Curiously, not a single arrow struck either Lando or Mohs. The former swung his weapon up on its strap, panned it along the low dunes a few yards away. He felt a slap! and turned the blaster, staring at the muzzle orifice with disbelief.
An arrow had found its way straight down the bore, turning the gun into a potential bomb, should Lando touch the trigger. He tossed the dangerous thing away, began struggling with the fastenings of his coat to find the stingbeam. It wasn’t much, but it was all—
“Stand where you are, ‘Lord’!” Mohs exclaimed, “If you resist, you will die before you draw another breath!”
The old man raised a hand. From behind the sand dunes, half a hundred Toka emerged, dressed as he was in nothing more than loincloths.
In his hands, each held a powerful crossbow, pointed directly at Lando.
• X •
SO THIS WAS a genuine life-orchard.
The trees were a little odd, but nothing spectacular. In the wild grove perhaps five hundred of the things grew, in no particular pattern, yet each was of an identical size and spaced several meters from its nearest neighbor. The trunk was relatively ordinary, too—until one examined it closely and discovered that what appeared to be bark-covered wood was in fact a fibrous glassy pigmented stem approximately half a meter through and a couple of meters tall under the spreading branches.
The first oddity one noticed, however, was the root system. Each tree seemed to rest on a base, an irregular disk two meters across, like a toy tree in a model monorail set. Composed of the same substance as the trunk, the disk spread from the tree, forming a platform that curved abruptly downward at the edge and buried itself in the ground. The entire undersurface was covered with hair-fine glassy roots reaching downward perhaps a kilometer but spreading laterally only as far as the longest of the branches.
The branches, in some ways, reminded one of a cactus. At about average head height, they began to sprout from the trunk, departing at a right angle for a little distance (the lower the branch, the longer the distance, none exceeded the span of the root system), then turning straight upward. Outer branches—lower ones—had shorter vertical components. Inner ones had longer, so that the entire tree was somewhat conical in shape.
At the slender, tapering tip of each branch, a single, faceted, brilliant crystal grew, varying from fist-sized, on the outer branches, to tiny gems no bigger than pinheads. Each tree bore perhaps a thousand crystals. In the center, along the line of the trunk, one very tall, slender branch reached skyward like a communications antenna, unadorned by a crystal.
These trees were a little shorter, a little stockier than Lando had been led to believe was normal. Perhaps the milder climate of Rafa IV had something to do with that. It was hard to understand how anything could grow on Rafa V.
For grow they did, those trees—despite the fact that they were some odd cross between organic life and solid-state electronics. From some unknown spread of seeds, each orchard grew, every tree at the same rate. Remove a crystal from its branch tip—something which had to be done with a laser—and another would replace it within a year’s time. Elsewhere in the Rafa System, Lando knew there were groves of trees no more than a hand’s-width tall, others in which no tree stood less than ten or twelve meters. All bore crystals proportionate to the tree size. Some life-crystals, uselss for commercial purposes, were microscopic. Others were the size of Vuffi Raa’s body.
The thought of Vuffi Raa caused Lando to stop thinking about trees and reflect, instead, on how he’d gotten into this predicament.
Back at the ship, he’d turned in dismay to look at the little robot. Its red-lit eye was out; arrows stuck from nearly every chink and crevice of its body. A light clear fluid ran from many of the wounds, darkening the reddish soil around it.
Mohs strode up to him, no longer bent and stooped. He thrust out a hand, palm up.
“Give me the Key, imposter!”
Lando set his jaw. He didn’t have much to lose, and he was mad—more at himself than anything else. He folded his arms across his chest, planted his feet in the sand, and grunted.
“The Key! It is not yours, it is ours! Give it to me!”
“Don’t be silly, old fellow!”
Quite inexplicably, a look of dismay spread over Mohs’ face. He dropped his hand to his side, turned to the other natives surrounding the pair in a heavily armed and dangerous-looking ring, and shrugged. He turned again to Lando.
