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

  “The Entropy I can’t! Do you think that overstuffed chair-warmer gives a nit in a nova what happens to any of us? All he cares about is that Sharu doohicky, and if we come back without it, we might as well not come back! Well, I—”

  “You mean this?” Lando drew the Key from his waistband. It gleamed in the early morning sunlight and, if anything, seemed more disorienting than before.

  Lando could see the guard-captain calculating whether it was worth the risk jumping for it. He looked from the Key to his former blaster muzzle, across to Lando, up at Vuffi Raa, then back to the Key again. Finally, he shrugged.

  “Let him get it for himself!” Jandler decided out loud. “Is there any way my men and I can get out of this alive, Captain Calrissian? I won’t give you those hull-scrapings about ‘just following orders again’—only, well, I’m not too fond of the idea of dying, just now. Especially since I seem destined to taste the fruits of civilian life for a while.”

  Lando turned, winked at Vuffi Raa, and looked back at Jandler.

  “Well, old Constable, you people do seem to present us with a problem. I’m impressed with your change of heart, but insufficiently so to be too happy about your breathing down my neck while I’m on this planet. Giving you all the Big Push would seem to be the answer—”

  He held up a hand.

  “—But I am highly disinclined in that direction, believe me. As you know, I am a gambler by profession, certainly no killer. I live by my wits, not by the gun, however useful the things may prove to be at times. If we can think of a way to let things work out for everybody, I’ll certainly cooperate.”

  Jandler grinned, scratched his head. His men, a few yards away, seemed to relax a few notches as well.

  “Now, Captain Jandler,” said Lando, “this is what I think we’ll do …”

  The idea worked out better than Lando had expected.

  Aboard the Millennium Falcon, there were several tough, inflatable life-bubbles that could be jettisoned, with air and other short-term supplies. A man could live inside one for several days in moderate discomfort. They weren’t much use if something went wrong in interstellar space, but, in the neighborhood of a solar system—where most accidents happen anyway—they could keep one alive until assistance, summoned by an automatic radio beacon, arrived.

  Lando’s original plan was to haul the constabulary contingent out a few astronomical units and abandon them in space. They’d be out of his and Vuffi Raa’s figurative hair for a few days, and yet live to tell their grandchildren about the experience. Happy ending all around.

  The little droid made it happier.

  “Well, Master, that takes care of that. I believe the gentlemen can go aboard now.” He was exiting a hatch in the side of a powered interplanetary cargo barge, large, dark, and rusty, in which the police team had originally traveled to Rafa V. The humble vessel’s presence had helped Vuffi Raa to locate Lando in the nick of time.

  Lando transferred the blaster to his left hand, extended his right to the constabulary boss. “I suppose this is farewell, then, old bluecoat. I trust you and your comrades will enjoy the trip.”

  Jandler grinned. “It beats a beam in the eye from a hot laser, Captain Calrissian—”

  “Call me Lando, nobody else seems to be able to do it.”

  “Lando, then. And when we get there, none of us will be in any particular hurry to report, will we, guys?” This last had a bit of an edge to it. The other four policemen quickly assumed a what? who, me? expression, and Lando trusted Jandler to keep them all in line. Not that it mattered. The plan was perfect.

  The officers trooped aboard. Lando waved, then watched Vuffi Raa weld the hatch shut behind them.

  “Thirty seconds, Master.”

  “Very well, let’s get back out of the way.”

  Slowly, gently, with impossible grace, the ungainly tub of a spaceship lifted from the sand, guided by a program Vuffi Raa had punched into its miniscule electronic mind. Lando glimpsed the fused and blackened end of a communications antenna, one of three the little droid had ruined. For the duration of its trip, the barge would be out of contact with the rest of the Rafa System. It would take the vessel a week to reach Rafa XI, last and least planet of the colony, a bleak ball of slush circling in the dark.

  A considerable research installation had been built there, and a fairly impressive helium refinery.

  “You didn’t forget the torches, did you?”

  “Please, Master, it was difficult making myself do it, don’t rub it in.”

