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

  He removed his hand from the nighttable, hastily, but without sudden, misinterpretable movement.

  “Lando Calrissian?” one of the helmeted figures demanded.

  He eyed the wreckage of the door.

  “Wouldn’t it be embarrassing if I weren—um, on second thought, let me revise that: yes, gentlebeings, I am Captain Lando Calrissian, in the flesh and hopeful of remaining that way. Always happy to cooperate, fully and cheerfully, with the authorities. What can I do for you fellows?”

  The bulbous muzzle of its weapon unwavering, the imposing armored figure stepped closer to the bed, its companions immediately filling up the space behind it.

  “Master of the freighter Millennium Falcon, berth seventeen, Teguta Lusat Interstellar—”

  “The very same. I—”

  “Shut up. You are under arrest.”

  “That’s fine, officer. Just let me get my pants—or not, if it’s inconvenient. I’ll be happy to answer whatever questions His Honor may wish to ask. That’s my policy: the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Support Your Local—Umph!”

  The big cop hit Lando in the stomach with his blaster, followed it with the empty hand, balled into a mailed fist. A second figure went to work on the hapless gambler’s legs. The other two swung crisply around the bed, started in on him from the other side.

  “Ow! I said I’d go peaceably—ghaa! I—unhh! Vuffi Raa, help me!”

  The robot cowered in its corner, manipulators trembling. Abruptly, it collapsed, curled up into a ball. Its light went out.

  So did Lando’s.

  • III •

  SQUAT.

  Squat and ugly.

  Squat and ugly and powerful—at least locally, Lando reminded himself with an inward groan as two of the helmeted officers dragged him into the presence of Duttes Mer, colonial governor of the Rafa.

  Lando hadn’t had time yet—nor the inclination—to inventory the indignities inflicted on him by the Colonial Constabulary. He seemed to be one solid, puffy bruise from neck to ankles. Avoid trouble with the cops in one system, get it in the next when you least expect it.

  It hurt, rather a lot.

  Yet nothing really serious had been done to him, he realized, nothing broken, nothing that would show if they ever gave him back his clothes. A thorough, workmanlike, professional beating, it had been, and, for all that it had seemed to go on and on forever, apparently a purely educational one, a few well-placed contusions meant to underline the fact that he was totally at their mercy.

  He’d bloodied his own nose, stumbling against the jamb as they’d frog-marched him over the broken door of his hotel room. In hopes of not acquiring any further damage, he wished they’d put a plastic sheet under him now, to keep him from getting blood all over the governor’s fancy imported carpet, the only extravagance apparent in an otherwise spare and utilitarian office.

  There was a useful clue, there, if only Lando’s head would begin working well enough to ferret it out.

  The governor blinked. “Lando Calrissian?”

  At least everybody seemed to know his name. It was a startlingly high-pitched, feeble voice, considering the ponderous bulk it issued from—and perhaps a touch more nervous, Lando thought, than current circumstances seemed to warrant. Gamblers make much more careful studies of such nuances than psychologists. They have to.

  Thickly muscled, improbably broad, resembling more than anything else a deeply weathered tree-stump crowned in fine, almost feathery hair, the governor looked like the kind to play his cards close to the chest, never to take wild chances, to be a merciless, implacable player.

  Turn the tables and he’d holler like a baby. Lando knew the type well.

  In the present context, he felt the information wasn’t terribly helpful. He glanced uncomfortably at the armored visor-wearers either side of him, then back at the governor. It doesn’t matter a whit if a bully’s a coward at heart—as long as he has all the guns.

  The governor blinked, lifted a blocky arm, repeating the salutation—or, more likely, the accusation: “Lando Calrissian?”

  “Flatten the first A a bit,” Lando answered, more bravely than he felt. “A little more accent on the second syllable of the last name. Keep trying, you’ll get it right.”

  He ran a tongue across his lips, tasted blood. His head hurt. So did everything else. Egg-sized eyes under the silly head-thatching regarded him coldly from behind a small, uncluttered, impossibly delicate-looking desk of transparent plastic.

