by Ken Liu
“Use the Force.…Use the Force…” I heard him mumble. “Have to use the Force….”
The rancor lumbered forward. One step. Another step.
Luke’s legs trembled, and the top of his head quaked like the deck of a ship caught in a solar storm. The boy was scared.
I had no choice but to leap to his ear again. “Let him grab you and move you closer to his mouth. Then stick the bone in his jaws.”
He froze for a second before relaxing again. “Oh, like sticking a proton torpedo down the exhaust port of the Death Star,” he said. “I understand.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but as long as he obeyed my directions…“Sure. Whatever.”
I have to give the kid credit. Rash and clumsy as he was, he was brave. As the rancor’s claws wrapped around him, he didn’t faint with terror or give in to the pain of being squeezed by those crushing, thick fingers. He winced but held on to the thigh bone, and as the rancor lifted him closer and closer to its jaw, he raised the bone and aimed it steady and straight down the gullet of the creature despite waves of hot breath filled with the stench of rotting meat.
“Now!” I shouted, and bit into his forehead before hanging on for dear life.
Luke crammed the bone right into the creature’s jaws, lodging the two ends firmly against the roof and floor. Howling with pain, the rancor dropped him. Its yawning jaws were jammed open.
“Go, go, go!” I bit into the right side of his scalp.
Curled up on the ground, Luke was breathing hard and fast. He looked up and saw a small opening to the right, under a jutting ledge. The space was just big enough to fit him. He scrambled into it.
“I used the Force!” he whispered gleefully. Oh, that goofy boy.
The rancor, its primary weapon rendered useless, howled at the grille far above. Jabba cursed in his rumbling, groundquake-like voice; Leia looked like she was ready to faint; and the whole court jeered some more.
Salacious, true to form, summoned some more weak cackles. Without me, he had no idea how to make a joke out of the wacky situation.
But we weren’t out of danger yet. With a grunt, the rancor managed to put enough pressure into its jaws to snap the thigh bone like a measly toothpick. The enraged predator then returned to the task of hunting down its surprisingly thorny prey as it lumbered toward the ledge under which Luke was hiding.
Closer and closer the monster came, and then it leaned down to dig Luke out from his hidey-hole. A sharp claw swiped dangerously close to Luke’s face.
“Now would be a good time to use force!” I hopped over and screamed into Luke’s ear.
“How? How do I use the Force?”
“Not the Force, just use some force!” I was so mad that I bit his earlobe, and Luke winced.
The pain seemed to finally get my point across.
Luke grabbed a rock off the cave floor and smashed it down, hard, on the probing claw. The rancor recoiled and reared back, howling in pain.
I looked through the arch formed by the creature’s bowed legs. In the far distance, I saw the opening through which it had emerged earlier.
Time for another ride.
I jumped back on top of Luke’s head and bit his forehead. “Get up!” I growled.
Thank the Great Mole-Flea that Luke had blind trust in this “Force” controlling him. He scrambled out from his hiding place and ran under the rearing rancor. I picked two spots over his forehead and sank my mouth-barbs into them rhythmically: left, right, left, right.…The quicker I alternated my bites, the faster his legs pumped. I doubt any AT-AT pilot could claim to have steered her mount with more precision than I did as I guided Luke toward his destination.
I maneuvered Luke into a full sprint until he ran under the door that had released the rancor and slammed into the control panel at the other end of the dungeon. A small door lifted to reveal…an iron lattice that barred the way.
Gaghhh! I cried out in frustration. I thought I had found an escape route, but of course it wouldn’t be so easy. Luke grabbed on to the lattice and flopped helplessly like a hooked fish.
“All right,” he muttered to himself. “It just looks hopeless, but I bet now is the time you show me what to do to take that thing down!”
He was talking to me, the voice of the Force. Even now he wasn’t giving up hope. That was pretty touching, actually. He might not be very smart, but he sure was determined and trusting.
All right, I said to myself, I’m not giving up, either. There has to be another way.
By then, the rancor had turned around and was stomping back toward its lair, intent on its still-alive dinner.
