Succulent.
(adj., of a plant: retaining water, especially in fleshy leaves or stems, to facilitate survival under arid conditions.)
Life was a subject of considerable debate amongst the locals. They quantified and qualified it with the over-enthusiasm of pubescent girls dreaming their weddings, of blind men speculating about sight. Unlikely rumors of life abounded. Since the duskiness inside their shelters tended to inspire the telling of tall tales, Tatooinians fleeing the double noon saved such stories for their tents and dugouts. Before the siesta, it was something of a local custom to exchange third- and fourth-hand stories, some so worn that they crinkled as they were unfurled. This practice was sufficiently widespread to occasion one of the planet's few widely respected points of etiquette: even in the face of a life-tale so flagrantly impossible that the teller's credulity visibly stretched, it was effrontery to express one's own doubts. This courtesy honored the rumor itself, not its relater; one held one's tongue to avoid offending whatever god had allowed the miracle, on the offest of chances that there might have been one.
The question did not address the planet's abilities to support native animal life. Such creatures were perfectly in evidence, if imperfectly understood—given that most of them were nocturnal, deadly, or both. Instead, these unlikely narratives featured the kind of life remembered by offworlders and of which the desert-born dreamed. In whispered tones of wonder, they carried reports of fauna that expressed neither ability nor inclination to tear the observer limb from limb, and non-poisonous, non-prickly flora.
This was the first life-tale he heard.
Seven months into his exile, a sandstorm trapped him during the quarterly supply run to Anchorhead. The gust front was a sudden one. A dozen late-afternoon shoppers fell victim to the ambush, clutching hats to their pates and parcels to their chests as the first cloud of dust battered its way through. They were quickly beckoned into a cavernous machine shed, the owner holding the door against the wind before bustling to batten tarpaulins over entryway and windows, the cracks of the sills stuffed with rag.
Temporary refugees arranged themselves about the room, awkwardly resting on and against the disemboweled husks of vaporators as they waited out the storm. One pair seated themselves on the floor, producing a pack for sabaac; some attempted a second siesta. The shopkeeper was passing around honeyed tea. He draped himself over a bin of parts in the gloomiest corner, masquerading as inconspicuous enough to overlook, or disreputable enough to let be.
Stranger observed stranger with embarrassed curiosity. Only once the galvanized door of the shop gave a rattle—the desert was finding her second wind—did more than murmured conversations arise. A small group had gathered round two figures, a hunched woman and her companion. The latter might have been the daughter or daughter-in-law of the former, but despite their difference in age, both of the pair had skin hardened to leather, transformed into a living topology of rifts and furrows. In other words: born and raised on this Forceforsaken rock. The interest shown by their motley audience led him to cautiously gather his purchases, tighten up his ruffian's scowl, and pad nearer.
It was the older woman who spoke, with a voice as harsh and gritty as the raging storm without. "Yeah, my Grammy Rina said she saw 'em," she was saying. "'Er dad wasn't a kind man, always yellin' at the girls if they made the least-little mistake in their chores. Jus' wasn't the sort for gentlin' up, I reckon. But she said 'e got 'er and Jola, that was 'er sister, see, got 'em up in the middle of the night this one time—she was five, mebbe six—drives 'em off to the salt flats 'bout four klicks from the 'omestead. They clamber all outa the speeder 'fore they get there, ya know, so they won't spook 'em? An' they sneak up on 'em, even though it's still dark out. She said there were 'undreds. Thousands, mebbe. That ya couldn't see the sand for all of 'em, and every one of 'em as big as 'er with a long long neck like an 'ose. They didn't make a noise, they were all jus' standin' there, lookin' at 'er.
"She said 'er dad thought they were waterbirds, but that don't make any sense."
…
He put the life-tales down to sentiment. In those first lonely weeks, it was easy to imagine the local fauna universally vicious and grotesque. First encounters with womp rats, krayt dragons, banthas and the men who broke them served only to reinforce that impression. His conclusion seemed not merely self-evident, but just. This was exile. What more fitting place to be banished than one without any friendly companion, sentient or otherwise? This fiery suns-baked planet became the pyre of all his hopes, as those of countless others.
A year and a half into his exile, he had at length become humbled enough to notice them. The first were the lizards. It was not long after dawn. He had just finished meditating outside his hut when he caught sight of one: flash of sand-colored movement in the corner of the eye. Suddenly hyperalert, he swiveled to follow the motion. The animal scuttled from one hideaway to the next with a speed that even his eyes could scarcely follow, and he was left wondering, for a moment, whether there had been anything to see at all. The lizards, naturally, had been noticing him all along. They peered out from cool clefts in the rocks, their bright black pins of eyes glaring at the invader. Once he knew they were there, he grew to welcome their condemning gazes, the mincing way in which they slashed slender tails about like whips. It was nice to be acknowledged again.
