Tales From Jabba's Palace
Page 38
a cantina out at the edge of Mos Eisley, doing a "droid" act whose
redeeming social value is perhaps in question. But an act is all it is,
my family being respectable moisture farmers who raised our girls
properly and with none of this modern permissive stuff. She is an
innocent in-every sense of the word, I can assure you of that.
The Imps on the other hand are not at all innocent.
They never are innocent. I am thinking that the Empire must test them
for basic cruelty before they even issue them their first armor.
So these Imps come into the cantina one evening and they see Shaara
doing her act, and they decide that they would like to see for
themselves what she looks like under the metal, and perhaps a few other
things above and beyond seeing.
So they convince the owner of this cantina, an unpleasant character who
rejoices in the name of Dakkar the Distant, to let them go and visit her
backstage after the show is over. I do not like to think about what
might occur if she is actually in her dressing room when they arrive.
She is not there, however, being as she is chatting with the band leader
about some changes in the musical arrangement for the next day.
So they make themselves at home to wait for her.
When she opens the door, still wrapped up neatly in bronze-colored kelsh
metal, she sees them removing their armor and going through her things,
so she wisely makes like the Kandos shuttle and departs ahead of
schedule. They follow her. Why should they not follow her? They are
after all the law, and nobody is going to interfere with them.
So a few minutes later, Shaara comes running into the dome of our
parents' farm, still dressed in her droid costume. She barely has time
to blurt out what has happened before they land on our puk garden.
They have picked up their transport, but as they have not bothered to
replace the various pieces of armor they had removed, they are an
interesting sight. The front door does not slow them down even a
little.
My older brother Kamma tries to stop them. I no longer have a brother
Kamma. I am watching this, a frightened twelve-year-old, from behind a
partition. I think that this is when I first begin to not like the Imps
so much, as a result of which I am now gainfully employed in the service
of Jabba the Hutt. Kamma does not stop them any better than the door
does, but he does succeed in slowing them down a little, during which
delay my sister jumps into the family land-speeder and vacates the
premises..
As you may have seen when you arrived on Tatooine, Mos Eisley is near
the edge of the Dune Sea, and Shaara heads for the sands. She is not
really paying a great deal of attention to where she is going, and
before long she is very near to the Great Pit of Carkoon.
The Imps are right behind her. Their transport is more powerful than
the landspeeder, but it is laden down with six of them while Shaara is
alone and quite light, so they gain very slowly. They are still a few
seconds behind Shaara as she flashes toward the pit. She tells me later
that she is crying at this point, and I think she is telling me the
truth about this.
She is now desperate. She pulls the family punch gun out of its rack
where it is kept in case of trouble and she points it at the hull of the
Imps' transport.
Shaara has been a good shot from childhood, and I think the Force must
guide her hand on this particular day, because she puts a hole right
through to the transport's engine. The resulting explosion should kill
the Imps right then, but they all have been pulling their armor back on.
None of them is fully dressed, and the driver is still down to his
bodyglove, but they also seem to have an unusual amount of luck at that
moment.
I say seem because although the explosion does not kill them it pitches
them into the air just in time for all of them to land in the Pit of
Carkoon, which I would consider to be a good thing indeed if it were not
that the blast also sends the landspeeder tumbling, and Shaara is also
dumped into the pit.
For a moment the seven of them lie there stunned.
Then, and this is the part I always have trouble believing, two of the
Imps begin crawling around the pit toward her.
They must surely know where they are. Even the Imperial Army must tell
their troopers the basic hazards of the land before sending them out.
Yet there they are right on the Sarlacc's doorstep and they are more
intent on finishing what they have planned for my poor sister than they
are in saving their own miserable lives.
Well, of course all this movement gets the Sarlacc good and active, and
its tongue-tentacles begin to poke around. It grabs one unconscious Imp
and drags him in without a sound. Shaara sees this and lets out a
screaming noise, but I guess the two Imps following her think that she
is screaming at them.
Then a tentacle gets hold of the foot of another Imp who is awake, and
now he begins to scream. This causes the others to sit up and take
notice, all but one who never wakes up at all but falls into the mouth
of the Sarlacc because of the shifting sands caused by those questing
tongues. I do not know whether you have been keeping count, Mister Boba
Fett, but this leaves only three Imps in the Great Pit of Carkoon but
outside of the Sarlacc, along with my sister.
