Lando followed the instructions - with the exception of lighting the cigars. He handed one to Mutdah, offered to light it for him.
“Oh, come now, Captain. I suppose you are afraid of being poisoned or something silly like that. Here: If you don't mind, I'll puff on both cigars while you apply the flame - no, don't let the flame touch them. That's right, just hold it there until the ends begin to glow. That's the way to enjoy a fine cigar. Please choose either one you wish.”
Lando was a gambler, a professional manipulator of cards. He knew how to “force” a draw, determine which card another person took while appearing to encourage a free choice. Mutdah wasn't doing it to him.
He took a cigar. It was very, very good.
“Well,” he said after a couple of satisfying draws. He'd missed the cigars he'd accidentally crushed aboard the Falcon, and the crude cigarettes he'd rolled from their tobacco had been no substitute. “I don't suppose you can just let me go my own way. Believe me, I don't care what substances you find enjoyable, and these two-” he waved a hand broadly to indicate the room in which the remains of Vobah and Fybot were floating somewhere “-were no friends of mine.”
Bohhuah Mutdah slowly exhaled smoke. “I'd be a great deal more inclined to take that seriously, my boy, if I hadn't seen the expression on your face when they were killed. I suspect that you pretend to be a blasted Core-may-care, live-and-let-five sort of rogue, Captain. But you are a moralist at heart, and I would always have to be looking over my shoulder for you.” He waggled his massive, bloated shoulders. “As you can see, I would find that quite a burdensome task.”
Lando's chest began to tighten. He hadn't any illusions about what was about to happen, not since he'd seen Waywa Fybot burned down, but here it was, unmistakably. Soon five corpses would drift on the air currents in the chamber, and the next few seconds would determine whether it was shiny and uniformed or gross and nearly naked.
“So I guess we can't make a deal, then?” Lando asked rhetorically. The second pistol hadn't been his only cautious preparation, but he was damned if he could see what good his others would do now.
“I'm afraid not,” Bohhuah Mutdah answered sadly. “And for more than one reason. In the second drawer of the end table, you will find a pair of manacles.” He drew the gun, leveled it at the gambler. “I wish you to put them on. If you do not, then I will slowly roast you with this weapon, rather than kill you outright. The first shot will pierce your lower spine so that you will be helpless to resist the subsequent agony. Get the manacles and put them on, please.”
Lando thought about it, looked at the muzzle of the pistol, looked into Mutdah's unwavering beady eyes, and got the manacles. They were force shackles, a pair of cuff bands connected by an adjustable miniature tractor beam. First class and very expensive. That figured.
“That's right,” the trillionaire said encouragingly. “Now put them on.”
Shrugging to himself, the gambler snapped the bands around his wrists. He wasn't altogether resigned; Mutdah had something in mind.
After all, he hadn't handcuffed Bassi Vobah or her partner.
“Thank you very much, Captain. Now place the shackle beam in this loop of monofilament. Yes. You see, I mentioned that there was more than one reason why I cannot let you go? You recall that?”
An exasperated expression on his face, Lando asked, “Why do jerks like you always have to go into this thespian routine? If you're going to kill me, do it with the gun instead of boredom, there's a good fellow.”
A flush spread itself across the vastness of Bohhuah Mutdah's face. With a gargantuan effort, he forced himself erect, pointed the weapon at Lando.
“The first reason I have explained. My enemies are hounding me and would see my power and fortune redistributed. Parenthetically, I must tell you that I do not care a whit about any of that. The continuation of the Bohhuah Mutdah 'empire' is of considerably less than no interest to me at all. I am constitutionally incapable of feeling any concern about it.
“The real reason, Captain, is that I don't want to let you go.”
The obese trillionaire's body began to blur, its colors swirling together, its outline dissolving. It was replaced by the somewhat smaller form of an individual swathed in gray from top to toe. Only his insanely hungry eyes showed through the wrappings of his headpiece.
