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?”
“Trilingual.”
“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?”
“The Modal Nodes.”
“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.
Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina Page 20