Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [54]
“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. Like 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 cu-pas, 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