Chapter 6.

Within a week of that fateful day, I had started work. Down a narrow dirt path winding over the rocks and rivulets on the forest floor as it spilled down the mountainside, a local contracting company pooled their resources at a depot tucked away in a crevasse. The lush granite rock face hung somewhat menacingly over the tiny building, while the plants dangling overhead waved their fronds just inches from the building's roof. A tiny stream raced downhill a few feet to the left, powering a small hydro-electric generator. The generator was what kept the thermostats in the depot running, which were used to control the temperature and humidity in rooms where sensitive raw wood and wicker structures were under various stages of construction. Across the stream, a three-sided barn housed stone blocks that were brought in by hand and stockpiled there. Everything apart from controlling the room temperature there was done manually. My first job had very simple parameters: do whatever the boss tells you to do. Chores varied daily from simple cleaning to learning to fell massive trees with hand tools-- a job that usually lasted days. I was paid a few credits hourly, and some days there was almost no work to do. Other times I would spend almost the entire day working for weeks on end. However, it was a job that earned me enough money to lease out a building about two miles from Onduin's place, and after about a month I was able to start returning some of the money he'd spent on me. My place was very small, and balanced on stilts taller than I cared to think about. However, it had a view out above the treetops that was amazing. The little town made of boardwalks and houses on stilts I was in, I discovered, existed near the summit of a spectacular mountain range, doused in lush greenery and spattered with the raised boardwalks spidering across the mountainsides. It looked like Hawaii, or the Himalayas. Sometimes a light mist would come through in the early mornings, briefly dimming the sunlight and giving everything a yellowish hue. Because the days were 14 hours here, I had a full day allotted for work and meals, and half a day allotted for sleep. It was an arrangement I got used to after a couple weeks.

Life outside of work was very simple. After I'd gotten some money for myself, I bought a comlink, which is more or less a small, high-tech cellphone, and a datapad, which is equivalent to a personal computer but is about the size and shape of a Nintendo DS, along with various personal supplies-- toiletries, clothing, etc. I found out where the local restaurants were, and which ones to avoid. Girous, it turned out, had one of the better eateries. Like her place, most restaurants would just serve you whatever they had that day, since the locals relied for food on whatever was growing, and that changed seasonally. Usually the oily vegetables and strong seasonings were the staple, but once in awhile someone would bring in the fresh carcass of some game animal, and they would serve meat. Water was precious here, and was brought in by way of aqueducts leading from some distant stream or lake. Since bathing with water wasn't practical, sweet oil extracted from local trees and collected in jars was used to conceal odor and wash out some of the dirt. It was an unusual life, but Onduin had been right: it was a hard place to leave once you got to know it. After a few weeks I'd settled into a routine of working and living, and paying off my debts, and I was quite happy with it all things considered. Of course, I still missed home. There were moments, when I had time alone, that I'd just break down and cry for half an hour; and there were times when I'd dream about home, and wake up in tears. But, little by little, the dreams faded, and I cried a little less each week. Slowly but surely, I was moving on.

I don't know how long I spent in this state. It was at least a few months, but in all it could have been a week. I met people at work and in town, made friends, and kept in touch with Onduin, who was supporting himself at the time by mediating a legal conflict between some people living in a town on another, nearby mountain. I was about halfway through paying him off, when we met by chance in Girous' haunted restaurant one afternoon. We sat down across from each other, happy for the opportunity to chat. It wasn't an uncommon occurrence. This time, however, our conversation kicked off a little differently from normal.

"Well, Andrea," he said, "I'm going to try and leave."

He had my attention. It seemed very out-of-character for him. "Really?" I said.

He nodded, smiling a little. "You know how I sent Dadaro to Dantooine all those years ago?" I nodded. "Well, I've decided it's time someone went looking for him. I can't leave yet; not while the Empire's this active." He was referring to an incident a few days before we'd heard about, where the Imperial navy had started blockading a solar system after two of the planets in it had supposedly expressed too much sympathy for the Rebellion. All travel there was shut down, and the Empire threatened to install a military government there if the offending worlds didn't renounce their traitorous ideals, along with paying the Empire a hefty fee for the trouble of blockading them. It was ridiculous. "Still," Onduin continued, "these things come and go in waves. I imagine before long they'll settle down again, and then I can go."

