Still, as a human woman in a rippling iridescent gown led Kedpin and Anglang Lehet to a comfortable little table and filled two glittering glasses with Cantonican cactus liqueur, it was hard to feel too bad. Kedpin removed the tiny black velvet bag he’d been given at the racetrack from around his neck. He opened it gingerly and carefully poured out the dozen or so shards of precious metal that were his winnings onto the table. A year’s worth of his salary. A year’s worth of his salary sparkling there beside a little bowl of fried seeds. Kedpin had sold vaporators that cost many times that amount, of course, but that was credit wands and computer accounts. This much money-metal in one place just looked so different.
“Put that away, you idiot!” Anglang Lehet said, but Kedpin knew he just was being protective.
“I’ll put it away,” Kedpin said. “As soon as you take your half.”
Kedpin had the great satisfaction of finally seeing Anglang Lehet look shocked. “My…what? This is your money, little man.”
Kedpin shrugged. “I figure we earned it together. So you take half. I won’t take no for an answer.”
Anglang Lehet didn’t protest further. He counted out half the winnings and scooped the sparkling slivers of metal into a some sort of hidden pocket. “You know what? You’re all right, lit—Ked. You’re all right, Ked.”
Kedpin felt his hearts swell with happiness and he knew he’d made the right decision about the money. Despite his bruises, despite everything, he thought that this might just have been the best day of his life.
“I still can’t believe my fathier won!” he said. “I’ve never won anything in my life!”
“What about Vaporator Salesbeing of the Year?” Anglang asked.
Kedpin’s guts began to clench painfully. He had buried the truth about the contest so deep it never surfaced anymore except in dreams. But…it was time to come clean, Kedpin decided. Anglang Lehet was a criminal, a professional liar, yet he was more honest than Kedpin, Kedpin realized with a shudder of shame. Kedpin didn’t know much about friends, but he knew they were supposed to be honest with each other.
“Ummm…Yes, that,” Kedpin began. “Well, I did win Vaporator Salesbeing of the Year, but…well, maybe not exactly by the rules.”
“Oh, really?” Anglang Lehet said, sipping his drink. Kedpin thought the tall alien might be holding back a smile. “Do tell.”
“The contest was rigged, Anglang. It took me decades to realize it, but the facilitators of VaporTech’s contest for Vaporator Salesbeing of the Year rigged things so that the computer that spits out the name of the winner always spat out Laz Lazzaz or some other managerial overseer who hates me. When I realized that, it was like getting punched in the face. One hundred and one years, Anglang. One hundred and one times I filled out my data card to apply for VaporTech’s Vaporator Salesbeing of the Year. I sold the most units. I signed up the most clients. I worked the most days. One hundred and one years and I never had a chance. So…I made a chance.”
“Made a chance, huh?” Anglang took another sip. He was looking at Kedpin differently now.
Kedpin sipped his own drink. It made his eye water pleasantly, and he had to blink a few times before going on. “The computer was old and clunky, and the program they used to cheat was pretty easy to reroute with my name attached. The way I won in front of everyone on the company network, they would have had to reveal their own cheating to expose mine.”
“Your bosses didn’t come stomp you down?”
Kedpin took another sip. The flavor was strange and strong. “You know what’s funny, Anglang? They never mentioned it. But when I was sent off by my Level Three managerial overseer—Laz is his name—he kind of smiled like he knew. Like he was proud of me for cheating. Or relieved. Like it proved something to him, Anglang. Oh…I didn’t like that smile he gave me at all.” Shoklop looked down with shame at his repulsive feet, too large for his little body. “And I don’t like being a cheater. But it wasn’t fair.”
“Beings talk about rules. Beings talk about fair. None of it ever seems to work out, little man,” Anglang observed. “But you’re here, tonight. Here in Canto Bight. Sipping…or in your case slurping Cantonican cactus liqueur. So what will you do now?”
Kedpin had to think about that for a moment. He closed his eye and took a deep breath. “Now?” he said at last, “Now I’m going to enjoy my vacation, darn it.”