“For I am Rokur Gepta, and I'm going to torture you until you beg for death!”
XVI
“SABACC!”
Lando Calrissian slapped down the cards in triumph - a triumph that turned to embarrassed agony when he saw he'd hesitated too long between shouting out his victory and sealing it in the stasis field of the gaming table. In the brief interval between the acts, his perfect twenty-three had transmuted itself into a losing hand.
The seventeen-year-old would-be professional gambler writhed inwardly, He'd practically begged for a chance to join the game in the back room of the local saloon. He'd lied to his family, ducked out on school, broken or severely bent several ordinances about minors and environments such as the one he found himself in now.
He wished that he was home in bed. He wished that he was home under his bed. He wished he'd never seen a deck of cardchips in his life, never practiced with them, never imagined himself a dashing rogue and scoundrel.
It was all a dream, a foolish, idiotic dream.
“All is illusion, Captain Calrissian!”
Lando shook his head. The back room of the sleazy hometown saloon had vanished, and with it the embarrassed memory of humiliation and mistake. Actually, he'd gone on to win that game, taking home more money than he'd ever had together in one place before. Why hadn't he remembered that?
Replacing the saloon in his field of vision was a broad rich lawn, trees at the horizon, Flamewind spouting, roiling, and coruscating overhead. That was where he'd seen all those people on the approach to Oseon 5792. Where had they gone?
“The sights you see at this very moment are no more real, no more substantial than the memories you have just experienced so vividly, my boy! That is the fundamental truth the universe has to teach us, and like nearly everybody else, you have not managed to learn it until the uttermost end of your life!”
The hiss in that voice was unpleasantly familiar. Lando twisted his head around - he was tied up! - but couldn't find the source. The range of his vision was limited by the upended picnic table, a cold, synthetic marble of some kind, to which he had been bound. All he could see was the garden before him.
And the Flamewind.
The soft sound of slippered feet on grass. A shadow passed around the table - from the angle, Lando guessed it had been propped up on a bench - and turned to confront him.
“Rokur Gepta!”
The voice was filtered through a smile behind the turban windings.
“And you thought I was dead, a victim of the uprising on Rafa IV. No, Captain, I have been quite thoroughly alive for a vastly longer time than you could guess. I am hard to kill and highly reluctant to let strangers terminate my existence.”
Lando bit back a witty reply. In the first place, this was not the time for it, not when he was staked down and helpless. The tractor cuffs were anchored to the table, the beam of force between them lying in close and inseparable contact with the marble surface above his head. Likewise, another pair of manacles had been added to his spacesuited ankles. He and Gepta had moved from the bubble-caves in the asteroid's free-fall center to the surface, beneath the domes.
And he couldn't remember a moment of it.
“No remarks?” the sorcerer taunted. “I see that you have at least learned some discretion. This is not a moment for repartee, but a time for contemplation. You are about to experience an agony so excruciating, so unprecedented in the history of intelligent life, that being one of its first experimental subjects is a privilege and a signal honor.
“You have had a sample of it: torture by chagrin.”
The sorcerer waved a leather-gloved hand.
A jail c
ell on Rafa IV at dawn. The open-fronted chamber looked out on a graveled yard. The noise was deafening: they were waking up the prisoners for a day of murderous labor in the life-orchards.
The guards beat on the bars. Lando had awoken with a start; now the fear of what was about to happen filled his being to the core. He backed into the cell, trying to escape the noise, his unsteady breathing slowly turning into a whimper.
BLAAASSSST!
The fire hose caught him unprepared. It dashed him against the wall, the icy water sluicing over him, blinding him, forcing itself into his mouth and nose. He fell to his knees, his head battered against the wall. He ducked it, trying to breathe, trying to stay alive against the killing force of it.
“But, you protest, it wasn't like that at all?” Gepta paced back and forth in front of Lando, relishing the gambler's agony. Despite the sweat on every centimeter of his skin, Lando was freezing, simply from the memory.
