Star Wars: Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambly

  “What are they?” asked Luke, and Umolly shrugged, twisted her white hair up more firmly and reset its wooden combs.

  “Exactly what they look like—ground lightning. They seem to start either in the mountains or from those crystal chimney formations—tsils, the Oldtimers call them—out on the wastelands. Couple of years ago one of ’em was strong enough to knock out Booldrum Caslo’s computers, but they’re usually not more than an inconvenience. I’ve been caught in them half a dozen times, out prospecting. It’s like being knocked down and having your bones polished from the inside, and you’re sick for a day and a half; Newcomers, anyway. The Oldtimers get over it faster. They don’t even bother putting their houses on poles to avoid them, just pick themselves up afterward, dust off, and go about their business, though they do hang their kids’ cradles from the ceilings to keep them clear. I used to hate ’em, but after that Force storm, if that’s what it was, these don’t look so bad.”

  The walls and furniture of Umolly Darm’s little dwelling, like every other building Luke had been in since his arrival in Ruby Gulch last night, bore the marks of the maelstrom of poltergeist activity that had swept over them the very hour—Luke guessed the very minute—he had drawn on the power of the Force to confuse and distract the Theran raiders. Dishes, tools, furniture, even transparisteel had been broken; walls were gouged where small farm machinery or implements had been hurled against them as if by a giant, invisible hand. Sheds and fences lay smashed on the ground and cu-pas, blerds, and grazers had scattered at large through the Oldtimers’ standing crops. In many cases the blerds had mixed in with the Oldtimers’ alcopays, which had also escaped in the confusion and which carried parasites inimical to the more fragile blerds; and on his way across to Umolly’s place that afternoon Luke had witnessed a dozen altercations between the two factions in the little town.

  Aunt Gin informed him that morning that the two men injured when their smelter leapt off its base were still in critical condition in the Hweg Shul hospital. A woman who’d been in the care of Ruby Gulch’s Oldtimer Healer—who by the sound of it used the Force to effect her cures—had died gasping as all the gentle psionics of the Healer’s art had been stripped away.

  He had done that. The thought made him sick with guilt.

  “You said the Oldtimers talked about Force storms.”

  “Only to say their granddads and grandmas spoke of ’em being common, way back in the days.” The delicate little prospector seated herself gingerly on the top step, keeping warily ready to leap up should the lightning below show signs of crawling up the pilings; Luke sat down beside her. “The last ones were two hundred and fifty, three hundred years ago, and even the Listeners don’t have stories about how they started or what they really were. Except the Listeners say, there was a span of only about a hundred years when they took place. There weren’t any before then, either.”

  Luke was silent, thinking about that. “Is there any chance …? Do the Oldtimers ever talk about there being some kind of—of beings living on this world? Invisible, maybe? Or hidden, back in the mountains? Something that may be causing this?”

  Umolly Darm chuckled. “Bless you, pilgrim, this planet was surveyed six ways from next week by the Grissmaths before they ever dropped a soul here. You can bet they’d never have set up a prison colony where there’d be the least chance of getting local help. I’ve been darn near all over this rock myself and never saw nor heard a thing. Even the Listeners will tell you, there’s nothing out there.”

  “Then what about the voices they claim to hear?”

  “They say those are their old saints, Theras and the others. There’s sure no invisible natives who’re causing the Force storms, any more than they’d cause the ground lightning or those killer blows we get in wintertime. Me, I’m inclined to think it was sunspots.”

  Sunspots, thought Luke, later in the day as from the bench of Arvid’s speeder he watched the white stucco buildings, the floating antigrav balls, and topato towers of Hweg Shul grow in distance. Or maybe a Jedi who had come and settled on the planet, perhaps taught a pupil? Who had never realized what was causing the Force storms? Or who had tried, with no regard for the storms, to control the effect?

  A Jedi who had learned something previously unknown about the Force?

