by M. Shayne Bell
I thought: This is it. I won’t get out of this one. I topped a dune in my landspeeder—going fast, always fast—and saw eight Sand People standing around the vaporator I’d come out to fix. I had seconds, then, to decide what to do: Plunge ahead over the last dunes to save a malfunctioning vaporator whose output I needed, or turn around and speed back to the defenses of my house and two droids. I gunned the speeder ahead.
The Sand People scattered and ran, and I watched where they ran so I’d know where they might attack from. All for .5 liter of water, I thought. I was risking my life for .5 liters of water. The vaporator’s production was down thirty percent to maybe one liter a day, and I had to get its production up to the standard 1.5 and keep it there, the farm was that close to the edge, so close that every vaporator had to work at maximum or I’d lose the farm.
In seconds I was at the vaporator, stopped in a cloud of dust and sand my speeder raised. I couldn’t see the Sand People, though their musky scent lingered around the vaporator in the heat at the end of the day. The shadows of the canyon walls were lengthening across the dunes on the valley floor.
It would soon be dark, and I was in a canyon where Sand People had come, far from home.
Human technology scared the Sand People—my speeder certainly had—but they wouldn’t stay scared for long. I grabbed my blaster and jumped out of the speeder to see what damage they had done to the vaporator.
A smashed power indicator. One cracked solar cell. Scratches around the door to the water reservoir, as if they had been trying to get to the water. The damage was minimal.
But what to do now? I couldn’t guard all of my far-flung vaporators. I had ten of them, each placed in a half kilometer of sand and rock, not the standard quarter kilometer—I was so close to the Dune Sea that a vaporator needed twice the land to pull the 1.5 liters of water worth harvesting out of the air. If the Sand People had figured out that vaporators held water and if they were determined to get into them, my farm would be ruined. I could replace power displays and solar cells. I couldn’t guard vaporators kilometers apart from Sand People who wanted water.
I heard a low grunt over a dune to the north, and I immediately crouched down against the vaporator and scanned the horizon. The grunt sounded like a wild bantha waking from the heat of day, but I knew it wasn’t bantha. The Sand People were coming back.
They were determined to get this water.
And why shouldn’t they, I suddenly wondered? Before I came, the water collected inside my vaporator would have been their water, distilled out of the air in the morning dew, not pulled out at all hours of the day by a machine. They must have been desperate for water to have come up to a human machine, to have touched it, to have tried to open it. What were they suffering to drive them to this?
I heard more “bantha” grunting south of me, over the dunes, then to the east and west, and finally to the north again. I was surrounded, and an attack would come in minutes.
Suddenly I realized what I had to do. “Go ahead and waste your profits,” Eyvind, who owned the farm closest to mine three valleys over, would say, “waste your profits so I can buy your farm cheap from your creditors when they force you off the land.” But I wouldn’t listen to Eyvind’s voice in my head, and I wouldn’t have listened to him if he’d been with me then. I spoke to the vaporator, and a panel slid back from in front of the controls. I punched in the number sequence I’d programmed, and I heard the vaporator sealing the pouch of water in the reservoir. When it finished, the door in front of the reservoir slid open. I pulled out the pouch and set it on the sand west of the vaporator, in shade out of the light from the second setting sun. I took out my knife and made a tiny slit in the top, where the air was, so the Sand People could smell the water and get to it.
I punched in the command to close the door to the reservoir, then told the vaporator to close the door over its controls, ran to my speeder, and flew it to the top of a dune southwest of the vaporator. I could see no Sand People, but I knew they were masters at blending into a terrain and surprising the unwary. I’d heard plenty of stories about just how quick—and deadly—they could be with their gaffi sticks, the double-bladed axlike weapons they made from scavenged metal off the Tatooine wastes. I sat low in my speeder and tried to watch for any movement—I did not dare fly farther away: They were all around me and they would surely throw their axes if I tried to run, and I did not fancy being beheaded in my own landspeeder. Besides, I hoped they would recognize what I had done: that I had given them water. I did not know, then, if I could hope it would buy my life and their trust and thus my farm.
I saw movement: one of the Sand People, coming from the north, slowly, low over the sand toward the vaporator and the water. When he reached the water pouch in the shadow of the vaporator, he knelt in the sand and smelled the bag: smelled the water inside it. He lifted his head slowly and gave out one keening cry that echoed through the canyon. Soon I counted eight Sand People—no, ten—hurrying toward the water, from all directions, four making a wide berth around my speeder.
Only one of them, a small one—young?—took a drink. Two others poured the rest of the water in a thin pouch of animal skin to take with them, and they did not spill any water. When they finished, the one who had first smelled the water looked at me. Then they all looked at me. They did not speak or make any noise, and they did not run. The one who had smelled the water suddenly raised his right arm and held up a clenched fist.
I jumped from the speeder, walked a few steps from it, and raised my right arm and clenched my fist in return. We stood like that, looking at each other, for some time. I had never been so close to them before. I wondered if they had ever been so close to a human. A light breeze from the east down the canyon blew over us and cooled us, and abruptly all the Sand People turned and disappeared in the dunes.
