by Daniel Keys Moran
I don’t suppose it took us five minutes that afternoon to execute the Rebels, start to finish.
The Rebellion on Devaron stood no chance. My home world is sparsely settled even by Devaronians, and is politically unimportant; but it is near the Core. Near the Emperor, may he freeze.
I was Kardue’sai’Malloc, third of the Kardue line to bear that name; a Devish and a captain in the Devaronian Army.
Kardue had served in the Devaronian Army for sixteen generations: through the Clone Wars, back into the days when no one dreamed the old Republic would ever fall. The army lifestyle suited me, and I the army; aside from the stress of dealing with the Imperium, and the detested necessity of placing Devaronian troops under Imperial command during the Rebellion, it was a tolerable life.
Sixteen generations of military service ended the afternoon after we overran the Rebel positions in Montellian Serat. It took me half a year to hang up the armor; but that was the moment.
Montellian Serat is an old city. Well, was; it dated back to the days before my people had star travel. That the Rebels chose to make a stand there was tactically foolish, but not surprising. I spent the night overseeing the shelling of the ancient city walls, and in the first light of morning stopped shelling long enough to offer the Rebels a chance to surrender. They accepted the offer, laid down their arms by the shattered walls at the city’s edge, and came out in single file: man and woman they were seven hundred strong.
I herded them into a hastily constructed holding pen, and mounted guards. I had concern for a rescue attempt; half a day’s march south, another group of Rebels were still fighting.
After they surrendered, we shelled the city into rubble. The Empire wanted to make sure no one made the mistake of sheltering Rebels again.
Our orders came just after noon. The Rebels were believed to be moving north; I was to take my forces and intercept them. I was not to leave any of my forces behind as guards for the captured Rebels.
The orders were no more specific than that … but they could not be misunderstood.
I had them executed in mid-afternoon. I pulled the guards back into a half circle, and had them open fire on the Rebels inside the holding pen. It took most of five minutes before the screaming stopped and I could be certain all seven hundred were dead.
There was no time to bury them.
We marched south to the next battle.
With one thing and another it took almost half a year for the Rebellion on Devaron to be put down. Rebellions are drawn-out affairs, even the failures. When it was over, I submitted my resignation. At first my superiors, humans all, could not decide whether to accept it and let my fellow “natives” kill me once I no longer had the protection of the Imperial Army, or to refuse it and execute me for treason for having made the request in the first place.
I recall I did not much care.
They let me go.
I vanished. Neither my Imperial superiors, nor the family or friends left behind, who lusted for my horns, ever saw me, or my music collection, again.
Time passed.
Halfway across the galaxy from Devaron, on the small desert planet of Tatooine, in the port city of Mos Eisley, in a cantina tucked away near the center of the hot, dusty city, I looked up from my empty drink and smiled at my old friend Wuher.
I gave him the polite one. Devish are more sharply differentiated by sex than most species. Men have sharper teeth than women, designed for hunting; Devish evolved from pack hunters. Women have canines as well, but also have molars and can survive on food that men would starve on. In rare cases, though, about one birth in fifty, a Devish man will be born with both sets of teeth. I’m one of them. In the old days it was a survival trait; Devish men with both sets of teeth were used as solitary scouts by the pack. They could range farther and survive in terrain where most males would starve. It may be cultural and it may be genetic, but there is no question that Devish with doubled teeth are less creatures of the pack than most Devish men.
I doubt most Devish could do what I’ve done, at that.
My outer row of teeth are female, flat and not at all threatening. The inner row, composed of sharp, needle-pointed teeth, is for shredding flesh. When I feel threatened or angry, the outer row of teeth retract. In those circumstances it’s a reflex; but I can do it on purpose.
Sometimes I do it on purpose. It startles humans … well, it startles most noncarnivores, but humans are a special case, a whole species of omnivores. There are not many intelligent omnivorous species out there. I have a theory about them: They’re food that decided to fight back. In the case of humans, tree munchies. They never quite get over their own audacity, I suspect, and they’re a nervous lot because of it.
(A human once tried to tell me that humans were carnivores. I did not laugh at him, despite his molars and his pitiful two pair of blunted incisors, and a digestive tract so long that the flesh he ate rotted before it came out the other end. With a body designed like that, I’d take up leaf eating.)
