Star Wars - [The Adventures of Lando Calrissian 01] - The Mindharp of Sharu (by L. Neil Smith)

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THE ADVENTURES OF
LANDO CALRISSIAN
#1
Lando Calrissian
and the
Mindharp of Sharu
by
L. Neil Smith
Based on the characters and situations created by
George Lucas
A Del Rey Book
.lit by DrB 12/04
BALLANTINE BOOKS, NEW YORK
This book is dedicated to Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.
PROLOGUE
“SABACC!”
It was unmercifully hot. Tossing his card-chips on the table, the young gambler halfheartedly collected
what they'd earned him, an indifferent addition to his already indifferent profits for the evening. Something
on the unspectacular order of five hundred credits.
Perhaps it was the heat. Or just his imagination. This blasted asteroid, Oseon 2795, while closer to its
sun than most, was as carefully life-supported and air-conditioned as any developed rock in the system.
Still, one could almost feel the relentless solar flux hammering down upon its sere and withered surface,
feel the radiation soaking through its iron nickel substance, feel the unwanted energy reradiating from the
walls in every room.
Especially this one.
Apparently the locals felt it, too. They'd stripped right down to shorts and shirt-sleeves after the second
hand, two hours earlier, and looked fully as fatigued and grimy as the young gambler felt. He took a sip
from his glass, the necessity for circumspection regarding what he drank blessedly absent for once. No
nonsense here about comradely alcohol consumption.
Most of them were having ice water and liking it.
Beads of moisture had condensed into a solid sheet on the container's outer surface and trickled down
his wrist into his gold-braided uniform sleeve.
What a way to live! Oseon 2795 was a pocket of penury in a plutocrat's paradise. The drab mining
asteroid, thrust cruelly near the furnace of furnaces, orbited through a system of pleasure resorts and
vacation homes for the galaxy's super wealthy, like an itinerant junkman.
The gambler was wishing at the moment that he'd never heard of the place. That's what came of taking
advice from spaceport attendants. A trickle of moisture ran down his neck into the upright collar of his
semiformal uniform. Who said hard rock miners were always rich?
He shuffled the oversized deck once, twice, three times, twice again in listless ritual succession, passed
it briefly for a perfunctory cut to the perspiring player on his right, dealt the cards around, two to a
customer, and waited impatiently for the amateurs to assess their hands. Real or imagined, the heat
seemed to slow everybody's mental processes.
Initial bets were added to the ante in the middle of the table.
It didn't amount to a great fortune by anybody's standards except perhaps the poverty-cautious
participants in the evening's exercise in the mathematics of probability. To them the gambler was a
romantic figure, a professional out-system adventurer with his own private starship and a reputation for
outrageous luck. The backroom microcredit plungers were trying desperately to impress him, he realized
sadly, and they were succeeding: at the present rate, he'd have to drain the charge from his electric
shaver into the ship's energy storage system, just to lift off the Core-forsaken planetoid.
Having your own starship was not so much a matter of being able to buy it in the first place (he'd won
his in another sabacc game in the last system but one he'd visited) as being able to afford to operate it. So
far, he'd lost money on the deal.
Looking down, he saw he'd dealt himself a minus-nine: Balance, plus the Two of Sabres. Not terribly
promising, even at the best of times, but sabacc was a game of dramatic reversals, often at the turn of a
single card-chip. Or even without turning it-he watched the deuce with a thrill that never staled as the face
of the electronic pasteboard blurred and faded, refocused and solidified as the Seven of Staves.
That gave him a minus-four: insignificant progress, but progress nevertheless. He saw the current bet,
flipping a thirty credit token into the pot, but declined to raise.
It also meant that the original Seven of Staves, in somebody's hand or in the undealt remainder of the
deck, had been transformed into something altogether different. He watched the heat-flushed faces of the
players, learning nothing. Each of the seventy-eight card-chips transformed itself at random intervals,
unless it lay flat on its back within the shallow interference field of the gaming table. This made for a
fast-paced, nerve-wracking game.
The young gambler found it relaxing. Ordinarily.
