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

  Alone aboard the transport, he leaned back on the outward-facing bench, unsure whether he enjoyed the unique scenery or not. Traffic was a modest trickle of wheels, hovercraft, repulsor-lifted speeders. Not a few pedestrians clumped along the quaint and phony boardwalks that fronted the human buildings, and among them Lando spotted many more like the old man at the port. Perhaps they were old prisoners who had served out their sentences. The bus wheezed into the center of Teguta Lusat. Lando paid the droid at the tiller, dismounted, and stretched his legs.

  The colony was an anthill built on soil scrapings in the cracks between ancient, artificial mountains. Whatever effort had been invested decorating the place (and it didn’t amount to much), it remained drab by comparison with the polychrome towers surrounding it. Streets were narrow, angling oddly. Human-scale homes, offices, and storefronts merely fringed the feet of titanic nonhuman walls.

  Lando walked into the least scruffy-looking bar. The usual crowd was there.

  “Looking for a cargo, Captain?”

  The mechanical innkeeper of the Spaceman’s Rest polished a glass. Bottles and other containers from a hundred cultures gleamed softly in the subdued lighting. A smattering of patrons—not very many: it was the dinner hour and Four was mostly a family planet—filled the unpretentious establishment with an equally subdued burble of unintelligibility.

  Lando shook his head.

  “Too bad, Captain, what else can I do for you?”

  “Anything that burns,” Lando said, childishly pleased to be recognizable as a spaceman. He was puzzled, however, over the robot’s commercial pessimism. This was a healthy, thriving colony, with enormous and growing export statistics. “Retsa, if you’ve got it.”

  In one dark corner, what might have been the same under-clothed old man leaned on the same old pushbroom.

  “Coming up, Captain.” Deft maneuvering with glassware followed.

  Lando turned his back, put elbows on the bar, inquired over his shoulder: “Where could a fellow find some action around here?” He’d put it in a colonial accent—when in hick city, act hickier than the hicks. Civilized polish scares money away. “I just got in from the Oseon; my evening’s free.”

  “How free?” The machine’s optic regarded Lando appraisingly. “There’s Rosie’s Joint, down the street. Has a real nice revue. Just turn left at the big red neon—”

  Lando shook his head. “Later, maybe. Perhaps a game—sabacc? Folks back home used to say I was pretty good.”

  Cynicism in its voice, if not upon its unyielding features, the automaton put on a show of thinking deeply. “Well, sir, I don’t know …”

  Lando offered twice the going price for retsa.

  “I might know of a game—my memory stacks just aren’t what they used to be, though, and …”

  Lando placed another bill in the bar-top. “Will this cover having them recharged?”

  The bill seemed to evaporate.

  “Don’t go away, Captain. Make yourself comfortable. I’ll be right back.”

  The ’tender vanished almost as impressively as had Lando’s money.

  • II •

  THE FLEDGLING STARSHIP owner/operator had scarcely picked up his drink, selected a dark, heavy, quasiwood table, and seated himself, carefully adjusting the creases in his trousers, when another figure appeared, a tall, cadaverous, nearly human individual wearing something loose, with polka dots.

  They clashed badly with his mottled orange complexion.

  “Allow me to introduce myself, sir: I am the proprietor of this establishment.” The creature stroked its moustaches—two separate levels filling the inhumanly broad space between nose and upper lip—took a chair to the gambler’s left, and lit a long green cigarette. The young gambler noticed with amusement that the fellow hadn’t really introduced himself at all.

  “I understand,” said the alien, “that you have expressed an interest in the scientific theories regarding the phenomenon of probability.”

  Lando had wondered how the subject would be broached.

  He settled back with a grin, assuming the facade, once again, of an overconfident colonial, put his feet up on the chair opposite, and winked knowingly.

  “Purely scientific, friend. I’m a spacer by profession, an astrogator, so my interest’s only natural. I’m especially intrigued by permutations and combinations of the number seventy-eight, taken two at a time. Fives are wild.”

