“Bootop!” the miner bellowed at the aborigine, while his companions chortled among themselves. “Bootop, ves?”
Its head twitching in what seemed to be an unnatural action, the whining, pleading alien stared up at the man, wiping the blood from its face. “Vickerman, vickerman?”
“Yeah, vickerman,” the miner admitted, tiring of the game a little. “Bootop.”
Without further prompting the native dropped on its belly. An unexpectedly long, snake-like tongue darted out and began to lick the grime and mud from the man’s boots.
“I’m going to be sick,” Luke whispered, barely audible. The Princess merely shrugged.
“We have our devils and our angels, Luke. You have to be ready to handle both.”
When she looked back to the bar the native had finished its demeaning task and was holding up cupped hands anxiously. “Tend vickerman, now, now?”
“Yeah, sure,” the miner said. Reaching onto the bar he picked up an oddly formed bottle and touched a button on its side. Part of the bottle’s upper section filled with a dark liquid. It stopped filling with a click.
Turning to face the expectant native, the miner tilted the bottle over, spilling the thick red liquor onto the floor instead of in the cupped hands. While the men and women at the bar enjoyed their final laugh at the poor creature’s expense, it dropped to a prone position and that amazing tongue flicked in and out like a frog’s, to lap up the liquor before it retreated into cracks and depressions in the floor.
Unable to watch further, Luke let his curious gaze wander around the large, smoke-filled chamber. Now he saw more of the green-furred bipeds moving about. Many were begging with an air of frantic hopefulness, others engaged in performing some menial task.
“I don’t recognize this race.”
“Neither do I,” the Princess admitted. “They must be native to this world. The Empire isn’t noted for the gentleness with which it treats non-allied aborigines.”
Luke was about to comment, but she made a quieting gesture. The attendant had arrived with their food.
The meat had a peculiar color, the vegetables more so. But everything was hot and of good flavor. Three spigots emerged flower-like from the center of their table. Filling his glass from one, he sampled the contents expectantly. “Not bad.”
Meanwhile the Princess tasted her meat gingerly. Her mouth wrinkled as she chewed, swallowed. “Not what I’d order if I had a choice …”
“We don’t,” Luke pointed out.
“No … we don’t. We …” She stopped, staring, and Luke turned to look behind him.
The attendant was still standing there, watching her. As soon as he noticed her looking back at him, he turned and walked away.
“You think he suspects?” she murmured worriedly.
“How could he? Your clothes are right, even I wouldn’t recognize you.”
Partly reassured, Leia bent over her plate and resumed eating.
“Look, over there,” she said. Luke turned, glanced furtively in the indicated direction.
The attendant was talking with a tall, urbane man dressed in the uniform of an Imperial civil servant.
“They do suspect!” she whispered tightly. She started to stand. “I’ve had enough, Luke. Let’s get out of here.”
“We can’t rush off, especially if we’re being watched,” he countered. “Don’t panic, Princess.”
“I said I’m leaving, Luke.” Nervous, she started to turn and leave.
Without realizing what he was doing, he reached out, slapped her hard across the face, and as heads turned in their direction said loudly, “No favors for you until I’m finished eating!”
One hand went to her burning cheek. Wide-eyed and voiceless, the Princess slowly sat back down. Luke frantically attacked his steak as the uniformed Imperial sauntered over to them, backed by the attendant at a discreet distance.
“If there’s some trouble …” he began.
“No, no trouble,” Luke assured him, forcing a smile. The man didn’t leave. “Can I help you, maybe?”
“Not you. It’s clear what you are, miner.” The bureaucrat’s oily gaze shifted to Leia. “I’m more curious about your companion here.” Leia didn’t look up at him.
“Why?” Luke wondered cheerfully. “What’s the problem?”
“Well, she dresses a little like a miner,” the man said, “but as Elarles here,” and he indicated the attendant, “noted, her hands would seem to indicate some other profession.”
