Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu

by L. Neil Smith

  For the first time, the old man appeared to be uncomfortable on Rafa V. He had goosebumps all over him, and was shivering with the cold—or something else.

  “That is all that is known to the Toka, O Lord. It is all that the Song hath to tell. Thy humble and obedient servant confesseth, in his unworthy manner, that, were I thee, I would consider departing this place without using the Key. All those numberless generations, waiting, waiting … Why me, Lord? Why in my time?”

  “Congratulations, Mohs, you’ve just joined the ranks of some great historical figures. That’s what they wanted to know, and usually in about the same miserable, desperate tone of voice.”

  Again, Lando extracted the Key, looked it over grimly. “Well, there’s no time like the present. Keep your eye open, Vuffi Raa. Mohs, what do your Songs say about using this thing?” He suppressed a shudder.

  The old man gave a highly articulate shrug.

  “That’s what I like,” Lando said, “help when I really need it. Here goes nothing!”

  Which is precisely what happened. Lando pressed the Key against the lock in a position and at an angle that seemed most likely. It was a little like putting a ship in a bottle—at least it seemed that way at first. Then, in a manner that defied the eye and turned the stomach, the Key was in the Lock.

  The sun shone. The wind blew. The sand lay on the ground.

  Lando looked at Mohs, who still had some of his shrug left. He used it. The gambler looked at Vuffi Raa. Vuffi Raa looked back at him. The robot and the elderly shaman exchanged glances. They both looked at Lando.

  “Well, Mohs, I realize you’ve had breakfast, or whatever you call it, but I could use another bite. This seems to be a bust. What say we repair to the ship and—Vuffi Raa?”

  As he had spoken to the old man, he’d turned to look at the robot.

  Vuffi Raa had vanished.

  “Mohs, did you see that—Mohs?”

  The instant Mohs was out of Lando’s field of view, he had disappeared, exactly like the droid, without a sound, without a movement.

  The sun shone. The wind blew. The sand lay on the ground.

  • XIV •

  LANDO CALRISSIAN WAS not, ordinarily, a physically demonstrative young man. His livelihood and well-being depended on dexterity and control, the subtle, quick manipulation of delicate objects, the employment of fine and shaded judgment.

  He smashed a fist into the pyramid wall.

  And reeled with surprise. Where, before, contact with the building had been much like ducking one’s head into a stiff wind—elusive but unquestionably real—now the experience had taken on the aspect of fantasy.

  His hand passed into the wall and disappeared as if the structure were a hologram. He withdrew the hand, looked it over, flexed it. He inspected the wall without touching it: the material itself was featureless, seemingly impervious to time, weather, the puny scratching and chipping of man. Yet there was a fine patina of dust, a film of oil or grease that seemed to coat everything within the planet’s atmosphere. Lando could plainly see a single fine hair, neither his own nor one of Mohs’—perhaps that of some animal that had wandered by or which had been borne on the wind until it stuck here.

  He thrust his hand into the solid-looking wall again. Again it disappeared up to the wrist. He stepped forward until he lost sight of his elbow, shuddered, backed away. And, again, his hand, his arm, were intact, unharmed.

  Lando Calrissian was nothing if not a cautious individual. Someone else might have plunged through the wall in pursuit of Vuffi Raa and Mohs, for it was clearly where they’d gone. But to what fate? If your best friend zipped from sight into a trapdoor in the floor, would you follow him onto the steel spikes below?

  Lando pushed his hand into the wall again, meeting no more resistance than before. It was as if the wall weren’t there—except as far as the eyes were concerned. He closed his own, and felt around. There wasn’t enough breeze outside that he could tell about the wall’s effect on air currents. The temperature felt the same. He was free to wiggle his fingers, clench and unclench his fist. He snapped his fingers, felt the snap—but couldn’t hear it outside the wall.

  Thrusting in a second hand, he felt the first. Both felt quite normal. He clapped them, feeling the sensation, missing the usually resultant noise. Odd. He placed his right hand around his left wrist, slid the hand slowly up the arm until it reappeared, much like a hand and arm emerging from water—except that this surface was vertical. He stooped, picked up a handful of sand, reinserted his arms, poured sand from one hand to the other.

