The Han Solo Adventures (21 page)

“You’ll never get to be a man of leisure at this rate, Solo,” opined Sonniod.

Han shrugged, rewrapping the stones. “All I want is a new stake so I can lay in a cargo and get the
Falcon
repaired.”

Sonniod studied the starship that had once been, and still looked very much like, a stock light freighter. That she was heavily armed and amazingly speedy was something Han preferred not to have show externally. Such display of force would have been too likely to arouse the curiosity of those entrusted with enforcement of the law.

“She looks spaceworthy enough to me,” Sonniod commented. “Same old
Falcon
—looks like a garbage sledge, performs like an interceptor.”

“She’ll run, now that Chewie’s welded the hull,” Han conceded, “but some of the control circuitry that was shot up over Rampa was about ready to give up when we got here. Before we came out into the Badlands we had to lay in some new components, and about the only thing you can get here on Kamar is fluidic systems.”

Sonniod’s face turned sour. “Fluidics? Solo, dear fellow, I’d rather steer my ship with a blunt pole. Why couldn’t you get some decent circuitry?”

Han was poring over the rest of this take. “This is a nowhere planet, pal. They’ve still got nationalism and their weapons—in the advanced places, I mean; not out here in the Badlands—are at the missile-delivered, nuclear-explosive stage. So, of course, someone developed a charged-particle beam to mess up missile circuitry, and naturally everyone turned to fluidics, because shielded circuitry was a little beyond them. So now fluidics is the only type of advanced systems they’ve got here. We had to load up on adaptor fittings and interface routers and use gas and liquid fluidic components. I
hate
them.”

Han stood up again. “I can’t stand the thought of all those flow-tracks and microvalves in the
Falcon
and I can’t wait to rip ’em out and retool her.” He held up and studied with pleasure a statuette carved from black stone, exquisitely detailed and no bigger than his thumb. “And the way things are going, that shouldn’t take too much longer.”

He put the statuette down in the much smaller of two piles of goods that had been stacked around the starship’s ramp. The larger one consisted of trade articles of relatively great bulk and little value, including musical instruments, cooking utensils, tunneling tools, chitin paints, and the portable awnings the Badlanders sometimes used. The smaller pile held all the semiprecious stones, much of the artwork, and a number of the finer tools and implements. The amassed goods had been cluttering up the
Falcon
, stored here and there in available corners of the ship over the past eleven local days. While Chewbacca had been completing repairs that afternoon, Bollux and Han had hauled all the stuff out for sorting and to determine just what it was they had accumulated.

“Maybe not,” Sonniod agreed. “Badlanders don’t usually trade like this; they’re very jealous of their territory. I’m amazed that you’ve got them flocking together here.”

“There’s nobody who doesn’t enjoy a good show,” Han told him. “Especially if they’re stuck out in a hole like this place. Or else I wouldn’t have all this junk.” He watched the last of the stream of Kamarians make their way down and take up their three-point resting positions. “Wonderful customers,” he sighed fondly.

“But what’ll you do with all the bulky stuff?” Sonniod asked, falling in as Han started down for the center of the amphitheater again.

“We’re planning a going-out-of-business sale,” Han declared. “Very good deals, everything must go. Super discounts for steady customers and compact items offered in trade.” He rubbed his jaw. “I may even sell old Lisstik the holoprojector when I go. I’d hate to see the old Solo Holo-theater close down.”

“Sentimentalist. So I don’t suppose you need work right now?”

Han looked quickly at Sonniod. “What kind of work?”

Sonniod shook his head. “I don’t know. Word’s out back in the Corporate Sector that there’re jobs to be had, runs to be made. Nobody seems to know the details and you never hear names, but word is that if you make yourself available, you’ll be contacted.”

“I’ve never worked blind,” Han said.

“Nor I. That’s why I didn’t get in on it. I thought you might be sufficiently hard up to be interested. I must say I’m glad you’re not, Solo; it all sounds a bit too tricky. I just thought you might like to know.”

Assuring himself of the holoprojector’s settings, Han nodded. “Thanks, but don’t worry about us; life’s a banquet. I might even do this some more, hire out a few projectors and hire local crews on these slowpoke worlds to run them for a split. It could be a sweet, legal little racket, and I wouldn’t even have to get shot at.”