With a start, Luke also noticed the Princess’ hands: soft, pale, uncalloused, clearly the hands of anyone but a manual worker. Luke’s years on his uncle’s farm had equipped his body, including his hands, to play the role of simple miner, but Princess Organa had probably spent her time handling only booktapes, never an excavator or pitter.
He thought furiously. “No, she’s … uh, I bought her.” Leia twitched, stared at him a moment before returning resolutely to her food. “Yes, she’s a servant of mine. Spent all my earnings on her.” He tried to sound indifferent, shrugged as he returned to his eating. “She’s not much, of course.” Her shoulders shook. “But she was the best I could afford. And she’s kind of amusing to have around, though she tends to get out of line at times and I have to slap her down.”
The bureaucrat nodded understandingly, smiled for the first time. “I sympathize, young man. Sorry to interrupt your meal.”
“No bother,” Luke called as the man returned to his own table.
The Princess glared up at him. “You enjoyed that, didn’t you?”
“No, of course not. I had to do it, to save us.”
She rubbed her cheek. “And that servant-girl story?”
“It was the first logical thing I could think of,” he insisted. “Besides, it explains you as well as anything could.” He sounded pleased. “No one will question you once the word gets around.”
“Gets around?” She rose. “If you think, Luke Skywalker, that I’m going to act as your servant until—”
“Hey, honey … you okay?” a new voice inquired. Luke looked at the old woman who’d appeared next to the Princess. Placing a firm hand on the Princess’ shoulder, she exerted a gentle but unyielding pressure. Still slightly stunned, the Princess sat down slowly.
Luke eyed the woman warily as she pulled a chair up to their table. “We haven’t met. And I don’t remember inviting you to join us. So if you’ll just leave my servant and me alone.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t bother you two, boy,” the woman insisted in a tone suggesting subtly that she knew something they didn’t. She jerked her head toward the Princess.
“Ain’t surprised we haven’t met before. You two are strangers here, ain’t you?”
That statement seemed to snap the Princess out of her paralysis. She gave the old woman a startled stare, then looked away … anywhere but at those knowing, accusing eyes.
“What makes you say a ridiculous thing like that?” Luke stammered.
She leaned conspiratorially close. “Old Halla has a pretty good eye for faces. You’re not residents of this town and I ain’t seen you in none of the other four. Sick and decrepit as this world is, I know all the sickies and decrepits inhabiting it. You’re new to me.”
“We … we came in on the last ship,” Luke alibied blindly.
She grinned at him, unimpressed. “Did you now? Tryin’ to fool old Halla, ain’t you? No, don’t look so frightened, boy and girl. Your face is turnin’ white as the inside of a trooper’s belly. So you’re strangers … That’s good, good. I need strangers. I need you to help me.”
The Princess swerved to stare wonderingly at her. “You want us to help you?”
“Surprised, ain’t you?” Halla cackled.
“Help you do what?” Luke queried in confusion.
“Just help,” she said, casually cryptic. “You help me, I help you. And I know you need help, because there are no strangers on this world, and yet you’re here. Want to know how I know you’re strangers?”
She leaned over the table again and wagged a knowing finger at Luke.
“Because, young man, the Force is strong within you.”
Luke smiled sickly at her. “The Force is a superstition, a myth people swear by. It’s used to frighten children.”
“Is that so?” Halla sat back and folded her arms in satisfaction. “Well then, boy, the superstition is strong in you. Much stronger than in anyone else I’ve met on this forsaken scoop of mud.”
Abruptly, Luke was peering closer at her. “What is it, Luke?” the Princess asked, seeing the expression that had come over his face. He ignored her.
“You said your name was Halla.” The woman nodded slowly, once. “You have a little of the Force about you, too.”
“More than a little, sapling,” she argued indignantly. “I am a master of the Force, a master!”
Luke said nothing. “You want proof then?” she went on. “Watch!”
Concentrating hard on a spice shaker in the middle of the table, under one of the spigots, she made it quiver slightly. It bounced once against the table, twice, and moved several centimeters to its left. Sitting back, Halla took a deep breath and wiped the sweat from her brow.