  He was deeply aware of the Force as, later in the day, he sat in the window of the room he took above the Blue Blerd of Happiness Tavern, watching the green-clotted antigrav balls being slowly cranked down out of the hammering of the evening wind. Aware of its weight and its strength, disorienting, frightening; aware of the impenetrability of it. He couldn’t push, couldn’t search for Callista through it, and in any case he didn’t know how much he could manipulate it without causing further harm.

  But he had to find Callista. He had to.

  The grief came back on him, like a cancer choking his lungs, his throat, his heart. There had not been a day when it hadn’t come back to him like this, with knifing pain, that she was gone. And without her laughter, without the wry glint of amusement in her eyes—without the scent of her hair and the strength of her arms wrapped around him—there was only night without end.

  There was an old song, one that Aunt Beru used to sing—a verse of it echoed in Luke’s mind.

  Through dying suns and midnights grim,

  And treachery, and faith gone dim,

  Whatever dark the world may send,

  Still lovers meet at journey’s end.

  He had to find her there. He had to.

  The eight months since the descent of the Knight Hammer in flames to Yavin 4 had been a darkness in which there were times when Luke wasn’t certain he’d be able to go on. He knew academically that there was still some point to life: that his students needed him; that Leia, and Han, and the children needed him. But there were mornings when he could find no reason to get out of bed and nights spent counting the hours of darkness in the knowledge that nothing whatsoever awaited him with the dawn.

  He closed his eyes, and pressed his forehead to his hands. Ben, and Yoda, and his studies with the Holocron, had taught him about the Force, about good and evil, about the dark side and the responsibilities that went with the bright. For eight months now he felt that he had walked utterly alone.

  His mind relaxed into the silence of the room, seeking only rest. He listened to the noises of the taproom downstairs, the dim gronching of blerds stabled somewhere near; smelled the chemical stinks of the processing plants that were the town’s heart, the musty curtains of the transparisteel behind him, and the not-terribly-clean blankets on the bed.

  His mind settled and adjusted to the alien roaring of the Force.

  And through it he felt the presence of a Jedi.

  There was a Jedi in the town.

  8

  They had released the Death Seed.

  Even through the haze of sweetblossom, the anger that filled her was a blind, sickened rage.

  From the rail of her balcony terrace, Leia watched one of Ashgad’s numerous synthdroids walk slowly, haltingly, out onto the greater terrace below. She knew these creatures weren’t genuinely alive, only quasiliving synthflesh sculpted like a confectioner’s buttercream over a robotic armature. But seeing the dark patches of necrosis on its face and neck, she felt a surge of rage and pity.

  The voice of the pilot Liegeus—whom she had deduced was considerably more than a pilot—rose to her from below, soft and deep and patient. “Every day at noon you are to come out onto this terrace and stand for fifteen minutes in full sunlight. This is a standing order.”

  He walked out to where she could see him, clothed in a many-pocketed gray lab coat with his long dark hair pulled out of the way with ornamental sticks. He was a middle-size man, slight beside the synthdroid’s powerful height and bulk. Ashgad must have been trying to impress someone—probably the local population—when he ordered these creatures, Leia thought. The muscular bulk was purely ornamental. Their hydraulic joints had the limitless, terrifying strength
of droids, and would have had they been the size and shape of Ewoks.

  Liegeus took the synthdroid’s hand, stripped open the sleeve-placket, and examined its arm. Leia could smell the decaying flesh.

  “You’re quick to give orders,” murmured the soft voice of Dzym, out of sight within the shadows of the house.

  Liegeus turned his head sharply. Leia could see his face, though she was too far away to read any expression. Still, even hazy with the drug, she could feel his fear. It was in his voice, as he said, “These synthdroids are my workers and assistants. They don’t die of the Death Seed but over a period of time their flesh dies. I won’t have you …”

  “You won’t have me what?” Dzym spoke slowly, a deadly silence framing each word. “You would prefer that the plague went aboard those ships in your body rather than those of their fellows?”