They did not destroy my vaporator. They did not try to kill me. They left the vaporator alone after I gave them the water, and they left me alone. They had accepted my gift.
I pledged, then, to leave them the water from this vaporator. I would miss selling the water, I knew that—I needed to sell it—but it seemed a small price to pay if by giving them a few liters they would then not ruin my vaporators. I could make do with the output of the other nine vaporators for a short time—and meanwhile buy two of Eyvind’s old second-generation vaporators to fix. When they came on-line, my output would be back to the minimum I’d need to survive.
All this effort seemed a small price to pay to be able to live near the Sand People in peace.
I counted the days of my farm from that day.
Eyvind had told me I was crazy to come out this far. “No one has gone that far,” he said. “I can’t believe the moisture patterns consistently flow up those canyons—you’re only a handful of kilometers from the Dune Sea!”
But I had tested the moisture patterns: There was water to be had there. Not a lot. It would not be a rich farm, like those outside Bestine, but one morning when I was camped in what I thought of then as a far canyon, I woke on the blanket I’d laid out on the sand, and it was damp from the dew. My clothes were damp. My hair was damp. I pulled the instruments from my speeder and set them up and they all read one thing: water. Harvestable water. Somehow it blew over the mountains and settled here before evaporating in the wastes of the Dune Sea farther west, and it did it day after day for the two weeks I spent in that canyon running tests. Over the course of a year, I tested that canyon and the surrounding canyons twenty-nine more times—I had to have that much detailed data to prove that this farm could work so I could borrow the startup money. But I’d known from that first day when I woke up with damp hair that I could have a farm here.
I spent months filling out Homestead Act forms and waiting for a grant of land, then months filling out loan applications and waiting for replies, all the while listening to other farmers tell me I was crazy. But I had the undeniable facts of my readings to hand anyone who could authorize my homestead or loan me the start-up money or even just listen and offer advice, and finally the manager at the Zygian branch bank did listen—and he read my reports, checked my background to see whether I knew anything about moisture farming, which I did, and whether I would keep my word, which I would. He loaned me the money.
He gave me ten thousand days to pay him back.
Ten thousand days was enough time to make any dream come true, I thought.
I lay on my bed in the dark at the end of a hard day, after leaving the Sand People the water I’d pledged them, remembering all this, remembering how badly I’d wanted to come out here, how hard I’d worked to get my homestead and the loan and then to set up my farm. Not once had I thought about who might already be out here, depending on this land I called my farm.
I rolled over and asked the computer to display the holomap I’d made of my farm and this region.
“The files you have requested can only be accessed after a user-specified security clearance,” it said. “Please prepare for retinal scan.”
I stared for a few seconds into a bright, white light that suddenly shone out of the monitor. I had to guard my map. I’d made the map myself—after a year of surveying and taking photographs that I fed into the computer and working from notes and memory—and if the wrong people knew I was making maps it could be dangerous. I programmed the computer to display the maps only to me and to never reference them when working with other files; they were not cross-referenced or indexed. When asked if such files existed, it would say no to anyone’s voice but my own. If asked to access them, it would respond and proceed with the security clearance only if it heard my voice.
“Retinal scan complete,” the computer said. “Hello, Ariq Joanson. I will display the requested files.”
Part of the wall I kept blank and white just for this projection suddenly became the canyons of my farm seen from the air: my house, marked in blue; the vaporators, smaller dots of green, widely separated; the canyons and mountains and dunes all in natural colors. A red dot far up Bildor’s Canyon northeast of my farm marked a Jawa fortress. White dots marked the houses of the farms closest to mine—and none of those dots were very close. “You’ll be three canyons and kilometers away from me—and I’ve been the farthest one out for two years!” Eyvind had warned. Over all the canyons and mountains and dunes I’d had the computer draw in black lines for the boundaries of the farms. The land lay spread out over my wall in the darkness, and the dots for houses and vaporators gleamed like jewels behind their black lines. Except for the red Jawa dot, all of them represented human houses or machines. I’d never thought of putting in dots for the nomadic Sand People—or of drawing boundaries for them and the Jawas.
“Computer,” I said. “Draw in a boundary line from the northeast border of my farm in Bildor’s Canyon, along the ridges on both sides of the canyon to a distance of one kilometer above the Jawa fortress.”
“Drawn as requested,” the computer responded, and it was. The lines appeared.
“Label the space inside those new lines ‘Jawa Preserve.’ ”
“Labeled as requested.”
The words appeared, but I didn’t like them. “Relabel the Jawa Preserve, the ‘Jawa—” What? Land? Reservation? Protectorate? “Just label it ‘Jawa,’ ” I said.
“Labeled as requested.”
The word “Preserve” disappeared from the map, and the word “Jawa” centered below the red dot.
“Now draw borders west from the northwest boundary of my farm to the Dune Sea and west from the northernmost boundary of the Jawa land also to the Dune Sea.”
“Drawn as requested.”
“Label that ‘Sand People.’ ”
The words appeared over the land. “Have the Jawas and Sand People acquired rights to this land?” the computer asked.
“No,” I said. “I’m only daydreaming.”
“Do you wish these changes saved?”