  “Lando Calrissian, we have here a list of very serious charges against you that have been brought to our attention. Very serious charges indeed. What, if anything, have you to say for yourself?”

  The governor blinked again as he finished, this time as if the very sight of Lando was painful to him. The young gambler bit back a second snappy reply. He wasn’t aware of anything illegal he had done. Lately, anyway. He hadn’t any qualms, particularly, about breaking the law: there were a lot of silly little planets with a lot of silly little laws. It was just that he’d rather—as an aesthetic point, mostly—be caught when he’d actually done something.

  He decided, more or less experimentally, to add truth to the courteous obsequiousness that had failed with the cops. One never knew, the combination might work on this fat tub of—

  “Sir—Your Excellency—I know nothing about any charges. To the best of my knowledge, I haven’t done anything to be charged with.”

  He left it at that; a complaint would be carrying things too far.

  The governor blinked.

  Lando opened his mouth to speak. A loop of fabric from his tattered pajamas chose that moment to slip embarrassingly from his shoulder and swing. He sniffed, lifted it with whatever dignity the occasion afforded, attempted to smooth it back in place.

  The governor blinked.

  It was not a large room they were in. There was a wide door—but then, it was a wide governor—either side of the desk. Like the door facing the desk, through which Lando had been escorted, both were framed in plain undecorative alumabronze, the spare motif echoed in wainscotting, baseboards, and a border around the high, somehow intimidating ceiling. The pace was tinted a bilious yellow to match the governor’s eyes. Instead of draperies, the windows displayed recorded scenes Lando recognized from other systems: greenish gravelly beaches, deep orange skies, scarlet vegetation. Entire worlds done up in bad taste.

  The governor, apparently deciding Lando had been sufficiently intimidated by the longish silence, lifted a thick arm from his desk, regarded the troopers half-holding the much-abused starship captain erect.

  “You are advised,” Duttes Mer squeaked menacingly, “to improve the best of your knowledge, then, young miscreant.”

  Miscreant? Lando thought, did people really say miscreant? The governor perused a printout lying on his desk, raised downy eyebrows.

  “Quite a record! Reckless landing procedures. Illegal importation of dangerous animals. Mynocks, Captain—really? Unauthorized berthing of an interstellar—”

  “But, Governor!” Lando forgot himself momentarily, struggled free of the policeman on his left—then remembered where he was and clamped the astonished man’s armored hand back around his elbow with a short-lived sheepish grin.

  He’d realized, with a sudden, stifled gasp, that the transparent desk the governor occupied was composed entirely of gigantic, priceless life-crystals—enough to extend the life-spans of hundreds of individuals. Power, then, was the key. It explained the barren office. Money and display wouldn’t impress the malevolent lump of wasted hydrocarbons sitting before him; he would be motivated only by the prospect of controlling and disposing of the lives of others.

  “Sir, I had all the clearances and permits. I—”

  “Truly, Captain? Where? Produce them and the charges against you may be reduced some small but measurable fraction.”

  Lando looked down, seeing his own frame—the thought whisked by that this might be an unfortunate choice of words
—draped in pocketless pajamas much the worse for their recent intimate acquaintance with Teguta Lusat law-enforcement procedures. He looked back up at the governor. “I don’t suppose you’d let me go back to my hotel … no, I didn’t think so. Well, better yet, check with the Port Authority. They should be able—”

  “Captain,” the governor sighed with affected weariness, “the Port Authority have no record whatever of any permits being granted to either a Lando Calrissian, or a …” He checked the list again. “… a Millennium Falcon. Of this I assure you, sir. In fact, you might say I ascertained the data in the matter personally.”

  “Oh,” Lando answered in a small voice, beginning to understand the situation.

  “There is also,” the governor continued, satisfied now that he had a properly attentive audience, “conspiracy to evade regulations of trade. You see, we know of your attempts to obtain an unlicensed cargo. Carrying a concealed weapon—my, my, Captain, but you are a bad boy. Finally: assaulting a duly authorized police officer in an attempt to resist arrest.”

