Star Wars: Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambly

  Entertainment, he had long ago deduced, seemed (as far as he could judge) to be based on random mixtures of incongruous elements. Therefore, taking into account the words of the assistant manager of the Wookiee’s Codpiece, he had acquired a concertinium, a set of violion twitch bells capable of activation through one of his chest jacks, and a drum for Artoo. Randomly digitalizing patterns of notes for every one of those thirty thousand songs popular in the Core Worlds over the past seventy-five years for reproduction on these three instruments and recalibrating his voice circuits to reproduce the tones of such luminaries as Framjan Spathen and Razzledy Croom, he was able to produce quite passable music, although Artoo, as a result of the switch boxes and Pure Sabacc’s computer circuits still taped and jacked and wired into him, was a little eccentric as far as the rhythm line was concerned. Threepio was quite proud of the result; and had his audience been sober, he was sure they would have appreciated just how good the entertainment was.

  And indeed, the one individual in the Chug ’n’ Chuck not engaged either in boozing himself into insensibility or behaving toward the opposite sex in a manner usually reserved for one’s honeymoon did applaud Threepio’s rendition of Gayman Neeloid’s “The Sound of Her Wings” and tossed a credit piece into the basket perched, hatlike, on Artoo’s domed cap.

  “Can you play Mondegrene’s Fuge in K?” he asked, naming a classical piece of great antiquity and grandeur, which Threepio had only heard performed by full orchestra with thunder cannons and a dual-spectrum light organ.

  It was one of Threepio’s favorites, the mathematical complexity of it a source of endless delight to his logic circuits. He leaned a little over Artoo’s bass percussion. “In its entirety?” he inquired hopefully.

  His audience, a sturdy little Chadra-Fan whose silky golden fur could have been much improved by a session in one of the spaceport’s grooming parlors had any been open, nodded enthusiastically. He signaled the bartender for a refill on his megavegiton ale. “Do you have it all in your programming?”

  “Hey,” grunted the bartender. “You ain’t playin’ none of that sithfesterin’ classical chunder in here.”

  The Chadra-Fan turned indignantly on his seat, and waved an expansive little paw at the other five patrons of the bar. “You think they’re going to care? All of you!” He raised his voice to a sharp tenor shout. Fifteen assorted eyes focused briefly on him, with a certain degree of effort. “I propose to buy from you all rights to the time and talents of these good musicians for the price of a drink apiece. Done?” He whipped a handful of credits from the sporran at his silken belt, slapped them down on the bar.

  “Festerin’ classical chunder,” groused the barkeep, lumbering back to her ale taps but pocketing the credits.

  The Chadra-Fan signaled Threepio with a peremptory wave of his paw and settled back in his chair, eyes shut, all his silk-fringed nostrils quivering. “Maestro, overwhelm me.”

  The swelling strains of Mondegrene’s Fuge had the effect of emptying the bar of all customers still clearheaded enough to walk, but Threepio didn’t care. Even on the concertinium and twitch bells—with Artoo’s enthusiastic if inaccurate assistance on the drum—the Fuge in K was an intellectual masterpiece, like a closely reasoned philosophical argument, and the transposition to the unfamiliar instruments added, in an odd way, to Threepio’s understanding and appreciation of the complex structure of the piece. The barkeep, with no customers to claim her attention, leaned back against the corner of the bar sucking plug after plug of zwil, listening to the wide-ranging variety with skepticism that, Threepio felt, was slowly turning into something else. Respect, perhaps. Appreciation of his capabilities. Maybe even a dawning enthusiasm for classical music.

  Or maybe not. At the conclusion of the piece she crossed the room to them, hands tucked through the heavy leather of her belt, blue eyes sharp and calculating under their (to Threepio’s mind) excessive maquillage of blue-and-gold paint and all the diamond rings through her snout twinkling in the bar’s intestinal light. She looked down into the basket on Artoo’s cap and said, “Ten creds. You boys ain’t half bad.”

  “Why, thank you, Madame.” Threepio removed the violion jack from his chest so the bells wouldn’t jingle an accompaniment to his speech.