—
Anglang Lehet watched as Kedpin Shoklop noisily finished his drink and spilled a thin trickle of it down his rubbery pink body. Shoklop slid determinedly off his barstool and toddled toward the exit of the Blue Wall. Anglang had serious doubts that the squishy little man knew how to get back to the hotel himself, but Shoklop apparently wasn’t going to let that stop him. As he pardon-me’d and oh-excuse-me’d his way out through the crowd, Shoklop teetered, clearly unused to strong drink. But the salesbeing also had now, beneath the oafishness, a boldness in his step. He should have looked comical. And yet, to Anglang at least, he didn’t.
Shoklop had nearly made it to the door when he collided with a Palandag whose exolung made what was supposed to be an exquisite natural music. Anglang had never heard it. There was a weird, beautiful noise now, though, when Shoklop, uttering apologies all the while, somehow managed to press harder against the alien in an awkward effort to squeeze past it. It was like watching a musician apologetically wrestling his instrument.
Well, perhaps he looked a bit comical, Anglang admitted.
Shoklop turned and waved at Anglang one last time before stepping through the Blue Wall’s blue energy field and out onto the street. Anglang waved back at the tougher-than-he-looked little fool, and he couldn’t help but smile. It had been years since Anglang had been reminded how much people could change, and how quickly.
It had happened tonight, and for that he was thankful.
Anglang took a long last sip of Cantonican cactus liqueur. It really was one of the most satisfying things he’d ever tasted. His people’s homeworld was light-years away but this stuff tasted like home.
He wouldn’t be retiring after this job after all. It would take every bit of the winnings Shoklop had shared with him to appease the Old City Boys. Even then, even if he lived, Anglang would be working this botched job off for years. He’d made a stupid, soft-headed mistake, and now he was stuck in Canto Bight. Stuck in the game. But for now, Anglang Lehet would remember this one night when he’d managed to change the rules.
THE GREATEST JOY OF HYPERSPACE is the brilliance of its light. There is a radiance that can never be matched, or even truly described to those who have never seen it. Derla Pidys closes her lower eyes as her ship drops from the glory of hyperspace into orbit above Cantonica. The stars flash into being, dazzling bright in their own right, if not the impossible glory of their hyperspace shadows.
The planet below her is dark, the sky a dizzying web of ships being pulled into place around the curve of the horizon. She presses the trigger for her prearranged docking, and feels the ship shudder around her as the autopilot engages with the beacon. Relaxing into her seat, she adjusts the folds of her sommelier’s robes and allows herself to anticipate the glory that is to come.
Hyperspace cannot be matched, but it can be challenged. And the architects who set the sky above Canto Bight ablaze will never cease their efforts. The legend of the city grows, its seeds planted by moments such as this—and perhaps, to someone with more limited vision than her own, the challenge is a closer one.
Her ship sails smoothly along the beacon’s route. The world curves below her, dark, purposeless Cantonica, and then, in the time it takes for a millitile to vanish into its hidey-hole, the horizon catches fire.
It is the burn of uncounted lights, of beams slashing high into the atmosphere, as if they would sever the stars and take them for their own. It is the rainbow radiance of Canto Bight, the only reason any sensible creature would travel to this otherwise pointless planet. Canto Bight, the city of dreams, the destination of uncounted sentients, all o
f them following one legend or another, most chasing a lie. Derla smiles, wishing she were not on her way to work, so she might toast the brilliance of the story unfolding in front of her.
She is not the only sommelier working this sector, but she is, without question, the best. Any wine merchant and liquor trader can claim her title as their own, if they like; she’s not the one to stop them. What they can’t claim is her peerless skill, her ability to assess the quality of any alcoholic beverage from a single sip. Nor can they claim her track record. Despite peddling her wares to representatives from dozens of species, she has never been the source of an accidental poisoning. It is a point of pride, and part of what has grown her reputation—her legend—to its current heights. She is a sommelier. She is the sommelier, the one to call when everything must be perfect.
