Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (27 page)

The Twi’leks would remember what Fortuna had done for them forever.

The names of his ancestors would be honored again.

He would be honored.

But there was work ahead, and he must be ready for it. The time for happy imaginings was past. He called up safeguards in his mind that hid his darkest thoughts and hurried on.

Only one monk waited for him in the council chamber, and he was not sitting in meditation. He paced the floor. “Master Fortuna,” he said.

“We thought you would not come. Your friend is in great danger.”

“What friend?” Fortuna asked. He had no friends.

“Nat Secura. Jabba is about to feed him to the ranCOr.”

Fortuna whirled from the room and rushed back down the passageway.

Jabba hated Nat because he was ugly: Nat had been horribly burned in fires Jabba’s slavers set in Nat’s city to force its inhabitants out and into their nets. His face and body were scarred. His lekku, the head-tails Twi’leks sign with for much of their communication, were nearly burned off. Nat could only communicate with his voice—a terrible handicap, but he was still who he was. Fortuna had found Nat in the rubble of the city and realized what a prize he was: of greater worth than jewels. Feed him to the rancor, indeed!

After Fortuna stopped running, smoothed out his robes, caught his breath, and walked into the throne room, he found this: Nat, bound, flogged, lying facedown on the grille. The rancor roared below him and held its mouth open for Nat’s dripping blood.

The shameful tatters of Nat’s lekku were splayed out above the grate: someone had torn off the head covering Fortuna made Nat wear.

Jabba’s crowd of sycophants and puppets jeered and taunted Nat over their dinners. Jabba’s own hand hovered inches from the button that would open the trapdoor, but when Jabba saw Fortuna he rumbled his deep bass laugh and motioned Fortuna to his throne.

“Nat is so ugly,” Jabba said. “I want to see if the rancor will eat him, or if it will throw him back up at US?”

The rancor would do that. It threw those it found unappetizing against the grille again and again till the body became an unrecognizable pulp the keeper dragged out the next day. The grille was dark with the blood of those the rancor had rejected.

“Then you will miss the sport Nat could provide,” Fortuna said.

“What sport?” Jabba rumbled.

Fortuna was thinking fast, trying to find a way to save Nat. “Nat is a runner,” he said, “and a tumbler.

He could elude the rancor for a time.”

Jabba loved watching such sport through the grille.

Everyone knew it. He moved his hand toward the button.

“But not now,” Fortuna said quickly. “Not after a flogging. Give him two days to recover, then send him to the pit. It will be a great diversion for us all.”

“You betrayed me!” Nat shouted at Fortuna’s back.

“I should never have trusted you. I—” Fortuna raised his hand.

Nat fell silent at once. Fortuna had trained him well, and obedience was an early lesson. “Master?” Fortuna asked Jabba. Jabba hesitated, considering. Fortuna could not take his eyes off Jabba’s hand over the button.

“Two days then,” Jabba said, finally, moving his hand back. “I look forward to it.”

Fortuna called two Gamorrean guards to lift Nat from the grille and drag him down to the dungeons.

Fortuna followed. The guards stopped by the first cell, which was already crowded. “Not there!” Fortuna said. “I will not incarcerate Nat with others who might kill him or maim him to spoilJabba’s fun.

Follow me.”

He led them down the passageway to the farthest cell. It was unoccupied. “Put him in here,” he said.

The guards threw Nat into the cell, slammed and locked the door, and walked grumbling away. Fortuna stood looking through the bars in the door. Nat lay on the stone floor. He would not or could not sit up to look at Fortuna. It made communicating more difficult, since much of what Fortuna wanted to say he could sign with his lekku so no one else would understand.

He did not want to speak aloud for others to overhear. But finally Fortuna did speak four words: “I will save you.”

He turned and walked away—not back to Jabba’s throne room, but down the passageway to the monks.

He knew of just one way to save Nat.

Only then, while walking in the swept passageway of the monks, did Fortuna wonder how they had known that this would happen, when he had not.

Fortuna led the monks’ surgeons to Nat’s cell before dawn of the second day. He wanted the procedure completed well before Jabba ordered Nat thrown to the rancor. “Leave the brain stem so the body will still breathe,” Fortuna said.

