“Apologies … Master.… Observe the walls.… There are the first large creatures to appear on this world.”
Vuffi Raa’s method of communication was far from perfect, but it didn’t fail to convey his excitement. Lando wondered what was so terrific about the fossils of old marine animals. Why, they looked like ordinary urchins, starfish, and the like. Perhaps that was what had moved the little robot. These things weren’t unlike him in their rough anatomy: five-sided, five-limbed.
That didn’t account for Mohs’ excitement: “Behold! Look upon the very ancestors of Those whose name it is not wise to speak in this place!”
“You mean the Sharu?” Lando said defiantly. He hated mumbo jumbo, even in a good cause, and this wasn’t.
“Yes, Captain,” the old man sighed resignedly, “I mean the Sharu.”
They were nothing more than a bunch of formerly slimy starfish, no matter whose ancestors they were.
The hours wore on, Vuffi Raa and Mohs alternating in rapture over what they observed embedded in the walls. Lando yawned, slid over onto the moving floor surface, arranged the hood of his parka comfortably, and did a little sliding of his own, in the direction of sleep.
The floor was solid, but resilient, and it was warm.
Even in his sleep, the science lectures wouldn’t leave him alone. He recapitulated the slow, steady progress—boring every step of the way—from the tiny, disgusting single-celled inhabitants of the planet’s soupy primeval waters, through the first colony organisms, up into multicelled animals, and from there to things with backbones and legs which eventually crawled out on the land.
Oddly, the further these imaginary entities got, climbing the tree of evolution, the vaguer and more nebulous they grew in Lando’s mind. Queer, shadowy shapes beat at one another with broken tree limbs. Even more intangible figures took those tree limbs, scratched the dirt with them, and planted the first seeds. By the time the ancestors of the Sharu were building tiny, crude cities, it was almost as if the cities built themselves and were inhabited by invisible citizens.
Continents were explored, migrations carried out. Wars were won and lost, with rapidly increasing technology. Discoveries were made, more wars fought. The pre-Sharu touched the boundaries of space in primitive explosive-powered machines, depositing the first installment of the junk the Millennium Falcon had had to fly through, getting to Rafa V.
All the while, Lando experienced a growing sense of unease, some vague pain or nagging that made his sleep less restful than it might have been. He’d had no idea, all day, where they were going. There wasn’t any choice in the matter for him: he had to find the Mindharp, and then figure out how to get out of the tunnel, away from the ruins, off the stinking planet, and, ultimately, clear of the Rafa once and for all.
They’d never catch him bringing mynocks into the Rafa System again!
Or anything else.
The sense of unease grew, gradually metamorphosing into something resembling real pain. Lando tossed and turned in his sleep, but kept on dreaming.
The ancestors of the Sharu had built roads and buildings that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to any civilized inhabitant of the galaxy. They had traveled in powered vehicles, eventually spread themselves to other planets of the system. At first they endured the harsh conditions on some of these globes, living in domes or underground. Finally, they had begun transforming them into replicas of their own home planet.
It hadn’t always been a desert. There had been oceans and trees and lakes and snow-covered mountains. There had been moisture in the air, and weather. How long ago all that had been, the part of Lando that did the dreaming wasn’t prepared to guess. How long does it take for the seas to go away?
Gradually, however, as their technology surpassed that which was currently available in Lando’s civilization, the shapes of buildings changed, the roads disappeared. The unseen entities who were becoming the Sharu fought no more wars, but struggled, instead, with the environment. No rock, whirling in its independent orbit around the Rafa sun, was too insignificant to be altered into a garden. To what precise purpose became increasingly unclear. Cities ceased to resemble anything that made sense. The first of the gigantic plastic structures appeared—on Rafa V. Then they appeared on the other planets, as well.
