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 im
provisations 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, ex
citement, or boredom.
Het Nkik cluttered 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 odiers 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 die 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 storm-troopers 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, subde 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 w alls 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
a
bout 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 former'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 feeling
of dread, Het Nkik drove back his impulse to run back to the
security of the sandcrawler and pushed forward to interrupt Wi
mateeka. "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?"
Star Wars - Tales From The Mos Eisley Cantina Page 25