Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian 03 - The StarCave of ThonBoka Read online

  THE ADVENTURES OF

  LANDO CALRISSIAN

  #3

  Lando Calrissian

  and the

  StarCave of ThonBoka

  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 one for E Paul Wilson, Healer and friend, and for James P Hogan, who makes seven.

  I

  LEHESU SWAM THE endless Open Sea.

  He was large for a young adult, although there were Elders of his species twice his size and mass. An alien observer in a different place and time would have pointed out his resemblance to an enormous manta ray-broad and streamlined, powerfully winged, and somehow pleasingly sinister. His sleek dorsal surface was domed high with muscle.

  Others would have been reminded of the Portuguese man-o'-war, seeing the tentacular ribbons hanging from his ventral side, marveling at the perfect glassy transparency of his body with its hints and flashes of inner color.

  Yet, naturally enough, such comparisons would have been misleading. Lehesu had been born among the people who call themselves the Oswaft. He was, unlike ray or jellyfish, penetratingly intelligent. Unlike most others of his kind, he was also aggressively curious.

  He dwelt in a place the Oswaft called the ThonBoka, which, in, Lehesu's language, brought to mind visions of a cozy harbor on the margins of astronomy’s ocean. It was a haven of peace and plenty, a refuge.

  There were those among the Oswaft, principally family and friends, who had warned him smugly that he would regret adventuring beyond the safe retreat of the ThonBoka into the dark perils of the Open Sea. Few of them actually dared speculate precisely what those perils might consist of, what he might find, what might find him - except a quick, unpleasant death. For all their intelligence, the Oswaft were not remarkably imaginative, particularly when it came to the topic of death. They were a long-lived people and patiently, even fatally, conservative in their outlook.

  Others hadn't even cared enough to scold him. Lehesu, himself, was a nuisance and a danger, whose very presence was somehow inappropriate to the warm sanctum of the ThonBoka, a hint of the darker ugliness that lurked beyond its confines. To their credit, it would have been completely uncharacteristic of them to expel him, just as it would never have occurred to any one of them, regardless of personal opinion, to attempt to stop Lehesu from sacrificing himself to his incomprehensible exploratory itch.

  At that moment, he was beginning to wish he had listened to someone. The Open Sea was slowly starving him to death.

  He flapped his great manta wings reflexively to achieve calm. It was an awe-inspiring, majestic gesture - had there been anyone to see it - among his kind, the equivalent of breathing slowly and deliberately.

  And for Lehesu, it was every bit as effective: it didn't help in the slightest. If anything, it only reminded him that he had a plight to worry about.

  He was not really frightened. For all their conservatism, fear came slowly to the Oswaft, panic not at all. It was just that curiosity was not a common characteristic among them, either.

  They had their ancient, venerable, time-tested, firmly established, customary, and honored traditions. Such redundancy was necessary, Lehesu thought, to convey the suffocating stuffiness of it all. Yes, there were ways of accepting innovation, After all, his people weren't savages. It happened gradually, over several dozen generations. The culture of the Oswaft was far from stagnant. It was simply, excruciatingly, boring.

  Lehesu, on the other fin, was a genius of curiosity - or a totally demented mutation. The conclusion depended on whom you sought for an opinion, Lehesu or any other individual of his species. In his thirst to know what unlooked-for wonders lay beyond the cloying safety of the ThonBoka, he was utterly alone. He could not so much as begin to explain the burning need that drove him into the Open Sea - not to anyone his own age, certainly not to any of the Elders, no, not even to the younger ones.

  Well, perhaps one day he would have young of his own. And if curiosity were something that could be passed on, they would understand and share his thirst. He chuckled to himself - how he would ever find a mate who could tolerate him might constitute something of a problem.

  Then again, it might not. It was highly unlikely he would survive traversing what amounted to a desert. Every fiber in his great and graceful body ached with hunger. He had been cruising for what seemed an eternity without encountering a molecule of nutriment, and it was far too late to go back. He lifted his enormous wings once more, unable to ignore their rapidly failing strength.

  Lehesu had never seen or even heard of a cat, but he would have understood what killed it, how, and why. Still, he couldn't really bring himself to regret what he had done. Curiosity may have killed him already, but it was vastly better than dying from boredom.

  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 Oswaft, 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 al
ways 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.