But Gepta was right: it hadn't been like that at all.
“It - it only lasted a few moments,” Lando stammered. Perhaps it was a surrender of some kind; he hated to give the madman any satisfaction at all. But he had to understand what was happening here. “I wasn't nearly that frightened. I'd already worked out a way to escape. And it only lasted a few seconds - not the hours I just...”
He tapered off, unable to continue because of his shaking. Shaking merely at the remembrance of something that hadn't bothered him all that much when it was actually happening.
“You're a brave man, Captain Calrissian. You don't like to think of it that way. What do you call it, 'creative cowardice'? You regard yourself a pragmatist, one not given to heroics.”
The sorcerer had paused, stood now nearly motionless before the gambler. In the background, the Flamewind whorled around the demented sky, casting many-colored shadows.
Lando shook his head to get the sweat out of his eyes, tried his bonds. As he'd expected, they were there to stay.
“And yet,” Gepta continued, “what is bravery but the capacity to reject our fears, ignore and suppress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do. What you are experiencing now, dear Captain, is the fear you refused to experience the first time. Now you have no choice!”
Surprise attack!
Wrestling the Falcon with one hand, Lando desperately tried to fire the cockpit guns with the other as the weird ragtag fighter-squadron bore down on him. It was a nightmare: they were too well shielded for his inconsequential guns to trouble, yet he couldn't operate the quad-guns without leaving the bridge. Vuffi Raa, insane and helpless, couldn't assist him.
He fired again. He might as well have been shooting streams of pink lemonade as the pale, ineffectual fire that was all he could manage. The enemy fleet bore down on him, bore down, bore down...
Lando finished throwing up, coughed, choked, cleared his throat.
“Obviously,” Gepta hissed cheerfully, “you survived the peril that you just re-experienced. Otherwise, you wouldn't be here now - it's only logical. It is a logic which enables us to live with our unpleasant memories, is it not? An integrative, healing contextualization which we all require to survive.”
“Sure,” the gambler gasped. “Sure, you rotten - anything you say!”
“Ahhh! Resistance at last! As I was saying, however, the art of torture-by-chagrin lies in denying the mind that integration, that perspective. As you relive the minor horrors of your life, you don't recall that you survived, eventually triumphed. You see, even at moments of extreme peril, there are defenses, distractions, digressions which dilute the passions... What is more, my method does not allow it’s subject to experience anything but the fear. You can think of nothing else. The experience goes on and on, in circles, until the ego and the will are utterly crushed.
“Resistance,” the lecturer trudged on relentlessly, “only adds the brisance, the, how shall I express it, the snap! which makes the quashing of the human personality possible. Get angry by all means, Captain. Insult me. Not only will it speed the process - without rendering your eventual agony any shorter in duration, I assure you - but I relish it, as you shall see to your dismay!”
Lando's breath was sour, the taste in his mouth bitter, but he managed a reply. “I'm betting that you're bluffing, Gepta. I'm betting that you're lying about that part. It would be like you. I think I'll continue hating your guts for a while, just as a matter of form. I think I'll imagine them pulled out through your navel and roasted over a slow-”
Lando's world was a forest of giant legs. All around him, grown-ups on their private hurried errands jostled him, threatening to knock him down and trample him. There wasn't anything he could do. He was only three years old.
And he had lost his mommy.
The frightening alien city streets were crowded for the holidays, wet and dirty, dark with early evening. The lighted windows of the giant stores along the sidewalk didn't help. He stumbled in the slush and nearly fell, sagged instead against the wall below a window filled with toys, and fought back the tears rolling down his terrified little face.
“Mommy!” Where was she? Why didn't she come and get him? She'd left him at one of the windows - he'd wanted to watch the animated display - when he'd promised he wouldn't move. He was tired of the inside of the store; everything was up too high; there were too many people; and it hadn't been an interesting department anyway, where the lady had given mommy too much money back.