“By the way,” Sonniod said, “what’s the other feature, the one you’ve been showing all along?”

“Oh, that. It’s a travelogue,
Varn, World of Water
. You know, life among the amphiboid fishers and ocean farmers in the archipelagoes, deep-seat wildlife, ocean-bed fights to the death between some really big lossors and a pack of cheeb, things like that. Want to hear the narrative? I’ve got it all memorized.”

“Thank you, no,” Sonniod replied, pulling his lower lip thoughtfully. “I wonder how they’ll react to a new feature?”

“They’ll love it,” Han insisted. “Singing, dancing; they’ll be tapping their little pincers off.”

“Solo, what was the word Lisstik used for the admission price?”

“
Q’mai.
” Han was finishing fine adjustments. “They didn’t have any word for ‘admission,’ but I finally got the idea across to Lisstik in spotty Basic and he said the word’s
q’mai
. Why?”

“I’ve heard it before, here on Kamar.” Sonniod put the thought aside for the moment. The holofeature appeared in mass-audience projection, filling the air over the natural amphitheater. The Badlanders, who had been swaying gently in the hot night breeze and clicking and chittering among themselves, now became utterly silent.

Love is Waiting
was standard fare, Han recalled. It opened without credits or title, which would appear shortly, superimposed on the opening number. That was just as well, Han reflected, since abstract symbols would mean about as much to Kamar Badlanders as particle physics meant to a digworm. He wondered what they would think of human choreography and music, of which there had been none in
Varn, World of Water
.

The feature opened with the woebegone hero stepping off a transporter beltway en route, with some misgiving, to a job with a planetary modification firm. A catchy beat, intended to inform the viewer that a production number was coming, began. Something appeared to make the Badlanders uneasy, however. The clicking and chittering grew louder, nor did it abate when the hero collided with the ingenue and their introduction led to his song cue.

Before the hero had even gotten through the first of his lyrics, discord among the Kamarians was drowning out the music. Several times Han caught the name of Lisstik. He raised the volume a little, hoping the crowd would settle down, puzzling over what had them so agitated.

A stone sailed out of the darkness and bounced off the holoprojector with a crash. From the light spilled by the dancing, singing figures overhead there could be seen the angry waving of Kamarian upper extremities. Multi-faceted eyes threw the light back out of the dark in a million fragments.

Another rock clanked against the holoprojector, making Sonniod jump, and a flung howlrunner thighbone, remains of someone’s dinner, just missed Han.

“Solo—” began Sonniod, but Han wasn’t listening.

Having spotted Lisstik, Han shouted up the slopes at him. “Hey, what’s going on? Tell ’em to calm down! Give it a chance, will you?”

But it was no use yelling to Lisstik. The Kamarian was surrounded by an irate crowd of his fellows, all waving their upper extremities and thrashing tails, making more noise than Han had ever heard Badlanders make. One of them swiped at the burned-out integrator banded to Lisstik’s skull. Elsewhere on the slopes around the holoprojector, shoving, arguments and differences of opinion had erupted into violent disagreement.

“Oh, my,” said Sonniod in a very small voice. “Solo, I just remembered what
q’mai
means; I heard it in one of the population centers to the north. It doesn’t mean ‘admission,’ it means ‘offering.’ Quick, where’s the other holo, the travelogue?”

By then a mob of hostile Badlanders was slowly closing in around the holoprojector. Han’s hand descended toward his blaster. “Back onboard the
Falcon
, why? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you stop and analyze things,
ever
? You’ve been showing them holos of a world with more water than they’d ever dreamed existed, filled with cultures and life forms that they’ve never even fantasized about. You haven’t set up a holotheater, you idiot; you’ve started a
religion
!”

Han gulped, pulling his blaster indecisively as the Badlanders closed in. “Well, how could
I
know? I’m a pilot, not an alien-contact officer!”

He took a handful of Sonniod’s coverall sleeve and, pulling gently, led him back slowly toward the
Falcon
. He heard Chewbacca’s alarmed roaring from farther up the slope. Overhead, the hero and the ingenue and everybody else at the transporter beltway were engaged in a meticulously choreographed dance routine built around the ticket kiosks and turnstiles.