"Do you think you'll find him?" I asked.

"I think I will, one way or another. There's no telling what state he'll be in, though."

I got the idea there was more to that last comment than I'd been told. I also got a little sinking feeling. The one person who'd helped me the most here was bailing out. I would have to really fend for myself, and Onduin wouldn't be around to ask questions of. It didn't worry me too much, though. I'd had much, much worse. At least this time, I had forewarning.

"Don't suppose you'd want to come?" he suddenly asked. That changed things.

"To Dantooine?"

He nodded. "We'd be stopping at several other places along the way to pick up connections. Depending on the political atmosphere and what's going on with the war, you might just get to see some of the Core planets too. I might not have asked, since it isn't really my place to ask you to get involved in this, but you just seem too important. I'm worried about what will happen if you stay in one place too long. I keep getting the strangest feeling... like something is supposed to happen, but it can't, unless you're on the move." He grinned. "I'm sorry, I know this all sounds like balderdash, but I don't know how else to put it."

"I don't know," I said. "It's... not really something I'd thought about."

Onduin nodded. "Well, it's not likely to happen anytime soon. Still, I'd bet things will settle down within twenty standard weeks. They can't keep paranoia like this up for too long at a time."

I really hadn't planned my life out any farther ahead than surviving and paying off Onduin. I didn't really want to leave, either. I'd made some good friends at work and near my house, and I didn't want to pick up my roots yet again. "Do you plan on coming back?" I asked.

"Of course-- if I can. I can't take all my rubbish with me, but I can't just abandon it either. Still, the trip to Dantooine by itself is about two standard weeks long, and there's no telling how long it'll take to find him, if he's even on Dantooine. So whatever else happens, you can be sure I'll be out for a long time."

That conversation cast a new shadow over my existence on Kovnyett, one that refracted memories of home back into my consciousness and compounded with them to form a kind of dark bubble in which I lived. Everything I looked at was filtered through the dim knowledge that either I was going to leave the place I called home yet again, or I was going to lose a friend and an opportunity. At some undesignated time, I would be forced to choose which of these I valued more. For the first few days, I thought about it constantly, trying to figure it out, but the answer wouldn't come. I didn't want to lose big things like this again. After about a week, I decided I didn't like thinking about it all, and it slid into my subconscious, making me feel depressed and somewhat worthless while hardly remembering why. It wasn't long before I just accepted this feeling as a condition of living, and gave up on trying to deal with its cause.

More weeks passed without incident. I told my friends at work, in rough terms, what had been bothering me, and the idea that Onduin would up and leave was surprising for everyone. He'd lived there for 20 years without even moving from one house to another, never mind going off-world. Everyone was going to miss him-- they said he'd brought a lot of stability to the area by being the responsible elder of the town. People were sympathetic, but a few started throwing me funny looks, like it was my fault somehow. I heard one old man, scrubbing the grime out of the water wheel attached to the generator at my job, say that Onduin hadn't been quite the same since I'd shown up. He didn't seem resentful, just very factual. People here liked Onduin enough that they weren't going to blame him if he left (they were sure he had a good reason)-- but they still didn't like it, and if someone of lesser standing could be blamed, they were happy for the opportunity. It was the kind of group mentality that only a small town can exhibit in its pure form.

I didn't realize it, but I had started making up my mind. The more time passed, the more the town's gossiping old ladies and suspicious old men spread their general disdain of me down through their descendants. People here existed in a close-knit community, and I was fundamentally an outsider. My friends were starting to give me the cold shoulder, but when I asked them why, they couldn't come up with an answer. They were just picking up on the sentiments of the people around them. The town had already begun cleaving me off from themselves. Uprooting myself, and leaving Kovnyett, didn't look as bad anymore.

