Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambley

  other aliens of Hweg Shul the Arcona who operated one of the

  majie-processing plants and a couple of Sullustans who owned the biggest

  branswed towers in the district. Luke noticed that all were vaguely

  ostracized by most of the Newcomer humans. He'd encountered this a number of

  times at the shop, this unspoken prejudice against the non-human species of

  the Core worlds. Stupid, when you thought of their technologies. But then

  the prejudices of the Empire had been stupid and had, in fact, brought about

  its downfall.

  More synthdroids guarded the door. He doubted that most of the people in the

  room realized that the guards weren't alive or human.

  They were realistic to the smallest degree, though the hair was a

  give-away--perfect, human, but with the oddly dead look that replants

  frequently had--and the smell. Everyone in the room smelled of sweat, of

  beer, of coffbine; of the salt of work and life. Synthflesh, until it grows

  into organic matter as a patch, requires no nourishment and excretes no

  by-products. Luke recalled an article he'd read about Loronar Corporation's

  efforts to make synthdroids that would be acceptable to scentcued species

  like the Chadra-Fans and Wookiees.

  There were even humans who reacted badly to the deeply buried anomaly of

  something that looked like a human and smelled like nothing.

  The conclusion of the article, as he recalled, was that the project was low

  on the Loronar priorities list. Chadra-Fans and Wookiees had little

  purchasing power and were considered an insufficient market to take the

  trouble over, even at a hundred thousand credits a throw'.

  "Arvid." Gerney Caslo jostled over to them through the crowd as people began

  to settle themselves on the edges of the low daises that were scattered

  around the room and on the compressed chairs set between.

  The whole place had been carpeted in a kind of dense industrial weave, which

  lent it an odd hybrid look. What had been food niches were now filled with

  the sort of cheap knock-off artwork available to the wealthy on thinly

  settled worlds bad holos of famous sculp ture, sometimes edited to

  substitute the faces of the new owner and his or her family, or cheap little

  sixteen-color-lights displays that ran through their cycles in a minute and

  a half. Luke had seen some beautiful sand-glazed Oldtimer pottery, and

  wondered that neither Seti Ash-gad nor his father, after all those years on

  the planet, had thought to include it in the house.

  Had the elder Ashgad so much resented this world that he'd have none of its

  works? But surely the son, who had been born there, or at least raised there

  he didn't look more than forty--wouldn't share the prejudice to the same

  degree? Or was Ashgad's other house, his dwelling in the Mountains of

  Lightning, more his than his father's?

  "We're looking for a couple of boys for a job," Caslo went on, speaking from

  the corner of his mouth like a bad guy in a holovid.

  "There's a drop coming in tomorrow night."

  "Where?"

  "Ten Cousins."

  Luke had heard Croig speak of the place. The Cousins in question were tsils,

  the crystal chimneys standing in a ring instead of a line, markers of some

  unknown geological process. A smuggler's dream, a formation easily

  identified on a scan but small enough to search in a night.

  "Can you use Owen here, too?" Arvid nodded to Luke. "He's working for Croig.

  He could use the cash."

  Booldrum Caslo, a thickset, smooth-faced little man with heavy

  sight-amplification equipment bolted into his head, grinned, "Anyone who

  works for Croig could use cash."

  Caslo studied Luke for a moment, then nodded. "We can use as many as we can.

  I hear it's a good-size cargo. You got that speeder of yours running yet?"

  Luke nodded, though running was a matter of interpretation.

  "You'll work pickup, then," said Caslo. Arvid sniffed as the older man

  walked away.

  "Doesn't trust you as a perimeter guard."

  "Hunh."

  "To keep the Therans away," explained Gin, coming over and perching on the

  edge of the dais where they sat. "Oh, the Listeners

  sometimes get word of drops and try to stop them, but mostly I think it's

  just keeping tabs on whatever's going on. Mostly they seem to concentrate on

  . . ."

  The lights dimmed, save for a single one on the main dais, set unobtrusively

  in what had been an olympian feeding niche. A curtain at the back of the

  room parted, and Seti Ashgad stepped through.

  Do not trust him, Callista had said. Do not meet with him, or accede to any

  demand he makes.

  WhyS.

  It was the first time Luke had seen the man face-to-face, though on the

  Borealis he'd glimpsed him and his escort in passing. He had not been born

  when Ashgad's father had been exiled by the Emperor Palpatine, but his

  teenage interest in the Rebellion had made him familiar with the older

  politician's easygoing charm and chameleon promises from holos.

  The old man must be in his eighties now, thought Luke, watching the son

  mount the dais and exchange jokes and pleasantries with those in the

  audience who knew him best.

  He hadn't heard Croig or anyone at the Blue Blerd of Happiness speak of the

  older man at all. Yet he'd defeated the (possibly Jedi) Hutt, taken over his

  power and his house. So he must have been a remarkable man. Was he dead, or

  just retired to the house in the Mountains of Lightning?