Taken altogether, they were nightmarish things. Lando squirmed in his sleep, flailed his arms and sweated. Every surface and angle was somehow wrong, things were added that seemed without function, passageways tapered out into tiny pipelines, hair-fine fractures became vast thoroughfares, in no logical order. The seas began to vanish, red sand replacing landscape everywhere. Had something gone wrong with the Sharu environment, or did they like it better the new way, plan it?
Lando sank deeper into a dreamless, pain-filled sleep. His last thought was a question: would this passage funnel down until the inexorably moving floor ground them into tiny pieces?
Lando woke up.
Somewhere, for a fraction of a second, he had the feeling that everything made sense after all. Then the feeling went away and left him with a terrible lingering headache.
“Vuffi Raa, are you awake? You’re going to have to find another perch for a while, my whole head hurts!” He rolled over on his back from the curled-up position he’d taken in the night.
“Masteryou’reawakeatlasthowdoyoufeel?”
He sat up—a sudden blast of pain hit him and he settled back again for a moment. “Take it a little slower, will you?” He lifted a hand to his ear. “Hop down a minute while I get rid of this headache.”
He felt a feather touch his palm. The pain subsided. Bringing his hand down, he looked at Vuffi Raa. Something was funny, but he couldn’t place it in his present groggy state.
The walls rolled by, this time showing discarded metal and plastic containers, parts of machinery and electronics frozen into the geological matrix. How long does a civilization have to last before its radios and televisions become fossils?
“Now, what was it you were saying, little fellow?”
“Merely … greeted … you … Asked … how … you … feel.”
“Lousy, but thanks for asking. Anything interesting happen in the night?” He scrounged around for a cigarette, started thinking about which of the ration bars to eat for breakfast.
“It … is … nighttime … now … outside.… Master … You … slept … through … the … day.”
“I don’t see that it makes all that much difference, down here. Where’s Mohs?” Lando had glanced around, up and down the tunnel, and hadn’t seen the old man. Perhaps he’d—
“What … Master?”
“We seem to be having some difficulty understanding one another this—er, afternoon. I said, where’s Mohs, did he wander off somewhere?”
“Master … there is something I must tell you.”
Lando felt a vague alarm. “What’s that, old watch-movement?”
“I believe … from measurements … that you’re shrinking.”
“What?”
“Everything is shrinking.… The tunnel grows narrower by the kilometer.… You have shrunk just enough that my weight upon you causes pain.… The previous rate at which I communicated is too fast.… We are nearing each other’s size and time-passage.”
“Which could mean just as well that you’re growing, did you ever thing of that?” Lando examined the tiny robot in his hand. Let’s see, he’d estimated Vuffi Raa’s previous size at perhaps three millimeters. Yes, no question of it, he was very nearly twice that size now and his miniscule weight was actually perceptible in Lando’s hand.
“Yes.… I considered it I think you are shrinking.”
“Well, I think you’re growing. What about Mohs?”
“Who … Master.… Who is Mohs?”
“Vuffi Raa, don’t do this to me! Mohs—the High Singer of the Toka—the old guy who led us here! Mohs!”
There was a long, long pause. It must have been vastly longer to the speeded-up droid. Finally:
“Master … I recall n
o Mohs.… Are you certain you feel all right?”
• XVII •
AS THE TUNNEL carried them along, they argued.
“Who was it that we met in the bar, who sang the Songs that pointed the way to Rafa V?”
“Why, Master, something that Rokur Gepta said must have given you the clue, and you guessed. Very good guessing, Master, highly commendable.”
“Well, then, damnit, what about that crowd at the port. Who had been leading the singing?”
“Why, no one, Master, it was simply community chanting, spontaneous on the part of the natives.”
“Arghhh! Okay, why did we land at the pyramid—never mind, I know: it was the biggest building on the planet. Tell me this: if there wasn’t any Mohs, who ambushed us, shot you full of holes, and carried me off to the life-orchard to die?”
“The natives, of course, Master. But there wasn’t any chief or head witch doctor or whatever. The Toka don’t have enough social structure for that.”
