Before Lirin Car’n knows it, Greedo pushes the unstuck blaster into his chest, keeping the Bith at bay in place against the wall. The gun shivers in Greedo’s hand, quivering in anticipation of firing.
“Today I capture or kill the most wanted man on Tatooine. Today I make my name in the court of Jabba the great. Today I collect my first fortune.” Every time he says “today” he jabs the pistol harder into Lirin Car’n’s already concave chest in a way impossible to consider anything other than hostile.
Lirin Car’n cannot stop looking at the gun and snickering. It all feels so remote and surreal.
“Stop it!” Greedo shouts, poking the gun into him one last time for emphasis. Lirin Car’n, actually hurt and actually annoyed now, shoves Greedo’s gun hand out of his way as if to say, Knock it off, and he slaps it to the side, which sends the lithe little green sylph back into the Pig-Nosed Man. The Walrus-Faced Man chugs like a motor igniting and rams the Bith back into the wall, hard, keeping his massive left arm pressed under Lirin Car’n’s chin, and at long last fear ignites inside Lirin Car’n and floods through his body all at once, lightning and fire and panic.
“Orrp-orrp-orrp-orrp,” orrps the Walrus-Faced Man.
“Twelve systems!” Pig-Nosed Man corrects.
Lirin Car’n feels throttled by genuine, panic-inducing, fight-or-flight fear now. Madness radiates off these two, and Greedo—Greedo wears bad luck around him like a cloud of fart, like ambient surface radiation, like a haunting aura of actual garbage. Mere proximity guaranteed—guaranteed!—his bad luck would contaminate you, too, and closer to now than later. Maybe the Pig-Nosed Man and the Walrus-Faced Man don’t know, but Lirin Car’n knows, and Lirin Car’n now, finally, wants to run but cannot.
“All right,” says Greedo, touching the Walrus-Faced Man, who frees Lirin Car’n from the wall.
Silence then. Car’n looks from one to the other to the other and they all stare at him. The silence holds. And holds.
“Can I…have until next week, then?” asks Lirin Car’n.
Greedo holsters his pistol once more and mutters in the affirmative. Car’n sees, along the length of the barrel of the thing, a little wisp of a prayer Greedo has scratched into its gunmetal surface—the word SOLO.
Desperate. Desperate and crazy.
—
As far as the Muftak can tell, the Pig-Nosed Man—called Dr. Evazan to his pig-nosed face but never in his absence—has no friends, except for the Walrus-Faced Man—called Ponda Baba and, same—and even so, they probably don’t like each other very much. They have only managed to not kill each other yet because it’s fifty–fifty how a fight would go down between them, a pair of psychotically entangled parasites. The Pig-Nosed Man lives life in a constant state of pain and anger. No one quite knew what, exactly, Evazan did to himself or why, but it mangled his face, split his nose, and made him quite impossible to deal with rationally. To mitigate the perpetual agony his wounds cause him, the mad doctor relies on a constant, alternating barrage of narcotics and physical violence, and a man with no friends except for a Walrus-Faced Man has great difficulties finding the first, and far too much ease finding the second. The result of the cycle is this: No one wants to sell Dr. Evazan his drugs, because Dr. Evazan tends toward dumb and dangerous behavior no matter what level of illicit substances flow through him.
This life will not end well for the doctor.
The Muftak hustles too hard to hold his hose shut at such an opportunity. He worked himself into a semi-regular arrangement as an intermediary. Evazan gives the Muftak a cool thousand and, less his danger surcharge and Breaking-the-Law expenditure, the Muftak pays the balance to the Smuggler who, knowing better than to ask why or who-for of his customers, converts the money into the anodyne chemical compounds the good doctor seeks minus his own not-inconsiderable shipping and handling charges, then delivers them to the Muftak, who delivers them to the doctor and hopes this will not be the time their arrangement gets him killed.
“I had to drop my cargo, pal. Sorry,” says Han Solo. “Imperial interference.” He shrugs. Nothing could have been done then; nothing can be done now. The Muftak might as well yell at the sun. Either sun. It won’t help.