“There, you see? A little of the Force, indeed!”
“I’m convinced,” Luke confessed, with a curious look toward the curious Princess, a look that said he was anything but impressed by such parlor tricks. “You do have a lot of the Force about you.”
“I can do other things when I want to, too,” Halla announced proudly. “Two manipulators of the Force … we’re destined to join hands, eh?”
“I’m not so sure …” the Princess began.
“Don’t worry about me, little pretty,” Halla instructed her. She reached out to touch the Princess’ hand. Leia drew hers away uncertainly. Halla studied her, smiled, grabbed the wrist hard.
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you? You think old Halla’s crazy.”
The Princess shook her head. “No … I didn’t say that. I never said that.”
“Eh, but you thought it, didn’t you?” When Leia didn’t reply, Halla shrugged. If she was offended, she didn’t show it. “No matter, no matter.” She let go of the Princess’ wrist and Leia drew it away slowly, rubbed it with her other hand.
“Why do you want to help us?” Luke inquired firmly. “Assuming just for the sake of discussion that we need any help and that your guesses are right.”
“Just for the sake of discussion, boy,” she mimicked him, “I’ll get to that. Tell me what you need from me.”
“Now look, old woman,” Luke began threateningly.
She wasn’t intimidated. “It won’t work with me, swaddle-clothes. You don’t want it widely advertised that you’re strangers here, do you?” Her voice rose slightly with the last, and Luke made shushing motions at her, glancing around to see if anyone had overheard.
“Okay. Since you know we’re strangers, you know what we need. We have to get off this planet.” The Princess gave him a warning look, but he shook it off.
“No, relax. She does have the Force about her.” He turned back to face the oldster. “Who are you, anyway?”
“Just old Halla,” the woman declared blankly. “And you just want to get off Mimban. You didn’t pick me a simple one, did you.” She frowned slyly. “Say, how did you two get here, anyways? You can’t convince me you came on the regular supply ship.”
“Regular supply ship?” Leia exclaimed. “You mean Circarpous knows about this installation?”
“Now, woman, did I say where the transport was from?” Halla snorted derisively. “The Circarpousians … those provincials! This place is right in their backyard and they don’t know about it. No, the Imperial government operates the mine and the towns direct.”
“We suspected as much,” Luke admitted.
“They monitor space out for many planetary diameters,” Halla went on. “The Circarpousians have a pretty good colony going on Ten. If a ship passes anywhere close by, they shut down everything. The mine, the landing beacon, everything.”
“I think I see why they didn’t detect us,” Luke ventured. Leia put out a restraining hand, looked at him warningly. He shook her off. “Either we trust Halla or we don’t. She already suspects enough to turn us over to the local enforcers anytime she wants to.”
He looked openly at the old woman. “We were traveling from Circarpous X to Four on business.”
“You were coming from the Rebel base on Fourteen, you mean,” Halla corrected him smugly. “So much for trust.” When Luke choked on his reply, she waved it away. “Never mind, boy. The only government I recognize is my own. If I wanted to sell out the Rebels, do you think that base’d still be there?”
Luke forced himself to relax, smiled at her. “We were traveling in a pair of single-seat fighters. If the instrumentation here is standard, it’s not calibrated to recognize anything that small. That must be why there’s been no alarm raised. We got down undetected.”
“Where are your two ships?” Halla asked with concern. “If they’re nearby, they might be found soon.”
Luke made an indifferent gesture in a generally northeast direction. “Out there, somewhere, several days’ walking. That’s if the muck that passes for ground here hasn’t swallowed them up by now.”
Halla gave a gratified snort. “Good! People don’t stray very far from the towns. Not likely they’ll be discovered. How did you manage to land without the field and beacon?”
“Land!” the Princess snapped. “That’s funny. We ran into some kind of field-distortion effect, produced by the energy mining, I’ll bet. It wiped out our on-board instrumentation. I’d expect a ship needs special shielding to pass through an atmosphere affected by that kind of waste energy. It’s a damn good thing we did, though, or we would have set down right on the Imperials’ field,” she finished.
