victim, injecting antishock and stabilizers, transferring the suppurating,
hairless, muttering forms to stasis boxes on antigrav tables. The other two
troopers disappeared down the hallways to continue their search for illegal
weaponry. Han felt the back of his neck prickle at this violation, but knew
that a Donnybrook at this point would result in not only himself, Lando, and
Chewie spending the night in the local ohokey, but these fifteen survivors
in all probability continuing for hours longer in their nightmare pain.
For himself, he'd have taken a poke at Hral Piksoar in a heartbeat, the
minute the goon laid a pincer on him. But he'd been through two parsees of
hyperspace hearing the feeble whispers of agony from the men and women
hooked up to makeshift life support every time he walked down these
corridors.
Maybe he was learning something from Leia, he thought, willing the flush of
anger from his face.
"What's the story?" he asked softly, as the treelike physician ducked
through into the next hold. "You tell me there's forty guys down with the
plague on the base here; we get attacked by something I've never seen
anywhere out there a partisan revolt on Durren--somebody sure shot down
these poor bastards . . ."
"Galactic Med Central is trying to contain the plague," said Dr. Oolos
worriedly. "Trying hard." His head tendrils flexed uneasily, a hundred
shades of crimson and scarlet ribbed and straked with violet;
his dark eyes were filled with concern. "They bring them to us dying of no
perceptible ailment--no virus, no bacteria, no poison, no allergy.
Bacta-tank therapy only seems to accelerate the progress of the slow
bleeding away of life."
He shook his head, and glanced across at Sergeant Hral Piksoar, who was
peering paranoically around the corner and into the hall. "With Gopso'o
raids on the suburbs--bombings of public buildings--they've seized one minor
spaceport already--the atmosphere here has been terrible, unbelievable." He
touched a gas mask hanging from his belt, and followed his team back into
the corridor with the last of the victims, Han striding in his wake. "Take
one of these with you if you plan to leave the vessel for any reason. The
Gopso'o are rumored to be using bilal and rush gas in their attacks, though
we haven't had any documented cases yet at the center."
"Think again if you think we're gonna leave this vessel." Lando Calrissian
stepped through the door of the bridge as they passed it, dark face taut
with anger but fear in his eyes. "My advice to you, old buddy, is to seal
and lift."
"Not without finding out something about what's out there." Leaving Lando
and Dr. Oolos in the corridor, Han ducked back onto the bridge and scooped
up the five wafers onto which he'd downloaded the unfortunate Corbantis's
log. "Can you get me an unscrambler for this, Doc? I need to know what and
who axed that ship and anything else they might have seen out there before
it happened."
"I'll certainly try." Dr. Oolos held out his hand for the wafers--Han
glanced at Sergeant Hral Piksoar, coming down the corridor toward them, and
simply pocketed the information himself. Through the Falcon's open boarding
ramp the sound of shots could be clearly heard, the heavy, percussive cough
of ion cannons almost drowning the harsher zap of blasters.
To Lando he whispered, "Don't take the engines all the way down and keep an
eye on the lift-off window. I'll be back in two hours."
Lando followed them to the doorway. The med team made a little caravan
across the rain-pocked permacrete of the bay, water sluicing off the
mist-filled coffins of the stasis boxes. Drovian guards surrounded
them, weapons at the ready, as if they expected the burned, pain-racked
husks inside to leap out with guns blazing in the cause of the Gopso'o
tribe. "And what if you're not?"
Han ducked his head against the rain, which was as warm as bathwater as he
stepped out into it. "If I haven't linked with you by then," he said,
feeling for the comlink in his pocket, "take off. Tell Chewie whatever you
have to, to keep him from coming to look for me." By the sound of it the
The wet air was rank with smoke. "But find Leia. Whatever it costs."
Human beings were most odd.
Given the capabilities of a high-quality' protocol unit to reproduce any
given language, complete with its inflections and tonalities, See-Threepio
could, of course, duplicate nearly any of the thirty thousand songs popular
in the Core Worlds over the past seventy-five standard years verbatim, note
by note and tone for tone. It was not a function he filled particularly
often, for there were automatons and semianimates with larger speaker units
and better bass range who could do the job more efficiently, but he could do
it. Postulating that on a relatively backward world such as Nim Drovis those
in quest of entertainment would pay a certain amount per song (with the
appropriate royalty percentage figured for members of the Galactic Society
of Recording Artists), he had calculated that even in such a moderate
establishment as the Wookiee's Codpiece he and Artoo-Detoo should be able to
earn enough in an evening to defray the costs of third-class passage to
Cybloc XII.
But, as the assistant manager of that pink plush-lined cavern had phrased
it, "You sound like a festerin' jizz-box. I got a festerin' jizz-box right
over there in that corner."
And Threepio, even had his programming permitted him to argue with a human,
would have been hard put to find grounds for disagreement.
Before seeking another resort of public entertainment, therefore, he gave
the matter some thought.
It was, as usual for Nim Drovis, pouring rain, and those citizens for whom
consumption of liquid befuddlement took precedence over defending their
homes and families, if any, from the street fighting in sporadic progress
all over the city were scarcely a promising lot. The denizens of the Chug
'n' Chuck seemed to consist mostly of Drovian soldiers on three-hour
furlough, professional mold-and-fungus removers--a hard-bitten lot with
their flame and acid throwers slung over their backs, Drovian molds and
fungi being what they were--a scattering of the small-time providers of
goods and services prohibited at the more polite levels of society; and the
joy-boys and lollygirls associated with every species represented on the
planet, together with their forbidding looking business managers. Given
their wholesale absorption of alcohol, sundry chemicals, and spice, Threepio
did not hold high hopes for his and Attoo's success in this venue, either,
but he was surprised.
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. Rand
omly 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 re-calibrating 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 C'hug '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 Attoo's domed cap.
"Can you play Mondegrene's Fugue 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 Fugue 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 Fugue 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 Fugue 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, flutrying 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 Attoo'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
regrettable 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 Attoo's 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 lihor Lad), 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