Star Wars: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Balu turned his head to consider her. Trevagg could tell from the man’s temperature and the vibration of his pulses, even at this distance, that he found her no more sexually stimulating than he’d have found a Jawa. Disgust flooded him at the sheer, galling insensitivity of humans.

  “Trevagg,” said the officer, “most species—most civilizations—ostracize members who bear hybrid children. If you find her attractive there’s probably enough enzyme compatibility for you to get her with child. You’d be ruining her for life.”

  Trevagg emitted a sharp, barking laugh. “I can’t believe you. You’re within two meters of that, and you’re talking to me about enzyme compatibility? Man, grow some gonads! If she was worried about that she shouldn’t be traipsing around the galaxy in that flimsy-little head-veil in the first place.”

  Balu put his hand on Trevagg’s arm warningly, and the Gotal halted in surprise. Balu seldom showed any disposition to care about anything, but there was a definite threat in his dark eyes.

  Patiently, Trevagg promised, “All right. I’m only taking her out for a walk. She can always say no.”

  But after three drinks at the Mos Eisley Cantina, he reflected, as he entered the outer office again and took Nightlily’s arm—not to mention the prospect of marriage that seemed to push every switch on her board—it wasn’t at all likely that she would.

  “I can’t believe that you would … would truly love me enough to wed,” crooned the girl, as they crossed the brazen burnish of dust and sunlight in the street. “The males of my species … fear that commitment. That giving of all for love.”

  “The males of your species are fools,” growled Trevagg, gazing deep into her eyes and drinking in the heady perfume of her sexuality. As far as he was concerned that went for the females too, but he didn’t say so. He glanced back from the shadows of the buildings opposite, just in time to see a flicker of dusty robes, the trailing brightness of an orange scarf …

  Pylokam the health-food seller. Crossing the street to the government offices.

  The Gotal’s mind seemed to click, all things falling into place with a hunter’s cutting instinct. Balu. Pylokam had seen the Jedi.

  His first reaction was sheer annoyance. He’d already told Nightlily he’d booked passage for her on the Star-swan, and she’d flung her arms around him, asking if he had booked his own passage, to come to H’nemthe to marry her with due ceremony before her mother and sisters. He’d gotten out of that one by promising to embark within a few days—“I am an official of the Empire, you know. I can’t just leave everything all in a moment, though, believe me, I will be counting the days.” But it meant that there was no putting her off.

  There was no reason for Pylokam to come to the impost offices other than to report to Balu, and he knew Balu, for all his world-weary slovenliness, was not one to waste time. He’d investigate—and he’d report.

  And that meant Trevagg would have to find someone to assassinate Balu this afternoon.

  Ordinarily, of course, he’d have gotten in touch with Jub Vegnu, set up a meeting, made an appointment with Jabba the Hutt, and arranged for payment …

  But of course he knew—everybody knew—that freelance assassins were ten for a half-credit in Mos Eisley and most of them were supposed to hang out in the Mos Eisley Cantina. It couldn’t be that difficult to meet one. The encounter would presumably be short and sweet—that’s what assassins were for, to make life easy for those who had other things to do—leaving him plenty of the afternoon and all of the evening to conclude an encounter of another kind with Nightlily in the Mos Eisley Inn.

  If entering the government offices from the noon street was like passing into a (more or less) cool grotto, transition from the late-afternoon dust and glare into the near-darkness of the cantina was comparable to being swallowed by a bantha with indigestion. Trevagg’s hunter eyes switched almost instantaneously from day vision to night as a great drench of vibration hit him: overlapping electrospectrum fields, personal magnetic auras buzzing like a hive of bees, halos of irritation and annoyance swollen by the proximity of strangers and exacerbated by every sort of psycho- and neural relaxant known in the galaxy.

  It was like the marketplace, only more sinister, without the bright spiciness of making a living. The thoughts and emotions swirling through the gloom were darker, more dangerous, against the brassy twirling of the little dark-clothed, insectoid band. “Are you sure it’s safe?” hummed Nightlily, clinging once more to his arm, and Trevagg patted her hand. Her fear reacted on his hunter’s instinct as her anxiety and distress had earlier—prey signals that read as an invitation to conquest. He felt an almost overwhelming desire to crush her in his arms.

