Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy

by L. Neil Smith

  Perhaps.

  Lehesu estimated that he had, at most, only a few hours before he expired. His people fed continually as they moved about through life, automatically, almost unconsciously. There was little capacity in his gigantic body for storage of nutrients.

  As he weakened, and the effect was increasingly noticeable, increasingly painful to him, he reflected that at least he was dying in the Open Sea, away from all the - But wait! What was that? There was something else in the desolation! Far beneath him in the depths, another entity swam, one that pulsed with life and power. Stretching his sensory abilities to their limit, he could feel that it was comparatively tiny, yet it virtually sang with strength-which meant there had to be sustenance around somewhere.

  He did another uncharacteristic thing then, something no other Oswaft would have done: he dived for the object. Lehesu was not a predator. Nor was he herbivorous. Such distinctions had no meaning in his time and place, under those circumstances. It was the habit of the Oswaft to eat whatever they found edible, leave everything else alone.

  They knew of no other intelligent species, and the entirety of creation was their dinner plate. At least he could discover what the thing had found to eat.

  He realized there was a possibility that it would find him, and he had little strength for fighting left, even if he had been inclined to fighting, which he was not. Yet he had less hope, even, than strength.

  Down and down he went. Yes, there it was, a mote less than a tenth his size, yet he could feel that it was stronger than he was by a substantial margin. Better armored, as well, much like the small carapace-creatures that swam the calmer currents of the ThonBoka.

  They were delicious.

  As he approached the thing, he could see that it was not shaped terribly differently from himself. To judge from its direction of travel, it was a bit broader than it was long, more rounded in its major contours than he was. Like Lehesu, it had two nondescript projections on its frontal surface, although whether they were sensory arrays, like his, was another question.

  Lehesu's senses were not strictly limited to straight lines. He could “see” that the creature possessed no manipulators on its underside. He had hundreds. Yet it appeared that part of the surface was capable of opening; perhaps its tentacles folded into its belly.

  He knew of organisms that - Lehesu recoiled in shock! He was near enough now to make out and be astounded by a major difference between himself and the... the thing. It was completely opaque, like a corpse!

  His people lost their transparency upon dying and, until they decomposed into the dust of which all life is made, remained visually impenetrable. This creature looked like a dead thing, yet moved with confidence and fleetness. There were those among his people who...

  But Lehesu was not superstitious. With a mental snort, he rejected such foolish notions. Almost completely.

  Another, milder surprise awaited him. Drawing even nearer - any other Oswaft would have known then and there that Lehesu was quite insane - he felt the thing trying to say something. The ThonBoka was vast and its people many, but neither so vast nor numerous that separate languages had ever developed. Within their limits, the Oswaft were far too wide-ranging, too swift. And they could speak over distances that would only seem incredible to another race.

  And so he felt the tingling of communication, for the first time in his life without being able to understand it. He broadcast a beacon of good wishes himself and waited. His own message was repeated back to him. He repeated the first greeting the small armored creature had sent him.

  Each now knew the other to be an intelligent organism. That was as far as communication could proceed. The armored creature began counting - that was silly, thought Lehesu; if it were intelligent, of course he could deduce that it would be able to count. Thinking hard, he spoke a picture-message, one meant to convey visual reality rather than pure ideas. Lacking any better image, the wave front he transmitted was that of the small armored object before him.

  A rather long pause followed. Deep within Lehesu, he experienced a brief sensation of satisfaction that he could surprise it. Then he received a picture-message of himself. Fine! Now he could convey the essence of his disastrous situation to it, and perhaps it would help him. If in no other way, perhaps it could help pull him into richer currents.

  He spoke a picture of himself, then modified it in his imagination until he showed a pitiable scene in which he was growing increasingly opaque, increasingly withered. Finally, just to do things properly and in full, he imagined himself dissolving, his molecular constituents wafting away. It made him feel very strange to imagine such a thing, but it was necessary.