“I say once more, you fake, you fraud, you, you …”
“If you do,” said Lando, not understanding what was happening, but willing now to hope, “I’ll just say something insulting. In fact, I think I will, anyway: your mother sang off key.” He nodded for emphasis.
Mohs took a step backward, aghast—whether at the magnitude of the insult or in surprise at the general turn of events, Lando couldn’t tell.
Mohs turned once again to his people—and there’s another problem, Lando thought idly: Mohs was from another planet. How was it that the locals seemed to know him and acknowledge his leadership?
Come to think of it, how had the ambush been set up in the first place?
The savages conferred for a while in their own language. A decision appeared to have been made.
“You will come with us, imposter!” Mohs ordered. He started to walk off on a course paralleling the nearest face of the giant pyramid. Lando stood where he was.
“I will when the Core freezes over! Owch!” This last was due more to surprise than injury. A crossbow bolt had whistled past Lando’s head, skinning an ear already made painful by the cold, striking the hull of the Falcon, and catching him on the rebound in the seat of his insulated pants. A pattern seemed to be emerging: they didn’t want to kill Lando; they couldn’t take the Key away without his consent (although Mohs had tried that back on Four, he reminded himself), but they could threaten and coerce him in other ways.
They seemed to be pretty good at that.
He reached for his discarded blaster, intending to pull out the arrow and create a little mayhem before they shot him down. He hadn’t moved a meter when another flight of arrows virtually buried the weapon, pinned it to the ground by its sling, trigger guard, and other apertures in the stock and fore-end. So much for that idea.
As one, the fifty or so natives swung their weapons back on Lando.
“Okay, okay, I’m coming! Anybody think to call a cab?”
Two hours later, Lando wished it hadn’t been a joke. They’d marched him for mile after endless mile, climbing over random, angular ruins, sloshing through deep-drifted sand, scrabbling through scrubby brush. His feet hurt and his legs ached and, no matter how high he turned his suit controls, he was still cold.
At last he stopped.
“All right, everybody, I’ve been a nice guy so far, but this is as far as I go. If you want the Key, you’ll have to take it off my dead body. I’m not going another meter.”
The silent natives who surrounded him looked to Mohs. The old man nodded. They loosed a flight of arrows that plucked at his clothing, kicked sand up in his face, whistled mere angstrom units over his head. These fellows were impressive markspersons, Lando found himself thinking; I hope none of them gets the hiccups. He stood his ground again until they started shooting between his legs.
It wasn’t worth the risk. He waited until they paused to reload, then began marching again.
What he had thought were crossbows had turned out to be something entirely different, some kind of spring-loaded contraption with hinged arms—which he’d mistaken for the limbs of a bow—that flailed forward, hurling the stubby arrows out through the front of the weapon. They didn’t seem to need reloading every time they were fired. He guessed there were perhaps half a dozen projectiles stashed in a magazine hidden within the mechanism. The weapons weren’t very powerful, as projectile throwers went, but the speed and accuracy with which they could be used made him realize he could die from a thousand pinpricks as easily as from a single blaster shot.
They marched.
Another couple of hours went by. Lando wasn’t sure exactly—he didn’t want to look at his watch, because he didn’t want to remind the natives that he had several items concealed beneath his winter clothes, notably his five-shot stingbeam. It would take a lot of figuring to get any good out of it in this Situation, but it was something to fall back on, and it gave him a bit of hope.
Step after endless step. The country didn’t vary much: something between desert and tundra, most of the space taken up with giant Sharu buildings. Sand, sand, and more sand. Occasional weeds. The clear, yet somehow foreboding sky. He worried about Vuffi Raa, hoped that robots die a swift and merciful death.
All during the long, pauseless ordeal, the Toka around him chanted, sometimes slowly, sometimes more rapidly. And to his continuous annoyance, never in rhythm with the marching. This caused him to stumble awkwardly every now and again. He didn’t know how the Toka mind worked, but he knew he didn’t like it. They sang low-pitched Songs, they sang high-pitched Songs. They sang in harmony, disharmony, and counterpoint. They would be great to record—they had an endless repertoire.
