“Leave him,” came another voice. “He’s dead. Killed in the crossfire.”
Cursing filled the stormtroopers’ airways. Several threw their blasters against the wall in disgust.
But as Davin pulled back with the rest, a new sense of purpose swept over him, like a cool wind cutting through the endless heat. He felt a kinship with the Rebels and almost wanted to join their cause.
But how?
Maybe he could warn them of the AT-AT’s vulnerability. Or maybe he could work as a “deep plant,” passing along vital information …
A spy? Maybe that was it. He’d have something to live for, something to believe in. He felt heady, as things suddenly fell in place.
As the stormtroopers formed up, Davin knew that he could help the Rebels best by staying in the belly of the beast.
Soup’s On: The Pipe
Smoker’s Tale
by Jennifer Roberson
Pain/pleasure … pleasure/pain. Inseparable. Indescribable. Ineluctable.
—come closer, a little closer—
Tatooine. Mos Eisley. A cesspit planet, a cesspit spaceport, offering little to the undiscerning save perhaps the loss of coin, of limb, of life, but rich to others in risk, in Chance, in Luck, in the endless mirage of hope—illicit, illegal, wholly intoxicating.
—closer, if you will—
To me, as to blood-bred crèche-mates, Tatooine and Mos Eisley are richer still in potential: of the flesh, of the blood, of the viscera, of the overwhelming promise of risks already taken and risks to be taken; in the ineffable indefinable we of my race call soup.
Pleasure/pain … pain/pleasure. Deep in flesh-molded pockets beside my nostrils, hidden by subtle flaps in otherwise humanoid features, proboscii quiver.
—closer yet—yet—
This is what I live for, what I fish for, what I hunt. The scent of soup, then the soup itself, running hot and fast and sweet in the confines of the veins, the vessels, the brain. In the confines of the flesh.
It lends us to legend. It makes of us myth. It shapes of us demons of dreams: Don’t misbehave or an Anzat will catch you and suck all your blood away.
But it is not blood at all.
—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 soupçon, 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 Dannik 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 now 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. Call me gourmet, if you will; I see no reason not to please myself between those assignments that, in t
heir 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 borrowed 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 altogether 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 distrust; deals are done at dusk, not under the fixed, unmitigated 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—
It 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 moment what it would be like to drink his soup … but Jabba is well guarded, and even an Anzat might find it difficult to locate within the massy corpulence the proper orifices into which to 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 turns away to bellow rudely at two droid-accompanied humans stopped by the detector, I sip slowly, savoring the water.
Spirits muddle the mind, slow the body, nourish nothing but weakness. Anzati avoid such things, even as we avoid joydrugs and synthetics. What is natural is best, even to the soup. There is strength in what is pure.
<
br /> 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 containment capsules. There is instead an imprisonment more insidious than such things, and as distasteful to an Anzat as soup drunk from a coward.
I drank tainted soup from a tainted man, and assimilated his vice: the daily need for a proscribed but 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 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.
Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina Page 28