Wuher gave me the usual scowl in response to my polite, flat-toothed smile. “Let me guess, Labria. The glass is defective.”
Wuher is my best friend on Tatooine. He’s a squat, ugly human with a bad attitude and none of the human virtues. He hates droids and doesn’t care much for anything else. I like him a great deal. There is a purity to his loathing for the universe that is quite spiritually advanced. If I could free him from his love of money, he might well attain Grace. “Yes, my friend. It has ceased functioning. If you would fix it …”
“With?”
“Oh, the amber liquid, I suppose.”
“The Merenzane Gold?”
“The bottle bears that label,” I conceded.
“One Merenzane Gold, point five credits.”
I dropped the half-credit coin on the bartop, and waited while he refilled my drink. Merenzane Gold is a sweet, subtle concoction, with many thousands of years of brewing tradition behind it. A single bottle goes for well upward of a hundred credits, depending on vintage.
I took a sip of my drink and smiled again. Proper. You could use it to clean thruster tubes, except it might melt the shielding. I wandered over to my favorite booth, as far away from the bandstand as I could get, and settled in with my ear plugs for the day.
I was the first customer in the door that morning. I could barely remember a time when I had not been.
Tatooine is a nasty, useless little planet. The only noteworthy things about it are Jabba, and the pilots it produces year after year. I don’t have any idea why Jabba picked Tatooine as a base; maybe because it’s so far from the Core that the Empire is less likely to bother him here. Doesn’t matter, really.
As for the pilots, well, Tatooine’s a desert, filled with moisture farmers north to south. A single farm takes up so much space that to visit with one another they must travel long distance by speedster; their children learn to fly at an early age. On most Tatooine farms it would take you a day to walk from one end to the other, and you’d likely die of thirst first.
I hate Tatooine. I’m still not sure why I stayed here. It was a temporary thing, I recall that. I was following Maxa Jandovar, the great—well, for a human, great—vandfillist. I kept missing her. She was one of the half-dozen surviving artists I hadn’t seen live who was worth seeing. I spent half a decade following her around through the outback, hitting planet after planet weeks or days or, in one instance that gave me ample opportunity to demonstrate Grace, a mere half day after she’d left. She didn’t leave an agenda; she couldn’t, very well. The Empire wouldn’t go to the trouble of hunting her, but if she’d announced where she was going next, she’d certainly have found a squad of stormtroopers waiting for her at the spaceport when she arrived.
The Empire doesn’t trust artists. Particularly the great ones. Politics does not interest them, and they persist in speaking the truth when it is inconvenient.
They arrested Maxa Jandovar on Morvogodine. She died in custody. I was on Tatooine when I got the news, getting ready to head to Morvogodine.
Somehow I ended up staying.
Nightlily, the H’nemthe sitting down at the end of the bar, looked bored and horny. I felt sorry for someone.
“Hey, Wuher!”
Wuher looked at me from down the length of the bar. “Yeah?”
“Universal Truth Number One: You should never say ‘Well, why don’t you bite my head off?’ to a female H’nemthe who is bigger than you are.”
He didn’t smile. Jerk.
In the booth next to mine, two humans were trying to talk a Moorin merc into helping them rob a bar over on the other side of Mos Eisley; I made a note to myself to call the bar’s owner and sell him a warning about the men. Not that it looked as if the Moorin were going to help them; only one of the humans spoke the merc’s language, his accent was horrific, and his syntax was occasionally hysterical. I could see the merc struggling to take them seriously. At one point the merc, Obron Mettlo, growled at them that he was a soldier, a fighter; he mentioned some of the battles he’d fought in. I’d actually heard of most of them—if he wasn’t lying, he was a serious professional.
“Hey, Wuher!”
Wuher looked at me from down the length of the bar. “Yeah?”
“What do you call someone who speaks three languages?”
“Someone who speaks two languages?”
“Bilingual.”
“Someone who speaks one language?”
He puzzled at it a second. “Monolingual?”
“Human.”
He almost smiled before he caught himself.
The day passed slowly. They tend to. I drank enough to keep the world slightly out of focus, and waited for the suns to set. I moved around a bit, sat at the bar a few times, looking for conversation; I even bought two drinks for an off-duty stormtrooper, slumming. Wasted; he was more interested in women than in conversation, and I doubted he knew anything anyway. That is the nature of investments, though; someday he might know something, if such a thing were possible for a stormtrooper. And then he might think of his old friend and drinking buddy, Labria.
