THE GREATEST JOY OF HYPERSPACE is the brilliance of its light. There is a radiance that can never be matched, or even truly described to those who have never seen it. Derla Pidys closes her lower eyes as her ship drops from the glory of hyperspace into orbit above Cantonica. The stars flash into being, dazzling bright in their own right, if not the impossible glory of their hyperspace shadows.

The planet below her is dark, the sky a dizzying web of ships being pulled into place around the curve of the horizon. She presses the trigger for her prearranged docking, and feels the ship shudder around her as the autopilot engages with the beacon. Relaxing into her seat, she adjusts the folds of her sommelier’s robes and allows herself to anticipate the glory that is to come.

Hyperspace cannot be matched, but it can be challenged. And the architects who set the sky above Canto Bight ablaze will never cease their efforts. The legend of the city grows, its seeds planted by moments such as this—and perhaps, to someone with more limited vision than her own, the challenge is a closer one.

Her ship sails smoothly along the beacon’s route. The world curves below her, dark, purposeless Cantonica, and then, in the time it takes for a millitile to vanish into its hidey-hole, the horizon catches fire.

It is the burn of uncounted lights, of beams slashing high into the atmosphere, as if they would sever the stars and take them for their own. It is the rainbow radiance of Canto Bight, the only reason any sensible creature would travel to this otherwise pointless planet. Canto Bight, the city of dreams, the destination of uncounted sentients, all of them following one legend or another, most chasing a lie. Derla smiles, wishing she were not on her way to work, so she might toast the brilliance of the story unfolding in front of her.

She is not the only sommelier working this sector, but she is, without question, the best. Any wine merchant and liquor trader can claim her title as their own, if they like; she’s not the one to stop them. What they can’t claim is her peerless skill, her ability to assess the quality of any alcoholic beverage from a single sip. Nor can they claim her track record. Despite peddling her wares to representatives from dozens of species, she has never been the source of an accidental poisoning. It is a point of pride, and part of what has grown her reputation—her legend—to its current heights. She is a sommelier. She is the sommelier, the one to call when everything must be perfect.

Arriving on the dark side of the world merely for the sake of this moment is a small indulgence. It wastes time, which is the only resource more limited than wine itself. But the time is hers to waste. Time that is never spent in any frivolous way will turn to vinegar even as wine does, as wasted as too much time spent heedlessly. Balance in all things.

She could never live here—the costs, in every sense, are simply too high—but there is a sweetness to the lie of Canto Bight that sings to her sommelier’s soul. It began, as most beautiful things do, with money, with ambition, and with deceit. “Come to Canto Bight, the greatest city of pleasures the galaxy has ever known,” they cried, and if they lied in the beginning, the ones who carry the cry now are telling the complete and utter truth. They crafted reality out of story.

Derla respects that. She has carried wines that her more sophisticated customers would consider little better than vinegar to backward farming planets where the names on their labels and the scent of distance clinging to their corks rendered them the finest vintages anyone had ever seen. She has taken the wines of those same worlds—common, ordinary things to the gawping farmers who press the grapes in their basements, who bottle their own harvests simply for the sake of having something to wash the dust away—and sold them for profits that would stun their vintners into silence. It is the story that moves the bottle, as much as the taste of what’s within.

This came from a city so far away and famous that its name would burn your uncultured tongue if you tried to speak it, she says, and hands reach out to grasp the glass, currency spilling from their palms.

This was crafted by simple farmers, aged on a world untouched by modern notions, as pure as the Force itself, she says, and people who would never step foot on that world’s soil stumble over themselves to claim it first.

Everything is the legend. Everything is the lie. She sells good wine, yes, sweet wine from the frozen vineyards of Orto Plutonia, bitter, astringent, cleansing wine from the drowned fields of Naboo. She sells vintages worth drinking. But more than that, she sells the sour, virtually undrinkable wine that comes from Naboo’s native fruits, bottled in the air by human vintners who say that Gungan wine will never compare. She sells the faintly poisonous wine of Alaspin and the overly potent wine brewed by the Yuzzum of the forest moon of Endor, which can be safely consumed only when mixed with the simpler, sweeter wine of their Ewok neighbors. She sells dreams, the idea of the galaxy in a single cellar, ready to be sipped and savored. She gives them what they ask for, nothing more and nothing less. Never mind that most of her customers will never crack a single seal on their purchases.

She is lovely, by the standards of her own kind, which makes her hideous to so many others: trading on personal beauty is not something to be done lightly. Her head is bulbous and heavy, with no visible nose. Instead, a single wide mouth sits at its center, anchored by two pairs of eyes, one above and one below. Her body is much like a human woman’s, a small piece of convergent evolution that has always amused and delighted her. Their faces are so flat and hideous, their eyes so small, and yet she looks so like them! What a fabulous galaxy this is. What a delightful story.

Canto Bight spreads out beneath her, and her prepaid docking port opens its doors to welcome her. Derla closes her upper eyes and hums softly. There is so much good work yet to be done, and so many good stories yet to be bought and sold. Tonight, in Canto Bight, she may acquire the best one ever.