Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu Read online

  Travel down the graceful, violated sinuosity, tapering, tapering, slimming impossibly. Approximately a meter from the torso seam, the tentacles branch again, into five delicate tapering fingers. Usually, these are held together so the tentacle seems to have a single, well-proportioned tip, concealing a tiny red optic in each “palm,” replicas of the larger eye in the torso. Now they are splayed, whether in haphazard array or in the agonies of death, only the mechanically sentient can tell, and they are a taciturn, unsentimental lot, for the most part, and will not say what it feels like for a machine to die.

  Perhaps, exactly like their creators, they don’t know, will never know until they experience it themselves and can’t relay the sensations to others. Perhaps it’s just as large a mystery to them as it is to everybody else. Perhaps.

  Each slender, dainty finger is divided into joints, precisely like the tentacles—fine, impossibly tiny joints, such as a watchmaker would create, looking through his loupe, trying to still the microscopic trembling of his hands. After a few centimeters, the fingers branch yet again—something absolutely no one ever notices. The joints continue marching, tapering, growing smaller and finer until they vanish from unaided vision—and continue.

  Those subfingers, at their ends, are hair-fine, wire-slender … alloy strong. Their inner composition is just as sophisticated, just as complex as any other portion of the creature they belong to. Yet, unlike the pentagonal metal torso, unlike the sinuous jointed tentacles, unlike even the slender adroit fingers, they are too small to be seen, too fine to be hit with an arrow.

  One of them stirs. It waves back and forth languidly a moment, living a life of its own. It coils and uncoils, testing itself. It stretches minutely, contracts minutely. It doubles back, wraps itself around the base of an intruding wooden object that had pierced the body above it.

  It pulls.

  There is a gentle, sucking noise. Slowly the arrow surrenders, sliding out, grating through tortured metal. The hair-fine subfinger plucks it out, casts it away. Elsewhere, other wirelike extensions perform similar tasks. And on the inside, where torn and dented metal protrudes in sharp triangular, ragged, toothlike edges, nearly microscopic flagellated motes begin pushing, thrusting, hammering the metal skin back into place, almost a molecule at a time.

  “The bantha is a shaggy beast, although it has no hair.… Its feathers are unique, at least, because they aren’t there.… Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee!”

  Lando began coughing uncontrollably, choking on his genius as a poet. He was disappointed. No one would ever get to hear his cleverness—although he couldn’t quite remember why at the moment. Whatever it was, it made him sad, and he lapsed directly from laughter into sobs.

  His fingers, highly trained and skillful at manipulating card-chips, coins, the entrances to other people’s pockets, went right on thinking for themselves, picking at the rough-woven cloth that bound the wrists above them, threatening to cut off their circulation before they had quite finished their self-assigned task.

  “The governor of Rafa Four is fat as he can be … with fuzzy crown and stubby limbs, he looks just like a … bee? Fee? Me? Thee? Thee! He looks just lika thee, old man, he looks just lika thee!”

  Behind Lando, between his body and the pseudoplant, a final fiber gave way. With something akin to shock, Lando jolted back to reality, momentarily, surprised that he could move his wrist, almost sorry as warmth crawled back into his right hand and the pins-and-needles began.

  Vuffi Raa had problems larger than pins-and-needles. His own fingers were free, now, where the primitive arrows had pinned them to the ground and punctured them. His joints would be stiff and uncooperative for some while to come—shoot a bullet through a hinge sometime and learn why—but he was already plucking the projectiles from his tentacles.

  The congealed fluid in each wound was hardened, not by cold, this time, but deliberately, by design, protecting his incredibly delicate inner mechanisms. He was through reclaiming fluid from the sand. The traces of raw materials he’d picked up that way wouldn’t serve him long: he’d require refuelling—something he’d only done once before in his long, long memory—perhaps even an unprecedented lubrication.

  But he was alive.

  Moreover, he was conscious, having the spare power, at last, to divert into consciousness. He had taken over the programmed simple-minded self-repair mechanisms, and the work was going at quadruple speed. He was beginning to feel good again, knowing that what he could do for others of his kind he could also do for himself.