  Instead he cradled the back of her exquisite coned head in one hand, said, “With me, you’re safe, my blossom. With me you’ll always be safe.”

  They took one of the small booths to the left of the raised entry vestibule, Nightlily gazing around her, fearfully marveling. In addition to being a virgin, she had confessed to Trevagg over lunch, she had never been away from her home planet before, had never seen anything like this. As well she hadn’t, thought the Gotal, amused at the way she relaxed under the influence of Wuher the barkeep’s drinks computer. In another booth a completely illegal card game was in progress between a ghoulish Givin, a giant one-eyed Abyssin, and a big fluffy white thing of a species even Trevagg had never seen; in another a shaggy, ferocious-looking Wolfman sipped his drink alone. While Nightlily sighed, and giggled over her second drink, and asked him, “Are you truly sure, beloved? Mating is such a solemn thing, such an awe-inspiring thing …” Trevagg was searching the crowd with his eyes and, more importantly, with his cones, seeking out the vibrations of danger and blood, the vibrations of another hunter, as he had once been.

  “It is as nothing,” Trevagg said. “No sacrifice is too great for what I feel for you.” The fact that she couldn’t even detect him in a lie—that she didn’t have that much sensitivity to the vibrations of his mind—only redoubled his contempt for her. So desirable—so innocent—so stupid … No wonder they don’t let virgins travel off her planet. She’d told him that, too. They’d never make it home.

  Not as virgins, anyway.

  Meantime, his hunter senses roved the dark forms, seeking another hunter.

  The two tall human females drinking by the bar were a maybe: They sparkled with danger, a flamelike brightness that some assassins had. But the color of their aura wasn’t quite right. The Rodian at another card table, with his small earlike antennae swiveling nervously in the noise of the room—yes. Definitely a killer, though Trevagg wasn’t certain he could take on Predne Balu. The Wolfman, yes; he looked big enough, tough enough, to take on the human and win. The brown-haired human talking quietly with an enormous Wookiee at another booth—maybe. The edge was there, but not the darkness. The thin man smoking a hookah at the bar—absolutely. His aura was dark, terrible, but there was a coldness about him that made Trevagg wonder if he could be approached at all. That was one, he thought, who killed for a huge sum … or for his own pleasure. Nothing between.

  For the rest, they were locals: the foul Dr. Evazan and his disgusting Aqualish friend were well known to Trevagg, dangerous but not for hire; the horned and sinister-looking Devaronian swaying his fingers dreamily to the music of the band was much less dangerous than he appeared. The old spacer in most of a flight suit Trevagg recognized as a smuggler who worked for the monastery, probably involved in something illegal—like most of the religious brothers of that organization—but he would stop far short of murder.

  And then he felt it. The rushing, buzzing sensation in his cones, the strange humming confusion, almost like the presence of a high-energy machine …

  And the Jedi came into the cantina.

  He was a nondescript old human, his beard gone white as the hair of humans did with age, his robes shabby with wear and desert dust. He was trailed by a human youth—a back-desert moisture farmer, by the look of his clothes and the way
he stared around him, as Nightlily had, awed by what he thought was the Big City—and by a couple of much-battered droids whose power cells made Trevagg’s cones prickle. Wuher the barkeep swung immediately around. “Hey, we don’t serve their kind here!”

  “What?” said the boy, and the taller of the droids, a dented C-3PO, looked as disconcerted as it was possible for a droid to look.

  “Your droids. They’ll have to wait outside. We don’t want them here.”

  Trevagg, sitting only a few feet away, heartily concurred. It was difficult enough to think in here, to determine what he should do, with Nightlily so soft and vulnerable and giggly on one side, and the dark vibrations of the assassins on the other.

  “Listen, why don’t you wait out by the speeder,” the boy said quietly—an unnecessary courtesy, in Trevagg’s opinion. A C-3PO only looked human, and an R2-D2 didn’t even do that. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  The old man, meanwhile, had gone to the bar, and was deep in murmured conversation with the elderly monastic spacer in the flight suit; Trevagg stretched his hearing to pick up their words, but over the music of the band it was not easy.

