Now Greido was what you might call a visible minority at the Center. In a galaxy defined by humans having crushed into submission all other sentient species thanks to the simple fact that we held practically all of the blasters and interstellar death machines, and, consequently, the majority of the galactic purse-strings, if you weren't born human (and if you weren't a slave), you were more likely than not going to end up earning a living boot-licking and scrapping leftovers. So, in a place like the Center, plush with the luxury of privileged spiritual living, a bug-eyed, green-scaled, antennaed Rodian like Greido was something of an oddity. To be fair, the Center was a progressive place and there was actually a good handful of token aliens – ensuring that we didn't need go looking around too far to have some properly behaved, cutsey rainbow-skinned freak to show people that we were indeed enlightened.
I can't say that I had many interactions with Greido, as I didn't have the patience to wade through his combination of stuttering words, obsequious nodding, and mesmerizing hand-gestures. From what I've heard from others willing to make the effort to communicate and foster positive inter-species relations (apparently, it helped to speak LOUDLY and slooowly), he was a nice enough fellow, if a little on the “fragrant” side that was a result of the metabolic byproduct of his stinky alien spices venting from his antennae.
Greido was the oldest of his brood, and the first in the family, he was very proud to say, to get off his home planet. At first, bewildered by all the technology and masses of people light-years away in distance and progress from his own planet, he narrowly avoided slavery by signing on for a five-year tour on an itinerant, barely legal Rodian bistro-ship that hopped from planet to planet selling spicy, greasy, yet cheap concoctions to mining colonies, factory planets or otherwise unpicky and unsuspecting clientele. They generally had to move on to the next planet after the cases of food poisoning attracted the local authorities, or when there were starting to be too many questions about their “special” sauce.
After his years wading in greasy fumes, Greido tired of working for others for what amounted to a pittance, and he went back to his planet and somehow convinced his brood and even his extended brood to lend him enough credits to start his own business. Knowing full well the galactic market was saturated with cheap Rodian bistros, questionable Anzati transporters, and burly yet reliable Gamoran cleaners and nannies, he instead decided to open a beauty and health spa, specializing in traditional horticopathic and wholeplanetalistic remedies and treatments from ancient, wise non-human species. Of course, Greido was smart enough not to make any of his offerings actually alien, but simply repackaged tried and true mass-produced products whose labels had prominent images of sympathetic children of his kind that were brocaded with meaningless script in his language. In short order, well-paying Imperial (human) citizens flocked to Greido's spa, seeking and finding their very own intimate and genuine connection to the Universe, while also supporting cute alien natives.
Greido's authentically alien spas became very successful, and he had enough to expand and hire help. Again, Greido demonstrated some degree of canniness by exclusively hiring for the front-end smooth-speaking, accentless and human-looking blue-skinned Chiss of the bosomed female persuasion, while retaining his own hard-working and uncomplaining Rodians for the back-end. He must have unwittingly tapped into a massive vein of hitherto-unknown demand, since, in less than a few years, with the odor of the bistros still lingering on him, Greido became the owner of a chain of spas, known and recognized everywhere by its tradional-ish green Rodian friezes on all its products and its trustworthy and straightforward name, “Authentic Native Pure Body and Soul” – both of which Greido had designed by an expensive human advertising company.
With success and wealth, Greido did what you would expect of a once poor and now rich person (after, of course, starting a few charities on his home planet): live like a human. This, in not so many words, was how he got to the Center. I imagined he must have been baffled by all the desire to do (pseudo) work and live simply (in a lot comfort) that was essentially a redux of his life as an alien, but he seemed to take to it quite well – when, like me, he realized that the work at the Center wasn't alien-work or even human-work, just rich-human-”work.” I wondered how much of an imbecile he felt now after having been lumped in with a group of humans and turned into a slave.
Until Mike's revelation, I had believed Greido's story, and even seen him as a good addition to the Center that brought diversity and openness. Like everyone else, I accepted and liked Greido and the aliens at the Center, and tolerated working with him. Little did I know that all that time, he had been a shill for the Empire, plotting to sell us out, even as he happily participated in group hugs and sang Powaah mantras. Fucker. Obviously, he was being kept in our group, so he could keep the guards apprised of any hints of dissent.
As word of Greido's treachery spread, the predictable reactions of miffed feelings and shock sparked long circular discussions with the usual suspects voicing their usual lines:
“The guy screwed us over!” Mike angrily denounced yet again, pounding his fist.
“We should listen to the Powaah and pray for guidance,” mollified Alice, acting as the voice of compassion.
“Can't you see that the guards are treating him better?” Sally said, bursting with impatience.
“We have to believe that he wouldn't do such a thing,” another tenacious Powaah-nut replied.
“Damn it! I heard it from the guards too. Lots of us did!” said an angry voice joining the fray.
“Let's give him a chance. He should defend himself.”
“You idiot. If he knows we're on to him, he'll have the guards throw more of us to the sarlack.”
“How do you know? We have to try.”
“It's fucking obvious. He's the traitor. Who else could it have been?”
“The Powaah teaches us that we should be forgiving...”
“Fuck that. The guy's betrayed us once. He could do it again. We should kill him.”
“Listen to the Powaah. It would never ask us to harm unnecessarily.”
“The alien is dangerous! We should kill him!”
With our slave-cohort divided between those still blissed-out on the lingering effects of the Powaah and those utterly disillusioned by it and wanting a focal point for their resentment and anger, there was, not surprisingly, no consensus, forcing us to continue wrangling over it for weeks.