The two who have been creeping' around the pit now cease creeping around
it and begin frantically crawling in a direction away from the mouth of
the Sarlacc, which of course does them no good whatsoever and only makes
the sand under them shift downward faster than they can climb up it.
This shifting attracts the attention of the Sarlacc, who immediately
grabs them both and drags them screaming to their doom. I do not know
whether the storyJabba the Hutt likes to tell is true, that you spend a
thousand years being slowly digested in the Sarlacc's belly, but I am
frankly all in favor of the idea in the case of these two, though Shaara
says she hopes they died quickly. Perhaps it is that she is of a more
delicate nature, or maybe she just wishes that they are dead.
This leaves just Shaara and one stormtrooper staring across the Great
Pit of Carkoon at each other and down at the tongue-tentacles of the
Sarlacc. This Imp seems to be more sensible than the others, and he
holds very still and does not send sand down the pit to let the Sarlacc
know where he is, Neither does Shaara.
He looks across the pit at her. She tells me later that he is not
wearing his helmet, and she has never seen a man look so frightened
before or since. Personally I hope never to see that kind of fear.
The Sarlacc's tongues, in the meanwhile, continue to quest around the
sandy surface of the pit for potential food. One brushes over Shaara's
leg and keeps moving--and then it comes back.
Shaara screams, and the Imp does what is perhaps the most surprising
thing in this entire story. He pulls his personal vibroblade from his
boot and throws it at the tentacle that
has hold of her.
The tentacle lets go, but two others snap up immediately, and half a
dozen more begin groping up the side where the blade has come from.
At this point the Imp's courage fails entirely. He begins to claw his
way up the walls of the Great Pit of Carkoon. This seals his doom.
One of the tentacles grasps Shaara's metal-wrapped leg, while two others
grab the Imp and tear him in half as they drag him in. Shaara says she
thinks he died quickly. I hope that she is right.
Then the tentacle that has hold of Shaara picks her up, coils down
toward the Sarlacc's mouth--and uncoils most violently, throwing her out
of the Pit of Carkoon entirely. The family landspeeder is a total loss
but its comm unit works well enough that she can send out a call for
help, and she does so.
Ah, look. We are getting near the Pit. of Carkoon.
Come this way, please.
Why does the Sarlacc let her go? That is a very interesting question,
Mister Boba Fett. First of all, I wish to point out that it does not
let her go, it makes her go. I do not know why it does this, but I have
given it much thought over the years and I have several theories on the
subject.
Perhaps it has had enough food for now, and it throws the excess back.
Shaara does not like this theory, and neither do I. I have seen it eat
much more than this at one time.
Shaara thinks that the tentacles are tongues indeed and have a sense of
taste. She thinks that the Sarlacc decides, based on the metallic taste
of her suit, that she is not edible. I do not think this is true
myself, for I have seen the Sarlacc swallow some things which could not
possibly have tasted like organic matter, and the armor of the Imps did
not seem to bother it at all.
What I personally think is this. Nobody really knows anything about the
Sarlacc. It seems to be the only one of its kind, but creatures simply
do not evolve as individuals in such a manner. And it is very old. We
assume that it is not intelligent, but perhaps it is.
Perhaps it just has a slower kind of intelligence which takes years to
think a single thought. And maybe, just maybe, it Knew what it was
doing.
I do not know why the Sarlacc saved my sister, and that is really all
there is to say about it. My parents say that they have never heard of
the Sarlacc eating anyone who had not done something to deserve it, but
if so we are undoubtedly all Sarlacc food in the final analysis.
Ah. Here we are. This is the best place to watch from, even better
than Jabba the Hutt's throne. Stay right here in the skiff and I can
promise you a truly amazing view. You may even see what few have seen
and lived: the Sarlacc's belly. A Barve Like That: The Tale of Boba Fett
by J. D. Montgomery
With the passage of the years he had learned to recognize certain
things.
When he first returned to awareness he knew that he was on the surface
of a planet. Artificial gravity shimmers at the boundaries of
perception; on a ship under thrust the engines, however well damped,
vibrate; and gravity provided by angular momentum causes a Coriolis
effect that a human who has trained himself can recognize.
But that was all that he knew when the voice out of the darkness said,
You are Boba Fett.
Fett's head jerked up and he stared into--Nothing.
He reached for his rifle--and did not move. His arms and legs were
firmly restrained. Fett hung in darkness, feet not touching the ground.