  “Ah … sabacc.” The owner took a long drag of orange smoke, exhaled softly. “I believe you could be inducted into the, er, research foundation practically instantaneously.” He paused, as if embarrassed. “But first, Captain … well, a small formality: your ship name if you please, sir, strictly for identification purposes. There are certain regressive, antiscientific enemies of free inquiry—”

  “Who carry badges and blasters?” He laughed. “Millennium Falcon, berth seventeen. I’m Calrissian, Lando Calrissian.”

  The proprietor consulted a data-link display on his oddly jointed wrist. “A pleasure, Captain Calrissian. And your credit, I observe, is more than sufficient to support this, er, research program of ours. If you will follow me.”

  It’s the same the galaxy over, Lando thought. A small back room, emerald-color dramskin tabletop, low-hanging lamp, smoke-filled atmosphere. In an honest game, there was a modest house percentage, and the cops were all paid off—that routine of the tavern owner’s had merely been a chance to check Lando’s credit rating. Only the particular mingling of smoke odors varied from system to system, and that not as much as might be expected. He might be out of his depth at the controls of a starship. For that matter, he didn’t know very much about asteroid mining or needlepoint. But here—wherever “here” happened to be—he was at home.

  He took his place at the table.

  There were three other players, and a tiny handful of spectators currently more interested in their drinks and breathing down each other’s necks than the game. He placed a few creds on the firm green surface. Card-chips were dealt around. He received the Ace of Sabres, the Four of Flasks, and Endurance—which counted as a minus-eight.

  That made eleven.

  “One,” said Lando neutrally. He drew a Seven of Staves, which promptly flickered and became the Commander of Coins.

  Twenty-three.

  “Sabacc! Dear me, beginner’s luck?” He allowed excitement to tinge his voice as he raked in the small pile of money, accepting the deck and dealing.

  He carefully lost the next three hands.

  It wasn’t easy. He’d had to dump two perfect twenty-threes and might have drawn to a third if he hadn’t stood pat with a fourteen-point hand, praying that the card-chips would keep the faces they’d begun with.

  The local talent thought they had a live one.

  In a manner of speaking, they were right—but not in any manner of speaking they’d find pleasant or profitable. It was one of those evenings when the young gambler felt made of luck, filled to the brim with spinning electrons and subnuclear fire. He ran the pot up gradually, so as not to frighten the others, conspicuously losing on the low bets, making steady, quiet gains.

  Drinks flowed freely, compliments of the polka-dotted proprietor. This may have been a spaceman’s bar, but at least two of the players were townies, likely splitting with the boss what they skinned from visiting sailors. The same glass of retsa Lando had begun with, diluted now with ice he kept having added, stood sweating on the plastic table-edging near his elbow.

  “Sabacc,” breathed Lando, flipping the trio of card-chips face upward. It was a classic: the Idiot’s Array, lead-card worth the zero printed on it, plus a Two of Staves and a Three of Sabres—an automatic twenty-three.

  “That cleans out my tubes,” grunted the player opposite Lando, a dough-faced anonymous little entity with slightly purplish skin. Like the gambler, he wore the uniform of a starship officer. Despite the coolness of the evening, there was a fine sheen of perspiration across his forehead. “Unless I can interest you in a s
mall cargo of life-crystals.”

  Lando shook his head, adjusted an embroidered cuff. First a beat-up freighter, then a robot he hadn’t even had time to inspect, now a holdful of trouble with the local authorities.

  “Sorry, old fellow, but it’s cash on the tabletop or nothing. Business is business—and sabacc is sabacc.”

  Born of fatigue, this partial transformation from rough-edged (if preternaturally fortunate) amateur into no-nonsense professional startled at least one of Lando’s opponents, a stalky, asymmetrical vegetable sentient from a system whose name the young gambler couldn’t quite recall. It placed three broad leaflike hands on the table—Lando thought the contrasting shades of green looked perfectly terrible together—and garbled through an electronic synthesizer fastened to its knobbly stem.

