Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (32 page)

Administrator Senior Lob Doluff had stoically suffered the indignity of ordering the datalink, normally tucked inoffensively away in an alcove and concealed by a hanging fern, rolled out into the center of what was supposed to be his office and what was, in reality, a miniature of his greenhouse home.

By landline he was having a view transmitted to him of the north polar spaceport, specifically, the central area where the
Millennium Falcon
vibrated in readiness.

Maybe, he thought to himself, he hadn’t the intestinal fortitude to be a first-rank administrator. He found it difficult in the extreme to order those beings, Lando Calrissian and his
doughty little Class Two droid, into the fury of the Flamewind at its most colorful and dangerous moment. His heart would be traveling with them, he knew, and might never return to its proper location.

He wished them well.

However, he sighed, he did know a cure for the anxiety and guilt he was experiencing. In another alcove, across the room from that in which the datalink normally was exiled, he kept a terrarium filled with odd spongy growths from a planet a quarter of a galaxy away. Even to him, the great lover of green, growing things, they were utterly repulsive. But they were necessary to nurture and conceal an even more repulsive specimen of lizard that lived in symbiosis with them and shared the planet Zebitrope IV.

On the back of the lizard, another symbiont, there grew a rather disgusting purple mold.

Lob Doluff locked his office doors, extracted a small plastic spatula from beneath the datalink, trod over to the terrarium, seized the lizard, and scraped a bit of mold from its back. This he rubbed with thumb and forefinger into the hollow at the base of his throat, covering the resulting stain, which looked rather like a bruise, with some flesh-colored powder he kept for just that purpose.

He settled back in his chair.

They were wrong, thought the governor, those “experts.” He watched the
Falcon
detach itself from the accordion tube beneath it and seal up its belly hatch.
Lesai
didn’t stop you from caring.

Lob Doluff wished it did.

Several thousand kilometers away, a missile streaked past an odd conglomeration of battered and obsolete fighting craft attached with long and brightly pulsing cables to the core of a starship engine.

It was a signal, the only means of conveying information across space during the Flamewind of Oseon. Klyn Shanga watched it sizzle past his canopy, began punching buttons to place himself in wire-communications with his companions.

“That’s it, men,” he said in a grim, determined voice. “Now it begins, and it will not end until
we
have ended it. Call off your status when I say your name. We have to get this damned mess synchronized just right or we’ll wind up slamming into a rock somewhere between here and there.

“Den Sait Glass!”

“
On the tick
,” came the reply.

“Glee Jun!”

“
Hot and ready
!”

“Stec Eddis!”

“
On the mark
!”

“Mors Eth!”

“Item two twenty-three,” Lando read. “At long last. Landing tractors out, prepare to lift.”

“Landing tractors offline,” Vuffi Raa answered. “Zero weight on the landingjacks, negative weight, we’re clear! Ease forward on the throttle, sublight drives engaged at three percent power. Altitude—if that’s the word for it—twelve thousand meters and rising.”

“Good!” the gambler/spaceship captain replied. He hit a button, spoke toward a small grill in the arm of his acceleration chair.

“This is Captain Calrissian speaking. Hope you two are thoroughly uncomfortable over there. We’re off the ground and headed toward the Fifth Belt. If we arrive in one piece, it won’t be any fault of yours!”

V
IOLET FRINGES LASHED
at the
Millennium Falcon
, purple flames licked at her hull as lavender-colored lightning flashed in a sky that was infinitely mauve.

“Vuffi Raa, according to these instruments, we’re spinning like a top and following a course that’s essentially a giant figure eight!” Lando shook his head. The plum-colored glare through the cockpit’s canopy was souring his stomach, and the hard vacuum of space, which supposedly was incapable of
conveying sound waves, rocked as if with the laughter of malicious giants.

He could scarcely hear the droid’s reply.

“I’m sorry, Master, there isn’t any help for it. We must trust the program I fed into the engines and attitude controls. I can’t see a single instrument on the panel that’s reliable.” Even the robot’s voice had the faintest hint of an hysterical edge. Or perhaps it was Lando’s ears, battered by the screaming of a universe tearing itself into bits.

