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Perhaps, exactly like their creators, they don’t know, will never know until they experience it themselves and can’t relay the sensations to others. Perhaps it’s just as large a mystery to them as it is to everybody else. Perhaps.

Each slender, dainty finger is divided into joints, precisely like the tentacles—fine, impossibly tiny joints, such as a watchmaker would create, looking through his loupe, trying to still the microscopic trembling of his hands. After a few centimeters, the fingers branch yet again—something absolutely no one ever notices. The joints continue marching, tapering, growing smaller and finer until they vanish from unaided vision—and continue.

Those subfingers, at their ends, are hair-fine, wire-slender … alloy strong. Their inner composition is just as sophisticated, just as complex as any other portion of the creature they belong to. Yet, unlike the pentagonal metal torso, unlike the sinuous jointed tentacles, unlike even the slender adroit fingers, they are too small to be seen, too fine to be hit with an arrow.

One of them stirs. It waves back and forth languidly a moment, living a life of its own. It coils and uncoils, testing itself. It stretches minutely, contracts minutely. It doubles back, wraps itself around the base of an intruding wooden object that had pierced the body above it.

It pulls.

There is a gentle, sucking noise. Slowly the arrow surrenders, sliding out, grating through tortured metal. The hair-fine subfinger plucks it out, casts it away. Elsewhere, other wirelike extensions perform similar tasks. And on the inside, where torn and dented metal protrudes in sharp triangular, ragged, toothlike edges, nearly microscopic flagellated motes begin pushing, thrusting, hammering the metal skin back into place, almost a molecule at a time.

“The bantha is a shaggy beast, although it has no hair.… Its feathers are unique, at least, because they aren’t there.… Hee, hee, hee, hee, hee!”

Lando began coughing uncontrollably, choking on his genius as a poet. He was disappointed. No one would ever get to hear his cleverness—although he couldn’t quite remember why at the moment. Whatever it was, it made him sad, and he lapsed directly from laughter into sobs.

His fingers, highly trained and skillful at manipulating card-chips, coins, the entrances to other people’s pockets, went right on thinking for themselves, picking at the rough-woven cloth that bound the wrists above them, threatening to cut off their circulation before they had quite finished their self-assigned task.

“The governor of Rafa Four is fat as he can be … with fuzzy crown and stubby limbs, he looks just like a … bee? Fee? Me? Thee? Thee! He looks just lika thee, old man, he looks just lika thee!”

Behind Lando, between his body and the pseudoplant, a final fiber gave way. With something akin to shock, Lando jolted back to reality, momentarily, surprised that he could move his wrist, almost sorry as warmth crawled back into his right hand and the pins-and-needles began.

Vuffi Raa had problems larger than pins-and-needles. His own fingers were free, now, where the primitive arrows had pinned them to the ground and punctured them. His joints would be stiff and uncooperative for some while to come—shoot a bullet through a hinge sometime and learn why—but he was already plucking the projectiles from his tentacles.

The congealed fluid in each wound was hardened, not by cold, this time, but deliberately, by design, protecting his incredibly delicate inner mechanisms. He was through reclaiming fluid from the sand. The traces of raw materials he’d picked up that way wouldn’t serve him long: he’d require refuelling—something he’d only done once before in his long, long memory—perhaps even an unprecedented lubrication.

But he was alive.

Moreover, he was conscious, having the spare power, at last, to divert into consciousness. He had taken over the programmed simple-minded self-repair mechanisms, and the work was going at quadruple speed. He was beginning