“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.
Swap Meet:
The Jawa’s Tale
by Kevin J. Anderson
The sandcrawler labored up the long slope of golden sand that rippled with heat under the twin suns of Tatooine. The immense vehicle moved ahead at a moderate but inexorable rate. Its clanking tractor treads left parallel furrows on the virgin surface of the dune. Within a few hours, gusting sandwhirls would erase the tracks and return the Dune Sea to its pristine state. The desert resisted all permanent change.
Deep in the murky bowels of the sandcrawler, in the cluttered engine rooms where throbbing power reactors pounded and echoed, Het Nkik labored with his Jawa clan members. From the depths of his hood, he sniffed the air, a veritable sauce of mingled odors. The engines smelled as if they were getting old again, lubricant spoiling, durasteel cogs wearing away.
Humans and many other sentient creatures loathed the way Jawas smelled, detecting only a stink that made them turn up their noses. But Jawas derived an incredible amount of information from such smells: the health of their companions, when and what they had last eaten, their identity, maturity, status of arousal, excitement, or boredom.
Het Nkik chittered his concern. At any other time the Jawas would have rushed to avert any potential breakdown—at least until they had unloaded their wares on a hapless customer. But today the Jawas paid him little heed, too preoccupied with the impending swap meet, the annual gathering of all clans. They pushed the engine to its maximum capacity as the sandcrawler toiled across the Dune Sea to the traditional meeting place of the Jawa people.
Het Nkik shook his head, his bright yellow eyes glowing in the dim shadows of his hood. The other Jawas would know he was annoyed and impatient from his scent.
Het Nkik had odd ideas for a Jawa, and he told them to any who would listen. He enjoyed watching his clan brothers scurry around, confused at the thoughts he placed in their heads—thoughts that perhaps the Jawas could do more than run and hide from persecution by the Sand People, by the human moisture farmers, or worst of all by the Imperial stormtroopers who had decided that helpless Jawa forts made good practice targets for desert assaults. He wondered if someone else among all the Jawas had realized that Jawas were only weak because they chose to be weak. None of his people wanted to listen.
Het Nkik turned back to the engines, tearing open an access panel and adjusting the delicate electronics. He found it amazing that the Jawas could use all their skill and imagination in a desperate fight to keep this ancient machine running, yet they would do nothing to protect themselves or their property if some antagonist tried to take it.
With the sound of a grating alarm signal, the Jawas in the engine room squealed with delight. Cinching tight his pungent brown robe, Het Nkik scurried after the others as they rushed for the lift platforms to the bridge observation deck. The old elevators groaned, overloaded with jabbering creatures.
At the pinnacle of the great trapezoidal sandcrawler, fifteen Jawa crew members clustered around the long, high transparisteel window, standing on inverted spare-parts boxes to see. All during Tatooine’s long double-day, Jawa lookouts stood atop makeshift stools, gazing out upon the baked sands, looking for any scrap of metal or signs of Sand People or Imperial stormtroopers or hostile smugglers. Upon glimpsing any potential threat, the pilot would swerve in a different direction and increase speed, locking down blast doors and shuddering with fear, hoping that the adversary would not pursue them. Het Nkik had never heard of even a krayt dragon striking something as big as a Jawa sandcrawler, but that did not stop the Jawas from living in terror.
Now the other small hooded forms looked down upon the broad bowl-shaped valley among the dunes. Het Nkik elbowed his way to one of the overturned metal boxes so he could step up and look out across the gathering place. Though this was his third season as an adult on the scavenger hunts, Het Nkik still found the swap-meet site breathtaking.
He stared across the dazzling sand as the twin suns shone down on a swarm of sandcrawlers like a herd of metallic beasts gathered in a circle. The vehicles looked similar, though over the decades Jawa mechanics had attached modifications, subtle differences in armor and patchwork.
Originally the sandcrawlers had been huge ore haulers brought to Tatooine by hopeful human miners who had expected to make a fortune exploiting the baked wastelands; but the mineral content of Tatooine’s desert was as bleak and unappealing
as the landscape itself. The miners had abandoned their ore haulers, and the rodentlike Jawa scavengers had seized them and put them to use, wandering the Dune Sea and the Jundland Wastes in search of salvageable debris. After more than a century, the sandcrawler hulls had been oxidized to a dull brown and pitted by the abrasive desert winds.