Brokering information is a chancy occupation, at best.
Can’t say I’m any good at it.
Long Snoot showed up toward late afternoon. It had been a good day until then; Wuher didn’t have musicians that day, and I hadn’t had to wear my ear plugs even once.
Long Snoot wanted to sell me information.
I smiled at him, in my corner booth as far away from the stage as I could get. The sharp smile. “That’s a new one. Pass.”
Long Snoot’s “name” is Garindan. I had a protocol droid do a search on the word once. In five different languages it meant “Blessed One,” “burnt wood,” “dust from a windstorm,” “ugly,” and “toast.” None of the five languages were spoken by a species that looked anything like Long Snoot’s.
Long Snoot’s the most successful spy in Mos Eisley. In a town with as many spies as this city has, that says something. He pays adequately for information; sometimes I give him information of value. Sometimes I even do it on purpose. “But Labria,” he wheedled, voice low, “this is a subject of particular interest to you.”
“Give me a hint.”
He shook his head, trunk waving gently in front of my face. I suppressed an uncivilized urge to swat it with a sharpened nail. (I often have the opportunity to exhibit Grace in dealing with Long Snoot.) “Fifty credits, Labria. You won’t regret it.”
I thought about it. I took a sip of the acid gold and swished it around my back teeth for a bit. I could feel it helping keep them sharp. “Fifty credits is a lot. Resellable?”
He scratched under his snout, thinking. “I can’t think to whom.”
Something of interest to me, but not resellable …
I could feel my ears straighten. “Who is it?”
“Fift—”
“I’ll pay. Who’s onplanet?”
“Figri—”
I came up out of my seat. “Fiery Figrin Da’n is on Tatooine?”
He made an urk noise. “People … are … looking.”
I looked around. Some of them were, in fact. Odd, having all those eyes on me. I let go of Long Snoot, and they turned away. “Sorry. Bit excitable.”
He rubbed his throat. “Your nails need trimming.”
“I expect they do.” He sat back down again, but I was too excited. “The band is with him?”
“Fifty credits.”
A snarl rose in the back of my throat. I pulled out a fifty-credit note and dropped it into his outstretched hand, and tried to keep the growl out of my voice when I spoke. “Who?”
“They’re playing for Jabba.”
“All of them?”
“That’s them,” I said, unable to keep the excitement out of my voice. “Doikk Na’ts on the Fizzz, Tedn Dahai and Ikabel G’ont on the Fanfar, Nalan Cheel on Bandfill, Tech Mo’r on the Ommni—”
“Yeah. Those are the names.”
Oh, my.
The greatest jizz band in the galaxy was in town.
I left earlier than usual, as soon as it was dark outside. Wuher nodded at me on my way out. “Tomorrow, Labria.”
I nodded at him and went outside into the hot night.
“Labria” is an extremely dirty word in my native tongue. It translates, roughly, as “cold food,” though the basic phrase loses the flavor of it.
By my horns, I don’t understand humans. I’ve lived around them close to two decades now. The things they swear by! Sex, excrement, and religion.
I’ll never understand them.
There are four hundred billion stars in the galaxy. Most of them have planets; about half have planets capable of supporting life. About a tenth of those worlds have evolved life of their own, and about one in a thousand of those worlds have evolved intelligent life forms.
These are rough numbers. There are well over twenty million intelligent races in the galaxy, though. No one can keep track of them all, not even the Empire.
I have no idea how many bounty hunters there are in Mos Eisley. Hundreds of professionals, I’m sure. Tens of thousands who would turn bounty hunter without a moment’s pause if the bounty were high enough, and if anyone knew of it.
The Butcher of Montellian Serat has five million credits on his horns. But Devaron is halfway across the galaxy, and there may only be a dozen sentients on all of Tatooine who even know for sure what species I belong to. (There are two other Devaronians onplanet, Oxbel and Jubal. I rather like Oxbel; we pretended to be brothers once, during a rather involved scam that didn’t work out the way we’d hoped. We don’t look anything alike—his ancestors evolved at the equator, mine toward the north pole—but the humans we were trying to cheat couldn’t tell the difference. I rather like Oxbel, but I don’t come close to trusting him. He’s been away from Devaron even longer than I have, and it’s entirely possible that even he hasn’t heard of the Butcher of Montellian Serat—but it’s best to be safe.