  Liegeus backed a pace, farther into the zone of the sunlight, and his hand moved almost unconsciously up to his chest, as if to massage away some cold, sinking pain.

  “You would prefer that I took a little pleasure, a little sustenance, at your expense rather than theirs?” Dzym went on, and his voice sank still further. Leia could feel his presence, as though Death itself stood out of sight below her balcony, where the shadow lay thick. “I was promised, little key tapper. I was promised, and I have yet to receive the payment for those things that only I can do. You remember that there are many hours in a day, and only half of them are hours of light.”

  He must have gone then, because Liegeus relaxed. But he stood for a long time in the sunlight, and even from the distance of the upper terrace, Leia could see that he trembled.

  He was still shaky when he came up to her room, only a few minutes later. He must have come directly from the terrace, she thought, when she heard the door chime sound softly—Liegeus was the only one who ever used the door chime. Ashgad, and the synthdroids who brought her water and food, simply came in. She thought about going into the chamber to greet him, but somehow couldn’t come up with the motivation. Cold as it was outside, and uncomfortable with the bitter dryness of the air, she found the sunlight soothing. So she remained curled up on the permacrete bench, wrapped in the quilt from her bed and the now-rather-scuffed red velvet robe, watching him as he looked around the room for her, checked the water pitcher, and then, turning, saw her.

  He always checked the water pitcher. They all did. Leia was rather proud of herself for finding a place on the terrace rail where it could be poured out, to make it look as if she were drinking the stuff. In the hyperdry climate she had been flirting for days with dehydration and had a headache now most of the time, but it was the only way to keep her mind even a little clear. Since the first day she had been trying to figure out a way of tapping the pipes that supplied the internal mist fields that made the house livable or of distilling some of the moisture from the air, but the drug in her system made it difficult to actually do anything. She’d think of solutions and then discover with a slight feeling of surprise that she’d been sitting staring at nothing for two or three hours.

  Liegeus came out onto the terrace. “Your Excellency,” he greeted her gently. She hadn’t meant to speak of what she had seen—hadn’t meant to let him know she knew anything—but with the sweetblossom it was difficult to remember any kind of resolve.

  He looked so pale, his dark eyes so haunted, that she said, “You’re as much a prisoner here as I am.”

  He flinched a little, and looked aside. He reminded her of an animal that had been mistreated and would shy at the raising of any human hand. Compassion twisted her heart. “You seem to have the run of the place. Couldn’t you leave?”

  “It isn’t that easy,” he said. He came over to the bench where she sat, looked gravely down at her. The synthdroid, Leia could see, still stood on the lower terrace, the pallid sunlight turning its dead, doll-like hair to gold. “How much of that did you hear?”

  “I … Nothing.” Leia fumbled, and she cursed her own weakness for not being able to do without some of the drugged water every day. But she knew that most people were not aware of how their own voices carried. “I heard you and Dzym talking, that is, but I couldn’t hear what you said. Only the way you shrank away, the way you fear him.”

  Liegeus sighed, and his shoulders slumped. A wan smile flickered over his lined face. “Well, as you can see for yourself, Your Excellency, even should I leave—and I’m being very well paid for my work here—there really isn’t anywhere for me to go.” He gestured around them, at the wild crystalline landscape, the dazzling gorges and razor-backed ridges of glass. Then he was silent a moment, looking down at her, helpless grief in his eyes.

  “Do you spend much time out here on the terrace?” he asked abruptly.

  Leia nodded. “I know it probably isn’t a good idea. It makes my skin hurt …”

  “I’ll get you some glycerine,” said Liegeus. “Did you hear what I said to the synthdroid? It’s convenient to have them all operated from a central controller but it means you never can tell them apart.”

  “The only thing I heard was that it’s supposed to spend fifteen minutes a day standing on the terrace.”

  “I’d like you to do that, too. More, if you can.”

