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Peace:

The Moisture Farmer’s

Tale

by M. Shayne Bell

Day 1: A New Calendar

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