  Even less easy was it to hear something besides Nightlily’s soft voice, slightly flown with unaccustomed substances, asking yet again, humbly, how he could truly love her so much.

  “Of course I do, of course,” said Trevagg, watching the old Jedi move into conversation with the towering Wookiee. He looked safe for a moment, and Trevagg turned back to Nightlily, grasping the smooth dark ivory of her hands. “Nightlily, you mean … Everything. Everything to me.”

  She said “Oh …” while staring up into his eyes. “Oh … Oh, Trevagg. That we should have met like this—that you should have come into my life like this …”

  He wondered if he could slip away for a moment, summon the city police … But he needed a go-between if he were to get the money. Slip away and contact Jub Vegnu—first speak to one of the assassins, in case Balu had tracked the old man here himself.

  He felt the flare of emotions, of irrational rage and drunken aggression, before the yelling started. Swinging around in his chair, Trevagg saw, to his horror, that the sinister Dr. Evazan had decided to pick a fight with the farm boy, throwing him sprawling into a table while Wuher ducked under the bar yelling desperately “No blasters! No blasters!” and someone else grabbed for a sidearm …

  The roar of the Force in Trevagg’s cones peaked like the drumming of a high-desert gravel storm. The old man, in what seemed like a single smooth gesture, somehow had a glowing stalk of light in his hand. A lethal slash, a severed limb leaking blood on the floor, Nightlily’s terrified hoot, and silence—a silence less shocked than cautious as everyone reevaluated the situation.

  Then the band started up again. So did the conversations. The wounded would-be combatant was taken away. So was the arm, by Wuher’s small helper Nackhan recognized as operating a fast-food stand in the marketplace. The old Jedi picked up his young companion, moved off with the Wookiee to the booth where the brown-haired smuggler with the scar on his chin waited. Trevagg became aware that Nightlily was clinging to his arm, and his every instinct told him now was the time to move in on her.

  Unfortunately, now was also the time to listen, to stretch out his hearing, to key and sharpen his hunter’s awareness of every word they said. Trevagg disengaged his arm from the trembling girl, stated “You need something to calm you down, my blossom,” and moved over to the bar, listening over the jumble of the music, the murmur of the crowd. Lingering by the bar, he heard the words “to the Alderaan system,” and felt the swift rush of hunter’s adrenaline in his veins. It was, indeed, now or never.

  Then, a moment later, he heard the old man say, “Two thousand now, plus fifteen when we reach Alderaan …”

  Trevagg breathed a sigh of relief. That meant a delay here, while they raised the cash. Probably they’d sell the speeder the boy had mentioned, or the droids, or all three. That only left the question of Balu.

  The brown-haired human and the Wookiee were obviously not for hire as assassins. Judging by such of the conversation as he could hear, Trevagg guessed they were only smugglers anyway. The Wolfman was engaged in a sharp altercation with a lampreylike thing beside him, whose vibrations caused Trevagg to back quickly away, and, nearby, the hookah smoker felt too eerily dangerous, too deadly. That left the Rodian …

  “Docking Bay Ninety-four,” he heard the smuggler say, and the old man repeated it, “Ninety-four,” as Trevagg returned to his booth with his own drink and Nightlily’s, double-strength and dosed with a Love-Wallop pill Trevagg had had the foresight to slip into his pocket before leaving the office. He knew how much Wuher charged for them. There would now, he knew, be plenty of time.

  Riches, he thought, and the beautiful creature leaning on his arm, crooning softly, “Oh, my love, my love.” Maybe he’d even spring for a first-class ticket for her. It was, after all, the least he could do.

  He wasn’t surprised, or particularly upset, when the stormtroopers showed up. He even felt a kind of scorn for them as they looked around, for of course the old man and the boy had vanished. So, incidentally, did several other patrons, including the hookah smoker. The Rodian didn’t, Trevagg observed, and slipped one hand from Nightlily’s soft waist to feel in his belt pouch for the money he’d brought. A hundred credits, he had been told, was the current going rate for the down payment on a man’s life.