Arriving on the dark side of the world merely for the sake of this moment is a small indulgence. It wastes time, which is the only resource more limited than wine itself. But the time is hers to waste. Time that is never spent in any frivolous way will turn to vinegar even as wine does, as wasted as too much time spent heedlessly. Balance in all things.
She could never live here—the costs, in every sense, are simply too high—but there is a sweetness to the lie of Canto Bight that sings to her sommelier’s soul. It began, as most beautiful things do, with money, with ambition, and with deceit. “Come to Canto Bight, the greatest city of pleasures the galaxy has ever known,” they cried, and if they lied in the beginning, the ones who carry the cry now are telling the complete and utter truth. They crafted reality out of story.
Derla respects that. She has carried wines that her more sophisticated customers would consider little better than vinegar to backward farming planets where the names on their labels and the scent of distance clinging to their corks rendered them the finest vintages anyone had ever seen. She has taken the wines of those same worlds—common, ordinary things to the gawping farmers who press the grapes in their basements, who bottle their own harvests simply for the sake of having something to wash the dust away—and sold them for profits that would stun their vintners into silence. It is the story that moves the bottle, as much as the taste of what’s within.
This came from a city so far away and famous that its name would burn your uncultured tongue if you tried to speak it, she says, and hands reach out to grasp the glass, currency spilling from their palms.
This was crafted by simple farmers, aged on a world untouched by modern notions, as pure as the Force itself, she says, and people who would never step foot on that world’s soil stumble over themselves to claim it first.
Everything is the legend. Everything is the lie. She sells good wine, yes, sweet wine from the frozen vineyards of Orto Plutonia, bitter, astringent, cleansing wine from the drowned fields of Naboo. She sells vintages worth drinking. But more than that, she sells the sour, virtually undrinkable wine that comes from Naboo’s native fruits, bottled in the air by human vintners who say that Gungan wine will never compare. She sells the faintly poisonous wine of Alaspin and the overly potent wine brewed by the Yuzzum of the forest moon of Endor, which can be safely consumed only when mixed with the simpler, sweeter wine of their Ewok neighbors. She sells dreams, the idea of the galaxy in a single cellar, ready to be sipped and savored. She gives them what they ask for, nothing more and nothing less. Never mind that most of her customers will never crack a single seal on their purchases.
She is lovely, by the standards of her own kind, which makes her hideous to so many others: trading on personal beauty is not something to be done lightly. Her head is bulbous and heavy, with no visible nose. Instead, a single wide mouth sits at its center, anchored by two pairs of eyes, one above and one below. Her body is much like a human woman’s, a small piece of convergent evolution that has always amused and delighted her. Their faces are so flat and hideous, their eyes so small, and yet she looks so like them! What a fabulous galaxy this is. What a delightful story.
Canto Bight spreads out beneath her, and her prepaid docking port opens its doors to welcome her. Derla closes her upper eyes and hums softly. There is so much good work yet to be done, and so many good stories yet to be bought and sold. Tonight, in Canto Bight, she may acquire the best one ever.
“HELLO, YES, HELLO,” SAYS ONE of the solemn-eyed sisters, staring raptly at the woman unlucky enough to be stationed at the front desk of their hotel. The other sister is brushing her fingertips against the petals of the decorative bromeliad that grows along the wall, watching raptly as its petals curl and bend away from her.
They are identical save for the cut of their clothes, with features as white as bleached coral, smooth, hairless skulls as white as bone, and frilled sensory organs that lend credence to the idea that their race may have arisen in some strange sea, very far from Cantonica. Both wear black, covering everything below their faces.
The clerk—who is human, brown haired and brown skinned, and as ordinary as the sands of Tatooine—forces a smile and says, “Yes, Miss Grammus? How can we improve your experience today?”
The solemn-eyed sister shakes her head and says, sadly, “You don’t know who I am. Three days we’ve been here, and all the walls know me, but you still don’t know who I am.” Her voice is soft, filled with shame and sadness.