(There are downsides to being safe, though. The closest Devish woman is on the other side of the Core. Just the thought makes my horns ache.)
Most bounty hunters are lazy. If they weren’t, they’d be in another line of work.
And research is not their strong point.
I took the short way home.
A Reason for Living:
I keep a small underground apartment about twelve minutes’ brisk walk from the cantina. It’s been broken into twice since I’ve lived there. The first time I came back and found the deed done; the second time I surprised the burglar in the act. A young human. Turns out humans don’t taste very good.
The lights come on automatically as I unlock and let myself in. The door leads down a flight of stairs to a cold, sweaty basement that costs an indecent amount to cool. The heat-exchange coils turn on automatically when I enter; I know from long experience I won’t be able to sleep until they have been on for quite a while—and at that it will not be properly cold until I am done sleeping, and it’s time to turn them off.
There’s only one thing of value in the apartment; neither of my two thieves found it, fortunately. From the outer room you go into the sleeping cubicle, and from there into the bathroom. The sanitary facilities are human designed, but they suit me well enough. In the shower, you push back on the tiled wall, and it slides back enough to step through, sideways.
I step through and into a small eight-sided room. The walls are not perfect; they tend to reflect the higher frequencies and absorb the lower ones, so virtually everything ends up sounding brighter than it should. Some of that can be adjusted for; some of it I simply have to live with.
The wall behind me sighs shut. The room is already cool; it’s the first part of the apartment to be cooled.
Along the walls are the chips.
Some of them are unique, I’m sure. Priceless. Copies of recordings that are preserved by no one else in the galaxy. Some of them are merely rare and very expensive.
I have everyone. Or, to be precise, I have something by everyone. I have music the Imperium banned a generation ago … by musicians executed for singing the wrong lyric, in the wrong way, to the wrong person, by musicians who simply vanished, by musicians who had the good fortune to die before the Empire came to power.
Maxa Jandovar is here, and Orin Mersai, and Telindel and Saerlock, Lord Kavad and the Skaalite Orchestra, M’lar’Nkai’kambric, Janet Lalasha, and Miracle Meriko, who died in Imperial custody four days after I saw him play Stardance for the last time. The ancient masters, Kang and Lubrichs, Ovido Aishara, and the amazing Brullian Dyll.
I have two recordings by Fiery Figrin Da’n and the Modal Nodes. Da’n may be the greatest Klooist the galaxy has ever seen. As for Doikk Na’ts … there’s something about his playing that’s always struck me as cautious, careful … but sometimes, sometimes the fire comes, and he plays the Fizzz as well as Janet Lalasha ever did.
Most of their backup players could play lead, in a lesser band.
I settle down in the seat, set just off center for the room, where the sound comes together most cleanly, open a bottle of twelve-year-old Dorian Quill, and wait for the music to start.
My people believe that to kill something, you must cherish it and love it as it dies. There is no barrier between you and the thing you are killing, and you die as you kill.
Music is the only thing I know that feels the same way.
The music surrounds me until I cease to exist.
I die as I kill.
It’s what I live for.
I’m glad my fathers are dead.
In the morning I went to see Jabba.
He had me stand on the trapdoor, and his tail twitched as we spoke. That always bothers me. Part of me was frightened by it; even carnivores get eaten by bigger carnivores. Another part of me wanted to pounce on it.
He regarded me with those slitted ugly eyes, and laughed a rumbling, unpleasant laugh. “So … what information does my least favorite spy have to sell me?”
I made it good. I spoke to him in Hutt, which I normally try to avoid; it hurts my throat, and I have to use both sets of teeth to make some of the sounds. After a long conversation, the front row aches from being pulled up and then dropped down again quickly. “There’s a mercenary in town.” I’d learned what I could about him before heading over. It hadn’t been much, but I’d been rushed. I wanted to move on this quickly—if Jabba didn’t like Da’n and the Nodes, I might never get to see them play. Nor would anyone else. “Obren Mettlo. A real professional, fought in dozens of battles, often on the winning side, looking for employment. Moorin, has an attitude—”
He made a low, grumbling sound that might have been interpreted as interest. Jabba had plenty of muscle, but not always smart muscle; and Moorin tend to be bright as well as vicious.
