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“Hast thou also the Key, Lord, the Key which—”

“What is this? Are you two seeing me off to summer camp or something?”

He led them out from beneath the ship, took a deep invigorating breath—and promptly froze the hairs in his nostrils. “Well, I can see why nobody much has staked a claim on this forsaken stretch of—”

“Master,” Vuffi Raa clattered up beside him and tugged at the hem of his jacket. “Master, I don’t like this, there’s something—”

“I know, old junkyard, I can feel it, too.”

The sky, a light greenish color, was cloudless. Nevertheless, somehow it impressed them all as gray, bleak, and overcast. And it was cold. The whine of Vuffi Raa’s servos was clearly audible, a sign that perhaps his internal lubrication was thickening. Lando replaced the glove on the hand he’d used to retract the ramp, thrust it deeply into a warm pocket where the blaster swung.

“Master!”

Something went zing! and a short, stubby, wicked-looking arrow suddenly protruded from the seam between the robot’s leg and body. In the next instant, a hailstorm of the primitive projectiles whistled toward them, bouncing off the Falcon’s hull, burying themselves in the sand at their feet. Vuffi Raa went down, looking like a five-legged pincushion. He didn’t utter a word.

Curiously, not a single arrow struck either Lando or Mohs. The former swung his weapon up on its strap, panned it along the low dunes a few yards away. He felt a slap! and turned the blaster, staring at the muzzle orifice with disbelief.

An arrow had found its way straight down the bore, turning the gun into a potential bomb, should Lando touch the trigger. He tossed the dangerous thing away, began struggling with the fastenings of his coat to find the stingbeam. It wasn’t much, but it was all—

“Stand where you are, ‘Lord’!” Mohs exclaimed, “If you resist, you will die before you draw another breath!”

The old man raised a hand. From behind the sand dunes, half a hundred Toka emerged, dressed as he was in nothing more than loincloths.

In his hands, each held a powerful crossbow, pointed directly at Lando.

• X •

SO THIS WAS a genuine life-orchard.

The trees were a little odd, but nothing spectacular. In the wild grove perhaps five hundred of the things grew, in no particular pattern, yet each was of an identical size and spaced several meters from its nearest neighbor. The trunk was relatively ordinary, too—until one examined it closely and discovered that what appeared to be bark-covered wood was in fact a fibrous glassy pigmented stem approximately half a meter through and a couple of meters tall under the spreading branches.

The first oddity one noticed, however, was the root system. Each tree seemed to rest on a base, an irregular disk two meters across, like a toy tree in a model monorail set. Composed of the same substance as the trunk, the disk spread from the tree, forming a platform that curved abruptly downward at the edge and buried itself in the ground. The entire undersurface was covered with hair-fine glassy roots reaching downward perhaps a kilometer but spreading laterally only as far as the longest of the branches.

The branches, in some ways, reminded one of a cactus. At about average head height, they began to sprout from the trunk, departing at a right angle for a little distance (the lower the branch, the longer the distance, none exceeded the span of the root system), then turning straight upward. Outer branches—lower ones—had shorter vertical components. Inner ones had longer, so that the entire tree was somewhat conical in shape.

At the slender, tapering tip of each branch, a single, faceted, brilliant crystal grew, varying from fist-sized, on the outer branches, to tiny gems no bigger than pinheads. Each tree bore perhaps a thousand crystals. In the center, along the line of the trunk, one very tall, slender branch reached skyward like a communications antenna, unadorned by a crystal.

These trees were a little shorter, a