Star Wars_ Tales From Jabba's Palace - Kevin J. Anderson [88]
Fewer and fewer candles, guttering in their niches, lighted the passageway. The shadows deepened. At times Fortuna walked in complete darkness, but he never hesitated. He walked straight ahead with confidence. He knew this passageway. He had come here many times to learn the secrets of the monks and to plot with them. But the lower levels were cool, and Fortuna pulled his cloak tighter around him.
A shadow moved down the passageway ahead. Metal scraped against bare stone. Fortuna stopped and analyzed the darkness around him: his intuition sensed no danger. But he heard movement again, in the darkness, coming toward him. He drew his blaster and crouched back against the wall as the shadow of a giant spider as tall as Fortuna loomed up. The spider itself crawled out of the shadows and scrabbled past Fortuna. Fortuna relaxed, barely, but kept the blaster in his hand: just a brain walker, he told himself, a machine shaped like a spider that carried an enlightened monk’s disembodied brain in a jar attached to the underbelly. Harmless. But even so he hated it. Brain walkers unsettled him. He watched lights at the base of the brain jar blink in calm greens and blues, as if part of a fluorescent bauble on a vain man-sized spider. Perhaps it meant to join Jabba at his dinner. They would do that: the brains talked through speakers on the jar in foolish attempts to instruct Jabba about the nature of the universe and promote his enlightenment. It always amused Jabba and his dinner guests.
Fortuna remembered the first time he had seen a brain walker. He had not thought it amusing then. As Jabba’s new majordomo, Fortuna had been hungry to learn everything about the palace—its main corridors, its secret corridors and rooms, its dungeons, its people and their routines. One evening he accompanied the kitchen staff on their rounds feeding prisoners. Just as they reached the first cell, a monstrous spider stumbled into them, upsetting a soup pot and splashing hot soup on Fortuna’s robes. Fortuna fired his blaster and hit the brain jar and the spider’s underbelly. The jar exploded, and the brain flopped onto the sandy passageway. The spider short-circuited with pops and shooting sparks.
Only then had Fortuna realized that the spider was a machine.
No one spoke, not the cooks or the guards or the prisoners standing in the open doorway of their cell. The spider unnerved them, too. Monks rushed up to collect the brain, and one explained that when a monk became enlightened, other monks trained as surgeons cut out his brain and placed it in a maintenance jar filled with a nutrient-rich solution. From there, the brain contemplated the cosmos, freed from the body’s distractions.
Fortuna gagged at the thought. He hurried back toward Jabba’s throne room, stained robes and all, to advise Jabba to order the monks exterminated. Their ways were intolerable. It astonished him that two distinct cultures lived in the palace, anyway: Jabba’s criminal organization, and these monks. For generations, criminals had occupied parts of the monastery the monks had built, turning it into a palace, taking all the best rooms, using more and more of its space. It was time to take it all.
But suddenly Fortuna had stopped. He was angry that any monks were left here at all. How must they feel about the presence of Jabba and his minions in their palace? Surely they were discontented. Fortuna believed he could turn their discontent to his advantage: side with them in their complaints, pretend to learn from them, guide them into open plotting to rid the palace of Jabba, mold them into an unsuspected force he could call on when the day came for him to seize control.
How well