I considered that. “No,” I said finally. “It is a fiction. Erase the changes and shut down.”
It did so.
I lay back on my bed. What I had told the computer to draw was worse than a fiction. I had asked two successive Imperial Governors to commission a mapping project of this region, with the same response: “We just don’t have the money.” Translate that: “We have too many people here who don’t want accurate maps made of what lies beyond the known settlements and farms, and if you want to live to bring your next water harvest to Mos Eisley, quit asking for such things.”
So I’d quit asking for them. But it wasn’t criminals who needed to hide places of illegal activity who threatened my life or livelihood, yet. It was Sand People violence and Jawa dishonesty and manipulation—all caused in part, I was coming to realize, by constant encroachments into what had no doubt been traditional Jawa and Sand People territories. Maps would be the first step to a secure peace for the farmers and Jawas and Sand People—if you could get them all to draw in negotiated boundaries on those maps and honor them. Without such agreements, farmers faced the equivalent of blundering around in the dark—setting up farms in areas where maybe no one should go, living in places that could—and did—get decent people killed. I wanted the killing to stop.
But for that, we needed a map. The government would not draw it.
So I drew it.
And I decided, that night, to take my map to the Jawas near my farm and talk to them about how to take it to the Sand People. If we agreed among ourselves on how to live together in these mountains and canyons, maybe someday the government would make our agreements official.
I looked at the monitor for another inevitable retina scan. “Computer,” I said, “redisplay the map I just requested and redraw the boundaries I had you erase. Copy this file to the portable holo-display unit.”
I knew these Jawas. I had been to the gates of their fortress many times, especially during the year I spent measuring the moisture in the canyons of my farm: They would come out to trade water for trash I’d found in the desert and for information about the Empire and its cities and the systems that made them work and the alien races and how to deal with them. I tried to be good to the Jawas, and fair. If they got the better of me in a few deals, I’d come out ahead in a few others, and the tally remained about even. Some of the Jawas even became my friends—the old ones, the ones I could learn from who had the patience to teach me their language, the uses of native plants, geographic lore.
Their thick-walled fortress blended into the walls of the canyon, but I knew how to fly straight to its closed and hidden gates. I stepped out of my speeder and held up the holo-display unit. “Oh, Jawas!” I called out. “I come to you with information and to barter.”
The gates opened at once—the word “barter” would always open their gates—and eight Jawas rushed out. I tried again to see inside, but could not in the darkness there. They had never invited me in. I had no idea what lay inside. This was a new family fortress, maybe only a hundred years old, with, I guessed, fifteen clans—four hundred Jawas. They were jealous of any secrets and wary of any alien, but they would talk to me and barter with me and spend hours outside on the sand.
The first Jawa to reach me was my old friend Wimateeka. He began chittering at me in Jawa, slowly, so I could understand.
“Do you still come here asking for water now that you farm it yourself?” he chittered, and they all laughed.
“No,” I said. “But I have brought you a gift of water to thank you for your generosity to me in the past.”
I set a pouch of water in Wimateeka’s arms, and he could barely hold it up alone. The others crowded around to help him set it on the sand and to touch it, to feel the water move inside it.
“What else have you brought us?” Wimateeka asked.
“The knowledge of maps,” I said, “and how the Empire uses them to decide questions about land. We can use them in the same way.”
I set the holo-display unit on the level sand outside the fortress, sand beat down and compacted by the comings and goings of Jawa crawlers, and I asked the unit to display my map close above the sand. The Jawas shrieked and rushed back, but not Wimateeka. He would not leave the water pouch: He kept his hands on it.
“What is this that you have brought, Ariq?” he asked.
A map, I explained. I told them what maps are and the purpose of them, how all the mountains and valleys and sand plains around us were represented here with small replicas, and they began to recognize and point out familiar features, marvel that at this scale their fortress was as small as the red dot.
I explained boundaries to them and what they could mean to us: How if they agreed to respect the boundary of the land grant the government had given me, I would not go to the government to claim land farther up the canyon toward their fortress—I would, in fact, help them fill out the forms to claim the land themselves. I suggested that they buy and put out vaporators of their own, all down the valley, to the border of my farm. Even if they didn’t do this, the imaginary line between their land and mine would give them some protection, and I told them how I hoped the Empire would come to accept the lines we agreed on and keep other humans from making farms in their valley.
When I finished, the Jawas hurried inside the fortress to discuss my information and proposal. They took the water. I asked Wimateeka to stay outside with me for a short time. We sat in the shade of my landspeeder to watch the sunsets while we talked.
“Can you teach me a Sand People greeting?” I asked him.
He looked up at me, surprised. After a moment, he said: “Koroghh gahgt takt. ‘Blessed be your going out from us.’ ”
“No, a greeting,” I said. “Not a farewell.” I thought I had mispronounced the Jawa word for “greeting” the first time I asked.
“That is a greeting,” he said. “The most polite. They greet each other like this because they are always traveling. They will seldom stay long in one place.”
Not even long enough to develop greetings, I thought, only hasty blessings because they left each other so soon.
“Say it again,” I asked, and Wimateeka did, and I repeated it till I could say it.
