unripe.
The young know nothing of life, nothing of its dangers, its
small and large hostilities. They know only of the moment, blind
to possibilities; it is not courage in the young, only the folly
of youth. In males it is worse a bantha-headed intransigence
mixed with hormonal imbalance. Their soup is immature and wholly
unsatisfying. It is better to let them ripen.
I draw in smoke, hold it, exhale. In the small moment of such
activity the confrontation worsens. Two entities now challenge the
boy human and Aqualish. It is bar belligerence, born of drink and
insecurity; a foolish attempt to establish dominance over a raw
boy whose inexperience promises shallow entertainment for those
amused by such things. A scuffle ensues, as always; the boy is
swiped away to crash against a table.
Behind it the music stops, cut off in mid-wail. It tells me
much of the band members Clearly they are unaccustomed to such
places as Chalmun's cantina, or they would know never to stop.
Experienced musicians would play a counterpoint to the shouts, the
shrieks, the squalls, using the cacophony, no matter how atonal,
to build a new melody.
Then a wholly unexpected sound is born, a sound such as I have
not heard for a hundred years the low-pitched, throbbing hum of
an unsheathed and triggered lightsaber.
-soup-
I turn instantly, seeking . . . proboscii quiver, extrude,
withdraw reluctantly at my insistence. But they know it even as I
know it Somewhere in Chalmun's cantina is the vessel I need.
It is a quick, decisive battle, a skirmish soon ended. With but
a single stroke of the lightsaber, the Aqualish is-well, unarmed.
One-armed, if you will.
The boy hangs back. I scent him again, wild and uncontrolled.
But there is more here now, far more than expected, hovering at
the edges, tantalizing me with its presence, with the repression
of its power . . . and then I see the old man quietly putting away
the lightsaber, and I realize what he is.
A Master despite his reticence, seeking no battles in word or
deed; Master of what is, in such times, left wholly unspoken, lest
the Emperor suspect. But I know what he is Jedi. I could not but
know. He is too disciplined, too well shielded against such
intrusions as Anzati probing, and in that very shielding the
truth, to me, is obvious.
I leave it its due unspoken. I see no need to speak it. Let
him be what he is; no one else will suspect He is safe a while
longer.
The boy has earned my study. If they have true business
together it is information worth knowing. If the old man has taken
a pupil there is indeed cause to fear -if you are part of the
Empire, and recall the old ways.
If not, as I am not-save I recall the old days, the even older
ways-it matters not at all. Unless you care to count the coin
Jabba would pay, or others, including Darth Vader.
Including the Emperor.
Braggadocio. It is a staple of such places, the ritual boasting
of entity to entity to save face, or to build face; to request a
place in the world, or to make a place; an attempt to create of
oneself something more than what one is.
There are those who are indeed more-as Anzat I am far more than
anyone might suspect (or comfortably imagine)-but only rarely do
they resort to braggadocio, because everyone else knows who they
are and what they have done. To say anything at all is redundancy,
which dilutes the deeds.
But even those most skilled, even those most notorious may well
be pressed to resort to braggadocio in the implacable face of a
Jedi Master dubious of those deeds. Such entities as the old man
can reduce the strongest to creche-born, and with little said or
done.
The band has recovered itself, or is under pain of reduced
payment if the musicians do not immediately resume playing. The
music, less strident now, mutes all conversations but those
closest to me, but I need not rely on words and tone for
information. In braggadocio is often borne the scent of soup.
I exhale, feel proboscii quiver, turn slowly to take my measure
of the cantina. The direction is easily gained, and as I mark it I
cannot help but smile; the old man and his pupil have gone into
one of the cubicles. It is not them I scent now, but those with
whom they speak a hulking Wookiee, and a humanoid male.
-soup-
It boils up quickly, powerfully, so quickly and so powerfully I
cannot help but mark it. It leaves me breathless.
Not the old Jedi, who is disciplined, and shielded. Not the
boy, who is young and unripe. Not the Wookiee, who is passive in
all but loyalty. The humanoid. The Corellian.
Anzati are long-lived. Memory abides.
A curl of smoke winds its way from my pipe. Through the wreath
of it I smile. He is wanted, as is the Wookiee, but all entities
in Chalmun's cantina are wanted somewhere. Even I am wanted, or
would be; no one knows who or what I am, or what I am wanted for,
and in that there is continuance.
I am careful in the hunt, always meticulous in those details
others ignore, and too often die of; I require confirmation. I
commit nothing until I am certain.
In this instance confirmation and certainty need little time
and less patience. The Jedi and his pupil depart, but are
immediately replaced by a Rodian. He is nervous. His soup is so
insubstantial as to be nonexistent; he is servant, not served.
