Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (19 page)

“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.

I
T 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?”

Vuffi Raa turned, followed Lando without a word.

It was a long, long trip. The Sharu had discovered the same secret that many human cultures had: that if you make the floors of a public building slick enough, keep them polished and slippery, they’ll force the people who have to walk there into little mincing steps that magnify the distances and humble the spirit—just as high ceilings tend to do.

Lando wasn’t having any. He took a few running steps and slid along the floor.

“Wheee! This is fun! Come on, old tinhorn, try it!”

“Master!” said the robot in a scandalized voice. “Have you no respect?”

Lando stopped, gave the robot a sober look. “Not a grain of it—not when it’s being imposed on me by the architecture.”

He took another running start, slid several meters this time. The robot had to hurry to catch up. By the time he had, he was very nearly his original height.

“Lando,” he said, “speaking of architecture, there’s something very odd about this place.”

Lando had to stop to catch his breath. He sat down on the floor.

“That would be consistent with everything else around here. What is it this time?”

“Well, from the entrance, the room looked circular, with a high domed ceiling, and perhaps a thousand meters across the floor to the altar.”

Lando looked around. “Still seems that way to me.”

“And to my vision, too. But, checking with radar and a number of extra senses, the room is ovoid—shaped like an egg
with a big end and a small end. The big end was the entrance. The roof keeps getting closer to the floor.”

Lando had another flash of his dreams. Something Vuffi Raa said earlier had triggered the first, something about the idea that it wasn’t he, the robot who was growing, but Lando who was shrinking. Yet if that were true—the tunnel had seemed to stay the same size the duration of the two-day trip—then the moving passageway had to have been shrinking. Lando had appeared to Vuffi Raa to be a hundred and ten or twenty meters tall in the beginning. Now he was back to being a little shy of two. The corridors had to have been shrinking accordingly.

At that rate, when they reached the Mindharp, Vuffi Raa would tower over Lando, and they’d both have to travel on hands and knees to reach the artifact.

“HALT
!” said a voice.

“
What
?” Vuffi Raa and Lando cried simultaneously.

“IT IS NOT PERMITTED TO CROSS THE HALL
.”

“What happens if we do?” inquired Lando.

The voice paused, seemed confused, “
WELL, I’M NOT SURE I KNOW, NO ONE EVER ASKED ME. BUT IT IS NOT PERMITTED
.”

Lando opened his mouth—

“Just who in the Hall are you, anyway?” Vuffi Raa said. Lando looked at the robot sharply. He hated having his good lines stolen. It was exactly what he’d been planning to say, himself.

“WHY, I AM THE HALL, OF COURSE. YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO LOOK AT THE EXHIBIT AS YOU APPROACH THE SACRED OBJECT
.”

“And it’s your job,” Lando suggested, “to make sure we do? Well, let’s get a few things straight here, Hall: I’ve been tugged along by everything that’s happened so far. I’m not going to let an empty room tell me what to do. Now answer me truthfully: does anything bad or dangerous happen to someone if they
don’t
skulk along the wall like vermin?”

“NO, I DON’T SUPPOSE IT DOES
.”

“Then I guess we’ll go on. You don’t happen to have a cigarette, do you?”

“I’M AFRAID I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN
.”

“I thought you were going to say that. Come on, Vuffi Raa.”

They continued across the broad expanse of the Hall, Lando sliding occasionally just to demonstrate his spirit. Vuffi Raa’s legs twinkled in the weird lighting. Lando had a thought:

“Hey, Hall?”

“YES, HAVE YOU DECIDED TO GO BACK TO THE WALL
?”

“No. I was just wondering: how much do you know about this place?”

“ABOUT MYSELF
?”

“No, about the pyramid and the moving tunnel we were in before we got here.”

The Hall considered. “
A GREAT DEAL. WHAT, SPECIFICALLY WOULD YOU LIKE TO KNOW
?”

“Well, just to begin, what size am I?”

A very long pause this time. “
IN WHAT UNITS OF MEASUREMENT
?”

“Skip it, then. What I really want to know is: was I gigantic a few kilometers back, or was my friend, here, very tiny?”