  Finally, he started the image over again, but this time had himself feeding richly on what drifted in the currents of the ThonBoka.

  He pictured himself growing stronger, healthier, sleeker, more transparent. He pictured himself growing to become a giant Elder. For some reason this made him feel worse than did the idea of dying, although whether the feeling came from imagining a feast while he was starving, or imagining himself in the image of his stuffy forebears, he was not quite certain.

  In any case, the creature hung motionless before him in the void, nor did it reply for a long, long time. As he waited, Lehesu examined it carefully. Numerous spots glowed on its outer surface, much like the courting glow pigments of some of the ThonBoka wildlife. One in particular, a large globular spot at the front end, displayed odd, changing patterns. All the while, the creature pulsed and throbbed with indecently good health. It had come to a halt when the communications began, and continued to be still though obviously restless and thrumming to be on its way.

  Finally, it sent him a picture-speech. That caught him by surprise, as his mind had wandered - another dangerous sign of imminent starvation. He had been gazing at the stars, wondering what they were, how far away they lay, and how he might, if he lived, contrive to reach them, as he had reached the Open Sea.

  The armored creature asked him, in effect, if these were what he liked to eat. It then began displaying pictures of every imaginable variety of wonderfully delicious nutriment, from the incidental nutrient haze that drifted on the currents and was gobbled up by Oswaft as they passed, to the most succulent of complex culinary creations.

  The trouble was, these images were mixed incomprehensibly with things he didn't even remotely recognize - and with downright garbage.

  Excitedly he shouted confirmation when the images were right, withheld comment when they were not. He and the creature hadn't gotten around to establishing the symbols for “yes” and “no”. He wondered what the thing had in mind. Would it lead him to this banquet it was promising? Would he have the strength to follow? Or was it merely mocking him?

  He was beginning not to care. There were only minutes left for him, anyway.

  Suddenly, the greatest shock of all. The belly of the creature split open and vomited out everything it had shown him. It filled the currents around them, forming an almost impenetrable fog. Shouting joyously, he swooped and dived and soared through it all, plowing great clean swaths where he had passed.

  The creature stood off, watching, doing, and saying nothing.

  One pass took him very near the thing. It was not smooth but was covered with knobs and bulges. Only portions of the thing showed any signs of transparency, and they simply admitted the sensory probes into an internal darkness that revealed nothing.

  But for once, Lehesu's curiosity was abated. He fed, perhaps more richly than he ever had in his life. Each pass brought him nearer the creature, but he was not afraid of it; it had saved his life. His senses passed over a spot that might have told him a great deal more, except that the Oswaft had no written language, no need for one. It was a plate, a plaque, attached with rivets to the creature's hide. On it were enameled five words that would have shocked him deeply, for this was not a living creature at all.

  The sign read: MILLENNIUM FALCON Lando Calrissian, Capt.

  Lehesu the Os
waft, swimmer of the starry void, was content merely to soar and graze about the Falcon, singing out his gratitude to her every second he did so, with the natural radio waves generated by the speech centers of his mighty brain.

  The formaldehyde was delicious!

  II

  LANDO CALRISSIAN, GAMBLER, rogue, scoundrel - and humanitarian?

  It didn't seem very likely, even to him. But the undeniable truth was that, several months after her initial encounter with that remarkable space-breathing being, Lehesu of the Oswaft, circumstances found the Millennium Falcon stolidly boring her way through the interstellar void straight toward the ThonBoka, which translated roughly into human languages as the StarCave.

  Lehesu's people were in trouble: Lando was bringing help.

  He was the help, and he was furious. His anger had nothing directly to do with Lehesu, the Oswaft, or the ThonBoka, but was rather more closely connected with the broken arm he was nursing at the moment. It was not quite so onerous nor prolonged an ordeal as it might have been in a more primitive place and time. He wore a complex lightweight brace consisting of a series of electrical coils that generated a field that would encourage his fractured humerus to knit up nicely in two or three days. Yet the appliance was cumbersome and inconvenient, particularly in free-fall. And Lando had grown particularly fond of free-fall. It helped him think.

