Star Wars - Tales From The Mos Eisley Cantina

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Star Wars - Tales From The Mos Eisley Cantina Page 32

by Kevin J. Anderson


  -nearly within reach-

  In the bloated brilliance of Tatooine's unyielding high noon

  there are no such things as shadows. Only the boldness of the day,

  the magnified munificence of double suns, and the still brighter

  blazing of the glory of my need.

  -it has been long, too long-

  Mos Eisley is never uncrowded, but those who understand

  Tatooine's uncowed character understand also its malignance, its

  maleficent intent to bake, to broil, to sear. And so they flee,

  those who know, into the sullen succor of sand-scoured, sun-flayed

  shelters.

  What need have I of shadows when the daylight itself will do,

  and the heedless, headlong haste of a man fleeing it?

  -three more steps-

  Humanoid. I can smell him-taste him, there, just there;

  measured in all the ways we measure a tint, a hue, a whisper, a

  kiss ... a soupcon, if you will, of minor excrescence, the steam

  off body-boiled soup, undetectable to all humanoid races save my

  own.

  -two more-

  He is not a fool, not completely; fools die long before meeting

  those such as I, which saves us some little trouble. Better by far

  to let life handle the screening process. By the time folk come to

  Tatooine, the true fools are already dead. Those who have survived

  to come have some small measure of wit, talent, ability, of

  significant physical prowess-and a greater portion of Luck.

  An intangible, is Luck; an attribute one can neither buy,

  steal, nor manufacture. But it is finite, and wholly fickle. Only

  you never know it.

  Only I know it. I am Dannik Jerriko, and I am the Eater of

  Luck.

  -one more step-

  -YES-

  He is good. He is fast. But I am better, and faster.

  An image only; I am too lost, too hungry the black-blind glaze

  of shock in his eyes, naked and obscene to those who understand;

  but he does not understand, he comprehends nothing. He knows

  neither who nor what I am, only that I am - and someone who has

  clapped hands across his ears and grasped his skull to hold it

  face-to-face in an avid embrace.

  - hot, sweet soup -

  He would fight, given leave, extended invitation. And I give

  leave, extend invitation - outright terror curdles the soup -

  briefly, oh so briefly, to make him think he is better than I;

  that Chance is his confidant and Luck remains his lover. It isn't

  fear I want, nor cowardice, but courage. The blatant willingness

  to step off the edge with a life at risk, your life, trusting

  skill and Luck and Chance to spread the safety net.

  He is good, is fast, is willing to step off the edge; and so he

  does step leaping, lunging, lurching . . . but no one is better

  or faster than I, and I have unraveled the net. Chance and Luck,

  thus mated, are dismissed in my presence I am after all Anzati.

  It is simply and quickly done with the manifest efficiency of

  my kind prehensile proboscii uncoiled from cheek pockets, first

  inserted, then insinuated through nostrils into brain. It

  paralyzes instantly.

  I eat his Luck. I drink his soup. I let the body fall.

  They will not know when they find him; they never know at

  first. That comes later, after, and only if someone cares enough

  to run a scan on him. I knit my own nightmare, make my own mythos.

  A quick, clean kill; no fuss, no muss.

  But assassins by trade have no friends, and no one to care

  enough. This is why I kill the killers.

  Exterminator. Terminator. Assassin's assassin.

  Soup is soup is soup, but sweeter from the container sitting

  longest on the shelf.

  - oh - it is sweet -

  But sweet - like Luck, like Chance - is finite. Always. And so

  the cycle begins, ends, begins again, and ends; but there is

  always another beginning.

  I am Anzat, of the Anzati. You know me now as Dan-nik Jerriko,

  but I have many names.

  You knew them all as children, forgot them as adults. Legend is

  fiction, myth unreal; it is easier to set aside childish things in

  the false illumination of adulthood, because the fears of

  childhood are always formed of truths. Some truths are harder than

  others. Some folktales far more frightening.

  Let there be no fear. Fear is not what I crave, neither what I

  desire. It is corrosive to the palate, like vinegar in place of

  wine.

  Let there be courage, not cowardice; let there be arrogance

  aplenty. Self-confidence, not self-doubt; security in one's

  skills. And the willingness, the restlessness, the boundless

  physicality of the only constant the testing of one's

  limitations. Assumption of risk, not reticence. The challenge of

  Chance.

  Make me no predictions. Write me no prophecy. Permit me to take

  what is best of you, what is best in you.

  Let me liberate it. In me you will live forever.

  It is not that I want to kill beings.

  Yes, I know-you have heard the tales. But this is a truth of

  the heart, if you can believe I have one Beings embellish.

  I am not crazed; I do not skulk; I don't drink blood. I take

  pride in appearances, pride in my heritage, pride in my work. It

  is serious to me, such work; there is no room at all for error, no

  latitude for a bad attitude.

  Given a legitimate and efficacious way out, I would stop the

  killing . . . but I have tried joydrugs, and they are not

  effective; the rush is temporary and counterproductive. Synthetic

  derivatives and recreations are utterly useless; in fact, such

  half-measures make me ill. Which leaves me only one answer, the

  answer for all Anzati the soup in its purest form, freshly exuded

  and as freshly extracted. It rots outside of the body.