The Badlanders at that side of the circle began to give way uncertainly before Han, who tugged the frightened Sonniod along after him. A number of the bolder Kamarians rushed the holoprojector and began beating at it with sticks, stones, and bare pincers. Overhead, the dance number began to dissolve into distortion. Some of the vandals—or outraged zealots, depending on one’s orientation—turned from the projector after a moment and advanced in a vengeful throng on Han.

Sensing correctly that by simply refunding the
q’mai
he stood little chance of mollifying his former audience-cum-congregation, Han fired into the ground before them. Sandy soil exploded, throwing up rocky debris and burning cinders. Whatever flammable material there was in the soil caught fire. Han fired twice more to his right and left, gouging holes in the ground in spectacular bursts.

Badlanders fell back for the moment, their enormous eyes catching the crimson of blaster beams, ducking their small heads and shielding themselves with upraised brachia. Han didn’t have to fire at the disgruntled Kamarians between himself and his ship; they were giving way. “Stay up there,” he hollered up into the darkness at Chewbacca, “and get the engines started!”

The crowd was doing a pretty fair job of disassembling the holoprojector. Its sound synthesizer was making simply random noises now, though at high volume.
Love is Waiting
had devolved to a sluggish flow of multicolored swirls in the air.

As Han watched, walking backward as calmly as he could, Lisstik rushed in from the darkness, wrenched the integrator from his forehead and hurled it to the ground, stamping and grinding it into the dust as he beat at the holoprojector with his pincers.

“It looks like your high priest has split with the church,” observed Sonniod. Lisstik succeeded in wrenching loose a piece of the control panel casing and flung it in Han’s general direction with a vindictive series of clicks.

Feeling himself more the aggrieved party than the one at fault, Han lost his restraint. “You want a show?
Here
’s a show, you rotten little ingrate!” He fired into the holoprojector. The red whining blaster bolt elicited a brief, bright secondary explosion from somewhere in the projector’s internal reaches.

Suddenly the sound synthesizer was producing the most appalling string of loud, piercing, unrecognizable agglutinations of noise Han had ever heard. The projection filled the sky over the amphitheather with nova bursts, solar flares, pinwheels, sky rockets, and strobe flashes. The entire crowd gave a concerted bleat and charged off in all directions up the slopes of the bowl.

Han and Sonniod took considerable advantage of the confusion by sprinting madly toward the
Millennium Falcon
. They could hear harsh chitters and clacks from both sides as Badlanders, having not yet vented their full outrage, began giving chase. Han pegged unaimed shots into the air and the ground behind him. He still hesitated to fire at his former customers unless it meant life or death.

As they neared the
Falcon
’s gaping ramp, Han and Sonniod were gratified to see the starship’s belly turret fire a volley. The quad-guns spat lines of red annihilation, and a rocky upcropping already passed by the racing men was transformed into a fountain of sparks, molten rock, and out-lashing energy. The heat scorched Han’s back and a stone chip whistled past Sonniod’s ear, too close for comfort, but it put a halt to the Badlanders’ chase for the moment.

When they reached the ramp, Sonniod dashed up at maximum speed while Han slid to a stop on one knee to gather up what he could from the more valuable
q’mai
. A hurled stone bounced off the
Falcon
’s landing gear and another ricocheted from the ramp while Han groped.

“Solo, get up here!” Sonniod screamed. Spinning, Han saw Badlanders closing in around the ship. He fired over their heads and they ducked, but kept coming. Backstepping rapidly up the ramp, Han fired twice more and fell when he dodged a thrown rock. He ended up crawling through the hatch.

As the main hatch rolled down, Chewbacca appeared at the passageway, leaning out of the cockpit with an incensed snarl in this throat.

“How should
I
know what went wrong?” Han bellowed at the Wookiee. “What am I, a telepath? Get us up and head for Sonniod’s ship, now!” Chewbacca disappeared back into the cockpit.

As Sonniod helped him up off the deck, Han tried to reassure him. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you back to your ship before the grievance committee arrives. You’ll have time to lift off.”

Sonniod nodded thankfully. “But what about you and the Wookiee, Solo?” The starship trembled slightly as she hovered on her thrusters and swung away toward Sonniod’s parked vessel. “I wouldn’t come back for my profits if I were you.”