Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu

by L. Neil Smith

  “It was the Song of the Emissary, Lord, in honor of the advent of you and—”

  “I see.”

  A long, thoughtful few moments followed. The old man’s breathing was almost loud in the control cabin. Lando hadn’t really thought very much about this Emissary business. There hadn’t been time. It was beginning to dawn on him that there might be more to all the chanting and Key-Bearing stuff than Gepta had seen fit to tell him.

  “Well, old fellow,” Lando said, not unkindly, “if you’re not too played out after all the excitement, why don’t you tell me—”

  With a clank at the doorsill betraying whatever weary clumsiness robots happen to experience, Vuffi Raa chose that moment to return from the drive area aft, clambered into the right-hand seat, which Lando had replaced after sending the pilot droid back to the Oseon. The little automaton was uncharacteristically subdued.

  “Everything shipshape and tidy to your liking, then?” Lando asked conversationally. “Good. Did you happen, by the way, to overhear that guard captain out there? He more or less directly identified himself as the unreconstituted son-of-a—”

  “Yes, Master,” the robot responded somewhat dully. “I must say, it was something of a surprise.”

  Lando mused. “I don’t know about that. I don’t suppose it’s all that great a coincidence. In the first place, they can’t have an endless supply of uniformed thugs to call upon in Teguta Lusat to do their dirty work. And in the second place, assigning that particular one to greet us would be Duttes Mer’s idea of a joke. Actually, I thought it rather sporting of the fellow to apologize and ask after my health and all that sort of thing.”

  Once more imitating human beings, Vuffi Raa did a double take, turning to “face” Lando. “And especially considering the effective way in which you got even, afterward, Master.”

  It was Lando’s turn to blink surprise. “Got even? What in the name of the Galactic Drift do you mean?”

  “Why, Master, I thought we were talking about the same so-called coincidence. Aren’t you aware of who that—”

  “Certainly: the paramilitary bully from the hotel, last night.”

  “And more recently, Master, a civilian ‘Mr. Jandler’ from the Spaceman’s Rest. I thought you recognized his voice, as I did—and the painful stiffness with which he moved his neck.”

  “You don’t say!”

  Perhaps there is some justice in the universe, after all, Lando thought with satisfaction. Then he screwed his face up sourly: another blasted mystery! What had that charade in the saloon been all about, then? He’d taken it for a bit of bigoted random stupidity on a highly bigoted and randomly stupid planet. And what did it all imply about the robot bartender (or its owner), who seemed—

  A previous idea demanded Lando’s attention quite suddenly: “Tell us about the Emissary, Mohs, old fellow—no, don’t sing it! Make it short, intelligible, and to the point.”

  The Toka ancient stirred. “Legend foretelleth of a dark adventurer, an intrepid star-sailor with preternatural luck at games of chance, who shall come with a weird inhuman companion in silvery armor arrayed. They shall possess the Key with which to liberate the Mindharp, which in turn shall liberate the—”

  Lando slammed a palm on the armrest of his chair. “Well, I’ll be doubled-dyed, hornswoggled, and trussed up like a holiday fowl! We were set up, Vuffi Raa! Gepta must have had his convict spies watching the port for months—possibly years—to find a sucker with the right qualifications: gambler, spaceship-captain, with an unenameled droid and a weak mind. That’s why neither a creepy old Tund magician nor that ugly neckless governor of his could play this hand themselves: they don’t fit the Toka legend!”

  “And we do, Master?”

  “Ask Mohs, here; he’s the local Keeper of the Flame.”

  “Master?”

  “Never mind, a figure of speech. Let’s go back aft and get some shut-eye. We’ve got some heroing to do in the morning—and don’t forget to polish your armor, old can-opener!”

  • IX •

  CAME THE DAWN, with a full night’s rest under his stylish if somewhat wrinkled satyn semiformal cummerbund, Lando was in a worse mood than ever. He loathed the idea that he might have been taken by one of the marks, and the nasty suspicion was growing within him that he’d only begun to discover the extent to which he’d been outmaneuvered by Rokur Gepta.