“Mommy?”
“Your mommy isn't here, Lando. You're all alone, and always will be.”
“Who's that talking?”
“I'm your fear, little Lando, I'm your terror. I'm an eternity of anguish and I'm going to get you!”
“Mommy!”
Somehow the voice sounded familiar. Somehow he knew the voice hated him and wanted to hurt him. He didn't know what those big words were, terror, eternity, anguish, but they didn't sound very nice. He wanted his mommy.
But he was lost forever in the forest of legs.
“Ahhh, that was a deep and fundamentally traumatic one, wasn't it, little Lando? I could barely stand it myself.”
Gasping, Lando shook the tears from his eyes, tried to catch his breath. It felt like he'd been crying for a thousand years. He remembered the incident very well. It had lasted, in reality, all of ten minutes, but somehow, he had never quite trusted the universe afterward.
“What do you mean you could barely stand it?” shouted Lando, then: “You! You were the voice! What are you doing to me?”
“Only beginning, my dear boy, only beginning. We've been at this, what? Half an hour? It will go on for days, Captain Calrissian, with any luck for weeks! I may attempt to prolong it for - But I see that you are puzzled, Lando.”
Gepta had resumed pacing. Lando moved, tried to stretch, and discovered that he'd hurt himself where the force cuffs held him, where the marble table bore against his back, he was in pure, unadulterated physical agony.
It felt good by comparison.
“You see, the art of torture-by-chagrin requires that its practitioner experience what the subject experiences. He must guide the mind of the subject into always deeper, always more terrifying waters. He must suffer the experiences himself, in order to assure the quality, the depth, the texture of it. And in your case, Captain, and in mine, to make sure it is suitable as revenge!
“Yes, I have a way of living in your head, and yes, I am willing to suffer every bit of pain you suffer, so that I will know that I am torturing you enough!”
Overhead, the Flamewind sheeted the sky with a demented rainbow. Interplanetary lightning crackled across ionized paths. A hurricane of color whirled around the asteroid.
Gepta whispered, “The next little nostalgic digression will concern your business failures, Captain. But before we begin, I wish to tell you that they are not altogether the product of a malicious universe or your incompetence.”
Gepta had been pacing back and forth a couple of meters in front of the tilted table where Lando was restra
ined. Now, for the first time, the sorcerer stepped forward until his eyes burned into those of the gambler.
“I hounded you!” Lando shook his head, too groggy from pain of several kinds to comprehend fully what Rokur Gepta was telling him. “I dogged your footsteps! Everywhere you went, I saw to it that the prices were a little higher, the rates you could resell at were a little lower! I warned the authorities anonymously that you were a smuggler, increasing the number of fees you had to pay, raising the amount in bribes! I devoured you by attrition - and then arranged for you to be invited to the Oseon!”
“What?” It didn't make sense. Hadn't the government wanted to destroy Bohhuah Mutdah? Hadn't-
“I anticipate the questions you are asking yourself, Captain. I and I alone arranged for that decadent leviathan to be harassed by the government, then had him killed and took his place. All so I would be here when you arrived. I saw to it that more money was placed in your hands than you have ever had before - tens of millions! - money you will now never have the chance to spend.”
Here, Gepta reached behind the table, took the thick sheaf of bills, and placed it on the ground at Lando's feet.
“Enjoy it, Captain Lando Calrissian, in the limited way that you are able. Enjoy it as you shall enjoy the memories of every sickening, humiliating, painful event in your life - including this one! I shall enjoy it all with you, purify it, help you to concentrate upon it to the exclusion of all else. And we shall see, as I have never had the opportunity to determine before, whether an individual can die of shame...”
He lifted a hand; Lando could feel something like drowsiness steal over him, just as he had in each instant before. He fought it, wrenching himself in the restraints, but his mind kept getting fuzzier, his eyes refused to focus on anything but his own terrifying inner realities. He fought it.
But he was losing.
Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy Page 29