“No!” Nat screamed. He realized what the surgeons had come to do.

“Don’t let them take out my brain!”

Fortuna did not worry at all that the other prisoners could hear Nat.

They would try to ignore him, if they could, and hope such horrors would not happen to them. But a Gamorrean guard was hurrying toward them. He did not ask what Fortuna and the surgeons were doing.

“I will tell Jabba that you tortured this prisoner and spoiled the sport, ” he told Fortuna.

“Then I will tell Jabba that since you informed on me, you obviously cannot keep secrets and must be fed to the rancor with Nat.”

The guard snuffled and stepped back. So stupid—so easily manipulated, Fortuna thought. A mistake of Jabba’s, taking these beings as guards.

“Then I will not tell if you will not,” the guard said.

“Be quick about your work.”

He walked away. Fortuna set his blaster to stun and looked at Nat.

“This is the only way I know to save you,” Fortuna signed with his lekku, then he shot Nat through the bars of the door. Nat fell to the floor—but his arms twitched as if, though stunned, he were still trying to pull himself up to fight to save his body.

Fortuna unlocked the cell door and swung it wide.

The surgeons wheeled their squeaking cart in ahead of them.

Fortuna did not follow. He did not want to watch. The sight of gore did not bother him in the slightest, but Fortuna believed it would show a lack of respect for Nat if he stood behind the surgeons to watch them wash Nat’s head and cut into it.

So Fortuna paced in front of the cell, impatient for the surgeons to be done. He remembered finding Nat as a child in the smoking rubble of Nat’s family home on Ryloth. Fortuna had gone there, looking for jewels.

But before he found any, he found Nat in the arms of his mother.

She was conscious.

“You!” she said, from where she lay, unable to get up to defend herself or save her child. “Bib Fortuna— I should have recognized your corrupt hand behind this attack. Only you would bring slavers upon your own people.”

She said his name with such hatred, such loathing, that Fortuna stepped back. Fortuna had been among the first to sell the addictive ryll spice off-world, and thus attract the attention of the Empire to Ryloth.

Twi’leks he thought his friends sat in judgment on him and condemned him to death for bringing slavers and pirates and renegades of all kinds upon them. He escaped. They confiscated his family’s holdings and put a price on his head. He came back for revenge.

He had had that revenge. Seven cities lay in ruin, their people sold into slavery, their riches going, most of it, to Jabba, but some of it, secretly, to Fortuna.

Yet it was not what he had wanted, after all. The demand for ryll spice was greater than he or anyone could have predicted, and it would suck his world dry and destroy it. Fortuna did not hate his own people so utterly. He tried promoting trade in the cheaper, less effective—less lucrative— glitterstim spice from Kessel to divert attention from ryll and Ryloth to no avail: the demand for spice of any kind would tear apart both planets. He had thought the Twi’leks would adapt to life in the wider Empire—Twi’leks always adapted—but events had happened too quickly. They had to be shown the way. Fortuna realized that, and his responsibility to show it to them, when Nat’s mother spoke to him in the rubble of her home. He drew his blaster and stepped back up to her, pointed the blaster at her head.

“Coward,” she said.

He shot her, and she died at once.Shooting her had not been an act of cowardice, he told himself. It had been an act of kindness. He had saved her from the horrors of slavery.

Then Nat moaned.

The child was alive. Fortuna did not shoot him or give him to the slavers. He carried him back to his ship and medical help. He later explained to Jabba that since this was the last son of a great Twi’lek family, it would amuse him to keep Nat for a time. In the years that followed, Fortuna never told Nat he had killed his mother. They planned together how best to save Ryloth from the hell the spice trade and the Empire were turning Ryloth into.

The cell door opened. A surgeon hurried out. He held a brain jar with a brain in it. All the indicator lights at the base of the jar glowed bright red: not a good sign. The lights should have blinked green or blue.

“The brain is screaming,” another surgeon told Fortuna: “If it does not gain control of itself soon, it will go insane and die. That is the way of things.”

Nat was not enlightened. He was not ready to give up the body.

The monks had explained all this to Fortuna, and he had forced them to operate anyway.

There had been no other way to save him. It was done now.

“We will do all we can to help your friend,” another surgeon said.