At long last, the marching ended at a grove of life-crystal trees.
Mohs approached him.
“Imposter, hear me: we are forbidden to remove the holy Key from the Key bearer, even should the Bearer be a false one. You have somehow guessed this. Nor may we kill him who bears the Key, although we have killed the false Emissary, which makes us glad.”
So that was it! Somehow Lando had gotten the idea that the Key Bearer and the Emissary were the same fellow, namely himself. Had he betrayed that belief to Mohs, setting up the debacle? He tried to recall what he’d said to Mohs on the subject, then realized it didn’t make a bit of difference anyway—and besides, the old man was still talking.
“—let them do it themselves. Come with me!”
Lando followed him to a tree. Several of the other Toka handed their weapons to comrades, joined Mohs and Lando, and, between them, produced a loincloth.
By the time Lando decided to resist, it was too late. They forced him into a sitting position, bound him to the tree trunk by the waist, and used the same length of cloth to tie his hands behind him. They pushed back his hood, unfastened his jacket, and tore it rudely from him.
“Hey! Do you know what my tailor charged me for—now hold on a minute, that’s going too far!”
Mohs had pulled off one of Lando’s boots, bent to seize the other. When this was accomplished, the boots tossed aside near his discarded parka, they tore his tunic off, and the light shirt beneath it.
Then Mohs produced a knife.
“Now wait a blasted minute, here! You can’t do that!” He kicked at the old man until a pair of natives held his ankles. He’d never believed in strong, silent heroes, and since the only thing he had left to do was yell, he yelled.
He yelled the entire time it took Mohs to slit his trouser legs, exposing bare skin to the chilling air.
“Now,” said the ancient Singer, when he was satisfied with Lando’s disheveled condition. “All will notice that the Key remains with the Bearer.”
This was true. They’d taken it from his tunic and tucked it into the dirty gray cloth about his waist. That had been a scary moment—he’d held deathly still so they wouldn’t clank it against the tiny beamer hidden beneath both loincloth and cummerbund.
“Now we shall wait. In Their own time, They will take his life, either in the cold or through the tree. We shall then return and claim the Key which is our rightful heritage. We go.”
They went.
As the sun sank behind the highly unnatural skyline, shadows crept inexorably toward the helpless gambler, and as they did, his heart sank at approximately the same rate as the sun. He watched as small plants curled themselves into little protective balls for the night. He watched as frost formed on his toes. He watched as moisture in the ground forced up the top layer of the soil on frozen ice columns.
Mostly, he watched his nice warm parka, tunic, boots and socks gather frost of their own, not three meters beyond his bound and helpless reach.
He began cursing, first through genuine anger at himself and Mohs and Gepta and Mer, then simply in order to keep warm. He cursed in his native tongue and in the dozen and a half others he’d learned during a long and checkered career. He cursed in three computer languages and the warbling cheep of a race of musical birds he’d once played cards with—until it reminded him of the Toka.
He cursed the Toka all over again. And again. And again.
He woke up with a start!
And began cursing for no other reason than to stay awake. If he didn’t, he would freeze to death.
• XI •
DEATHLY SILENCE.
Beneath a looming, monstrous, crustacean form resting on stilted legs, the twin pale moons of Rafa V picked out metallic reflections in the night-blackened sand. Shadows overlaid at different angles with slightly differing shades: the enormous double shadow of the Millennium Falcon, hundreds of tiny double shadows of stubby wooden projectiles buried in a fragile metal carapace and nearby soil.
Deathly silence and deadly cold.
Everywhere within sight of the Falcon, small, ground-hugging plants had rolled themselves into compact olive-colored balls in order to survive the frigid darkness. The air was dry, even drier than the daytime atmosphere. The subtlest sparkling of frost showed here and there, on half-frozen plantlife, on the crest of miniature dunes, on the rims of a thousand footprints that surrounded the ship, even on the tortured, tangled mess of chromium cables lying in a heap just outside the Falcon’s shadow.