I forged ahead. “If you like, I could get in touch with him. Bring him by to meet you … for dinner, perhaps. Possibly some entertainment, some music—music is good with Moorin. Keeps ’em peaceable.”
His eyelids drooped slightly; either he was bored or he was thinking. Finally he gave me a slight chuckle, and said, “Send him over.”
I bowed and backed away as quickly as was polite, getting off that trapdoor. “As you wish, sir. We’ll be by—would first dark be appropriate?”
He smiled at me and it made the fur on the small of my back stand straight up. “Send him by,” he clarified. “You are not invited.”
I stood frozen at the edge of the trapdoor, mind refusing to function. Surely there had to be some way to wangle—
Jabba made a sound. A familiar sound; I’ve heard Devish make it, too—except that it takes a pack of Devish. It straightened my ears and made my front teeth jump out of the way. “You can leave now.”
I bowed and got out.
I spent the evening at the cantina, drinking myself into a stupor.
I just knew Jabba would feed the Modal Nodes to the rancor. He’d never had a decent band before, never, not once. The closest he’d ever come was Max Rebo’s bunch, who could carry a melody if you gave them a basket to keep it in.
But the next morning, I learned that Rebo was out looking for work.
Jabba had a new favorite.
It came this close to killing me.
For four days I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it. There they were, not a half part’s speedster trip from Mos Eisley. Playing for him. It ate me alive thinking about it. I lost so much Grace in those days that if I had any shame left to me, I’d have to use some of it on that period.
Sometime on the fifth day I drank too much. I awoke lying facedown in the alleyway upstairs and behind the cantina, in darkness, with someone nudging my shoulder with his toe. I decided to take a chunk out of his calf—
Wuher knelt next to me. “Can you stand up?”
The cold gravel pressed against my cheek. I had bruises, cuts—the memories came back slowly. Several someones had beaten me—heavy wood or metal staffs, I vaguely recalled. Just a random robbery. My right arm wouldn’t move at all. “I don’t think so.”
“Come on.” My body is denser than humans’; he staggered, helping me to my feet. The strain sent a jolt of astonishing pain through my shoulder. “Where do you live?”
He half carried me to my apartment, and stood at the opening while I fumbled with the interlock. “Do you need medical help?”
I don’t remember if I answered him or not. It was a stupid question. No doctor on Tatooine knew anything about Devish physiology—or if they did, I didn’t want to know them.
I made it to the shower before I collapsed. I got the cold water turned on and sat in it until morning, trying to decide how badly I wanted to live.
By morning the apartment half reminded me of home. I stayed in it and did not go out, kept the heat-exchange coils running all day. Around midday I found the strength to pull a slab of womp rat the length of my arm from the freezer, heat it to blood temperature, and drag it into the shower with me. I sat under the water, nude, eating until my stomach bulged, and when there was nothing left but bones on the floor of the stall, turned the water off and staggered to my bedpit.
It took me some time before I felt safe going out in public again. Several times someone came to my door; I didn’t open it. Some information travels Mos Eisley faster than light. Mos Eisley is like a living creature: It eats the sick and weak. I’d survived all these years without having to kill more than a few of my fellow residents. They’d have heard by now of the attack on me—the humans who’d robbed me might have boasted of it, in which case I’d have them in my freezer, whoever they were, before the month was out.
But in any event I dared not go back to the cantina until my strength was returned.
The arm took longest to heal; weeks later it was still stiff and it hurt when I moved it wrong. But I was almost out of food, so I had no choice. Early one morning I dressed, set my alarms, and headed for the cantina.
Wuher looked up and nodded at me when I entered. First one in the door. He put a glass on the counter and poured a shot of golden liquid. “On the house. Drink it before someone else comes in.”
I looked at the drink, and then at Wuher, almost as much at a loss for words as I’d been when Jabba told me to send the merc over by himself. “Many thanks,” I finally got out. He nodded and I lifted the glass—
And stopped. Predators have better noses than leaf eaters. There was something wrong with the alcohol. It was—
He poured himself a shot while I was staring at my glass, raised it to me, and knocked it back.
Merenzane Gold. The real stuff. Precious, pure, real Merenzane Gold.
