Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (18 page)

“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 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 no Mohs.… Are you certain you feel all right?”

A
S 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.