Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambley

  landing bay whose doors, surprisingly, stood open. They passed inside,

  Yarbolk pausing to crank the doors shut manually from within.

  The bay was tiny and almost completely filled by the lumpy ovoid of the

  Aqualish smugglers' vessel. Beyond the dark, silvery green egg of the ship,

  the magnetic field glimmered faintly around the oval shape of the entry

  port. Yarbolk hooked Artoo's coax links into the access hatch beside the bay

  door "Figure five minutes should do us?"

  Artoo tweeped.

  "You can get that baby started in that short a time?"

  Artoo tweeped again, indignantly.

  "()kay, okay. Once you get it to turn over those things are candy to fly. I

  doubt she's got the juice in her to make it to Cybloc, but I know a fellow'

  on Budpok who'll buy her, no questions asked, cargo and all. The proceeds

  should get me back to the Core, and you to Cybloc no problem."

  "Not again," groaned Threepio, as he, Artoo, and Yarbolk hastened across the

  decking to the Aqualish ship. "I do hope we can arrive at a more convincing

  disguise this time. I must say that I am quite frankly becoming very tired

  of being treated as the potential personal property of every sentient being

  we meet."

  "Not to worry." Yarbolk pulled the hatch shut behind them and twirled the

  locking rings--for a space-going civilization, the Aqualish had some

  surprisingly primitive features on their ships. He toddled ahead of the two

  droids to the bridge, where he hooked Artoo into the computer core again and

  perched on the stool before the console, his furry little feet dangling.

  "I have a plan--one that doesn't depend on you two pretending to be anything

  you're not."

  Threepio said nothing, but in the portion of his central processing unit

  that formed opinions as protocol paradigms for communications facilitation,

  he reflected that he was heartily sick of plans.

  They were undoubtedly doomed.

  From the dense shadow at the base of the plateau, Luke looked up the

  striated cliff-face at the matte black jumble of Seti Ashgad's compound, and

  wondered how many of those glowing rectangles of yellow' and white denoted

  occupation. Was one of them Leia's prison? Or were they holding her

  somewhere in the heart of the house, within the rock of the plateau itself?

  Shivering in the dense cold, he reached out with his mind, seeking to touch

  hers--Leia . . .--but did not know if she could hear. In the darkness, the

  whisper of the Force around him was very strong, pressing on his mind,

  tugging at all his thoughts, so that he was hard put to keep it at bay. Even

  as there were ways of using the Force to keep from being seen, so it was

  possible to keep from making an image on certain types of sensors. Luke

  hoped that such minor use wasn't sufficient to trigger a reaction elsewhere

  on the planet.

  What was happening elsewhere in the galaxy as a result of Leia's

  kidnapping--what other events that kidnapping would have been coordinated

  with--he didn't like to think.

  He'd brought a toolkit from Croig's shop--leaving most of his slender

  finances to pay for it--and it didn't take long to rewire the alarm and

  spring the door-catches. His small glowrod showed him a permacrete parking

  bay containing a sleek black Mobquet Chariot, and by the stains on the floor

  there were two other speeders usually in residence, one of them with a

  faulty rear coil. Turbolift doors gleamed dully in the light. Luke ran the

  beam along the wall, seeking a stairway

  door, and drochs the size of his thumb waddled and skittered out of his way.

  The stairway, he thought, was going to be bad.

  The Force was life, Yoda had said Connecting all living things.

  What he felt, standing in the doorway to the stair and reaching up with

  whatever senses he could muster, Luke had never felt before and never wanted

  to feel again Life, thick and cloying. Life huge and all-encompassing--there

  couldn't possibly be that many creatures in the stairwell! Billions,

  billions.

  . . The sense of life there was overwhelming, and yet there was something

  hideously wrong with it. Something ugly, evil, rotted. A dirty miasma, a

  sense of fermentation, swollen like cancerous tissue, rotted and foul. Luke

  had no idea how to interpret this, no concept of what this meant, or even if

  his perception were accurate. He couldn't even tell if it was billions of

  lives he felt, or only one, huge and vile and waiting.

  But Leia had to be up there The lightsaber hummed to life in his hand.

  He maneuvered the little clip-on glowrod from the toolkit onto the front

  flap-pocket of his coverall, flicked it on.

  Permacrete steps ascended to a landing, then turned out of his view.

  Darkness, and something moving along the walls. With the choking inner sense

  of evil it was impossible to determine anything else about what might be up

  there, shape or size or sound or smell.

  Cautiously, Luke began to climb.

  He passed one landing, two, then three. Each break in the stair was twenty

  steps up. The plateau looked well over three hundred meters high, but there

  was no telling how deep the foundations of the house extended. As far as

  Luke could tell, there were no holocams or viewers in the stairwell only a

  close-crowding monotony of permacrete walls, grimy with the brown tracks of

  drochs. The join of the walls and floor was almost sepia with the noisome

  exudations of their bodies.

