“What is the past?” Dice asked, reading his mind again.
Sivrak tore the med-kit from his belt, somehow knowing that another battle was being fought above a world of forests. He stared blankly at the contents of the kit. Most of its salves and ointments were for his species. He had no idea how they would react with Florn biology. But he had to do something.
“You have done something,” Dice said soothingly. Her voice was calm, almost peaceful. She fixed her light sensors on the clear blue sky.
“We are alike,” she continued, “as you have always known. The hunter and the killer know the sick and diseased must be culled from the herd—and the Empire is rotten with corruption. That is why you must leave me, to continue our fight until its end.”
The vials and tubes from the med-kit spilled into the snow from Sivrak’s rigid paws. “Dice, no. I can’t.”
“I know you can’t. In time, I know you won’t. But for now, my love, you must. Alliance and Empire. Predator and prey.”
Sivrak’s communicator sounded the evacuation code sound. A terse voice announced that Imperial troops had entered the base.
“I will die with you here,” Sivrak said.
He cradled her head close against his warm body.
“What is death compared to love?” Dice asked, her voice fading.
Sivrak could not move. He was losing her.
“What you must do,” she whispered, “is believe in the Force.”
“If you wish me to,” Sivrak said thickly, unwilling to argue with the old religion if that is what brought her peace at this time. He felt the mourning cry rise in his chest.
“Not because I wish you to, but because there is no other choice you can make.”
Before Sivrak could answer, the lamproid’s body shivered, then quietened. He stared down at Dice as one by one her light sensors drooped, losing focus, losing contact. And then, amid the sounds of battle light-years removed from the moment that they shared, Dice blessed him with the Force, willing it to remain with him, forever.
Sivrak held her body until a walker destroyed the main generator and the fall-back lines finally fell. Energy beams cut through the air like falling stars. Sivrak’s communicator relayed a final evacuation alert. The roar of departing transports, now launching two at a time, was continuous.
But as if he were on a different world, one that knew no war or conflict, Sivrak arose and moved with a slowness and surety that set him apart from the chaos around him.
He heard no explosions as he laid Dice upon the snow, sheltering her in an alcove of the trench. He felt no walker’s footfall as he arranged her fur-trimmed hood around her serene, unmoving face, and caressed her ringed teeth that were never again to know the bliss of shredded flesh.
A human Rebel slipped to a near halt in the trench and pulled on Sivrak’s arm to urge him to the evacuation point. But Sivrak’s snarl sent the human on alone.
Then Sivrak stood over his beloved and took his blaster from his holster. He had heard the stories of what the Imperial biogeneticists did with the bodies of the Rebel dead. How parts could be cloned and kept alive for unspeakable research, or Imperial sport. He set the blaster for full immolation.
“May your Force be with you,” he said in the most intimate inflection of the predator’s tongue, and his breath swirled into the frozen air to join with hers.
He would make it to the evacuation point or he would not. There was no reason to hurry.
Sivrak activated the blaster.
Dice’s body shimmered with the disassociative energy of the beam. She became fiery, incandescent, and somehow, Sivrak thought, she might have appreciated that transformation. And then the fire that consumed her reached out for Sivrak, engulfing him too as—
—a single TIE fighter emerged from the carbon cloud with all weapons firing blindly. Blinking with surprise, Sivrak felt the chill of Hoth still pulsing through him as he instinctively switched from his etheric rudder to full atmospheric controls, and dodged the killing strands of the TIE fighter’s beams until his rear sights locked and he fired.
The TIE fighter flew apart as Sivrak’s beam tore open its skin and the moon of Endor’s atmosphere instantly ripped the Imperial craft to dust-sized fragments. The hunt was over.