“Why do you want to learn this greeting?” Wimateeka asked me.
I explained to him about the Sand People and the water and my questions about the land—their land.
Wimateeka was quiet for a time, looking at me. “The young Sand People are dangerous in the days that come and for a time,” he said. He explained that this was the time when the adolescents had to perform some great deed to earn adulthood, deeds that often included acts of mayhem against non-Sand People races.
“All our crawlers are coming home to wait here through this time,” he said. “You should take your fellow humans to Mos Eisley and do the same.”
He told me how a vast army of young Sand People had once attacked a Jawa fortress south of us and slaughtered the inhabitants. That fortress was still an empty, burned ruin that Wimateeka had once visited. I was lucky the Sand People around my vaporator had not been adolescents out to earn adulthood.
Wimateeka asked me how to operate the holo unit, and I told it to obey Wimateeka’s voice when he asked it to display the map, nothing more. He displayed the map three times, then asked if he could take it to the discussions in the fortress.
“This is not a trade,” I said. “I want this holo unit back, unharmed.”
“I will bring it to you personally,” he said. He abruptly snatched up the holo unit and hurried into the fortress.
I ate the supper I’d brought with me. After the last sunset, I laid blankets out on the sand. I expected to sleep there, blaster in hand—especially after Wimateeka’s story about the young Sand People’s rite of passage—in the relative safety outside the Jawa gates. But in the night, the Jawas came out to me, with torches.
Wimateeka led them. “You have honored us,” he said. He set the holo unit in front of me. “Extend our boundaries to include the valley west of us to the Dune Sea, and we will accept your proposal.”
I displayed the map and told the holo unit to make the boundary changes. The Jawas chittered softly when their black lines moved to include the valley they asked for. It was a valley their crawlers traveled through to get to the Dune Sea to scavenge. Everyone would agree that they needed that valley.
“It is not safe out here on the sand,” Wimateeka said. “Bring your blankets, your speeder, and your holo unit and come inside to spend the rest of the night with us.”
I hadn’t expected this. I got up at once and folded my blankets and stowed them and the holo unit in my speeder and walked the speeder through their gates.
We did not sleep. The Jawas took me to a great room, and in the heart of their fortress we talked by torchlight about maps and water and the Sand People and how to talk to them about maps.
Eyvind and I sat openly in front of our speeders on the dune southwest of the vaporator and my day’s gift of water to the Sand People.
“So they come here for this water?” Eyvind asked.
“Every day.”
“And they don’t break into your other vaporators?”
“No.”
“I still don’t like this. Your farm’s the farthest out, and you’re separated from the rest of us—so maybe you have to deal with the Sand People—but my farm’s the second farthest out and I don’t want to do anything to encourage Sand People to come around it. I won’t give them any water—but how long before they show up on my farm expecting it?”
“There—I can see one of them. Watch the dunes to the northwest. They come most often from that direction. They must camp somewhere to the northwest.”
“And you’re luring them down here.”
I didn’t answer that. We’d argued about this again and again over the last few days. I was not going to argue with Eyvind when Sand People were so close to us. To give Eyvind credit, he stopped arguing, too. The canyon was utterly still, then. No wind blew. I could not hear the Sand People moving. It was the first time I’d brought anyone else to see the Sand People take my gift of water.
I stood and put my hand on Eyvind’s shoulder. I did not believe that the Sand People would harm me. I hoped that if they saw me physically close to Eyvind they would learn not to harm him or ever want to. I’d made decisions, and I meant to stick by them—but I realized my decisions had moved the boundaries of racial interchange for everyone out here, I hoped for the good, that’s what I hoped.
Suddenly one of the Sand People stood in the shadow of the vaporator, near the water pouch. I hadn’t seen him come up. He was just suddenly there. I raised my arm and clenched my fist in greeting, but he would not raise his fist in return.
“Maybe this wasn’t a good idea,” Eyvind whispered. “Should I leave?”
“Not yet,” I said. I kept my arm up and my fist clenched. “Koroghh gahgt takt,” I called out.
The Sand Person stepped back, out of the shadow and into the sunlight, almost as if he were going to run.
“Koroghh gahgt takt!” I called again. I hoped I was pronouncing the words right—that Wimateeka had learned the greeting right to begin with before teaching it to me, that I wasn’t challenging the Sand People to a fight or cursing their mothers.
Slowly, the Sand Person began to raise his arm and clench his fist. “Koroghh gahgt takt!” he shouted back.
So I had it right, I thought. This was working.
I heard the greeting shouted at me from somewhere over the dunes to the east—then from all directions and from the canyon walls, again and again the same greeting: Koroghh gahgt takt.
Eyvind stood up. “They are all around us!” he said.
But we could see only one of them. That one picked up the water pouch and disappeared into the dunes.
Eyvind and I took our speeders and got out of there and saw no more of the Sand People that day. We went to my house and talked late into the night.
I’d sent Wimateeka’s warning about the Sand People’s rite of passage to all the other farmers in this region, and everyone agreed that we couldn’t run to Mos Eisley. If we did, we could never expect to stay out here at all. But to stay, we had to have peace, and most farmers felt that could only be guaranteed with blasters and maybe Imperial protection. A few listened to my ideas about maps and good neighbors. Not Eyvind.
