by Ken Liu
Artoo and Luke headed for the cockpit, looking for all the world like an ordinary human pilot and his astromech droid.
I’ve made many tree-stump carvings of the pair since then, and I tell anyone who asks that they are of the great Jedi Luke Skywalker, who once freed thousands of slaves on a forgotten world.
But I know a deeper truth. Luke Skywalker is not merely a great man; he is also, at least partly, a great droid.
“I WANT TO HEAR MORE stories about droid heroes in the future,” said G’kolu. “Thank you, Geetoo.”
The others in the galley agreed. The ancient droid beeped an acknowledgment.
Time to move on.
Flux took a deep breath. “Is there no other choice?” She looked with trepidation into the yawning maw of the dark chute that led to the bilge. The odor of rotting garbage and pungent machine grease wafted up from the hidden depths.
Just then, all the lights on the mess deck turned on in unison. The bright glare made everyone squint. The humming of the ship’s engines shifted to a deeper rumble.
“I think we just came out of hyperspace,” said Teal, more experienced than the other deckhands.
Speakers came to life throughout the ship as Tuuma the Hutt’s growling voice filled the air.
“Attention, crew members: We’ve been intercepted by a Cantonica customs patrol for a surprise visit. All deckhands should remain where they are as officers make a final sweep of the ship before the inspectors come aboard to make sure that everything is…orderly.”
“He means that the officers need to prepare the bribes and get the smuggled goods out of sight,” hissed Teal.
Footsteps echoed in the corridors, and the fathiers moaned and growled nervously.
“You gotta go!” Teal snapped at Flux.
“All right,” said Flux. “But will you come with me? I’ll be too scared down there alone.”
Teal hesitated. “But—”
“It must mean something that we shared stories tonight,” said Flux. “I can’t explain it, but I believe the Tide wants us to be together.”
Teal bit her lip and nodded. “Fine. I doubt Tuuma will check the bunks while the ship is being turned upside down by inspectors.”
“EEP-ding tick OOP ding-ding TWEEP,” beeped G2-X.
Tyra turned to Teal and Flux. “He says he needs to go with you. There are sludge-cleaning droids and maintenance systems down there that could hurt you. He can help.”
“Thank you, Geetoo,” said Flux. She placed a hand over the squat form of the droid custodian affectionately.
“What’s going on here?” asked G’kolu. “When did the bilge become the most popular part of the ship?”
The pounding of the footsteps in the corridors grew louder, intermixed with the first mate’s impatient voice. “Check the mess deck.…One of the deckhands spilled something down there last night.…Make sure it’s cleaned up and the contraband spices in the pantry are hidden….”
“I think I need to go with you,” said Tyra to Flux. “I don’t like to be seen by…officials. Besides, I can help you down there. We scavengers are good to have around whenever garbage heaps are involved, and I can help you talk to the droids.”
“Hey! I’m not going to stay here all by myself,” said G’kolu. “How am I supposed to explain why I’ve been here half the night when I was supposed to just clean up and go back to sleep?”
“What happened to ‘the Grease’?” said Tyra, her voice cracking with mirth. “I thought you were the expert on smooth talking.”
The footsteps were just outside the entrance to the mess deck.
“All right! No more bickering,” said Teal. “We’re all going into the bilge.”
One by one, they grabbed the top of the chute and jumped in.
Total, complete darkness.
Splash. Burble. Pitter-patter. Plop.
“Oh, the smell!”
“This is so much worse than I thought.”
“Even piles of rotting fish and shells is better than this—”
“What was that thing that just brushed my legs? I think it had scales!”
“Just give it a hard kick. Bilge-water lobsters are harmless—”
“Keep going! Keep going! There should be a platform out of this sludge in the bow.”
“EEP! EEP! Ack-ackackack.”
“I’m going to throw up if we stay here much longer.”
“Quiet! Do you want to make so much noise in here that the customs inspectors come down? Just stop thinking about the smell. Breathe through your mouth and pinch your nose.”
“I smell through my horns.”