  The takeoff of the Millennium Falcon shortly after sunrise, had proceeded as smoothly as clockwork, as fluidly graceful as a textbook exercise. Even the Teguta Lusat control tower had complimented Lando on it. This failed to cheer him. He passed the compliments along to Vuffi Raa, who had been at the controls.

  The troopers and freight-handlers had departed sometime the previous evening under the cover of the moonless sky, sealing the Falcon’s hatches tightly behind them until the control boards displayed a solid, unbroken tapestry of green pilot lamps. Mohs had curled up on a lounger, snoring like some impossible archaic internal combustion engine. Vuffi Raa had tidied up and tinkered through the night.

  Sapient robots do need sleep—the brighter they are the greater the need—but Lando never had been able to discern a pattern in their nightly habits. He himself had tossed and turned, sweating into the fancy and expensive synsilk bedroll he’d spread under the common-room gaming table, and finally achieving an unrestful semiconsciousness from which the robot had awakened him, stiff and groggy. Several large containers of hot, black coffeine had only deepened his already gruesome mood.

  “All right,” he snarled unnecessarily at the old Toka shaman. They were forward in the cockpit once again, Mohs perched on the jumpseat, Vuffi Raa occupying the right-hand copilot’s couch as a token concession to the human captain, but very much in control of the ship. Someday, thought Lando, when it all was over, he’d sell both blasted machines, Vuffi Raa and the Millennium Falcon, to someone fully capable of appreciating them.

  “So where do we go from here?”

  They were lying in a close orbit around Rafa IV. From there they could reach any point on the planet’s surface within minutes or strike out freely across space for any other body in the system. Mohs closed his eyes, mouthed the rote-memorized words of an ancient ritual to himself, and finally pointed a dessicated finger out the viewport.

  “Lord, the Mindharp lieth in that direction.”

  Perfect, Lando thought sourly to himself, I’ve got a mechanical kid’s toy for a pilot, and an elderly witch doctor for a navigator! A sadistic little voice inside him insisted on adding that he also had a sabacc-playing conman for a captain. Even all around, then. He gave it up and peered through the faceted transparency.

  How in the devil do you discuss the details of navigational astronomy with an utter savage? “You mean that bright light in the heavens, there, Mohs?”

  “Of a certainty, Lord: the fifth planet of the Rafa System; it possesseth two natural satellites, a breathable atmosphere, and approximately nine-tenths of a standard gravity, not unlike Rafa IV beneath us, whence we came—except in the matter of the moons. Is it not pleasing in thy—”

  “Forget it!” The gambler peered suspiciously at the old man. “How is it that you know so blasted much about astronomy, all of a sudden?” And who’s really the utter savage here, he asked himself quietly; he’d never have been able to pick out the next planet from the local sun against the starry sky, not without the ship’s computer as a crutch.

  The ancient Singer shrugged, gave Lando a saggy, toothless grin. “It is all there, Lord, in the Song of the Reflective Telescope, which detaileth all things in this system. Should it not be so?”

  There was a long, long silence, during which the only thing accomplished was Vuffi Raa’s computer-guided confirmation that Lando’s “bright light in the heavens” was, indeed, Rafa V. “How many of these bloody chants do you know, anyway?”

  The savage considered: “Many beyond counting, Lord. More than the fingers and toes of all my great-great ancestors and children. I would say approximate
ly seven point six two three times ten to the fourth. Does this please thee, Lord?”

  For a humble worshiper, the old boy was getting pretty sarcastic, Lando thought. “I suppose that last comes from the Song of Scientific Notation.” He shook his head. He understood fully now why Gepta and Mer hadn’t gone on this wild falumba chase themselves. It had nothing to do with conforming to ancient Toka legends. They simply wanted to stay sane.

  The question now was, why did Vuffi Raa and Mohs need him?

  “What now, Master? Do you want to go to Rafa V?”

  “DON’T CALL ME MASTER!”

  The relatively short jump of a few dozen million kilometers was blessedly uneventful for the captain and “crew” of the Millennium Falcon.

  They hadn’t started it at once. Vuffi Raa and Lando quizzed the elderly Mohs, had made him repeat and translate the appropriate stanzas of the appropriate Songs until they, too, were as certain as they could be, under the circumstances, that Rafa V was the place to find the Mindharp.