  “All right.” Leia nodded. It couldn’t be sunlight that was a cure for the Death Seed, she thought. Billions had died of it, daytime or nighttime, on worlds across half the galaxy. “Liegeus …”

  He was starting to leave; he turned back within the shadow of the house.

  “If there’s anything I can do to help …”

  The minute the words were out of her mouth she felt like a fool. The drug, she thought, and cursed it again. Here she was a prisoner, her very life under their control—for it looked to her like Dzym was able to call the Death Seed into being and to take it away again—and she was offering to help him.

  But something changed in Liegeus’s eyes: Shame and gratitude for even that small kindness, replacing the fear. “Thank you,” he said, “but there’s nothing.” He disappeared into the shadows of the house.

  The house Luke sought lay deep in the heart of the Oldtimer quarter. In many respects it bore a rather surprising resemblance to Seti Ashgad’s, which Arvid had pointed out to him that afternoon on the way into town. Like Ashgad’s, this house was built at ground level—something that surprised Luke until he remembered that Ashgad’s house had been built forty years ago by Ashgad’s father—and like Ashgad’s was now, this one had evidently once been surrounded by a luxuriant growth of plants, not just the standard vegetation common to low-light terraformed planets, but rarer growths and trees watered by a complex of droppers and pipes.

  But while Ashgad’s dwelling still supported this arrogant display of wasted water, this house bore only the detritus of former glory. Broken pipes crossed the dirty white stucco of the walls. A few dessicated stumps clung to niches, overgrown with snigvine like almost everything else in the grubby Oldtimer quarter. The milky-white stucco of the walls themselves had been smashed by winter windstorms, and beneath the gaps showed the grayish plastopress of which everything in the town was constructed. On the roof, most of the solar panels were broken as well, the cables rattling in the wind. Decay seemed to ooze from the boarded-up transparisteel like the foetor of a swamp: Decay and the enormous sense of something terribly wrong.

  Not here, thought Luke.

  It was something he had not considered: That in eight months, Callista would have ceased to be the woman he had known.

  She had lasted thirty years inside the gunnery computer on the dreadnought Eye of Palpatine. Could she have deteriorated so quickly in less than one?

  But whoever it was, whose strength in the Force he had felt, was here.

  The door opened before he knocked on it. The woman standing on the low slab of crystal before its threshold wasn’t Callista.

  She smiled, and held out her hands to him, the smile transforming her to beauty. “Another one,” she said softly. “Thank all goodness.”

/>   It was impossible to tell her age. Luke knew immediately she wasn’t young, in spite of the porcelain perfection of her face. It was like a very good reproduction of youth that succeeded only in not looking old. She lacked the wrinkles and lines of human sorrow and delight around her mouth, the crow’s-feet at the corners of the eyes that made Leia’s so wise, lacked the print of even the smallest thought on her forehead. Her hair was raven black and hadn’t been washed in weeks. Neither had her trim, high-breasted, long-legged body or the dingy green dress that wrapped it.

  “Welcome.” She drew him into the dense shadows within the first of the house’s many rooms. Her hand was like that of a goddess who bit her nails. “Welcome. I am Taselda. Of the Knights.” Her eyes met his, jewel blue under the flawless brows. “But then, you knew that.”

  Luke looked around the shabby darkness. Most of the transparisteel had been boarded shut and the room was illuminated only by a string of old-fashioned glow-bulbs tacked to the ceiling. His heart went out to her in compassion. Obi-Wan Kenobi had hidden himself for years in the obscure deserts of Tatooine, mocked at as a crazy old hermit, willingly surrendering the use of his Jedi powers that he might guard the last, chosen hope of the Knights. But he, thought Luke, had had the disciplines of the Force to help him bear it. This woman had been here for who knew how long, unable to use her powers for fear of harming the innocent in another Force storm. From the Newcomers she must have heard that Palpatine was dead, unable to harm her …