  “Your boss going to be by here later? Maybe he and I could work out a deal of some kind.”

  “Oh, we don’t have a boss, Madame. Our master is …”

  “Now, don’t confuse the poor lady, Threesie.”

  Threepio turned in complete astonishment as the Chadra-Fan—who had at the conclusion of the Fuge in K gone to the doorway to listen to such street noises as were audible above the steady patter of the rain and to sniff at the dark moving air of the coming night—came padding back.

  “Igpek Droon—he’s a buddy of mine on the Antemeridian route—he hates to have even his droids call him ‘boss,’ ” the Chadra-Fan went on, looking up at the barkeep with his sharp little black-coal eyes. “Spent a pile reprogramming every droid on his ship to call him ‘friend’ and ‘comrade.’ He was raised by Agro-Militants—would you believe it?—and he says it’s just sand in his gills to have anything subordinate to him. Has a terrible time whenever he gets a Gamorrean or a Griddek in his crew, spends the whole time arguing with them over what they’re going to call him. I’ll be heading back with these boys …” He slapped Threepio with one hand, Artoo with the other, with a familiarity the protocol droid found more than a little offensive, “… to Pekkie’s ship, just to make sure they get there okay and don’t get picked up.”

  “I beg your pardon,” protested Threepio. “But do I …?”

  “Sure you remember the way,” cut in the Chadra-Fan, and the next moment snapped at him in the meeping, flurrying speech of Chad’s indigenous inhabitants, “Go along with me, you silly pile of tin! You want to end up playing sparkle-bop at this meat market for the next thirty-five years? She’s trying to steal you!”

  Threepio squeaked, “What?” in the tongue in which he had been addressed. “Steal us?”

  The Chadra-Fan rolled his eyes, turned back to the barkeep, and said with a laugh, “Damn technical sticklers, these See-Three units. They’ll give you an argument over which side of the street they’re programmed to walk down. Let’s go, uh—” He glanced quickly and unobtrusively at Artoo’s serial numbers, “Let’s go, Artie. Pekkie said you had to be back before full dark, and it’s close to that now.”

  He put a furry little paw behind Threepio’s golden elbow and tugged, and so disoriented was he that Threepio followed, trying hard to frame his objections to the deception. Artoo rolled obediently in their wake, leaving the barkeep squinting suspiciously after them, fingering her snout rings and twitching her ears.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” said Threepio, once they were in the rain-slick street. “I have reviewed all my files and I can find neither your name nor your likeness in any of my records.”

  “Yarbolk Yemm. Reporter for the TriNebulon News. Not that it’d be in any of your circuits, Threesie—where is your boss?”

  “My counterpart and I are the property of … Artoo, what are you doing?” The little astromech swung sharply around in a ninety-degree turn, banging his golden counterpart with the drum that was still attached, like a mammoth mechanical pregnancy, to his leading surface. Artoo followed up the assault with a trilling obbligato of beeps, tweeps, and wibbles, to the effect that it would not be a particularly good idea to inform a reporter for TriNebulon of their mission, goals, or concerns.

  And there was much, Threepio had to admit, in what he said.

  “Our master is waiting for us on Cybloc XII,” explained Threepio, after considerable thought that fortunately took place so quickly as to make the remark have the promptness of truth. “Through a shipping error my counterpart and I were dispatched to Nim Drovis instead, and we have been unable to get in touch with our master to arrange for our transport. It is vitally important that we rejoin our master with the utmost speed. Hence the regrettabl
e exigency of acquiring sufficient funds by these means.” He gestured to the concertinium, folded into a neat red lacquer box and hanging by its straps from his chest, and to Artoos drum. They stood on one of the myriad little bridges that led from the Old Town to the New, the lightening rain flecking the brown water beneath them and trickling down the two droids’ casings and the Chadra-Fan’s black-wet silk tunic. Across the canal, rising commotion and the sound of shots grew louder, voices shouted orders, feet splashed through the puddles.

