+Star Wars - [The Adventures of Lando Calrissian] - The Mindharp of Sharu Read online

  THE ADVENTURES OF

  LANDO CALRISSIAN

  #1

  Lando Calrissian

  and the

  Mindharp of Sharu

  by

  L. Neil Smith

  Based on the characters and situations created by

  George Lucas

  A Del Rey Book

  .lit by DrB 12/04

  BALLANTINE BOOKS, NEW YORK

  This book is dedicated to Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

  PROLOGUE

  “SABACC!”

  It was unmercifully hot. Tossing his card-chips on the table, the young gambler halfheartedly collected what they'd earned him, an indifferent addition to his already indifferent profits for the evening. Something on the unspectacular order of five hundred credits.

  Perhaps it was the heat. Or just his imagination. This blasted asteroid, Oseon 2795, while closer to its sun than most, was as carefully life-supported and air-conditioned as any developed rock in the system. Still, one could almost feel the relentless solar flux hammering down upon its sere and withered surface, feel the radiation soaking through its iron nickel substance, feel the unwanted energy reradiating from the walls in every room.

  Especially this one.

  Apparently the locals felt it, too. They'd stripped right down to shorts and shirt-sleeves after the second hand, two hours earlier, and looked fully as fatigued and grimy as the young gambler felt. He took a sip from his glass, the necessity for circumspection regarding what he drank blessedly absent for once. No nonsense here about comradely alcohol consumption.

  Most of them were having ice water and liking it.

  Beads of moisture had condensed into a solid sheet on the container's outer surface and trickled down his wrist into his gold-braided uniform sleeve.

  What a way to live! Oseon 2795 was a pocket of penury in a plutocrat's paradise. The drab mining asteroid, thrust cruelly near the furnace of furnaces, orbited through a system of pleasure resorts and vacation homes for the galaxy's super wealthy, like an itinerant junkman.

  The gambler was wishing at the moment that he'd never heard of the place. That's what came of taking advice from spaceport attendants. A trickle of moisture ran down his neck into the upright collar of his semiformal uniform. Who said hard rock miners were always rich?

  He shuffled the oversized deck once, twice, three times, twice again in listless ritual succession, passed it briefly for a perfunctory cut to the perspiring player on his right, dealt the cards around, two to a customer, and waited impatiently for the amateurs to assess their hands. Real or imagined, the heat seemed to slow everybody's mental processes.

  Initial bets were added to the ante in the middle of the table.

  It didn't amount to a great fortune by anybody's standards except perhaps the poverty-cautious participants in the evening's exercise in the mathematics of probability. To them the gambler was a romantic figure, a professional out-system adventurer with his own private starship and a reputation for outrageous luck. The backroom microcredit plungers were trying desperately to impress him, he realized sadly, and they were succeeding: at the present rate, he'd have to drain the charge from his electric shaver into the ship's energy storage system, just to lift off the Core-forsaken planetoid.

  Having your own starship was not so much a matter of being able to buy it in the first place (he'd won his in another sabacc game in the last system but one he'd visited) as being able to afford to operate it. So far, he'd lost money on the deal.

  Looking down, he saw he'd dealt himself a minus-nine: Balance, plus the Two of Sabres. Not terribly promising, even at the best of times, but sabacc was a game of dramatic reversals, often at the turn of a single card-chip. Or even without turning it-he watched the deuce with a thrill that never staled as the face of the electronic pasteboard blurred and faded, refocused and solidified as the Seven of Staves.

  That gave him a minus-four: insignificant progress, but progress nevertheless. He saw the current bet, flipping a thirty credit token into the pot, but declined to raise.

  It also meant that the original Seven of Staves, in somebody's hand or in the undealt remainder of the deck, had been transformed into something altogether different. He watched the heat-flushed faces of the players, learning nothing. Each of the seventy-eight card-chips transformed itself at random intervals, unless it lay flat on its back within the shallow interference field of the gaming table. This made for a fast-paced, nerve-wracking game.

  The young gambler found it relaxing. Ordinarily.