  "Now, now', we can't have any of that," Ashgad was saying, to a raucous

  suggestion that Republic troops would soon be on hand to "settle for" the

  Therans. Good-natured sarcasm dripped from his deep voice.

  "They're the majority, after all, you know. It's their planet."

  "It's our planet, too!" yelled Gerney Caslo, springing to his feet.

  "We bust our backs putting plants on this motherless rock. Don't that

  count?"

  "Does it?" Ashgad swept the crowd with a green eye suddenly cold and angry.

  "I thought so. I was optimistic enough to assure you I could do something

  about that. It appears that I was wrong."

  Silence fell, but Luke felt anger pass like ground lightning through the

  crowd.

  "As you know," said the politician, now suddenly the focus of the entire

  quiet room, "I had high hopes. Through connections I was able to obtain a

  meeting, not with some politician, not with some bureaucrat, not with some

  committee member, but with Leia Organa Solo herself--not," he added

  bitterly, "that she was at all enthusiastic about coming, as she made clear

  to me from the outset."

  They'd called the senior Ashgad the Golden Tempter. Luke knew, listening to

  his son, what he must have sounded like. Ashgad used his voice like a master

  artist used a light organ, evoking nuance, shade, twilight, and brilliance

  with the slightest shifts of tone and volume.

  "I apologize," went on Ashgad, "for my enthusiasm and for my folly. I owe

  you all that apology, for raising hopes not destined to be fulfilled." He

  gestured, and another man--at this distance Luke couldn't tell whether it

  was a synthdroid or not, though there was something
suspiciously smooth

  about the way he moved--slipped through the curtain and set up a holo player

  in the niche.

  "Perhaps I should let Her Excellency tell you in her own words."

  The light in the chamber dimmed still further. The holo of Leia was of

  crystal-clear quality, appearing almost solid in the near darkness, as if

  she were bathed in radiance from an unseen source. The scale was

  perfect--life-size, so that she truly seemed to be in the room, hands folded

  on her knees, the heavy folds of her robe of state spread around her. The

  Noghri bodyguards squatted on their bunkers, nearly a dozen strong, like

  shadows behind her. Her chin was up, and she spoke with a cold precision

  Luke had only heard her use when she was truly angry.

  "I'm afraid that any help from the Republic is out of the question, Master

  Ashgad," she said. "The Republic cannot afford to be seen to support a

  minority-any minority by prospective planetary councils still undecided

  about joining. Too much trade depends on our maintenance of the status quo

  and too many people see the efforts of the Rationalists on your planet as

  disruptive, unruly, and criminal."

  A buzz stirred the crowd. Beside Luke, Gerney Caslo mutttered,

  "Criminal--I'll show you criminal, honey!"

  "Criminal to make an honest living pumping water . . ."

  "What's disruptive about wanting medicine for my son . . . ."

  Leia's image went on, "I understand your problems, Master Ashgad.

  But the Republic must look at the larger picture. And, quite frankly, the

  discontent of a handful of settlers on a world that isn't even a

  member of the Republic is not worth the two billion credits it would

  cost--not to mention the damage done to the Republic's image--should we

  intervene in your quarrel."

  Her last words were drowned in a rising roar. Someone yelled, "Festering hag

  witch, what in blazes does she know?" and Luke was on his feet, his whole

  body aflame with rage, not at the man who had shouted insults at his sister

  but at the man who stood on the dais, just visible beside the glimmering

  holo, his head bowed in pious resignation and regret.

  Luke yelled, "Liar!" but his voice was drowned in other outcries, and before

  he could draw breath for another shout he realized that to protest that the

  holo was faked would only reveal his own identity and make it impossible for

  him to locate Callista. The holo was as much a fake as the cheap sculptures

  in the niches, holographically altered to resemble family members. For one

  thing, even before Leia had eliminated the bodyguards, she had never

  appeared in public with the Noghri.

  When "Leia" rose from her chair Luke was sure of it the chair itself was

  nothing like those in the Borealis's conference room or indeed anywhere on

  the executive flagship at all. The crimson robe was one she'd worn on a

  dozen state occasions over the past few years, easily copied. Luke had never

  seen it done this effectively, but presumably a really good slicer could get

  a holo of Leia's face and alter the movement of the lips to mesh with any

  voder-modified script.

  But all this, he realized, was something he'd learned over the course of

  years with the Rebellion, years of dealing with the sophisticated

  technologies and scientific neepery available on Coruscant and its inner

  worlds. As a kid on Tatooine--and had he grown to adulthood there, as Uncle

  Owen and Uncle Owen's friends had--he'd had no more suspicion that truth

  could be skillfully edited than he'd had the ability to fly.

  They believed what they saw.

  They believed Seti Ashgad.

  And they were furious.

  Ashgad was up on the dais artfully giving the impression that he was

  mollifying the crowd without in any way lessening their outrage.

  Luke slipped past the synthdroids by the door, crossed through the smaller

  chamber beyond, his boots making no sound in the carpet, too angry to

  remain. He was aware of the synthdroids watching him--their Central Control

  tinit, wherever it was, was undoubtedly programmed with the faces of every

  Rationalist on the planet. But no one stopped him.