  With the deck-plate gravity switched off, he would sit in the middle of a room - equidistant not only from its walls, but from its floor and ceiling as well - parked comfortably on a cushion of thin air, cogitating. But the cast got in the way.

  Lando also had a black eye and a broken toe. But, considering everything else that had happened, those were minor annoyances. He flicked expensive cigar ash at a vacuum hose he'd arranged to hang conveniently nearby, and spoke in the direction of an intercom panel set in a table somewhere beneath him.

  “Vuffi Raa, what's our ETA again?”

  The instrument returned a voice to him, soft-spoken and polite, fully as mechanical in its origins as the instrument itself, yet rich with humorous astute inflection.

  “Seventy-six hours, Master. That's a new correction: this region is so clean we've gained another four hours since I made the last estimate. I apologize for my previous inexactitude.”

  Inexactitude! Lando thought. The Core-blessed thing talks prettier than I do, and I'm supposed to be the con artiste around here!

  The Millennium Falcon's velocity, many times greater than that of light, was limited only by the density of the interstellar medium she traversed. Ordinary space is mostly emptiness, yet there are almost always a few stray molecules of gas, sometimes in surprisingly complex chemical organization, per cubic kilometer. Any modern starship's magnetogravitic shielding kept it from burning to an incandescent cinder and smoothed the way through what amounted to a galaxy-wide cluttering of hyperthin atmosphere. But the resistance of the gas was still appreciable through a reduction in the ship's theoretical top speed.

  The particular area the Falcon was then passing through seemed to be an exception. Bereft of the usual molecular drag, the Falcon was outdoing even her own legendary performance.

  The captain pondered that, then addressed the intercom again.

  “Better back her off a few megaknots. I need more time than that before this confounded dingus comes off my arm. And you’ve still got a dent or two yourself that needs ironing out. And Vuffi Raa?”

  “Yes, Master?” was the cheerful reply. Lando could hear the clack-clack-clack of keyboard buttons being punched as per his instructions. The vessel slowed, but that could not be felt through her inertial dampers.

  “Don't call me master!”

  That had been very nearly reflexive. He'd long since given up wondering what the robot's motivation was for the small but chronic disobedience. Actually, Lando was concerned about his little mechanical friend, and not just because Vuffi Raa was such a terrific pilot droid. Or at least not entirely.

  These sporadic violent attacks they'd been suffering lately were getting to be a serious matter where they had only been minor nuisances before, and knowing why they were happening, to Lando's great surprise, hadn't helped a bit.

  The gambler sneered down at his foot where another, tinier set of coils pulsed healing energies into his flesh. Somehow, that was the final insult - that and the black eye. It was one thing to attempt to murder an enemy. That was what a vendetta was all about, after all. But to do him in by millimeters, an abrasion here, a contusion there?

  Fiendish, Lando was forced to admit - if it wasn't simple ineptitude.

  Somehow the enemy realized that a man otherwise willing and capable of bare-handedly confronting a ravening predator his own size, sometimes panics at the sound of a stinging insect barnstorming around his ears.

  Well, the gambler told himself, that's why we're on this so-called errand of mercy. I'm going to put a twelve-gee stop to all of this juvenile assassination nonsense, one way or the other, once and for all.

  Sure, it was a risky proposition; the stakes were as high as they could be. But above and beyond every other consideration, Lando Calrissian - he told himself again - was a sport who'd wager anything and everything on the turn of a single card-chip.

  That's how he'd gotten into the mess in the first place.

  It seemed that, some time before, a talented but essentially prospectless young conscientious-objector-of-fortune had won himself a starship - actually a converted smuggling freighter - in a game of seventy-eight-card sabacc. A little while later he had, quite unintentionally, acquired a pretty peculiar robot in much the same fashion. Together, the two machines and their man had set out upon a series of adventures, some more profitable than others. In the process, they had made a number of enemies, one of them a self-proclaimed sorcerer who had plotted to Rule The Galaxy, and had tripped over Lando on his way to the top. Twice.

