Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (48 page)

“I’ll give it to you at cost, madame,” the vendor said. “Two more of those jewels, for three days’ supply.”

Which still wouldn’t leave her with enough to buy all three children free. But Yarna found that she couldn’t turn her back on the hunter.

“All right,” she snarled, slapping the requisite amount onto the counter. “Give me those cartridges!”

With the precious little container in her hand, she bent over Doallyn, wondering if he’d died while she bargained. That would be a final, searing irony…

But no… he still breathed, if slowly. Slipping the cartridge into his helmet, she triggered it and saw that it was working. Only then did the Askajian stuff her bag back into its place of concealment.

She managed to drag Doallyn off to the side of the shop, into the shade, then sank down beside him. For a long, nearly comatose time she simply existed, not thinking, not feeling… simply breathing in and out.

Yarna was jerked out of her half-trance when Doallyn stirred, then sat up with a groan. His helmeted head turned back and forth, as though he could not - .believe where he found himself. Finally he turned to face her, “You… carried me here?”

“I had to,” Yarna said. “You were unconscious.

Don’t you know that reptiles never die until after sundown?”

The hunter shook his head. “That’s an old tale.”

“Well, it was true enough this time,” Yarna pointed out.

Doallyn had evidently checked the hydron-three gauge inside his helmet.

“Full!” he exclaimed.

Gravely, Yarna reached out and dropped the spare cartridges into his hand. “Here. You’ll need these.”

“Where…” he sputtered. “How…”

Briefly, she explained about how she had come to buy the cartridges.

Doallyn slowly released the catches on his helmet and took it off, holding the cartridge side close to his face so he could inhale the hydron-three when it was released. “You gave up one of your children… for me?” he asked slowly, as though he could not believe what he’d heard.

Yarna shrugged wearily. “I couldn’t stand there and let you die, could I? “

With a quick movement, he reached out and grabbed her hand. “I can’t believe you did that… for me.”

“You saved my life, remember?”

“Well, now we’re even,” he said, and, for the first time since she’d known him, Yarna saw him truly smile. His scarred features brightened; he looked almost handsome. “Yarna… I have a surprise for you.”

“What is it?”

Slowly, with great ceremony, he reached into his tunic and took out five small objects, then held them out to her. “Dragon pearls.

One is worth a fortune.

With these we can buy all your children—and a spaceship to transport them in.”

Yarna stared at the gems, dazzled. “Where did you get them?” she asked finally.

Doallyn pulled his helmet back on, fastened it. “I’ll tell you on the way,” he said. “Let’s go find your children.”

Money, Yarna discovered, was the key to everything in Mos Eisley.

Before moonrise that same night, she and Doallyn had accomplished their goal. Yarna had Luka and Leia in one arm, and Nautag in the other.

She couldn’t believe how they’d grown, and she was even more amazed that they still recognized her. Simply holding her babies in her arms again made the Askajian speechless with joy.

They paused on the street corner across from the Hutt lord’s town house.

“Well, you have them,” Doallyn said. “Now what?”

Yarna stared at him, nonplussed. She had concentrated so hard on reaching this moment that she had no idea what she’d do next. She thought for a moment, and the answer came. “Get off Tatooine,” she announced firmly. “I never want to see this planet again.”

Doallyn nodded his helmeted head. “Very sensible.

My sentiments exactly. After we buy that spaceship, would you… that is, do you think you might like to see Geran? It’s a nice world. You’d like it, I think.”

Yarna considered the question, then a slow smile crossed her face.

“I think that Geran would be a very nice place to go,” she said “Good!” Doallyn said, warmth ringing his voice even through the mechanical filter. “Next stop, the spaceport. I’ve always wanted my own personal ship.”

Yarna nodded, and shifted Nautag, who was squirming restlessly and trying to pull her hair. “The spaceport, then.”

Doallyn stretched out his arms toward Nautag.

“Here. Let me carry him. You have your hands full.”

Yarna nodded, and handed the child over to the hunter. Together, they walked away, and the light of Tatooine’s little moon shone down gently upon the five of them.

Epilogue: Whatever Became Of…?

