Star Wars_ Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin J. Anderson [74]
He nudged a toggle on the control board of his desk. A human deputy in a rumpled uniform came in and showed the three females out. Trevagg could sense the man’s pity for them, and also, much to Trevagg’s disgust, the fact that the human found the insubstantial creatures physically attractive, even sexually interesting.
Of course, Trevagg had always had difficulty understanding how humans found each other sexually interesting. Wan, flabby, squishy, they lacked both the Gotal ability to transmit a range of emotional waves, and the contrast between strength and weakness so necessary to pleasure. How could anyone …?
He shrugged, and turned back to his desk to tap through a call. Behind him he heard a step on the threshold, felt the heat of a body—no closer than the threshold, and human range—and recognized the electromagnetic aura as that of Predne Balu, Assistant Security Officer of Mos Eisley. Felt too like a smoky darkness the man’s weariness, the bitter tang of his disgust.
“You couldn’t have let her have another month?” Balu’s raspy voice sounded tired. The heat of the Tatooine suns seemed to have long ago baked out of Balu the savagery, the enthusiasms so necessary to a hunter. Trevagg despised him.
“She’s had two. Water’s expensive to import.”
A message flickered across the black screen of the receiver: PYLOKAM 1130. Trevagg moved a finger and the pixels wiped themselves away as if they had never been. He turned in his chair, to face Balu: a heavy man, slope-shouldered in his wrinkled dark blue uniform, hair black, eyes black, but the pitiful stubble of what humans called beard was thickly shot with gray. A head like a melon. Trevagg never could look at humans without feeling contempt and a little amusement. He knew they had other types of sensory organs than head cones, but even after many years on the space lanes—as bounty hunter, Imperial bodyguard, and officer of ship security—Trevagg had never gotten over how silly, how ineffectual, beings looked who didn’t have cones. On Antar Four, though everyone knew in their heart of hearts that the size of one’s cones didn’t affect their ability to pick up sensory vibration, Gotals whose cones were undeveloped frequently resorted to falsies.
He simply, instinctively, had no respect for a being without them.
“Be ready with your deputy to close the water lines to her compound tomorrow.”
Balu’s mouth tightened under heavy cheeks, but he nodded.
“I’m going out. I should be back within the hour.”
Walking through the marketplace of Mos Eisley always filled Trevagg with a sense close to intoxication. A hunter by upbringing as well as by blood, he had quickly found his current position as a tax official a disappointment. What had been represented to him as an opportunity for acquiring vast quantities of credits had turned out to be little more than a clerical stint.
Yet he sensed, he knew, that there were credits here to be made.
In the marketplace of Mos Eisley, the hunter stirred again in his blood.
Awnings flapped overhead in the baked breeze, the solar coats casting black rectangles of hard shadow, the cheaper cotton and rag staining the faces of those beneath them with red and blue light. The harsh sizzle of bantha burgers and much-used fritter grease swirled from a hundred little stands wherever some enterprising Jawa or Whiphid could find room to set up a solar-power stove. Races from every corner of the galaxy wandered the banded shadows of this makeshift labyrinth. In one place a corpse-faced Durosian was holding up strings of opaline “sand pearls” and sun-stained blue glass for a couple of inquisitive human tourists; in another, a nearly nude Gamorrean belly dancer was performing on a yellow-striped blanket to the appreciative whistles of a couple of Sullustans, who were among the many