Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu Page 16

  “Oh?” the gambler asked beneath raised eyebrows. “Well, suppose I’d fled to the Dela System, as I’d intended, or simply—”

  “There was the ‘treasure’ as an inducement, plus the fact that you had a valuable asset to claim in the droid, here. And, of course, if you hadn’t come, our Ottdefa Osuno Whett would simply have found a new prospect. You were our first—I’m rather proud of the Ottdefa.”

  Lando shook his head resignedly. “I get it. That’s why Vuffi Raa was left here: if you’d missed your chance with me, and I’d had him in my possession in the Oseon, you would have lost a valuable ’bot, whereas any poor jerk who took your bait—”

  “Precisely. I’m gratified that you appreciate the subtlety of the scheme. That will be all. Officers, take him away.”

  Lando didn’t even have time to protest. The police hauled him from the office, along the corridor, and down a flight of stairs to a waiting hovercruiser. They whisked through the streets to the edge of town, where they entered a force-fence around a series of corrugated-plastic buildings.

  “Give him the usual processing,” one of the anonymous visored officers told a fat man in a dirty tunic. “You’ll have the paperwork in the morning.”

  “Very well,” the fat man beamed. He was short and greasy looking, but the neuronic whip in one hand and the military blaster in the other added something to his personality. The cruiser roared away.

  “Welcome to the penal colony of Rafa IV.” The fat man grinned.

  Midnight.

  Listening to the chanting of the Toka, Lando lay on a steel-slatted cot in a barred cell. Offworld prisoners occupied cells on one side of the corridor; the Toka shared an unlocked kennel-like affair on the other side. Lando was unusual in that the other three bunks in his own cell were unoccupied.

  He figured that the governor didn’t want him talking to anyone until he was “processed”—whatever that meant.

  To say he found the native chanting annoying would have been a calamitous understatement. It was unpleasant enough in itself, but it further served to remind him of Mohs—the little man who wasn’t there. If he had been. The question bothered the gambler almost as much as his present predicament did.

  More, perhaps, because he’d been in jail before.

  Less, perhaps, because he’d never faced a sentence in the life-orchards.

  And, unlike the other freshly arrived convicts in the cells around him, he knew what that meant, had had a taste of his mind’s being sucked away by the trees from which the crystals were harvested.

  And his memories of Mohs were clear; the chanting across the hallway was in no way inconsistent with them. The language was distressingly familiar. He could almost imagine he understood it. Not for the first time, he reasoned that it was a corrupted version of some tongue spoken in a place he’d been once. If only he could remember …

  “ALL RIGHT, RISE AND SHINE!”

  The fat man had friends, at least five of them, also armed with blasters and whips. They paced up and down in front of the barred cells, shouting to wake up the offworld prisoners. The Toka were already gone, sometime in the night.

  Lando groaned, turned over. Before they’d placed him in the cell, they’d taken his clothes, replacing them with rough-woven pajamas of unbleached cloth. Now he was being ordered to remove even that minimal dress.

  He quickly found out why. Two of the guards placed their weapons to one side, manhandled a huge fire hose into place before the cells, and turned it on. Lando was dashed to the back of the cell, where he fetched up against the rough plaster wall and slid to the floor, shielding his eyes against the blast of water. The stream passed on to the next cell. He rose stiffly, put his shirt back on—he hadn’t time to undress all the way before the water hit him—and wondered what came next.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  “All right, prisoners,” the fat man shouted, “we will open the cells in a moment, and you will step outside, stand at attention, until told otherwise. Then you will turn left-face and march, single file and silently, into the waiting bus. Step out of line, utter so much as a single word, and you are dead where you stand.”

  Luckily, Lando didn’t have a snappy come-back ready anyway.

  The door slid open with a clank. He stepped out and stood stiffly, shivering in the early morning breeze. He had his first look at the compound, and, having looked around, decided he didn’t want to make a habit of it. Boxed into the corner between two plastic Sharu buildings hundreds of meters tall and unscalable, the yard was fenced on the other two sides. Bare earth, a handful of small one-story cell blocks, and an administration building. Home sweet home for the rest of his life.

