Star Wars_ Tales From Jabba's Palace - Kevin J. Anderson [93]
But Jabba would die soon.
Fortuna’s preparations were nearly complete: securing the final sets of codes to Jabba’s scattered bank accounts, testing the loyalty of the last few he needed to stand by him during the coup. He had little left to do. But besides his own plot, Fortuna knew of fourteen others against Jabba’s life, plots he would not stop now. It was always wise to make contingency plans, and he had fourteen sets of plotters doing just that for him. He would simply watch them, and guide them where possible. He hoped he would beat the others and actually have the pleasure of murdering Jabba, but it did not much matter to him, as long as it got done at roughly the correct time. However Jabba’s death came about, Fortuna would end up in charge. He would control the bulk of the fortune.
Some plots were quite entertaining: the Anzati assassin, for instance, in the pay of both Lady Valarian and Eugene Talmont, the Imperial prefect—an amusing confusion of patrons for that assassin. There was Tessek, a fussy little Quarren Jabba wanted killed, who himself plotted to kill Jabba. A simple plot Fortuna favored was that of a kitchen boy who had planned to poison Jabba because several years earlier Jabba had fed his brother to the rancor after a sauce failed. So many here hated Jabba, and Jabba relished their hatred—one of his many great mistakes, Fortuna thought. Jabba believed his acts of cruelty made beings everywhere fear him, and he thought fear protected him. But fear endured for days and months and years turns to hatred. Hatred spawns plots for revenge. Fortuna planned to run things differently.
He lay back and smiled to himself. Fourteen assassination plots—and beyond that, sixty-eight plots to rob the palace. There was no end to the plotting.
Of the day’s other annoyances, these, he continued. That he had found it necessary to watch Nat’s body be destroyed. That he had had to threaten the monks to get them to remove Nat’s brain. That the delivery of two-headed effrikim worms Jabba favored on hot mornings—and whose endorphins induced hours of drowsiness—had not come in, again, thus making the constant supply of other diversions necessary: dancers, liquor, spice. Annoyances, all of them—a day of annoyances.
But of them all, the greatest—the chief annoyance—was that Jabba still lived.
The rancor roared in the pit and banged against the walls of its cage. No one stirred.
Those were common sounds.
The surgeons assured Fortuna that “brain swapping” was possible but rarely tried—and then only when the galaxy needed an embodied spiritual guide and there hadn’t been time for one to be born and raised up. In those times, the monks would choose a healthy acolyte and one of the enlightened, and surgeons would swap the brains. Fortuna felt confident that he could force the monks to perform the procedure for Nat.
Fortuna talked to Nat’s brain every day, sometimes twice a day, and after two weeks, some lights glowed green and blue. But at least one always glowed bright red: panic was always there in Nat, and it had probably been there too long. The brain was unstable. The monks thought Nat partially insane: he would imagine, for days at a time, that he was blindfolded, his body tied down, and that Fortuna and the monks wouldn’t let him up—that he was still in his body. Fortuna once asked him why, if he were just tied down, he couldn’t feel his body—and all the lights suddenly glowed red.
“Fit him in a brain walker,” he told the monks. “Maybe if he can walk around he will become more sane.”
It took Nat days to learn to make the walker move, and his walker was forever stumbling into walls or Fortuna or the monks. Fortuna was afraid he would break his brain jar open, but the monks assured him the jar would not break easily. Nat tried to follow Fortuna wherever he went, and the monks would