Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (22 page)

Once more, he looked upon the Mindharp. It had better work this time.

Rokur Gepta was coming.

“You will pardon my dramatic appearance, Captain Calrissian,” Mohs said as he ushered them around the curving corridor toward the
Falcon
’s cockpit, “but things are beginning to happen, and I am too busy to be anything
but
dramatic.”

“I know,” Lando said, throwing himself into the left-hand seat. He flipped a couple of switches and helped Vuffi Raa through the preflight checklist. It was a long list, much too
long for comfort. “I know everything—but I’m in something of a hurry myself right now.”

Mohs looked puzzled, then relaxed and grinned. “Ah, yes. You put the pieces together. All my life I was the instrument of my ancestors, given orders—the Voices of the Gods—whisked thither and yon at Their bidding. It was terrifying to the savage that I was, for example, to brush near an ancient wall, as I did that night in Teguta Lusat, and appear an instant later, leagues away, amidst a gathering of my people. I apologize also for vanishing from the tunnel; its purpose was elementary education, you see, and I matriculated and went on to higher things.” He absently ran a fingertip over his bizarre eyes. “The decision was made
for
me, and I—”

“Had no choice about it?” Lando asked. He looked at Vuffi Raa. “There’s a lot of that going around. What in heaven’s name is that red light on the life-support panel! Here, let’s override—”

“You are in no danger,” Mohs smiled. “The two of you helped me, and now I shall help you. We mean you no harm.”

“Swell. Can you fend off the governor and his friend the sorcerer?”

“I can tell you that the governor is alone, trying to use the Mindharp, while Gepta is on his way from Rafa V. He ought to be down any minute, but he won’t be coming to the spaceport.”

Lando turned to look at the old man, no longer bent and wizened. He was still old, but it lent him dignity and authority now.

The tattoo of the Key—the Mindharp, Lando realized—was darker now, stood out more sharply on the old man’s forehead. It practically glowed.

“Are there any more like you?” Lando asked.

“No, Captain, I am the only one. I am all there ever was, of
my
generation. The burden was to be passed on next year, but here I am.”

“Master, what are you talking about?”

“Quiet, Vuffi Raa. Watch the temperature in that reactor!”

“I assure you, Captain, everything is under control. You’d realize that, if you truly know our secrets.”

“I
know
your secrets, Mohs, believe me. There never were any pre-Republican colonists here, right?”

“That is correct, Captain.”

“But what are you saying, Master? If—”

“Nor were there really any Toka. Or would that be telling?”

“Master—”

“
Quiet
! You people
are
the Sharu. It’s written all over your walls inside the pyramid. You’re humanoid and very, very advanced. I don’t know what scared you into this masquerade—and I’m willing to bet you don’t either!”

“Master, will you please explain—”

“All right, all right. Mohs will correct me over the rough spots. I hardly understand contemporary Trammic, let alone an ancient—and thoroughly synthetic—version. But this is the gist: something pretty scary threatened the Sharu. Something that liked to eat hyperadvanced cultures but that wouldn’t bother with savages.

“So, a vast computer system was created. That’s all the so-called ruins in the system. The Sharu, before the threat, lived in cities not terribly different from our own, and they’re probably concealed beneath the monumental architecture too—along with the
intelligence
of the Sharu. Hand me that checklist a moment.”

“Very good, Captain, very good.”

“You bet it’s good. The life-orchards weren’t created to increase intelligence or longevity. They were created to suck it away from the population. I’ll bet three-quarters of everybody’s mind on the planet is stored inside that pyramid and other buildings like it. That’s so succeeding generations would be disguised as savages, too. But, when the crystals were separated from the trees by the colonists, the things absorbed small amounts of intelligence and life-force from the ambient environment, then fed them back to whoever wore the crystal—an accidental and unlooked-for effect.”

The old man nodded. “The colonists’ harvesting did no harm. What was of real value was stored in the buildings.”

“The buildings,” Lando continued, “may be the biggest computer system ever created. When this colony was founded, the computer searched our records, came up with a missing pre-Republican colony ship, and decided to use that as a cover story. The Sharu—reduced to mere Tokahood—were poor savage brutes, ‘broken’ by their experience with the mighty Sharu.

“I just couldn’t swallow it. What were the Sharu afraid of? How could they be so mighty, and yet—”

“I still don’t know the answer to that, Captain. It was expunged from the records, out of sheer terror, I think. It worries me”

“It ought to. Ready, Vuffi Raa?”

“I think so, Master. Yes, we’re ready.”

Another tremor rocked the ship.

“Mer’s trying to use the Harp again. Boy, will he be disappointed. It’s a trap, isn’t it, Mohs?”

“I’m afraid so,” the old man admitted gravely. “The legends were spread among my people in order to entice members of another intelligence species into finding and using the Harp. That way, we’d know that it was safe to come out of hiding.”

“Your giant computer system will regurgitate all those smarts it’s been storing for thousands of years, the covers will be stripped off your cities—there’s going to be a good deal of earth-moving around here, isn’t there?”

“All over the system.”