But now the Endor moon filled his canopy. Sivrak slammed at the atmospheric controls, fighting to reduce the X-wing’s roll. The navigation display showed his two possible courses. One to safety. One to the generator. The rear display showed the Death Star firing at will. The X-wing shook as it tore through the thickening atmosphere. Sivrak’s claws dug into the yoke. He was less than thirty heartbeats from the point of no return. Again, he had to decide. He couldn’t decide. The atmosphere sang to him. Like music. Like music from—
—the cantina. Sivrak leaned against the wall inside the doorway, trying to understand what he heard outside on the streets of Mos Eisley. Fighting. Rioting. Speeders rushing. Detonations from the direction of the spaceport.
He stumbled down the stairs to the bar, breathless, feeling the panic of time running out.
It was night. The cantina was deserted. The music was recorded. Something was wrong.
Sivrak slumped against the bar, feeling it shudder as if it coursed through atmosphere.
“Jabba is dead,” Dice said.
Sivrak looked up from the bar to find the lamproid close beside him, studying the reflections in her snifter of clarified blood.
“How …?” Sivrak rasped. His question took in everything that had happened but Dice heard it in only one way.
“Strangled on his sand ship,” Dice said. “A human slave girl, of all things. Used her own chains.”
From somewhere outside, there was an explosion, much closer than the spaceport. The bottles and glasses stacked up behind the bar rattled.
Dice picked up her snifter. “Mos Eisley is in flames. No one knows who is in control.” She unrolled her drinking tongue into the blood and ingested.
Sivrak smoothed the fur around his muzzle in agitation. He knew there was something he had to do, but he couldn’t work it out. He had to discover what was out of place here.
“If Jabba is dead,” he began uncertainly, “then Hoth … Hoth has already been evacuated.”
Dice put the snifter back on the bartop. “That’s right,” she said.
Sivrak felt the fur lift along his spine. “But then,” he said, “you’re dead.”
Dice slid the tip of her tail across Sivrak’s forearm. “Do I feel dead?” she asked.
The Wolfman closed his claws over the tail tip, focusing only on the magic of her improbable presence. He heard other sounds now. Shuffling. Voices. Boots grinding sand into the floor. He looked up at Dice. They were sitting at the table in the corner, the horned Devaronian nodding to the music behind them. Now the cantina was full, bustling. As it had been, long ago.
“The golden droid will come in soon,” Sivrak said. He wasn’t sure how, but he was beginning to understand what was happening, the choice he must make. “And then the golden droid will leave again.”
Dice’s light sensors were unfathomable, as deep as a gravity well. “And what of you, this time?” she asked, as if she had read his mind. “Will you choose to leave as well?”
“The Force,” Sivrak said with wonder as understanding finally welled within him. “The Force is with me, isn’t it?”
Dice smiled, an irksome habit in those who knew the Force so well. “The Force is within everything,” she said.
“But here and now, in this cantina”—Sivrak’s voice rose as all that had happened, all that would happen, all that might happen, converged on him at once—“in the trenches of Hoth, or falling toward some nameless moon of Endor—the Force binds it all.”
His pulse hammered, his lungs strained for air. A flicker of light by the entrance showed that someone had entered the cantina. The Devaronian glanced over to see who it was.
“Of course,” Dice said, as if she had heard every word he had spoken uncount
ed lifetimes ago.
The farm boy appeared on the stairs as the old man hurried ahead. The Artoo unit and the golden droid followed behind.
“This time, when the golden droid leaves, I can leave too, can’t I?” Sivrak asked.
“That choice was yours when we first met,” Dice said. “Nothing has changed.”
Sivrak felt the worldlines converge, then pull apart, not on this one place and time, but on this one feeling, this one experience that transcended all else.
He now knew that through some trick of the Force, he could follow the golden droid back onto the streets of Mos Eisley, and all would be as it had been before he had met Dice Ibegon.
The same choice but a second chance.
In love, Dice had given him this way out.
“Hey,” the bartender growled from behind the bar. “We don’t serve their kind here.”
Sivrak watched intently. The farm boy talked with his droids. Only heartbeats remained. The time between one decision and another. One direction or the other.
“I don’t want to leave you,” Sivrak said to Dice.