No matter how much the chill tempted, venturing outside at night was an unwise prospect. Only on a handful of occasions could he bear enclosure no more, and stepped outside to breathe the evening air. Again he was not alone; again he was watched. This time his observers were rodents, some miniature and harmless cousin of the womp-rat. He had taken them unawares; they stared wide-eyed at him, blinded by the circle of light from the still-open door, before springing back into the safety of shadow. He could have held four or five in his palm. Their backs hunched over sinewy legs as though bent beneath the burden of survival. Their terror drew taut at his presence.
Nor were these the only ones. His catalog of desert creatures—the life-tales he might have shared were he not playing the part of mad hermit—slowly enlarged. He learned their habits, their means of defense, and the thousand variations on the colors "sand" and "stone" that hid them from eyes less keen. From time to time he would see hare-like creatures perched atop the limestone crags. They had paddle feet and noses that twitched with worry as they scouted; their comically disproportionate ears were so thin that sunslight shone through them, an aureole of pink. Protected only by hardiness and strong haunches, they ventured out in mid-afternoon when frailer creatures would have wilted. The same cliffs they inhabited sheltered others as well. Benign snakes sought shade within their hollows; when he came across them, they musked, played dead, spat blood, hooded their necks and reared toothless mouths as if to strike. He let the poor actors alone.
The birds were hideous things. Their dozen types all seemed to be black, differentiated only by the forms their ugliness took: bare wrinkled heads, tangled-feather mantles, talons or beaks cruelly curved. They were scavengers, and hence the most ubiquitous dwellers of this plane. Two hours before twilight they would come in to roost, slowly circling on the horizon, a nightly flourish in the dance of death. Then they rested where their young lay cradled among the rocks, feeding them on corruption and hoping for a deadly morrow.
…
Three years into his exile, the terror seemed suddenly to redouble. He had been able to suppress it at the beginning, tamping a stopper of duties and discipline and simply-trying-to-survive into a chasm that would otherwise have threatened to consume him. As soon as banishment began to be mundane, memory twisted the steel in healing wounds. Every night he awoke to retch and weep, driven to revulsion by nocturnal remembrance: silent hallways, murdered brethren, entire worlds stained black and scarlet. Sleep and he parted ways.
The body is not built to be thus tormented, and his began to betray him. Since everything had first fallen apart, he had used routine to maintain some measure of normalcy in a tenuous existence; when sleep fled him, balance fled too. Soon he was jumping at the most innocuous noise, even while his senses told him nothing was there. The distinction between nightmare and reality increasingly blurred. There were tremors in his hands. His thoughts turned first jumbled, then morbid. One corner of his mind always asked how the dénouement had occurred, but only now did he dare wonder how much rested on his own head.
He had long lived with a sense of rightness surrounding everything he valued. It was as though he looked up at the sky, and finally recognized it as the abyss of space viewed from a different angle. There was no rightness, anymore.
On one more morning of arising rather than awaking, he found he could not bear to look at his excuse for a home. Too tired to think, he wandered. The desert never appeared wholly uninhabited; if so, it would have had the beauty of pristine wilderness, however harsh. The threat of it was its sense of desertion, of having fallen into ruin in the wake of some long-forgotten plague or genocide. The Chott Flat, topped with twisted monoliths, suggested nothing more than some antediluvian seabed long since devoid of both water and hope. To the east, where he now found himself, lay another type of forsakenness. Here cavernous pits blemished the plateau, their walls scored by ancient stonemasons or the finger of a vengeful god. The mesa was shot with dry arroyos, canals to irrigate the crops of races gone extinct. If the salt flats were a prehistoric ocean, then this place seemed a quarry, abandoned after it had given up all the good it ever held.
He followed his feet to the maze of ravines. Sand-devils twirled about his ankles; each step echoed in the powdered-dust basin as against the skin of a drum. One could pass from trough to trough endlessly, it seemed, and at every canyon he felt as though he were trespassing in the halls of a ruined palace, disturbing the decay of a forgotten tomb. These ghosts did not slow him. The ones he fled were more terrible than they.
There were only three hours left before twilight when he first found company. His legs were trembling beneath him, and at the time he had no intention of turning back, even though he knew it was foolish. Rounding the thousandth contortion of his chosen labyrinth, he saw her: a turtle, helmed in yellow, shelled in forest green, and big as a dinner plate. She was climbing—slowly, but with purpose and an air of resigned deliberation—up the coulee wall. Intent on her own pilgrimage, she took her time in deigning to notice his presence. When she finally paused in her travels and craned a wrinkled neck toward him, he realized what he had been doing wrong. She was in her native element, and thus wiser than he.