“Oh…I didn’t know that.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about the Grease.”
“I’ll be sure to set aside time after this to study the legends of Your Smoothness.”
“I’ve got to be distracted. Help me.”
“How do you want us to distract you? Don’t ask me to sing.”
“I won’t—I’ve heard you in the shower.…How about you tell me a story?”
“You want me to tell a story?”
“Sure. You must know some good stories, considering how much you like to talk. Tell me a story about…Luke Skywalker. That seems to be the theme tonight.”
“It’s the Tide.”
“Oh, enough with the Tide!”
“Start talking, Teal! I need a Luke Skywalker story to keep my mind off this stench!”
“All right…I don’t know if this story is true. But I did hear it from one of the most interesting characters I’ve ever met….”
SIZE MATTERS NOT. LOOK AT ME.
JUDGE ME BY MY SIZE, DO YOU?
—YODA
IT’S TOUGH BEING SMALL.
A curious fact of life in the galaxy is that most sentient species are about the same size: ranging in height between about half a meter to three meters. This fundamental assumption about scale in most designers’ minds can be observed in the ceiling height of wretched, scum-ridden cantinas on backwater planets like Tatooine, as well as the size of the repulsorpods in the ancient Grand Convocation Chamber of the Galactic Senate.
Anyone under this typical range is often looked down on. Literally.
That is why Kowakian monkey-lizards, smaller than human infants, get no respect in most corners of the galaxy. Even the most famous Kowakian monkey-lizard of them all, Salacious B. Crumb, widely acclaimed by his own kind as a master comedian, skilled in both physical antics and verbal whimsy, could not be accepted among the upper echelon of society. He had to settle as court jester to the terrible and butyraceous Jabba the Hutt.
See, you’ve never even heard of Salacious, have you? But your eyebrows lifted at the mention of Jabba, the peerless crime lord.
Surprised at my vocabulary, are you? Did not expect sesquipedalian words to emerge from my half-centimeter body? Oh, how predictable you are.
I’m Lugubrious Mote, the real source of Salacious Crumb’s comedic genius, and this is my tale.
Splash. Burble. Pitter-patter. Plop.
“Wait, wait! What do these words mean? I’ve never even heard some of them.”
“I told you the story is from a most unusual teller.”
“Sounds like she just likes big words.”
“Ha, you’re not entirely wrong. A sesquipedalian word is a really long word, one spelled with enough letters to go around the page a few times. For such a small creature, she had extraordinary lung capacity.”
“At least my brain is sufficiently distracted that I can almost forget the smell around here….”
“Jabba didn’t smell much better, from what I understand.”
“What about ‘buty-,’ um, ‘buty-ra’—”
“You don’t need to understand every word to understand a story. In fact, the most important parts of stories aren’t always told in words. Just follow along.”
First, observe and admire my form. I know I’m a bit hard to see, so feel free to use the magnifying glass hanging next to my
ten-centimeter stage. Take note that my body is just a hair under four millimeters long, and from an ovoid torso covered in chitinous carapace extend two pairs of furry legs, a pair of smooth segmented arms ending in opposable pincers, and a pulchritudinous, whiskered head. Like other females of my species, I can jump as high as a meter from standing still, and I can lift forty times my bodyweight.
Biologists from the University of Coruscant describe my species, the mole-fleas of Kowak, as parasites, but that’s hardly fair. We think of ourselves as living in an ancient arrangement of mutual benefit with the monkey-lizards. In the lush, dense forests of Kowak, each monkey-lizard has living on its body a colony of mole-fleas who advise it on relations with the other monkey-lizards, warn it of danger, and keep its skin and hair free of harmful, true parasites. When infant monkey-lizards are born, some mole-fleas from each parent migrate to the young creature to set up a new colony, and thereby give the child the wisdom and experience of the mole-flea communities of both parents.