In the passenger lounge, Waywa Fybot was aroused from a sleep unusually deep even for his deep-dreaming species. He stirred, felt the feathers on his long neck ruffling themselves, and tried to close his eyes again. A glimpse through a small round port across the room caught his attention. His gaze became involuntarily fixed upon it, as, one by one, his feathers lifted, stood perpendicular to his body.

Bassi Vobah’s hands covered her eyes.

Had she been capable of a single linear thought, she would have wished for a second pair to cover up her ears. It seemed to her that the very Core of the galaxy was shrieking at her for some terrible thing she’d done and somehow forgotten. With a sob, she collapsed sideways on the curving couch, squeezed herself into a huddled ball, knees up to her chin, eyes shut so tightly that they were slowly blackening under the self-inflicted pressure.

Her hands were on her ears, now, so that the titanic bellowing of a sun gone mad and its resonating orbital companions transmitted itself through her very bones.

Beneath her face, the cushion of the couch was soaked with tears.

What end was there to madness?

Starboard, in the cockpit, Vuffi Raa switched off another bank of useless instruments. They were distracting and therefore worse than useless. In a similar disgruntled humor and for identical reasons, he had shut off his hearing, but it hadn’t done quite as much good. Where humans had a small cluster of senses, seven or eight at most, he had nearly a hundred, and at the moment, every one of them seemed to be his enemy.

Unlike Lando, who could suffer the effects but never feel the machine-gun sputter of ionizing particles through his body, part of Vuffi Raa’s sensorium was a sophisticated scintillation counter. He could
experience
the density and frequency with which a dozen distinct kinds of particle drilled through him.
For the first time in his long existence, he wished sincerely that he had the same limits to his awareness as his master. For the first time in a very long existence indeed, he entertained the notion that what he didn’t know mightn’t hurt him.

Lando had finished being sick—or at least with having something to be sick with. Fortunately the cockpit sanitation unit was still functioning. Of course it wasn’t electronic and had almost no moving parts. Lando, wishing for the impossible like everybody else, was wishing
he
didn’t have any moving parts, because, every time he moved something, it sent waves of nausea up whatever limb it happened to be, waves that zeroed in on his solar plexus and waggled it back and forth until he had to inspect the sanitation unit again.

Closely.

He didn’t think he ever wanted to see anything purple again as long as he lived. If he lived. Or wanted to.

A blueness that was more than blue seeped in through every port, window, blister, bubble, and televisor on the ship. With the same delightful irony that determines every other day-today event in a malicious universe, the only electronic devices on the ship that worked perfectly were the outside visual pickups and their repeaters inside the hull.

Navy blue, robin’s-egg blue, sky blue (the sky of a million different planets, all mixed together indiscriminately in agate whirls), powder blue, denym blue, velvet blue, true blue.

Lando blew his nose.

His stomach seemed to have subsided a little. He glanced at Vuffi Raa, who bristled with alertness, tentacles on the controls and his big red eye fastened on the cockpit transparency.

“How are you feeling, Master? Better?”

“Don’t call me master. Yes, I’m feeling better. How are you feeling, old trash-compacter?” Lando thought about lighting a cigar—and immediately had to lean over to the sanitation unit again. False alarm, but it very nearly made him stop smoking for the rest of his life.

“I don’t know, Master. I’m afraid I had to shut my feelings off in order to function. Please forgive me if I don’t seem quite myself for the duration of this journey.”

Lando laughed. “I’m never going to be myself again! What can I do to help? You look like you have your tentacles pretty full.”

“There is really nothing either of us can do, Master. The
course is logged in and—one trusts—being followed. I am merely monitoring life-support and other housekeeping functions. And wondering how reliable even
those
indicators are.”

“We could always go back and look—you
or
I, I mean, whichever you think best.” He tightened his chair harness a little, straightened up. He’d always wondered why sadness was described as being “blue.” Now he knew: much more of this, and he’d be looking around for something sharp to cut his wrists with.