  Yarbolk turned his head sharply, long ears twitching; then he looked back at the droids with speculation in his black little shoe-button eyes. “Cybloc XII, eh? There’s been no word out of there in thirty hours, from everything I’ve heard. They sent out two cruisers to deal with the wildcat pirate fleet out of Budpock—the Ithor Lady and the Empyrean. Nobody’s heard word of them, either. Now the talk all around the bars here is that somebody’s supplying the Gopso’o with weapons, and promising them the guard stations on the roads are going to be down—and aren’t they just, tonight? You boys be careful,” he said, pulling up the wet silk hood over his head. “There are laws governing ownership of droids, but I’ve yet to see them enforced, anywhere, and anyway they’re only as good as the last memory flush. There’s any number of people in this town who’d welcome a windfall like a free See-Three unit and an astromech with nobody’s name on them.”

  He fished in his sporran again, and brought out a red-burnished twenty-credit cylinder, which he dropped into the half-full basket of credits on top of Artoo’s cap. “Buy your tickets in a human name—Igpek Droon really is a small-time trader, if you want to use his—and get yourselves out of here. Good luck. Thanks for the music.”

  There was another crescendo of mayhem, closer this time, and with it the bass roar of ion cannons. Yarbolk Yemm shifted to the front of his belt the small recording devices he wore, and scampered off across the bridge in the direction of the noise, a bright, wet little form of pink-and-blue silk and matted fur. A moment later combatants came pouring out of the narrow street visible some twenty meters farther down the canal, a knot of uniformed Drovians, a couple of humans, and a Ho’Din all defending themselves against a much larger contingent of differently uniformed Drovians, whose shaved crania bore long topknots in which random shapes of colored plastic and rubber had been braided—animal totems, Threepio’s programming informed him, and a lively trade item from the larger interplanetary corporations seeking to purchase the bulk protein from the Gopso’o slug ranches.

  “Good gracious!” exclaimed the protocol droid. “Artoo, that’s Captain Solo!”

  Heavily armed and aided by strategic betrayals of the outlying guard stations, the Gopso’o clansmen poured into the town. In the enclaves within Bagsho itself where the Gopso’o lived in low-paid, ill-educated obscurity, they emerged from their foul-water tenements with new weapons in their hands, shouting the names of their murdered ancestors and of the Twenty-Five Personifications of Virtue and firing on their oppressors and anyone they associated with their oppressors.

  “Stinkin’ scumtoes,” growled Sergeant Hral Piksoar, voice nasal and bubbly around the zwil plug because its pincers were fully occupied with the ion cannon it was trying to site. “Well, you better be proud of your handiwork, Solo …”

  “Me proud?” yelped Solo, and flattened behind the corner of an alley wall to return fire. “I never even heard of Nim Drovis until last week!” Down in this district the canals hadn’t been disinfected for weeks. At the sound of voices and the trample of feet, the scummy, rain-pocked waters bulged and surged, and Han could see the molds beginning to emerge, glistening vilely in the dim reflection of streetlamps blocks away.

  “Republic’ll send us troops, they said. No need to have big standing armies. The festerin’ Republic will help out if there’s need. Well, we sent for troops, pal …”

  “Captain Solo had nothing to do with the dispatch of emergency forces,” put in Dr. Oolos severely. He leaned a long viridian arm around the corner and popped off four or five shots at almost complete random—Han guessed the physician had never had a weapon in his hands in his life—and ducked back under a storm of return fire. “There is a plague in the military bases of this sector …”

  “All I know is your festerin’ Republic said they’d be here, and they festerin’ ain’t.” Hral Piksoar cursed as laser fire clipped the back of its rearmost tentacle. “And where have your patrols been that that kind of armament’s gettin’ through, hunh? Those maggot suckers got canister guns, fer the love a’ Truth and Beauty!” It spit a yellowish stream of zwil.

  “Lando!” Han thumbed the toggle on the comlink, keeping a worried eye on the molds creeping toward them in a slobbering orange line. “We’re on our way back. The Gopso’o are overrunning this whole sector. Alert the port guards if they don’t know already and tell ’em we’re coming through. Have the Falcon ready for liftoff the minute we’re on board.”

