Star Wars_ Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin J. Anderson [68]
Wuher had been abandoned on Mos Eisley in early youth, a human amidst peoples who disliked humans. He’d been kicked about and spat upon all his squalid, hard life. His boss hated droids essentially because they didn’t drink and thus took up necessary room in the cantina that might be occupied by paying customers. Wuher hated everyone, but droids were the only creatures he could actually kick with impunity.
He was a bulky, middle-aged man, Wuher, with a constant late-afternoon-shadow beard, dark bags under his eyes, and a surly attitude from the top of his greasy head to the depths of his low stony voice. His eyes were hard and dark, and it was impossible to see anything but quotidian amoral stoicism in them. However, a small fire flickered in his heart, a dream that he kept alive with hard work through years of drudgery. At night, shuffling back to his grimy hovel, often as not a little tipsy from his own spirits, Wuher would gaze up at the night stars in the blessed cool and it would seem possible to actually reach up and touch them, possible to live out his fantasy.
Perhaps then, when that dream was achieved, he would no longer have to kick helpless, imploring droids to bolster his own pathetic self-esteem. Perhaps then he could give something to lesser creatures than he.
The lumpy mushroom shape of the cantina billowed before him. Wuher stumped around to the rear entrance. He took out his ID card, unlocked a door, and walked carefully down dark steps. He turned on lights. It was not dank down here in the cellar. There were no dank basements on a world like Tatooine. However, a dry, earthy smell was the foundation for all the other scents that fought for attention here, smells that hung upon the rows of laboratory equipment, barrels and tanks and vats that rose from tables and the floor like ridges of metal, plastic, and glass mold.
Chalmun imported a minimum of drinking materials, the cheap bastard. The rest of what the Mos Eisley Cantina served was either made in the city, or down here.
Wuher had little time. His shift topside started soon. Nonetheless an urgent sense drove him to a small alcove in the rear section, a portion of the large basement where the other employees seldom ventured. He turned on a small light there, revealing a machine consisting of coils, tubings, dials, and glass beakers. In the largest of these beakers, a small amount of dark green fluid had collected. Wuher examined the dials detailing gravity and chemical composition. A kind of acrid effluvia hung over the enclosure, like moldy socks. Sweet music to Wuher’s nostrils! And the dials and digital readouts—why, they displayed almost exactly the ratios of contents that Wuher had calculated was necessary. A shiver of excitement passed over him. This could be the stuff. His elixir! His perfect liqueur, suited expressly to the biochemical taste buds of no less a personage than Jabba the Hutt, for all intents and purposes lord and slave master of the criminal element of Tatooine.
Wuher contained his trembles, took a deep breath, and found a sterile dropper tube. He lifted the stopper of the beaker, inserted the tube, and sucked up a minuscule amount. Carefully, he withdrew the jade treasure.
Ah! If this distillation was the right stuff, the drink that Jabba the Hutt deemed to be the perfect liqueur, then what else could Jabba do but name him his own personal bartender, distiller, brewer, winemaster? Thus elevated in position, the lowly Wuher might gain reputation and monies that would allow him to ship off this anal juncture of a desert snotworld to some bright, pristine bar on a paradisal planet.
Wuher brought the tube toward his mouth.