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“One Merenzane Gold, point five credits.”

I dropped the half-credit coin on the bartop, and waited while he refilled my drink. Merenzane Gold is a sweet, subtle concoction, with many thousands of years of brewing tradition behind it. A single bottle goes for well upward of a hundred credits, depending on vintage.

I took a sip of my drink and smiled again. Proper. You could use it to clean thruster tubes, except it might melt the shielding. I wandered over to my favorite booth, as far away from the bandstand as I could get, and settled in with my ear plugs for the day.

I was the first customer in the door that morning. I could barely remember a time when I had not been.

Tatooine is a nasty, useless little planet. The only noteworthy things about it are Jabba, and the pilots it produces year after year. I don’t have any idea why Jabba picked Tatooine as a base; maybe because it’s so far from the Core that the Empire is less likely to bother him here. Doesn’t matter, really.

As for the pilots, well, Tatooine’s a desert, filled with moisture farmers north to south. A single farm takes up so much space that to visit with one another they must travel long distance by speedster; their children learn to fly at an early age. On most Tatooine farms it would take you a day to walk from one end to the other, and you’d likely die of thirst first.

I hate Tatooine. I’m still not sure why I stayed here. It was a temporary thing, I recall that. I was following Maxa Jandovar, the great—well, for a human, great—vandfillist. I kept missing her. She was one of the half-dozen surviving artists I hadn’t seen live who was worth seeing. I spent half a decade following her around through the outback, hitting planet after planet weeks or days or, in one instance that gave me ample opportunity to demonstrate Grace, a mere half day after she’d left. She didn’t leave an agenda; she couldn’t, very well. The Empire wouldn’t go to the trouble of hunting her, but if she’d announced where she was going next, she’d certainly have found a squad of stormtroopers waiting for her at the spaceport when she arrived.

The Empire doesn’t trust artists. Particularly the great ones. Politics does not interest them, and they persist in speaking the truth when it is inconvenient.

They arrested Maxa Jandovar on Morvogodine. She died in custody. I was on Tatooine when I got the news, getting ready to head to Morvogodine.

Somehow I ended up staying.

Nightlily, the H’nemthe sitting down at the end of the bar, looked bored and horny. I felt sorry for someone.

“Hey, Wuher!”

Wuher looked at me from down the length of the bar. “Yeah?”

“Universal Truth Number One: You should never say ‘Well, why don’t you bite my head off?’ to a female H’nemthe who is bigger than you are.”

He didn’t smile. Jerk.

In the booth next to mine, two humans were trying to talk a Moorin merc into helping them rob a bar over on the other side of Mos Eisley; I made a note to myself to call the bar’s owner and sell him a warning about the men. Not that it looked as if the Moorin were going to help them; only one of the humans spoke the merc’s language, his accent was horrific, and his syntax was occasionally hysterical. I could see the merc struggling to take them seriously. At one point the merc, Obron Mettlo, growled at them that he was a soldier, a fighter; he mentioned some of the battles he’d fought in. I’d actually heard of most of them—if he wasn’t lying, he was a serious professional.

“Hey, Wuher!”

Wuher looked at me from down the length of the bar. “Yeah?”

“What do you call someone who speaks three languages?”

“Trilingual.”

“Someone who speaks two languages?”

“Bilingual.”

“Someone who speaks one language?”

He puzzled at it a second. “Monolingual?”

“Human.”

He almost smiled before he caught himself.

The day passed slowly. They tend to. I drank enough to keep the world slightly out of focus, and waited for the suns to set. I moved around a bit, sat at the bar a few times, looking for conversation; I even bought two drinks for an off-duty stormtrooper, slumming. Wasted;