Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [90]
It looked like the rock was thinking.
Not only that, it looked like the rock was thinking with a number of distinct minds, which seemed to have some sort of self-reinforcing phase relationship, analogous to the process in social insects by which discussion leads to consensus.
Which was a development that R2 would have liked to investigate more thoroughly, but he was currently preoccupied by constantly recalibrating his internal gyromagnetic stabilizer to keep himself from landing, when he did eventually land, on his damaged locomotor arm; this ongoing recalibration—owing to the bewildering unpredictability of the shifting magnetic fields—took up most of R2’s processing capacity.
Another slide, two bounces, and one last tumble brought R2 to a brief halt, as he fetched up against Chewbacca’s short ribs hard enough to make the Wookiee grunt and wheeze for breath; then the stone opened beneath them for a final time and dropped them another three point six meters, which left the two of them unceremoniously deposited on the smooth stone floor of yet another cavern.
R2 activated a pair of manipulators to shove himself off Chewbacca—which elicited a groan of protest from the half-stunned Wookiee—and righted himself on the cavern floor. There was human-visible light in this cavern, though the light source swung so violently from side to side and up and down that shadows whirled and blended and parted again so swiftly that R2’s photoreceptor lens couldn’t parse the scene; he cycled back to his previous EM sensor band and began to make sense of the situation.
The human-visible light source was revealed to be none other than the glow rod, which was being wielded as an improvised club by Han Solo to swat at a mass of vaguely humanoid shapes while he shouted, “Back off! I’ll bash any one of you who takes one more step! Back off!”
R2 assumed that Captain Solo was either highly agitated or speaking in the confusing idiomatic human code that C-3PO referred to as metaphor, because it was certainly clear—to R2’s sensors, at any rate—that these humanoid shapes to which he spoke did not actually have legs, much less feet, and thus were already certain, regardless of threat or instruction, never to take one more step. It was also entirely clear to R2 that these humanoid shapes were not, in fact, creatures at all, at least not as his programing generally understood the term.
These shapes were only nominally humanoid, in the sense of being generally upright and having a vaguely head-shaped knob on top, as well as a pair—several had more—of arms; these shapes grew upward from the very stone of the cavern itself, more like animated stalagmites than actual living things, but they moved as though directed by some type of consciousness, and they clearly exhibited that peculiar electromagnetic field signature R2 had noted during his precipitous descent. A quick scan of his data files for any reference to this type of apparently mineral life-form came up blank … except for one provisional reference that he had preserved in his short-term cache because he had no internal referent to guide him in choosing where to file it.
It was the recording of Aeona Cantor, when her companion had asked what they should do “if whoever shows up isn’t a Jedi”:
Then we take their stuff and leave ’em to the Melters.
R2 found this to be a satisfactory correlation, and he consequently created a new file tagged with the keywords MINDOR, MINERAL LIFE-FORM (MOTILE), and MELTERS.
This entire process, from Han Solo’s shout to R2-D2’s filing decision, took only .674 of a Standard second, which left R2 plenty of time for a full systems self-check and operational verification while Chewbacca was still rolling to his feet and drawing breath for a Wookiee war whoop.
Chewbacca’s war cry was followed by a headlong charge against the Melters—that these were the “Melters