“I'll take a card, please, Captain Calrissian.” Vett Fori, the player in patched and faded denims on the
gambler's left, was the chief supervisor of the asteroid mining operation, a tiny, tough-looking individual of
indeterminate age, with a surprisingly gentle smile hidden among the worry-lines. She'd been betting
heavily - for that impecunious crowd, anyway - and was losing steadily, all evening, as if preoccupied by
more than the heat. An unlit cigar rested on the table edge beside her elbow.
“Please, call me Lando,” the young gambler replied, dealing her a card-chip. “‘Captain Calrissian'
sounds like the one-eyed commander of a renegade Imperial dreadnought. My Millennium Falcon's only
a small converted freighter, and a rather elderly one at that, I'm afraid.” He watched her for an indication
of the card she'd taken.
Nothing.
A nasal chuckle sounded from across the table. Arun Feb, the supervisor's assistant, took a card as
well. There was a hole frayed in the paunch of his begrimed singlet, and dark stains under his arms. Like
his superior, he was small in stature. All the miners seemed to run that way. Compactness was
undoubtedly a virtue among them. He had a dark, thick, closely cropped beard and a shiny pink scalp.
Drawing on a cigar of his own, he frowned as he added what he'd been dealt to the pair in his hand.
Suddenly: “Oh, for Edge's sake, I simply can't make up my mind! Can you come back to me, Captain
Calrissian?” Lando groaned inwardly.
This was how the entire evening had gone so far: the speaker, Ottdefa Osuno Whett, for all his
dithering, had been the consistent big winner, perhaps owing to his tactics of continuous annoyance of the
others. Fully as much a stranger in the Oseon as the young starship captain, at the moment he was
operating on considerably less goodwill.
“I'm sorry, Ottdefa, you know I can't. Will you have a card or not?”
Whett assumed an expression of conspicuous concentration that might have been a big success in his
university classes. Ottdefa was a title, something academic or scientific, Lando gathered, conferred in the
Lekua System. It was the equivalent of “Professor.” Its owner was a spindly wraith, ridiculously tall, gray
headed, with a high-pitched whiny voice and a chronically indecisive manner.
It had taken him twenty minutes to order a drink at the beginning of the game-and even then he'd
changed his order just as the chink arrived.
Lando didn't like him.
“Oh, very well. If you insist, I'll take a card.”
“Fine,” Lando dealt it. Either the academic had an excellent poker face, or he was too absentminded to
notice whether the resulting hand was bad or good. Lando looked to his right.
“Constable Phuna?”
The squat, curly-headed tough-guy he addressed was T. Lund Phuna, local representative of
law-and-order under the Administrator Senior of the Oseon. It was not, apparently, the happiest of
assignments in the field. The uniform tunic hanging soddenly over the back of his chair looked nearly as
worn as his companions' work clothes. He lit cigarette after cigarette with nervous, sweaty fingers, filling
the cramped, already stifling room with more pollution. He wiped a perspiration soaked tissue over his
jowls.
“I'll stand. Nothing for me.”
“Dealer takes a card.”
It was the Idiot, worth zero. Given the circumstances, Lando felt it was altogether appropriate. If only
he'd headed for the Dela System as he'd planned, instead of the Oseon. He'd, seen richer pickings in
refugee camps.
Bets were placed again. Vett Fori took another card, her fourth, as did her assistant, Arun Feb, asking
for it around the stub of his cigar. Ottdefa Whett stood pat. A Master of Sabres brought the value of
Lando's hand up to a positive ten, as a final round of wagering commenced.
Arun Feb and Vett Fori both folded with a nine and minus nine respectively. The cop Phuna hung grimly
on, his broad features misted with sweat. Lando was about to resign himself, when Whett excitedly cried,
“Sabacc!” slapping the Mistress of Staves, the Four of Flasks, and the Six of Coins down on the worn
felt tabletop.
The Ottdefa raked in a meager pot: “Ah...not exactly the Imperial Crown jewels, nor even the fabulous
Treasure of Rafa, but”
“Treasure of Rafa?” echoed Vett Fori.
She might as well ask, thought Lando, she isn't doing herself any good playing cards.