“Knowing all that you know?” she asked. “Knowing with certainty what lies ahead?”
Sivrak didn’t answer. He simply reached out to her, to gather her coils close around him for one timeless moment that would last, had lasted, forever.
The golden droid left the cantina. The music played. Sivrak waited for the hum of the old man’s lightsaber to drown out all other noise.
“Sometimes choice is an illusion,” Sivrak said, at last knowing that all choices were the same choice, and had been from the instant he had set foot into this cantina and seen Dice Ibegon, waiting as she had always waited to join him.
He forced his eyes shut, knowing all that would happen. The old man reached into his cloak and pulled out his antique lightsaber. The glow of its beam sparkled from the glasses on the bar. The Aqualish pirate screamed. The cantina shuddered—
—under the withering assault of the Endor moon’s atmosphere.
Sivrak bayed at that moon as he lifted the nose of the X-wing to make it skip through the turbulence, riding his own sonic compression wave, shedding just enough speed to bring his velocity below the X-wing’s critical stress load. This time he reached the point of no return and knew at once he had always lived his life precisely at this moment. The enormity of now. His movements were instinctual, no thought required, no decision possible. He pulled on the control yoke to bring his course around to intersect with the ground generator’s coordinates.
His X-wing screamed through the atmosphere, the forward deflector shields blazing red like a dying star. His tactical display remained silent—no Imperial ground defenses tracked him. Standard defenses were unbreachable, but perhaps, with the space battle in progress above, these weren’t standard times.
The navigation display confirmed his trajectory. Over-the-horizon scanners locked him onto the generator’s transmission antenna. The X-wing bucked like a crazed tauntaun. Everything Sivrak saw blurred before him, blending in with the cacophony of his communicator: a burst of static, then Ackbar’s exultant voice—“The shield is down! Commence attack on the Death Star’s main reactor!”
The moon’s forest streaked below Sivrak’s X-wing as he saw a plume of smoke and fire rush for him, the remains of the transmission antenna already destroyed. Solo’s strike team had succeeded after all.
General Calrissian’s voice broke up with static. “We’re on our way!” Raw cheering voices. Human and Bothan. Mon Calamari and Bith. Even a droid who announced it had always wanted to do this.
It was the frenzy of a successful hunt, Sivrak knew, even as he understood that no power in the universe could stay the streaking course of his fighter, because it had already been set by the strongest power.
The flaming ruins of the Imperial base came at him with the speed of destiny. Calmly, Sivrak took his claws from the controls—
—and walked the forest of Endor’s moon.
It was night. The breeze was cool. His nostrils were aflame with the scents of a multitude of prey and smoky woodfires. The fires’ distant crackling was punctuated by rhythmic drumbeats and excited voices lifted in triumphant song.
Sivrak drew in the clean air, flushing the last stale traces of recycled fighter oxygen from his lungs. This time, he did not try to remember what had happened. He knew, in time, all answers would come.
“Those are the Ewoks singing,” Dice said behind him, as he knew she must.
He turned to face her, gasping at the ethereal wonder of her lamproid form as she glowed with the inner light she had always carried. The dark trees of the forest basked in her radiance.
“They celebrate the death of the Emperor,” she said.
“Then the battle of Endor’s moon …?” Sivrak began.
“Has been won. Our fight is at its end.”
Sivrak lifted his paw to touch her, and was not surprised when he saw that his own arm shone as did Dice’s body.
She wound her tail tip around his paw. “We are luminous beings,” she said, “and always have been. True love can never be denied.”
For long moments, Sivrak stood silent in that forest, united at last in such a way that he knew he would never be alone again—a balance even simpler than that between predator and prey, the joining of all things in the Force. But blended in the Ewoks’ chorus, he heard the strains of a different music, from a different time.
“The cantina,” Dice explained without him having to ask.
“I know,” Sivrak said. “But there is no need to return there.”
“There never was,” she said.