  The governor got a thoughtful look on his face, looked down at the list again, picked up a stylus and made a note. “And failure to settle your hotel bill as you departed those premises.

  “Now what have you to say?” The governor blinked, licked fat lips in anticipation.

  “I see,” Lando said, barely concealing his glee. His spirits had begun to lift considerably in spite—or because—of the list of charges against him. The governor was someone he could deal with, after all.

  Ante: “My gun was on the nighttable, it wasn’t concealed. And if ‘assault’ consists of willfully striking a constable in the fist with my stomach, then I’d say you’ve got me, fair and square. Governor. Sir.”

  Raise: “Very well, Captain. Or ought I to make that ‘Mister Calrissian’—you will not likely be doing very much more captaining from now on. What have you to say to the probability of finishing your days doing stoop-labor in the life-orchards amidst other criminals, malcontents, and morons like yourself?”

  Lando saw that and raised with a grin: “In all truth, sir, I wouldn’t like that very much. I’ve heard that the life-orchards tend to take it out of you.”

  The governor nodded, not exactly an easy feat for someone without a discernible neck: “If you had it to begin with, Captain—if you had it to begin with.”

  Call: “I’d also say you’re about to offer me some less-unpleasant alternative. That is, unless you make a custom of trumping up silly charges against every independent skipper who makes your port. And I guess I’d have heard about that long before I got here.”

  The governor resembled a frowning tree-stump covered in feathers. “Don’t anticipate me, Captain, it takes all the fun out of occasions such as this.”

  He blinked, then pressed a button on his desk.

  Lando replaced the cup on its saucer, leaned back in the large soft chair a servant had been ordered to bring him, and drew deeply on one of the governor’s imported cigars. Yes, indeed, all of life was one big sabacc game, and he was coming out ahead, just as he had done the night before.

  The servant—one of the Rafa System’s “natives”—offered to pour more tea. That had come as a surprise (the native, not the tea). It stood there with a look of worshipful expectancy on its seamed, vacant, elderly gray-hued face. Lando shook his head. One more cup and they could float him out of there.

  Another puff: “You were saying, my dear governor?”

  “I was saying, my boy—by the way, are you finding that dressing gown adequate? Your baggage should be here from the hotel by now. But I’d rather we didn’t interrupt ourselves at this point in the conversation. I was saying that, among the intelligent species of the galaxy, we humans are a most prolific, preternaturally protean people.”

  “And alliterative as all get-out, too, apparently.” Lando flicked two centimeters of fine gray ash into the vacuum tray on the governor’s desk.

  Mer ignored the jibe, indicated the stooped and withered servant as it quietly shambled through the main office door behind Lando. “Consider, for example, the Toka—known locally as the ‘the Broken People.’ Entirely devoid of intellect, passion, or will. Subhumanoid in intelligence. Every one of them bears what would be the signs of advanced age among our own kind—white hair, sallow, wrinkled faces, a bent, discouraged gait. Yet these are but superficialities of appearance—or are they?—they carry each of these dubious attributes from birth.

  “Domestic animals, really, nothing more. Useful as household servants, they’re too unintelligent to be anything but discreet. And in harvesting the life-orchards. But nothing else.”

  Lando stirred uncomfortably in his chair, adjusting the front of his borrowed bathrobe to conceal his discomfiture. The fabric was velvoid, a revolting shade of purple, sporting bright green-and-yellow trim. If everyone took to using the fabric—and with such egregious taste—he’d have to reassess his entire wardrobe. He wondered precisely what all the palaver was leading up to. He’d heard slavery justified a thousand different ways in a thousand different systems, yet it did seem to him that the Toka lacked some spark, some hint of the aggressive intelligence that made people people.

  “You said ‘for example’: ‘Consider the Toka for example’—don’t you mean ‘by contrast’?”

  The governor signaled for yet another cup of tea. “Not at all, my dear boy, not at all. With offworld prisoners as overseers, a few droids for technical tasks, the Toka are content to eat food intended for animals, and will quite willingly work themselves to death if it’s demanded of them.”

