Star Wars_ Tales From Jabba's Palace - Kevin J. Anderson [30]
“Er, I see,” said Melvosh Bloor, who didn’t. “I’m afraid I don’t quite get the joke, but—”
“Better you don’t than Jabba don’t. Every day, every day, fresh jokes. All time, fresh, fresh, fresh! Try tell Bloated One same joke twice!” The creature’s face doubled in on itself in a frightful grimace.
“Are you saying that this Salacious Crumb deliberately led Professor P’tan to fall into the Sarlacc pit as a—a joke?”
The creature turned a totally innocent gaze to the academic. “ ’Smatter? You don’t get it?”
Melvosh Bloor shook his head.
The creature sighed. “Bloated One too don’t. Seen it. He say, ‘Next time, louder and funnier.’ ”
Melvosh Bloor’s yellow eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You seem to know an awful lot about the doings of Salacious Crumb.”
“So?” The creature sprang to its feet, its pelt standing out in spikes that made it even more unattractive to the eye. “You know lot about Jabba. This makes you Hutt?”
Melvosh Bloor shuddered. “I hope not.”
The creature snorted. “Come.”
For once it was the academic who became the echo. “Come? Come where? You don’t mean come with you to meet—to meet—Jabba the Hutt?”
“Jabba … the … Hutt!” The creature pronounced the crimelord’s name in a low, rolling, impressive voice reminiscent of Lord Vader himself.
“So—so quickly? So easily?” Melvosh Bloor didn’t know whether to tremble with delight or trepidation, so he settled for a generalized case of the shakes. “You can take me to him now?”
“Right now. Timing, timing, timing! Time is ripe!” It made a great show of sniffing its own armpits, then cheerfully added, “Me too!” It loped across the floor on all fours and flung open the cell door. “Last one out, Sarlacc food.”
Such an invitation coming hard on the heels of Professor P’tan’s reported fate was impossible to ignore. Melvosh Bloor fairly sprinted out of the cell in pursuit of his guide. Once back in the corridor, the creature climbed the academic’s body as if it were a sail barge mast and perched on his shoulder. “You listen,” it hissed in his ear. “I do talk, get it? Else—” It drew one claw across its own scrawny throat and uttered: “Sskkkrrrhtt!”
“You mean you’ll conduct the interview? But my questions—” Melvosh Bloor gestured helplessly with his datapad.
His guide grabbed it from his hands and chewed on one corner experimentally. “Naaaah. You shut up until throne room. Then you talk.” He chortled. “Oh boy.”
Melvosh Bloor snatched back his datapad and secured it from the creature’s covetous fingers. “That is agreeable,” he said. “Let’s go.”
The sights and sounds that greeted the Kalkal in the palace vaults would have been fodder for a score of monographs on debauchery, suffering, and substandard hygiene, had he been minded to turn back from his original goal. From its piggyback perch, his guide greeted every other being they passed—Twi’lek, Gamorrean, Quarren, and the rest—with an easy camaraderie that was … Well, in truth, it was downright rude. Insults and jibes flew from the ugly little creature’s mouth with astonishing fluency. Melvosh Bloor’s fingers almost fell off from the rapidity with which he had to enter the many terms with which the other inhabitants of Jabba’s palace showered his guide. (All of them filed under “U” for “Unbelievably Foul.”)
At last they came to a curtained portal. A tusked Gamorrean raised his vibro-ax in challenge until Melvosh Bloor’s guide poked his head up over the Kalkal’s shoulder and loosed an ear-splitting cackle. The Gamorrean snorted in reply and waved them through.
As Melvosh Bloor stepped into Jabba the Hutt’s throne room he felt an overwhelming sense of awe that was almost as heart-shaking as the dread that had possessed him when he went in to take his doctoral oral examination. Jabba the Hutt in person was indescribably more imposing than the mountains of research the academic had accumulated to prepare himself for this moment. He felt the weight of his guide drop from his back and saw the creature scamper across the vast chamber to