Never once did Eyvind tell me about his wedding plans.
I took my speeder to Eyvind’s farm to pick up one of his old broken-down vaporators, and he walked out of his house with a beautiful girl.
“This is Ariela, my fiancée,” he said. “We’re getting married in five weeks.”
As simple as that. Eyvind hadn’t told anyone about this, not even me. I hadn’t known he’d kept boundaries like this between our friendship.
“I’m pleased to meet you,” I told Ariela. “And congratulations to both of you.”
“You’re the farmer with the big plans for us all,” she said.
Eyvind looked closely at me. “Can you understand now why I don’t want Sand People coming around my farm?” he said.
The arguing wouldn’t stop. I’d barely met Ariela—I’d barely been told about their wedding—and already the three of us were arguing. “Look,” I said. “I just believe that none of us can survive out here if we can’t make peace with the Sand People and the Jawas. At any rate, I’m sure the two of you don’t want to argue with me five weeks before your wedding. Sell me that old vaporator, Eyvind, and I’ll go.”
“But I think you’re doing the right thing, Ariq,” Ariela said, and that stopped me, fast. I didn’t know what to say.
“I think we should help you—and I believe I know the way to start. Would your Jawa friends come to our wedding? Would you invite them for us? As neighbors, they should be part of the important things in our lives.”
“She’s never smelled them,” Eyvind said.
“They’ll come,” I said. “I’ll go today to invite them.”
And I did. I dropped the old vaporator off at my house, packed up provisions for a night in Bildor’s Canyon, and set off. I reached the Jawa fortress before the sunsets.
“You have honored us again!” Wimateeka chittered after I extended the invitation. “But what of presents? We should take something, but we can spare so little! Our gifts will seem cheap and tawdry.”
“They will honor whatever you give them,” I said.
They took me, again, inside their gates to the great council chamber. We talked late into the night about wedding gifts—of rock salt, which they thought might make a good gift; of water, which they couldn’t spare; of cloth, which was never in adequate supply; of reconditioned droids, which would make elegant but prohibitively expensive gifts.
“Offer to teach them your language,” I said. “That would make a fine gift.”
But they liked best the idea of rock salt.
We did not resolve the question that night.
I finished installing the second old vaporator I’d bought from Eyvind just after dark, and if the diagnostics I’d run on it were accurate it would be a decent producer—maybe as much as 1.3 liters a day. My farm would be producing one to two liters above my old average, so I knew I was definitely not going to miss the water I was giving the Sand People.
I packed my tools in the landspeeder and headed slowly back toward my house and supper. I went slowly because it was dark and there were things out here to be wary of. At least I didn’t have to worry about the Sand People as I had before. At least there was that.
I dropped down into the canyon where I’d built my house, and there were lights around my house—a lot of lights. I sped up then.
“It’s him!” I heard people shouting when I stopped.
What had happened?
It was Eyvind and Ariela, the Jensens, who’d home-steaded next to Eyvind, the Clays, the Bjornsons—and six or eight others.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Eyvind stepped forward. “We’ve come to ask you, as your neighbors, to stop giving water to the Sand People. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
I’d imagined Imperial trouble of some kind—maybe the razing of Mos Eisley to stamp out corruption and the need to house refugees—trouble on that level to bring people out here to my farm. Not this. “Have the Sand People hurt any of you since I started giving them water?” I asked.
“They killed my son five years ago,” Mrs. Bjornson said.
“You don’t know that,” Ariela said quietly.
“I found him dead in the canyon north of us! Who else is out there chopping people apart with axes? The Imperial investigators said Sand People killed my son.”
No one said anything for a minute. No one wanted to point out that so many people could have been out there, not just the Sand People. No one wanted to say that Imperial investigators might have wanted to fix blame on suspects who could never be brought to trial.
“They destroyed five of my vaporators,” Mr. Jensen said.
“They broke into my storage shed and tore it apart,” Mr. Clay said.
“One of them threw a gaffi stick that lodged in a rear stabilizer when I was driving into Mos Eisley,” Mrs. Sigurd said. “I barely made it to the city.”
Ariela stopped them. “So bad things happened out here, and all of you jumped to blame the Sand People.”
Mr. Olafsen cut her off. “It’s outsiders like you, coming here from where was it—Alderaan?—with your ideas of how we should start living, it’s outsiders like you—and this Ariq, here—who cause the most trouble.”
“I’m not an outsider,” I said, but that was not the point. My ideas were new. There could be trouble before they worked, before we could all live in peace. It looked as if all the trouble wouldn’t come from the Sand People.
“So you worked on a moisture farm as a kid,” Eyvind said to me, “so you’ve made this farm of yours turn a profit—does that mean you can appoint yourself diplomat for the rest of us and negotiate with the Sand People and Jawas?”
“The Sand People would have ruined my farm, Eyvind, you know that. I have to find a way to live with them. You know that, too.”
“Most people out here are against what you’re doing, Ariq.”
