Star Wars_ Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin J. Anderson [123]
It has been a long time. There have been countless other employers in all sectors of the galaxy, but Jabba is … memorable. Perhaps it is time I sought a second assignment; there are always failed assassins the Hutt wants killed. He does not suffer incompetence.
I consider for a moment what it would be like to drink his soup … but Jabba is well guarded, and even an Anzat might find it difficult to locate within the massy corpulence the proper orifices into which to insert proboscii.
I shut my hand upon the glass and feel the bite of ice. On Tatooine, such is luxury. It is not soup, in no way, but worth anticipation. Even as the bartender turns away to bellow rudely at two droid-accompanied humans stopped by the detector, I sip slowly, savoring the water.
Spirits muddle the mind, slow the body, nourish nothing but weakness. Anzati avoid such things, even as we avoid joydrugs and synthetics. What is natural is best, even to the soup. There is strength in what is pure.
There is weakness in vice—and I, after all, should know. In the freedom of my lifestyle there is also captivity. There are no bars, no mesh, no energy fields, no containment capsules. There is instead an imprisonment more insidious than such things, and as distasteful to an Anzat as soup drunk from a coward.
I drank tainted soup from a tainted man, and assimilated his vice: the daily need for a proscribed but oft-smuggled offworld substance known as nic-i-tain, its vector named t’bac.
I am Dannik Jerikko. Anzat, of the Anzati, and Eater of Luck.
But I never said I was perfect.
It blows up quickly enough—a Tatooine sandstorm from the heart of the Dune Sea—as bar confrontations do. I pay it no attention beyond air-scenting for promise; it is there, but muted. I take my time preparing my pipe—there is comfort in ritual, satisfaction in preliminaries—set the mouthpiece between my teeth, then draw in t’bac smoke deeply. It is a despicable habit, but one that even I have been unable to break.
Behind me, music wails. Chalmun has hired a band since my last visit. It is appropriate music for a cantina dim as desert dusk. Through the malodorous fug of smoke and sweat, the whining melody waxes and wanes, insidious as dune dust.
—soup—
I turn, exhaling evenly; in cheek pockets, proboscii twitch.
—soup—
A flare, abrupt and unshielded, wholly raw and unrefined. It takes me but an instant to mark it, to mark the entity: human, and young. Fear, defiance, apprehension; a trace of brittle courage—ah, but he is too young, too inexperienced. Despite the stubborn jut of his jaw, the flash of defiance in blue eyes, he has not lived long enough to know what he risked. He is as yet unripe.
The young know nothing of life, nothing of its dangers, its small and large hostilities. They know only of the moment, blind to possibilities; it is not courage in the young, only the folly of youth. In males it is worse: a bantha-headed intransigence mixed with hormonal imbalance. Their soup is immature and wholly unsatisfying. It is better to let them ripen.
I draw in smoke, hold it, exhale. In the small moment of such activity the confrontation worsens. Two entities now challenge the boy: human and Aqualish. It is bar belligerence, born of drink and insecurity; a foolish attempt to establish dominance over a raw boy whose inexperience promises shallow entertainment for those amused by such things. A scuffle ensues, as always; the boy is swiped away to crash against a table.
Behind it the music stops, cut off in mid-wail. It tells me much of the band members: Clearly they are unaccustomed to such places as Chalmun’s cantina, or they would know never to stop. Experienced musicians would play a counterpoint to the shouts, the shrieks, the squalls, using the cacophony, no matter how atonal, to build a new melody.
Then a wholly unexpected sound is born, a sound such as I have not