  Which means there must be a body.

  It is a mother lode, Mos Eisley, a powerful concentration of

  entities of all gender, gathering on private business that nov is

  also mine. Between jobs, it is vacation, holiday, opportunity to

  hunt for myself. To track and find the vessel most capable of

  satisfying my palate. Gall me gourmet, if you will; I see no

  reason not to please myself between those assignments that, in

  their completions, in the method of their completions, serve to

  please my employers.

  I have time. I have wealth. I am in fact quite rich, though I

  say nothing of it; credits are a wholly vulgar topic. If you

  cannot afford to hire me, you do not even know I exist.

  Only one employer, my first, complained about my prices. He was

  a hollow man of small imagination . . . I drank his soup for it,

  but he left me unsatisfied; the entities who hire me are usually

  cowards themselves, incapable of anything beyond the desire for

  power and financial reward, and their soup is dilute. But it

  served, that death; no one ever again complained.

  Loyalty, like Luck, cannot be purchased, only bar-rowed for a

  precontracted space of time in which I serve myself even as I

  serve others in furthering the ambitions-or settling the petty

  squabbles-of myriad entities. It is altog
ether a wholly

  satisfactory arrangement My employers have the pleasure of

  knowing a certain "annoyance" will no longer annoy, I drink the

  soup of the fallen foe, and my employers pay me for it.

  But what the entities do not realize is how transitory my

  bondage It is only the soup to which I am loyal, and the purposes

  of extraction.

  Other Anzati bind themselves to small lives, lives wholly

  focused on hunting. But there is more, so much more; one need only

  have the imagination to see what lies out there, and to find a way

  to take it.

  Let them bind themselves. Let them live their small lives,

  drinking soup from unworthy vessels. Let me take the best instead.

  A heady brew, such soup, far more intoxicating-and therefore

  longer-lasting-than the temporary measures that other Anzati rely

  on.

  And meanwhile I am paid to do what I must do.

  Yes. Oh, yes. The best of all the worlds.

  It is always the spaceports, always the bars. I suppose one

  might equally suggest the brothels serve much the same purpose,

  but in those places an entirely different sort of business is

  conducted, transitory in nature and without much risk taken save

  in choice of partner and, perhaps, of mechanics. In bars they

  drink, they gamble, they deal. They come here first when a run is

  completed, seeking such vice and spice and entertainments as might

  be purchased in the cantina; and they come here looking for work.

  Space pirates, blockade runners, hired assassins, bounty hunters,

  even a handful of those involved in the Rebel Alliance. The Empire

  has driven the latter out of such places as they might prefer,

  altering good-hearted, once-innocent entities into souls as

  desperate as others, but with a vision pure and argent as the

  double suns of Tatooine, wholly unadulterated by the harsh

  realities of the times.

  When one believes firmly enough, when conviction is absolute,

  one is undaunted by odds. Their soup is very sweet.

  Sand chokes. It is an entity of itself, at once coy and

  pervasive. It dulls boots, befilths fabric, insinuates itself into

  the creases of the flesh. It drives even Anzati to seek relief,

  and thus I go indoors, out of the heat of the double suns; and I

  pause there-remembering one day many years before, and a

  corpulent, unforgiving Hutt -eyes closed to adjust more quickly to

  wan, ocherous light, thick and rancid as bantha butter.

  It is too much to hope the cantina owner might install more

  lights, or improve his Queblux Power Train, identifiable by its

  lamentable lack of efficiency and a low, almost inaudible whine.

  Such repairs would be at odds with Chalmun's nature, which is

  dictated by dis-trusl; deals are done at dusk, not under the

  fixed, un-miligated glare of Tatoo I and Tatoo II, conflagrations

  of eyes in the countenance of a galaxy that is, much as the

  Emperor's face, shrouded within a cowled hood.

  Ah, but there is more here, inside, than relief from sand, from

  heat. There is the scent, the promise of satiation.

  -soup-

  11 is thick, so thick-at first I am overwhelmed; this is better

  than I remembered so many layers and tastes, the hues, the tints,

  the whispers . . . here I may drink for endless days, replete with

  satisfaction.

  Ahh.

  So many entities, so many flavors, so much Luck to eat. Chance

  is corporeal here, variety infinite. It is a symphony of soup

  running hot and fast and wet, like blood ever on the boil beneath

  the fragile tissue of flesh.

  I am not droid, the detector says; I am welcome in Chalmun's

  cantina. And I laugh in the privacy of my mind, because Chalmun,

  contented by his bias, doesn't know there are things in the world

  more detestable than droids, which are on the whole inoffensive,

  unassuming, and more than a little convenient. But leave a man his

  bigotry; if they were all like the Rebel Alliance, so intransigent

  in honor, the soup would be weak as gruel.

  -soup-

  In cheek pockets, proboscii quiver. For an instant, only an

  instant, they extrude a millimeter, overcome by the heady aroma

  detectable only to Anzati; the others, despite races and genders,

  are in all ways unaware. But nothing is earned without

  anticipation; it is a fillip wholly invigorating, and worth the

  self-denial.

