Star Wars_ Splinter of the Mind's Eye - Alan Dean Foster [56]
She turned memory-haunted eyes on him, “Maybe I’ll tell you someday, Luke. Not now. I’m not … I haven’t forgotten enough. If I told you I might remember too much.”
“Don’t you think I could take it,” he asked tightly.
She hastened to correct him. “Oh not you, Luke, not you. It’s me, my own reactions I’m worried about. Whenever I start trying to remember exactly what they did to me that time, I start to come apart.”
They walked on in silence. “Say, don’t you think it’s getting brighter in here?” she finally said, with exaggerated cheerfulness.
Luke blinked, the feelings that had been running searingly through him the past several minutes beginning to fade as he considered the import of her comment.
Yes, it did seem lighter. Almost bright, in fact.
“Switch off your luma,” he instructed her, even as he was thumbing the switch of his own.
For a brief instant it grew darker. Then their eyes compensated and it was as bright as before. The light was a faint blue-yellow, somewhat brighter than the hue of his own saber.
When his gaze returned to the Princess he saw she was standing next to the tunnel wall. “Over here,” she called, directing him to an especially luminous section of stone. He leaned close. It seemed as if the rock itself was pouring out the light.
“No,” she corrected when he voiced that thought, “look closer. Here.” She dug at the stone with her nails and the light came off in her hands, setting her palm aglow. It burned coldly in her hand. After a while it started to fade out.
“Some kind of growth,” she announced, “Lichen, a fungus … I don’t know. I’m no botanist. This is what Halla told us we’d find if we kept on.” She brushed living light from her hand, looked on down the gradually descending cave, “It’s another world down here, but now I don’t find it frightening.”
As they continued downward, the path they were traveling leveled off. The tunnel widened into a true cavern. Multicolored stalactites began to appear, mineral impurities turning them into painted pendants coated with the phosphorescent growths. Blunt-tipped stalagmites thrust ceilingward. They were accompanied by the ever-present music of dripping water.
A faint rumble sounded ahead and they slowed cautiously. The noise turned out to be the song of a running underground stream. It ran parallel to their path, a bubbling, unceasingly cheerful guide and companion.
They passed a hole in the cave’s roof. Water poured through it and disappeared into a bottomless pond, looking for all the world like a piece of standard piping with the middle section removed.
Further on, they encountered a miniature forest of helicites. These twisted, grotesquely contorted crystals of gypsum defied gravity in their swirling projections from floor, walls, and ceiling. Luke had the feeling they were walking through a gigantic clump of glass wool. Here the reflections from the glowing plant life reached blinding proportions.
In addition to the lichen-fungi, they were starting to see larger, more advanced varieties of light-generating vegetation growing from the ground and walls. Some looked like cantilevered mushrooms. They passed a tall stand of something resembling paralyzed bamboo encased in quartz. When the Princess accidentally bumped into one, they discovered another of its properties.
There was a bong. Startled, Leia jumped aside, then experimentally gave the stem a sharp rap with her knuckles. The ringing was repeated.
“Hollow, maybe,” suggested a delighted Luke.
“But are they vegetable or mineral?”
“No telling,” he admitted. He rapped another of the growths, was rewarded by a totally different ring. They exchanged smiles, and then the cave was filled with crude but sprightly tunes as the natural chimes sang under their hands. They grinned like a couple of mischievous children.
Eventually they tired of this amusement, resumed their journey as Luke broke out two concentrate cubes and handed one to the Princess. He talked