They left, wheeling their cart ahead of them, its squeaks loud in the dungeons.

Fortuna walked into the cell. Nat’s body lay on the floor. He knelt to examine it. The surgeons had done excellent work: the sutures that closed the skull back up were undetectable except to the closest examination.

The brain stem kept the lungs breathing. The heart still beat.

Fortuna’s own heart raced in his chest.

He would die for this, ifJabba found out before Fortuna could kill Jabba. Fortuna straightened Nat’s robes. He tied a bright red scarf around Nat’s disfigured lekku. He turned the body onto its back and gently brushed the sand from its face. The face was so scarred, tortured.

Then, with a sudden clarity, Fortuna realized why the universe had ordered events this way. Nat had to lose this body. No one on Ryloth would have recognized him. Soon, Fortuna would control Jabba’s vast fortune. He could locate and employ the services of those who practiced the illegal arts of cloning and clone Nat a new and perfect body to put his brain in.

When they returned to Ryloth, Nat would be able to communicate more effectively—if he survived the next few days. Fortuna resolved to go to him later to give him the hope of cloning to hold on to.

Later that morning, when Jabba ordered Nat thrown to the rancor, Fortuna dispatched two guards to drag Nat’s body to the trapdoor in front of Jabba’s throne.

“Nat has fainted from fear,” he told them quietly.

“But he will surely awake on his descent to the rancor.”

They believed him. Much depended on the events of the next few minutes and whether Jabba would accept them.

The guards flung Nat’s body onto the trapdoor and Jabba hit the button at once—as Fortuna had hoped he would. The trapdoor dropped open, and the body plunged down to the rancor’s pit. Jabba’s sycophants crowded around the grille to watch the rancor eat Nat.

Jabba pressed buttons that rolled his throne to the edge so he could see, too.

Nat’s body lay facedown in the sand below. The rancor roared at it, but it did not move.

“Nat won’t run!” Jabba shouted. “Why won’t he run?’?

The rancor seized the body and ate it in three bites.

Blood spattered through the grille onto Fortuna’s hands and robes and face, and the hands and robes and faces of everyone around the pit.

The rancor looked up at them and belched and roared.

BUt everyone in Jabba’s throne room was quiet.

They all expected Jabba to be angry. “Nat must have come to hate you,” Fortuna told Jabba, in the relative silence. “He knew it would please you to see him run, so he would not run.”

Someone laughed. Sy SnOOtles started humming a tune. Max Rebo began pounding his keyboard. And Jabba finally laughed. “He ate him—the rancor ate him. It has no aesthetic sense.” Jabba rolled his throne back to its original position, away from the grille, while the music picked up and palace life returned to normal.

Jabba believed what Fortuna had told him. He never suspected what had just happened. Fortuna walked thoughtfully through the milling crowd of galactic toughs of all species, toughs he hoped to make his people a part of, rubbing at the speckles of Nat’s blood on his hands.

When he could, later that night, Fortuna hurried to the monks and Nat’s brain. He went first to the Great Room of the Enlightened, where the brain jars sat on shelves and the brain walkers waited below them.

One embodied monk was dusting. “Nat would not stop screaming, so we had to move him to a cell of his own,” the monk said. “He was disturbing the enlightened ones.”

The monk led Fortuna to the cell. The brain jar holding Nat’s brain sat alone on a table. All the lights at the base of the jar glowed bright red in the darkness.

The monk lit two candles in niches near the door and left quietly.

Fortuna sat at the table and put his hands on the jar for a time. The brain was a ghastly sight: raw, white in places, suspended in a solution Nat’s blood discolored red. The monks would change the solution daily for three days till there was no more blood and the solution stayed clear.

Fortuna pressed a button at the base of the jar that made it “hear” for the brain. “Nat,” he said, “this was the only way I knew to save you.

Believe me.”

He went on to tell him his plans for cloning, but then another idea came to him. “Perhaps we can find a holding body to put your brain in till we clone a body of your own.”

The more he thought of it, the more Fortuna liked that idea: kidnap someone acceptable, discard the brain, and put Nat’s brain in the body for a time. The sensations of a living, breathing body would surely help keep Nat’s brain sane till it could be put into Nat’s own clone.