  That is, if you were willing to place much confidence in an intermittently senile shaman mouthing rhymed and metered legends of an indeterminate age.

  Lando spent the few hours of transit catching up on his sleep, while Mohs and Vuffi Raa carried on whatever passed for conversational small talk between them. The pilot’s acceleration couch was infinitely more comfortable than the sleeping bag, and by the time Vuffi Raa woke him again, he felt halfway human. Downright cheerful, in fact. Or at least as cheerful as he ever—

  SPANG!

  Something struck the roof of the control cabin, hard.

  “What in the eternal blue blazes was that?” Lando shouted. Behind him, the old man cringed, began gibbering to himself in a high-pitched, hysterical voice. Something about the wrath of—

  SPENG!

  This time, it was somewhere aft, near the engines. A yellow light winked on the control board. Vuffi Raa stabbed console buttons, his tentacles blurring with speed into near invisibility. “One moment, Master, while I—”

  SPING! SPONG!

  Red lights flickered now. There was the faint but definite whistle indicating loss of atmosphere. Lando swallowed hard. His ears popped as the pressure equalized, although that hadn’t been his intention.

  Something was striking the Millennium Falcon repeatedly and with great force. For some odd reason, the image of Constable Jandler (if that was really his name) flashed through Lando’s mind. They were in close orbit over Rafa V, preparing to use the old Toka chants as a guide to selecting a landing site.

  Vuffi Raa heeled the Falcon over so she could take whatever was hitting her on her better-armored underside, but they had already received at least minor damage.

  SPUNG!

  “In the name of the Galactic Center, what’s that?” Lando hollered.

  An unlikely object had wedged itself into the space between the cockpit transparency and a small communications antenna. It resembled nothing more than a fancy cut-glass plumber’s helper, complete with handle and suction cup, but rendered in some crystalline substance reminiscent of Rafa orchard produce.

  “I don’t know, Master!”

  Was that hysteria in the robot’s voice? Wonderful, thought Lando.

  The ship rolled, stabilized, and they were traveling in orbit on her side. The bombardment seemed to slacken off. The droid turned to Lando.

  “It’s an artifact of some kind, Master. Archaeoastronomers believe that Rafa V was the original home of the Sharu, the planet they evolved on. Mohs’ Songs seem to agree with that. I suspect, Master, that we’re seeing—and suffering—the remnants of their first attempts at spaceflight, objects launched by primitive rockets, others expelled by small spacecraft as they prepared to reenter atmosphere.”

  It made sense. Planetary orbits were always the richest fields in which to discover the leavings of primitive technology. There were probably cameras out there, used spacesuits, free-fall table scraps, all of them practically as good as the day they had been jettisoned—barring a little micrometeorite and radiation damage.

  A thought came to him.

  “Vuffi Raa, why didn’t you just power the Falcon’s shields up when we started taking hits? There’s nothing out there the deflectors couldn’t have handled, especially given our relative speeds in orbit.”

  Reading through the flight manual over and over again seemed to be doing him some good, Lando thought. Maybe if he watched the robot fly this machine long enough, he’d pick up the knack himself.

  On the other hand, right now he could be aboard a luxury passenger liner, sipping a tall cool drink and shearing two-legged sheep.

  “Why, I don’t know, Master,” came the reply. “I simply acted as quickly as I could. Brace yourself, everybody, we’re going in!” The droid began punching console buttons again.

  Rafa V—birthplace of the fabled Sharu or not—was not the favored planet for human colonization. There was atmosphere, the usual thick scattering of titanic multicolored buildings, and, most importantly, the ubiquitous life-orchards. But the place was just a trifle too cold, a trifle too dry, and Rafa IV, the planet they’d just come from, was moist and shirt-sleeve comfortable over a wide range of latitudes.

  Here and there, according to their orbital survey and maps programmed into the Falcon at Teguta Lusat, lay small settlements, orchard-stations where a combination of Toka (native to the planet, as they were to all bodies in the system with sufficient resources), convicts, and government horticulturists harvested life-crystals, although on nowhere near the scale of Rafa IV.

