He stepped through into a rectilinear room, exactly like the tankless blue ones he’d spent the last day wandering through.
Only these were a brilliant scarlet color.
One, two, three, four. He should be between two of the blue tankrooms, now, but there wasn’t any tank in here. Five, six, seven—something odd. The far wall seemed to tug at him, and the red glow was a little fainter here. He backed up and thought.
Thirty-two hours, fifteen minutes, forty-two seconds had passed since he’d gotten into this mess. He didn’t much care, now, how he got out of it.
He let the wall pull him toward itself and stepped through …
Lando sat by the transparent pyramid wall, his head in his hands. The last half hour had had its shocks, but this was the worst of all. Where the old Singer’s eyes had been, there were now a pair of deep ugly wounds—healing rapidly, it was true, and showing no signs of infection, just as the old man showed no signs of pain. But he was blind, horribly, hideously blind.
And happy about it.
“Captain,” said Mohs, “please do not be distressed. There is nothing free in this life. I seem to have exchanged my eyes for a certain understanding. I now know what I was: a retarded savage who could see, but did not know what it was he saw. Now I am an intelligent, civilized man, who happens to be blind. Do you not think it a fair trade?”
Lando grunted, poked a fìnger idly at a tiny line of dust gathered in the corner between wall and floor. Something tiny sparkled there, like a speck of metal, a fleck of mirror silvering. Curious, Lando brushed the dust away from it. It was better than answering Mohs, either truthfully or insincerely. Nothing could make up for blindness.
“Further, Captain. My new-found reasoning capacities seem to serve me in the stead of eyes to some extent. I can tell that you are sitting to my left, turned mostly to the wall, poking with a finger in the corner. I believe I know this by deducing from the sounds you make, what I know of your personality and habits—it’s quite as if I could see you.”
“I’m happy for you, Mohs,” Lando mumbled irritably. Suddenly, the minute sparkly bit grew larger, and Lando drew his hand back abruptly. “Son of a—look at this!”
Not noticing what he’d said to a blind man, Lando watched the corner. There was a spider there, a tiny one, very shiny, very fast. It skittered about frantically, trying to escape Lando. It couldn’t have been much more than three millimeters in diameter.
Lando reached down, unafraid, let the spider race up his thumb, turned the thumb down into the palm of his other hand …
And watched a nearly microscopic Vuffi Raa, accelerated to sixty times normal speed, trip over his lifeline and go sprawling.
• XV •
NO ONE HAD ever accused Vuffi Raa of being stupid.
Of course he’d recognized the hundred-meter giant looming over him, the instant he’d popped out of the final red-lit chamber and through the inside wall of the pyramid. It was his master, and what surprised him was the feeling that, whatever their current predicament, he was home.
Apparently, Lando grasped the weird situation, too. He’d held his thumb down on the floor in front of Vuffi Raa, keeping it amazingly still for the full minute the little—very little—droid required to climb its length.
For his part, Vuffi Raa was very careful: the thumbnail at this scale was rough and full of convenient handholds, but the flesh seemed soft and spongy. He went gently, using all five tentacles and spreading them, outward and flat, to distribute his mass. One misstep would cruelly pierce his master’s flesh like a needle and, perhaps, precipitate the robot into disaster.
Not that that wasn’t the situation now.
With incredible slow steadiness, Lando had raised the robot up to his eye level, then across his mountainous chest, over to the other hand. Vuffi Raa tumbled down into the waiting palm, righted himself, and looked up into the giant eye that peered down at him.
“Master! What a mess! What are we going to do?”
“EEEVVVUUUFFFEEE EEEUUURRRAAAHHH,” responded Lando, taking at least twenty seconds to do it, his voice low and thunderous. A human being in Vuffi Raa’s position might not have been able to hear what Lando said—the little droid’s range of hearing was impressive—but he’d certainly have felt it.