  He pulled his arms out, threw the sand away …

  … and stepped through the wall.

  Sometimes you have to take a gamble.

  * * *

  He hadn’t thought of that before.

  Old man Mohs, ancient and revered High Singer of the Rafa Toka, had been leaning against the pyramid wall when the Key-Bearer inserted the Key. Suddenly, it had been as if the wall weren’t there, and, in the short fall into darkness that resulted, his garment had nearly been lost.

  All his long, long life, Mohs had put up with the chilly draft that found its way beneath the simple wraparound. Now, even in the darkness, even in this terrifying, holy place, it had occurred to him that he could take a long free end of the cloth, tuck it up between his legs, and eliminate the draft.

  Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Why hadn’t anybody else among his people? He found himself thinking cynically that this little piece of information alone was worth a hundred silly Songs about—no! That’s blasphemy! He cringed, trying to peer into the utter darkness around him, fearful of … of … what?

  He thought about that.

  He seemed to be doing a lot of thinking in the past few minutes.

  Finally, he decided—in what may have been the first real decision he’d ever made for himself—to wait until his eyes adjusted. He sat—on some firm, resilient surface—enjoying his new-found warmth.

  And the new-found working of his mind.

  It had been hours!

  Four hours, twenty-three minutes, fifty-five seconds, to be precise, by Vuffi Raa’s built-in chronometer. He never had to see the time, he simply knew. The trouble with built-in faculties, he reflected, such as being able to pilot a starship, for example, is that they denied or dulled the urge to acquire new ones for oneself. Better to be like a human being, he thought, without innate programming, with the ability and necessity—

  A human being? What was he thinking?

  He’d been approximately—no, exactly—seventeen centimeters from touching it with his nearest tentacle, and yet, when Lando had activated the Key, suddenly, he, Vuffi Raa, was here (wherever here was) on the other side of the wall.

  Five hours, twenty-nine minutes, thirty-one seconds.

  Exactly what here was, Vuffi Raa thought rather ungrammatically, was a good question in itself. He’d felt strangely isolated, lonely for quite a while, and, oddly, that feeling had preoccupied him so thoroughly that he’d failed to examine his surroundings with much enthusiasm. The feeling hadn’t gone away, it had gotten worse, much worse. Now, it was necessary to investigate, if only to take his badly shaken mind off his emotions.

  Of the presumed-to-exist inside wall of the pyramid, he could see no evidence. He stood in a brightly lit corridor, seemingly kilometers between him and the ceiling. His doppler radar, not his strongest sense, couldn’t reach quite as far as the roof, although he got some tantalizing echoes from it.

  The area he occupied was a longish rectangle, five meters by perhaps fifty. Behind him was a semitransparent wall through which he could see what appeared to be a vast circular drum, several stories high, much like a fuel storage tank, yet made of the same plastic-appearing material as everything else here. In front of him, a smaller circular subchamber filled the corridor from wall to wall, yet he could see beyond it with several of his senses, knew it divided his chamber precisely in half.

  To the right and left were similar, exactly paral
lel corridors, “visible” through walls much as the one behind him, and identical to the corridor he occupied except that they lacked the smaller circular “storage tank.”

  He turned left.

  As far as he went along the wall, there was no exit. The available space grew smaller and narrower as he approached the circularity. Finally, he stopped, retraced his steps, and took the right-hand direction. This time, near the angle of the wall and the tank, he found a permeable area. He stepped through into the next corridor. The predominating light was blue, as it had been in the chamber he had left, but here it was slightly brighter. He crossed the corridor, found another “soft” spot in the wall, went through into a third chamber, identical to the second.

  The fourth chamber was shaped differently—five-sided, but not regularly so. The only permeability was in the far right-hand wall, a very short one, forcing him to take a right turn. The next chamber was the mirror image of the last, then a series of rectangular chambers began again.