  The frozen desert saw the first faint glow of ruddy amber from the lens set in his pentagonal torso, a luminescence vastly dimmer and less conspicuous than the moons above—another conscious decision.

  His body stirred the sand around it, continued plucking arrows out and healing.

  Lando Calrissian pondered one of the deep philosophical problems of all time. His right arm was completely free, but he didn’t know why that was important. What had he intended to do with that arm?

  Something about being cold.

  Well, that was silly: he wasn’t cold at all. He was nice and warm. Nice and rosy warm. The warmth spread from his toasty feet, up through his legs, into his body, out through his shoulders. His ears were warmest of all. They were practically on fire.

  Fire!

  He looked around him. It was smoky enough for a fire. The grove where he sat so warmly comfortable seemed to be full of haze. Someone hadn’t opened the damper on the fireplace, evidently. Well, he’d just have to get up in a few minutes and do it himself. Couldn’t trust anybody these days, even with so simple a task as tending a—

  Fire!

  Something about a gun! Now what in the blazes would he do with a gun if he had one? There was nothing to shoot here, nothing to fight, nothing to eat, even if he’d been the wild-game type, which he wasn’t. Besides, they’d plugged his gun up with an arrow. Devilishly good shots, those … those …

  Now who had been that good a shot, shooting?

  Shooting?

  What did that have to do with anything? He’d been going to tend the fire, hadn’t he? Well, no time like the—he tried to sit up. Great Galactic Core, he thought, I’m paralyzed from the waist down! No—I was simply careless putting on my pants and looped the belt around this … this …

  With sudden, momentary clarity, he reached into his cummerbund, extracted his five-shot stingbeam pistol, flipped off the thumb-safety, and fired. The rough cloth fell from his waist. Almost in panic, he rolled away from the life-tree, and had to restrain himself from wasting his remaining four shots on the thing that had been sucking his brains away.

  It cost him. Every bone, every muscle in his body, every square inch of his skin was in agony. Each movement threatened to shatter him or tear him. All he really wanted to do was go back to sleep. All he really wanted to do was rest. That was it: he knew he had other things to do, but he could rest up, first. Get warm again—not really sleep, just close his eyes and—

  Nearly shrieking defiance—at what he was never afterward able to say—he rolled, crawled, pushed himself along the ground, inflicting new pains with every centimeter of progress. At least he reached the heap of clothing Mohs and his bravos had stripped from him, nearly dived into the parka, and turned the thermoknob to Emergency Full.

  And the agony really began.

  There wasn’t much he could do about his pants. They’d been sliced open from cuff to crotch—Lando remembered the knife, seemingly made from a life-crystal. The abandoned loincloth still clung to his waist. With stiff fingers, he spread it out, tore it into strips, wrapped the strips around his legs, and tied them at strategic points to hold his trousers together.

  Bundled up in the parka, he put the gloves on next. The stingbeam was small enough to conceal inside the right glove so that he could shoot it in a hurry if he needed to. The little weapon was blessedly warm from the one shot he’d expended.

  Time to think about standing up. Should he take the parka off, replace
his undershirt and tunic? It would be in better taste, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter right now. Oh, yes! He’d almost forgotten about his boots and socks.

  When he got around to examining his feet, he almost wished he hadn’t. He was going to miss those toes, and regeneration was a long, fairly painful process. Oh, well, to paraphrase an old, old saying, it beat the hell out of having to regenerate new feet. With great tenderness, he pulled his socks on—being careful to dump as much sand out of them as possible—and, over those, his boots.

  How the dickens was he going to stand up? He didn’t dare approach one of the deadly trees close enough to lean against. He rolled over on his side, pulled his knees up, rolled up onto them.

  It felt as though someone had clamped his feet in a vise and was tightening it. He told himself that at least he was alive enough to feel pain. Somehow that didn’t cheer him much. He told himself that at least he had his mind back, could think, wasn’t going to be a drooling vegetable.

  He clambered to his feet, forced himself to walk around.