Now the robot understood his master’s unnatural rock-steadiness. There seemed to be some difference in their perception of time, correlative to the difference in their sizes. Lando was living at a vastly slower rate than Vuffi Raa. He considered the problem for what would have seemed a millisecond to his master, then gave forth a series of loud chirps, spaced evenly over about a minute’s time, each burst carefully shaped and calculated to blur with the ones before and after into something the giant could follow:
“Can’t understand you, Master,” Lando heard a tiny voice say, “Can you hear me?”
Lando wasn’t stupid, either. He could see how quickly, jerkily, Vuffi Raa was moving about in his hand, and figured out that time—or at least metabolism—was flowing differently for each of them. He even had a good idea how Vuffi Raa was managing to communicate with him, although none whatsoever as to how he could communicate back.
He decided on short words: “Yes.”
Vuffi Raa received this as “EEEYYYEEEAAASSSSS,” but the part of him that was a high-powered computer quickly squashed it all together (as it had eventually learned to do when Lando called him by name) and formulated a brief reply—although it would take a much longer time to transmit:
“Ask Mohs about this.”
“OOOGGGAAAIIIEEE!”
Giant-to-giant: “I say, Mohs old fellow, what does your new-found cogitational capacity tell you about this distressing turn of events? I believe I’ve got the galaxy’s smallest droid here, but I don’t think he’s appreciating the distinction very much.”
Wrapping the loincloth back around his middle by feel, the old shaman shuffled up beside the gambler, cocked an ear over the tiny robot in lieu of peering down at him with ruined eyes, and thought his answer over for a moment.
“I do not know of any Song which speaks of such a thing as this. He can hear us, can he not?”
“Yes,” came the small, clear reply, almost as quickly as Mohs has asked the question, and long before Lando could respond. This method of communication seemed to work satisfactorily for the organic giants, Lando realized, but it must be agonizing unto tears for the tiny speeded-up droid, each word requiring many seconds to assemble, then the even more annoying molasses-like wait for the humans, with their slower reaction time, to answer.
“Captain,” the old man said, seemingly unwilling to address a spider-sized machine directly, “I can see—in a manner of speaking—no intelligent alternative but to go on with our search for the Harp. We can do nothing for your friend here. Perhaps some solution lies ahead of us.”
“Agreed,” Vuffi Raa said before Lando had a chance to think about it. Meanwhile, the miniature automaton had also had time to think to become thoroughly fascinated with the examination of his giant master’s hand. The epidermis was shingled like a shale field, and the fine ridges were like furrows made by a plow. Lando’s pulse was a quiet, steady earthquake every few minutes. Open pores lay scattered abut like gopher holes.
Finally, long after Vuffi Raa had tired of his explorations:
“AAAIII EEEGGGIIIEEESSS EEEIIIYYYOOOUUURRR EEERRRAAAIIITTT.”
Eventually, Vuffi Raa managed to convey a question about travel arrangements. He was willing to make his exploration of the building on foot, as the humans intended to do, but his own far greater rate of operation would be more than offset by his size and the (to him) roughness of the terrain. Accordingly, he suggested that he ride, somehow, and asked diffidently how and where.
“I’ve always rather fancied an earring,” Lando told the surprised robot. “D’you think you could manage it without tearing off my earlobe?” That would make communications a bit easier, and there would be little chance of Vuffi Raa’s getting injured or dro
pped, since Lando would be inclined to be careful about injuring his own head.
“Captain,” Mohs asked, once that had been settled, “there is supposed to be a way out of this chamber, somewhere near the center. Can you see it?”
For the relatively short time they’d been there, Lando’s attention had been directed outward, through the transparent walls. Then it had all gone to Mohs and the pitiable condition of his eyes, and finally to Vuffi Raa. Now he took a good hard look around. It wasn’t easy: the floor was glossy, as if it were transparent glass over some darker base. He guided the old Singer toward the center of the room, approximately fifty meters away, the little droid clinging with all five tentacles to his ear.