“Or to build crossbows? Look, Vuffi Raa, I couldn’t have made up that part about eating a lizard, I just couldn’t.”
“What do you expect me to say, Master?”
“I expect you to say that this is all an elaborate practical joke, and that you’re sorry and will be a good little droid from now on.” Lando shook the plastic package. There weren’t any cigarettes left. “Life is just full of annoyances these days.”
Vuffi Raa stood on the floor by Lando’s knee. He was five or six centimeters tall, by then, looking very much like one of those tropical spiders that eat birds.
“I wish I could do that,” he squeaked, no longer coding his messages in pulses. He had to make a conscious effort to slow them down for his still-gigantic master. “What reason would I have to lie, Master?”
Lando crushed the pack, started to throw it away, then, looking around him at the clean, uncluttered tunnel, thought better of it and put it in his pocket. “I’m not saying you’re lying, Vuffi Raa. One of us is wrong, that’s all. By the Eternal Core, I can describe the old man to you in the finest detail, from the tattoo on his wrinkled forehead to the dirt on his wrinkled feet!”
Vuffi Raa said nothing to that. He simply sat there growing—or watching his master shrink. That was something else they hadn’t been able to agree about, but they’d tired of arguing about it.
They were also tired of asking one another when the journey would be over. Lando extracted the deck of sabacc cards he carried with him, began to shuffle them. Vuffi Raa looked on with interest.
“Did you know, old pentapod, that these things were once used for telling fortunes?” He shuffled the deck again, cut it, and began laying the cards out on the floor.
“Highly irrational and unscientific, Master.”
“Don’t call me Master. I know what you mean, though—except that sometimes they can help you solve a problem, simply by getting you to look at it in a way you hadn’t thought to before.”
“I’ve heard that said, Master, but so can a sudden blow to the head, if you’re looking for random stimuli.”
That’s right, Lando thought, what I really need now is a fresh machine to banter with. The first card to fall was the Commander of Staves, one which Lando had often associated with himself. It was the apparently chance appearance of the right card—as happened so often—that made him wonder if his “scientific” analysis was all there was to the things.
“That’s me,” he explained to the robot, “a messenger on a fool’s errand. Let’s see what stands in the way.” He dealt a second card, laid it across the first. “Great Gadfry!” he exclaimed.
“What is it, Master?”
“Not what, who. It’s Himself—the Evil One. I’d guess that to be Rokur Gepta. Hold on, now, it’s changing.”
As sabacc card-chips are prone to do now and again, the second card transformed itself into the Legate of Coins—but the image was upside-down.
“Duttes Mer!” laughed Lando. “A being corrupt and evil if ever there was one! Well, that makes sense, even though it tells us nothing new. Let’s see what else.”
The third card he placed above the others. The Five of Sabres, Lando explained, represented his own conscious motivations, in this case, the desire to relieve the weak and unwary of the burden of their excess cash. He chuckled, dealt a card below the others, indicating his deeper, possibly subconscious motives. He groaned.
“The Legate of Staves. Don’t tell me I’m a do-gooder at heart!”
“Master, this is simply a random distribution of images, don’t take it seriously.”
Lando looked at the little robot cautiously. “I think I’ve just been insulted. Well, the next card should tell us something. It represents the past, things coming to an end.”
It was the Six of Sabres. Lando placed it to the left.
“Oh-ho! This usually denotes a journey, but its position indicates the journey is nearly at an end. What do you think of that?”
“I think, Master, that journeys can end in many ways, not all of them pleasant or productive.”
“That’s what I keep you around for, to bring me down whenever I feel too good, to remind me that every silver lining has a cloud. Say, you know, you’re getting bigger—eight, maybe nine centimeters. And your voice is changing, too.”
The little robot didn’t reply, but simply watched Lando lay the next card down to the right of the center pair.
“Flame and famine! You spoiled the run, Vuffi Raa—it’s the Destroyed Starship!”
“Does that mean harm will come to the Falcon, Master?”