Our civilization evolved in conjunction with theirs, and I daresay our civilization is the more sophisticated for the simple reason that our minds are far quicker than theirs, just as our movements are far nimbler. We mole-fleas may live a life only a tenth as long as the average monkey-lizard, but we squeeze just as much delight and sorrow into it. To do so, we live a single day as though it were a week, and in the time it takes a monkey-lizard brain to think and say one word, we’ve composed a sentence out of ten words.
To compensate for our small stature, nature gave us outsize brains and accelerated nerves.
I grew up on Salacious Crumb. When Salacious first decided to leave Kowak to seek his fortune, my colony held a meeting and decided that they didn’t want to go into the uncertainties of space. Instead, members of the colony would scatter to join their relatives on other hosts. I was the only one who decided to accompany Salacious on his adventure.
“I want a full partnership,” I told him.
He cackled for five minutes. I took that as an inept expression of gratitude.
See, here’s the thing: Salacious was a natural performer, and he was blessed with a panoply of physical features suitable for a crowd-pleasing clown: floppy ears, messy hair, wide-and-oh-so-hypnotic eyes, gangly limbs, clumsy movements, and an infectious cackle. But he didn’t possess much of a brain between those outsize ears.
He couldn’t write any jokes, because he was dumber than a newborn rancor.
I was the one who came up with all his material, including the monkey poodoo jokes. I also had to sit in the nest of hair on top of his head and whisper the jokes into his big ears because he couldn’t memorize them.
So why didn’t I go into the comedy business myself if I was so clever? you ask. Comedy requires a certain willingness to look like a fool, to suffer humiliation, to scrape and bow, to use small words. You’ve heard my eloquence—I don’t have the temperament for it.
That’s why I thought the two of us would make a great team.
The trouble was, few outside of Kowak understood the screeching language of the monkey-lizards, and working through an interpreter was death for any comedian. (You’ve dealt with protocol droids, haven’t you? They’re insufferable.)
To rescue Salacious’s nonexistent career, I advised him to turn himself into a physical comedian. Pratfalls and slapstick are the universal language of comedy. I came up with a whole routine of tumbles, slips, falls, leaps, twirls, handstands, spit takes, fake choking, and pantomimed shocks.
But Salacious was a terrible student. He was so uncoordinated and clumsy that he couldn’t do many of the flips and slides I had choreographed for him. After many seconds of hard thinking, I came up with the idea of sitting on top of his head, like the pilot of one of those AT-AT walkers we once saw at a spaceport under martial law, and sending him signals for how to move by biting him in different spots on his head. That was the only way he could move with enough coordination to chew a snapping fish bladder while also dancing like an inebriated Gamorrean—trust me, it was a funny move.
He couldn’t help cackling at his own jokes though, which ruined a lot of the effect.
But humor is subjective, and despite all odds, the gangster boss Jabba the Hutt took a liking to him—particularly his cackling. Salacious took credit for the whole thing and never even mentioned me to His August Corpulency. Some partner he turned out to be.
Then again, considering Salacious had to amuse Jabba at least once a day to get his food and drink—and I got to share in the crumbs—lest the oversize slug kill him, maybe it was a good thing that I was beneath Jabba’s notice.
For a long time I lived in Salacious’s hair and helped him survive at the crime lord’s pleasure. At night I hopped about the palace and listened to the talk of bounty hunters and smugglers who came to bargain with the oily oversize sausage. I learned a lot about the galaxy, even if I didn’t get to see every corner of it. It wasn’t the life of adventure I was promised, but I thought I was content.
Until the day Skywalker showed up.
Picture me in my nest, woven from thick vines, each of which was the width of my legs. Instead of plant fibers, the vines were made from keratin, colored the same shade of tannish puce that dominated everything on the desert planet of Tatooine. The vines were hard to work with: stubborn, inflexible, and utterly lacking in the kind of yielding softness desirable in good bedding. The thick strands emerged from the dry, leathery ground, and I had to introduce some pliancy into that most uncooperative material with judicious nicks from my teeth.
My teeth were hurting that morning because I’d had to chew through several extra-thick keratin vines to soften them up—maintaining the structural integrity of my nest was a constant struggle as the strands grew without cease, and new cuts had to be made every few days lest my nest unwind itself.