  “Oh, very well. But sabotaging the ship’s controls was your idea, I’ll remind you. The cops can’t alter the taped course, and they can’t communicate with anyone until they’re close enough to do it with flashlights out the viewports. You did send along that Oseon brandy, I trust?”

  “Yes, Master, and those … those …”

  “Holocassettes? Absolutely imperative, old gumball machine. The scenery where they’re going is remarkably boring.” He gave a final salute as the barge lifted through a rack of rare, high cirrus clouds and disappeared.

  Vuffi Raa said nothing. In truth, he was rather proud of his master for sparing the men’s lives, and especially for parting with them under somewhat cordial circumstances. Perhaps humans—this one in particular, at least—weren’t such a bad lot, after all.

  “All right,” Lando said, breaking into the robot’s reverie, “let’s get moving ourselves. We’ve got to find the Toka. I’m going to kill that buzzard-necked Mohs if it’s the last thing I ever do!”

  The first thing they had done, after sending off the constabulary contingent, was to attend to Lando’s wounds. Frostbite—of which he had been plentifully supplied by the previous evening’s adventure—is no minor matter, can be as serious as a blastershot under some circumstances, and, even with all the facilities of modern medicine, can lead to gangrene in a matter of hours.

  The Millennium Falcon did not provide all the facilities of modern medicine. In a locker, Vuffi Raa discovered a portable gel-bath, miniature version of the large, full-body devices used to heal serious wounds. It would fit Lando’s feet nicely. He unfolded it in the common room and slid it under the gametable where Lando was considering a problem in Moebius chess.

  Or appeared to be.

  “Dash it all, Vuffi Raa, where would you be, on this planet, if you were an ancient savage with an angry outworlder after you?”

  “I couldn’t say, Master, the inscrutabilities of the organic mind—”

  “Nonsense, old android. Your mind is every bit as organic as—”

  “Please, Master, I have done nothing to deserve insult. If you truly wish, I will consider the problem you have just posed.” Silence, then: “Why do you suppose he had us land the Falcon near that giant pyramid, Master?”

  Lando gave up on the game, slapped the OFF switch, and watched the weird serpentine playing board fade and vanish from the tabletop.

  “I’ve been wondering about that, myself. It’s much the largest building on the planet—perhaps, in the system, which would make it the largest in the entire galaxy, I’m sure. On the other hand, the Sharu—now there are some inscrutable minds for you—the Sharu may have used it to store potatoes.”

  “Or the Mindharp.”

  “Yes, although I’d venture that if the Mindharp were simply a device to tell the Toka to run and fetch their masters’ pipe and slippers, it wouldn’t deserve quite so august a resting place. However, one thing is certain: it is where that scoundrel Mohs met up with his savage cohorts. As such—”

  “As such,” Vuffi Raa ventured, “it may be a wonderful place to get ambushed—again. Hold still, please, Master, while I tape your ears.”

  “Leave my ears out of this, you mechanical menace, they were fine before.”

  “Master, please! I am programmed to—”

  “All right, all right! Then limber up your piloting appendages. We’re headed for that pyramid again. Only this time, I’m carrying two heavy blasters—and an umbre
lla to keep arrows out of the muzzles.”

  Mohs wasn’t hard to find. When the Millennium Falcon arrived, he was sitting on a sand dune in the shadow of the pyramid, smoking a lizard.

  • XIII •

  “TWICE HAVE I doubted thee, O Lord, yea, even as twice hast thou proved me in error! Kill now thy miserable excuse for a servant, that he may disgrace thee no further!”

  The fire, built of twigs and leaves in a scooped-out hollow in the ubiquitous reddish sand of Rafa V, was no larger than a teacup. It failed to warm Lando although he sat cross-legged not more than two feet away, trying to avoid noxious fumes rising from a branch that sported a small, disgusting reptile skewered neatly from end to end.

  An ugly way to die, the gambler thought, even for a lizard. And it made an even uglier lunch.

  “Look, Mohs, see me about that sometime when I’m not so tired. I may surprise you and take you up on the offer. In the meantime, are you still interested in trying to use the Key?”