It was the day after I'd paid the last few credits back to Onduin. I was in my house, in a chair on the balcony that overlooked the mountains from the back of the house. It was sunny, as usual, and a large, lizard-like animal had wrapped itself around the top of a tree not too far from me, and I was watching it. I had my datapad in my lap. It had a dull, black case, with a clean, silvery screen. I turned it on. I was going to write a short journal entry; about what, I don't remember. But it started beeping immediately, which usually meant some important news flash had just occurred. I tapped the screen to acknowledge the message, and the first words I read were as follows:

"ALDERAAN DESTROYED BY IMPERIAL DOOMSDAY MACHINE; SUPERWEAPON DEMOLISHED IN REBEL COUNTERATTACK."

My heart started going a little faster. Suddenly, vividly, I remembered where I was. Not just a secluded mountain town in an alternate universe, but a world at war, with lasers and starships and Death Stars. And here was proof: the Death Star had just destroyed Alderaan, which, I guessed, was Princess Leia's planet, based on what I remembered of Star Wars. Luke Skywalker had just destroyed the Death Star. My day suddenly became a little more surreal. I read the article that followed. It gave a vague description of how eyewitness reports referred to a massive laser destroying the planet in a single shot, and report that the orb-shaped superweapon then traveled to a planet called Yavin, where the Rebels attacked it with one-man starfighters and somehow caused its destruction. I had just gotten to the last paragraph after about half an hour, and started reading it, when the entire article vanished. A few seconds passed as I tried to figure out what had happened. Then, the article reappeared, but it wasn't the same. Now it described the reverse: a Rebel superweapon, devised to end all life, brought to bear on the peaceful world of Alderaan, and the superweapon's destruction by brave but suicidal Imperial insurgents. It apologized for the previous edition of the article, referring to it as a product of hysteria and misinformation on the part of the writers, and stated they would be admonished for their unscrupulous depiction of the beneficent Empire and her traitorous adversaries. It didn't take me long to figure out that a cover-up had been born.

Barely a moment later, my comlink started beeping and buzzing. It was sitting inside, on a table. I walked over and picked it up. It was from Onduin.

"Good morning," he said, sounding droll. "Have you seen the news?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Did you read the first article?"

"Yes."

"Good. That's what you said would happen, isn't it? That they would destroy a planet?"

"Um... yeah."

"Now's our chance. I'm willing to wager the Empire put a lot of money and manpower into that thing, and if they want to get their military back in order there are going to be some big vacuums to fill. They're in total disarray. And with all those vacuums to fill in the navy, how much effort do you think they'll be putting into spaceport security?"

"I'm gonna guess not much?"

"Precisely. I imagine security will get terrible in a few weeks, but for the next few days, there'll be almost none at all. So, not to press, but if you want to go to Dantooine, it's time to pack. I'm leaving tomorrow, bright and early."

There was a space of silence. It was like I'd blinked, and while my eyes were closed everything started happening at once. Now I had no idea what I wanted to do. All I had was an impulse: go. Meanwhile, the idea of leaving right then terrified me. I decided to go with it. I was a little shaky when I gave my response.

"Okay. What do I need to bring?"

A few hours later, I was stumbling down an unfamiliar stretch of dirt trail, at daybreak, with a heavy backpack across my shoulders. Near the bottom were some heavier things: a small jar of sweet oil, laced with nanodroids (microscopic robots) designed to attack germs and parasites on contact; a bag of dried food, for emergencies; a wooden brush; then, higher up, was a bundle of clothing; above that, an array of forged identification, courtesy of Onduin (which I really hoped was a good forgery), which I would need to set foot on any interstellar shuttle; and on top lay my datapad and a credchip loaded with all the credits I had. I had a small, similarly forged identification card buried in my pocket, with my comlink shoved in next to it. I carried my chunk of rebar with me-- the same piece I'd kept with me back on Agonis in the city, and which had been leaning against my rickety wooden table for several months now. Onduin seemed to think I would have no trouble getting that past security, as long as my identification looked valid. Apparently the Empire didn't consider sections of rebar to be effective weapons.