“I've heard of the Rafa System,” the mine supervisor continued, “everybody has. It's the closest to our
own. But I haven't heard of any treasure.”
The academic cleared his throat. It was a silly, goose-honk noise. “The Treasure of Rafa-or of the
Sharu, as we are now compelled to call it, not for the Rafa System, my dear, but for the ancient race who
once flourished there and subsequently vanished without a trace-is a subject of some interest.”
This had been delivered in Whett's best professional tones.
Vett Fori's weathered face, impassive enough when it came to playing cards, plainly displayed
annoyance at being patronized. She picked up her cigar, stuck it between her teeth, and glared across the
table.
“Without a trace?” Arun Feb snorted with disbelief. “I've been there, friend, and those ruins of your -
what'd you call ‘em? - 'Sharu,' are the biggest hunks of engineering in the known galaxy. What's more,
they cover every body in the system bigger than my thumbnail. They--”
“Are not themselves the Sharu, my dear fellow, of whom no trace remains,” Whett insisted, his tone
divided between pedantry and insulted reaction. “I certainly ought to know, for, until recently, I was a
research anthropologist for the new governor of the Rafa System.”
“What's a bureaucrat want with a tame anthropologist?” Feb asked blandly. He blew a final smoke ring,
mashed his cigar out on the edge of the vacuum tray, and took a long drink of water. It dribbled down his
chin, soaking the collar of his soiled shirt.
“Why, I suppose,” sniffed Whett, “to familiarize himself thoroughly with all aspects of his new
responsibilities. As you are no doubt aware, there is a native humanoid race in the Rafa; all of their
religious practices revolve about the ruins of their legends of the long-lost Sharu. The new governor is a
most conscientious fellow, most conscientious indeed.”
“Yes,” Lando said finally, wondering if the anthropologist was ever going to deal the next hand, “but
you were speaking of treasure?”
Whett blinked. “Why, yes, yes I was.” A shrewd look came into the academic's eyes. “Have you an
interest in treasure, Captain?”
More interest than I've got in this game, Lando thought. I wish I'd steered for the Dela System, no
matter how much easier it is to land a spaceship on an asteroid than a full-scale planet. Soon as this farce
is over, that's precisely what I'm going to do, win or lose, even if the astrogational calculations take me
twenty years.
“Hasn't everybody?” Lando answered neutrally. He extracted a cigarillo from his uniform pocket and lit
it. Treasure, eh? Maybe there was something to be learned here, after all.
“Not quite everybody. Speaking for myself,” the scientist intoned, beginning at last to shuffle the thick
seventy-eight-card deck, “my interest is purely scientific. What use have I for worldly wealth? One for
you, one for you, one for you, one for you, and one for me. One for you, one for you, one for you…”
“Well, you surely came to the right place, then!” Vett Fori guffawed, picking up her cards. “No worldly
wealth to get in your way at all! What are you doing here, anyway? We didn't hire any anthropologists.”
Lighting another cigarette, Constable Phuna spoke bitterly. “Seeing how the other half lives, that's what!
I saw his entry papers. He's studying life among the poor people of a rich system a fat Imperial grant,
speaking of worldly wealth.
We're specimens, and he--”
“Please, please, my dear fellow, do not be offended. I aspire only to increase our understanding of the
universe. And who knows, perhaps what I learn here can make things better in the future, not just for
you, but for others, as' Vett Fori, Arun Feb, and T. Lund Phuna spoke almost simultaneously: “Don't do
us any favors!”
“Do me one,” Lando suggested in the embarrassed silence that followed, “tell me about this treasure
business. And kindly deal me a card while you're about it, will you?”
Bets were placed again and additional cards dealt out.
Lando, having actually lost interest in the increasingly slim pickings the game afforded, watched absently
as the card-chips in his hand transmuted themselves from one suit and value to another. He paid a good
deal more attention to what the anthropologist had to say.
“The Toka are primitive natives of the Rafa System. As Assistant Supervisor Feb has so cogently
pointed out, they and the present colonial establishment co-exist among the ruins of the ancient Sharu,
enormous buildings which very nearly occupy every square kilometer of the habitable planets. I'll see that,
and raise a hundred credits.”
