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“No,” I said. “I’m only daydreaming.”

“Do you wish these changes saved?”

I considered that. “No,” I said finally. “It is a fiction. Erase the changes and shut down.”

It did so.

I lay back on my bed. What I had told the computer to draw was worse than a fiction. I had asked two successive Imperial Governors to commission a mapping project of this region, with the same response: “We just don’t have the money.” Translate that: “We have too many people here who don’t want accurate maps made of what lies beyond the known settlements and farms, and if you want to live to bring your next water harvest to Mos Eisley, quit asking for such things.”

So I’d quit asking for them. But it wasn’t criminals who needed to hide places of illegal activity who threatened my life or livelihood, yet. It was Sand People violence and Jawa dishonesty and manipulation—all caused in part, I was coming to realize, by constant encroachments into what had no doubt been traditional Jawa and Sand People territories. Maps would be the first step to a secure peace for the farmers and Jawas and Sand People—if you could get them all to draw in negotiated boundaries on those maps and honor them. Without such agreements, farmers faced the equivalent of blundering around in the dark—setting up farms in areas where maybe no one should go, living in places that could—and did—get decent people killed. I wanted the killing to stop.

But for that, we needed a map. The government would not draw it.

So I drew it.

And I decided, that night, to take my map to the Jawas near my farm and talk to them about how to take it to the Sand People. If we agreed among ourselves on how to live together in these mountains and canyons, maybe someday the government would make our agreements official.

I looked at the monitor for another inevitable retina scan. “Computer,” I said, “redisplay the map I just requested and redraw the boundaries I had you erase. Copy this file to the portable holo-display unit.”

Day 3: In the Jawa Fortress

I knew these Jawas. I had been to the gates of their fortress many times, especially during the year I spent measuring the moisture in the canyons of my farm: They would come out to trade water for trash I’d found in the desert and for information about the Empire and its cities and the systems that made them work and the alien races and how to deal with them. I tried to be good to the Jawas, and fair. If they got the better of me in a few deals, I’d come out ahead in a few others, and the tally remained about even. Some of the Jawas even became my friends—the old ones, the ones I could learn from who had the patience to teach me their language, the uses of native plants, geographic lore.

Their thick-walled fortress blended into the walls of the canyon, but I knew how to fly straight to its closed and hidden gates. I stepped out of my speeder and held up the holo-display unit. “Oh, Jawas!” I called out. “I come to you with information and to barter.”

The gates opened at once—the word “barter” would always open their gates—and eight Jawas rushed out. I tried again to see inside, but could not in the darkness there. They had never invited me in. I had no idea what lay inside. This was a new family fortress, maybe only a hundred years old, with, I guessed, fifteen clans—four hundred Jawas. They were jealous of any secrets and wary of any alien, but they would talk to me and barter with me and spend hours outside on the sand.

The first Jawa to reach me was my old friend Wimateeka. He began chittering at me in Jawa, slowly, so I could understand.

“Do you still come here asking for water now that you farm it yourself?” he chittered, and they all laughed.

“No,” I said. “But I have brought you a gift of water to thank you for your generosity to me in the past.”

I set a pouch of water in Wimateeka’s arms, and he could barely hold it up alone. The others crowded around to help him set it on the sand and to touch it, to feel the water move inside it.

“What