“You’d be Colonel Pakkpekatt, I take it,” said Luke. “And was that Dr. Eckels? Is Lando still aboard the vagabond, then? You haven’t been able to get to him? I need an update covering the last five days.”
“You are not authorized for that information,” said Pakkpekatt. “You are not cleared for this security zone.”
“Colonel, I’m all the assistance you’re likely to get for a while, given the demands on the Fleet at the moment. And I know Dr. Eckels doesn’t want to see this expedition end with a shoot-out, anyway—”
“Absolutely correct,” Eckels said, pushing his way into the holocomm’s field of view.
“—so let’s see if we can’t work together and make something better happen.”
“Do you have any ideas about what that might be, Luke?” said Eckels. “The artifact has been notably uncooperative so far—even more so than the colonel.”
“I know. I’ve reviewed your reports—yours and his both,” Luke said.
At that news, Pakkpekatt threw his hands in the air in disgust and turned away from the flight console. “I will demand an investigation of this entire operation,” he muttered. “The breaches of security—the complete disregard for the lines of authority—”
“I think I can get the team off the vagabond,” Luke went on. “But I’m hoping for more than that. Why don’t you tell me what you think happened here, Doctor?”
“May I ask first if you’re planning to board the vagabond yourself?”
“Yes, I am, Dr. Eckels.”
“Then would it be possible for you to collect me before you do? I will likely have better answers for you once I’ve seen it for myself.”
“I was hoping you’d offer, Doctor,” Luke said. “If you and the colonel would locate some power packs for the droids and put together a mercy basket for the men, I’ll rendezvous with you on your next orbit.”
“Very good,” said Eckels. “We’ll be ready.”
As the vagabond grew outside Mud Sloth’s cockpit viewpanes, Eckels looked nervously from it to Luke’s face.
“How will you know if it’s working?”
“We’ll know if it isn’t,” Luke said, closing his eyes.
“Shouldn’t we at least alert General Calrissian that we’re coming in?”
“No signals,” Luke said. “No sounds. No thrusters. Nothing that will disturb the flow. Nothing that will announce our presence.”
Eckels looked back toward the alien vessel. “But can’t it see us just as easily as we can see it?”
Luke shook his head slowly. “You’re aboard a submarine, Doctor, not a spaceship. We’re five hundred meters under the surface and just floating with the current. They won’t know we’re there until we bump up alongside.”
The scientist received Luke’s reassurances with a dubious expression. “You’ve done this before, I trust?”
“No, never,” Luke said.
“Oh, my—”
“But I saw it done, not too long ago.”
Eckels swallowed. “I trust that you’ve been practicing since then, at least.”
Eyes still closed, Luke smiled. “All the way here. Relax, Doctor. I learned this trick from people who were at the top of their class in the business of hiding.” He paused. “But even so, you might want to let me concentrate.”
Pressing his lips together in a line, Eckels slumped against the back of his seat and stared at the vagabond, which now filled half the sky ahead.
“Lando.”
At the sound of his name, Lando stirred and reached slowly for his comlink.
“What is it, Lobot?”
“Someone is here.”
“Where here?” Lando said, suddenly shaking off his sleepy lassitude.
“Outside, near the bow.” Lobot paused. “We are puzzled. There is a touch, and yet we cannot find the source.”
“They’re knocking on the door,” Lando said impatiently. “Open it up and see what comes in.”
There was a long silence. “The visitors are in the interspace,” Lobot said at last.
“So who or what are they?”
“We do not recognize them.”
“I’ll check it out,” Lando said gruffly. Fatigue and hunger had left him in a state of permanent annoyance. “Artoo, let’s go—power up. Artoo—”
The droid remained inert—like Threepio days before, its power supply was finally exhausted.
“Sure,” he grumbled. “Make me be the one to check out the noise in the dark. It’d serve you both right if I never came back.”
“Ahoy the ship,” a new voice crackled over the comlink. “Anyone home?”
