Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (10 page)

“That’s right,” the guardsman answered, then added in a more subdued and, Lando thought, somehow civilian tone, “I sure hope your bruises are healing up okay. We were pretty careful. Nothing personal, you understand, sir. A guy has orders to follow.”

And plenty of morally evasive clichés to fall back on, Lando thought as he peered into the anonymous helmet visor. He
gave it up. “Think nothing of it, my dear fellow, I understand completely. I’ll try and do as much for you, someday.”

The cop chuckled, snapped to attention, clicked booted heels, and brought his heavy handweapon to port arms. Lando suppressed an unmilitary snigger of his own at the display, and climbed aboard the
Falcon
with Vuffi Raa and Mohs behind him.

The interior of the
Millennium Falcon
, Lando thought for the hundredth time, was more like the innards of some great living beast than the inanimate human construction that it was. Starliners and other vessels he was familiar with were as rectilinear and orderly as the hotel where he’d spent an uncomfortable night in Teguta Lusat. But aboard his ship were no separate compartmentalized cabins of any sort, nor any clear demarcation between cargo and living space, simply lots of un-specialized volume, currently being rapidly and compactly filled with cartons and crates of highly valuable life-crystals.

Lando watched the port’s longshorebots work. It appeared Gepta was more than keeping his part of the bargain—Lando made a note to have the crystals assayed as soon as possible. There was nothing about the sorcerer, or his governmental flunky, that inspired trust, even had Lando been the trusting type.

Parking Mohs at a convenient bulkhead frame, Lando and Vuffi Raa stopped off beside the ultralightspeed section of the ship’s drive area. There had been some changes made. And not for the better, Lando thought.

“Oh, Master!” the dismayed Class Two robot wailed. “Just see what they have done to her!” He rushed to the faster-than-light drive panels and stood, wringing his metallic tentacles and making the kind of high-pitched squeal humans call tinnitis and see physicians about.

All along the wall, access panels had been left rudely hanging open. Frayed wires and broken cables dangled from the overhead. Small bits and pieces of machinery, mechanical detritus such as nuts and washers and scraps of insulation littered the decking. The faint foul stench of soldering and scorched plastic defied the ventilating system’s best efforts.

“It’s quite a mess, all right, old home appliance. But don’t fret, she’s only a machine, after all, and they’ve promised to make full and complete repairs, once we—”

“
Only a machine
?” The robot’s voice was disbelieving,
scandalized, and almost hysterical. “Master, I, too, am ‘Only a machine’! This is horrible, unbearable, cruel, evil. It’s—”

“Oh, come now, Vuffi Raa, don’t exhaust your vocabulary. You’re a
sapient
machine. The
Falcon
’s big and smart, but she’s way, way beneath you on the scale of things. Otherwise I shouldn’t have had to rent that confounded, idiotic—”

“Master,” the droid interrupted, more gently this time, “how does it make you feel to see somebody’s furry pet run over by the roadside? Do you dismiss it, say it’s only an animal, beneath you on the scale of things? Or do you feel like … well, the way I feel now?”

Lando shook his head, too tired to argue further. The point, within limits, was certainly well taken. And he hated to think that the little automaton was a more humane being than he himself.

“I’m going forward,” he said abruptly. “There’s no telling what trouble somebody like Mohs can find to get into with all those dials and pretty buttons going unsupervised.”

“Very well, Master. With your permission, I’ll remain here a little while to comfort her as best I can and tidy up this … this butchery.”

“As you will.” Lando paused in the bight of curving corridor, turned back to see the droid collecting washers and sheared rivets from the decking. “Er, uh, sorry I didn’t understand your feeling at first, old cyberaet. It’s just that I …” His voice trickled off.

There was a long silence between the two, then: “That’s all right, Lando. At least you understood after I explained it. That’s more than most organic beings could do, I think.”

The gambler cleared his throat self-consciously. “Yes, well, er, ah … see you forward in a little while, then—and don’t call me Lando.”

In the tubular cockpit forward, Lando took an inexpert look at the indicator lights on various control boards, then thumbed through the
Falcon
’s dog-eared flight manual to see what they meant.

Mostly, the unfamiliar lights he saw were warnings of open hatch covers where the loading was being carried out. Clunks and thumps and groans below confirmed the telltales. The entire section of instrumentation given over to the ultralight drive had only solid reds and yellows glaring balefully.

Behind Lando, in the high-backed jumpseat where the gambler
had placed him firmly, Mohs seemed to have lapsed back into senile passivity. Lando couldn’t blame him: he almost wished he could do the same. It had been a long, hard day for the poor old savage. The Toka sat, eyes wide open, staring down at the decking plates, knobbed hands lying palms up in loinclothed lap.

“Mohs?” Lando asked gently.

The old man started, as if he’d been thoroughly asleep despite the open eyes and hadn’t seen Lando turn around to speak to him. He blinked, rubbed a slow and shaky hand over his stubbly chin.

“Yes, Lord?”

“Mohs, what was it that you and your people were chanting out there by the fence?”

The old man breathed deeply, resettled himself in the heavily padded jumpseat. He’d never placed his scrawny fundament in so luxurious a resting place before. He patted the arms a little, almost in disbelief.

“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!”

C
AME 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 approximately 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.