  “Awrr, Captainshipness, being a sports!” It turned a petal-fringed face toward the small technician. “Negatordly give these person ill considerations. Cargo of value, inarguability.”

  The third player, a hard-bitten bleached blonde with a thumb-sized oval life-crystal dangling from a chain around her wattled neck, hooted agreement.

  “Sure, Phyll,” Lando replied, ignoring the woman. “Is that how you obtained that marvelous translator you’re wearing—in lieu of credits in a sabacc game?”

  The plant-being shivered with surprise. “How thou understanding these?”

  “With considerable difficulty.”

  He paused, thinking it over, however. To a gambler, particularly one who was both reasonably honest and consistently successful, good will represented an important stock in trade.

  “Oh, very well, Chaos take me! But only this once, understood?”

  The amorphous-featured fellow nodded enthusiastically; he lasted only two more hands. On his way out the door, he reached into a pocket of his coveralls, presented Lando with a bill of lading and a few associated documents.

  “You’ll find the shipment at the port. Thanks for the game. You’re a real sport, Cap’n Calrissian, honest to Entropy, you are.”

  Lando, now some seventeen thousand credits ahead, and ready to bow out of the game as gracefully as he could—or as firmly as he must—scarcely heard the little nonentity. He had blessedly near the price of the Millennium Falcon, right there on the table before him. A plague on interstellar freight-hauling! Let somebody else worry over landing permits and cargo manifests. He was a gambler!

  It sure beat scraping mynocks off a starship hull!

  Shortly after midnight, strolling the few boardwalked blocks toward the modest luxury of Teguta Lusat’s “finest hotel”—the droid bartender’s recommendation—Lando kept one hand on the credits in his pocket, the other on his little gun. It didn’t seem to be that kind of town, still, there were that kind of people everywhere you went.

  Beside him shambled the weirdest apparition of the mechanical subspecies he had ever seen—or even wanted to.

  “Vuffi Raa, Master, Class Two Multiphasic Robot, at your service!”

  The transport station with its dozens of storage lockers had been on Lando’s way to the hotel. Desiring an early start on the morning’s business, the gambler had thought it a good idea to pick up the droid he’d won immediately. Now he wasn’t sure.

  Some things are better faced in daylight.

  It stood perhaps a meter tall, about level with Lando’s hip pocket—hard to judge, as it could prop its five tentacles at various angles, achieving various heights. It was the shape of an attenuated starfish with sinuous manipulators—which served both as arms and legs—seamed to a dinner-plate-size pentagonal torso decorated with a single, softly glowing many-faceted deep red eye. The whole assemblage was done up in jointed, glittering, highly polished chromium.

  Utterly tasteless, Lando thought.

  “Most people,” he had observed, watching the thing unfold itself from the rental locker, “have forgotten that ‘droid’ is short for ‘android,’ meaning manlike.” It stretched its long, metallically striated limbs almost like a living being, carefully examined the tips of its delicately tapered tentacles. “And what kind of name is that for a robot, anyway: ‘Vuffi Raa’? Aren’t you supposed to have a number?”

  It regarded him obliquely as they squeezed past a geriatric janitor and left the terminal through automatic glass doors, headed up the boardwalk.

  “It is a number, Master, in the system where I was manufactured—in the precise image of my creators.

  “I wish I could recall exactly where that is: you see, I was prematurely activated in my shipping carton in a freight hold during a deep-space pirate attack. This seems to have had a bad effect on certain of my programmed memories.”

  Wonderful, thought Lando, keying open his hotel room. A ship he couldn’t fly, and now a robot with amnesia. What had he done to deserve this kind of—never mind, he didn’t want to know!

  The Hotel Sharu wasn’t much, but it was regarded locally as the best, and he had certain standards to uphold with what he thought of as his public. He mused: in this age of wide-ranging exploration, it was entirely possible for a commodity such as Vuffi Raa to change hands many times, be bought, sold, resold, won, or lost, winding up half a galaxy away in a culture totally unknown where the product had originated.