  Accordingly proboscii withdraw, if resentfully, coiling back

  into the pockets beside my nostrils. I brush a film of sand from

  my sleeves, tug the jacket into place, and walk down the four

  steps into the belly of the bar.

  Soup here is plentiful.

  Patience will be rewarded.

  He is at first disbelieving. A sour, sullen, mud-faced man,

  doughy-pale despite double suns, somewhat lumpy and misshapen as

  if he were unfinished, or perhaps unmade later in the small

  hostilities of his life. A long blob of a swollen nose downturned

  above a loose-lipped mouth. His clothing is unkempt, his hair lank

  and stringy. He does not remember me.

  Courtesy is nonexistent; in Mos Eisley, in Chalmun's cantina

  from Chalmun's bartender, none is expected. "You want what?"

  "Water," I repeat.

  Dark eyes narrow minutely. "You know where you are?"

  "Oh," I say, smiling, "indeed."

  He jerks a spatulate thumb beyond his shoulder. "I got a

  computer back there that mixes sixteen hundred varieties of

  spirits."

  "Oh, indeed, so I would imagine. But I want the one it can't

  mix."

  He scowls. "Ain't cheap, is it? This is Tatooine. Got the

  credits for it?"

  His soup is slow, and weak, its scent barely discernible. He is

  servant, not the served, not one who acknowledges edges or assumes

  risks beyond setting a glass before a patron; he would offer

  little pleasure, and less satisfaction.

  But there are those who would. And all of them are here.

  I withdraw from a pocket a single flat coin. It glints in wan

  light clean, ruddy gold. It is not precisely a credit chip, but

  it will nonetheless buy my water. On Tatooine, they know it. In

  Mos Eisley they know to fear it.

  The bartender moistens his lips. Eyes slide aside, busying

  themselves with glaring at a tiny Chadra-Fan coming up to ask for

  libation. "Jabba's marker ain't any good here," he mutters, and

  reaches beneath the bar into his hidden reserve to bring forth an

  ice-rimed crystal container of costly chilled water.

  I leave the coin on the bar. It tells him many things, and will

  tell others also; Jabba pays well, and those who work for him-or

  work for others who work for him- recognize the tangible evidence

  of the Hutt's favor.

  It has been a long time. There have been countless other

  employers in all sectors of the galaxy, but Jabba is ...

  memorable. Perhaps it is time I sought a second assignment; there

  are always failed assassins the Hutt wants killed. He does not

  suffer incompetence.

  I consider for a momenl whal it would be like to drink his soup

  . . . bul
Jabba is well guarded, and even an Anzat might find it

  difficult to locate within the massy corpulence ihe proper

  orifices into which lo insert proboscii.

  I shut my hand upon the glass and feel the bite of ice. On

  Tatooine, such is luxury. It is not soup, in no way, but worth

  anticipation. Even as the bartender lurns away lo bellow rudely at

  two droid-accompanied humans slopped by ihe deleclor, I sip

  slowly, savoring the water.

  Spirits muddle the mind, slow the body, nourish nothing bul

  weakness. Anzati avoid such things, even as we avoid joydrugs and

  synthetics. What is natural is best, even to the soup. There is

  strenglh in what is pure.

  There is weakness in vice-and I, after all, should know. In the

  freedom of my lifestyle there is also captivity. There are no

  bars, no mesh, no energy fields, no conlainment capsules. There is

  instead an imprisonment more insidious than such things, and as

  distaste-ful lo an Anzat as soup drunk from a coward.

  I drank tainted soup from a tainted man, and assimi-lated his

  vice the daily need for a proscribed bul oft-smuggled offworld

  substance known as nic-i-tain, its vector named t'bac.

  I am Dannik Jerikko. Anzat, of the Anzati, and Eater of Luck.

  But I never said I was perfect.

  It blows up quickly enough-a Tatooine sandstorm from the heart

  of the Dune Sea-as bar confrontations do. I pay it no attention

  beyond air-scenting for promise; it is there, but muted. I take my

  time preparing my pipe-there is comfort in ritual, satisfaction in

  preliminaries-set the mouthpiece between my teeth, then draw in

  t'bac smoke deeply. It is a despicable habit, but one that even I

  have been unable to break.

  Behind me, music wails. Chalmun has hired a band since my last

  visit. It is appropriate music for a cantina dim as desert dusk.

  Through the malodorous fug of smoke and sweat, the whining melody

  waxes and wanes, insidious as dune dust.

  -soup-

  I turn, exhaling evenly; in cheek pockets, proboscii twitch.

  -soup-

  A flare, abrupt and unshielded, wholly raw and unrefined. It

  takes me but an instant to mark it, to mark the entity human, and

  young. Fear, defiance, apprehension; a trace of brittle

  courage-ah, but he is too young, too inexperienced. Despite the

  stubborn jut of his jaw, the flash of defiance in blue eyes, he

  has not lived long enough to know what he risked. He is as yet

 

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