Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [132]
And then anger. Deep, burning, violent anger, the anger of those who have seen their friends and family members raped and murdered and enslaved before their eyes, the memory of voices outcrying in pain as their minds were stripped from them, helpless fury and pain.
Don’t let them. Don’t let them. Why did he think they were standing all around him, looming shadows in the canyons’ rocks, looking down at him while he slept. We can still hear their voices. Still they cry to us. Still they are part of us.
Luke shook his head. I don’t understand.
He was on Tatooine. He was standing in the courtyard of his old home, restored, no longer just a subsidence half-filled with sand, as the stormtroopers had left it so many years ago. There were stormtroopers in the courtyard, and out of the kitchen doorway that led into the court they were dragging Jawas—shrieking, pleading, kicking, jabbering. Aunt Beru, of course, would never have permitted a Jawa into her clean kitchen, but dimly Luke realized that this wasn’t the point. Someone standing just beside and behind him, someone he couldn’t see, was making these images, someone very old and very patient and very angry, trying to make him understand.
Two stormtroopers seized a Jawa by the arms. A third one raised up a huge hand drill of the kind used for taking water rock samples, and drove the spinning bit down into the Jawa’s head. Horribly, the Jawa continued to kick, continued to struggle, as the drillmaster set aside his drill and withdrew from a tub at his side a brain, naked and gray and dripping clear fluid, and packed the stuff into the opening in the Jawa’s head like a sapper packing explosive into a hole. Then the Jawa ceased to struggle and remained standing passively while the two stormtroopers released it, picked up white stormtrooper armor from a giant pile in front of the workshop door, and stuffed the Jawa inside it, closing up the armor like a trooper-shaped box and locking it along one side. Though the suit was rigid while it was being manipulated, once the hapless Jawa was inside it, it became articulated, like regular armor. Though it was impossible that anything as small as a Jawa would be able to fill it out, it seemed, within, to have grown to size.
It saluted the others and walked smoothly up the steps and out of sight, just as if there were a man inside.
Hunh?
A second Jawa was brought out of the kitchen (Aunt Beru must be having a fit!), had its head drilled and packed with brains, and was in its turn packed into armor—given a weapon, he now saw, an Atgar-4X blaster rifle, and sent on its way.
I don’t understand. He turned, to try to get an explanation out of the one who had invented the vision, but found himself back in the canyon with Liegeus. He was standing over his own body and that of the engineer, and though he could have sworn that the one who had shown him the images, the one who was trying to communicate with him, had returned to this reality with him, he saw nothing behind him by the dull-gleaming facets of the rock wall.
Callista’s voice said to him, “It’s their world, Luke. It’s their world.” He saw her walking away from him, her long brown hair hanging in a tail down the back of her jacket of leather and nerf wool that, though it was black in the starlight, he knew was red.
Walking away down her own road in the starlight, toward a destination that he could not see.
Around her, Leia was conscious that the glittering walls of crystal had changed. When she had entered the cave, a crevice far up the canyons above the Theran camp, she had been dazzled by the lights thrown from the thick encrustation of gems. But as she extinguished her lamp, as she had been instructed, and walked farther into the dimly radiant chamber, she was aware that somehow the deep-buried geode had been