Jabba’s rancor keepers came up to the lattice and jeered at Luke, poking at him with their sticks to force him back into the dungeon.
Luke stumbled back and leaned against the wall, gasping, as the rancor was only a few meters away.
Time slowed down.
A single red light glowed through the gloomy, dank dungeon air from the opposite wall, mocking my plans. I had come so close to saving the foolish boy, to fulfilling my promise to the princess. And all my hard work would come to naught.
I wished I had full control of Luke’s muscles. What wouldn’t I be able to accomplish if I had that body? I could picture myself leaping onto the back of that lumbering beast and gouging out its eyes, biting into its skin to draw blood. If only…if only…
The rancor took another step forward and opened its slimy jaws, pawing the air with its menacing claws….
Luke froze.
“I believe in you,” he said. “Use the Force.”
The universe was not fair. I had such good reflexes; I could lift forty times my body weight. And yet, because we mole-fleas were so diminutive, we were prey for the mantis-crows, and the mantis-crows were prey for the monkey-lizards. The monkey-lizards, in turn, had to avoid annoying the Gamorreans lest they become snacks for the porcine brutes, and the Gamorreans were helpless against the mindless rancors. As each link in the food chain got bigger, it also seemed to become less intelligent.
Wait a minute, I thought. We just need an even bigger mouth.
I glanced up at the jagged metal teeth at the bottom edge of the door that had released the rancor. Each of them was the size of a mountain peak, far bigger than the stalactite teeth of the rancor standing under them.
Time snapped back to its regular flow.
I bit down into Luke’s scalp determinedly. Left, left, right, left, right…
He stumbled forward and knelt. I jumped to his ear and screamed at him. “Pick it up! Pick it up!”
He picked up the rock in front of him.
“Now throw it!” I commanded him in the voice of the Force.
His arms moved jerkily, and the rock flew out of his hands and crashed into the single red light on the opposite wall. It was the control panel for the gate.
The door slammed down like a giant jaw and instantly crushed the skull of the rancor. With a few final spasms, the humongous body stopped moving.
“I knew it!” Luke said. “I never doubted.”
The jeers coming from above quieted. A surprised gasp from Jabba. Even Salacious had enough presence of mind to figure out that it was not a good time to cackle. I heard Leia’s momentary laugh of delight before it was choked off.
The rancor’s keeper, a burly cliff of a man, stumbled into the lair and sobbed as he saw the lifeless body of his charge. I suppose I could understand him. After all, even I was coming to like that clumsy, stubborn deluded man-mountain called Luke Skywalker. Whatever his faults, he had an endless supply of hope, and that was no small thing. He really was growing on me.
Luke slumped against the wall, and I slumped against his skull, both of us exhausted but delirious with joy.
You might think that the perspicacious thing for Jabba to do after his pet rancor was killed would be to investigate what happened and possibly offer a good contract to the killer—I would have preferred to be directly credited, but I was willing to share s
ome of the credit with my mount. After all, if someone was able to neutralize your fiercest killing machine in such short order, chances are you’d want them working for you.
But instead of the logical thing, Jabba decided that the Wookiee, Captain Solo, and Luke Skywalker—with me still riding on his pate—would all be taken deep into the Dune Sea on his sail barge, where we’d be tossed into the Pit of Carkoon to feed the all-powerful Sarlacc, who would digest us slowly over a thousand years.
Like I said, the bigger they are, the less brains they possess.
There was nothing to do but train Luke for the task ahead. (I wasn’t exactly scared, since I could always leap away at the last minute—I did have powerful legs. And even if that didn’t work, I decided that if the Sarlacc swallowed Luke and me together, I’d jump in his mouth and make myself a home in his belly. If it took the Sarlacc a thousand years to digest its victims, surely I’d be protected inside Luke and would live out the rest of my life in relative comfort. But I didn’t tell Luke that—large creatures rarely appreciate being informed of the ways we small creatures can take advantage of them.)