Lando blinked, trying to force his mind to recognize what it was hearing. “Luke? Luke, is that you? What are you doing here?”
“I could leave, if it’s not a good time—”
“You leave without me, and I’ll hunt you down and kill you one cell at a time,” Lando warned, with no trace of humor in his voice. “Stay where you are. I’m coming out.”
“We’re already in,” Luke said. “The vagabond’s hull opened up and swallowed us whole.”
“Nooo—”
“It’s all right. We’re in some sort of zero-g hangar area between the outer and inner hulls—we even seem to be tethered. I’m suiting up to come to you,” said Luke. “Stay put and talk us in.”
Grabbing a liter of water from Dr. Eckels, Lando drained it so fast that his stomach balked and threatened to reject it.
“Luke,” Lando said, flipping the container away. “Can you believe it? This whole monstrosity is nothing but a museum—” He stopped to swallow the bitterness climbing his throat, and started coughing when the taste reached his mouth.
“Go easy, Lando—”
Lando waved off the concern. “A museum! And when—when have you ever known me to go near a museum?” He laughed hoarsely. “And you don’t even know the funny part—none of the treasures is real. It’s all just modeling clay—nothing of any value.”
“Do you know what he’s talking about, Dr. Eckels?”
“Possibly,” Eckels said, digging in the supply pouch for a FirstMeal food pack.
Lando continued to babble, his tone turning sorrowful, almost maudlin. “Can only look—can’t take anything with you. No souvenirs. What a waste of time, Luke—what a miserable waste of time. Like picking flowers. Pretty today, dead tomorrow—” He suddenly noticed the food pack and snatched it away, turning his back on them as though protecting it against poaching.
“Lando, where’s Lobot?”
The answer came after a long draw on the food pack’s straw. “He has new friends.” Lando shrugged. “He hardly talks to me anymore.” He chortled abruptly. “He’s lost his mind. You’ll see.”
“Take us to him,” Luke said firmly. “We need to take care of him, too.”
Somersaulting slowly, Lando waved a hand absently toward the interior. “In there. Left, left, right, right, center, right, center. Something like that.” The food pack expired with a sucking sound. “You can’t miss him. He’s the one with legs.”
Luke and Dr. Eckels found Lobot curled up in a side tubule, floating, his eyes closed, his hands cupped against the side of his head. The transparent leads of his split interface tethered him to the rounded mass at the far end of the tubule.
“Do you have any idea what we’re looking at here, Doctor?”
Eckels peered into an adjacent tubule for an unobstructed view. “These are the size and geometry of the Qella remains we recovered from the ice,” he said in hushed awe.
“These don’t feel like remains to me,” Luke said, entering the tubule where Lobot was floating. “Lobot—it’s Luke. Wake up, fella—your relief’s here.”
“Are you saying that they’re alive?” Eckels demanded. “I had discounted those reports as unreliable.”
“Why?”
“Why, it’s unprecedented—unthinkable—”
“This whole ship feels alive to me, Doctor,” Luke said. “Though with a differen
t quality than I’m used to.”
“Different how?”
“Usually this much power is matched with much greater awareness. It’s almost like—sleeping. Just like Lobot here seems to be sleeping.” Frowning, Luke reached out and dug his fingernails into Lobot’s elbow. “Hey—talk to me.”
“But these bodies have no limbs,” Eckels protested. “The creatures on the surface were quadrupeds.”
“I’m not trying to tell you what they are, Doctor. I’m just telling you that what Lobot reported is true—these things are alive, and this ship is alive. I’ll let you tell me the relationship between them.”
Lobot was stirring by then. “Waiting,” he murmured in a trancelike monotone.
“Waiting for what?” Luke asked. “What question is that an answer to?”
Behind him, Eckels was frowning. “Physically, the relationship mirrors one that exists inside the Qella, between the Eicroth bodies and—” His eyes widened in surprise. “Luke, I must see the rest of this vessel at once. I must see these exhibits Lando spoke of.”