  Pain stabbed him in the calf and he looked down to see half a dozen huge

  drochs--the length of his thumb wriggling and climbing up his boots. Several

  had bitten through his pants leg and into the flesh already.

  Disgusted, he pulled a hypo-driver from his belt and used the shaft of it to

  dislodge those that hadn't bitten yet, but more were crawling purposefully

  toward him across the floor.

  As he bent down, the light of his little glowrod fell on them, and to his

  surprise he saw that several of the biggest had definite limbs,

  pincer-clawed or tentacular, sometimes both on the same organism. He stepped

  quicker, reminding himself that Arvid said they simply died and dissolved in

  the flesh ....

  But the pain in his calf was followed by weariness, a cold lassitude, an

  ache in his chest, and the sudden, overwhelming desire for sleep.

  He stepped around a corner, and onto another landing, and there they were.

  The floor was brown with them. Among the glistening mass there were half a

  dozen nearly the size of Luke's hand, spider-shaped or arthropod, some with

  the batrachian, springing legs of a Cabuloid pad-hopper ....

  Luke fell back, appalled, and something struck him from behind, fastening to

  his back between the shoulder blades, and pain like the slice of a chisel

  jabbed the back of his neck.

  He flung himself back against the wall, crushing whatever it was against the

  permacrete, but as if that had been a signal the drochs on the floor hopped

  and skittered and flowed toward him. The pain on his neck still reechoed,

  though a sticky fluid trickling down his back told him that whatever had

  attacked him was dead. He turned to flee down the stairs and saw
that the

  drochs had gathered in behind him, big and small, some of them huge, legged,

  toothed, and fast as lizards.

  Weakness flowed over him with the agony of a hundred bites, as if all his

  veins had been opened--not blood loss, he knew at once, but life-loss, the

  draining of the electrochemical field of his nervous system, of the life

  essence of his flesh and heart.

  He fell against the wall, clinging to the permacrete to stay upright,

  knowing that if he went down among them he was a dead man indeed.

  They evaded the slashes of his lightsaber, a weapon too big to touch them,

  too slow for all its speed. On the steps ahead of him Luke saw the biggest

  droch of all, nearly twice the size of his two fists bunched together,

  carcinomorphic, staring at him with two bright eyes on short stalks, and he

  thought, It's sentient. Or nearly so.

  And he knew' somehow that it was this thing that had orchestrated the attack

  on him, letting him come so far up the steps that there was no chance of

  descent.

  He cut at it, staggering with weakness. The thing sprang aside.

  Luke's knees gave out and he fell, gasping, dizzy, pain stabbing him as if

  he were rolled in needles ....

  And he summoned the Force.

  Like a shining wind he called it, and like a shining wind it came, tearing

  the drochs from his body as Vader had once torn cabinets and spools and

  railings from the infrastructure of the carbon-freeze chamber on Bespin to

  hurl at him. But the drochs he hurled away, crushing them against the walls,

  staggering to rise as more flowed toward him, from up the stairs and from

  below.

  He thought, I can't do this. The balance of the Force is broken. This will

  destroy some other place ....

  But when they fastened on him again, stabbing with greedy mouths through the

  ripped cloth of his suit, panic and horror seized him, and he knew that he

  must use the Force or die.

  Like a whirlwind the psychokinetic energy ripped and chopped at them,

  plucked them up and flung them against the walls, down the steps, and Luke

  had glimpses, in the jarring swirl of splintered light, of the bigger drochs

  seizing and fastening their mouths upon the smaller, then hurling themselves

  at him. The choking sensation of rotted, fermented life blotted his brain,

  more and more life, as if each droch were bloated on the lives of those it

  drank.

  In For more creds, so let's rob the bank, thought Luke. No sense in being

  inconspicuous now. He directed the Force before him, and staggered up the

  stairs, climbing on his hands and knees, while above him he had the sense of

  the big arthropod droch retreating, claws clicking on the floor, eye-stalks

  watching him like evil stars out of the darkness.

  "What's that?" Leia whirled at something that was less a sound than a

  stabbing in her mind, a tightening in her chest, flicking her consciousness

  like a whip. From deep below them in the locked and sealed tower came a

  crashing sound, something falling. The Listener Be caught up a white lamp

  and sprang up the steps to the downward-leading door, pressed himself to it

  like a spider. At the same moment one of the other Therans camped on the

  roof cried out, pointing. With a shiver Leia saw one of the clapped-out

  grenade launchers rise from where it lay and begin to smite itself against

  the black shielding of the central gun.

  Eerie in the uncertain starlight, it crashed against the metal wall, over

  and over, bending the metal of its own barrel in its violence, untouched by

  any hands. Leia pressed back against the parapet, wondering if she were the

  only one to hear a sound like dim shouting, the clamor of voices within her

  own mind, crying something she did not understand.

  Then the voices dimmed. The grenade launcher fell to the pavement again, its

  barrel bent nearly ninety degrees. In the silence the

  yammer of the cu-pas on the ridge behind the gun station sounded suddenly

  clear.