  Like hell, Lando swore to himself. He would be free. He had debts to settle.

  The command was given. He turned left smartly, walked behind half a dozen other prisoners to the bus, an old one, driven by another convict. Its skirts were stained and tattered. It would be a rough ride this morning. It—

  The ground began to shake.

  Across the compound, the earth billowed up like waves on the ocean, heaved at the cellblocks, smashing them to bits, ripped the administration building apart, toppled the hoverbus. The man inside it screamed.

  Several convicts ran to help the trapped driver. They were shouted at by the guards. One of the uniformed men opened fire, sending a prisoner up in flames that were mirrored by those which suddenly burst from a leaking fuel line in a building on the far side of the yard.

  Lando stood where he was, then decided to fall down, since the quake threatened to do it to him anyway, and there was less chance of getting shot. Suddenly, a figure in the town-cop uniform, mirrored helmet visor and all, staggered up to the warden or whatever he was. Lando could hear him over the rumble, roar, and screaming.

  “That man is to be turned over for further interrogation!” The armored finger pointed at Lando. The warden and the cop leaned on each other to stay erect.

  “I have no authorization! He’s mine! Can’t this wait?”

  “The governor wants him immediately!” There was sudden menace in the big policeman’s voice. “Something about a load of cops he tried to maroon on Rafa XI four months ago.”

  “Then by all means take him. I—” That was all the fat man had to say. He swayed and fell. The cop ducked back, came for Lando.

  “Let’s go!”

  Grabbing Lando by the pajamaed scruff, the cop bore him along toward a waiting cruiser that had been left aground beside the cell block. “Get in!”

  They roared away through the gate, which hung open on one hinge. It wouldn’t have mattered: the force-fence was down, even its auxiliary power system apparently destroyed in the quake. The car rocked and swayed, turned right, and sped down the road.

  “Say, old flatfoot, this isn’t the way to Teguta Lusat!” Lando shouted. He cringed as they rounded a corner and dashed toward the country.

  “What’s it to you? Shut up and mind your own business!”

  “Would this make it my business?”

  The cop looked down to see what was pressing at his side. It was his own blaster. He raised a visored head to the young gambler.

  “Very good. I guess you didn’t need rescuing that badly, after all. Want to go back and have all the glory to yourself?”

  “What are you talking about?” Lando demanded. “Stop this car and take that helmet off. I want to see who I’m talking to!”

  The cruiser slowed as per specification. They halted in the middle of the road and waited out an aftershock. Lando leveled the blaster at the policeman’s face. “Okay, take it off.”

  The gloved hands rose, took the helmet and lifted. In place of a head sticking up through the collar, there was—a snake! A chromium-plated snake.

  “Can I get out of this uniform, Master? It’s very uncomfortable.”

  “Vuffi Raa! You little—but what’s going on here? Why are you rescuing me?”

  Shucking the rest of the guardsman’s uniform—he’d been w
alking on two tentacles, using two for arms, and the fifth as an ersatz head—Vuffi Raa assumed a more normal position behind the driver tiller.

  “Master, I was programmed to betray you from the beginning, and not to tell you about it. But you’re my Master, Lando, and, as soon as that program had run out, so did I. And here I am. We’ve got to get off this planet, out of the system, and fast.”

  “I know.”

  “You know? How?”

  “The dreams, the chanting I heard last night. It’s Old High Trammic—the language of the Toka. I was on Trammis III a couple of years ago. I still can’t understand the language very well, but my subconscious apparently made something of it. I woke up this morning knowing the truth about the Mindharp, and I know we’ve got to get out of this place now.”

  “Why is that, Master?”

  “Don’t call me Master. Because, once somebody starts the music up, this system’s never going to be the same again.”

  “Then we must go now, Master. Duttes Mer is using the Harp. That’s what the earthquake’s all about.”