“Don’t call me Master. I thought you didn’t believe in any of this.”
“I don’t. But what does it mean?”
“Cataclysmic changes in the near future, death and destruction. It may be the worst card in the whole deck. Maybe. One thing I’ve learned from all this: there’s always a worse card. This next will tell us what will happen to us and how we’ll react to it.”
“We, Master?”
“There you go again—great: the Satellite. It means a lot of fairly nasty things, things that you find under rocks. Mostly it means deception, deceit, betrayal.” He looked closely at the robot again. “Are you getting ready to double-cross me, my mechanical minion?”
“There, Master, is the greatest danger in such mystical pursuits. You trusted me before you started playing with those card-chips, didn’t you?”
“I still do, Vuffi Raa. The next card, up above the Satellite, here, is supposed to tell us where we’ll find ourselves next. Hmmm. I wonder what that means?”
The Wheel sat shimmering on the card-chip, an image denoting luck, both good and bad, the beginning and the ending of things, random chance, final outcome—it gave Lando no information whatsoever.
The third card in that part of the array, placed in line above the Satellite and the Wheel, represented future obstacles. Lando cringed when he saw what had appeared.
“Gepta again! Well, I suppose that’s only logical. Want to see the final outcome, old clockwork? Well, you’re going to, anyway. Here we go. Well, that’s not too bad, after all. It’s the Universe. It means we’ll have a shot at everything we want to do. Join the human race and see the world. Something like that.”
“Master.”
“Yes, Vuffi Raa, what is it?”
“Master, that Six of Sabres: that’s a journey over with?”
“That’s what I said although it can mean other things, in other—”
“Master, our journey’s over with.”
And, indeed, so it appeared to be. The floor slowed as they came upon the towering doorway of a chamber large enough to park a fleet of spaceships in. A long, long distance away, something resembling a giant altar was raised, all the lights in the cavernous room focused upon it.
Even from several hundred meters off, Lando could tell it was the Mindharp of Sharu. It hurt his eyes to look at it.
• XVIII •
IT WASN’T AS easy as all that.
There were
other things inside the hall besides the podium or altar where the Mindharp stood, and a giant replica of the Key Lando had carried until the wall of the pyramid had taken it.
“What do you make of that, Vuffi Raa?”
The robot, standing now as high as Lando’s knee, peered into the same odd well-lighted gloom that had filled the tunnel behind them. The light was a brownish amber and seemed to emanate from the floor. The room, a vast auditorium of a place, was lined with something between sculpture and painting—a pageant that seemed, to the gambler, to recapitulate his dreams of the night before.
Here, at the entrance, shaggy forms, barely erect, shambled along the walls in a frozen march, growing straighter, taller, beginning to carry things in their hands, to lose their furry coverings, to wear clothing.
Lando and Vuffi Raa followed the right wall, which curved gently into the vast circularity that was the chamber of the Mindharp. By the time the figures on the wall were playing with internal combustion engines and rocketry, the pair had only walked a few dozen meters. Uncounted thousands of centuries of history lay ahead of them.
The robot hadn’t spoken. Lando looked down at him. His eye was glowing peculiarly—or perhaps the peculiarity was in the lighting of the chamber.
“Vuffi Raa, did you hear me?”
“Why yes, Lando,” the droid said, seeming to be waking from a sort of walking dream. “What do I make of this? The same that you do—that this is somehow the center of Sharu culture. What they left behind of it, anyway. That the Harp is somehow even more important than we thought it was.”
Lando hadn’t been thinking that at all. He’d been thinking that the chamber was a place of worship, that the figures on the wall were human—Toka—that the bas-relief murals would convey to them the story of how they arose on some far-off planet and came to the Rafa System. That somewhere along the wall the story would be told of how they met the Sharu and discovered their masters.
He didn’t want to wait. “I’m going on across the room—enough of this historical nonsense. Coming with me?”
Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu Page 14