He’d never known there were so many shades of blue, all of them ugly.

“I think not, Master. If something goes wrong up here, I believe it will require the attention of both of us to correct it. You might try asking one of our passengers how things are elsewhere in the ship, though.”

“Good idea.” He pushed an intertalkie button. “Hello, over there! Anybody listening? We just want to know if the air and lighting and heat are all working. Hello? Can you hear me? Bassi? Fybot?”

Nothing could be heard over the roar of static in the system. Lando looked at Vuffi Raa and shrugged. The instruments said everything was all right in the lounge and elsewhere in the ship. Other instruments, however, said that they were traveling in a spiral now, looping the loop as if riding down the coils of a cosmic corkscrew.

Everything was blue outside. Lando felt a tear creep down his cheek and, for the first time, in a long, long time, thought about a dog he’d had once. It had been run over by a hovercraft.

Bassi Vobah felt green inside.

As a matter of fact, she felt green outside, as well. The leaf-colored radiation then battering at the
Falcon
’s viewports seemed to penetrate to her very marrow, turning it and the blood it produced green, too.

It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense, and that alarmed her far worse than the light or radiation. She was a person of certain bounds, of linearity, of rationality, of rules. She was a person—an upholder, a maintainer—of law and order.

Now
see what had become of her. The penetrating green light let her do exactly that. She could see her own heart beating, deep green muscle fibers pumping bright green blood to medium green tissues and organs—all of which she could
watch functioning—and returning, gray-green, to be reoxygenated in her spongy green lungs.

With transparent green oxygen.

Vuffi Raa examined his tentacles one by one. Reflecting bright yellow light from the cockpit canopy, they gleamed back at him as if made of gold. He had been silver-colored all his life. Now he was a golden droid, glittering at every joint. He rather liked it.

A beeping on the control panel indicated another set of instruments gone mad. Irritably, he shut them off, then returned to a pleased and fascinated contemplation of his highly polished self. Perhaps when it was over, he’d have himself gold plated. Tastefully, mind you, nothing ostentatious. How would gold and the red of his eye look together? Rather nice, he thought.

A yellow light began blinking on the console. It clashed with the yellow streaming in the windows, so he flicked a tentacle down and squashed it. There was a
pop
!, a fizzle, and—blast it all, he had soot on his tentacle tip! He searched around for something to clean it with, found a tissue beneath the panel, and began tidying up. Must be perfectly clean, unless I want the plating to peel on me, and that would be atrocious!

Absently, he reached down to turn off another half-dozen switches, and suddenly became aware of a sallow pinkish starfish of a being sitting right on the dash in front of him. Vermin! How in the name of—

“Vuffi Raa! What are you doing, old cybernaut?”

“What did you call me, you—”

“Vuffi Raa, listen to me! You’ve busted up the intercom, and you were starting to turn off the life-support monitors. Get hold of yourself, droid! What’s the matter?”

With considerable effort, Vuffi Raa forced himself back into something resembling a normal frame of reference. “My word, I’m sorry, Master, I must be taking radiation damage! I don’t know what to do about it, though; it’s so hard to think. Would you like me better if I had myself gold plated, or would it be too garish?”

Lando stared in blank amazement at his friend. “Can you turn yourself off temporarily? If you removed your tentacles, I could put you in the safe—the one under the panel where I keep my cigars. Would that work?”

“… Er,
what
? You want me to
what
, you organic slug, you blind, groping grub, you sniveling, hydrocarbonated—
yawp
!”

Lando snatched the robot from the pilot’s chair and, tentacles trailing, crammed his pentagonal body into the safe.

“I hope you appreciate what I’m doing, old geiger counter. I’ve ruined my entire supply of cigars—crushed them to a … Vuffi Raa, are you all right?”

The robot responded groggily. “I think so, Master. Did I really call you all those things?” The heavy genuine steel antique safe—left by a previous owner of the
Falcon
—surrounded him on all sides but one and seemed fairly effective at shielding him from the radiation. Lando swung the door as far shut as the robot’s tentacles would allow, and chuckled.