  “I'll take a card, please, Captain Calrissian.” Vett Fori, the player in patched and faded denims on the gambler's left, was the chief supervisor of the asteroid mining operation, a tiny, tough-looking individual of indeterminate age, with a surprisingly gentle smile hidden among the worry-lines. She'd been betting heavily - for that impecunious crowd, anyway - and was losing steadily, all evening, as if preoccupied by more than the heat. An unlit cigar rested on the table edge beside her elbow.

  “Please, call me Lando,” the young gambler replied, dealing her a card-chip. “‘Captain Calrissian' sounds like the one-eyed commander of a renegade Imperial dreadnought. My Millennium Falcon's only a small converted freighter, and a rather elderly one at that, I'm afraid.” He watched her for an indication of the card she'd taken.

  Nothing.

  A nasal chuckle sounded from across the table. Arun Feb, the supervisor's assistant, took a card as well. There was a hole frayed in the paunch of his begrimed singlet, and dark stains under his arms. Like his superior, he was small in stature. All the miners seemed to run that way. Compactness was undoubtedly a virtue among them. He had a dark, thick, closely cropped beard and a shiny pink scalp. Drawing on a cigar of his own, he frowned as he added what he'd been dealt to the pair in his hand.

  Suddenly: “Oh, for Edge's sake, I simply can't make up my mind! Can you come back to me, Captain Calrissian?” Lando groaned inwardly.

  This was how the entire evening had gone so far: the speaker, Ottdefa Osuno Whett, for all his dithering, had been the consistent big winner, perhaps owing to his tactics of continuous annoyance of the others. Fully as much a stranger in the Oseon as the young starship captain, at the moment he was operating on considerably less goodwill.

  “I'm sorry, Ottdefa, you know I can't. Will you have a card or not?”

  Whett assumed an expression of conspicuous concentration that might have been a big success in his university classes. Ottdefa was a title, something academic or scientific, Lando gathered, conferred in the Lekua System. It was the equivalent of “Professor.” Its owner was a spindly wraith, ridiculously tall, gray headed, with a high-pitched whiny voice and a chronically indecisive manner.

  It had taken him twenty minutes to order a drink at the beginning of the game-and even then he'd changed his order just as the chink arrived.

  Lando didn't like him.

  “Oh, very well. If you insist, I'll take a card.”

  “Fine,” Lando dealt it. Either the academic had an excellent poker face, or he was too absentminded to notice whether the resulting hand was bad or good. Lando looked to his right.

  “Constable Phuna?”

  The squat, curly-headed tough-guy he addressed was T. Lund Phuna, local representative of law-and-order under the Administrator Senior of the Oseon. It was not, apparently, the happiest of assignments in the field. The uniform tunic hanging soddenly over the back of his chair looked nearly as worn as his companions' work clothes. He lit cigarette after cigarette with nervous, sweaty fingers, filling t
he cramped, already stifling room with more pollution. He wiped a perspiration soaked tissue over his jowls.

  “I'll stand. Nothing for me.”

  “Dealer takes a card.”

  It was the Idiot, worth zero. Given the circumstances, Lando felt it was altogether appropriate. If only he'd headed for the Dela System as he'd planned, instead of the Oseon. He'd, seen richer pickings in refugee camps.

  Bets were placed again. Vett Fori took another card, her fourth, as did her assistant, Arun Feb, asking for it around the stub of his cigar. Ottdefa Whett stood pat. A Master of Sabres brought the value of Lando's hand up to a positive ten, as a final round of wagering commenced.

  Arun Feb and Vett Fori both folded with a nine and minus nine respectively. The cop Phuna hung grimly on, his broad features misted with sweat. Lando was about to resign himself, when Whett excitedly cried, “Sabacc!” slapping the Mistress of Staves, the Four of Flasks, and the Six of Coins down on the worn felt tabletop.

  The Ottdefa raked in a meager pot: “Ah...not exactly the Imperial Crown jewels, nor even the fabulous Treasure of Rafa, but”

  “Treasure of Rafa?” echoed Vett Fori.

  She might as well ask, thought Lando, she isn't doing herself any good playing cards.

