farmers and Jawas and Sand People-if you
could get them all to draw in negotiated boundaries on those maps
and honor them. Without such agreements, farmers faced the
equivalent of blundering around in the dark-setting up farms in
areas where maybe no one should go, living in places that
could-and did-get decent people killed. I wanted the killing to
stop.
But for that, we needed a map. The government would not draw
it.
So I drew it.
And I decided, that night, to take my map to the Jawas near my
farm and talk to them about how to take it to the Sand People. If
we agreed among ourselves on how to live together in these
mountains and canyons, maybe someday the government would make our
agreements official.
I looked at the monitor for another inevitable retina scan.
"Computer," I said, "redisplay the map I just requested and redraw
the boundaries I had you erase. Copy this file to the portable
holo-display unit."
Day 3 In the Jawa Fortress
I knew these Jawas. I had been to the gates of their fortress
many times, especially during the year I spent measuring the
moisture in the canyons of my farm They would come out to trade
water for trash I'd found in the desert and for information. about
the Empire and its cities and the systems that made them work and
the alien races and how to deal with them. I tried to be good to
the Jawas, and fair. If they got the better of me in a few deals,
I'd come out ahead in a few others, and the tally remained about
even. Some of the Jawas even became my friends-the old ones, the
ones I could learn from who had the patience to teach me their
language, the uses of native plants, geographic lore, j Their
thick-walled fortress blended into the walls of] the canyon, but I
knew how to fly straight to its closed and hidden gates. I stepped
out of my speeder and held up the holo-display unit. "Oh, Jawas!"
I called out. "I come to you with information and to barter." The
gates opened at once-the word "barter" would always open their
Star Wars - Tales From The Mos Eisley Cantina Page 38