Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia

Another figure appeared: a tall, cadaverous alien wearing something loose, with polka dots. “I understand that you have expressed an interest in the scientific theories of probability.”

“
Purely
scientific, friend. I’m a spacer by profession—an astrogator—so my interest’s only natural. I’m especially intrigued by permutations and combinations of the number seventy-eight, taken three at a time. Fives are wild.”

“Ah … 
sabacc
.” The alien took a long drag of orange smoke, then exhaled softly. “I believe you could be inducted into the, er, research foundation. But first … well, a small formality: your ship name, if you please, sir—strictly for identification purposes. There are certain regressive, antiscientific enemies of free enquiry—”

“—Who carry badges and blasters?” The human laughed. “
Millennium Falcon
, berth seventeen. I’m Calrissian, Lando Calrissian.”

“
S
ABACC
!”

It was unmercifully hot. Tossing his card-chips on the table, the young gambler halfheartedly collected what they’d earned him, an indifferent addition to his already indifferent profits for the evening. Something on the unspectacular order of five hundred credits.

Perhaps it was the heat. Or just his imagination.

This blasted asteroid, Oseon 2795, while closer to its sun than most, was as carefully life-supported and air-conditioned as any developed rock in the system. Still, one could almost
feel
the relentless solar flux hammering down upon its sere and withered surface,
feel
the radiation soaking through its iron-nickel substance,
feel
the unwanted energy reradiating from the walls in every room.

Especially this one.

Apparently the locals felt it, too. They’d stripped right down to shorts and shirt-sleeves after the second hand, two hours earlier, and looked fully as fatigued and grimy as the young gambler felt. He took a sip from his glass, the necessity for circumspection regarding what he drank blessedly absent for once. No nonsense here about comradely alcohol consumption. Most of them were having ice water and liking it.

Beads of moisture had condensed into a solid sheet on the container’s outer surface and trickled down his wrist into his gold-braided uniform sleeve.

What a way to live! Oseon 2795 was a pocket of penury in a plutocrat’s paradise. The drab mining asteroid, thrust cruelly near the furnace of furnaces, orbited through a system of pleasure resorts and vacation homes for the galaxy’s superwealthy, like an itinerant junkman.

The gambler was wishing at the moment that he’d never heard of the place. That’s what came of taking advice from spaceport attendants. A trickle of moisture ran down his neck into the upright collar of his semiformal uniform. Who
said
hardrock miners were always rich?

He shuffled the oversized deck once, twice, three times, twice again in listless ritual succession, passed it briefly for a perfunctory cut to the perspiring player on his right, dealt the cards around, two to a customer, and waited impatiently for the amateurs to assess their hands. Real or imagined, the heat seemed to slow everybody’s mental processes.

Initial bets were added to the ante in the middle of the table. It didn’t amount to a great fortune by anybody’s standards—except perhaps the poverty-cautious participants in the evening’s exercise in the mathematics of probability. To them the gambler was a romantic figure, a professional out-system adventurer with his own private starship and a reputation for outrageous luck. The backroom microcredit plungers were trying desperately to impress him, he realized sadly, and they were succeeding: at the present rate, he’d have to drain the charge from his electric shaver into the ship’s energy storage system, just to lift off the Core-forsaken planetoid.

Having your own starship was not so much a matter of being able to buy it in the first place (he’d won his in another
sabacc
game in the last system but one he’d visited) as being able to afford to operate it. So far, he’d lost money on the deal.

Looking down, he saw he’d dealt himself a minus-nine: Balance, plus the Two of Sabres. Not terribly promising, even at the best of times, but
sabacc
was a game of dramatic reversals, often at the turn of a single card-chip. Or even without turning it—he watched the deuce with a thrill that never staled as the face of the electronic pasteboard blurred and faded, refocused and solidified as the Seven of Staves.

That gave him a minus-four: insignificant progress, but progress nevertheless. He saw the current bet, flipping a thirty-credit token into the pot, but declined to raise.

It also meant that the original Seven of Staves, in somebody’s hand or in the undealt remainder of the deck, had been transformed into something altogether different. He watched the heat-flushed faces of the players, learning nothing. Each of the seventy-eight card-chips transformed itself at random intervals, unless it lay flat on its back within the shallow interference
field of the gaming table. This made for a fast-paced, nerve-wracking game.

The young gambler found it relaxing. Ordinarily.

“I’ll take a card, please, Captain Calrissian.” Vett Fori, the player in patched and faded denyms on the gambler’s left, was the chief supervisor of the asteroid mining operation, a tiny, tough-looking individual of indeterminate age, with a surprisingly gentle smile hidden among the worry-lines. She’d been betting heavily—for that impecunious crowd, anyway—and losing steadily, all evening, as if preoccupied by more than the heat. An unlit cigar rested on the table edge beside her elbow.

“Please, call me Lando,” the young gambler replied, dealing her a card-chip. “ ‘Captain Calrissian’ sounds like the one-eyed commander of a renegade Imperial dreadnought. My
Millennium Falcon
’s only a small converted freighter, and a rather elderly one at that, I’m afraid.” He watched her for an indication of the card she’d taken. Nothing.

A nasal chuckle sounded from across the table. Arun Feb, the supervisor’s assistant, took a card as well. There was a hole frayed in the paunch of his begrimed singlet, and dark stains under his arms. Like his superior, he was small in stature. All the miners seemed to run that way. Compactness was undoubtedly a virtue among them. He had a dark, thick, closely cropped beard and a shiny pink scalp. Drawing on a cigar of his own, he frowned as he added what he’d been dealt to the pair in his hand.