  He kept walking, lonely, and, for the first time in his life, really afraid.

  Seven hours, sixteen minutes, forty-four seconds.

  From the inside, the pyramid was transparent.

  That was the first thing Lando noticed. Outside, he could see the sun shining, the reddish color of the sand, a few scrappy shrubs, and, comfortingly close (although farther away than he would have liked) the Millennium Falcon sat patiently awaiting his return.

  He hoped she wouldn’t have to wait very long.

  It was difficult to judge the thickness of the wall. It was not quite perfectly transparent, but shaded a very pale bluish tint. Behind him was an empty chamber—and he realized that there was a good chance his eyes were being tricked somehow. Not a hundred meters away, he could see one of the farther walls of the five-sided building, more sandy desert beyond. The walls came to a point perhaps two hundred meters overhead.

  The trouble with all that was that the building was several kilometers in any dimension you chose to measure.

  The walls, then, were sophisticated viewing devices, conveying the illusion that the building was much smaller—human-scaled, in fact—than it really was.

  He called out: “Vuffi Raa! Where are you? Mohs? Answer me!”

  There wasn’t even a decent echo. He—

  What was that? Embedded in the wall he’d come through, stuck like a fly in amber, was the Key. He reached for it—and barked his fingers badly. The wall could have been made of solid glass, and the Key was at least a meter beyond his reach. It had been his way—and Vuffi Raa’s, apparently, and Mohs’—inside the pyramid.

  He looked around the featureless chamber he occupied. From wall to wall, a smooth reflective floor stretched, devoid of furniture or fixtures. It was rather like being in a large, deserted warehouse. Through the walls, the sky was a slightly more brilliant blue than it had really been.

  The desert was a trifle darker: red and blue make purple. The transparency had another odd effect, it made everything outside seem very far away, subtly shrunken by perspective and refraction. Perhaps the walls were curved minutely. The Falcon almost looked like a model, a child’s toy.

  Perhaps he’d better find another way out.

  There had better be another way out.

  Grown considerably more desperate, Vuffi Raa stopped to rest.

  He was internally powered; a microfusion pile that was practically inexhaustible burned within him at all times, requiring only a minimal amount of mass to keep itself (and Vuffi Raa) going.

  But the little droid was tired.

  In a lifetime vastly longer than his current master would have found comfortable to contemplate, the robot could not recall ever feeling lonelier or more isolated. There, in that endless series of empty chambers, it was like being a piece in a huge meaningless game, shuffled from one spot to the next by vast, uncaring, uncommunicative fingers.

  The little droid was afraid.

  He’d come a considerable distance. Six featureless rectilinear rooms, after the one he’d first appeared in, with its almost transparent circular tank in the middle. Then another tankroom. The four empties, the last of which had forced him into a sharp left-hand turn. The next room had had a circularity, although there had been a narrow space to get by it. Then another empty room, another left-hand turn, three more flat blue chambers and another tank.

  The pattern had repeated itself, again and again, the robot growing more disconsolate with every fruitless turn and passage. This didn’t even seem like the same planet—the same reality—let alone the same building he’d somehow accidentally entered.

  He wandered onward.

  Thirteen hours, forty-five minutes, twenty-eight seconds had passed.

  Another right-hand turn (the first since the initial one), two more lefts, and another right. Two more lefts. And always the same stark, empty, blue-tinted rooms, the occasional empty circular columns in their centers, more left turns, fewer rights. How long could this go on?

  Nineteen hours, eleven minutes, four seconds.

  Lost in thought, Mohs didn’t notice that he couldn’t see. It didn’t matter much to him, he didn’t have anyplace to go at the moment. There wasn’t any hurry. He’d only been here for a minute or two, and before another minute or two went by, the Bearer and the Emissary would come and get him.

  Or not.

  It wasn’t very important, really. He’d just realized, thinking about his loincloth once again, that if he took the long, rectangular strip of cloth, pulled it around end to end, but twisted it a half turn before joining the ends together, he’d get a very odd result: an object with only one side and one edge. How that could be, when everything had at least two sides, had to have, he wasn’t sure. There must be some important secret to this cloth shape, he reasoned, some hint at the fundamental nature of the universe. But the secret kept eluding him, there in the dark, seemed just barely out of reach. It was annoying.