"Go home, stranger," she seemed to say. "There is nothing for you here."
He did.
…
Perhaps it reflected the inadequacies of his own nature, but the plants took considerably longer to notice. He tended to remark on them only when they changed. The foothills of the Jundland Wastes, for example, were dotted in scrub. There were sere clumps of grass and brushes that gave off a spicy smell when he walked through them. These too had their modes of defense, whether needled or poisoned or coated with stinging oil. Most forbidding were the swollen-stemmed succulents, garlanded in spikes.
Every summer, the cacti bore paper-thin blossoms. Six years into his exile, those blossoms fell in autumn, replaced by plump red fruits. He had not done his tours on active intra-galactic campaign without learning a little about foraging. An astute sense for impending danger—as well as more generic impressions of how plants friendly to Human physiology should smell—had served him even in wholly foreign ecosystems, on planets whose names he had forgotten by the time the transport touched down. Thus it was, with considerable caution and his last remaining pair of gloves, that he plucked some of the pods. He singed off the prickles and cut them open. The juicy pulp, sweet with a bitter finish, was shot through with seeds small enough to swallow, and despite all his caution, left a dusting of hair-thin needles in his lips.
Tatooine was endowed with a surprising quantity of grass, provided one knew where to look. Grasses blanketed the hollows of the crags, hiding from wind and heat. White as bone, they curled into themselves, shedding excelsior like snow when disturbed. More vibrant plants hid in the caves. Better shielded from the suns, they wove soft moss-like knots of themselves, an unruly carpet beneath his feet. The stems, thick with the promise of moisture, terminated in miniscule yellow and lavender flowers whose filmy petals had a delicacy out-of-place in this rough-hewn land. In a moment of weakness—when the longing for comfort was stronger than it should have been—he clumsily transplanted a few next to his stoop, where the walls could protect them from the worst of the sun. They bloomed in mid-morning, and he cherished them as a sign of hope.
…
He would once be favored with a similar miracle. Twelve years into his exile, it threatened to rain.
Threats, of course, do not always deliver. Some might have considered thunderheads over Tatooine a kind of cruel joke, and their gradual dissolution inevitable. Still, even the most mischievous of gods are not without pity. There were several days of higher humidity, a bumper crop for the moisture farmers. The scrub grass, after years without showing any sign of life, had turned a sickeningly cheerful lime green. For the first time in two seasons, the cacti bore fruit. The moss roses refrained from cinching themselves fast all day, out of sheer exuberance.
On the morning of the second moist day, he went hiking to the east of his hut. In the east were arroyos; in the arroyos, there was mud; and in the mud, there sat a toad. Said toad tried to jump away from him, but its legs were sluggish in the still-cool air. Without thinking, he cupped one hand under its flaccid belly and lifted it up. Capping the other over the back, he walked to the house to examine the creature under the light. The animal was surprisingly chilly to the touch, and—marvelous to fingers that had forgotten the feel of water—a tiny bit clammy. His captive did not struggle to jump from his grasp, but was merely shuffling spurred feet against the inside of his palm, as though trying to dig its way out of the situation. Its creamy jowls, stippled with bumps like the rind of a citrus, quivered with unease.
"What are you?" he asked the unfortunate amphibian, immediately feeling ridiculous.
The toad responded with a forlorn croak. His eye was met by a crescent pupil, jaundiced iris flecked with jet. He knelt at the stoop, and removed his hand from the animal's ridged back. Warmed in his grasp, the toad had become more agile; it flashed black spurs as it hopped away, back to the mud in which it had waited during decades' worth of drought.
Fear not; you are in the hands of something much greater and much better than you imagine.
…
Seventeen years into his exile, the moss rose blanketed the entire east slope of his hut.
…
Twenty years into his exile, he had made his peace with the desert.
He felt life humming all around him, consuming and consumed. It was scarcely as though all the life-tales were true in their most extravagant details, yet the principle, the heart, the truest truth of them were. Not only did the desert live, but he had learned to live within it, and the life that surrounded him proved both comfort and guide. At length he had discovered how to find beauty in bleakness.
The desert was not only alive but hummed with living. This was a tenuous life, dragged along, balanced atop a precipice, snatched for as long as it could be had, bargained with, reasoned with, pleaded with. Yet still the desert breathed, and stored up its strength for the day it would again be needed. He would be mindful of the future while living in the present, content in the never-alone-ness of it.
...
finis ef 7.23.2013
(The Star Wars franchise, as I am only too painfully aware, is not mine, nor is the old woman's life-tale—it belongs to my paternal grandmother, whose father once woke her up in the middle of the night to see migrating sandhill cranes resting in a wallow. Criticism is, as always, welcomed.)