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Nat’s body lay facedown in the sand below. The rancor roared at it, but it did not move.

“Nat won’t run!” Jabba shouted. “Why won’t he run?”

The rancor seized the body and ate it in three bites. Blood spattered through the grille onto Fortuna’s hands and robes and face, and the hands and robes and faces of everyone around the pit. The rancor looked up at them and belched and roared.

But everyone in Jabba’s throne room was quiet. They all expected Jabba to be angry. “Nat must have come to hate you,” Fortuna told Jabba, in the relative silence. “He knew it would please you to see him run, so he would not run.”

Someone laughed. Sy Snootles started humming a tune. Max Rebo began pounding his keyboard. And Jabba finally laughed. “He ate him—the rancor ate him. It has no aesthetic sense.” Jabba rolled his throne back to its original position, away from the grille, while the music picked up and palace life returned to normal.

Jabba believed what Fortuna had told him. He never suspected what had just happened. Fortuna walked thoughtfully through the milling crowd of galactic toughs of all species, toughs he hoped to make his people a part of, rubbing at the speckles of Nat’s blood on his hands.

When he could, later that night, Fortuna hurried to the monks and Nat’s brain. He went first to the Great Room of the Enlightened, where the brain jars sat on shelves and the brain walkers waited below them. One embodied monk was dusting. “Nat would not stop screaming, so we had to move him to a cell of his own,” the monk said. “He was disturbing the enlightened ones.”

The monk led Fortuna to the cell. The brain jar holding Nat’s brain sat alone on a table. All the lights at the base of the jar glowed bright red in the darkness.

The monk lit two candles in niches near the door and left quietly. Fortuna sat at the table and put his hands on the jar for a time. The brain was a ghastly sight: raw, white in places, suspended in a solution Nat’s blood discolored red. The monks would change the solution daily for three days till there was no more blood and the solution stayed clear.

Fortuna pressed a button at the base of the jar that made it “hear” for the brain. “Nat,” he said, “this was the only way I knew to save you. Believe me.”

He went on to tell him his plans for cloning, but then another idea came to him. “Perhaps we can find a holding body to put your brain in till we clone a body of your own.”

The more he thought of it, the more Fortuna liked that idea: kidnap someone acceptable, discard the brain, and put Nat’s brain in the body for a time. The sensations of a living, breathing body would surely help keep Nat’s brain sane till it could be put into Nat’s own clone.

He would speak to the surgeons about it.

When he left Nat’s cell an hour later, one third of the lights glowed rose, even pink: not bright red.

Fortuna returned to Jabba’s throne room to sleep. He had to sleep there. Jabba’s paranoia required that everyone close to him sleep around him at night—supposedly to protect him from assassins, but in reality so the guards could watch them all and keep them from assassinating Jabba. The routine had grown lax. The guards slept along with everyone else. Fortuna had even stopped lecturing them about it.

But he would get new guards when he was in control.

Fortuna could not sleep. He sensed goings-on in the palace he could not pin down and that he could not attribute to the anxieties of the day—probabilities swirling in the subconscious undercurrent of life around Jabba. But the monks had trained him well. Things would come clear again, he was confident of that. Beings from all parts of the galaxy constantly came and went here, and it sometimes took days to sort out the true purposes of their visits. Meanwhile, the monks would advise him, as they had advised him about Nat. Fortuna had allies no one suspected.

Fortuna lifted his head and looked at Jabba, so close to his own public bed. He could smell Jabba’s alien, musky sweat in the heat of the