  He stepped through a pair of long windows to the outside, breathing hard

  with fury, and made his way through the thickets of blueleaf and aromatic

  shrubs to the street. The wind had died to a dull hammering with the coming

  of full darkness. The voices in the dining hall still echoed in his ears,

  yelling vituperation at his sister.

  Beyond the edges of the settlements, the tsils glistened like spikes of ice

  in the cold-eyed starlight of the wastes. The ground was lustrous with

  frost, and the cold was like iron. He felt the Force all around him,

  breathing--waiting.

  There were people out there in the waste, not far away. Though they bore no

  lights he sensed them dimly eddies, stirrings in the Force.

  Therans?

  Probably. Watching Seti Ashgad's house.

  Release your anger, his father had said. Release your anger.

  He had meant it then as a lure, a come-on--use your anger in combat--a

  fool's trick.

  But now Luke truly released his anger, let go of it let it rise like steam,

  to be absorbed and defused by the stars. There was entirely too much anger

  afoot that night anyway, deliberately being stirred up, raised like a

  magician raising power back in that house. Rid of it, Luke was able to think

  clearly again, to ask questions. And the chief question was What does Seti

  Ashgad stand to gain?

  Under pouring rain, the port of Bagsho on Nim Drovis crawled with troops.

  Han had alerted the Med Center from orbit that he had fifteen critical cases

  of radiation sickness on board. Ism Oolos, the Ho'Din physician he'd talked

  to over subspace, awaited him in the docking bay with an emergency team,

  surrounded by a squad of uniformed Drovians who seized Han's arms the minute

  he came down the Falcon's ramp, shoved him up against the nearest wall, and

  searched him none too gently.

  "Is this really necessary?" demanded Dr. Oolos indignantly; Han also

  expressed himself to the head of the Drovian squad along the same lines but

  with considerably greater emphasis.

  "Doc, if you'd seen some of the armaments coming in for the Gopso'o tribes,

  you wouldn't be asking that." The Drovian sergeant pulled out its esophageal

  plug to make the remark, and shoved it back in with a squish. Since the

  onset of high-tech civilization in the wake of Old Republic military bases,

  most Drovians--who had been a pastoral network of tribes when contacted--had

  acquired the habit of sucking zwil--a cake-flavoring agent common to

  Algarine cuisine--through the mucous membranes of their breathing tubes via

  fist-size spongy plugs saturated with the stuff. Four-fifths of the soldiers

  wore plugs of various sizes and the air was thick with the dreamy,

  cinnamon-vanilla scent, where it wasn't heavy with the odors of wet

  vegetation, mildews inadvertently imported from every corner of the galaxy,

  and the oily smoke of burning.

  "You must excuse us." Dr. Oolos ducked his bright-tentacled head as he

  accompanied Han, the sergeant, two troopers,
and the med team back up the

  ramp. "The Gopso'o have been restless for months--ances-tral enemies of the

  Drovians . . ." He lowered his soft voice and his twenty-five-meter height

  to speak without the sergeant hearing. "Not a particle of difference between

  them, you understand, except that they have been at blood feud for,

  literally, centuries. I have heard the original issue was whether the root

  word for truth is in the singular case or the plural, but so many atrocities

  were committed on both sides that, of course, it barely matters now. The

  Drovians were the ones who made interstellar contact first, so, of course,

  they're the dominant tribe, but . . ."

  "They're killing each other over a festering grammatical construction?"

  Han couldn't keep his voice down. Dr. Oolos winced and gestured him quiet,

  but it was too late. The Drovian sergeant grabbed Han's arm in a viselike

  pincer "I'm killin' those moldspawns because they killed my family, see?

  Because they disemboweled Garnu Hral Eschen, because they tore the flesh off

  the bones of the children of Ethras, because they .

  . ."

  "All right," said Han hastily, as the sergeant was dragging him closer and

  closer to the muzzle of its gun. "Uh--Chewie . . ." He turned just in time

  to make it appear to the Wookiee, emerging from the door of the bridge, that

  he was in no actual danger and manufactured a cheerful grin. "Chewie, this

  is Sergeant . . ."

  "Sergeant Knezex Hral Piksoar." The sergeant shoved its plug back into its

  breathing apparatus again; a little thread of greenish mucus squirted out

  around the side to join the glistening crust that caked the lower part of

  its face.

  "it's necessary that they be permitted to search the ship," the Ho'Din

  informed them gently. "It's purely a formality. With local unrest as violent

  as it has been, and with forty deaths from the plague so far on the Republic

  base . . ."

  "Forty?" Han stared up at the willowy form towering over him, aghast.

  "I fear so. It's why I questioned you so closely before I was permitted to

  give you medical clearance to make planetfall.

  Authorities here have put the whole base under quarantine."

  Hral Piksoar allowed them into the first of the several storage holds Han

  had converted to emergency sick bays. It held its weapons trained in four

  directions while Dr. Oolos and his team passed swiftly from victim to