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By Root 863 0

to the reservoir, then told the vaporator to close the door over its controls, ran to my speeder, and flew it to the top of a dune southwest of the vaporator. I could see no Sand People, but I knew they were masters at blending into a terrain and surprising the unwary. I’d heard plenty of stories about just how quick—and deadly—they could be with their gaffi sticks, the double-bladed axlike weapons they made from scavenged metal off the Tatooine wastes. I sat low in my speeder and tried to watch for any movement—I did not dare fly farther away: They were all around me and they would surely throw their axes if I tried to run, and I did not fancy being beheaded in my own landspeeder. Besides, I hoped they would recognize what I had done: that I had given them water. I did not know, then, if I could hope it would buy my life and their trust and thus my farm.

I saw movement: one of the Sand People, coming from the north, slowly, low over the sand toward the vaporator and the water. When he reached the water pouch in the shadow of the vaporator, he knelt in the sand and smelled the bag: smelled the water inside it. He lifted his head slowly and gave out one keening cry that echoed through the canyon. Soon I counted eight Sand People—no, ten—hurrying toward the water, from all directions, four making a wide berth around my speeder.

Only one of them, a small one—young?—took a drink. Two others poured the rest of the water in a thin pouch of animal skin to take with them, and they did not spill any water. When they finished, the one who had first smelled the water looked at me. Then they all looked at me. They did not speak or make any noise, and they did not run. The one who had smelled the water suddenly raised his right arm and held up a clenched fist.

I jumped from the speeder, walked a few steps from it, and raised my right arm and clenched my fist in return. We stood like that, looking at each other, for some time. I had never been so close to them before. I wondered if they had ever been so close to a human. A light breeze from the east down the canyon blew over us and cooled us, and abruptly all the Sand People turned and disappeared in the dunes.

They did not destroy my vaporator. They did not try to kill me. They left the vaporator alone after I gave them the water, and they left me alone. They had accepted my gift.

I pledged, then, to leave them the water from this vaporator. I would miss selling the water, I knew that—I needed to sell it—but it seemed a small price to pay if by giving them a few liters they would then not ruin my vaporators. I could make do with the output of the other nine vaporators for a short time—and meanwhile buy two of Eyvind’s old second-generation vaporators to fix. When they came on-line, my output would be back to the minimum I’d need to survive.

All this effort seemed a small price to pay to be able to live near the Sand People in peace.

I counted the days of my farm from that day.

Day 2: A Farm on the Edge

Eyvind had told me I was crazy to come out this far. “No one has gone that far,” he said. “I can’t believe the moisture patterns consistently flow up those canyons—you’re only a handful of kilometers from the Dune Sea!”

But I had tested the moisture patterns: There was water to be had there. Not a lot. It would not be a rich farm, like those outside Bestine, but one morning when I was camped in what I thought of then as a far canyon, I woke on the blanket I’d laid out on the sand, and it was damp from the dew. My clothes were damp. My hair was damp. I pulled the instruments from my speeder and set them up and they all read one thing: water. Harvestable water. Somehow it blew over the mountains and settled here before evaporating in the wastes of the Dune Sea farther west, and it did it day after day for the two weeks I spent in that canyon running tests. Over the course of a year, I tested that canyon and the surrounding canyons twenty-nine more times—I had to have that much detailed data to prove that this farm could work so I could borrow the startup money. But I’d known from