In the meantime, I spent my days staring at Greido balefully as frequently as I could without getting caught. I could make him out two aisles over in Jubba's Hut of Delicates section, where all he did was attach artful bows to exciting lacy underwear. Everyone knew that the Delicates was the plum job that we all only wished we could have done. Considering the multiple attempts to switch into the Delicates section with sexual favours or promises of riches from secret accounts and passwords that all invariably failed, Greido had to have had connections to get him that posting. It was the only explanation. Only the slaves who had somehow sold out the others were there.
Eventually, the steady administration of whips and lashes and ever-present threat of sarlack-death took its toll even the most resilient of spirits, beating out the lingering delusions of compassion and patience for Greido. Even those who had most ardently espoused the familiar Center refrain of love-for-all began to demand punishment – so that, at last, the decision to kill Greido was unanimous. Unfortunately, however, we were kept from gaining our revenge by the frustrating difficulty to plan and arrange his death, resulting from the limited hours after our shift that we had to discuss it, which was in itself limited by our having to wait until Greido was safely asleep.
And, so for another interminable week we debated: some were content with a simple and uncomplicated strangling; others, like myself, were not satisfied with only death, but wanted some kind of punishment to be involved, like a beating or something more elaborate that involved hooks and knives, or even a complicated set-up that ended w
ith him being thrown, with poetic justice, to the sarlack, much as Jimmy had – which we were convinced Greido had arranged as well.
With the hours of wasted time debating the method Greido's death, I continued to seethe in anger. My riveting became fierce and furious, as I took out all my rage out on the fancy purses I was being forced to make. As the nights continued to end unconsummated by demands of an increasingly grisly death, my hatred grew and expanded to indiscriminately include everyone and everything that caused our enslavement from the stormtroopers who shot me, to the imperial agents who recruited Greido, to the Empire who ran on slaves, to the Emperor who condoned it, to the citizens who bought the dumb shit we were making, and to the thousands of crappy, ugly-ass purses I made everyday. Fucking hell, I hated that mother fucking alien!
Finally, after an animated discussion that revealed yet more of the many past betrayals and transgressions we discovered were Greido's doing, our collective anger crested, and for a rare moment everyone was singing the same tune:
“Fucking bastard pretended to be our friend,” Mike growled.
“He claimed to want to know more about the Powaah. He pretended to listen me to bring down my guard,” Alice snarled, as she wrung her hands.
“We took him in! We accepted that alien.” Sally decried, jabbing a finger in Greido's direction.
“He was lying!”
“He was manipulating us!
“He gave us in to the Imperials!”
“I saw him killing sand gophers for fun.”
“That funny taste in the water? That had to be him.”
“I lent him all my copies of Louke's works. Never got them back. The fucker!”
“I should have known that he was hiding something. He would never tell his full story. Ever think it was strange he never talked about his family?”
“Probably sold them too. That's what Rodians do. Never trust a Rodian.”
“No decency. He's the kind of guy who would shoot first and never give you a chance to reason.”
“The bastard!”
“Let's kill him!”
We were now properly whipped up into a satisfying lynch-mob tizzy, with the common refrain of 'Die, Greido! Die!' beating in our heads. Nothing could stop us from killing the alien.
With no more desire for anything complicated that could delay our bloodlust, we rapidly agreed to bludgeon him with the rocks of our cell. Where once we cursed the many unavoidable stones that kept those who had to sleep on the floor from a having a decent night's sleep, we now hefted their pleasantly heavy weight and fondled their sharp edges.
Someone whispered, “Grab him!” and, in an rabid jumble, we fell en masse upon the little alien, resulting in one person holding each of his limbs and one person holding his trumpet-like mouth shut to keep him from bringing in the guards.
“Greido, this should not come as a shock to you,” Alice intoned, as she pointed a menacing rock at the struggling alien, his compound eyes flashing and pleading at us incomprehendingly. “You have betrayed us. Us! Your Powaah Family who took you in and loved you! You will now die.”
None of us particularly cared what Alice said, desperately wanting only the bloody gratification that had been delayed for so long, but having him know why were about to kill him and that we knew he had fucked us over; that we weren't going to let him get away with it; that none of us had any sympathy for him whatsoever; and that his death was justified, o-so-very justified – felt more satisfying than him feeling as if our retribution came out of the blue or, worse, that he might be able to retain some sense of innocence.
It similarly felt more satisfying to be pummeling our rocks first on his non-essential parts, like his arms and legs, and then his body and lastly his head – so as to extend his suffering as long possible. It took a frenzied half hour of taking turns pounding, before his limbs were turned into twitching broken, and we began to work on his head and body. By then, we had no need to hold him down or muzzle him, as he was barely conscious and kept that way with regular slappings and douses of our limited drinking water that we had sacrificed for this especial purpose. His body, being as frail and malnourished as ours, gave way easily to our gleeful blows and split apart into a gooey mess that we reveled in and mashed further into an oozing paste. His head, however, sustained many blows – something to do with his reptilian physiology – until it cracked open, its pulpy contents spilling onto the floor.
Greido was dead; he had been dead for some time at that point, but, despite that, we continued desecrating his body with uncontrollable desperation, taking out our fury, our anger, our frustration, our sadness, our powerlessness, our disillusionment, our abandonment on the flaccid remains of an alien we barely knew.
As I heaved shaky breaths into my body, I looked down at the sharp rock that I still held in a petrified grip. It took much focused concentration to order my hand to loosen its hold the chunk of concrete that was slippery with blood. My hands and my tattered clothes had become damp with bluish-green blood from the horror we had done. A fetid odour that I knew to be Greido's wafted into my nose, and would continue to cling to me for many haunting weeks.
For the rest of the night, I hid myself in a corner and sobbed.
CHAPTER 10