Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [40]
The old Jedi must have known. Callista must have known. He had thought he would be able to track her through the Force with his mind, but now he wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure he could track anyone or anything on this world, with the Force like an intensity of light blinding his mind.
“Well, what’s done is done,” said Gin philosophically. “Talking won’t better it.”
“We can festering better it by breaking a couple of heads,” snarled Caslo, and pulled the skimmer away, the blue-white glare of the Aratech’s lights flashing across the shiny black housings of his blaster rifle. “They better be festering careful in the future, that’s all I can say. When Ashgad gets back from this conference of his …”
“Gerney’s mouth’s always been the biggest thing he’s got,” explained Gin, swerving her bike to avoid the tether of an antigrav ball the size of a small house. Dark vines hung down from it, ravelly clouds of nisemia thread blossoming from them like tiny clouds.
They were close to the lights of Ruby Gulch now and the crops that supported the town were everywhere in evidence, stunted bott and smoor making a dark patchwork of vegetation across the coarse, thin soil of the Oldtimer farms, and spiky towers of branswed and topato protecting the more fragile, higher-yielding plants of the Newcomers from whatever blights and diseases might inhabit the soil. The antigrav balls worked better still but, Luke suspected, were expensive. All the balls rode high, their tethers extended with the dropping of the wind.
“The rest of his family are decent folk, though. His cousin Booldrum’s got the biggest library in Hweg Shul, bigger than Master Ashgad’s, even. The offer’s still open, to stay and work at my place awhile.”
Luke shook his head. “Thank you. If Mistress Darm can help me with finding a friend who might have come in through Hweg Shul, I’ll be on my way.”
“As you please.” She nodded toward the two clusters of lights that marked the town, the tidy lines of the Newcomer dwellings set high on buttonwood pilings, and the dimmer, lower clumps of brightness that showed where the Oldtimers had their humbler abodes. “I got stew and beer back at the house, unless the pair of you want to go on to the Flowering Bott Pub with the rest of those louts and grouse about how this place would be paradise if only we could get trade in. It ain’t never going to be paradise, you know, no matter what Seti Ashgad works out with whomever he made such a big deal of getting to talk with him.” She glanced across at Luke again. “No place ever is, if you’re not restful in your heart.”
She swung her bike in a long loop, heading toward the high-standing Newcomer houses with their bright lamps.
She was right, of course, thought Luke. But he doubted her opinion was that of the majority of Newcomers, nor should it be. They had a right to live in comfort, to have their children grow up with proper medical attention, to avoid the grinding, horrible labor of primitive agriculture and stagnant economy.
They were a minority on the planet, the majority of whose population did not want their world to become part of the Republic. Nothing Seti Ashgad said to the Republic’s representatives would alter that.
But while their speeders were tinkered together from scrap and their clothing consisted of makeshifts and hand-me-downs, somebody, Luke noticed, had thought it worth his while to provide every single one of those Newcomers with the very latest in blasters, rifles, and ion cannons.
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