  The fellow had resented that, blamed Lando for his own humbling and bad luck, and the vendetta had begun. Until now, it had been an unrequited, entirely one-sided relationship.

  All Lando wanted was to be left alone. He'd tried explaining, via various media, that he didn't care who ran the universe - he'd break whatever rules it suited him to disobey in any case, whoever was in charge - and that the sorcerer was perfectly welcome to all the power and glory he could grab. Alas, these blandishments, reasonable as they sounded to the gambler, had fallen upon inoperative auditory organs.

  Just to make things really complicated, Vuffi Raa had already had enemies of his own. Although the robot hadn't known it. His previous master, while spectacularly untalented at games of chance, had been a highly effective government employee in the spy business. This fellow, ostensibly an itinerant anthropologist, had used the little robot, forced him to help undermine a previously undiscovered system-wide civilization in a manner that had resulted in the brutal military extermination of two-thirds of its citizens. The remaining third, understandably perturbed, had sworn eternal hatred for the droid, and had enthusiastically begun to do something about it.

  Subsequent attempts at negotiation, as in Lando's case, had been nearly lethally futile. Some people just won't listen.

  Well, life is like that, Lando thought as he hovered in what had been designed as the passenger lounge of the Millennium Falcon. It served as their living room; just then, it was the gambler's private thinking-parlor, and the thoughts he was thinking were reasonably ironic. He took another puff on his cigar.

  The trouble with two partners having separate sets of mortal enemies is that said enemies don't always make distinctions.

  Particularly when using fragmentation grenades. Poor Vuffi Raa had gotten badly dented by an assassin in the employ of the sorcerer at their last port of call. The idiot had confessed before expiring; with the nervousness of a beginner, he'd thrown the pin instead of the grenade. The robot's injuries would work themselves out after a while.

  He had excellent self-repair mechanisms.

  In another incident, Lando had b
een pushed over a rail into a vat of vitamin paste he had considered acquiring for that very trip, somehow fracturing both arm and toe and picking up a shiner. What really hurt was that he'd simply ruined his second-best velvoid semiformal captain's uniform. He was certain Vuffi Raa's enemies were responsible. It felt like their style. Clumsy.

  Nor was the Millennium Falcon considered immune. In fact, she'd rather taken the brunt of things, with bombs planted inside her (two of which had actually gone off) and having felt the fury of several small space battles in recent months. A fighter pilot had deliberately rammed her, crumpling her boarding ramp. She'd strained her engines getting them in and out of various places in a hurry. Her battery of quad-guns, under Lando's capable direction, had staved off the occasional pirate vessel, who probably hadn't anything at all to do with vendettas. Surprised at the ferocity with which her captain had taken it all out on their hides, defeated pirates were giving the battered old freighter quite a reputation.

  Pirates they could handle. The Falcon was a good deal faster than she looked, terrifyingly well armed; he and the robot were pretty hot pilots, but Vuffi Raa had taught Lando everything he knew in this regard. Lando told himself again that the business at the StarCave would pay off all other debts, as well. He was thoroughly fed up, loaded for whatever omnivorous quadruped the fates cared to place in his path.

  Tugging gently at the vacuum ashtray hose, Lando drifted to the ceiling of the lounge, gave a little shove against the overhead, which propelled him near the floor. He switched on the gravity and walked both forward and starboard around the Falcon's curving inner corridor, to the cockpit, which was set in a tube-like construction projecting from the front of the ship.

  In the left-hand pilot's seat, an equally weird construction perched, a five-limbed chromium-plated starfish with a single glowing red eye set atop its pentagonal torso. Its tentacles were at rest just then, having reduced the Falcon's speed as Lando had requested.