Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [11]
“Awrr, Captainshipness, being a sports!” It turned a petal-fringed face toward the small technician. “Negatordly give these person ill considerations. Cargo of value, inarguability.”
The third player, a hard-bitten bleached blonde with a thumb-sized oval life-crystal dangling from a chain around her wattled neck, hooted agreement.
“Sure, Phyll,” Lando replied, ignoring the woman. “Is that how you obtained that marvelous translator you’re wearing—in lieu of credits in a sabacc game?”
The plant-being shivered with surprise. “How thou understanding these?”
“With considerable difficulty.”
He paused, thinking it over, however. To a gambler, particularly one who was both reasonably honest and consistently successful, good will represented an important stock in trade.
“Oh, very well, Chaos take me! But only this once, understood?”
The amorphous-featured fellow nodded enthusiastically; he lasted only two more hands. On his way out the door, he reached into a pocket of his coveralls, presented Lando with a bill of lading and a few associated documents.
“You’ll find the shipment at the port. Thanks for the game. You’re a real sport, Cap’n Calrissian, honest to Entropy, you are.”
Lando, now some seventeen thousand credits ahead, and ready to bow out of the game as gracefully as he could—or as firmly as he must—scarcely heard the little nonentity. He had blessedly near the price of the Millennium Falcon, right there on the table before him. A plague on interstellar freight-hauling! Let somebody else worry over landing permits and cargo manifests. He was a gambler!
It sure beat scraping mynocks off a starship hull!
Shortly after midnight, strolling the few boardwalked blocks toward the modest luxury of Teguta Lusat’s “finest hotel”—the droid bartender’s recommendation—Lando kept one hand on the credits in his pocket, the other on his little gun. It didn’t seem to be that kind of town, still, there were that kind of people everywhere you went.
Beside him shambled the weirdest apparition of the mechanical subspecies he had ever seen—or even wanted to.
“Vuffi Raa, Master, Class Two Multiphasic Robot, at your service!”
The transport station with its dozens of storage lockers had been on Lando’s way to the hotel. Desiring an early start on the morning’s business, the gambler had thought it a good idea to pick up the droid he’d won immediately. Now he wasn’t sure.
Some things are better faced in daylight.
It stood perhaps a meter tall, about level with Lando’s hip pocket—hard to judge, as it could prop its five tentacles at various angles, achieving various heights. It was the shape of an attenuated starfish with sinuous manipulators—which served both as arms and legs—seamed to a dinner-plate-size pentagonal torso decorated with a single, softly glowing many-faceted deep red eye. The whole assemblage was done up in jointed, glittering, highly polished chromium.
Utterly tasteless, Lando thought.
“Most people,” he had observed, watching the thing unfold itself from the rental locker, “have forgotten that ‘droid’ is short for ‘android,’ meaning manlike.” It stretched its long, metallically striated limbs almost like a living being, carefully examined the tips of its delicately tapered tentacles. “And what kind of name is that for a robot, anyway: ‘Vuffi Raa’? Aren’t you supposed to have a number?”
It regarded him obliquely as they squeezed past a geriatric janitor and left the terminal through automatic glass doors, headed up the boardwalk.
“It is a number, Master, in the system where I was manufactured—in the precise image of my creators.
“I wish I could recall exactly where that is: you see, I was prematurely activated in my shipping carton in a freight hold during a deep-space pirate attack. This seems