Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [141]
Excitedly he shouted confirmation when the images were right, withheld comment when they were not. He and the creature hadn’t gotten around to establishing the symbols for “yes” and “no”. He wondered what the thing had in mind. Would it lead him to this banquet it was promising? Would he have the strength to follow? Or was it merely mocking him?
He was beginning not to care. There were only minutes left for him, anyway.
Suddenly, the greatest shock of all. The belly of the creature split open and vomited out everything it had shown him. It filled the currents around them, forming an almost impenetrable fog. Shouting joyously, he swooped and dived and soared through it all, plowing great clean swaths where he had passed. The creature stood off, watching, doing, and saying nothing.
One pass took him very near the thing. It was not smooth but was covered with knobs and bulges. Only portions of the thing showed any signs of transparency, and they simply admitted the sensory probes into an internal darkness that revealed nothing.
But for once, Lehesu’s curiosity was abated. He fed, perhaps more richly than he ever had in his life. Each pass brought him nearer the creature, but he was not afraid of it; it had saved his life. His senses passed over a spot that might have told him a great deal more, except that the Oswaft had no written language, no need for one. It was a plate, a plaque, attached with rivets to the creature’s hide. On it were enameled five words that would have shocked him deeply, for this was not a living creature at all.
The sign read:
MILLENNIUM FALCON
Lando Calrissian, Capt.
Lehesu the Oswaft, swimmer of the starry void, was content merely to soar and graze about the Falcon, singing out his gratitude to her every second he did so, with the natural radio waves generated by the speech centers of his mighty brain.
The formaldehyde was delicious!
• II •
LANDO CALRISSIAN, GAMBLER, rogue, scoundrel—and humanitarian?
It didn’t seem very likely, even to him. But the undeniable truth was that, several months after her initial encounter with that remarkable spacebreathing being, Lehesu of the Oswaft, circumstances found the Millennium Falcon stolidly boring her way through the interstellar void straight toward the ThonBoka, which translated roughly into human languages as the StarCave.
Lehesu’s people were in trouble: Lando was bringing help.
He was the help, and he was furious. His anger had nothing directly to do with Lehesu, the Oswaft, or the ThonBoka, but was rather more closely connected with the broken arm he was nursing at the moment. It was not quite so onerous nor prolonged an ordeal as it might have been in a more primitive place and time. He wore a complex lightweight brace consisting of a series of electrical coils that generated a field that would encourage his fractured humerus to knit up nicely in two or three days. Yet the appliance was cumbersome and inconvenient, particularly in free-fall. And Lando had grown particularly fond of free-fall. It helped him think.
With the deck-plate gravity switched off, he would sit in the middle of a room—equidistant not only from its walls, but from its floor and ceiling as well—parked comfortably on a cushion of thin air, cogitating. But the cast got in the way.
Lando also had a black eye and a broken toe. But, considering everything else that had happened, those were minor annoyances. He flicked expensive cigar ash at a vacuum hose he’d arranged to hang conveniently nearby, and spoke in the direction of an intercom panel set in a table somewhere beneath him.
“Vuffi Raa, what’s our ETA again?”
The instrument returned a voice to him, soft-spoken and polite, fully as mechanical in its origins as the instrument itself, yet rich with humorous astute inflection.
“Seventy-six hours, Master. That’s a new correction: this region is so clean we’ve gained