Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (11 page)

The question now was, why did Vuffi Raa and Mohs need him?

“What now, Master? Do you want to go to Rafa V?”

“
DON’T CALL ME MASTER
!”

The relatively short jump of a few dozen million kilometers was blessedly uneventful for the captain and “crew” of the
Millennium Falcon
.

They hadn’t started it at once. Vuffi Raa and Lando quizzed the elderly Mohs, had made him repeat and translate the appropriate stanzas of the appropriate Songs until they, too, were as certain as they could be, under the circumstances, that Rafa V was the place to find the Mindharp.

That is, if you were willing to place much confidence in an intermittently senile shaman mouthing rhymed and metered legends of an indeterminate age.

Lando spent the few hours of transit catching up on his sleep, while Mohs and Vuffi Raa carried on whatever passed for conversational small talk between them. The pilot’s acceleration couch was infinitely more comfortable than the sleeping bag, and by the time Vuffi Raa woke him again, he felt halfway human. Downright cheerful, in fact. Or at least as cheerful as he ever—

SPANG!

Something struck the roof of the control cabin, hard.

“What in the eternal blue blazes was that?” Lando shouted. Behind him, the old man cringed, began gibbering to himself in a high-pitched, hysterical voice. Something about the wrath of—

SPENG!

This time, it was somewhere aft, near the engines. A yellow light winked on the control board. Vuffi Raa stabbed console buttons, his tentacles blurring with speed into near invisibility. “One moment, Master, while I—”

SPING! SPONG!

Red lights flickered now. There was the faint but definite whistle indicating loss of atmosphere. Lando swallowed hard. His ears popped as the pressure equalized, although that hadn’t been his intention.

Something was striking the
Millennium Falcon
repeatedly and with great force. For some odd reason, the image of Constable Jandler (if that was really his name) flashed through Lando’s mind. They were in close orbit over Rafa V, preparing to use the old Toka chants as a guide to selecting a landing site.

Vuffi Raa heeled the
Falcon
over so she could take whatever was hitting her on her better-armored underside, but they had already received at least minor damage.

SPUNG!

“In the name of the Galactic Center, what’s
that
?” Lando hollered.

An unlikely object had wedged itself into the space between the cockpit transparency and a small communications antenna. It resembled nothing more than a fancy cut-glass plumber’s helper, complete with handle and suction cup, but rendered in some crystalline substance reminiscent of Rafa orchard produce.

“I don’t know, Master!”

Was that hysteria in the robot’s voice? Wonderful, thought Lando.

The ship rolled, stabilized, and they were traveling in orbit on her side. The bombardment seemed to slacken off. The droid turned to Lando.

“It’s an artifact of some kind, Master. Archaeoastronomers believe that Rafa V was the original home of the Sharu, the planet they evolved on. Mohs’ Songs seem to agree with that. I suspect, Master, that we’re seeing—and suffering—the remnants of their first attempts at spaceflight, objects launched by
primitive rockets, others expelled by small spacecraft as they prepared to reenter atmosphere.”

It made sense. Planetary orbits were always the richest fields in which to discover the leavings of primitive technology. There were probably cameras out there, used spacesuits, free-fall table scraps, all of them practically as good as the day they had been jettisoned—barring a little micrometeorite and radiation damage.

A thought came to him.

“Vuffi Raa, why didn’t you just power the
Falcon
’s shields up when we started taking hits? There’s nothing out there the deflectors couldn’t have handled, especially given our relative speeds in orbit.”

Reading through the flight manual over and over again seemed to be doing him some good, Lando thought. Maybe if he watched the robot fly this machine long enough, he’d pick up the knack himself.

On the other hand, right now he could be aboard a luxury passenger liner, sipping a tall cool drink and shearing two-legged sheep.

“Why, I don’t know, Master,” came the reply. “I simply acted as quickly as I could. Brace yourself, everybody, we’re going in!” The droid began punching console buttons again.

Rafa V—birthplace of the fabled Sharu or not—was not the favored planet for human colonization. There was atmosphere, the usual thick scattering of titanic multicolored buildings, and, most importantly, the ubiquitous life-orchards. But the place was just a trifle too cold, a trifle too dry, and Rafa IV, the planet they’d just come from, was moist and shirt-sleeve comfortable over a wide range of latitudes.