But-but-but-but, the Muftak panic-tweets, my client—I took his money. You took his money. Then upon delivery he’d pay me a completion bonus and hazard stipend, as per our agreement. You owe me his money! You owe me my money that he will not pay me now, as I will not provide him with the goods and services he requires! What are we going to do about this, Solo?
Solo turns to the Wookiee, who barks and growls and snorts a pidgin translation.
“Well,” Solo says. “Nothing. Unless you want to take it up with the Empire, we lose this round.”
This does not help calm the Muftak.
“Everybody loses sometimes. Even me.”
But I lose every time! the Muftak bleats out, banging his big furry fists on the table.
The Wookiee puts his bigger, furrier fists on the table, too, because some things you can say without saying anything sometimes, even if you can’t say anything at all. The Muftak inhales. And then exhales. The temperature at the table lowers as quickly as it rose.
The Muftak imagines Evazan doing to his face what was done to his own. He imagines Ponda Baba shoving all of his eyes in, all at once.
He imagines them both coming upon Kabe, helpless and alone without the Muftak’s protection, blind in the daylight, dying of heat and then, then, then dying of them.
He turns to Chewbacca. Could I implore you, at least, this: Come with me as I explain to my client our shared predicament in the hope that his fury—and make no mistake, there will be great fury—might find itself diminished by the sheer majesty of your great physical presence?
The Wookiee snorts. He probably means yes?
—
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A Chadra-Fan, a Bith, a Sakiyan, an Abyssin, an Aqualish, a human, a Rodian, a Wookiee, another human, and a Muftak walk into a bar, all of them trying to rip one another off at best, and kill one another at worst, more or less.
The Muftak freezes. Every head at his usual table turns to him. Some faces look happy; others furious. Only the Sakiyan speaks.
“Come, friend. Join us.”
Not the Muftak’s first choice. He finds the reception awaiting him at the usual table a complicated array of responses. No one, it would seem, feels terribly happy he has come, except Kabe, of course, who figures her odds of dying in the near future have dropped at least a little bit. Djas Puhr gets up—as does Lirin Car’n—ensuring that the Muftak cannot leave the table with any great ease.
“Quite a day you’ve had.”
I’m doomed, the Muftak says.
“Rightfully so!” shouts Myo.
“Gentlemen, keep your heads,” says Djas Puhr.
Myo, I took from you a pawnable thing of value to reimburse what you owed me in losses. It was not mine to take, but I was owed.
Hissing now through gritted teeth, hoping it reduces his volume, Myo leans over. “It was not yours to take.”
I just… The Muftak looks around to his compatriots. Did I not just say—yes, Myo, yes. It was not mine to take. In my defense, I collected on a debt.
“I might have had the money! You don’t know!”
The Muftak honestly hadn’t considered this. Did you have the money?
Myo, a terrible liar, lies. “Maybe.”
“Can we address, perhaps, a larger point, Myo,” says Lirin Car’n, turning his fury on the furious one, “in that I, in my cups, made a foolish decision and you chose to exploit it?”
“Profit from it, you mean,” Myo says, and laughs. He looks to the others to join in, yet they do not. The ugly truth among them all finds its place at the table now, too; the fragility of their civility to one another radiant in the dank alcove of their booth.
I am particularly doomed, the Muftak says. Today especially. Sounds of agreement, to varying degrees and with varying leve
ls of enthusiasm, issue forth from his cohort.
“Why today of all days? Why not yesterday? Why not tomorrow?”
Solo wet his pants at the sight of an Imperial garbage barge and dropped cargo. Some of that cargo was mine, owed to someone else, and now they’re going to kill me, and if they don’t, they’re not paying me the balance owed, which means someone else will kill me, as I find myself financially embarrassed at the moment and direly in need of some liquidity, the Muftak squirps, motioning to Myo and Lirin Car’n as he does, the subtext being to pay these gentles back what they are owed, even though, strictly speaking, none of them are owed anything, not really. All of which is to say I have no idea how to resolve the issue of the horn or how to reimburse those who demand and deserve adequate recompense.
“He dropped your cargo,” Djas Puhr says. “And yet he kept mine. Had Solo been searched, and searched thoroughly, by these admirals of the Imperial refuse fleet, possession of the cargo he brought me would have brought him a death sentence. And yet.” Djas Puhr lets the notion hang in the space among them.