“Lobot, talk to me,” Luke was saying. “What do you need from me?”
“We wait,” Lobot said dreamily.
“What are ‘we’?” Luke asked.
“Answers,” said Lobot.
“Yes, I need answers,” Luke said. “What are you waiting for? What do you need?”
The words came haltingly. “We wait… for… the thaw.”
Luke looked questioningly back at Eckels.
“I must see the ship,” he insisted. “I will not make wild guesses when there is evidence at hand.”
Nodding agreement, Luke said, “I think we need to break up Lobot’s new friendship, anyway—I can hardly find a boundary between his mind and everything else. Know anything about neural interfaces, Doctor, or should I just pull the plug?”
Eckels grimaced. “Do what you think best. I’ll wait outside.”
It was nearly an hour before either Lando or Lobot was fit for their final duties as host and guide. For Eckels, it was an hour of maddening impatience. For Luke, it was an opportunity to bring the droids back online and begin repairs to Threepio’s damaged arm.
“I’m very glad to see you, Master Luke,” the droid said. “You won’t believe the stories I have to tell you. I don’t know why I was sent on this mission in the first place. Why, I was nearly vaporized by the vagabond, and then we were attacked by an entire fleet of warships. Master Calrissian abandoned me to be captured by intruders—”
Luke grinned. “It’s good to see you, too, Threepio. And I promise to let you tell me all the stories, later. Twice, even, if you need to.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir.”
When the droids had been moved to the skiff, Luke went off to explore with Lando, while Lobot led Eckels on a separate tour. But before long Lando decided the familiar comforts of a starship, however humble, had greater appeal than Luke’s company, and excused himself from sight-seeing.
By then Luke understood the geometry and instrumentality of the vagabond well enough to manage on his own. The “museum” rooms and the interspace gallery were equally astonishing, but Luke found himself drawn back to the interior, to the maze of tubules and the clusters of what Luke had begun calling Eckels bodies. They were the center of the vagabond’s limited consciousness, the focus of the flow of energy through the ship. Four hours vanished in an eyeblink before Luke even thought of rejoining the others. Another hour and a half passed before he actually did.
They were all there—Lando asleep in the bunk, Lobot stretched out on the floor of the systems compartment, Threepio strapped into the right-hand seat, and Artoo contentedly plugged into both the data port and the power port at the interface board.
Eckels was in the pilot’s seat, bending forward over the ship’s small data displays with a frown while keying the datapad on his lap fluidly by touch alone.
“I believe I have an answer for you now,” Eckels said without looking away from his work. “Shall we wake the others?”
“No,” said Luke. “They’ve done their part—let them rest. Let’s compare notes first. If we find we have questions for them, we can take care of that later.”
“I was able to get the benefit of Lobot’s thoughts while he showed me around,” said Eckels. “He has an admirably disciplined mind.”
“People have been underestimating him for as long as I’ve known him,” Luke said. “So what do you have?”
Eckels sat back in his seat and pointed to the data display. “Lobot was right,” he said. “The moons are the key.”
“The moons they saw in the orrery.”
“Yes,” said Eckels. “With the assistance of Colonel Pakkpekatt, we’ve analyzed the recordings Artoo-Detoo made the first time the expedition reached the auditorium and viewed the diorama. The orbits depicted for the moons turn out to be unstable.”
“Check me if I’ve missed something, Doctor, but Maltha Obex has no moons.”
Eckels nodded. “But Qella did. Unremarkable moons—nothing to inspire a grand mythology. At least not until one of them fell from the sky.”
“The ice age is the result of a moonstrike,” Luke said, his expression gravely thoughtful.
“Yes, it would appear so,” said Eckels. “The smaller moon was a capture moon, with an irregular orbit. Working backward from Artoo’s recordings, we found that the gravity of the larger moon disturbed the capture moon into a decaying orbit—a hundred years, in round numbers, before the fall.”
“And the Qella saw it happening. They knew what lay ahead for them,” Luke said. “And they used the warning, and the time they had left, to build this vessel.”