“Is that so? The McPhersons, the Jonsons, and the Jacques all support me, and I don’t see any of them here. What about Owen and Beru? Have you talked to them? Or the Darklighters? Where do they stand?”
“In two days we have a chance to see firsthand how Ariq’s plans are working,” Ariela said. “Eyvind and I asked him to invite the Jawas to our wedding, and they are coming as our guests.”
That announcement started more arguing amongst these people than I had ever heard. Eyvind did not look happy to have had her say that.
“The Jawas were honored to be invited,” I said. “We can live with them—you’ll see. Maybe we can come to live with the Sand People.”
But no one listened to me. Ariela looked at me, and she looked worried. I could imagine plenty of reasons for her to be worried. It was clear she didn’t support Eyvind’s ideas about my ideas. I was sorry to be the cause of what was probably their first argument.
“We’ll take this to Mos Eisley—we’ll even take this to Bestine,” Eyvind said when everybody started to leave.
I walked my speeder into the shed and locked things down for the night. When I came back out, Ariela was still standing there.
“What are you going to do?” she asked me.
I wanted to ask her the same question. “I don’t know,” I said. We sat on the sand in front of my house and were quiet for a time.
“Are you really from Alderaan?” I asked her.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you miss it?”
“Not really,” she said. “I’m in love, and that makes up for it. But I do miss the water—we’re so wasteful with it there!”
“I can’t imagine such a place. I’m used to guarding every drop.”
“Not there. If I could take you and Eyvind to Alderaan you’d get fat on the water.”
“I’d swim in it all day.”
“You could take an hour-long shower and no one would care.”
“I’d keep plants in my house and water them.”
She looked at me and smiled. After a minute she stood up. “I won’t let Eyvind cause trouble for you in Mos Eisley or Bestine. I can’t answer for the rest.”
“Thank you,” I said. After she left to catch up to the others, I went inside. I didn’t have the stomach to eat. It was hot in the house, so I took the holo-display unit and walked outside onto a ridge overlooking my house and sheds. I’d shut down all the lights, so the compound was dark. I displayed the map, and it shone out brightly above the rocks. The rocks around the map looked like the mountains around my farm. The stars shone brightly, and I lay back on the rock to look at them.
I do not look up often enough. I am so busy all the time and so tired after dark that I do not look up often enough at the stars.
I wondered how all of this would turn out.
Thirty-one Jawas came to the wedding, and they brought sacks of rock salt, a liter of water, a bolt of their brown cloth—and a diagnostic droid so small it could fit in the palm of my hand. They couldn’t decide on one gift, so they brought some of everything we’d talked about.
The diagnostic droid spoke the binary language of vaporators. The Jawas had polished it so finely that it hurt to look at it lying in the sun with the other gifts.
People just stood and stared at their rich gifts and wondered at the pleasure the Jawas had in being invited to this wedding.
Eyvind hurried up to me and asked me to come translate for him and Ariela. They wanted to thank the Jawas. I was standing by the punch bowl with the Jensens and Ariela’s mother and sister, who had come out from Alderaan for the wedding. Mrs. Jensen stopped me before I could leave. “Maybe you’re right about all this,” Mrs. Jensen said. “Maybe you are.”
I smiled at her and hurried off to translate. The Jawas all bowed to me, and I bowed back. I translated for Eyvind and Ariela, then started answering the Jawas’ questions about this human ceremony: Yes, the humans crowded here were all potential customers of their wares and, yes, the tiny diagnostic droid impressed everyone; no, Eyvind and Ariela would not consummate their marriage in public; yes, everyone hoped Eyvind and Ariela would have children; yes, the humans brought special foods to the wedding to make the day memorable. “Try the spiced juice,” I said. “You’ll love it. It’s better than plain water.”
I wondered what they would think of the spice. They followed me to the punch table, and I poured Wimateeka a cup of spiced juice and gave it to him.
He just held the cup and looked into it. “The cup is so cold!” he said.
“We usually serve cold drinks at important occasions,” I said.
“Why is it red? Does it have blood in it?”
“No—we don’t drink blood!”
Wimateeka looked up at me oddly, and I suddenly wondered if the Jawas drank blood at their weddings. I would probably find out soon enough. Wimateeka still hadn’t tasted the drink. “It’s quite good,” I assured him. “At least, we think so.”
“How much does this cost?” he asked, finally.
So he thought he’d have to pay for this. They’d all no doubt worried about having enough to pay for food and drinks—especially if they were pressed to try certain things. “Everything here is a gift to the guests of the wedding,” I said.
Wimateeka smiled then, and lifted the cup to his lips. His eyes went wide when he tasted the spiced juice—and I wondered if he would spit it out, but he didn’t, and soon he took another drink. I served the rest of the Jawas, and they all loved the spiced juice and asked me for more and I served Jawas for fifteen minutes straight.
Eyvind came up to me, nervous and anxious. “I want to get started,” he said, “but Owen and Beru aren’t here yet, and they were sure to come.”
“Who knows what’s kept them?” I said, while I handed a Jawa another cup of spiced juice. “But you’d better start soon or I’ll have all thirty-one Jawas drunk before the wedding.”
Eyvind laughed.
And the shooting started.