The clerk’s smile stiffens, freezes, pulls upon her face. She took this job when she lost her life savings in the casinos and realized she had no way offplanet and no real reason to go. Here she’s part of the faceless mass that keeps Canto Bight alive, the beating heart of the city that the tourists constantly see but barely remember. The sweet powder she mixes in her food at night keeps her tapped into that heart, keeps her working for the dream of somehow making her fortune there. It’s the powder—the memory of it, the longing for it—that keeps her rooted in her place, allows her to say, as carefully as she can, “I’m sorry, Miss Grammus, I didn’t mean to offend. Of course I know who you are. You and your sister are among our most honored guests.”
All guests are among the most honored, at least as long as the credits keep flowing, as long as they can pay. When the money runs out, that’s when they join her and the others like her on the subservient side of the counter. A quick, bitter thought crosses her mind: She very much looks forward to the day the Grammus twins are forced to don some cheaply made, objectifying uniform and force a smile for someone clever enough not to lose everything they have to the great greedy beast that is Canto Bight, city of dreams, city of schemes, city of nightmares.
“Do you?” The sister tilts her head in an unrecognizable gesture, part of a strange biology from a stranger land. “Tell me, then, and I will buy the remains of your indenture to this hotel and have you on the first ship out of this place, returning to your world of origin with full pockets and a head full of stories that will make you sound like the hero of the ages. Tell me. Who am I?”
The clerk’s heart stutters in her chest.
Canto Bight is not only a destination for gamblers. There are a thousand pleasures to be had here, a million opportunities for decadence or deprivation. But it cannot be denied that most who come seeking the shining city do so because they yearn for the roll of the dice, for the turn of the cards. They follow the lady across the stars, and when she opens her arms to pick their pockets, they laugh from the sheer delight of her presence.
“What if—and I ask only for curiosity’s sake, because of course I know each and every one of our honored guests like my own family—what if I cannot answer your question?” she asks, with the utmost of care.
The sister looks briefly, achingly sad, like the very concept of sorrow has been distilled into a single bipedal form. “I am afraid I will have to request your immediate termination from this position, for you will have offended me so gravely that the very sight of your face will cause my heart to bleed. If there is any mercy in this world, it is that you are so shamefully singular in nature that you need fear no repercussions striking your sister, whose face you should, in all propriety
, share.”
Not only is Canto Bight a destination for gamblers, but they hold the greatest share of the city’s heart. The clerk calculates her odds, reviews every encounter she has had with the strange pair over the past three days, every glance and gesture, every tiny thing that might allow her to tell one from the other. Finally, serenely, she smiles.
“You are Parallela Grammus,” she says confidently.
“Ah,” says the sister. Her sorrow, if anything, has deepened. She turns.
One of the hotel managers is suddenly there, his nictitating membranes drawn politely tight across his eyes, reducing his vision to a subservient level. “You are distressed?” he asks, voice fluting and groveling.
The clerk realizes two things in the same breath: that she was wrong, and that once again she has gambled everything…only to lose.
“Yes,” says the sister, glancing back to the clerk. Her expression softens but becomes no less sad. “We have been treated poorly by this establishment. We will be removing ourselves from this place and traveling to one that better suits our needs. We desire a…keepsake…of our time here.”
The manager’s eyes widen, nictitating membranes briefly pulling back to reveal the bright magenta of his irises. Showing them so plainly is a shameful display that would normally cause him to grovel and apologize before two such highly regarded clients. In this moment, faced with the reality of losing them, it seems doubtful that he even notices.
“But how— We have met your every request! Fulfilled your every desire!”
The second sister, who must actually be Parallela, if only through the process of elimination, turns away from her bromeliad, one hand still caressing its petals.
“You have only met the requests we made,” she says, and her tone is gentle, as if she were speaking to a child. “A truly fine establishment would meet the requests we uttered only in the space behind our souls. We have been insulted by your carelessness. If you would appease us…”
Canto Bight [Star Wars] Page 6