A After visiting Geran, Yarna and Doallyn decided to live aboard their new spaceship and become free traders, specializing in textiles and gemstones. Whenever they needed extra credits, Yarna moonlighted as a dancer. She performed the Dance of the Seventy Violet Veils at the wedding of Han Solo and Leia Or-gana, where she was spotted by a designer of exotic lingerie and recruited as a model for his line of extravagant jeweled brassieres.

Doallyn managed her new career, taking time out to capture specimens of renowned fierceness for zoos on the worlds they visited.

The cublings showed great aptitude for music and became a swinging jizz trio in the tradition of Max Rebo and his band.

Shortly after leaving Tatooine, Sy Snootles dissolved her partnership with Max Rebo and went solo, releasing two music collections, both of which sold abysmally.

Her career in shambles, unable to find work as a solo act, she joined another jizz-wailer band and is still touring under a variety of pseudonyms.

Max Rebo fell in with the Rebellion shortly after Sy Snootles ended their partnership. He spent the next few years entertaining Rebel forces across the galaxy.

(“The Rebellion has the best food,” he is reported to have said on his entrance paperwork.) Following the death of the Emperor, Max returned to civilian life and currently owns a successful string of restaurants on eight different planets.

Droopy McCool vanished into the Dune Sea and has not been seen since Jabba the Hutt’s death. Some old-timers claim to hear Kitonak pipe music late at night from the farthest, most desolate corners of the deep desert, and some think it may be Droopy and his kind playing their music as they wait for the coming of the Cosmic Egg.

In the confusion that reigned following the disaster on the sail barge, Malakili the rancor keeper released Porcellus the chef from his cell, and the two of them managed to loot sufficient funds from the treasury to open the Crystal Moon restaurant, agreed by all to be the finest in Mos Eisley. The two still operate it in partnership, and its fame has spread through most of the Outer Rim.

Gartogg the Gamorrean guard spent the rest of his life wishing he could have ridden on the sail barge’s last voyage. However, when Ortugg never came back to have him ground up for Jabba food, he tagged along with a small group leaving the palace for Mos Eisley. He still carried his new friends over his shoulders and found that as they journeyed through the desert, the kitchen boy and the monk dried out into firm, lightweight mummies with perpetual smiles. In Mos Eisley he found gainful employment’as an enforcer for a smuggling operation and faithfully took his grinning friends everywhere he went.

Ephant Mon chose to return to his home planet of Vinsioth. The touch of the young Jedi Knight had reawakened the spiritual side of him and he began a religious contemplation of nature, finally founding a new sect that worshiped the Force.

He did, however, still keep just a bit of his snout immersed in the old life, running a “harmless” little scam now and again to finance his sect and build it a very fine temple, indeed.

When J’Quille the Whiphid tried to return to his homeworld of Toola for a little R and R, though, he was informed that the Lady Valarian, inconsolable over his “rejection,” had placed a bounty on his head if he ever left Tatooine. Condemned to a life of sweltering misery, J’Quille returned to Jabba’s palace and joined the B’omarr monks. Exchanging his body for a jar seemed his only chance at surviving Tatooine’s insufferable heat.

Meanwhile, Bib Fortuna found that he did have friends, even as a disembodied brain, next to Tessek and Bubo and several other new “initiates” following Jabba’s fall. Nat spoke to him and eased him through the shock of losing his body, helped him learn to guide a brain walker up and down the corridors, and he and Nat eventually looked like any other pair of disembodied brains held tight against the underbelly of a mechanical spider, taking a stroll together. Passing monks still in their bodies would bow to them as they would to any of the truly enlightened.

But Fortuna still tried to learn what had happened to all the schemes he had put in place. The computers would not respond to the voice that came from his brain jar’s speakers, but he found that he could make his two mechanical forelegs grasp an eating implement, using its handle to enter his private access codes, slowly, punching in one number at a time.

Not all of the codes had been erased, not the secret ones. If an embodied monk approached, Fortuna would drop the teaspoon and amble about the corridor till the monk had passed, then sweep the walker’s legs about the stone floor, listening for the teaspoon so he could find it and pick it up and start again. Of the day’s annoyances, these, he often thought. That I had to drop the teaspoon eighteen times. He checked his accounts and found that many secret ones, the ones under different names, were intact and growing in interest. He possessed a fortune. He sent replies to his former associates—and sentence by sentence, word by word, they learned what had happened. One said he would come to rescue him.