  He pondered the question, picked at it, unraveled it like the homespun fabric his single garment had been made from. It wasn’t easy going, but the more he thought, the simpler things seemed to become.

  Presently, they became very simple, indeed.

  Mohs laughed.

  Lando heard somebody laugh.

  He turned, and there was Mohs—where he had not been a moment before—squatting on his heels, one arm across his naked lap, the other braced between chin and knee. Forgotten on the floor before him lay three or so meters of gray, aged loincloth, laid out in a circle, and twisted into a giant, floppy Möbius cylinder. The old man’s back was toward Lando.

  “Mohs!” Lando cried. “Where did you disappear to?”

  The old man chuckled without turning. “Apparently the same place that you did, Captain. What time is it?”

  And odd question from a naked savage, thought Lando. He glanced at his watch. “I’d say it’s been perhaps twenty minutes since you vanished through the wall. What have you been doing all this time, just sitting?”

  “What would you suggest I do, Captain?” The old man rose, pivoted on a heel to face Lando. “I thought it better than getting lost. You can’t see your hand in front of your face in here.”

  “Good heavens, man! What’s happened to your eyes!”

  The old man blinked, lids wiped down over eyeballs that might as well have been opaque white glass.

  “My eyes? There’s nothing wrong with my eyes, Captain.” The ancient Singer smiled. “What’s wrong with yours, can’t you see the darkness?”

  Vuffi Raa wasn’t lost, he simply didn’t know where he was.

  Since he’d first popped through the pyramid wall, he’d wandered through this strange, blue-lit maze for what seemed like days, taking pathways that offered no alternative. The only choice he’d had was to stay where he was or go where he could, and he’d always preferred action to inaction.

  He’d taken four right turns (each carrying him through two of the oddly shaped rooms), and six left turns, not necessarily in that order. Before very
long, he’d wind up exactly where he’d begun, no closer to any meaningful destination, no wiser concerning what this rat-run was intended and constructed for, and no likelier to find his friends.

  Just a machine, Lando had said once. Vuffi Raa wondered if his master knew how lonely a machine could get. Vuffi Raa hadn’t known, not until the last few hours. Twenty-seven of them, to be precise, plus thirty-six minutes, eleven seconds. He was three rooms past one of those with the small circular subchambers. That meant he ought to be entering a fourth, which would force him to take a left turn. After that, one more left, four more rooms, and he’d be back to where he’d started from.

  And a lot more discouraged, in the bargain.

  He found the soft spot in the wall, slithered through. Sure enough, none of the walls within this place—including the one he’d just passed through—would let him pass except the left-hand one. He took it, the light dimmed a little as it always did in rooms with circular tanks, and he walked automatically the length of the room, past the tank, and to the end wall.

  And banged right into it. It wouldn’t let him pass.

  Well, here was something new. Oddly enough, it failed to hearten him, or even relieve the tedium that had become his only companion. Had he been a mammal, he’d have stood there, scratched his head, folded his arms in exasperation, and sworn.

  He stood there, raised a tentacle to his chromium carapace, scratched at it absently while folding two more tentacles in disgust.

  “Glitch!” he said, and meant it.

  Exploring the unprecedented chamber, he traveled along the left wall, squeezed back through the narrow opening past the circular tank. The short wall through which he’d come was totally impermeable. He began feeling his way along the half of the other long wall he could reach before he had to make a circuit of the tank again—and made another discovery.

  Up until now, the rounded sides of the features he chose to call tanks were just as solid and impassable as any of the other walls. This one was different. He could stick a tentacle through it. For lack of any better course, he followed the tentacle into the circular area, where, on one spot along the curved inner side, there was a deep purplish glow. As he expected, the “tank” wouldn’t let him back out, so he felt the glowing section carefully. Yes, it, too was permeable.