Wuher corked the unlabeled bottle while I was still staring at him, put it away under the bar, and wandered away from me to finish opening up.
I took the glass to my booth, sat and drank it very slowly. I hadn’t known there was a bottle of real Gold on all of Tatooine. I’d almost forgotten what it tasted like.
I wondered how many years he’d had that bottle down there without saying anything about it.
By the Cold, I’m a lousy spy.
That’s something to be proud of.
I spent the morning listening to the talk throughout the bar. I’d been out of touch … and interesting things had happened while I’d been hidden away from the world. Last night an Imperial battle cruiser had fought in orbit with a Rebel spaceship, and today stormtroopers were looking all over Tatooine for someone, or something, that had escaped them.
And a piece of horrifically bad news: The damn mercenary I’d recommended to Jabba had picked a fight with a pair of Jabba’s bodyguards and shot them both up before getting himself fed to the rancor. There was some rumor that perhaps the merc had been an assassin paid by the Lady Valarian, whose real target had been Jabba himself—
Maybe Jabba had forgotten who had recommended him.
And maybe Long Snoot would give me my fifty credits back.
It came to me in a vision.
Okay, that’s not true, but it’s close. Long Snoot stopped by and mentioned something interesting: The Lady Valarian was getting married. Max Rebo and band were going to play at the wedding.
I barely noticed when Long Snoot left. I stared straight ahead, through the noonday crowd come to escape the heat, not seeing them, not seeing the cantina. Just thinking.
“Wuher.”
He turned away from a conversation with a pair of human females who looked like clones; the Tonnika sisters, they’d introduced themselves as. He did it grudgingly; they were attractive, by human standards. “Yeah?”
“How’s business?”
He stared at me suspiciously. “It stinks. It always stinks.”
“How would you like entertainment by real musicians?”
“Rebo? Can’t afford him, and his bunch don’t draw what they cost anyway.”
I gave him the polite smile. “Figrin Da’n and the Modal Nodes. They’re Bith. They’re good, Wuher. I mean really, really good.”
“What would they cost me?”
“Five hundred a week.”
He gave me the suspicious stare again. If something sounds too good to be true, someone’s being screwed. “Really. A band better than Rebo’s will work here for less than his.”
“I think I can arrange it.”
“How?”
I told him. When I was done he said in a somber voice, “You are one twisted puppy, Lab.”
“Is it a deal?”
He shook his head no, said “It’s a deal,” and wandered away, shaking his head and muttering to himself.
The Lady Valarian is the closest thing to competition that Jabba the Hutt has on Tatooine. That’s not saying much; Jabba tolerates her because it keeps all the discontents in one place. She’s a Whiphid, which means she’s stupid, huge, ugly, has more muscle on her than I do, and smells worse than Jabba. I wouldn’t eat her even after a long hunt.
I went to see her at her hotel, the Lucky Despot. The Lucky Despot isn’t much of a hotel, truth told; just a spaceship that won’t ever lift again.
“That’s right,” I said. “Modal Nodes. Lead is Figrin Da’n. I know you want the best for your wedding, Lady Valarian. This group makes music so glorious, your wedding will be the talk of this corner of the galaxy. People for dozens of light-years will speak with envy and longing of the entertainment provided at the wedding of the great Lady Valarian and her handsome consort, the daring D’Wopp, of the romantic mood set by the finest musicians this poor galaxy has ever seen.”
She glared at me—well, I think she glared at me; with those mad little eyes Whiphids have, it’s hard to tell—and said skeptically, “Better than Max Rebo? I love Max Rebo.”
She would. And she deserved to have the ugly little runt play her wedding, for all of me. “Fair mistress, your taste is as that of your tongue, and none would dare say otherwise.” I gave her the polite smile. “But Modal Nodes is currently Jabba the Hutt’s favored entertainment. Would you have it said that the entertainment at your wedding was provided by the musicians Jabba deemed too poor to play for him?”
It took her a bit to work through it. I’d gotten a little carried away with my syntax; Whiphids have a working vocabulary of only about eight thousand words. “No! No, I won’t have it! I want the Nodal Notes!” She looked briefly uncertain. “Do you think they’ll come?”
“They’ll be expensive, madam. They’ll be braving Jabba’s displeasure to play for you. It might cost … two, or three thousand credits, perhaps. If I can have the loan of a messenger droid, I would be most happy to begin making the arrangements …”
The morning of the wedding I called Jabba.