Their sandcrawler had arrived late, as Het Nkik had feared. Two days ago the pilot had taken them deep into a box-ended offshoot of Beggar’s Canyon where the metal detectors had found a slight trace of something that might have been the framework of a crashed fighter’s hull. But instead they had found only a few girders rusted away to flakes of powder. The oxidized debris was worthless, but before the Jawas could leave the narrow canyon, an early-season sandwhirl had whipped up, trapping them in a blinding cyclone of sand and wind. Strapped to the walls of their living cubicles, the Jawas had waited for the storm to blow over, and then used the powerful engines to plow through the drifted sand.
Though they had arrived at the swap meet late, there still seemed to be a bustling business. Far below, other Jawas scurried about like insects setting up the bazaar. Het Nkik hoped he could still find something worthwhile to trade.
Standing on their metal stools, the pilot and the chief lookout called across to each other, discussing the final sandcrawler count. Het Nkik calculated quickly with his darting yellow eyes and saw that they were not the last to arrive. One of the other vehicles was missing. Some of the Jawas around him speculated on what misfortune might have overtaken their brethren, while others consoled themselves by pointing out that even if the goods had already been picked over, they would have a new batch to inspect when the final vehicle arrived.
As the pilot guided the sandcrawler over the lip of the dunes in a switchback path down into the flat meeting area, the Jawas scurried back to their living cubicles to prep their own wares. His body wiry beneath the heavy robes, Het Nkik had no difficulty scrambling down fifteen decks to reach the stuffy cubicles.
Het Nkik slept in an empty upright shipping pod, rectangular and scarred with corrosion, barely large enough to step inside and turn around. During sleeping cycles he buckled himself to the wall and relaxed against the belt restraints where he could stare at his prized possessions stashed in pockets, magnetic drawers, and field jars. Now he grabbed the accumulated credit chips and barter notes he had earned during their great scavenger hunt and darted toward the main egress doors.
Faced with the magnitude of the great bazaar, the Jawas worked together as an efficient team. They had set up their merchandise dozens of times during their half-year trek, stopping at every moisture farmer’s residence, every smuggler’s den, even Jabba the Hutt’s palace. Jawas didn’t care where they sold their wares.
Down in the bowels of the sandcrawler, Het Nkik scurried among the merchandise, tweaking the barely functional droids and servo apparatus. Jawas had an instinctive feel for machinery and electronics, knowing how to get a piece of equipment functioning just well enough to sell it. Let the buyer beware.
The deserts of Tatooine were a veritable graveyard of junk. The harsh planet had been the site of many galactic battles over the centuries, and the dry climate preserved all manner of debris from crashed ships and lost expeditions.
Het Nkik loved to fix and recondition broken things, energized by his ability to bring wrecked machines back to life. He remembered when he and his clan mate and best friend Jek Nkik had stumbled upon a crashed fighter. The small fighter had blown up, leaving only fragments—nothing even a Jawa could salvage. But digging deeper, they had found the burned and tangled components of a droid—an E522-model assassin droid that had seemed hopelessly damaged, but he and Jek Nkik vowed to fix it, secretly scrounging spare parts from the storehouse in the Jawa fortress.
Their clan leader Wimateeka had suspected the two young boys were up to something and watched them closely, but that only made them more determined to succeed. Het Nkik and his friend had spent months in a secret hideaway deep in the badlands, piecing together tiny components and servomotors, adding new instruction sets. Finally the assassin droid stood emasculated of murderous programming, purged of all hunter-seeker weapons and all initiative to cause violence. The E522 functioned perfectly, but as little more than an extremely powerful messenger droid.
Het and Jek Nkik had proudly displayed their triumph to Wimateeka, who scolded the boys for such folly; no one would want to buy a reprogrammed assassin droid, he said. But Het Nkik could tell from the not-quite-controlled rush of scent that Wimateeka also admired the young Jawas’ brashness. Never again had Het Nkik believed common wisdom about what Jawas could not do.
He and Jek Nkik had surprised themselves by selling the repaired assassin droid to the tusk-faced Lady Valarian, Jabba the Hutt’s chief rival on Tatooine—a very risky trade that brought them even more scolding from Wimateeka. Lady Valarian was a tough customer; and the one time she had felt cheated, the only remains of the hapless Jawa traders were a few tattered brown cloaks found in the Great Pit of Carkoon where the voracious Sarlacc waited to devour anything that came within reach. Het Nkik had no idea what had happened to their reprogrammed assassin droid, but since Lady Valarian had not come after them, he presumed the huge Whiphid smuggler queen must have been satisfied.