  “What the blue blazes is goin’ on?” yelled Lando’s distracted voice back. “We already know about the Gopso’o, old buddy, we just got done drivin’ ’em off the docking pads. You better get here in the next ten minutes or there ain’t gonna be liftoff.”

  Solo cursed, and fired a blast of hot plasma at the oncoming molds, which melted in an unbelievably foul-smelling sizzle under the blast itself and kept right on coming. At the head of the alley, Hral Piksoar and its fellow troopers were holding their own, though two were down, Dr. Oolos plastering in synthflesh and cauterizing arteries with grim speed. It would be fairly simple, thought Han, for himself or the long-legged Ho’Din to dash, jump, and spring through the mottled field of advancing molds—they moved in clumps, and an agile human could get through between them if he or she kept moving—leaving the bottom-heavy Drovians behind. By the same token, once they were through the molds and across the canal—there was a ramshackle plank bridge about ten meters farther down—the oncoming Gopso’o would be too slow and heavyset to pursue through the molds.

  His eyes went immediately to the high walls that hemmed them in.

  Since from time immemorial there had never been a day on Nim Drovis without torrential rain, the architecture of Bagsho was of a solid order, heavy stone walls broken by lines of the thick timbers that supported additional floors. Even in these shoddy tenement districts by the Thousand Stinking Ditches, this type of building prevailed, the residents using the round, projecting ends of the floor timbers as fastening points for balconies, plank gardens, and bird traps. Han tore the length of emergency cable from his belt, primed the stubby firing tube, and shot the cable hook upward, to lodge in a timber some five meters down the alley and nearly that distance above the mold-crawling pavement.

  “Can you swing?” he yelled to Hral Piksoar, pointing to the low balcony above the canal bank beyond the advancing molds and close to the plank bridge.

  The sergeant regarded the thin cable with extreme doubt—Drovians averaged twice the weight of moderately sized adult humans—but Han said, “It’s tested at a thousand.”

  “What about my pals?” Hral Piksoar nodded back to the two downed troopers.

  “Are you kidding, Sarge?” said the larger of the two, struggling to sit up. “Between the slime-festering Gopso’o and them molds, believe me, I’ll try it. I got one good tentacle still.”

  At their weight, Drovians are not good acrobats, but by scrambling up a makeshift heap of boards, broken doors, and furniture looted from the ground floor of one of the buildings opening into the alleyway, they could get enough height to make the swing to a low balcony, and thence clamber down and across the plank bridge. There was no problem of them throwing back the weighted end of the cable to the next swinger—Drovian tentacles are like mechanical pistons and with that many different sensory devices on their bodies, their aim is exceptional. Han and Dr. Oolos went last, maintaining cover fire against the Gopso’o who maneuvered, crouching, everywhere on the street outside and on the balconies of the various tenements above street level. It
would only be a matter of time, Han knew, before they made their way through the mazes of alleys and tenements to surround the retreating party; only a matter of time, he reflected dourly, before the masses of advancing molds grew too thick and too insistent to be driven back. Since their first run-in with the Gopso’o, every summons Hral Piksoar had sent out for reinforcements had been met with, “We’ll be there when we can.” A polite euphemism, Han knew, for “You’re on your own, pal.”

  Laser fire skinned the wall above him, tearing his face with burning chips of rock. He aimed for the muzzle flash but didn’t know whether he scored. No body fell from the balcony where it had originated, but no return fire came, either. Behind him, Dr. Oolos yelled, “Solo!”

  The last Drovian had swung to safety. The molds were thick over the street now, churning sluggishly, the whole enclosed seam of the alley rank with oozing digestive acids and with the smoke of charring where the Drovians were forcing them to keep their distance. “Can you make it?” yelled Solo. After the physician had volunteered to escort him back to the docking bay—Solo suspected out of a very real fear that the Drovian troops would abandon him in the event of an attack—he’d hate to see the Ho’Din miss his grip and have the flesh burned off his bones by carnivorous fungi.