He laughed with, I think, real amusement on seeing me. “My least favorite spy!” he boomed. “Perhaps you should come visit me. We can have dinner together, and talk about the mercenary you introduced to me.”
“I have information, Jabba.”
“Hmmm.”
“Do you know your musicians are missing? Figrin Da’n and the Modal Nodes?”
“Hmmmph!” He made a bellowing noise and rocked himself off camera. I heard shrieks, steel clanging, things breaking … I stood patiently in front of my comlink’s pickup and waited for him to come back, if he was going to. After a bit he did. “Hoooo,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Where are they, least favorite spy?”
“The Lady Valarian is getting married today. She’s hired them to play at her wedding, at the Lucky Despot Hotel.”
The eyes narrowed to slits. “And what does my least favorite spy want for this information?”
I spread my hands. “Let us forget a certain unfortunate introduction …”
He looked at me through the slitted eyes for a second, and then gave the booming laugh. “Least favorite spy, call me again sometime.”
He broke the connection.
Cold sweat trickled through the fur on the small of my back.
Wuher had dressed for the wedding. He’d changed his shirt.
The cantina was dark and silent; I’d never seen it like this before, except the first few minutes in the morning. I gave Wuher my invitation; the Lady Valarian had given it to me in gratitude for acquiring the “Nodal Notes” for her wedding, while hinting that, in the future, I might find it better business to share information with her rather than with Jabba.
Someone’ll kill Jabba, someday, but it’s not going to be Valarian.
“You’re sure the wedding’s going to be broken up,” he repeated.
“I’m sure the Modal Nodes aren’t going to want to go back to Jabba after this. All you have to do is offer them a place to lie low for a while, play a few gigs, pick up a few credits. They’re going to be broke; Valarian won’t pay them after her wedding is broken up.”
He shook his head, tucking his shirt in again. “You think they’ll go for it?”
“I think they’ll jump at it.”
Wuher stood there, studying me in the gloom. “Lab … if you put this kind of effort into anything else, you could be a wealthy being.”
I shook my head, and said gently, “My friend, this is all that I want.”
It’s hard to outthink Jabba. Also dangerous.
I sat in the shadows of a building down the way from the Lucky Despot, watching the crowd arrive for the wedding. A scummy lot, all around. I recognized several of the “guests” as Jabba’s people. I hoped there wasn’t any shooting. I didn’t see enough of Jabba’s troops to make that likely; if he’d decided to wipe out Lady Valarian for her theft of his musicians, he’d have sent more soldiers. That was a good sign.
I could hear, so faintly that my ears twitched, a song that might have been “Tears of Aquanna.” It was followed by what was, quite definitely, “Worm Case.” Odd choices for a wedding. Maybe they were playing requests.
And then the bad news arrived.
Stormtroopers.
Two squads. They set down out of the night, quietly and with running lights doused, in full combat armor. One squad covered the entrance to the hotel, and the second squad went in. From the moment they set down I doubt it took them twenty seconds.
Oh, the noise was awful. From where I sat, I could hear it. Screams, blaster bolts, yelling, another round of blaster fire—one of the stormtroopers near the entrance went down. I lifted my macrobinoculars and watched the building through them. Windows opened and the scum of a dozen different races came squirming out through them. I moved the macrobinoculars up, scanning across the structure of the half-buried ship … Toward the top of the ship, three stories above the dirty sand, an emergency airlock clanged open. The first head through it was a Bith. I couldn’t guess who: All Bith look alike, even when you’re not looking through macrobinoculars. More Bith followed, and then the unmistakable squat form of my friend Wuher. They took off across the sand together, Wuher and the Bith, and ran straight by me in the darkness without pausing.
I’d never have guessed that Wuher could move that fast … and a moment later I saw why he was managing it. A pair of stormtroopers came charging after them, weapons at the ready. I shed a little Grace by tripping the one in the lead. The second stormtrooper tripped over him. I bent over them and picked up their rifles. I hadn’t handled an assault rifle in—well, in a very long time, but they hadn’t changed. I pulled the charge cages from them and handed them back to the two stormtroopers as they recovered their feet.
“You appear to have dropped these, gentles.”