Two years ago, Het and Jek Nkik had been separated upon reaching their age of adulthood, sent out to do scavenger duty away from the Jawa fortress. In a few years, sandcrawler crews would swap clan groupings and arrange marriages; but for the time being Het Nkik saw his friend only during the annual swap meets.
Now he had credit chips in his barter pouch, he had merchandise to trade—and he looked forward to seeing Jek Nkik.
The sandcrawler ground to a halt in the demarcated area set aside for their clan subunit. When the cargo doors opened, Jawa teams scurried to haul out the repaired droids, scraps of polished hull-metal plates, appliances, and primitive weapons they had found among the sands. The Jawas’ motto was not to look for uses in a salvaged piece of garbage, but rather to imagine someone else who might find a use for it.
Jawas bustled about setting up tables, awnings, credit display readers. Others gave a last burnish to the exoskeletons of clanking mechanical servants. A few tried to look nondescript, hiding emergency repair kits inside their cloaks in the event that their wares unexpectedly stopped functioning before a sale could be confirmed.
Power droids lumbered down a ramp, little more than boxlike batteries walking on two accordioned legs. Harvester droids and ’vaporator components were set up and displayed; Jawa salesmen took their positions proclaiming the quality of their wares. A few lucky ones rushed off to be the first to snoop among the items for sale or trade by other clans.
Around the perimeter of the rendezvous flat, Jawa sentries stood with image enhancers and macrobinoculars, searching for any sign of approaching threat. At the slightest suspicious sign, the Jawa clans would pack up their wares in a flash to vanish into the endless dune wilderness.
Het Nkik looked around but could not locate Jek’s sandcrawler.
After finishing setup procedures, he took his turn to look at the other wares. In the bustling melee, he smelled the stinging sweet scents of hundreds of Jawas keyed up with excitement. He felt the baking suns’ heat on his brown cloak, he heard the cacophony of squeaking voices, the rumble of sandcrawler engines. Electronic motors ratcheted and choked, missing beats until Jawa mechanics effected quick fixes in hopes that none of the potential customers would notice. He wandered among the huckster tables, his excitement soured by the fact that Jek’s sandcrawler was not there.
Het Nkik saw his clan leader, old Wimateeka, discussing something in hushed tones with the clan leader from an outlying Jawa fortress near the human settlement of Bestine. Het Nkik could smell the concern, the fear, the indecision. Wimateeka was so alarmed he didn’t even try to mask his odors.
Het Nkik sensed bad news. Wimateeka was whispering, for fear of sending the rest of the Jawas in a panicked flight. With a feeli
ng of dread, Het Nkik drove back his impulse to run back to the security of the sandcrawler and pushed forward to interrupt Wimateeka. “What is it, clan leader?” he asked. “Do you have news of the last sandcrawler?”
Wimateeka looked at him in surprise, and the other clan leader chittered in annoyance. Normal protocol among Jawas held that younger members did not approach their clan leaders directly, but went through a labyrinth of family connections, passing a message up through higher and higher relations until finally it reached its target; answers came back down through a similarly circuitous route. But Het Nkik had a reputation for sidestepping the rules.
“Clan leader Eet Ptaa was telling me of a Tusken attack on his clan’s fortress,” Wimateeka said. “The Sand People broke in and attacked before the Jawas managed to flee. Our brethren will never return to their ancestral home. They lost all possessions except what they could throw into the sandcrawler.”
Het Nkik was appalled. “If the Jawas were inside their fortress, did they not fight? Why did they just flee?”
“Jawas do not fight,” Wimateeka said. “We are too weak.”
“Because they don’t try,” Het Nkik said, feeling his temper rise. His body scent carried his anger to both clan leaders.
“We would have been slaughtered!” Eet Ptaa insisted.
“Jawas are too small,” Wimateeka said. “Sand People are too warlike.” The old clan leader turned to the other, dismissing Het Nkik. “This young one has a reputation for speaking without thinking. We can only hope his wisdom will grow with age.”
Het Nkik swallowed his outrage and pushed for an answer to the question that concerned him most. “What about my clan brother Jek Nkik? Where is the last sandcrawler?”
Wimateeka shook his head so that his hood jerked from side to side. “We have lost all contact with them. They sent no explanation of their delay. We are concerned. Perhaps the Sand People attacked them, too.”
Star Wars: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina Page 22