Before them lay a downward-slanting ramp set neatly into the floor, flush, without guardrails or other embellishment. Lando thought they hadn’t noticed it before because of this, and the fact they’d been looking straight across its foreshortened length to the reflective surface on the other side.
It was strangely dim in the middle of the room, beneath the pyramid’s peak. The brightly shining sun outside lent an eerie contrast, which got on Lando’s nerves.
“Well, friends, shall we?” Lando asked no one in particular.
No one replied.
He shrugged, took a step—remembering, once it was too late, that this sort of thing was what had gotten him into … well, this sort of thing in the first place. As soon as it rested on the gently downward-slanting surface, his foot began to slide forward of its own accord. He gave a hop, his other foot joined the first, and he found himself moving without walking—just as Mohs’ prophetic Song had had it—on a sort of glassy, featureless elevator.
He looked behind him. Mohs was in the rear, expression a bit unsettled—apparently not very happy to realize his Songs had come true.
Well, Lando thought, are any of us ever, really?
The place that they had entered was broad, perhaps ten meters wide, and as they settled down through the floor and the tunnel seemed to level off, they saw that the roof overhead was about the same distance—ten meters—from the moving floor. The walls went straight up, tipped over into an arch overhead.
At first the walls were featureless, the same impression as above of transparency over darkness. The floor showed no signs of mechanical moving parts; an object placed upon it simply flowed along at the same rate Lando, Mohs, and Vuffi Raa were traveling. Whether the floor itself traveled with them, they were unable to determine.
“EEEIIIUUU OOOGGGAAAIII, EEEVVVUUUHHHVVVIII EEERRRAAAHHH?”
Vuffi Raa clung to Lando’s ear, watching, measuring, trying to do his part—since someone else was carrying his miniscule weight. Yet most of his mind was on the matter of his size. Assuming it was he who had diminished—never mind how or that the disparity was supposed to violate several laws of physics—he certainly didn’t want to spend the rest of his life that way. Droids live a long, long time.
On the other tentacle, suppose Lando and their native companion had somehow grown, violating different laws. Vuffi Raa didn’t think he’d have to ask them how they’d feel about that.
His contemplations were interrupted by the part of him that was watching. He gave an internal, mechanical sigh as he prepared himself for another of the tedious attempts at communication:
“Master, the corridor’s beginning to curve.”
“Not so loud, Vuffi Raa! Curve?” Lando glanced around. He couldn’t see it; it must be very gradual. A thought occurred to him: “What’s the rate? At some point, it’s got to bend back on itself, and we should see the junction—for whatever good that does us.”
“I don’t think so.… It never fully leveled out.… Starting a gradual downward spiral.”
“So? At what rate?” Lando repeated. The old Toka Singer listened to this exchange as it went on, a strange look on his blinded face. “What’s the apparent diameter of the spiral?”
“Whose scale?”
Lando chuckled. “A good question. Make it mine, if you don’t mind. I’ve got to figure it out, haven’t I?”
Vuffi Raa refrained from saying that Lando hadn’t been much good so far at figuring out anything—and only partly because communications were such a chore. Instead, he simply divided everything his sensors told him by approximately sixty.
“Ten klicks at current rate. Drops a hundred meters every thirty kilometers.”
“Can you tell how fast this thing is carrying us?”
“About twenty kph. One full spiral every one-twenty-third of a planetary revolution.
The journey went on and on. Hours passed.
It was Vuffi Raa who first noticed the changes in the walls.
“Master. Please observe that something is visible.”
“I see it.” Lando peered through the transparency. Where before there had been inky blackness, now some form and structure could be seen, like a highway cut through a mountain pass. “We’re out of the pyramid! Below it!”
• XVI •
THEY TRAVELED THROUGH the heart of the planet.
This was not precisely true, as Vuffi Raa was already pointing out, but it was a metaphor that suited Lando.