“DOES IT MATTER
?”

“Of
course
it matters. Would I ask, otherwise?”

“Organic entities seem to take considerable delight in doing things to no good purpose,” Vuffi Raa offered. “But in this case, Hall, I’d be interested in knowing, too.”

“Right,” Lando said under his breath, “so the two of us can compare notes on the frailties of humankind. Play your cards right, Vuffi Raa, cozy up to this Hall and they may make you a telephone booth or something.”

“VERY WELL. THE CHANGES IN THE DIMENSION WERE WROUGHT ON THE ORGANIC LIFE-FORMS HERE. IT IS A NECESSARY PART OF THE PROCESS WHICH CULMINATES, PROPERLY, IN TRAVELING AROUND THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE HALL AS YOU ARE INTEN—
”

“Skip the commercial, Hall,” said Lando, “and get on with the explanation.”

“VERY WELL. THIS INSTRUMENTALITY IS CAPABLE OF ALTERING THE PROPORTIONS OF INANIMATE MATTER AS WELL, BUT IT MUST BE IN THE PROXIMITY OF ORGANIC LIFE. OTHERWISE, IT IS ABSORBED BY THE MAINTENANCE SYSTEMS
.”

Vuffi Raa described his journey through the blue and red maze. “Can you tell me what all that was about?”

“CERTAINLY. YOU WERE MISTAKEN BY THE WALL FOR A SMALL HOUSEKEEPING DEVICE AND ROUTED THERE FOR REPROGRAMMING AND REPAIR. HAVE YOU BEEN REPAIRED
?”

“Not that I know of.”

Lando laughed. “Any secret urges to sweep up or take out the garbage?”

“Lando, this is serious. I want to know what happened!”

“Touchy! Okay, I concede, I grew, I shrank—but I’ve got
you on another one: Mohs. The Hall said organic lifeforms, plural.”

“QUITE CORRECT, SIR, YOUR INTESTINAL FLORA, OTHER SYMBIOTIC ORGANISMS, ALL WERE GREATLY ALTERED IN SIZE, THEN BROUGHT BACK TO NORMAL MAGNITUDE AS PART OF—
”

“What about Mohs. Was there
another
human being with us when we entered, and what happened to him?”

The hall was silent—a guilty silence if ever there was one. Lando realized suddenly that relations between mechanical intelligences weren’t all that different from those between organic ones.

“Well?”

More silence.

Lando looked at Vuffi Raa. “That thing mistook you for a maintenance bug, and bummed up your memory trying to ‘repair’ you.
That’s
why you don’t remember Mohs. Now it feels ashamed.”

Vuffi Raa looked at Lando. “I certainly hope so, Master, I certainly hope so. What are we going to do, once we reach the Harp?”

“Shhhh! The walls have ears. We’re going to use it in whatever manner was intended—rather, take it to somebody who knows how to and let him do it.”

“You mean the governor?”

“That fat ape? No, I mean Gepta. He’s the one who really says when we get to leave this lousy system.”

They shuffled onward, trying, occasionally, to get the hall’s attention again. Since it obviously hadn’t gone away, it must have been ignoring them. Finally they reached the base of the raised platform on which the Mindharp stood. It wasn’t as bad as Lando had predicted: the ceiling
was
much lower—Vuffi Raa was now his old familiar size again—and the room felt smaller, but it was still huge and awe-imposing. As was the altar.

A dozen meters high, it was cut from a single perfectly transparent slab of what appeared to be life-crystal. It was hexagonal in cross section, with corners one could practically cut himself on. Otherwise, it was smooth and featureless.

It would be a long, difficult climb.

Lando sat down to consider the problem. His survival kit included no rope, suction cups, antigravs. Its designers had anticipated he would be among others—fellow soldiers—and had shared out supplies in a package that was sold originally to an
entire squad. They had not anticipated that survival would necessitate committing a burglary.

“Any ideas, Vuffi Raa?”

“No, Master. If I were small again …”

“You never were small, remember? We argued about that and you won.”

“Oh, that’s right. You argued so persuasively that I forgot for a moment.”

“Vuffi Raa, I think that’s the first nice thing you’ve ever said to me.”