He is coward. He is fool. He is incompetent. He is slow to
commit himself. And thus he is dead in a burst of contraband
blaster in the hand of a wholly committed and consummate pirate.
-soup-
I exult even as proboscii twitch expectantly. It is here,
here-and now, right now, this moment . . . the hue, the tint, the
whisper, the shout, the evanescence of soup incarnate, enfleshed
and unshielded, and rich, so rich-
I need only to go and to get it, to drink it, to embrace as
Anzati embrace, to dance the dance with the Corellian whose soup
is thick, and hot, and sweet, sweeter by far than any I have
tasted for too long a time-
Now.
Now.
But haste dilutes fulfillment. Let there be time, and patience.
-such soup-
The band wails on. There is the sharp scent of smoke; the acrid
tang of sweat; the smut-dusty stench of dune sand, of city sand;
the blatancy of blaster death but newly encountered, redolent of
the Rodian's cowardice and stupidity. It was a poor death worth no
comment; he will not be mourned even by the entity who hired him.
He is-was-the Hutt's, of course. Need you ask? There is none
other who would dare to hire assassins in Mos Eisley, on Tatooine.
None but Lord Vader, and the Emperor.
But they are not here. Only Jabba.
The Hutt is in all things; is of himself all things, and
everywhere, on Tatooine, in Mos Eisley, in Chahnun's cantina.
-such soup-
A
final inhalation of t'bac, sucked deep inside and savored, as
is the moment, the knowledge, the need itself savored. A brief
glare of searing sunlight illuminates the interior as the
Corellian pirate and his Wookiee companion depart with alacrity
Chalmun's premises, wary of Imperial repercussions. It is Jabba's
spaceport in all but name, and that name is the Emperor's, who
need know nothing of such dealings as the Hutt's; or who knows,
and does not care.
It is dusk again inside. They will clear the body away; and
someone will report to Jabba that his hireling is dead.
Has reported; he knows it by now, and by whose hand it was
done.
-such soup-
But what sense in paying for it of my own pocket? Jabba's is
deeper.
Indeed, the Hutt will pay well. But it is / who will drink the
soup.
-such soup-
Proboscii quiver as I exhale the twinned smoke-stream slowly,
steadily, with quiet satisfaction and the frisson of my own soup
as it leaps in anticipation.
-Han Solo's soup-
Ah, but it will be a hunt worth the hunting . . . and soup such
as I-even Dannik Jerriko, Anzat of the Anzati, Eater of Luck, of
Chance-have never, ever known.
At the Crossroads The Spacer's Tale
by Jerry Oltion
The Infinity was hot in more ways than one. BoShek smiled as he
prepared to drop out of hyperspace over Tatooine. He'd just beat
Solo's time on the Kessel run.
Of course he was running empty, bringing in just the ship to
have its transponder codes altered, but even so, it would be fun
to tell the braggart Corellian and his furry sidekick he'd broken
their record.
The cockpit fit like a glove around him. He could reach all the
controls from the single pilot's chair, and everything was right
where instinct made him reach first. The windows wrapped around to
give him almost a full circle of view, and a heads-up holo filled
in the gap to the rear. In his three years of piloting smugglers'
ships for the monastery-cum-forging operation, BoShek had never
flown one so well designed as this.
The computer counted down the last few seconds, then
automatically switched to the sublight engines. Elongated
starlines snapped back to points of light, and high to the left
the bright yellow-white disk of Tatooine swelled into being. Holy
bantha breath, it was close! Another second in hyper and he'd have
popped out underground.
He swung around so the navcomputer could get a straight shot at
the orbiting beacons, but he was willing to bet it already knew
where they were. Sure enough, within seconds the planetary image
in the navscreen filled with longitude and latitude lines, then
showed a sparse dotting of oases and settlements across the desert
planet.
Mos Eisley was about a third of an orbit away. BoShek was just
about to accelerate toward it when the navcomputer buzzed a
warning and two bright white wedges slid into view from around the
curve of the planet. Imperial Star Destroyers. BoShek glanced out
the windows and shuddered. They were so big he could actually see
them with the naked eye.
Where had they come from? Tatooine was so far off the beaten
track, the Empire hardly ever sent a tax collector, much less a
pair of warships. Somebody must have caused some major trouble
while he was gone.
And now their trouble was his too, because the Infinity was
still running under hot transponder codes. If the Imperials
bothered to scan for its engines' unique emission signature-and
they no doubt would-then they would know it was a smuggler's ship,
wanted throughout the galaxy for tariff violation, tax evasion,
gun-running, and dozens of other crimes. The fact that BoShek was
merely piloting it to Tatooine for someone else wouldn't save him
in a trial. If he ever got a trial.