The Muftak looks to the ceiling, dingy and stained and encrusted with filth generations old, and bleats a noise that sounds, oddly enough, as if it came from the Kloo horn that started this whole mess.
What’s your point? Han Solo likes you better than me. You have more friends than me. Fine. Great. You’re a beloved figure, Djas Puhr. I’m already dead; I just don’t know it yet.
“I am merely intrigued. Solo made a choice. Perhaps not a moral choice, but an ethical one,” Djas Puhr says in response. “Perhaps he considers me a threat, so he decided not to drop my contraband. Perhaps he considers you a—well, you are the Muftak.”
The Muftak bangs his head on the table.
“You are not a killer, is my point. Maybe the medications you provide Dr. Evazan—”
The Muftak snaps his head up. That…arrangement was supposed to be discreet.
“Everybody knows. Sorry.”
Those at the table agree—demure as they can manage, but agreeing all the same. The Muftak drops his shoulders a little more, thoroughly and totally defeated, as bad a drug dealer as he is a card player, a money-haver, a life-liver.
“One moment,” says Lirin Car’n. “You’re not giving him narcotics now, are you? Today?”
No. Because Solo dropped cargo. I have nothing to give, clicks the Muftak. Why?
“Greedo the Rodian is making a play for Solo. Ponda Baba and Evazan are backing it. I thought, for a moment, of an Evazan blitzed to the gills, who would make a violent situation only more violent, and was relieved he shall be without. Though saying it out loud, I’m not so certain. Which Evazan is better? Medicated, or not?”
I need a drink, says Kabe, and she escapes under the table to approach the bar.
I am going to die, the Muftak says.
“Well then, Muftak, on the precipice of death, what sort of creature shall you be? One who values friends? Or profit? By which code have you lived?”
The Muftak wiggles his wee trunk back and forth. He looks around the bar. He sees all sorts: friends, fiends, foes, financial prospects and liabilities. All of whom would just as soon gut him and rob him blind as reach down to help him, he is sure.
And then, as always, he sees the best part of a place like Mos Eisley and is filled with a new hope.
A teenage girl enters, looking around, eyes wide as dying stars, skin radiant with the flush of youth. The Muftak knows she’s never been here before because she tries bringing her golden interpreter droid in with her. An old man who should know better follows. The Muftak looks at this girl and tries to imagine how much money she and her ancient father could have between them, how much he could swindle or steal. The prospect of fresh work, of a new project, a new mark, excites him.
The Muftak looks to Lirin Car’n. Lirin Car’n, I never should have accepted your father’s horn from Myo—
Banging the table in protest, Myo turns. “ ‘Accepted’?”
“Let him finish,” Djas Puhr says.
All of us knew that horn meant more than whatever payday it represented. We should have watched out for it, all of us, and for you, and for one another, and we didn’t. This…I think maybe this is what separates us from the animals.
“Technically, Muftak, I believe your kind may be animals,” says Djas Puhr.
Nobody likes a pedant, the Muftak says.
“You are not a pendant, you are a know-it-all,” Myo says, and snarls. As Myo’s intellectual prowess impresses no one, least of all himself, the table finds itself collectively surprised.
“We are all just money to one another, that is all. Today or tomorrow, one day, one of us will be a payday to the other and we will pounce. I took your stupid thingy, Lirin Car’n, yes. And I knew you were drunk and I knew you would want it back and I knew I could get money I didn’t have for it. Just as the Muftak knew the same and took it from me. And we would both do it again.”
“I’m not so sure,” says Djas Puhr, looking at the Muftak.
“This is the way the world works,” a dejected Lirin Car’n says. “Especially at Mos Eisley. Life is cheap, Kloo horns are cheaper, and money is expensive.”
“I propose a wager, friends,” says Djas Puhr. “I say Han Solo lives to see the other side of this day, despite unfavorable odds, because he is a man with friends. I say Greedo does not collect his bounty, for Greedo has no friends but for those he pays.”
The table considers. The table wonders why.
