Star Wars - The Adventures of Lando Calrissian Trilogy

by L. Neil Smith

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 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... 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 this chamber precisely in half.

  To the right and left were similar, exactly parallel 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 banged 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 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 four empties, the last of which had forced him into a sharp left-hand turn, another tankroom.

  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 right ones. 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 h
ere 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 Moebius 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.

  He stepped through into a rectilinear room, exactly like the tank-less blue ones he'd spent the last day wandering through. Only these were a brilliant scarlet color.

  One, two, three, four. He should be between two of the blue tankrooms, now, but there wasn't any tank in here. Five, six, seven-something odd. The far wall seemed to tug at him, and the red glow was a little fainter here. He backed up and thought.

  Thirty-two hours, fifteen minutes, forty-two seconds had passed since he'd gotten into this mess. He didn't much care, now, how he got out of it.

  He let the wall pull him toward itself and stepped through...

  Lando sat by the transparent pyramid wall, his head in his hands. The last half hour had had its shocks, but this was the worst of all.

  Where the old Singer's eyes had been, there were now a pair of deep ugly wounds - healing rapidly, it was true, and showing no signs of infection, just as the old man showed no signs of pain. But he was blind, horribly, hideously blind.

  And happy about it.

  “Captain,” said Mohs, “please do not be distressed. There is nothing free in this life. I seem to have exchanged my eyes for a certain understanding. I now know what I was: a retarded savage who could see, but did not know what it was he saw. Now I am an intelligent, civilized man, who happens to be blind. Do you not think it a fair trade?”

  Lando grunted, poked a finger idly at a tiny line of dust gathered in the corner between wall and floor. Something tiny sparkled there, like a speck of metal, a fleck of mirror silvering. Curious, Lando brushed the dust away from it. It was better than answering Mohs, either truthfully or insincerely. Nothing could make up for blindness.

  “Further, Captain. My new-found reasoning capacities seem to serve me in the stead of eyes to some extent. I can tell that you are sitting to my left, turned mostly to the wall, poking with a finger in the corner. I believe I know this by deducing from the sounds you make, what I know of your personality and habits - it's quite as if I could see you.”

  “I'm happy for you, Mohs,” Lando mumbled irritably. Suddenly, the minute sparkly bit grew larger, and Lando drew his hand back abruptly.

  “Son of a - look at this!”

  Not noticing what he'd said to a blind man, Lando watched the corner. There was a spider there, a tiny one, very shiny, very fast. It skittered about frantically, trying to escape Lando. It couldn't have been much more than three millimeters in diameter.

  Lando reached down, unafraid, let the spider race up his thumb, turned the thumb down into the palm of his other hand...And watched a nearly microscopic Vuffi Raa, accelerated to sixty times normal speed, trip over his lifeline and go sprawling.

  XV

  NO ONE HAD ever accused Vuffi Raa of being stupid.

  Of course he'd recognized the hundred-meter giant looming over him, the instant he'd popped out of the final red-lit chamber and through the inside wall of the pyramid. It was his master, and what surprised him was the feeling that, whate
ver their current predicament, he was home.

  Apparently, Lando grasped the weird situation, too. He'd held his thumb down on the floor in front of Vuffi Raa, keeping it amazingly still for the full minute the little - very little - droid required to climb its length.

  For his part, Vuffi Raa was very careful: the thumbnail at this scale was rough and full of convenient handholds, but the flesh seemed soft and spongy. He went gently, using all five tentacles and spreading them, outward and flat, to distribute his mass. One misstep would cruelly pierce his master's flesh like a needle and, perhaps, precipitate the robot into disaster.

  Not that that wasn't the situation now.

  With incredible slow steadiness, Lando had raised the robot up to his eye level, then across his mountainous chest, over to the other hand. Vuffi Raa tumbled down into the waiting palm, righted himself, and looked up into the giant eye that peered down at him.

  “Master! What a mess! What are we going to do?”

  “EEEVVVUUUFFFEEE EEEUUURRRAAAHHH,” responded Lando, taking at least twenty seconds to do it, his voice low and thunderous. A human being in Vuffi Raa’s Position might not have been able to hear what Lando said - the little droid's range of hearing was impressive - but he'd certainly have felt it.

  Now the robot understood his master's unnatural rock-steadiness. There seemed to be some difference in their perception of time, correlative to the difference in their sizes. Lando was living at a vastly slower rate than Vuffi Raa. He considered the problem for what would have seemed a millisecond to his master, then gave forth a series of loud chirps, spaced evenly over about a minute's time, each burst carefully shaped and calculated to blur with the ones before and after into something the giant could follow: “Can't understand you, Master,” Lando heard a tiny voice say, “Can you hear me?”

  Lando wasn't stupid, either. He could see how quickly, jerkily, Vuffi Raa was moving about in his hand, and figured out that time - or at least metabolism - was flowing differently for each of them. He even had a good idea how Vuffi Raa was managing to communicate with him, although none whatsoever as to how he could communicate back.