  • XX •

  UNLIKE A FICTIONAL villain, Duttes Mer hadn’t gloated or divulged his plans to the beaten Lando Calrissian. He’d simply had him disposed of, as quickly and neatly as possible.

  Where he’d made his mistake—his first one, anyway—was in his attitude toward menials. Toka servants were virtually invisible to him—drinks and cigars simply appeared near his elbow, and that, he thought, was as it should be. He was the governor, after all. Droids were even more invisible.

  So Vuffi Raa had stood in plain sight in the governor’s office as he made a transspace call to Rokur Gepta.

  “Ahhh, it is you, my esteemed sorcerer. I have some news.”

  “What is it, Mer? It had better be good!”

  “Are you enjoying your stay in orbit around a dried-up desert planet?”

  “My ship is far more comfortable than that heap of bricks you call a city. Get on with it, Governor, you’re beginning to anger me!”

  The governor reached for the pickup on his communicator, pulled it out on a retracting cable, and pointed it at the top of his desk. “See anything you recognize, Gepta?”

  In the screen, the sorcerer’s eyes were filled, by turn, with wonder, greed, and rage. “The Mindharp! How did you—”

  The governor chuckled. “It only matters that I did, Gepta, and that you’re millions of kilometers from here. You see, that story you told Calrissian—that the Harp is the ‘Ultimate Instrument of Music’—may have been good enough for him, but the story you told me about its being a master control over all the Toka never washed. Such a thing would be commercially useful, but this,” he indicated the Harp, “is much, much more than that.”

  “What do you mean, Mer?”

  “I am capable of hiring investigators, too, my dear former partner, and I took the wisest course: hiring yours. Recall that I have the power to commute sentences, order pardons. I know the truth: that the Mindharp of Sharu is an instrument capable of controlling every mind within the system—possibly beyond it. And the instrument is miner!”

  “Don’t try it, Mer, you don’t know what you’re doing!” Panic was evident in the sorcerer’s voice.

  “On the contrary, my dear—”

  “NO! You don’t understand! The Mindharp will—”

  The governor smiled benignly. “It will give me absolute power, even over you. I suggest that, if you don’t want to feel that power, you turn your ship out of orbit and leave my system. That may buy you a few years, at least.”

  “Mer, I’ll warn you once more: you don’t have the knowledge to safely—”

  Click.

  When the opportunity arose—which wasn’t until the middle of the night—Vuffi Raa crept from the governor’s offices, stole a uniform from the guard laundries, jump-wired a police cruiser in the maintenance yard, and went off to rescue Lando.

  “Well, I appreciate it, Vuffi Raa, old criminal, but I trust you’ll understand the residue of skepticism that remains within me.”

  They were whisking back into town at a moderate, legal, and inconspicuous velocity. They had felt several more tremors, but nothing like that first quake.

  “I understand,” Vuffi Raa acknowledged, “and I suppose telling you I was programmed to betray you is much the same as a human being’s saying he couldn’t help himself. Well, I came to rescue you by way of restitution.”

  Lando thought about that. “Very well, and just to show you my good faith, you might as well know that Rokur Gepta and Duttes Mer are both wrong about the Mindharp.”

  Vuffi Raa brought the car to a screeching halt as they neared the outskirts of Teguta Lusat. “What?”

  “That’s correct. And we’ve got to get out to the port, steal something that will get us out of the system, but fast.”

  “Master, I agree about getting out. You don’t want your mind controlled, especially by a being like the governor—believe me, I know. But if they’re wrong …”

  “It will be worse, Vuffi Raa. My only regret is leaving the Falcon on Rafa V.”

  “Master, four months have passed. Mer had the Falcon brought back. It’s cargo of life-crystals hasn’t even been unloaded, because until we reappeared in Teguta Lusat, Gupta and Mer didn’t know if they might have to bargain more with you.”

  “What? Why didn’t you tell me? He didn’t think to have her drives repaired, did he?”