Here and there, according to their orbital survey and maps programmed into the
Falcon
at Teguta Lusat, lay small settlements, orchard-stations where a combination of Toka (native to the planet, as they were to all bodies in the system with sufficient resources), convicts, and government horticulturists harvested life-crystals, although on nowhere near the scale of Rafa IV.

No doubt in another hundred years or so, there would be towns, eventually cities other than those the Sharu had abandoned. But for now, there were a paltry few hundred individuals sprinkled over an entire planetary surface.

The colossal pyramid Mohs pointed them toward was at
least a thousand kilometers from any contemporary outpost of civilization.

Vuffi Raa brought the
Falcon
to a gentle leaflike landing in a space between several ancient constructs at the foot of the pyramid that dwarfed even them. There were no convenient words to describe the building that now loomed over them. At least seven kilometers of it protruded above ground level. The
Falcon
’s various scanners had disclosed that it kept on going beneath the surface, but the depths exceeded the capabilities of her instruments. It was a literal mountain of smooth impervious plastic that served no discernible function.

The pyramid had five facets (not counting the bottom—wherever
that
was), the angles between each of them not particularly uniform, giving the gigantic construct an eerie, dangerous, lopsided look. Each face was a different brilliant color: magenta, apricot, mustard, aquamarine, turquoise, lavender.

Execrable taste, Lando thought, well deserving of cultural extinction.

There was no finishing ornament at the top; the sides simply came together in a peak sharp enough to give anyone who reached it a nasty puncture wound.

Not for the first time, Lando wondered who or what it was that had scared off creatures capable of creating such an edifice. He rummaged through the ship’s chests and his own wardrobe looking for suitable clothing, settled finally on a light electrically heated parka, heavy trousers, micro-insulated gloves, and rugged boots with tough, synthetic soles. It was a measure of his uneasiness about the place that he broke long precedent, slinging a short, weighty, two-handed blaster over his shoulder and filling his pockets with extra power modules.

The weapon hung at his waist, muzzle swinging with his body when he moved.

Mohs flatly turned down the offer of additional warm clothing, joined the gambler and Vuffi Raa at the boarding ramp. Lando wondered if the old fellow wanted to add frostbite to the rest of his infirmities. If nothing else, they already made an impressive collection.

“Now, you’re absolutely certain this is the place?”

Mohs nodded vigorously as the ramp lowered them and itself to ground level, unaffected by the cold as the angle beneath their feet steepened and a deep chill entered the belly of
the ship. Air puffed out in visible vaporous clouds. They tramped down onto the dry-frozen soil.

“Master,” Vuffi Raa admonished, “I trust you’re carrying sufficient water. The humidity in this region does not quite reach two percent.”

Lando slapped the gurgling plastic flasks tucked into the pockets of his parka. “Yes. And I brought a deck of card-chips, as well.” He looked out over the barren surface of the planet. Fine reddish sand lapped like a frozen sea around the bases of the abandoned buildings. “Chances are we’ll die of boredom before thirst gets to us.”

Mohs turned, an odd look on his face as he watched Lando open a small panel at eye-level on one of the
Falcon
’s landing legs. The gambler pushed a sequence of buttons that started the boarding ramp groaning upward again into its recess under the ship’s belly.

“Hast thou also the Key, Lord, the Key which—”

“What is this? Are you two seeing me off to summer camp or something?”

He led them out from beneath the ship, took a deep invigorating breath—and promptly froze the hairs in his nostrils. “Well, I can see why nobody much has staked a claim on this forsaken stretch of—”

“Master,” Vuffi Raa clattered up beside him and tugged at the hem of his jacket. “Master, I don’t like this, there’s something—”

“I know, old junkyard, I can feel it, too.”

The sky, a light greenish color, was cloudless. Nevertheless, somehow it impressed them all as gray, bleak, and overcast. And it was
cold
. The whine of Vuffi Raa’s servos was clearly audible, a sign that perhaps his internal lubrication was thickening. Lando replaced the glove on the hand he’d used to retract the ramp, thrust it deeply into a warm pocket where the blaster swung.

“
Master
!”

Something went
zing
! and a short, stubby, wicked-looking arrow suddenly protruded from the seam between the robot’s leg and body. In the next instant, a hailstorm of the primitive projectiles whistled toward them, bouncing off the
Falcon
’s hull, burying themselves in the sand at their feet. Vuffi Raa went down, looking like a five-legged pincushion. He didn’t utter a word.

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.

S
O 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.