Eventually the monks would let him and Nat walk outside the palace during the Tatooine evenings, and one day rescue would come, and they would leave Tessek and Bubo and all the others behind. He and Nat would find the cloners, obtain new bodies: young and strong and perfect.

Fortuna hoped, if the monks knew what he and Nat planned, as seemed likely, that they would find it in their hearts to let them go.

Deprived permanently of Jabba’s soup in the explosion of the sail barge, Dannik Jerriko responded by going on a killing rampage throughout the palace. An Anzat who had always prided himself on self-control and elegance, he now was stripped of both by his outrage at losing Jabba.

Never before hadJerriko. failed to drink an entity’s soup. His reputation forever tarnished, he became a wanted entity himself, and his name now tops the list of such bounty hunters as have worked for Jabba and others.

The predator is now the prey.

And, of course, both Boba Fett and Mara Jade kept themselves very, very busy… but those are other stories entirely.

About the Authors

novels Darksaber and the Jedi Academy Trilogy, cowritten the Young Adult series YOUNG JEDI KNIGHTS with his wife, Rebecca Moesta, cowritten the comic series for Dark Horse comics, as well as non-STAR WARS science fiction novels Climbing Olympus and Blindfold, and collaborations with Doug Beason, I’ll Wind and Virtual Destruction. He maintains a monthly spreadsheet working on.

M. SHAYNE BELL’s novel, Nicoji (Baen Books, 1991), is currently being translated into Spanish. His second novel, Inuit, was published by Harcourt Brace in 1995. He edited the anthology Washed by a Wave of Wind: Science Fiction from the Corridor (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993), for which he received an AML award for editorial excellence. His short fiction has appeared in many science fiction magazines and anthologies, including Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina and Tales of the Bounty Hunters (forthcoming). He grew up on a ranch in Idaho, spent two years as a missionary in Silo Paulo, Brazil, and has spent weeks hiking around the Utah desert finding the abandoned cities of the Anasazi. In 1995 he plans to climb Kilimanjaro in Africa.

JOHN GREGORY BETANCOURT is the author of quite a few novels, including a collaborative fantasy with editor Kevin J. Anderson, Born of Elven Blood. Lately he has been having fun returning to favorite childhood places, working on Batman, Spider-Man, Riverworld, and STAR TREK books and short stories for a wide variety of publishing companies. His own work can be found in such novels as The Blind Archer, Johnny Zed, and Rememory. John also runs a publishing company called the Wildside Press with his wife, Kim. They were nominated for a special World Fantasy Award in 1993 for their publishing activities.

MARK BUDZ, newly transplanted to Watsonville, California, is putting down roots near the artichoke fields along the beautiful Monterey Bay. In his spare time, he works as the managing editor and advertising director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Bulletin. His short fiction has appeared in F&SF, Amazing, Pulphouse, Writers of the Future Vol. VIII, Quick Chills II, Rat Tales, and Science Fiction Review.

A. C. CRISPIN is the author of four STAR TREK novels, including the recent best-selling Sarek. She is the creator, author, and coauthor of the STAR-BRIDGE series: StarBridge, Silent Dances, Shadow World, Serpent’s Gift, and Silent Songs (Ace Books). In addition, she has coauthored two fantasy novels with Andre Norton: Gryphon’s Eyrie and Songsmith (Tor Books). One of her short stories recently appeared in Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina. His. Crispin is a frequent guest at STAR TREK and science fiction conventions, where she often teaches writers’ workshops. A Maryland resident, she lives with her teenage son Jason, two horses, and three cats.

DAN’L DANEHY-OAKES is a typical SF writer: too bright to work in a McDonald’s, not bright enough to be a real scientist, and physically unfit, he took refuge at an early age in vivid fantasy life. “Shaara and the Sarlacc” is his vengeance on Certain Persons. You know who you are.

GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER won the Nebula Award in 1988 for his novelette “Schrodinger’s Kitten,” though he is perhaps best known for his humorous work. He lives in New Orleans. Living in the Watsonville, California, wilderness amid lettuce, strawberries, apples, ollalie berries, and an occasional zucchini, MARINA FITCH plays with children for fun and profit. Currently at work on a novel, she has published short fiction in F&SF, Asimov, Pulphouse Hardback, MZB, and Writers of the Future Vol. II.