While we rode through the Dune Sea on a skiff alongside the sail barge, I drilled Luke on a detailed set of hair-pulling commands. It was hard work. The guards had Luke pinned in place, that fool Solo insisted on distracting him with nonsense small talk, and the wind whipped by Luke’s ears, making a howling ruckus. I had to cling to the swirly ridge around Luke’s left ear canal with all six of my limbs and shout into it to give him instructions on what he was supposed to do based on each distinct pattern of bites. A few times, the wind almost tore me away from him. But I hung on and climbed right back to my piloting perch.
At least I was in the sun. After Jabba’s dank palace, bathing in sunlight felt divine.
“The Force is with me,” Luke muttered, his innocent eyes wide open as he nodded at my instructions.
By the time we got to the sedentary Sarlacc, it was almost anticlimactic. One surprise: Luke’s little astromech droid tossed him his laser sword when they finally freed the young man to push him into the monster’s mouth. Does he even know how to use that thing? I wondered, and I immediately took control.
“Just shut up and do what your tingling scalp tells you,” I told him.
He nodded vigorously. “Right. Use the Force. Listen to the Force. I’ve been through this training.”
As deluded as the kid was, he did have good reflexes and strong muscles—for a human. Even though everything was slightly delayed because I had to relay my orders through his scalp, it was no trouble for me to keep Luke alive and defeat his enemies, because everyone was basically moving in slow motion compared with my quick mind.
One hard bite at the very center of his head, and he launched himself straight up, out of the way of the yawning mouth of the Sarlacc; another quick series of nips later, he was tumbling through the air, heading straight for the sail barge. Up-up-down-down I pulled and pushed my sucking tubes, and woosh-zing-woosh-zing went his laser sword, cutting down Jabba’s henchmen like giant pasol trees being felled. I pressed my tentacles in deeper and leaned left-right-left-right, and Luke swung his laser sword into precisely the right positions to block incoming blaster bolts.
“Bam!” I shouted, but it came out as a gurgle, as I had forgotten that my mouth was still firmly embedded in his skin. “Achoo!” my mount sneezed. Apparently he was the sort who sneezed when his scalp tingled a certain way. “Good to know,” I said after I pulled my regurgitation ducts free. “We’ll avoid that in the future. Let’s start again!”
Piloting him was overall a pretty amazing experience. I wouldn’t say that he was leaping with anywhere near my grace or swinging that sword even one-fortieth as hard as I could have (proportionately speaking), but he was imitating my movements with reasonable accuracy.
I even started making laser-sword humming noises in my head as I drove Luke around. It just felt right.
We landed on the sail barge and wreaked more havoc. I peeked inside and saw Princess Leia wrapping her chain around Jabba’s neck and choking him. “Attagirl!” I shouted. In sympathy I gave Luke’s forehead a celebratory bite, and he yelped.
“Sorry!” I shouted. It was fun to see my partner Leia turn the instrument of her enslavement around on that arrogant criminal. I felt Leia and I were spiritual mates, both of us able to impose our will on creatures much larger than we were.
Under my guidance, Luke soon cleared the decks. Monsters spilled from the sail barge as they decided it was preferable to try their luck at fleeing the always-hungry Sarlacc on foot rather than being cut down by the hot fury of the mole-flea-guided spinning Jedi.
Let me amend that. Smart monsters jumped ship.
As Luke passed one of the portholes in the barge, I peeked in and was shocked by the sight. There was Salacious Crumb, my former mount, trying to tear out the photoreceptors of that supercilious protocol droid Luke had gifted to Jabba. Instead of leaving the vicinity of the rampaging Luke Skywalker–Lugubrious Mote combo, Salacious had apparently decided that moment was the perfect time to demonstrate his loyalty to His Exalted Blubber—even though Leia had already strangled the gangster boss.
Without me, the monkey-lizard didn’t even have a mote of political sense.
“Run! Salacious, run!” I shouted. I knew then just how Jabba’s rancor keeper felt.
But he couldn’t hear me. Luke’s little astromech ran up at that moment to save his gold-plated friend and zapped Salacious with a buzzing electric wand.