  After a long pause, the droid replied, “No, Master, I did that, the first thing on the way to Rafa V.”

  Lando didn’t say anything. If he’d realized the extent of the droid’s housekeeping back then, they might have taken off and skipped the last four months inside the Sharu ruins. “Well,” he said irritably, “let’s get out to the port!”

  “Yes, Master.”

  Aboard the decommissioned cruiser Wennis, leaving orbit from Rafa V, a decision had been made. Rokur Gepta lay in a special acceleration couch, being strapped up for the voyage ahead of him. The vessel in the lifeboat bay was not a lifeboat, but an elderly Imperial fighter, refitted as a scout. It could make the trip to Rafa IV in a third the time of its parent vessel.

  If the occupant could stand the G-forces involved.

  The safety precautions were primarily for the benefit of the crew, Gepta reflected. He didn’t need them, but it was dangerous for them to know that. As the last strap and bit of tape was in place and the port clamped down, he relaxed, waited for the tick, and didn’t stir a hair when thrust that might have seriously injured a mere human being passed harmlessly through his body.

  He’d be in Teguta Lusat within an hour.

  * * *

  Duttes Mer looked down at the Mindharp on his desk, afraid to try again, but desperate to master the weird thing before Gepta could return and take it from him. He had no illusions. If he couldn’t control that mind, along with millions of others, he was doomed. He placed his short, square hand on the central shaft of the Harp again, suppressed a wave of fear, and tried to concentrate.

  “Master!”

  Vuffi Raa clung to the steering tiller as the road tried to shake them off its back like a wet dog. Lando grabbed the ends of a seat belt, tried to fasten them together as the police car pitched and swayed.

  “This is no good!” he shouted, finally giving up the effort. “Look, let’s make a run for it!”

  The spaceport gates were only a few hundred meters away, and they were traveling twice that distance weaving back and forth across the road. Lando slammed the door open, rolled out, got to his feet, and ran toward the gate. Vuffi Raa, right behind him, took no time at all to catch up.

  A guard, well away from his swaying guardpost, was standing in the gateway. He aimed a blaster at Lando.

  “Halt! Looters will be shot!”

  “I’m not a looter,” Lando hollered as he approached the guard. Both were pretty busily occupied just staying on their feet. “I’m the captain of that ship over there, the Millennium Falcon, and I’ve got to get her o
ff before she breaks up with everything else on this planet!”

  The blaster came up to Lando’s eye level. “That ship’s under the governor’s seal. You can’t—”

  Lando stepped closer. The guard fired, but, swaying as he was, succeeded only in burning a shrub across the road. By that time, Lando was close enough to seize the weapon, push it upward, punch the other man in the solar plexus with his fist.

  Flexible armor is for bullets and energy beams. It’s no protection at all against an unarmed man. The guard folded. Lando took his gun away, added it to the weapon he’d taken at the labor camp.

  “Let’s go!”

  They ran toward the Falcon, and, as they approached it, the boarding ramp swung downward slowly, as if in welcome. Cautiously, Lando and Vuffi Raa walked up the inclined plane.

  At the top, still aged and wrinkled, but sporting a stylish haircut and expensive business suit, stood Mohs, High Singer of the Toka. Where his ruined eyes had been now glittered a pair of faceted multicolored optics like those of a giant psychedelic spider.

  Duttes Mer glared resentfully at the alien object on his desk. Twice, now, following the mental procedure conveyed to him by Gepta’s captive sociologists, he had tried to gain control of the Mindharp, and thus—

  He slammed his hand down on the desk, making the object jump. He didn’t want to try again; all it seemed to do was cause quakes that threatened to tear his administration building apart. Why that should be, he didn’t know, but he knew one thing: Rokur Gepta was coming.

  The spaceport radar people had confirmed it, just before the communications lines had gone dead. A small, extremely fast craft was no more than twenty minutes from landfall. Mer suspected that Gepta didn’t need the port facilities; there was a wide flat space atop the administration building. It would do nicely for—