  Or vice versa, as seemed to be the case here. He couldn’t recall any sapient species shaped even remotely like Vuffi Raa. Somehow, he hoped he’d never run across them. In any event, he thought, that’ll make two white elephants for sale in the morning.

  He’d already come to a decision about the Millennium Falcon.

  Table talk during the sabacc game had been understandably sparse, but one thing was obvious even before he’d accepted those crystals for cash. The life-orchards operated on a combination of unskilled labor supplied mostly by the near-mindless natives of the Rafa—he wondered if he’d see any of the creatures while he was there, but came to the same decision about that that he had concerning Vuffi Raa’s manufacturers—and supervision by offworld prisoners. The whole enterprise was a monopoly of the colonial government.

  As nearly as Lando could determine, consignments of life-crystals traveled only via the Brother-In-Law Shipping Company (whatever its local equivalent was actually called), and free-lance haulers were simply out of luck. There would be no cargo for the dashing Captain Lando to write manifests on.

  Well, that suited him. He’d trade off the cargo tomorrow.

  Door-field humming securely, and the bed turning itself down with cybernetic hospitality, Lando undressed, carefully supervising the closet’s handling of his clothing. Vuffi Raa offered its services as a valet, the appropriate skills being well within the capacities of its Class Two architecture, which supposedly approached human levels of intellectual and emotional response.

  But Lando declined.

  “I haven’t had servants for a very, very long time indeed, my fine feathered droid, and I don’t intend starting again with you. I’m afraid you’re to change hands once more, first thing in the morning. Nothing personal, but get used to it.”

  The robot bobbed silent acknowledgment, found an unoccupied corner of the room, and lapsed into the semiactivation that in automata simulates sleep, its scarlet eye-glow growing fainter but not altogether dimming out.

  Lando stretched on the bed, thoughts of ancient treasure dancing through his head. Of course, he considered, life-crystals weren’t the only possible cargo he could take away from this place. The ancient ruins were supposedly impenetrable, but whatever race had built them, it hadn’t stinted on strewing the system with more portable artifacts. Museums might be interested—and possibly in the crude statuettes and hand-tools fashioned by the savage natives, as well. High technology past and primitive present: quite a fascinating contrast.

  But the treasure …

  Come to think of it, there were also a few colonial manufactured goods. But that meant he’d have to chase all over the Rafa just to line up a single decent holdful—with a messy, embarrassing, and possibly dangerous takeoff and landing a
t each stop along the way, he reminded himself.

  Of course, there was always the treasure …

  No. Better stick to the original plan: find a buyer for the Falcon. It had been fun for a short while, but he was no real space captain, and she was far too expensive to maintain as a private yacht, even if he’d wanted one. Find somebody to give him a fair price for Vuffi Raa, as well. Perhaps the same suck—customer. Then ship out, tens of thousands of credits richer, on the very next commercial starliner.

  He whistled the lights out, then had an afterthought. “Vuffi Raa?”

  The faintest whine of servos coming back to full power. “Yes, Master?” Its eye shone in the darkness like a giant cigarette coal.

  “Don’t call me Master—gives me the creeps. Can you, by any chance, pilot a starship? Say, a small converted freighter?”

  “Such as your Millennium Falcon?” A pause as the droid examined its programming. “Why, yes, er … how should I call you, sir?”

  Lando turned over, the smug look on his face invisible in the darkened room. “Not too loudly, Vuffi Raa, and no later than nine-hundred in the morning. Good night.”

  “Good night, Master.”

  KRAAASH!

  The door-field overloaded, arced and spat as the panel itself split and hinges groaned, separating from the frame.

  Lando awoke with a start, one foot on the floor, one hand reaching for the stingbeam on the nightstand before he was consciously aware of it.

  Four uniformed figures, their torsos covered with flexible back-and-breast armor, helmet visors stopped down to total anonymity, stomped over the smoking remains of the door as the room lights came up of their own accord. Their body armor failed to conceal the sigil of colonial peacekeepers. They carried ugly, oversized military blasters, unholstered and pointing directly at Lando’s unprotected midsection.