Arun Feb shook his head, but tossed in a pair of fifty-credit tokens from a dwindling stake. Vett Fori
folded, a look of disgust on her face. She placed her still unlighted cigar back on the table's edge.
Phuna raised another fifty. “Yeah, but the really important thing about the Rafa is the lifecrystals they
grow there.” He fingered a tiny jewel suspended in its setting from a slim chain around his sweaty neck.
Whett nodded. “Important to you, perhaps, good Constable. It is true, the life-orchards and the crystals
harvested there are the chief export product of the colony, but my interest-and what I was paid to be
professionally interested in-were the Toka legends, especially those bearing upon the Mindharp.”
Glancing at his cards, Lando saw he had a Mistress of Coins, a Three of Staves, and a Four of Sabres.
He dropped the requisite number of tokens into the pot just as the Three turned into a Five of Flasks:
twenty-three, but it didn't really matter; Fives were wild anyway.
“Sabacc!” He gathered in the largest pot of the evening thus far. “Mindharp?” the gambler asked.
“What in the name of the Core is that?”
Ottdefa Whett wrinkled his nose, passing the rest of the deck to Lando. “Oh, just a ridiculous native
superstition. There is supposed to be a lost magical artifact designed to call the Sharu - with whom the
Toka identify in some strange fashion - to call the Sharu back when the Toka need them.
Silly, as the Toka could not possibly ever have been contemporary with a civilization millions of years in
the past, any more than human beings and dinosaurs--”
“I've seen dinosaurs,” Arun Feb interrupted. “On Trammis III.” The gigantic reptiloids of Trammis III
were famous the galaxy over, and a chuckle circulated around the table.
“I take it, however,” Lando said as he shuffled and dealt the cards, then watched the bets pile up again,
“that you have your own theories.” Somehow the talk of treasure seemed to have loosened up the purse
strings a bit, except perhaps for Vett Fori and her assistant.
The gambler took a puff of his cigarillo. “Would you mind talking about them?”
The anthropologist looked as if he wouldn't mind at all, even if requested to discourse standing barefoot
on a large cake of ice while his ample gray hair were set on fire.
“Well, sir, the ruins, for all that they are ubiquitous, are impenetrable, closed completely on all sides
without a sign of entryway. I daresay that all the collected treasures of a million years of advanced alien
culture await the first adventurer to gain admittance. I don't mind confessing to you all that I attempted it
myself on several occasions. But the ruins are not only impenetrable, they are absolutely obdurate. No
known tool or energy yields so much as a smudge upon their surfaces. I'll see that, and raise five
hundred. Constable?”
Grudgingly, the policeman threw in five hundred credits' worth of tokens. Lando saw the bet with
amazement and raised it a hundred credits himself.
“Sabacc!”
Hmmm. Things were looking up a little. He was now ahead two thousand credits. He dealt the cards a
third time, wondering what prospects for a gambler might be met in the Rafa.
The idea was tempting: only a handful of straight-line light years to navigate across, and, if he recalled
correctly, a major spaceport with good technical facilities - which to him meant landing assistance from
Ground Control. The Millennium Falcon was completely new to him.
He'd be playing cards in the Dela System this very moment if he weren't such an abysmally amateurish
astrogator and ship-handler. He'd balked at the long, complicated voyage and reputedly tricky approach
to a mountaintop landing field, despite well-founded rumors of rich pickings in an atmosphere friendly to
his profession.
But the Rafa...
He won the third hand and a fourth, was now ahead some fifty-five hundred credits. The prospects of
action seemed to be encouraging him, and he wasn't noticing the heat as much anymore.
“Oh, I say, Captain Calrissian It was Vett again. As the stakes mounted, the anthropologist seemed the
only one whose interest in desultory conversation hadn't lagged.
“Yes?” Lando answered, shuffling and dealing the cards.
“Well, sir, I... that is, I find myself somewhat embarrassed financially at this moment. You see, I have
exceeded the amount of cash I allowed myself for the evening's entertainment, and I--”
Lando sat back disappointed, drew on his cigarillo. It was too much, he reflected, to have expected to
get rich off this emaciated college professor. “I move around too much to extend credit, Ottdefa.”