  So this was a genuine life-orchard. It had bloody well nearly been a death orchard, he thought. Wouldn’t Mohs be surprised, come morning, to find his victim gone, and along with him—

  The Key!

  He felt beneath his cummerbund. Even though both gloves and coat, he couldn’t mistake the lumpy weirdness of the artifact. Well, that was going to upset the old man. Lando chuckled to himself.

  The thought came to him that perhaps he was being watched. Well, let them watch! The stingbeam didn’t have an orifice like a blaster, its muzzle was a pole-piece, more like a thick, stubby, rounded antenna than anything else. He was alive, intelligent, on his feet—he was going back to the Falcon for a hot cup of—

  Vuffi Raa!

  It had been one monster of a day! He’d nearly been killed, certainly been hijacked, and lost his best friend. No, he wasn’t ashamed to say it: the little droid had been a better, more loyal friend to him than any he’d ever had before. He was going to miss the little guy.

  Now, which way was the Falcon? Simple: just follow the tracks, which, with the double portion of moonlight and the dry, still atmosphere, were still plainly visible in the sand.

  He took a step.

  LANDO CALRISSIAN!

  Before he realized it, the glove was off his right hand, the stingbeam pointed aloft. Overhead, a repulsor-vehicle hovered, bright with running lights, a searchbeam shining down on him and illuminating the entire grove.

  It settled to the ground.

  “Drop your weapon,” a familiar voice said over the loudhailer, “and put your hands over your head!” Lando didn’t move.

  Nor did he move when four constabulary troopers, their armor glinting in the moonlight, jogged up beside him, took his gun away, and held their own weapons leveled at his chest.

  Captain Jandler—if that was his name—had rendered his own visor transparent, this time. He strutted over from the hovercar.

  “Well, Captain Calrissian, we meet again. As soon as we’ve taken care of you, we’ll recover your vessel and get that cargo back to its rightful owners. If you thought you were in trouble before … By the way, you have something else we want. Where is it?”

  “Where is what?” said Lando between gritted teeth.

  “The Sharu artifact. The Key the governor gave you. Where is it?”

  “Come and get it, thug!”

  “All right, men, we’re going to do it the hard way. Search him. Strip that clothing off and search him!”

  • XII •

  THUNDER BOOMED OVERHEAD!

  Bathed in a glorious dawn that hadn’t yet reached the ground beneath it, the Millennium Falcon roared down upon a constabulary detachment frozen with confusion and surprise, and stood hovering a dozen meters over their heads.

  Lando seized Guard-Captain Jandler’s weapon muzzle, swung it aside, and kicked the hapless policeman. Jandler sank with a moan to his knees, eyes crossed beneath his helmet visor, and, with a preoccupied gurgle, collapsed onto his face. Lando resisted the urge to kick him again, someplace more breakable.

  Two things happened at the same time: one of the other police officers leveled his blaster at the gambler, a finger whitening inside his gauntlet on the trigger. Roiled dirt and fire spurted up into a wall ahead of him as a turret on the Falcon spat energy down at him. He dropped his gun and raised his hands unbidden, as did two of his comrades. They were out of the game.

  The fourth wasn’t giving up so easily. He seized the opportunity to dash for the repulsor-cruiser where a heavy beamer was mounted on the transom. Before he’d taken three hurried steps, the starship’s turret pivoted, a second energy bolt lashed down from above, and the police cruiser heaved upward from the ground, fell back in flaming wreckage. Smoke poured from the ruined vehicle into the rapidly lightening sky.

  Keeping a wary eye on Jandler, Lando sat down heavily himself, wondering where all his vim and vigor had come from all of a sudden. And where it had gone just as abruptly. The Falcon settled, its active turret still aimed at the policemen. Lando noticed the guard-captain’s heavy blaster, lying in the sand a few inches from his rag-wrapped knee, picked it up and rested it in his lap.

  The Falcon’s long, broad boarding ramp creaked down slowly. After a while there was a flash and twinkle at the dark, inner end of the passage. Vuffi Raa came slither-marching down to the ground, his posture and movements conveying somehow that he was rather pleased with himself—although he looked a bit worse for the previous evening’s wear.