  “I've heard of the Rafa System,” the mine supervisor continued, “everybody has. It's the closest to our own. But I haven't heard of any treasure.”

  The academic cleared his throat. It was a silly, goose-honk noise. “The Treasure of Rafa-or of the Sharu, as we are now compelled to call it, not for the Rafa System, my dear, but for the ancient race who once flourished there and subsequently vanished without a trace-is a subject of some interest.”

  This had been delivered in Whett's best professional tones.

  Vett Fori's weathered face, impassive enough when it came to playing cards, plainly displayed annoyance at being patronized. She picked up her cigar, stuck it between her teeth, and glared across the table.

  “Without a trace?” Arun Feb snorted with disbelief. “I've been there, friend, and those ruins of your - what'd you call ‘em? - 'Sharu,' are the biggest hunks of engineering in the known galaxy. What's more, they cover every body in the system bigger than my thumbnail. They--”

  “Are not themselves the Sharu, my dear fellow, of whom no trace remains,” Whett insisted, his tone divided between pedantry and insulted reaction. “I certainly ought to know, for, until recently, I was a research anthropologist for the new governor of the Rafa System.”

  “What's a bureaucrat want with a tame anthropologist?” Feb asked blandly. He blew a final smoke ring, mashed his cigar out on the edge of the vacuum tray, and took a long drink of water. It dribbled down his chin, soaking the collar of his soiled shirt.

  “Why, I suppose,” sniffed Whett, “to familiarize himself thoroughly with all aspects of his new responsibilities. As you are no doubt aware, there is a native humanoid race in the Rafa; all of their religious practices revolve about the ruins of their legends of the long-lost Sharu. The new governor is a most conscientious fellow, most conscientious indeed.”

  “Yes,” Lando said finally, wondering if the anthropologist was ever going to deal the next hand, “but you were speaking of treasure?”

  Whett blinked. “Why, yes, yes I was.” A shrewd look came into the academic's eyes. “Have you an interest in treasure, Captain?”

  More interest than I've got in this game, Lando thought. I wish I'd steered for the Dela System, no matter how much easier it is to land a spaceship on an asteroid than a full-scale planet. Soon as this farce is over, that's precisely what I'm going to do, win or lose, even if the astrogational calculations take me twenty years.

  “Hasn't everybody?” Lando answered neutrally. He extracted a cigarillo from his uniform pocket and lit it. Treasure, eh? Maybe there was something to be learned here, after all.

  “Not quite everybody. Speaking for myself,” the scientist intoned, beginning at last to shuffle the thick seventy-eight-card deck, “my interest is purely scientific. What use have I for worldly wealth? One for you, one for you, one for you, one for you, and one for me. One for you, one for you, one for you…”

  “Well, you surely came to the right place, then!” Vett Fori guffawed, picking up her cards. “No worldly wealth to get in your way at all! What are you doing here, anyway? We didn't hire any anthropologists.”

  Lighting another cigarette, Constable Phuna spoke bitterly. “Seeing how the other half lives, that's what! I saw his entry papers. He's studying life among the poor people of a rich system a fat Imperial grant, speaking of worldly wealth.

  We're specimens, and he--”

  “Please, please, my dear fellow, do not be offended. I aspire only to increase our understanding of the universe. And who knows, perhaps what I learn here can make things better in the future, not just for you, but for others, as' Vett Fori, Arun Feb, and T. Lund Phuna spoke almost simultaneously: “Don't do us any favors!”

  “Do me one,” Lando suggested in the embarrassed silence that followed, “tell me about this treasure business. And kindly deal me a card while you're about it, will you?”

  Bets were placed again and additional cards dealt out.

  Lando, having actually lost interest in the increasingly slim pickings the game afforded, watched absently as the card-chips in his hand transmuted themselves from one suit and value to another. He paid a good deal more attention to what the anthropologist had to say.

  “The Toka are primitive natives of the Rafa System. As Assistant Supervisor Feb has so cogently pointed out, they and the present colonial establishment co-exist among the ruins of the ancient Sharu, enormous buildings which very nearly occupy every square kilometer of the habitable planets. I'll see that, and raise a hundred credits.”

