Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (16 page)

With the fading of the Sabacc's launch engines in the gluey warmth of the night, darkness settled around the two errant droids. In every direction around the wide, smoke-stained permacrete rectangle of the pad, hillocks of brush-furred mud alternated with forests of reeds whose thin heads rose no more than a few centimeters above the ambient water, a desolation of marsh-gunnies, gulpers, and the blinking green eyes of wadle-platts like ghost lights among the sedge. Against the dark hem of the sky, a sprinkling of lights marked Bagsho, largest of the planet's free ports, settled largely by Alderaan colonists but transformed in the past five years into a major crossroad between the New Republic and the neutral systems of the Meridian sector.

Had he been capable of doing so, See-Threepio would have heaved a sigh.

As it was he turned from the glimmer of the lights to regard his comrade and said, “Well, I hope you know what you've gotten us into.”

Artoo whistled a sorry little whistle, dropped himself forward onto his roller-leg, and snapped on his headlamp. A trifle unsteadily--be-cause of the switching box still space-taped to one side and the clusters of wires looped up from a jack on his back that hadn't been there before--he led the way across the permacrete pad to the narrow ribbon of trail that led toward the city, Threepio clanking resignedly in his wake.

“There,” said Umolly Darm, sitting back in her chair and pecking through a save command on the ramshackle keyboard. “Eight and a half months ago, on Buwon Neb's run in from Durren. One human passenger, female, hundred and seventy-five centimeters tall--she's the only human female that height all year. Cleared port authority under the name Cray Mingla.”

“That's her,” Luke said in a breath. His whole body felt strange, tingling with pain and grief and joy. He was almost afraid to speak, in case the grimy orange lettering should be swallowed into the monitor's dark again. “Thank you.”

“No occupation listed,” went on Darm. Her violet eyes flicked kindly to his face, then away; she kept her voice matter-of-fact.

“Though in Hweg Shul . . . drat!” The screen fuzzed out. Luke felt as if he'd been knifed through the heart; a moment later, he was aware of the prickling lift of the hair at his nape and turning quickly toward the window, saw the racing blue tentacles of ground lightning pouring across the gravel, writhing between the pylons of the Newcomer houses, crawling up the cable tethers of the antigrav balls and the battered, pitted metal columns supporting towers where bransved and topato grew.

“Not a big one.” Darm got up and crossed to the open door. “It'll pass in about ten minutes.”

They stood together in the doorway, watching the electricity race and chitter under the pilings of the house, the light of it splashing like water up over their faces from the faceted gravel. Like most of the Newcomer buildings in Ruby Gulch, Darm's house doubled as her office, storeroom, and workshop--two rooms fabricated from recycled packing plastene and mounted on buttonwood pilings a meter and a half tall.

ike most Newcomer buildings it stood just beyond the belt of terraformed land that followed the water seam, arable being too precious to waste, and its enormous transparisteel panels, double-glazed in an ineffective effort to keep the cold at bay, flooded the rooms with the harsh, broken, strangely colored sunlight reflected from below.

“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 cupas, 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 or--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 word for the storms, to control the effect?

A Jedi who had learned somethinq 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 BronchinB 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.

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 re mained 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.