Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy

by L. Neil Smith

  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 EEEIIIYYYOOOUUUURRR 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 dropped, 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 lo
nger 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 multi-celled 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?”

  The old man lifted his sightless head. “There must be a better word than 'seeing,' Captain.”

  “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!”

  “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 multi-celled 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 s
urpassed that which was currently available in Lando's civilization, the shapes of buildings changed, the roads disappeared. The unseen entities who wer6 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?