One of them immediately jumped backward, rifle pointing at me, and shouted, “Don’t move!”
The other one looked at me, and then at his rifle, and then at me again.
“Come now,” I said gently. “We’re reasonable beings. You tripped and I helped you up again. No need for anyone to get upset. If you got injured in the fall, perhaps, I’d be more than happy to compensate you for it …”
I let my voice trail off and the three of us watched each other for a beat.
The one pointing the useless rifle at me said in a strained voice, “Are you trying to bribe us?”
I drew myself up to my full height and stared down at them, and gave them the sharp smile. “Not,” I said, “if you’re going to be snotty about it.”
In the morning, when I reached the cantina, I found the Modal Nodes already there, setting up.
Wuher scowled at me. “I got shot at. By a stinking droid.”
“I’m sorry.” He didn’t seem that angry, though … “You heard them play.”
He nodded grudgingly. “Yeah. They’re pretty good.”
“They’re the best,” I said softly. “And I think you know it.”
He just snorted.
“About my fee.”
“Yeah?”
“Free drinks for a year.”
He snorted again. “Not bloody likely. We won’t get a year out of this lot; they’ll jump planet as soon as they can find some idiot to run the lines for them.”
He had a point. Still—
“Their stay might be longer than that,” I pointed out. “Jabba will want to keep them from leaving the planet. He might even want them back someday.”
He actually smiled at me; I like him better scowling. “Seven free drinks a day as long as they keep playing. As soon as they sneak out of here, you pay again. You pay for every drink over seven anyway.”
I grinned at him before I remembered myself, with the sharp teeth. “Deal.” I got up and walked over to where Figrin was setting up with the band, and introduced myself.
I swear, Biths look contemptuous even when they’re not trying to. The fellow had obviously heard of my reputation: Labria the drunk. The half bright, half sly, half sober. He barely glanced at me. “Oh, yes. Jabba’s least favorite spy.”
The fellow was a notorious gambler. “Interested in a few hands of sabacc? The crowd doesn’t start showing up here until later afternoon anyhow.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Twenty-credit minimum bid.”
His head swiveled as though it belonged to a droid. “Oh? Can you back that up?”
I gave him the sharp smile, on purpose. Bith know they’re food. “Are you trying to insult me, Figrin Da’n?”
There may have been a deck somewhere, somewhen in the history of time colder than the one we used, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Bith come from a warm, bright world. Devaronians, by the way, see farther into the infrared than practically anyone. It’s useful to be able to see heat, when you evolve in the cold.
Buried in the black border along the edges of the cards were markers sensitive to low-spectrum infrared light. I knew every card he held, all that morning.
They were already broke: By the time we were done I owned their instruments, except for Doikk Na’ts’s Fizzz.
And what a day that turned out to be.
For the life of me it seemed the universe had conspired to keep me from enjoying the music. First the band squabbled with each other, and then when they finally got going, with a nice upbeat rendition of “Mad About Me,” some old fool chopped up another fool—with a lightsaber, of all frozen things—and interrupted it. That psychotic Solo actually showed his face in the cantina just after that, and then of course had to kill a miserable excuse for a bounty hunter named Greedo. If I’d had a blaster on me I might have shot Solo in the back as he left, but well, opportunities slip by.
Besides, it’s best not to draw attention.
• • •
Afternoon slid into evening, and I nursed my drinks and watched them play. It took them a while to get into it; at first Figrin couldn’t stand looking at me, and every time he saw me watching them it threw him out of his game. But it’s hard to stay infuriated with someone who is knowledgeable about what you do, and appreciates it as I appreciated them. The music got darker as the day wore on, smokier and more intimate, and Figrin Da’n performed with his eyes closed, moving through the numbers, with Doikk Na’ts at his side; and they played with each other, building through the numbers together, playing off each other, feeding improvisations back upon improvisations, playing, for the first time in who knows how long, for an audience that could, and did, appreciate what they did. An audience of one.
They closed up with “Solitary World,” an appropriate choice, I suppose, with the long intertwined sequences of Fizzz and Kloo, ending with one of the most difficult of the Kloo solos, and Doikk finished his piece, bowing out in recognition of genius: And the Bith stood there and played, Fiery Figrin Da’n in the midst of the music and I watched him wail away, safe, secure, surrounded by the sound, in that place that I would never know.