And then, tail in paw, their hearts and souls entwined forever, Dice led Sivrak through the forest of Endor’s moon, to a special place near an Ewok village where three friends waited, as they had always waited, as they always would wait, for all who would join them, bound by the Force.
And behind them in the forest, the music from the cantina softly faded, and was never heard again.
Contributor Biographies
KEVIN J. ANDERSON has spent a lot of time in a galaxy far, far away. He is the author of the STAR WARS: The Jedi Academy trilogy and the STAR WARS novel, Darksaber, as well as the science fiction novels Climbing Olympus, Resurrection, Inc., and several others with Doug Beason. He has edited two other STAR WARS anthologies, Tales from Jabba’s Palace and Tales of the Bounty Hunters. He has worked for ten years as a technical writer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He is married to writer Rebecca Moesta.
Author of twelve books—eight with Cantina editor Kevin J. Anderson and four on his own—DOUG BEASON is an accomplished short-story writer, appearing in such publications as Analog, Amazing, Full Spectrum, SF Age, and others. A Ph.D. physicist, Doug has served on a presidential commission with astronaut Tom Stafford to develop plans for the United States to return to the Moon and go on to Mars. He worked at the White House for the President’s Science Advisor under both the Bush and Clinton administrations. As a lieutenant colonel in the USAF, he is currently an associate professor and director of research at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
M. SHAYNE BELL grew up on a ranch in Idaho. His first novel, Nicoji, was released in 1991 by Baen Books. His short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Amazing Stories, and anthologies including Simulations: Fifteen Tales of Virtual Reality, Hotel Andromeda, and Under African Skies. He also edited an anthology of stories set in Utah by all the SF writers from or living in Utah, Washed by a Wave of Wind. His poetry was nominated for the 1989 Science Fiction Poetry Association Rhysling Award. He writes medical software documentation. In 1987 he was awarded first place in the Writers of the Future Contest. In 1991 he received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
He lived in Brazil for two years in the 1970s, where he first saw Star Wars in a crowded theater in Campinas—the only movie he saw during the en
tire two years. He could not understand the English through the bad sound system and had to resort to reading the Portuguese subtities.
DAVID BISCHOFF is the author of over forty SF/horror/fantasy and mystery novels and several dozen short stories. His most recent efforts include The Judas Cross, with Charles Sheffield (Warner/Aspect), Dr. Dimension, with John de Chancie (ROC Books), and the New York Times bestselling Star Trek: The Next Generation novel, Grounded. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.
A. C. CRISPIN is the author of several Star Trek novels, including Yesterday’s Son, its sequel, Time for Yesterday (classic Trek), and The Eyes of the Beholders (Next Generation). She is the creator, author, and co-author of the StarBridge series: Starbridge, Silent Dances, Shadow World, Serpent’s Gift, and Silent Songs (ACE Books). In addition, she has co-authored two fantasy novels with Andre Norton: Gryphon’s Eyrie and Songsmith (TOR Books).
Ms. Crispin is a frequent guest at science fiction conventions, where she often teaches writers’ workshops. She currently serves as the Eastern regional director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. A Maryland resident, she lives with her teenage son Jason, two horses, and three cats. In her spare time (what’s that?) she enjoys trail riding, swimming, sailing, hiking, and reading.
KENNETH C. FLINT of Omaha, Nebraska, is to date the author of fifteen novels. All are works of adventure/fantasy, many of which are based upon ancient Celtic legends and myths.
From her earliest years BARBARA HAMBLY found fantasy and science fiction far more interesting than reality in the modest California town where she grew up. She attended college at the University of California in Riverside and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux in France. After obtaining a master’s degree in medieval history, she held a variety of jobs: model, clerk, high school teacher, karate instructor (she holds a black belt in Shotokan Karate), technical writer, mostly in quest of a job that would leave her with enough time to write. Finally, in 1982 her first novel was published by Ballantine/Del Rey.
Star Wars: Tales from Mos Eisley Cantina Page 37