  “Master! I’m gratified to see you’re still alive. I feared I wouldn’t get here in time, but I see you’ve taken care of nearly everything yourself already.”

  The gambler grinned wearily, accepted the proffered tentacle. “I’m gratified myself, considering some of the alternatives. But you look like you’ve been out in a meteor shower! Or is that the latest robot fashion you’re wearing?”

  From eye lens to manipulator tips, the little droid was covered with small, rounded dents. Where they overlapped his joints—which was practically everywhere—his movements were a little stiff and uncertain, and he sounded, when he replied, just the slightest bit self-conscious.

  “Yes, well, these arrow wounds are healing, Master. In not too many days I’ll be quite myself again. But you have suffered damage which will not be repaired so quickly. We must get you into the ship, where I can administer—”

  “Hold it.” Grunting, Lando hauled on Vuffi Raa’s tentacle, pulled himself onto his knees, and, placing a palm firmly in the middle of the little robot’s lens, pressed himself upward, to his feet. He swayed a little, but he was vertical—and still had the blaster pointed straight at the constabulary contingent.

  Meanwhile, Captain Jandler was beginning to do some grunting of his own. He rolled over, tears welling from his eyes and dripping on the inside of his visor, shook his head from side to side, and lay there, still doubled up.

  “We’ll administer to me later, old pencil-sharpener. First we’re going to ‘administer’ to our military friend, here. He seems to be among the living, again, although how long …”

  Lando offered the blaster to the droid, glancing significantly at the four undamaged troopers. “While I’m attending to Jandler, I don’t suppose you could …”

  “Hold them at bay? I’m afraid not, Master. I cannot threaten a living being with bodily harm. Sorry.”

  “Well, I’m not complaining, not anymore. I’ll just have to keep an eye on them myself. But I am curious: how was it that, ten minutes ago, you could—”

  “Use the Millennium Falcon’s armament to keep them from attacking you?”

  “And to do that demolition job on the police cruiser. Neat, but a little outside your specialties, wouldn’t you say?”

  Lando approached the semiconscious guard-captain, toed him not too roughly in the armored ribs. “All right, time to rise and shine! We’ve got a little talking to do!”

  Vuffi Raa shambled up beside the gambler.
“Master, I can watch the troopers for you, and they needn’t know I can’t initiate force against them.” The little robot continued in a louder voice, intended for a broader audience, “If one of them so much as twitches an earlobe, we’ll burn him off at the kneecaps!”

  Lando chuckled, “Yeah, right up to the armpits! Just be sure”—he whispered to Vuffi Raa—“that you don’t compromise yourself into a nervous breakdown.” Then he added, more loudly, “I said get up, you!”

  Jandler stirred, did some more groaning, rolled over, and sat up painfully. Wincing, he took off his helmet and wiped sweat from his face.

  “Calrissian, you just plain don’t fight fair, do you?”

  Lando aimed the confiscated blaster at its former owner’s nose. “I don’t like to fight at all. When I have to, I try to get it over with as quickly and neatly as possible. Now, WHAT IN THE BLAZES IS THIS ALL ABOUT?”

  Jandler, his troopers, even Vuffi Raa jumped a little at this outburst. The police leader blinked, considered, then shook his head and sighed.

  “Okay, Calrissian—I wish to perdition I knew! I’ve been sent on more crazy errands in the last couple of days than in my whole career, up until now: your hotel room, the Spaceman’s Rest, the spaceport, and now this. It puts a man in mind of retiring early, pension or not. What do you know about it?”

  Lando squatted down on his haunches, keeping the blaster centered on Jandler. “I hate the devil to steal your line, Captain, but I’m asking the questions, here. Tell me, exactly where—rather, from whom—did you receive your orders, if one may ask?”

  Jandler glanced quickly at his men, then back to Lando, and licked his lips. “Where do you think? From that fat son-of-a-”

  “Captain!” shouted one of the cops, “you can’t—”