“And when the dust clears, the Sharu will be back in control. Well, considering the governor and the nature of the colony here, it can’t happen too soon for me. We’re leaving. Better jump off, Mohs. I’d say it’s been nice to know you, but I hate being used, by governors, sorcerers, or representatives of semilost civilizations.”

Rokur Gepta swept down upon the governor’s office building. As he’d expected, guards were posted all over the miniature landing field.

He cleared them away with a burst of the craft’s blasters and set down lightly amid the smoking remains. The ground trembled again, and this time it didn’t stop. Gepta hurried down to the penthouse office.

He thrust the doors aside and walked into a burst of radiance. Gepta was thrown against the corridor wall as energy streamed out all around him. He squinted his eyes, employed certain other protections, and gazed briefly at the governor’s desk.

The Mindharp of Sharu shone far too brightly to be looked upon, even by the sorcerer. Behind it, his fat hands wrapped around the base, stood the governor, his mouth and eyes opened wide, frozen, paralyzed.

And doomed.

Even as Gepta watched, both governor and Harp began to melt, to fuse, showering the room and hall with deadly radiation. He regained his feet and ran back up as the earth tremors redoubled.

It was a scene from hell. All around, as far as the horizon,
the giant forms left by the Sharu were shifting, fusing, melting like the Harp or, occasionally, detonating rather spectacularly. Something else was rising from the rubble, something Gepta didn’t want to see.

He leaped into his scoutship but neatly tumbled it off the roof before he got it properly airborne. Ahead, toward the spaceport, an ungainly crustacean-shaped object lifted from the runway.

Gepta cursed.

He heeled the fighter around, then aimed it straight for the
Millennium Falcon
. Closing, closing, he laid a thumb on the firing stud, his crosshairs on the unsuspecting freighter.

Two things happened.

Aboard the
Falcon
, another thumb rode another stud. Energy streaked toward the fighter Vuffi Raa had noticed landing on the roof. The
Falcon
’s radar was good, and they’d both been alert against flying debris.

I may not be much of a pilot yet, but I can shoot, Lando thought.

Almost simultaneously, a small obelisk of Sharu manufacture exploded beneath Gepta’s fighter, driving fragments into the small craft. The explosion staggered the scout, disabling it but throwing it from the path of Lando’s beam.

Seconds later, Rokur Gepta clambered from the wreckage as the
Millennium Falcon
soared away, safe, and with a precious load: the last life-crystals ever to be harvested in the Rafa System. Lando would be very, very rich.

Gepta shook a fist at the departing ship.

Someday …

H
E WAS SLIGHTLY
over a meter tall, from the faceted wide-angle lens glowing redly atop his highly polished pentagonal body to the fine feathery tips of his chromium-plated tentacles.

Of these, there were five, which he felt was as it should be. After all, hadn’t he been created in the image of his manufacturers?

He thought of himself as
Vuffi Raa
, an unsentimental designation from a different numbering system and a different language, half a galaxy ago. It served well enough as a name.

At the moment, he was in a hurry.

The tree-lined Esplanade of Oseon 6845 was a broad, jungly, cobblestoned thoroughfare built exclusively for pedestrian traffic, no matter what the individual sentient’s personal means of locomotion. It was equipped with an artificial gravity field three meters deep to accommodate the most attenuated of species. It was lined on both sides with elegantly restrained shops to accommodate the very richest.

It has been said that the commercial footage along the domed Esplanade of Oseon 6845 is the most expensive in the known universe. And that the patrons strolling its landscaped and sculptured kilometers are the wealthiest. Vuffi Raa didn’t know about that—a rare failing of information on his part. In the first place, he hadn’t the appropriate statistics ready to hand (in a manner of speaking). And if compelled to base his opinion on an
n
of one—the single case with which he was intimately familiar—he’d have had to hold the opposite was true. Not everybody there was rich. Not everybody there had come to buy and sell.

Which conclusion neatly brought his musings back around to the reason for his present urgency: his current master, latest
of what had been, until recently, an embarrassingly lengthy list of thoroughly dissatisfied customers.

Freeble-reeep
!

From the heavily planted median on the Esplanade, an entity that might have been a songbird warbled noisily in what may have been a bush, momentarily distracting the little robot. You could never tell. In the plush, cosmopolitan resort, the creature doing the singing might well be a photosynthetic vegetable attempting to attract pollen carriers, and the foliage it perched in, a soil-rooted animal. The entire Oseon System was like that, a rich-man’s playground, cleverly intended by those who had ordained its construction to be full of surprises.

But then, so was life itself. Their very presence in this overstuffed watering hole, his and his master’s, was ample testimony to that.

Vuffi Raa forced his jumbled thoughts back into relevant channels. He was a Class Two droid, with intellectual and emotional capacities roughly equaling those of organic sapients. And an uncorrected tendency in his programming to let his mind wander and to mix his metaphors on occasion. It was a price he paid for being one of the rare machines abroad with an imagination.

At the moment, it was a luxury he couldn’t afford. He held the blackened evidence before his eye again as a reminder. It was a fist-sized chunk of scorched metal and fused silicon. A few hours ago, it had been a neutrino hybridizer, a delicate and critical component in the sub-lightspeed drive of a certain class and vintage of starship.