“You see, Halla,” Luke explained. “You have to help us arrange off-world passage.”
“Next to impossible, boy. Think of something else. You’re here illegal, without proper identification. The moment anyone asks you to produce it and you can’t, they’ll dump you in the local lock-tight for questioning. The local head is a mind-ugly-ug named Grammel.” She looked at each of them in turn, solemn. “A good man to avoid.”
“All right,” Luke agreed easily, “then if we can’t leave through normal channels, you’ll have to help us steal a ship.”
For the first time since she’d joined them, Halla sat speechless. “Anything else you’d like, boy?” she finally wondered. “Grammel’s cloak of office, or maybe the Emperor’s Dualities? Steal a ship? You’ve got to be out of your mind, boy.”
“We’re in sound company, then,” the Princess observed with satisfaction.
Halla turned on her. “I’ve had just about enough of you, little pretty. I’m not sure I need your help.”
“Do you have any idea who I am?” the Princess started to tell her. She caught herself just in time. “Not that it matters. What does matter is that you can’t do it, can you?”
Halla started to object but the Princess cut her off challengingly. “Can you?”
“It’s not that I can’t, little pretty,” Halla said carefully. “It’s that the risks involved to make it worthwhile …” She went quiet, finally looked up reluctantly at Luke. “All right, boy and lady. I’ll help you steal your ship.”
Luke looked excitedly over at the Princess, who continued to watch Halla. “On that one condition.”
The Princess nodded knowingly. “What condition?” she inquired formally.
“You help me first.”
“I don’t see that we have much choice,” Luke essayed. “What do you need us to help you with?”
“To find something,” Halla began. “With your knowledge of the Force combined with mine, boy, it should be simple. But it’s something I can’t do alone, and something I can’t trust anybody else with. I know I can trust you, because if you try to cross me, I’ll sell you to Grammel.”
“Sensible,” the Princess noted easily. “You say the task will be simple. What are we supposed to find?”
Halla looked around the table with seriocomic intensity before turning back to them. “I don’t suppose either of you children have ever heard of the Kaiburr crystal?”
“Right so far,” Leia admitted, unimpressed.
“Your ignorance ain’t surprising,” Halla explained. “Only a few people familiar with the exploration of Mimban have heard of it. Circarpousian xenoarcheologists first heard about it on their one and only exploration expedition to this planet. They eventually decided it was a myth, a local tall story concocted by the natives in an attempt to coax more liquor from them. Mostly they forgot about it. But it was in the Imperial records when the mining outfit set up their hole here.
“According to the myth, the crystal is located in the temple of Pomojema. It’s a minor local deity, say the greenies I’ve talked with.”
“All sounds plausible,” Luke was willing to concede. “Where’s the temple?”
“A long haul from here, again according to the native information I’ve been able to piece together,” Halla went on. “This world is rotten with temples. And remember, this Pomojema’s a third-rate god. So nobody’s been too interested in finding his temple-house.”
“Temples, gods, crystals,” the Princess murmured. “Okay, suppose this legendary place does exist,” she hypothesized, jabbing an accusing finger at Halla. “This Kaiburr crystal, just what is it supposed to be … a big gemstone of some kind?”
“Of some kind,” Halla confessed with that sly smile of hers. “Interested in spite of yourself, ain’t you?” The Princess looked away.
“We’re interested in anything that brings us closer to getting off here,” Luke admitted. “I have to say this story of the crystal sounds intriguing on its own. What kind of gem is it?”
“Pfagh! I could care less what kind of necklace it could make for some spoiled noblewoman, boy.” She eyed the Princess meaningfully before continuing. “I’m more interested in a certain property it’s supposed to have.”
“More stories,” the Princess murmured. “How can you be so absolutely convinced, Halla? So certain that the xenoarcheologists weren’t right and that it’s all a native tale?”
Splinter of the Mind's Eye: Star Wars Page 5
