• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Gaph wagged his forefinger. “Trust me, child, jail is no place for the Ryn. Here, at least, we’ll be able to sing and dance and revel in our good fortune.”

“Follow the droid,” the guard barked. “And no lingering or wandering off, or you’ll have me to answer to.”

“Ah, good fortune,” Melisma said sarcastically. “Let’s just hope for a roof, Gaph.”

The droid, a squeaking, limping protocol model, ushered them into a warren of ramshackle dwellings slapped together from aged harvester and spaceship parts—bulkhead hatchways, harvester blades, foils, and the like. Elsewhere were prefabricated duraplast huts anchored to slabs of ferrocrete, tents and A-frames, primitive lean-tos, self-standing blister shelters, elliptical huts sided with animal hide, and conical ones wrapped in lubricant-stained tarpaulins.

“Facility 17 was built on the site of a former junkyard,” the droid said proudly. “Everyone has been very inventive in the use of obsolete equipment.”

In unlighted interiors or on muddy ground or patches of lifeless trampled grass sat species native to sectors as remote as the Imperial Remnant and as close as the Koornacht Cluster, all uprooted from the worlds they had called home, some of which the Yuuzhan Vong had rendered uninhabitable or destroyed outright. In a half-circle scan, Melisma’s eye fell on Ruurians, Gands, Saheelindeeli, Bimms, Weequays, Myneyrshi, Tammarians, Gotals, and Wookiees. Absent, though, was any indication of fellowship; in its place a sense of impending riot tainted the air. Beings glowered at one another or stood sullenly with jaws clenched and hands balled into fists.

As if reading her concerns, the protocol droid provided commentary, in Basic.

“With everyone crammed together without regard to differences and distinctions, some suppressed prejudices and hostilities have on occasion boiled to the fore, resulting in contentious seizures of territory or sustenance, or melees that have spread throughout the facility. But, of course, those incidents were quickly quelled by Salliche Ag’s well-trained staff, who employ physical force only when absolutely necessary.”

As had happened on the transport, the Ryn met with looks of suspicion and repugnance from all sides. Fathers safeguarded family valuables, and mothers gathered children within arm’s reach. Some made religious gestures of self-protection, and others voiced outrage that Ryn had even been allowed into the camp.

Melisma stared straight ahead. She was accustomed to such treatment, and she understood that the Ryn’s penchant for wanderlust and secrecy was at least partly responsible for the fictions that had grown up around them. Ostracized by many societies, the Ryn had grown only more transient, secretive, and self-sufficient over time, and as outsiders they had become keen observers of the behaviors of other species—second-guessers of what many beings, humans especially, often had in mind to say. And so their fondness for song, dance, and spicy foods, and their adeptness at forgery and fortune-telling—lacking any true psychic abilities. The gambling game that had come to be known as sabacc had its roots in a deck of cards the Ryn had invented as a means of disguising their mystical doctrines.

“We’re now approaching the distribution center,” the droid announced.

“I wondered what that smell was,” Melisma said to Gaph, who chided her for being overly critical, only to change his tune when they got a good look at the situation.

Queued sinuously at makeshift stalls, hundreds of beings were waiting to receive squirts of an off-color, pastelike synthfood squeezed by droids from enormous, pliant containers. Other lines snaked to the patched-up hulls of vintage riverboats filled to the gunnels with foam-covered water.

“For paltry sums,” the droid remarked, “many of Salliche Ag’s well-trained staff will gladly provide foodstuffs to please the most discriminating palates. Superior housing can also be secured for reasonable fees, as evidenced atop Noob Hill.”

Melisma followed the droid’s metal finger to a parcel