Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambley

  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

  smugglers made landfall on this planet. With Pedducis Chorios so close it

  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