Let me tell you, I had never seen Salacious jump that high that fast, or heard him scream in as high-pitched a tone. I laughed and laughed. It was the funniest bit of comedy he had ever performed, albeit he didn’t come up with the idea.
With Jabba dead and Leia freed, I had Luke grab Leia, shoot the deck gun at the barge itself, and swing off the barge onto the skiff, where Captain Solo, the Wookiee Chewie, and another one of Luke’s friends, Lando Calrissian, had taken control. We took off just as the barge exploded into a fiery ball of flames. I hope Salacious had a chance to get out. He might have been a bubble-headed brute, but he was my bubble-headed brute.
I jumped from Luke’s head onto Leia’s nose.
“You’re right,” I said. “He did grow on me.”
Leia gave me a cross-eyed grin.
Despite the loss of my home on Salacious, Leia refused to let me resettle on her.
“Come on,” I said, “it will be fun! Two girls together to take on the galaxy!”
She mumbled something about being allergic to furry feet and suggested that I move in on Luke.
“He’s a good kid,” I said, “and I really do like him. But it will be too exhausting, having to do all his thinking for him.”
And I told Leia never to mention me to Luke—the kid was so joyous about having used the Force to save his friends that I didn’t have the heart to let him know the truth. I didn’t mind not getting credit for the part I’d played; I had given him smarts, but he had given me hope, and I counted myself ahead in that deal.
So Leia found a nice woolly hopwell beast who agreed to take me in as a guest. We traveled around the galaxy for a while before I decided to join the circus. It’s a nice life: I get my name on the posters, in bigger font than anyone else’s (I insisted on that), and kids love my act.
Leia has done well, of course, but sometimes I think about what happened to Luke. All these stories about him…I hope he has learned to think for himself instead of just trusting the voices in his head.
SPLASH. BURBLE. PITTER-PATTER. PLOP.
“Did…did you see Lugubrious perform?” G’kolu asked.
Teal chuckled. “Yes. It was quite an act. She had a scaled replica of Jabba’s sail barge built—though it was so gaudy it’s hard to believe anything like it had ever existed. Inside the barge, the circus installed a fuzzy sandypede larva as a stand-in for Jabba the Hutt. Then Lugubrious leapt and tumbled and dashed about the model with a tiny glowing toothpick that she said was h
er lightsaber. She made high-pitched lightsaber noises to go with it.”
“Wow,” said G’kolu. “I wish I could have seen it.”
“I think they’d have banned you from the circus after the show,” Teal said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Let’s see….” Teal closed her eyes and concentrated. “You would have stayed behind to debate lightsaber dueling techniques with Lugubrious—”
“Oh, that would be fun! I could get a toothpick and practice with her—”
“That’s right. Imagine yourself jumping about the sail barge—”
“And imagine if Captain Tuuma instead of Jabba were on the barge? I’d swing my lightsaber like this—”
“And there, you’d have crushed the stage. Very smooth.”
“…”
“See? I know how you think.”
G’kolu tried to change the subject. “Would you…would you have wanted Lugubrious to live on you?”
“Um, no. But I can see—”
“Wait!” Flux broke in. “I think we’re moving out of the sludge!”
Indeed, the floor under their feet was slanting upward, lifting them out of the odorous slime. They had finally reached the raised platform in the bow of the ship. There, a round access port in the hull would be connected to the sewage pipes to drain the bilge once the Wayward Current docked in Canto Bight.
“Wish we had a little light,” Teal said. “Hey, what are those glowing things?”
A few maintenance droids zipped through the darkness, emitting a series of staccato clicks as the beams from their searchlights pierced the darkness.
“Maybe we should grab one of those to serve as a lamp,” said G’kolu.
G2-X beeped in warning. One of the maintenance droids swept toward the deckhands, and a bright bolt shot out, missing G’kolu’s astonished face by mere centimeters.
“Augh!” G’kolu jumped back into the sludge from the platform. “Quit it! What’s it doing shooting at us?”