For that matter, neither the monastery nor the Infinity 's
owners would be happy with him if he let the Empire confiscate the
ship. His job was to bring it in undetected so the monastery's
technicians could alter its codes and give it a clean record, not
to lose it to the first patrol that happened along.
Without hesitation, he aimed straight down and accelerated
hard. In space he wouldn't stand a chance against the destroyers'
short-range TIE fighters, but down in the atmosphere, with the
planet to help confuse their sensors, he might be able to lose
them.
Tatooine grew from a sphere to a close, mottled wall. The
Infinity began rocking gently as it reached the top of the
atmosphere, then a bright flash came from the starboard side and
the ship suddenly lurched to port. The destroyers had opened fire.
BoShek kept the Infinity aim ed straight down, diving deep
before he leveled out, knowing that the more air he put between
him and the destroyers, the more shielding he would have from
their turbolasers. His passage left a glowing, ionized wake behind
him, but when he slowed to just a few times the speed of sound he
left no trace.
He wasn't free yet, though. Four TIE fighters from the warships
arced into the atmosphere after him, and their closer range made
up for the air's energy absorption. The Infinity once again
shuddered under Imperial fire.
Fortunately, they weren't trying to kill him yet. Confident
that he couldn't get away, they were just trying to disable the
ship and force him down. They were probably even trying to contact
him by radio, but BoShek left the receiver switched off. Any
transmission he could make would only give them his voiceprint; as
it was, if he could lose them he might remain anonymous.
He shoved the throttles forward again, at the same time
corkscrewing down and underneath the fighters to skim the sand. He
was over the vast Dune Sea, far to the west of civilization; the
wavelike dunefield erupted into clouds of roiling sand as his
shock wave passed over it.
Lining up directly behind him for another salvo, the flat-
winged fighters plowed straight through 'the clouds, the airborne
particles etching away their instruments and control surfaces and
pitting their windows. They immediately rose up above the
billowing sand, but BoShek chose that moment to pull back on the
throttles, letting them overshoot him. He banked left, waited
until they had committed to a left turn, then banked hard right
and shoved the throttles down again, racing for the Jundland
Wastes to the east.
The TIE fighters were catching up again by the time the jagged
canyonland slid toward him over the horizon. BoShek dodged a few
last energy bolts, then dived into the first canyon he reached and
wove his way up it at top speed. The Infinity handled like a
dream, hugging the ground as if on rails, but the TIE fighters
were just as maneuverable. Only the damage they'd taken in the
sand cloud kept them from catching him.
Then one of them made a mistake. Clos
ing in for a crippling
shot, it crossed into the Infinity's shock wave, and the
turbulence against its wide vertical wings tossed it like a leaf
into the side of the canyon. The explosion sent another fighter
into the ground, leaving only two to follow him.
Losing half their number had changed the rules, though. Now
they weren't shooting just to cripple; they were out for blood.
BoShek frowned as he tried to think of away to take them out
first, but the Infinity was built for speed, not fighting.
Fleetingly, he thought of calling upon the Force, of trying to
use its ancient mystical powers to throw his pursuers off, but he
knew it would be useless. He'd been meditating and concentrating
on the Force ever since he'd heard of it from one of the few real
monks at the monastery in Mos Eisley, but he'd never yet gotten
any indication that it even existed, other than a faint awareness
of other people's presence from time to time. The old Jedi might
have been able to draw from it to subdue their enemies a long time
ago, but the Force hadn't protected them from the advancing
Empire. No, he needed something more concrete, something physical
he could do to escape.
Then he remembered a story Solo had told him once, about how
he'd faked out a bounty hunter in an asteroid belt. Yeah. The same
thing might work here.
He led the fighters deeper and deeper into the canyon, until
its high walls boxed them in on either side. The Infinity
shuddered under more and more impacts, and a flashing light on the
instrument board warned of a shield about to fail, but instead of
speeding up, BoShek intentionally slowed down. He rested his fin
ger on the emergency escape-pod launch button, and just as he
rounded a sharp bend, he hit it. The escape pod blew free and
continued straight into the canyon wall, where its fuel supply
exploded in a spectacular fireball. BoShek kept his eye on the
heads-up rearview, but neither of the TIE fighters emerged from
the flames. Either they'd been swallowed up in the explosion, or
they'd pulled up and were circling around to examine what they no
doubt assumed was the wreckage of the entire Infinity.
Smiling, BoShek pulled up out of the canyon, aimed straight
east, then cut his engines completely. He had enough velocity to
fly ballistic all the way to Mos Eisley if he had to, and with his
Star Wars - Tales From The Mos Eisley Cantina Page 33