I didn't feel as bad about leaving as I'd thought I would. My slow alienation by the locals had already eliminated a lot of the appeal to this place; by the time I was following Onduin's instructions on how to reach the tiny local spaceport, I had few regrets. I had told my landlord that I'd be on extended leave, and repeated the information to my boss and the people who weren't really friends anymore. I was angry that they'd drifted off from me, and that such a beautiful town could lose its appeal. It made me walk faster. They'd been shocked that I was going with Onduin, but they didn't act like they were going to miss me much. At least I wasn't breaking anyone's heart by leaving. Now and then it would occur to me that letting Onduin make identification forgeries for us to get through a spaceport was an act of total, idiotic trust. For some reason, I wasn't worried-- which bothered me, because I'd always been a responsible do-gooder, not the type to start sneaking through security with forged IDs. Maybe surviving on my own had changed my attitude.

The spaceport looked truly alien after months in the Kovnyett mountains. Its solid, slanting gray cement walls were a shocking contrast to the wicker buildings everywhere else, and now and then shuttles would arrive or depart, and their stabilizers, which worked by some bizarre electromagnetic principal I didn't understand to keep them floating above the ground, would send rhythmic pulses of bass thrumming through the earth, shaking the ground. The shuttles were T-shaped in cross-section, about two hundred and fifty feet long and sixty or seventy feet wide and deep, with three large engines at the rear; and they moved like massive helicopters. Their hulls were made of polished steel that glared painfully in the blue Kovnyett sunlight. They kept rising and descending into some kind of depression hidden behind the glittering gray fortress, like mechanical Harpies set on aggravating some invisible giant.

Inside, the spaceport was about as dull and utilitarian as any airport back home. Its organization and construction were a little different-- more like a big train station than an airport, with a big central seating area and a single wall with glass doors through which arriving and departing passengers moved. Shuttle numbers and departure times were announced over loudspeakers that echoed loudly around the walls of the roughly circular structure. This was the first time I saw any robots, or droids as they were called. They were beige, humanoid robots that looked a bit like C-3P0, but their motions were more smooth and lifelike than movie robots. They were acting as desk managers and ticket salesmen, rendering customer service that in America was normally administered by sadistic, overtired airline workers. They had silky, electronic voices that sounded male. I watched them work for awhile, listening to their happy calls of "hello, how may I help you?" reverberating sporadically through the spaceport. Humans and aliens of various types intermingled everywhere; near the far wall, a group of brightly-colored Twi-leks were talking-- aliens who looked much like humans, but had a thick pair of tentacles two or three feet long hanging from the back of their heads like long hair, and often had multi-tone skin in various rainbow colors. There was an Ithorian-- a creature that stood on two thick legs like elephant's feet, with a hunched back and a head like and neck shaped like a tapeworm, curving first down from the neck and then back up at the face; with this they had skin in mottled browns and dark greens, and wore simple clothing. Elsewhere stood other creatures, some like seven-foot-tall, miniature Godzillas; others with scaly charcoal-colored skin or devil horns, and occasionally a creature that looked more like an animal than anything else, covered in fur or hunched down on four legs. The variety was endless. Yet, among all these, only one had six legs and translucent, aquamarine skin. I spotted him after awhile, with something like a small pair of saddlebags slung over his second set of shoulders, which connected to what were more or less his front legs. He'd already seen me, and was jogging forward in a very weasel-like way.

He asked if I had my ID, and how much money I had. I told him, and he thought I could safely buy a one-way pass to Dantooine without worrying too much about getting food and the like later. He said he'd already gotten his ticket, so apparently the forgeries worked. Now it was my turn.

I got in line in front of the ticket desk where one of the droids was working. It moved quite slowly, but at least it was short. "Hello. Would you like to purchase a travel pass?" the droid said, when I finally got there.

"Yes," I replied warily.

"When would you like to depart?"

"Today."

"Destination?"

"Dantooine."

"Is there a specific spaceport you would like to access there?"

"Hivanna Territory."

