• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

This Sarlacc doesn’t have it that bad, tucked away out here in the desert. It’s not really aware that it exists; it has a neural system, but it’s not very well developed, and not likely to become so in the desert. Sarlacci do interesting things with messenger RNA: over the course of millennia, they can attain a sort of group consciousness, built out of the remains of people they’ve digested. I talked to such a Sarlacc, once a few decades ago. It was a thoroughly asocial creature that wondered, quite wistfully, whether a Jedi would taste better or worse than the other sentients it had eaten. I remember being amused by it, for I knew that I was not such a fool as to come within reach of its outer tentacles.

I walked right over this baby Sarlacc. It lay buried just beneath the sand, tentacles hidden in the drifts. It got me by the ankle and dragged me down into the pit, through a sand plug nearly a meter thick.

The sand plug came down right after me, right on top of me. I lay on the bottom of the pit, held in place by surprisingly strong tentacles, with sand all around me, looking up into the night sky. The Sarlacc’s digestive acid is weak, and the sand that came down with me has blotted up much of it. Nonetheless my clothing is already dissolving; if I do get out of here I’ll be a sight, a naked sixty-year-old Jedi with a rash trying to make it back to her survey ship.

Even diluted, the acid burns.

I do not blame the Sarlacc; it is behaving as its nature dictates. It’s not very bright and it is very young—only five meters wide, and perhaps that deep as well. Hard to say quite how deep underground I am, looking up into the night sky through what used to be the sand plug.

I may only be the second or third sentient it’s ever eaten. One of them is hanging, totally cocooned, on a wall in the chamber here with me; a Choi named Susejo who was mostly digested already when I fell into the pit. I can feel his thoughts; he’s mildly telepathic. He’s very young, for a Choi, barely out of childhood, and very angry—he has not taken being eaten very well, and I feel rather sorry for him, too.

When morning came, the light filtered down around me, and I saw my chance; my only chance. My lightsaber had come down with me. I hadn’t been able to tell, there in the darkness; it no longer hung from my belt, and I hadn’t known whether I’d lost it up on the surface, or down here in the pit. It lay on its side in the acid a few feet away from me, and I turned my head to look at it.

It leaped across the pit and into my hand. I lit it and bent my hand back at the wrist, bringing the blade down as close to the tentacles holding my arm as I could get it, straining; the Sarlacc made a sound, a high-pitched squeal, and the tentacles holding that arm pulled free. I wrenched the arm free and sliced away at the other tendrils still holding me, cutting for just a few seconds until I was free, rolled off my back into a crouch, and then—

Five meters is a long way up, even for a young Jedi. I raised the Force and leaped.

The tentacle caught my ankle in mid-leap. The Sarlacc broke my leg and two of my ribs pulling me back down. I lost the lightsaber again on the way down and by the time I had the presence of mind to look for it, it was gone for good. I don’t know what the Sarlacc did with it, but I never saw it again.

For the rest of the day the Sarlacc remained restless, tentacles waving aimlessly, twitching ceaselessly. It held me so tightly that the blood flow to my extremities was impaired. It was very upset by the whole thing.

I tried to tell it that I was sorry, that I would not have hurt her had I been able to avoid it.

That got a rise out of the Choi, hanging on the wall facing me—If you must chatter, it snapped, at least do it for the benefit of the one who can listen to you.

A slow death has a few things to recommend it; time to get your thoughts in order, at any rate. I blocked the pain radiating from my body, and frankly, after a few days I was bored, too.

Susejo, I