Fluid still stained the sand for a short distance around the pitiable heap, slow and thick and gummy now, in the frozen quiet. Yet, a few inches beneath the grainy surface, there was movement. Pseudo-organisms, shiny and metallic, motelike, hovering at the edge of human visibility, stirred within the thickened fluid, migrated a millimeter at a time back toward the larger pseudo-organism they had tumbled from before dark.
Microscopic flagella beat languidly, laboriously. Yet, centimeter by centimeter, millions of the tiny objects swam what was to them enormous distances, back to where they belonged. In their wake, the fluid became thinner, more liquid, and withdrew after them, carrying minerals and trace metals from the soil with it.
The same two moons cast double shadows several kilometers away. Beneath a spread of glassy boughs, a figure huddled, trying to stay alive in the cold. Lando Calrissian was dying. As Vuffi Raa’s life had run out into the sand, so he could feel his own life running out through his exposed skin into the frigid air, into the hungry sinister plant he was bound to.
Around him, if he’d cared to look, he might have seen the same small plants rolled up into the same small, heat-conserving spheres. He might have wished that he could do the same. But he was past all that, by now. From time to time he shivered, convulsions wracking his body, seeming to tighten the painful fibers around his waist, around his wrists, cutting off the circulation even further.
It was getting hard to think, and Lando didn’t know whether the cold was causing that or the tree. It seemed important to figure it out. What had he heard about trees like this? That there was nothing free in the universe—that what the crystals gave to those who wore them, they had first taken from someone else. Were they taking from him now?
Most of all, it hurt. His naked feet felt as if they were on fire. Even in the parched air, frost was forming on their tips, on the nails. How cold does tissue have to be before frost will form on it. Cold enough for gangrene?
Well, they weren’t going to get him that easily! He nodded confirmation to himself, and only then noticed the tears that had run down his cheeks and frozen there. If he could still feel his feet—he wished he couldn’t because the agony was as distracting as the cold itself—he ought to be able to feel his fingers. They were cold, too, but shielded from the air by his body, the little cl
othing they’d left him, and the tree.
The tree.
Its glassy trunk was like a block of ice at his back. Overhead, its strangely precise limbs showed a bit of transparency—or was it translucency?—where they crossed the moons.
He shook his head, and a pattern stopped. Dully, he tried to figure out what was missing. Had his heart stopped beating? He didn’t think so. He was still breathing—only now that he was conscious of it, it became an effort, an added burden to keep on doing so. He wished he could forget about it, begin breathing automatically again.
That was it! Unconsciously, he’d been doing something with his hands, his fingers. Why did the tips of his fingers hurt? Were they frozen, like his toes? They shouldn’t be—but “shouldn’t” was a funny word: he shouldn’t be there, trussed up to a tree that was eating his mind. He should be … should be … what should he be doing? Something about long corridors and beautiful women and … and … card-chips! What would he do with card-chips?
Trying to figure that one out, he didn’t notice that his fingers had gone back to picking the fabric at his wrists, stripping the aged cloth one shredded fiber at a time.
Begin with a metal pentagon, approximately thirty centimeters across its longest dimension, seven or eight centimeters thick at the edges, perhaps twice that in the rounded center.
In the center, a lens, deep red, the size of a man’s palm. And dark. Dark where it should be glowing softly, warmly. Dark as death itself.
Back at the edges, seams. On the other side of each seam, a tubular extension, joined every centimeter or so, tapering gracefully, each joint a little closer, a little finer than the one that preceded it. Sinuous, serpentine, and very, very highly polished, reflecting a curve-distorted picture of the frozen moons and cruel stars. Tangled now, heaped up and disheveled.
And at nearly every joint, at nearly every seam, a crude stubby brown pencil, rough and splintered, hundreds of them, jutting out at every conceivable angle. Where each arrow pierced the thin, fragile metal, a tiny pool of thick, transparent fluid welled. Some of it dripped off curved shining surfaces to the sand a few centimeters below.
Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu Page 9