The geological strata they were seeing dated, according to the little droid, from the beginnings of life on Rafa V. Beds of stone formed by tiny microscopic creatures living in seas that no longer existed on the ancient, dried-up sphere alternated with slabs of solidified lava from volcanic eruptions. Vuffi Raa’s fine vision—and perhaps the fact that he was so small—enabled him to see and describe the smallest details through the transparent glass.
“And here we see … Master … the evidence of the first cellular colonies … the precursors of multicelled animals.”
“Don’t call me Master, especially when you’re lecturing me. Do you want a bite of this, Mohs?”
Lando had delved into the pockets of his survival parka for water and condensed rations. Vuffi Raa hadn’t any need of them, but the old man surprised Lando by accepting only a small portion from the plastic canteen.
Otherwise, the ancient High Singer had been strangely quiet for hours, watching the walls, peering ahead into a gloom that was something other than darkness, listening to Vuffi Raa. How much the old man understood of the droid’s paleontological dissertations, he had no way of guessing.
“But if we’re seeing the slow, steady progress of microscopic life,” Lando asked Vuffi Raa, “doesn’t that mean we must be gaining altitude again?”
“On the contrary … Master … the corridor leveled out some time ago … and straightened.… We’re traveling in a diagonal upthrust formation.”
For some reason, this bothered Lando. He wished the robot had kept him informed on the shape and direction of their travel. More, this was almost as if … as if …
“They chose this route deliberately, didn’t they? So we’d see what we’re seeing!”
“They, Captain?” Mohs spoke up, surprising Lando. The old man had long since discovered that he could travel on a moving sidewalk just as easily by sitting down as standing. Lando had joined him, and they were sitting a few feet apart now. Lando had been thinking about taking a nap before the walls grew transparent and the geology lectures began. He was still thinking about it.
“You know perfectly well who I mean. There’s some purpose to all this, isn’t there?”
“If so, Captain, the Songs do not—”
“I’ll bet they don’t! Mohs, the primary purpose of those Songs of yours was to make sure somebody, someday, wound up sitting precisely where you are.”
“So I, too, had surmised.”
Lando searched through his pockets, found a cigarette. He didn’t smoke much at all, and when he did, he preferred cigars. Whoever had packed this parka—an Imperial surplus model—had left very little missing. Lando lit a dried-up cigarette with a tiny electric coil built into one sleeve of the jacket.
“The question, then, is why. What’s so flaming important about your seeing all these rocks and suchlike?”
“Great Heavens, man, I’d almost—,” He had almost forgotten about Mohs’ eyes. At least the hideous wounds were healing.
Yet Mohs had not been moving like a newly blinded man, had not been stumbling and groping. He had peered at the walls, down the tunnel, listened to Vuffi Raa as if he could—
“What do you mean, ‘a better word,’ Mohs? Is there some sense better than seeing?”
The Toka Singer swiveled himself where he sat on the floor and faced Lando. He drew in a deep breath, then let it out.
“It would appear so, Captain. You are carrying the Emissary on your right ear. You have a container of water in your left hand, the remains of a food-stick in your right. Your coat is unfastened; the shirt beneath has a missing fastener, second from the top. You hold a burning weed-stick in the same hand which holds the canteen. It is approximately one-third consumed.”
Lando was as impressed as he ever was by anything. “What color are my eyes?”
“They are the color of deceit, the color of avarice, the color of—”
“Enough, enough! Don’t go getting poetic on us. Somehow you are ‘seeing’ all these things. Any idea how: clairvoyance, telepathy, psychometry …”
“I do not know the meaning of these words, Captain. I can hear the water gurgling, the weed-stick crackling, the tones within your voice and that of the Emissary. I smell things and feel vibrations in the floor. Here it is warm, there it is cold. Pictures form themselves in my mind. My remaining senses assemble information which tells me everything my eyes once did.”
“Pretty good trick. How many fingers am I—ow! Take it easy, Vuffi Raa, that’s my earlobe you’re destroying!”
Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu Page 13