From over by the landspeeders. Everyone had parked west of Eyvind’s house, and the commotion came from there: Two or three men were shouting and firing at the landspeeders. I wondered why they would do such a stupid thing—and then I saw the Sand People.
The adolescents, I thought. They’d taken it into their heads to steal a landspeeder or two while we were busy with the wedding.
The Sand People fought back with their gaffi sticks, and threw a few with deadly aim, and people screamed and ran for cover, and Eyvind ran off to start shooting or to stop the shooting, I didn’t know which. I ran after him, but lost him in the crowd, and when I broke through I almost stumbled over Ariela holding something on the ground.
Eyvind. I knelt next to her. She was holding Eyvind with blood all over him, and there was shooting all around us, and then Sand People. I stood up and held on to Ariela so maybe they would recognize me and not kill me and Ariela, and some of them did step back when they saw me—
But something hit me in the back and sent me sprawling—a backhanded slap from the broad, flat face of a gaffi stick—and I couldn’t breathe for a minute, though I never blacked out. I heard screams, and I heard Ariela scream, and I couldn’t move, I could only see, for a minute, the feet of Sand People rushing around me, and then human feet, and a human pulled me up and leered into my face.
“This is your fault!” he shouted. “This comes from giving them water.”
He shoved me back down onto the sand, but I could breathe now and get up on my own, and they were carrying Eyvind away.
“He’s dead,” someone shouted at me, and the words hit me almost as hard as the gaffi stick had hit me. I couldn’t breathe again.
“They’ve taken Ariela,” someone else shouted. “They dragged her away from Eyvind and took her.”
Ariela’s mother grabbed hold of my arm. “You’ve got to save her,” she said. “The others are going after the Sand People to shoot them, and the Sand People will surely kill my daughter before she can be rescued. You’ve got to save her.”
“I’ll take Wimateeka,” I said. “He can translate for me.”
And that eventually became our plan: I had twelve hours to find the Sand People and convince them to turn Ariela over to me. In the meantime, everyone else would organize a well-equipped posse. If I wasn’t back in twelve hours, they would come looking.
And they would come out to kill the Sand People.
I found Wimateeka and the other Jawas huddled in their crawler. I explained what I had to do, and I asked Wimateeka to come with me. He started shaking, but he got up and walked with me to my speeder. He was still shaking when I lifted him in.
After I’d started off, I wondered why I wasn’t shaking.
I waited by the vaporator because I thought the Sand People would take Ariela to their main camp, somewhere northwest of here. I could travel faster than the adolescents in my landspeeder, so I was ahead of them and they would pass by me. They would probably stop to see if I had left some water.
And I had worked out what I would tell them. These were adolescents who needed to prove themselves worthy to be adults. I could offer them a way to be remembered forever in tales and gain an adulthood always honored: negotiate with the Jawas and me to secure the boundaries of their land and thus their nomadic way of life. I knew their adults would have to be consulted, but the adolescents could start the process and convince them of the necessity of it.
I hoped they would agree with me. I hoped they wouldn’t behead me first. I hoped they would agree that Ariela was a trifling matter compared to this and that the water and cloth Wimateeka and I had brought from my house to trade for her would buy her back.
So we waited on the sand, with our water and cloth, and the holo-display unit and my map.
And they came to us, suddenly. All at once we were surrounded by young Sand People, each armed with a gaffi stick, glistening sharp-edged in the harsh sunlight. The dunes were covered with Sand People. I looked for Ariela, but could not see her at first.
I stood and raised my arm and clenched my fist and greeted them: “Koroghh gahgt takt.”
They were all quiet. None of them spoke or raised their arms. That’s when I saw Ariela: bound and gagged and guarded on top of a dune south of me. “Tell the Sand People what I say,” I asked Wimateeka, and I knew I had to speak quickly and well to save her life, and probably Wimateeka’s and my own.
I told them we could stop trouble like we had gone through today. I knew a way. I told them my plan, and my hope that the Empire would come to recognize what we had done, and what this would mean for their people and mine.
Wimateeka had trouble explaining the map, and I didn’t know if they could understand what a map was. Wimateeka and I smoothed out a flat space in the sand, and I set up the holo-display unit and displayed my map. Some of the Sand People rushed back, startled, but others soon crowded forward, and it began to make sense to them.
But I would not negotiate till they had freed Ariela.
“What we are about to do is better than more killing,” I said. “I want you to free your captive—release her to me. She is my friend. Accept this water and cloth as compensation for the trouble you’ve had in caring for her till now.”
They argued about that, but eventually they took the water and cloth and passed it back into the crowd somewhere, and they cut Ariela free and let her walk up to me.
She came slowly through the throng of Sand People. They would barely move aside for her. But she was taller than all of them, so she kept her eyes on me and Wimateeka and eventually got to us. I hugged her, and she hugged me and Wimateeka.
And we started to haggle and negotiate and draw the lines on my map.
It was working.
I thought of all the generations of anthropologists who would have wanted to be here with the Sand People. The day was bright with sunlight, and I could feel the tension ebb away from among us. My map had never looked so beautiful, I thought, as it did then shining out flat above the sand and divided by the black lines of boundaries.