  Lando allowed himself a small, cynical snort. He’d heard that working in the orchards had some kind of drainage effect. Most human prisoners had purely supervisory positions, as the governor had suggested. Ditto for nonhuman sapients that had gotten themselves into trouble. Those unfortunate few “special” prisoners of both classifications, condemned to menial labor, wound up sub-idiots within a year or two. Apparently it didn’t affect the Toka that way.

  They were already sub-idiots.

  “All that must be highly convenient,” he said, “for the owners of the orchards.”

  Mer looked at Lando closely. “The government owns the orchards, my boy, I thought you understood that. The point is, the Toka are quite as human as ourselves.”

  Lando’s jaw dropped. He scrutinized the servant as it poured the governor’s tea, oblivious to the highly insulting things being said about it. How could this acquiescent, wizened, hunched, gray-faced nonentity, with its tattered homespun loincloth and thinning white hair, be human?

  The governor blinked, managing to look smugly proprietary in spite of it. He opened his mouth to speak …

  WHAAAM!

  The air was split by an explosion that rocked the office. There was a blinding flash; a column of blue-black smoke boiled into existence, floor-to-ceiling, at the right of the governor’s desk.

  Oh, brother, Lando thought, what now?

  • IV •

  “ENOUGH OF THIS!” The blue-black smoke column shrieked, evaporating into tiny orange sparks that winked and disappeared.

  A Sorcerer of Tund, Lando groaned inwardly, how quaint. Members of an allegedly ancient and rather boringly mysterious order from the remote Tund System, they were all given to flashy entrances. The rest of the column condensed into a vaguely humanoid figure about Lando’s height and general build. The old boy had probably tossed his flash-bomb into the office, then stepped through the door quite casually into the center of the smoke.

  Nobody was quite sure what species the Tund wizards were, or even if they were all members of the same species. Swathed entirely in the deep gray of his order, the newcomer wore heavy robes that brushed the carpet, totally concealing the form beneath. A turbanlike headdress ended in bands of opaque cloth across the face.

  Only the eyes were visible. To his surprise, Lando found himself wishing fervently that they were not. Despite the absurdity of the sorcerer’s melodramatic actions, the ey
es told a different, more sobering story: twin whirling pools of—what? Insane hunger of some sort, the gambler decided with a shiver. Those ravenous depths regarded him for a moment as if he were an insect about to be crushed, then turned their malevolent power on the governor, Duttes Mer, who blinked and blinked, and blinked.

  “You prolong these preliminaries unnecessarily!” a chilling voice hissed through the charcoal-colored wrappings. Lando couldn’t quite determine whether it was a natural utterance or one produced by a vocal synthesizer. “Tell the creature what it needs to know in order to serve us, then dismiss it!”

  The governor’s composure disintegrated completely. He swiveled his enormous bulk in his chair, short stubby arms half-lifted in unconscious and futile defense, his large yellow eyes rolling with abject terror. His walnut-shaded skin had paled to the color of maple. Even his feathery hair seemed to stir and writhe.

  “B-But, Your Puisssance, I—”

  “Tell the tale, you idiot,” the sorcerer demanded, “and be done!”

  Lando spat out a bit of ceiling plaster jolted loose by the intruder’s showy appearance.

  With a terrible effort, the frightened governor turned partially toward Lando, never quite daring to take his eyes altogether off the sorcerer.

  “C-Captain Land-do Calrissian, p-permit me t-to introduce Rokur Gepta, my … my …”

  “Colleague,” the sorcerer supplied with an impatient hiss that sent goosebumps up the starship captain’s spine. It didn’t seem to do the governor much good, either. He nodded vaguely, opened his mouth, then slumped in his chair, unable, apparently, to utter another word.

  “I see,” the sorcerer hissed, taking a step forward, “that I shall have to finish this.”

  Another step forward. Lando fought the urge to retreat through the back of his own chair. “Captain Calrissian, our friend the governor, in his slow, bumbling way, has informed you of the failings of the Toka. They are manifold, I shall warrant, and conspicuous. What this oaf has not seen fit to mention thus far—and the very heart and soul of the matter before us—is their most interesting and singularly redeeming feature.