“I appreciate that fully, sir, and wish to...well, how much would you consider allowing on a Class Two
multiphasic robot, if one may ask?”
“Once may indeed ask,” the gambler replied evenly.
“Thirty-seven micro credits and a used shuttle pass. I'm not in the hardware business, my dear Ottdefa.”
There was an idea, however: he could rent a pilot droid to get the ship from here to the Rafa - or
wherever else he decided to go. He reconsidered. A Class Two was worth a good deal, perhaps half
again the value of his spaceship. In these circumstances...
“All right, then, a kilocred - not a micro more. Take it or leave it.”
The Professor looked displeased, opened his mouth to bargain Lando up, examined the determined
expression on the gambler's face, and nodded. “A kilo, then. I haven't any use for the thing in any event,
it was attempting to help me break into the Sharu ruins, and I--”
“Will you have a card, Supervisor Fori?” Lando interrupted.
“I'm out; this game's gotten too rich for me, and I'm on shift in fifteen minutes.” Much the same was true
for Arun Feb. They sat through the hand, enjoying watching somebody else lose for once.
Osuno Whett, however, bet heavily with his borrowed thousand, perhaps in an attempt to tap the
gambler out. He was assisted in this by Constable Phuna. The money on the table grew and grew as
Lando met their every raise, increasing the stakes himself. He wanted the game over with, one way or the
other.
He'd dealt himself a Two of Sabres and a Four of Coins, taking an additional card after his two
opponents had accepted them. Abruptly, the Four became a Three of Flasks, and his extra, which had
been a Nine of Staves, transformed itself into the Idiot.
“Sabacc!” Lando cried in double triumph. To judge from the money on the table before him, and the
lack of it in front of Whett and Phuna, that was the game. “Where can I pick up that droid, Ottdefa? I'm
going to put it to work immediately as a navigator”
“On Rafa IV, Captain. I left it in the custody of a storage locker company, intending to sell it there or
send for it-now, please don't get angry! I have here the title and an official tax assessment indicating its
true value. You may take these with you, or use them to get a fair price for the robot here!”
Lando had risen, violence flitting briefly - very briefly through his mind. That he had been gulled like any
amateur was his first coherent thought. That he had a small but powerful pistol secreted beneath his
decorative cummerbund was his second. That he could wind up dead, or in jail, on this sweltering fistful
of slag was his third.
There wasn't time for a fourth.
“Hold on there, son!” the Constable said, seizing Lando's arm. “No need for any uproar. We're all
friends here.” He pointed with his free hand to the papers Whett had preferred. “The Ottdefa here can
post bond to you in the full amount of - say, what's this?”
Lando felt something small, round, and cool thrust up beneath his embroidered sleeve. He glanced
down just as Phuna was pretending to remove it, and groaned. It was a flat, smooth-cornered disk a
centimeter thick, perhaps four centimeters in diameter. He knew precisely what it was, although he'd
never owned one in his life.
“A cheater!” the indignant Constable exclaimed. “He had a cheater all the time! He could change the
faces of the cards to suit him any time he wanted! No wonder-”
With a feral snarl, Osuno Whett took advantage of the asteroid's minimal gravity, launching himself
across the table at Lando. Just as his skinny frame was halfway to its target, a dirty denim jacket flopped
over his head, followed by a knobby set of knuckles belonging to Arun Feb's right hand.
There was a dull thump of contact and a muffled squeak from the anthropologist.
“Get out of here, kid!” Feb shouted. “I saw Phuna plant the cheater on you!”
The lawman whirled on Feb, fist upraised. Apparently Vett Fori trusted her assistants judgment - and
knew how to maneuver in the absence of gravitic pull. She snatched up the nearest solid object - which
happened to be the anthropologist's already battered head-and dashed it sideways against the startled
cranium of the police officer. Eyes crossed, he collapsed, drifting slowly to the floor. Still holding Whett
by the occipital region, Fori pried the wad of official-looking papers from the unconscious scientist's
fingers.