  “Of a certainty, Lord! Too long have my people, the wretched Toka, suffered under the tyrannical thumb of the—”

  “Save it for the union meeting, Singer. All I want to know is where to put this thing. If somebody—your people, for instance—benefits, and somebody else loses as a result, well, that’s no paint off my hull, I can assure you.”

  Secretly, the amateur star-captain was thoroughly enjoying the chance to use what he imagined was tough-sounding spacefaring jargon. Now that he’d had a hot meal, plenty of coffeine, and was wearing a fresh change of clean, undamaged clothes, he felt downright jaunty, even considering the miserable night he’d spent in the life-orchard.

  “I don’t give a hiccup out the airlock, even if Gepta benefits, as long as I get out of this confounded system with a full cargo and a whole skin—not necessarily in that order, mind you.”

  Mohs had started a little at the mention of the sorcerer’s name. Now he positively reeled, managing to wring his bony hands at the same time. “O Lord, they servant knoweth full well that thou sayest these cynical things only as a test of my faith, fortitude, and other virtues—”

  “Which are too microscopic to mention.”

  “—which are too microscopic to mention, as thou sayest, Lord. Yet, wouldst thou mind very much not making such vile, blasphemous, and mercenary utterances in the mortal presence of thy humble servant? It causeth unease.”

  “Oh it doth, doth it?”

  Lando glanced back over his shoulder. He was pretty sure that at least half of the old man’s “unease” derived from the imposing presence of the Millennium Falcon about fifty meters away across a clear expanse of sand, her full batteries trained in a protective circle to prevent a reenactment of the earlier ambush. In an inner pocket of his parka, her captain carried a transponder that kept the Falcon’s guns from sweeping within a couple of degrees of whoever wore it. This was a necessary precaution because Vuffi Raa was not at Battle Stations, inside.

  He was programmed against it.

  Somewhere back along the line, Lando had ceased resenting the little robot’s programmed pacifism, and simply begun planning around it. In the righthand outside slash pocket of his parka, he carried a second device with which he could trigger every weapon aboard his ship. Vuffi Raa could handle opening the boarding ramp as Lando ran for it, if anything went wrong. It wasn’t against his built-in ethics to save a life. In fact, the droid had proved himself quite useful in that department already.

  But to the problem at hand.

  “Okay, old theologue, we’ll change the subject: How did you know we had survived this morning, and why did you wait for us here, when you knew how sore I’d be about last night?”

  Lando wanted to move back from the fire. About a thousand meters would do nicely. The cooking reptile, presently hovering somewhere between second-degree blistering and third-degree charring, smelled exactly like … like … well, he’d smelled more appetizing things attached to starship hulls while he was melting them off with live steam. Nonetheless, even the idea of the fire was warming; he hadn’t felt really comfortable since he’d landed on that stupid clot of sand, not even aboard ship.

  The elderly Singer opened his mouth. “Lord—”

  “MASTER, HUMAN FORMS ARE MOVING BEHIND THOSE DUNES OVER THERE.”

  Mohs jumped at least a meter. The little droid’s voice had come amplified through the ship’s external loudhailers.

  “Thanks, old cogwheel.” Lando answered in a normal tone. Millennium Falcon had excellent hearing, and so did Vuffi Raa. He chuckled as the antique shaman regained his dignity.

  “THEY APPEAR TO BE CARRYING THOSE CROSSBOW THINGS, MASTER.”

  “Mohs,” the gambler said evenly, “I’m going to give you just thirty seconds to send your people away, and if they’re not gone by then, you’re going to swap places with that poor uncomfortable creature you’re cooking. I ought to turn you in to the ISPCA—or at least the Epicures Club.”

  The Singer slowly cranked himself into a standing position, rattled off a few discordant stanzas—probably the Song of Strategic Withdrawal, Lando thought—then he sat again, turned the lizard on its stick, and addressed Lando.

  “I have told them to depart, Lord. They came only for your protection. Now, if thy servant may have a few moments in which to fortify himself and attend to bodily needs, then we shall go to a place I know … where the Key may be used.”