"Thank you. One moment please." The droid turned its head to look at a computer screen in front of it as it typed something in. "Tickets to Dantooine Hivanna Territory spaceport are available. Would you like to purchase the exclusive travel package with this?"

"No."

"Will this be one way, or round-trip?"

"One way."

"Thank you. Will you be paying from a bank, or by credchip?"

"Credchip."

"Thank you. If you will please hand me your payment and legal identification, I will secure your travel pass and provide you with a print of your travel route. Your effects will then be returned promptly."

I gave the droid my credchip and forged ID cautiously, wondering what I would do if the robot figured out that something was wrong. It scanned both cards across some kind of device, which beeped, and then handed them back to me, along with a card listing departure and arrival times on the various planets on my route, along with comlink numbers I could call for assistance.

"Do you have any questions, ma'am?" the droid said.

"No."

"Have a good day." I left, and the droid turned its attention to the next person in line. I had to give them credit-- the robots were far less aggravating than the airline personnel at home. I picked up my bag and my rebar rod, which I'd left with Onduin, and started reading over the schedule. There were three stops en route to Dantooine. I checked them against Onduin's card to make sure that, as far as possible, we were both on the same flights, and would at least arrive at the same time. Everything fit together nicely, so we sat down and waited for our first shuttle, talking about how to navigate through spaceports, what had happened to Alderaan, what we'd do if Dadaro wasn't on Dantooine and so forth. The time passed quickly. After about an hour, it was time to leave.

Really for the first time since I'd landed in this crazy world, I found myself excited about something. I was going on a trip, of unknown duration and possibly unknown destination, which in a strange way mirrored my passage from Kansas to Agonis-- but this time, I had control. I'd had a chance to choose whether or not I wanted to go, and it made a difference. I was starting to get a working knowledge of how this world rolled, so the unknown didn't have the raw, instinctual drive to survive associated with it that it had gained in the city. And, really for the first time, I knew where I was going, in rough terms. First, I was going to climb up a big steel ramp leading into the belly of a shuttle, and then I was going to find my assigned cabin and settle in for a 3-day-long trip to a planet called Naboo.

The people moved in a fluid tide as boarding was announced for the shuttle to Naboo. It seemed like half the spaceport emptied into that one ship. People walking heavily under backpacks or stumbling with weighty handbags, or pulling rolling trunks that clacked and hummed along the glossy floor, all massed forward into an opening twenty feet wide at the top of a corrugated steel ramp, spilling into the belly of the ship, and pulling along the rest of the crowd in their push to board. It was like getting on a plane for Chicago. Onduin and I marched on near the tail of the crowd, pushing up the glittering corrugated ramp towards the shadowy doorway. At the top, just inside the shuttle, the crowd fanned out into a delta whose streams wound off and scattered in all directions. The ship had five decks. Our cabins, incidentally, were both on the third floor. We only had to get up one set of spiral stairs, which wound tightly around a central pole and would have been virtually impassible with bulky luggage. On the third floor, a lounge dominated the first thirty feet of the shuttle from the right, and after that there were three rows of cabins, one row against each wall and one in the middle, with each cabin being about nine feet square. There was a walkway between each row of cabins, and down these the cabin doors seemed to stretch infinitely. I found my cabin about midway down the leftmost row. It had two folding beds, like a train, and a quadrilateral window about two feet wide that afforded a view outside. Onduin's was similar, although his was towards the back of the center row, so it didn't have a window. The floors were all done in a uniform burgundy carpet, while the walls were a glossy off-white plastic that blended into the ceiling. At the corners between the walls and the ceiling, electric lights of some kind shed irregular, bluish light on everything, making the floor look a little darker and more purplish than it probably should have. I tossed my bag onto the lower bed in my cabin and sat down next to it, staring out the window for awhile. Doors whizzed open and shut around me, and feet thumped rapidly on the floor overhead as people went to find their cabins. Voices chattered and laughed somewhere near the lounge for awhile. I felt a little depressed, now that I was on my way. I realized I was still attached to Kovnyett. Outside the bluish ferns and trees waved a little in the brilliant sun, dappling the inside of my cabin with wavering shadows. It was the last I would see of Kovnyett's greenery for a good while.