  Arun Feb shook his head, but tossed in a pair of fifty-credit tokens from a dwindling stake. Vett Fori folded, a look of disgust on her face. She placed her still unlighted cigar back on the table's edge.

  Phuna raised another fifty. “Yeah, but the really important thing about the Rafa is the lifecrystals they grow there.” He fingered a tiny jewel suspended in its setting from a slim chain around his sweaty neck.

  Whett nodded. “Important to you, perhaps, good Constable. It is true, the life-orchards and the crystals harvested there are the chief export product of the colony, but my interest-and what I was paid to be professionally interested in-were the Toka legends, especially those bearing upon the Mindharp.”

  Glancing at his cards, Lando saw he had a Mistress of Coins, a Three of Staves, and a Four of Sabres. He dropped the requisite number of tokens into the pot just as the Three turned into a Five of Flasks: twenty-three, but it didn't really matter; Fives were wild anyway.

  “Sabacc!” He gathered in the largest pot of the evening thus far. “Mindharp?” the gambler asked. “What in the name of the Core is that?”

  Ottdefa Whett wrinkled his nose, passing the rest of the deck to Lando. “Oh, just a ridiculous native superstition. There is supposed to be a lost magical artifact designed to call the Sharu - with whom the Toka identify in some strange fashion - to call the Sharu back when the Toka need them.

  Silly, as the Toka could not possibly ever have been contemporary with a civilization millions of years in the past, any more than human beings and dinosaurs--”

  “I've seen dinosaurs,” Arun Feb interrupted. “On Trammis III.” The gigantic reptiloids of Trammis III were famous the galaxy over, and a chuckle circulated around the table.

  “I take it, however,” Lando said as he shuffled and dealt the cards, then watched the bets pile up again, “that you have your own theories.” Somehow the talk of treasure seemed to have loosened up the purse strings a bit, except perhaps for Vett Fori and her assistant.

  The gambler took a puff of his cigarillo. “Would you mind talking about them?”

  The anthropologist looked as if he wouldn't mind at all, even if requested to discourse standing barefoot on a large cake of ice while his am
ple gray hair were set on fire.

  “Well, sir, the ruins, for all that they are ubiquitous, are impenetrable, closed completely on all sides without a sign of entryway. I daresay that all the collected treasures of a million years of advanced alien culture await the first adventurer to gain admittance. I don't mind confessing to you all that I attempted it myself on several occasions. But the ruins are not only impenetrable, they are absolutely obdurate. No known tool or energy yields so much as a smudge upon their surfaces. I'll see that, and raise five hundred. Constable?”

  Grudgingly, the policeman threw in five hundred credits' worth of tokens. Lando saw the bet with amazement and raised it a hundred credits himself.

  “Sabacc!”

  Hmmm. Things were looking up a little. He was now ahead two thousand credits. He dealt the cards a third time, wondering what prospects for a gambler might be met in the Rafa.

  The idea was tempting: only a handful of straight-line light years to navigate across, and, if he recalled correctly, a major spaceport with good technical facilities - which to him meant landing assistance from Ground Control. The Millennium Falcon was completely new to him.

  He'd be playing cards in the Dela System this very moment if he weren't such an abysmally amateurish astrogator and ship-handler. He'd balked at the long, complicated voyage and reputedly tricky approach to a mountaintop landing field, despite well-founded rumors of rich pickings in an atmosphere friendly to his profession.

  But the Rafa...

  He won the third hand and a fourth, was now ahead some fifty-five hundred credits. The prospects of action seemed to be encouraging him, and he wasn't noticing the heat as much anymore.

  “Oh, I say, Captain Calrissian It was Vett again. As the stakes mounted, the anthropologist seemed the only one whose interest in desultory conversation hadn't lagged.

  “Yes?” Lando answered, shuffling and dealing the cards.

  “Well, sir, I... that is, I find myself somewhat embarrassed financially at this moment. You see, I have exceeded the amount of cash I allowed myself for the evening's entertainment, and I--”