He heard a distant crack followed by the same noise again, rather more
close. His head was not restrained but the rest of his body felt as
though it had been wrapped in-He stuck out his tongue and flipped the
switch that turned on his helmet's macrobinoculars.
You are Boba Fett.
Even with the macrobinoculars, translating up out of the infrared and
down from the ultraviolet, there was not much to see. Fett hung against
the wall of a tunnel--a tunnel not of stone or any artificial material,
but soft and yielding, spongelike, ridged and corded as though the
tunnel had grown into its current shape. He could turn his head just
enough to see that the tunnel curved sharply out of sight a few meters
to his left and right.
Screams in the distance.
A whistling crack.
The voice said after a long pause, curiously, You are Boba Fett ?
It came back in a rush--Tatooine, the sail barge, Skywalker and Solo,
and with a rush of horror that stilled every other thought fighting for
his attention it came to him where he was, in the belly of the
Sarlacc-Being digested.
Most of those who dealt with Fett over the course of the decades did not
consider him a man of much feeling.
This was accurate. He was not.
Leaving Bespin, though, he was filled by a certain fondness for Han
Solo. Do not misunderstand--he did not approve of the man--but it was
rare to receive two bounties for the same acquisition. But Vader had
paid well and the Hutt would pay nearly as well again,The Hutt had
promised a bounty of a hundred thousand credits. A respectable amount,
though not as good as some Fett had earned. He had once received a
bounty of a hundred and fifty thousand credits for the pirate Feldrall
Okor; and on a memorable occasion, half a million credits for the
delivery of Nivek'Yppiks, an incautious Ffib heretic who had fled his
homeworld of Lorahns, and the religious oligarchy that controlled it.
Fett did not imagine he would ever come to like religious autarchies;
they reminded him of his youth. But he had come to appreciate them.
They paid exquisitely well and their "criminals" were intellectuals who
talked too much and rarely shot back.
Fett's fee for the Solo acquisition was, though the Hutt did not know it
yet, about to be increased. Fett did not imagine he would be able to
push Jabba to half a million credits--the Hutt was a business creature,
not a religious fanatic--but the Hutt was among other things an art
collector.
Han Solo, encased in carbonite, had to be worth more than Han Solo alive
or dead.
By the time he got done, counting both his fee from the Empire and his
fee from the Hutt, Fett fully intended to better the half million he had
received on that Yppiks fool.
Fett slept sitting up in the pilot's chair, which made a more
comfortable bed than some Fett had known, while the Slave 1 made the
last jump to Tatooine.
Hyperspace transit was as a rule the only place Fett felt safe enough to
sleep soundly. He did not dream, at least nothing he remembered; his
sleep was peaceful and uninterrupted. One might have called it the
sleep of a just man.
He awakened not long before hyperspace breakout.
No device awakened him; he had decided to awake at the correct time, and
he did. He awoke alert, scanning the Control board. All seemed well.
Minutes later the hyperspace tunnel fragmented around him. Stars
appeared in the viewplate--and a klaxon shrilled through the ship.
Bad news and Fett took it calmly e
nough, under the circumstances: a
beacon had activated itself down in the hold, announcing Fett's arrival
insystem to whoever was listening on that frequency. Fett's deduction
was instantaneous and correct; another hunter had planted the beacon
during his stay on Cloud City. Fett slapped the autopilot control and
sprinted below deck.
Another hunter, looking for the Hutt's bounty on Solo. It was the only
answer that made sense, and Fett damned himself for a fool for not
checking his ship when he had the chance. Basics, basics, you ignore
the basics and you deserve what happens to you. Fett unslung the
flame-thrower as he ran, rounded the last corridor before the cargo bay,
to the stretch of corridor where the sensors showed the beacon
originating, and let loose. He cooked the bulkhead until the metal
glowed and the air around him burned hot and stank with ozone, brought
the flame tracking upward-The klaxon ceased and Fett left the Slave's
maintenance droid to deal with the fire he'd started, and ran back to
control.
He slid into his seat. The Slave 1 had continued to head insystem at
high speed, Tatooine growing large in the viewscreen. The local
shipping did not seem to be taking notice of Fett, which was all to the
good, but somebody out there knew he'd arrived. Fett fed figures to the
autopilot, had it calculate a hyperspace jump back out of the system,
started another thread, and set a portion of the computer to performing
diagnostics on ship functions.