It was about twenty minutes after this that most of the voices and thumping had stopped. An announcement came over some kind of intercom that the shuttle would be departing for Naboo in several minutes. I was excited again. I was on a spaceship, with absolute certainty this time, and I had a room with a view. I was about to take off, along with several hundred other people, for some distant world three days away. It was really the first time in ages that I honestly looked forward to something. My months spent living in a quiet mountain town had helped me a lot to recover from the shock of Agonis, and my last experience on a spaceship.

A low, quiet rumbling began, coming from the back of the shuttle, probably the engines, which was accompanied by the rapid bass thrumming of the stabilizer. The shuttle gave a slight rock forward, and then lifted off the ground, putting feet between itself and the forest below at an impossible rate. I felt almost no acceleration the whole time. Looking out my window, the ground below sharpened into a rumpled green map of the landscape, growing smaller by the second. Meanwhile the blue sky overhead got progressively darker, and near the horizon the bluish haze and the bluish mountains became indistinguishable. Not long after they were little more than a greenish, textured sheet, and the sky was almost black. Stars began appearing, and the ground vanished behind the shuttle in a haze as it floated off into space. Outside, all I could see were stars, which looked like they'd been liberally applied to their black surroundings with some cosmic spray can. Not very romantic, perhaps, but there were a lot of stars.

It was only a few minutes after this when another announcement, which sounded like one of the droids talking, was made.

"Passengers on all decks: please place all loose items on the floors of your cabins and remain seated, as we will be entering hyperspace in two minutes. I repeat..."

And so it went. The announcement was repeated one minute later, and then again when the ship was preparing to "enter hyperspace." I sat down and waited. A quiet, high-pitched whine built up from the back of the shuttle, ending in a low rumbling. With that, the shuttle accelerated forward, and all those stars outside merged into a flowing, white mass. It wasn't like they slid backwards so much as they elongated themselves in both directions, and brightened simultaneously. Then the feeling of motion stopped. Finally, the captain made the announcement that we were now in hyperspace, and would arrive at Naboo in approximately three standard days. Various other announcements and advertisements were made. I stared out the window for about an hour, then decided to get some sleep. There wasn't much to see.

The day after that progressed much as it would on a train: announcements were made now and then to advertise the restaurants and entertainment onboard, or talk about news. Onduin and I got dinner up on the 5th floor, and the food was a shock after living on Kovnyett's vegetables and meat. Here water was plentiful, so there was more variety. Some cheap fish-like animals were kept onboard for cooking. Things were fried, and strange animals like frogs or crabs were cooked into light soups or appetizers. Also, this place had a menu, something I hadn't seen since I'd lived in Kansas. The food smelled good, though. Onduin did a lot of explaining that time as to what things were, but in the end I had no option but to try something and decide for myself whether oversized frogs were palatable. Supposedly they were called chubas. I got one fried. It tasted like halibut, only stringier.

I didn't get much sleep that night. I was tired, but I had too much to think about. I woke up some time later, but on a ship in hyperspace day and night really had no meaning. The next two and a half days ran together the way the first morning had, and at times it seemed like they would never end. I would eat, sleep, read something from my datapad, and repeat. It was only when the droid on the intercom announced that we were about to exit hyperspace that I felt some life returning to me.

With a descending whine, the stars around the shuttle resolved themselves into their normal pinpricks, and in front of the ship I could make out the edge of a massive blue disk. White clouds swirled across its surface, and a blue ozone haze marked the edge of its atmosphere. Over the course of a few minutes it came to fill my entire window, becoming a seemingly infinite, curving blue surface. Getting closer, the shuttle descended through the top of the bluish haze, and within seconds translucent yellow and orange flames covered up my entire window. After a few minutes they faded away, and I could see clouds, the dark blue sky above, and below an expanse of green that seemed unnaturally yellow after living on Kovnyett. There was even a yellow sun, like Earth.