“Let us wager on the nature of the universe. Who wins? The man with friends, or the man seeking profit at all costs? If I’m right, Lirin Car’n, I will pay your debt to Myo. Myo, I will pay your debt to the Muftak. Muftak, I will pay what you and Kabe owe Ackmena in rent. And if I’m wrong…well, Greedo will kill Solo, Evazan will kill the Muftak, or Chalmun will, or, hell, maybe even Myo. Myo will figure out that Kabe took the horn from the Muftak and pawned it and will probably kill her, being robbed of the chance to kill the Muftak, and Lirin, your debt will remain unpaid, so Greedo, confident with a Wookiee pelt across his chest and Solo’s scalp nailed to his wall, will inflict great pain, if not actual death, upon you, for he is now a killer and killers can never stop once they’ve started. He’ll drain you like a shallow-dug well, and when you’re dry…”
He doesn’t need to finish the sentence.
“And I…I will have to find a new cohort to associate with, which is a shame, as I’ve quite come to enjoy this table. For all its foibles.”
The gathered work through the scenario Djas Puhr has laid out and they realize, one at a time, that he has spoken with unerring accuracy.
The Muftak sighs. I leave now to see a Pig-Nosed Man about a dropped shipment of illicit narcotics. He turns, then pauses.
I am sorry, Lirin Car’n. I am sorry, Myo.
Djas Puhr raises his glass to the Muftak.
—
Wandering through the Mos Eisley crowd, no one feels more friendless in its dim and cool confines than the Muftak. He senses something in his paw.
A drink, handed to him by Kabe.
You look like you need it more than me, friend, she squeaks.
And he does. So he drinks. It is cold and smooth and good. It is relief in a tall blue cup.
Maybe Djas Puhr is right after all.
—
At the bar, keeping an eye on the door and, one assumes, Djas Puhr, stands Dr. Evazan, and next to him Ponda Baba. Down a piece stands Chewbacca, ready to play backup to the Muftak as promised, buttressing an expectant space between them being held, the Muftak knows, for the Muftak himself. All he can do is insert himself therein and explain to the psychopaths that he doesn’t have their drugs or their money.
He chooses to steady his nerves with the drink before getting probably murdered and, in the time it takes him to start snuffing the thing down his little protuberant gullet, the teenage girl and the old man take that space at the bar in his place.
The Muftak sighs. The only thing worse
than waiting is being made to wait when you’ve resolved to do something after you’re finished waiting but now have no control over how long that waiting must last.
He responds in the only sane way possible: He drinks slower.
Before he’s gotten even halfway done, the Aqualish lunatic attacks the teenage girl at the bar. And before this registers with anyone in Mos Eisley as anything outside of the positively banal and predictable, the Old Man ignites the air and slices into Ponda Baba and Dr. Evazan with pure light before they can lay a hand on his daughter’s flowing flaxen locks. The chaos lasts half a second longer, until the air stops sizzling and the Old Man and his wee lass head off after Chewbacca, toward the smuggler’s table, away from the downed lunatics.
Chewbacca offers the Muftak a shrug. Sometimes these things take care of themselves.
Greedo, behind the Old Man and the Wookiee, watching his hired muscle bleed out on the cantina floor, feels his luck shift beneath his feet. Greedo remains too stupid to turn back, and the Muftak knows the feeling.
—
The Muftak returns to the table where Lirin Car’n seethes, watching the band play, and Djas Puhr looks delighted.
Did you know that was going to happen? he clicks.
“No. Isn’t it amazing?” asks Djas Puhr, who is, indeed, genuinely delighted.
Djas Puhr rises to allow the Muftak back into the corner seat, keeping Kabe and the Muftak pinned in between the lamenting Lirin Car’n and the angry Myo.
“I should be up there,” the Bith says.
“Where? The bar? You wish to fight as well?” asks Myo, attention going to the mild outbreak of excitement as though the smell of blood holds a tractor beam only Abyssin can feel.
“What? No, the stage, the stage, I should be playing,” he says.
I thought you hated music, says the Muftak.
“I hate being a musician,” continues Lirin Car’n in a moment of clarity.
Is there a difference?
The Bith leans around to look at the band on what passes for a stage in this dump, playing their jaunty, syncopated, trademark tune.
“One fills your heart. The other breaks it,” Lirin Car’n says.