  No doubt in another hundred years or so, there would be towns, eventually cities other than those the Sharu had abandoned. But for now, there were a paltry few hundred individuals sprinkled over an entire planetary surface.

  The colossal pyramid Mohs pointed them toward was at least a thousand kilometers from any contemporary outpost of civilization.

  Vuffi Raa brought the Falcon to a gentle leaflike landing in a space between several ancient constructs at the foot of the pyramid that dwarfed even them. There were no convenient words to describe the building that now loomed over them. At least seven kilometers of it protruded above ground level. The Falcon’s various scanners had disclosed that it kept on going beneath the surface, but the depths exceeded the capabilities of her instruments. It was a literal mountain of smooth impervious plastic that served no discernible function.

  The pyramid had five facets (not counting the bottom—wherever that was), the angles between each of them not particularly uniform, giving the gigantic construct an eerie, dangerous, lopsided look. Each face was a different brilliant color: magenta, apricot, mustard, aquamarine, turquoise, lavender.

  Execrable taste, Lando thought, well deserving of cultural extinction.

  There was no finishing ornament at the top; the sides simply came together in a peak sharp enough to give anyone who reached it a nasty puncture wound.

  Not for the first time, Lando wondered who or what it was that had scared off creatures capable of creating such an edifice. He rummaged through the ship’s chests and his own wardrobe looking for suitable clothing, settled finally on a light electrically heated parka, heavy trousers, micro-insulated gloves, and rugged boots with tough, synthetic soles. It was a measure of his uneasiness about the place that he broke long precedent, slinging a short, weighty, two-handed blaster over his shoulder and filling his pockets with extra power modules.

  The weapon hung at his waist, muzzle swinging with his body when he moved.

  Mohs flatly turned down the offer of additional warm clothing, joined the gambler and Vuffi Raa at the boarding ramp. Lando wondered if the old fellow wanted to add frostbite to the rest of his infirmities. If nothing else, they already made an impressive collection.

  “Now, you’re absolutely certain this is the place?”

  Mohs nodded vigorously as the ramp lowered them and itself to ground level, unaffected by the cold as the angle beneath their feet steepened and a deep chill entered the belly o
f the ship. Air puffed out in visible vaporous clouds. They tramped down onto the dry-frozen soil.

  “Master,” Vuffi Raa admonished, “I trust you’re carrying sufficient water. The humidity in this region does not quite reach two percent.”

  Lando slapped the gurgling plastic flasks tucked into the pockets of his parka. “Yes. And I brought a deck of card-chips, as well.” He looked out over the barren surface of the planet. Fine reddish sand lapped like a frozen sea around the bases of the abandoned buildings. “Chances are we’ll die of boredom before thirst gets to us.”

  Mohs turned, an odd look on his face as he watched Lando open a small panel at eye-level on one of the Falcon’s landing legs. The gambler pushed a sequence of buttons that started the boarding ramp groaning upward again into its recess under the ship’s belly.

  “Hast thou also the Key, Lord, the Key which—”

  “What is this? Are you two seeing me off to summer camp or something?”

  He led them out from beneath the ship, took a deep invigorating breath—and promptly froze the hairs in his nostrils. “Well, I can see why nobody much has staked a claim on this forsaken stretch of—”

  “Master,” Vuffi Raa clattered up beside him and tugged at the hem of his jacket. “Master, I don’t like this, there’s something—”

  “I know, old junkyard, I can feel it, too.”

  The sky, a light greenish color, was cloudless. Nevertheless, somehow it impressed them all as gray, bleak, and overcast. And it was cold. The whine of Vuffi Raa’s servos was clearly audible, a sign that perhaps his internal lubrication was thickening. Lando replaced the glove on the hand he’d used to retract the ramp, thrust it deeply into a warm pocket where the blaster swung.

  “Master!”

  Something went zing! and a short, stubby, wicked-looking arrow suddenly protruded from the seam between the robot’s leg and body. In the next instant, a hailstorm of the primitive projectiles whistled toward them, bouncing off the Falcon’s hull, burying themselves in the sand at their feet. Vuffi Raa went down, looking like a five-legged pincushion. He didn’t utter a word.