Star Wars_ Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin J. Anderson [57]
“Which means?” Nadon asked.
“This Alima is an outcast among his own men—probably recently demoted, on his way down in the ranks. There is a good chance that he is the one who betrayed your people. If he is, what will you do?”
Nadon stopped his digestive processes for a moment, sending extra blood to his brains as he considered. Alima was a vicious man. Contacting him would be dangerous, but Nadon knew he could not resist confronting the man who was responsible for his exile. “I don’t know what I will do,” Nadon said. “If this Alima is my old foe, tell him that you know of an enemy to the Empire who may be harboring the droids. Sell him my name.… And make sure he pays you well.” It was an ironic moment. For years now, Nadon had spied for the Rebellion and had sought to hide this affiliation. Now he was asking a friend to sell him out.
“One more thing,” Muftak said with a note of warning. “This Alima was brought in by Lord Vader as an interrogator. Word from the desert is that he’s already killed fifty of our citizens.”
“I know the type of man I am dealing with,” Nadon said heavily.
That evening, as the lavender- and rose-colored suns of Tatooine dipped below the horizon, Nadon felt restless. His sympathies for the Rebellion were widely known, and he did not doubt that the Imperials would soon come to question him—probably even torture him.
Over the years, Nadon had used his share of his family fortune to invest in farming ventures on a hundred worlds. His investments were paying such handsome dividends that he had gained a fortune, and usually at this time of night he would have been hard at work, managing his wealth. But tonight he was ill at ease.
To calm himself, Nadon decided to engage in an ancient Harvest Ceremony, so he took his hovercar to a nameless valley in the mountains north of Mos Eisley. There, Nadon had planted leathery, shade-giving Cydorrian driller trees. With their far-reaching root systems, the driller trees had quickly formed a thriving grove.
Nadon went to the healthiest specimen and pulled a series of thin golden needles from a pouch at his belt, then inserted the probes into the tree bark so that he could harvest gene samples. As a part of the gene-Harvest Ceremony, he talked softly to the tree as he worked. “With your gift, my friend,” he told the tree, “I will splice the DNA for producing your long root systems into the native Tatooine hubba gourd. The hubba gourd serves as the staff of life to Tatooine’s wild Jawas and Sand People. And so, because of this little pain I have inflicted, many people will be served. For this harvest I thank you. And I thank you for the greater harvests to come.”
When he had collected his samples, Nadon lay back on the warm sand, watched the stars burning in the night skies, and remembered home. Nadon had a flawless memory, so he replayed incidents in his mind, and as he remembered, the sights and smells and emotions all came to him new again so that he was lost to the present. He relived the time that he and his wife Fandomar had planted a small, gnarled Indyup tree to commemorate their son’s conception. For a moment in his memory, Nadon knelt beside his wife digging beneath a sun-splattered waterfall in the steaming Ithorian jungle, then cocked his head to listen to an arrak snake that burst into song from the heights of a nearby cliff.
Then he recalled being a child, gently inhaling with both mouths the sweet smell of a purple donar flower.
After the rush of memories, Nadon felt frail, wasted. Home. Nadon could not go home. Once, he had been revered among his people as a great High Priest, an Ithorian renowned for his knowledge of many agricultural ceremonies. But then Captain Alima had come with his Star Destroyer and forced Nadon to reveal the secrets of Ithorian technology to the Empire.
Nadon’s people had banished him. As his punishment, Momaw Nadon had chosen to live on this dreary