“The ultimate and supreme achievement of their species,” said Eckels. “Judging from what I saw, they did not have the means to destroy or repulse a moon—even the small moon of Maltha Obex dwarfed this vessel and its power. Nor did they have the means to evacuate a populous planet—the culture depicted in these serographs numbered hundreds of millions, if not more.”
“It would have taken thousands of vessels this size,” Luke said. “An impossible task in the time they had.”
“But they could build one, and send it away before the end came,” Eckels said. “When the expedition looked at the orrery, they saw this system as it was when the vagabond had last seen it—before the moonstrike, the destruction of the Qella, and the death of their planet under a blanket of ice.”
Eckels gazed out the front of the cockpit at the faces of the gallery. “Your friend Lando was wrong,” he went on. “What’s here is very real. This ship isn’t a collection of objects—it’s a collection of ideas. We may never know why, but the Qella valued these ideas more than their lives. And that which we value is that which gives meaning to our lives. What a grand gift they have given us—what a gloriously defiant futility.”
“Futility?” Luke asked. “What about those things in the interior? Lobot keeps wanting to call them Qella. You said that they looked like the Qella. And now the ship has brought them home.”
Frowning, Eckels looked down at his datapad. “But there are only a few thousand of them, on a vessel that could have held many more.” Eckels shook his head. “No, it cannot be. This is not an ark, or even a lifeboat. Those bodies are the controllers and protectors of this vessel, not its treasure. The real treasure of this vessel is in ideas and memories—a thousand years of history, a thousand years of art, this splendid biomechanical science. No, this is no museum. This is a monument, Luke.”
“No,” Luke said stubbornly. “There’s something more here.” Turning away, he dropped gracefully through the open entry hatch. Catching a handhold on the hull, he catapulted himself forward, away from the skiff and into the silence and darkness of the interspace.
There, drifting slowly in front of the Qella gallery, Luke extended his senses to the planet below. He found only a great stillness. There was no halo of life energy, no reservoir of the Force. The ice-encased surface had the same profound quiescenc
e as the mass of rock below it.
“What are you looking for?”
“A reason to wait for the thaw,” Luke said.
“So it can finish its journey,” Eckels said. “It meant nothing more than that.”
“Shhh,” Luke said. He had drifted close to the outer skin of the vagabond, and he reached out and drew himself to it. He listened to the complex rhythms of the ship and allowed them to resolve into the deep, fundamental pulse of its being. He listened only to that pulse until he had absorbed it completely, knew it utterly.
Then he extended himself toward the planet once more, this time quieting his own urgency and desire, seeking that most profound state of egoless connection in which everything could be heard without distraction or distortion.
And suddenly there they were, like millions of grains of sand falling slowly to the surface—a collective heartbeat so faint and so languid that the slightest whisper of impatience would obscure it. With an exultant cry, Luke pushed himself away from the wall in a backward somersault.
“What? What is it?” Eckels exclaimed. He jetted across the open space to intercept Luke, catching him just before he reached the gallery.
But Luke twisted away from Eckels’s grasp, turning to trace the lines of a Qella face with both hands. “The bodies you found—the Qella who roamed the ice—those weren’t the survivors,” Luke said. “They were the dissenters.”
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I said. We were all wrong. This ship isn’t a museum, or a temple full of treasure, or a lifeboat—or a monument, either. It’s a tool kit, Doctor—a tool kit for rebuilding a destroyed world.”
Turning, Luke grabbed both of Eckels’s hands in a fervent grip. Joy and wonder together animated his smile. “They had time to do more than prepare this ship, Doctor—they had time to prepare themselves. That planet is not dead—there are millions of Qella buried in the ground, awaiting the thaw. And we can give them that.”
As soon as Mud Sloth cleared the opening the vagabond had created for it, Luke gave the thrusters one hard kick, then turned the skiff around so that all could watch the Qella vessel fall away behind them.
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