  "The Force," whispered Callista. "Someone is using the Force."

  Leia shuddered. All desire that Callista's words had roused in her to learn

  to use the Force for good trickled away like ice melting in the summer sun.

  Not if that's what it is. Not if that's what I could become, mindless p ower

  hammerinq in raqe.

  "BeldorionV' "Maybe," said Callista. "He still has that power within him,

  though he can't use it, or control it, as once he could. That's why he

  wanted you under his control."

  Leia shook her head. "I don't understand." The very air seemed to whisper

  with a lambent horror, violence waiting just beyond the finger touch. "The .

  . . the Force here. Could it have done something to him?"

  "Not the Force," said Callista. "Dzym. And the drochs. They're lifedrinkers,

  Leia. They are the Death Seed plague. The Grissmaths knew.

  They seeded the planet with drochs, hoping those political foes they exiled

  here would die. But the light of the sun fragmenting through the crystals

  here generates a radiation that weakens the electrochemical bonds of their

  tissues. It prevents the larger drochs from damping the electrochemistry of

  organic life until they're absorbed harmlessly by their hosts. The smaller

  ones it kills outright.

  "I don't know how the prophet Theras knew this," she went on.

  "So little is known of him. Certainly he never knew' that it was the drochs

  who caused the plague, only that no ship large enough to carry heavy

  shielding should be permitted to leave the planet. He may have been a spy,

  or a politician opposed to the Grissmaths. But at least he understood that

  the planet must be kept in quarantine. Over the years that must have

  extended to forbidding larger ships to land. Somehow he must have known

  there was a connection."

  "And Ashgad took them out in the flesh of the synthdroids," said Leia

  softly. "How could he do that? How could he get them past the quarantine

  screens? How can Dzym control them the way he does?

  "I can't prove this," said Callista softly. "But I think the drochs are

  sentient, after a fashion. Even the littlest ones. They mimic shapes,

  chemistry, electromagnetic currents, anything, down to the cellular level.

  That's why they can't be detected. I think in some ways they mimic

  intelligence as well. They become of the same substance as their hosts, even

  as they're drawing the life out of them and into themselves.

  And the big ones, the captain drochs, can draw life out of the victims

  through the smaller ones, without themselves attaching to their hosts.

  That's when they get dangerous," she went on, shaking her head. "The more

  life they drink--their victims' or each other's--the more intelligent they

  become. Bigger, and more capable of mutability.

  Those things you described in the stairwell of Ashgad's house weren't

  related to drochs, they were drochs. Drochs grown big from eating one

  another, from absorbing one another's energy. People used to eat them, to

  absorb life and energy into themselves."

  "Does it work? The memory of Beldorion digging around in his cushions and

  popping drochs into that huge, slime-dribbling
slit of mouth came

  revoltingly back to her.

  "In its way," said Callista. "In its way."

  The stab of pain, of terror, struck Leia again, the voices clamoring in her

  brain, and a hundred meters off the black mouth of a canyon suddenly spewed

  forth a whirl of dust, like sparkling smoke in the starlight. Not a breath

  of wind stirred, but she saw boulders, slabs of crystal and granite and

  basalt, leap like fish in the maelstrom, and heard the hammer and crash of

  them striking the canyon's walls. Panic closed her throat. Callista sprang

  to the top of the parapet, barely touching the maze of beams and wire for

  balance, staring out across the salt-white wasteland at the sudden whirl and

  rise of dust from that direction that collected slabs and boulders as it

  came. Beneath them in the gun station, other things were falling, or

  hammering frenziedly against the walls.

  Then the horror sank again, the voices in her mind stilled. Leia wondered

  why she thought they had been saying her name.

  Callista stepped down, her gray-black veils stilled, though they had whipped

  around her as if wind-blown while she listened. "That's too big for it to be

  simply Beldorion looking for you." Her eyes were grave.

  "Something else is going on. This is only my opinion, you understand, but I

  think that the drochs become part of the brain of those who eat

  them. And the bigger ones, if they're eaten, exert influence even after

  they're consumed. I know the bigger drochs--the truly big ones, the size of

  a pittin--can control the little ones. 1)zym ...."

  "Callista!" Be cried out a warning. At the same moment sudden wind erupted

  from below the parapet, pouring out of the canyons all around the gun

  station. Grit ripped Leia's face, chunks of gravel and flying arrowheads of

  broken crystal gouged her cheeks and forehead.

  Above them and on all sides the beams and timbers of the defensive works

  began to shake, wire and rivets groaning and writhing like live things.

  Scarred face cut by shrapnel, arms covered with drochs digging into his

  flesh, the Listener emerged from the doorway of the tower and ran to where

  Callista stood, even as the grenade launchers, the stacks of pellet guns and

  spears, were sent sprawling by the kick of some giant, invisible foot. One

  of the flamethrowers began to spout fire.

  Be caught it up, hurled it over the parapet--Leia saw it flare like a torch