  He seized the lizard by its head, pulled backward in a peeling motion, and tore it off the stick.

  “Good heavens,” Lando cried, gulping to control his upper gastrointestinal tract, “are you going to eat that thing?”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were standing at the base of the pyramid. Even tilted backward as the wall before them was, it seemed to loom over them like some fantastic, infinitely high cliff, threatening to topple and bury them at any instant.

  Vuffi Raa, having locked the spaceship up securely, joined them. The Toka Singer cast around, seeming to look for something recognizable on what appeared to be a featureless magenta wall. Finally, he stopped and pointed.

  “There,” he said with finality, “about a meter downward, Lord.” He folded his arms.

  Lando rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Well, don’t look at me. I’m the Key Bearer. You’re the peon. You want a shovel, or will you perform this ceremony by hand?”

  The old Toka was aghast. “Me, Lord? I am Singer of the—”

  “One moment, gentlebeings,” the robot said. “I can have it done before the two of you are finished arguing about it.”

  With that, his tentacles became a blur of motion. He resembled a shiny circular saw blade with a glowing red center. Sand poured upward in a wake behind him like an absurd dry fountain, and he was, as he had promised, soon finished.

  “Escargot and Entropy!” Lando swore, struck by what he saw where Vuffi Raa had dug. Mohs was startled into silence, fell to his knees and began chanting in a low, whimpery tone.

  It shouldn’t have been possible. Draw a line around your hand and rout out the material within the outline to a depth of approximately a centimeter. It can be done, and easily.

  Now try it with the blade of an eggbeater. The human hand is, in its simplest representation, a two-dimensional form. Something requiring three dimensions can’t be represented in the same way, not including its essential element—its three-dimensionality. Not unless that object is a Sharu artifact, and the people doing the bas relief are the Sharu themselves.

  In some ways, it was rather as if the wall were transparent—which it was not—and the molded impression of the Key were buried yet visible inside it. But that wasn’t truly the case. In another way, it was like seeing the Key itself, inside out, glued to the side of the pyramid—except that the “image” (or whatever it was) neither protruded from the surface nor was inset into it. The whole thing looked just as preposterous, just as impossible, as the Key itself, only more so.

  And it hurt the eyes in just the same way.

  Lando step
ped back, blinked, and shook his head to uncross his eyes.

  “All right, Mohs, suppose you tell us exactly what you know—what your Songs have to say, if anything—about what we’re seeing and what happens if we use the Key in it.”

  The old man hummed a little to himself, at first as if to get the right pitch, then as if he knew the data only by rote and had to find the right place before he could start properly.

  “This is the Great Lock, Lord. For generations uncounted, no Toka—no, nor any interloping stranger from the stars—has entered into the least of the many sacred shrines They left behind.”

  “Marvelous. We already knew that.”

  “Ah, yes, Lord, but now it is as it has been told: we shall enter, without entering. We shall walk the hallowed halls and yet they shall not echo to our feet. We shall travel to their farthest corners without going anywhere. We shall dream, therein, without sleeping, and know without learning. And, in due course and in Their time, we shall discover the Harp of the Mind; setting free the Harp, we shall set free the—”

  “All right, all right. Politics again. Let me think this over a minute.” He kicked experimentally against the bottom edge of the pyramid where it showed above the ground. There was no sound, no sensation of impact. It was like kicking at water or fine dust. “Vuffi Raa?”

  “Yes, Master?”

  “Don’t call me master. What do you think about all this interloping business?” He took the Key from his pocket, turned it over in his hand, and thrust it back in his pocket.

  “I think I’m long overdue for a lube job, Master, and would just as soon go home and—”

  “I thought your lubricated areas were permanently sealed.”

  Was that a sheepish look in the droid’s single eye? “Yes, Master, although I did get rather badly punctured and lost a good deal of … oh, I can’t see any alternative to using the Key as Mohs suggests, Master. Much as I would like to.”

  Lando laughed. “I don’t much like this enter-without-entering, sleep-without-dreaming stuff myself, truth to tell. Look here, Mohs, what else have you got for us—in plain language.”