  He would be glad, he thought, to get this annoyance out of the way. To make sure Balu was not going to cheat him out of the reward that was rightfully his.

  Unfortunately, just as Trevagg was rising to go to the Rodian’s table, the Rodian himself got up, with a shift in aura that told Trevagg that this was indeed a hunter, closing in on his own prey. That prey, it turned out, was the brown-haired smuggler, who after a prolonged altercation shot the Rodian neatly with a blaster drawn under the table.

  Nightlily shrieked again and clung to Trevagg’s arm; Wuher’s helper ran to guard the remains even as the smuggler and his Wookiee companion tossed the barkeep a couple of credits and took their leave: “Sorry about the mess.” After a momentary pause, the band took up its tune without missing a bar.

  Disgusted and annoyed—because the Wolfman had also left by this time—Trevagg gathered the flustered and languishing Nightlily on his arm. So much, he thought, for trying to shortcut middlemen. When he contacted Jub Vegnu to arrange information to the City Prefect about intercepting the old man and the boy at Spaceport Speeders, he’d mention the need to dispose of Balu for an extra hundred creds. That should take care of any competition for the reward for the old man’s hide.

  And in the meantime, thought Trevagg, slipping his arm around the trembling bundle of aromatic sensuality that fate had dropped into his lap, there was the matter of this girl, and getting a room at the Mos Eisley Inn, to consummate what she thought would be the start of a wonderful marriage—the more fool she!—and what was, in actuality, merely the more delectable of the two hunts upon which he had engaged today.

  Really, Trevagg thought, as he guided Nightlily’s tipsy steps along the gold and shadow of the street outside, he might have retired from the trade, but he was still quite a passable hunter after all.

  What with the commotion of Imperial troops coming into Mos Eisley to search for a pair of droids, the sudden rumors of a Sand People massacre on an outlying farm, and the firefight at Docking Bay 94 ending with a smuggling craft’s illegal liftoff, nobody found Feltipern Trevagg’s body until the following afternoon.

  “Didn’t anybody tell him?” demanded Wuher the bartender, brought over to the Mos Eisley Inn by Balu’s deputy to view the body and give the security officer his deposition.

  “Tell him what?” Balu looked up from jotting on his logpad. He’d never much liked the Gotal, but that kind of death—evisceration with what looked to have been a long, thin knife, skillfully wielded—was something he wouldn’t have wished on anyone.

  “About H’nemthe.
” When Balu continued to look blank, the bartender added, “The girl he was with. The H’nemthe female.”

  “Nightlily?” Balu was startled. The girl had looked too frightened by her surroundings—and too dazzled by Trevagg’s charms—to have harmed a hair of the Gotal’s head.

  “Was that her name?” Wuher rolled his eyes. “It figures.”

  A small crowd had gathered. Of course, none of the Imperial stormtroopers and none of the Prefect’s guard, either. A murder this small wasn’t worth their time. Balu couldn’t help observing Nackhar in the background slipping the coroner’s deputy a few credits. For what, he decided not to ask.

  “The m’iiyoom—the nightlily—is a carnivorous flower that feeds on small rodents and insects that try to drink its nectar,” said the barkeep, hands on hips and looking down at the dark-stained sheet the coroner had laid over what was left of Trevagg. “After mating, H’nemthe females gut the males with those tongues of theirs—they’re as sharp as sword blades, and a lot stronger than they look. Some kind of biological reaction to there being twenty H’nemthe males for every female. The males seem to think it’s worth it, to achieve the act of love. I saw them together in the cantina, but I didn’t think Trevagg was crazy enough to try to bed the girl.”

  “He was always bragging about being such a great hunter,” said Balu wonderingly, stepping aside for the coroner’s deputies to carry the body out of the dingy and bloodstained room. “You’d have thought he’d sense it coming.”

  “How could he?” The barkeep tucked big hands into his belt, followed the officer back out to the street. “For her it was the act of love, too.”

  He shrugged, and quoted an old Ithorian proverb current in some sections of the spaceways: “N’ygyng mth’une vned ‘isobec’ k’chuv ‘ysobek.’ ”

  Which, loosely translated, means: “The word for ‘love’ in one language is the word for ‘dinner’ in others.”