Might as well give you a climate and seismic activity report. The sky was its usual, perpetually hazy murk unbroken by the light of the twin suns or the twinkle of stars—since Mount Jabba didn’t like being outside much, Salacious Ridge, my host and habitat, couldn’t go outside, either. Earlier that day, chunks of the remains of some unfortunate creature slathered in slime and digestive juices had rained down in the vine forest, and a flash storm consisting of sour wine and fermented fruit juices had carved rivulets in the dry ground. Despite my disgust, I emerged from my nest to scavenge what edible bits of flesh I could find—oh, how shameful I would appear in the eyes of my home tribe! And then I had to scramble to clear out what I couldn’t eat or drink by tossing the excess chunks off the sheer cliff face beyond the vine forest, lest the nest turn into a smelly, swampy mess. To get a bit of exercise, I hop-climbed Left-Ear Peak and Right-Ear Peak with some rotting carrion as free weights.
A vile-smelling mist rolled in and clouded over everything. All I could do was retreat into my nest and hold my breath, coughing in fits when it got to be too much. Overhead, thunderous snores and roaring laughter alternated in unpredictable waves, forcing me to cover my delicate ears as my whiskers twitched in annoyance. Under me, my host reacted by quaking like the deck of some storm-tossed ship, with a high-pitched cackling that sounded like the ground itself was being torn asunder.
All in all, just a typical day in the tangled hair-jungle atop the head of Salacious Crumb and beneath the looming mountain of flesh and fat that was Jabba the Hutt.
“Can’t you shield me from the hookah smoke?” I begged Salacious. “Put on a hat or something.” Of all Jabba’s disgusting habits, that was the worst. The smoke got into Salacious’s hair and there was nothing I could do to get the smell out.
Salacious made no reply except stamping his foot, grinding it into the ground, and then cackling maniacally. The message was clear: if I made myself known, he would do nothing to protect me, and I would be squashed like a common, insensate flea.
I was thinking of some clever insult for Salacious—sometimes it took him days to work out what I meant—when a flash of lightning split the murk in the distance a
nd a gargantuan, glowing man-star flickered into existence like an exploding supernova, lighting up half the sky. He was so huge that he loomed over the bulk of Jabba like the ten-thousand-year-old pasol tree shading the slick rock that was Salacious Crumb’s hideout back on Kowak. He was like an ancient god from the creation myths, there in the flesh. I hopped onto the tip of Salacious’s ear to get a better look.
“Greetings, Exalted One….”
I had never heard a voice like that: sonorous and resonant, at once pleading and threatening, suffused with a confidence that seemed indistinguishable from swagger. The hubbub of Jabba’s court quieted as I had never remembered the place quieting, and the glowing man-star went on.
“I am Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight and friend of Captain Solo. I seek an audience with Your Greatness, to bargain for his life….”
The booming figure flickered. I realized that this Luke Skywalker was not real but an illusion projected from the top of a dome-headed blue-and-silver droid standing next to a golden human-formed droid companion. They were gifts to Jabba from this Skywalker, apparently. He was submitting to Jabba before even arriving; I couldn’t help being disappointed.
My time in Jabba’s palace had shown me plenty of sycophants and frauds and con artists. This Skywalker, however, presented a bit of a conundrum. On the one hand, he wasn’t even brave enough to show up in person and was just as cloying and meek in his approach to the Hutt gangster as any lowlife criminal. On the other hand, he wasn’t there to bargain for profit or some unsavory favor from Jabba but to plead for his friend, which endeared him to me a little.
Was he just foolhardy or running some big con? I wondered.
He was an uncertainty wrapped within an enigma hidden within a mystery.
After Luke made a splash with his hologram, nothing new happened for a while, and life in Jabba’s palace fell back into its usual routine of disgusting food, smelly smoke, and an endless stream of obsequious toadies. I tried to get Salacious Crumb to vary his routine a bit—I was sick of the old slapstick—but he adamantly refused.