“Fake these and get your ship out of the Oseon, Lando. I'll talk sense with Phuna when he comes
around. He's crooked, but he isn't crazy. Besides, in theory, he works for me.”
It wasn't the first rapid exit Lando had made in his brief but eventful career. However, it was passing
rare for those whose money he had taken to assist him at it. With a pang of gratitude - and the feeling
he'd regret it later - he made to toss his winnings back on the table beside the insensate Ottdefa.
“Don't you dare!” Vett Fori growled. “You want us to think you didn't win it fair and square?” Behind
her, Arun Feb tapped Phuna on the pate again with a stainless steel water carafe,thunk! He looked up
from the pleasant occupation and nodded confirmation.
Lando grinned, waved a wordless farewell on his way out the door.
Twenty minutes later, he was aboard the Millennium Falcon, bolting down a very hastily rented pilot
droid. Ten minutes after that, he was above the plane of the ecliptic, blasting out of the Oseon System
and headed for the Rafa. It was the last place Whett would look for him.
He told himself.
I
GOLD-BRAIDED FLIGHT CAP carefully adjusted to a rakish angle, a freshly suave and debonair
Captain Lando Calrissian bounded down the boarding ramp of the ultra-light speed freighter Millennium
Falcon - and cracked his forehead painfully on the hatchcoaming.
“Ouch! By the Eternal!” Staggered, he glanced discreetly around, making sure no one had seen him,
and sighed. Now what the deuce was it Ground Control had wanted him to look at?
They'd put it rather ungenteelly...
“What's that garbage on your thrust-intermix cowling, Em Falcon, over?”
Well, it had been something they could say without insulting references to the amateurish way he'd
skidded, setting her down on the Teguta Lusat tarmac. Atmospheric entry hadn't been anything to brag
about, either. Gambler he may have been, scoundrel perhaps, and what he preferred thinking of as ‘con
artiste.’
But ship-handler he was definitely not.
He frowned, reminded of that rental pilot droid he'd wasted a substantial deposit on, back in the Oseon.
Let' em try to collect the rest of that bill!
Stepping - gingerly this time - around the hydraulic ramp lifter, he backed away from under the smallish
cargo vessel (which invariably reminded him of a bloated horseshoe magnet), shading his eyes with one
hand. Intermix cowling... intermix cowling... now where in the name of Chaos would you find “Yeek!”
The noise had come from Lando, not the hideous leathery excrescence that had attached itself to his
ship. It merely flapped and fluttered grotesquely, glaring down at him with malevolent yellow eyes as it
scrabbled feebly at the hull, unaccustomed to the gravity of Rafa IV.
Two hideous leathery excrescence!
Four!
Lando pelted back up the ramp, slamming the Emergency Close lever and continuing to the cockpit.
The right-hand seat was temporarily missing, in its place bolted the glittering and useless Class Five pilot
droid, its monitor lights blinking idiotically.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” the robot smirked, despite the daylight pouring through the
vision screens from outside, “and welcome aboard the pleasure yacht Arleen, now in interstellar transit
from Antipose IX. The young gambler snarled with frustration, slapped the pilot's OFF switch, and threw
himself into the left acceleration couch, just as one of the disgusting alien parasites began suckering its
way across the windscreen, fang corrosives clouding the transparency.
“Ground Control? I say, Ground Control! What the devil are these things?”
A long, empty pause. Then Lando remembered: “Oh, yes... over!”
“They're mynocks, you simpering ground lubber! You're supposed to shake them off in orbit! Now
you've violated planetary quarantine, and you'll have to take care of it yourself nobody's gonna dirty
his--”
摘要:

    THEADVENTURESOFLANDOCALRISSIAN#1LandoCalrissianandtheMindharpofSharubyL.NeilSmith BasedonthecharactersandsituationscreatedbyGeorgeLucasADelReyBook.litbyDrB12/04BALLANTINEBOOKS,NEWYORK   ThisbookisdedicatedtoRobertSheaandRobertAntonWilson.       PROLOGUE  “SABACC!” Itwasunmercifullyhot.Tossinghis...

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