We finished negotiating, six hours before my deadline.
Ariela and Wimateeka and I packed up.
The Sand People stood up and watched us, then started to move off into the dunes, heading northwest to their camp.
Ariela climbed into my landspeeder.
I handed Wimateeka to her and climbed in.
And the dune west of us exploded in flame. My vaporator blew apart, and steam rushed up from it like smoke. Explosions ripped the air—and the young Sand People were screaming and running.
Six hours before our deadline—after everything we had worked for had come to pass. I had to stop the shooting.
I flew straight to where the shots were coming from —a rocky rise south of us—and we were not hit. A path through the fire opened up for us.
Stormtroopers. There were Imperial stormtroopers in the rocks. The farmers who opposed me had called them in, that was all I could think. I slammed the landspeeder to a stop and rushed up into the rock. “Stop shooting!” I shouted. “Those aren’t even adults you’re killing!”
But no one listened or stopped firing. I pushed into the stormtroopers and shoved their guns up to make them stop—and I was grabbed from behind and slammed into the rock.
“Stop it!” someone shouted at me.
It was the other farmers who had me, eight or ten of them.
“The stormtroopers will kill you,” someone hissed in my ear. “Live through this day and we’ll talk later about what happened.”
I tried to break free, and they shoved me back.
“The Empire would never let your plan work,” someone else hissed in my ear, then Ariela was in front of me, her face white and tear-streaked.
“Don’t you see?” she said. “They want trouble on all the worlds so the majority will welcome their presence to keep the peace. If you make peace here, our real enemies would become clear—and what then?”
I should have seen this. I should have known this would happen from the day the Imperial Governors first refused to map this region.
The firing stopped. The other farmers thanked the stormtroopers for “rescuing” Ariela and Wimateeka and me.
“You’ll have to evacuate from your farm for a time,” a stormtrooper told me. “It won’t be safe to stay in your house, isolated as it is.”
I wouldn’t just have to evacuate for a time. This could be the end of my farm. The Sand People would want to kill me for sure—unless I could find a way to convince them I hadn’t betrayed them, unless I could find a way to convince them just who had betrayed them.
“We’ll escort the Jawa home,” another stormtrooper said.
“No,” I said. “I’m taking him myself.”
And I did. I would not let them take him alone. I thought they might kill him if they got him alone—to anger the Jawas and to drive a wedge between them and the farmers. So a stormtrooper contingent escorted us to the Jawa fortress.
I lifted Wimateeka out of my speeder, near the gates of his fortress, and he rushed inside without saying a word to me.
The Imperial commander ordered me into Mos Eisley to make a deposition, and I had to go. Ariela asked me to take her mother and sister to the spaceport. She stayed with the other farmers to prepare for the Sand People’s onslaught of revenge.
“Eyvind left me his farm,” Ariela told me. “I’d like you to help me run it after this is over—when we can go back to it.”
So I had that to think about on my way into Mos Eisley.
I left Ariela’s mother and sister at the spaceport. In a short time, they would be safe on Alderaan. I made my deposition, and the Imperials confiscated my map and let me go.
I wondered for how long.
In the meantime, my farm was abandoned.
My hopes for making peace with the Jawas and the Sand People were ruined.
The Sand People would surely feel betrayed and kill innocent people.
My maps, my dreams, my successful negotiations meant nothing to the Empire.
All because the Empire did not want us to have peace. All because the Empire did not care about the safety and the work and the lives of its citizens. We were pawns to be used and discarded—our efforts channeled as long as possible into “approved” paths.
I stopped at the cantina for a drink. I could not go straight back.
I sat in a dark corner and watched the people around me—people from all corners of the Empire. Representatives of peoples who had each, in their own way, been oppressed by the Empire. We had all endured it.
But there was another way. I knew there was another way.
There was the Rebellion.
The Empire had driven me into rebellion.
I took another drink and looked around. I didn’t know how to find the Rebellion. I didn’t know how to join. But this cantina would be the place to find out, I thought. If I asked a few judicious questions, maybe I’d find out. I decided to ask the Ithorian a few tables down.
I took another drink, for courage, but before I could move, Owen and Beru’s nephew, Luke, walked in with somebody I didn’t know and two droids that got ordered out.
Where were Luke’s aunt and uncle? I wondered. And that started me thinking. Owen and Beru’s farm was quite far from mine and Ariela’s. Maybe they could use an extra hand or two till things settled down and it would be safe for Ariela and me to go back to our farms.
Then we could start our work for the Rebellion.
Ariela would follow me into the Rebellion. Most of the other farmers probably would too after what had happened today. The Jawas would help. In time, maybe even the Sand People might come to understand what had happened to them—and that restoring the Republic would stop Imperial atrocities. Farmers like me, in an odd alliance with Jawas and maybe Sand People, would have to fight for our right to live in peace on the world we called home.
After I thought this through, something told me I’d find the Rebellion just fine, out in the mountains and valleys of the water farms of Tatooine.
Something told me things were going to change on Tatooine, in ways the Imperials never imagined or wanted.
Something told me that, in the end, someday, somehow, there would be peace here.
We would draw the maps of peace.