Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [33]
“I heard the Therans were savages—the ones who tried to put holes in me sure looked like them. My cargo must have upped the ship’s mass reading. They can run a gun station?”
“Don’t sell them short.” Scraf picked up his own canteen. Water splotched his sand-beaten orange sleeves, and down the front of his suit. “Where’d you come down? The Therans will have finished by now. I’ll help you haul whatever’s left into Ruby Gulch. You can get cash for it there.”
A childhood on Tatooine had made Luke familiar with the economics of salvage. They’d been severe enough on the desert world, which had an open trade of sorts through Mos Eisley. On a planet with virtually no natural resources and little access to imported goods, that much metal and microchips would make him a wealthy man.
“Who are they, anyway?” he asked, settling himself on the rough wooden bench that served Arvid Scraf’s landspeeder as a seat. The speeder was a crumbling Aratech 74-Z Jawas wouldn’t have touched. The starboard buoyancy tanks were so low that the deck canted sharply, and Arvid had built up a second deck on planks, with posts to level it up. He’d rigged a retractable limb underneath as well, with a wheel to keep the whole thing steady if too heavily laden. It gave the speeder the appearance of a badly misshapen mushroom, balanced on a single stem that did not quite touch the ground.
“She don’t look like much, but she covers ground,” the young man said, half-proud and half-defensive, when Luke did a double-take. With Luke on the bench, Arvid had had to shift the gravel sack ballast to compensate for his weight.
But she did, in fact, cover ground. Like the Millennium Falcon, there was marginally more to her than met the eye.
Now Arvid said, “Who, the Therans? There’s little villages of ’em up the canyons, or in caves, anyplace they can find a spring or an old pump still working. But most of ’em just come out of the farms. Half the Oldtimers were Therans at some time in their lives. Kids go out of the settlements and ride with the bands for a couple-three seasons. They sniff the smoke, they hear the voices, they dream the dreams, and they meet people they wouldn’t have met if they’d stayed around home, I guess. Then they come back and get married and have kids of their own. Sometimes they ride out again later, but mostly once seems to be enough.”
He shrugged, clinging like a bantha-buster to the struggling levers, his eyes moving constantly between the sand-scored gauges and the eroded jags and zigs of the rising ground as the Aratech labored through the narrowing steepness of those light-laden crystal rocks, to where Luke had left his appropriated XP-38A.
“That’s why we can’t make headway against ’em,” Arvid Scraf went on. “Their Listeners tell ’em anything coming in or going out is bad, tell ’em in their sleep, in their dreams. Then it’s part of their dreams for all time. It gets stuck in their heads so bad you can’t make ’em see different. They can’t see what this world could be, if we could get any kind of trade going. ‘We don’t want that,’ they’ll say, and you can talk to the edge of anoxia, and they just look at you with those eyes and say, ‘We don’t want that.’ We Like they know what all the other Oldtimers think. Weird.”
He shook his head. His big hands on the levers were callused and stained with grease, as Luke’s own had been, he remembered, back in his days of trying to wring a living from a world not intended to support human life.
The two of them wrestled the XP-38A up wholesale and lashed it to the -74’s bed. Luke knew the reasoning well. In a world without native metal, without timber, without imports, a rusty bucket was treasure.
The anemic sun was sinking fast, and harsh wind pounded them out of the west, making the repulsorlift vehicle jerk and wobble. As they were wrassling the ropes, Luke caught