Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [49]
“Well, Mohs, I realize you’ve had breakfast, or whatever you call it, but I could use another bite. This seems to be a bust. What say we repair to the ship and—Vuffi Raa?”
As he had spoken to the old man, he’d turned to look at the robot.
Vuffi Raa had vanished.
“Mohs, did you see that—Mohs?”
The instant Mohs was out of Lando’s field of view, he had disappeared, exactly like the droid, without a sound, without a movement.
The sun shone. The wind blew. The sand lay on the ground.
• XIV •
LANDO CALRISSIAN WAS not, ordinarily, a physically demonstrative young man. His livelihood and well-being depended on dexterity and control, the subtle, quick manipulation of delicate objects, the employment of fine and shaded judgment.
He smashed a fist into the pyramid wall.
And reeled with surprise. Where, before, contact with the building had been much like ducking one’s head into a stiff wind—elusive but unquestionably real—now the experience had taken on the aspect of fantasy.
His hand passed into the wall and disappeared as if the structure were a hologram. He withdrew the hand, looked it over, flexed it. He inspected the wall without touching it: the material itself was featureless, seemingly impervious to time, weather, the puny scratching and chipping of man. Yet there was a fine patina of dust, a film of oil or grease that seemed to coat everything within the planet’s atmosphere. Lando could plainly see a single fine hair, neither his own nor one of Mohs’—perhaps that of some animal that had wandered by or which had been borne on the wind until it stuck here.
He thrust his hand into the solid-looking wall again. Again it disappeared up to the wrist. He stepped forward until he lost sight of his elbow, shuddered, backed away. And, again, his hand, his arm, were intact, unharmed.
Lando Calrissian was nothing if not a cautious individual. Someone else might have plunged through the wall in pursuit of Vuffi Raa and Mohs, for it was clearly where they’d gone. But to what fate? If your best friend zipped from sight into a trapdoor in the floor, would you follow him onto the steel spikes below?
Lando pushed his hand into the wall again, meeting no more resistance than before. It was as if the wall weren’t there—except as far as the eyes were concerned. He closed his own, and felt around. There wasn’t enough breeze outside that he could tell about the wall’s effect on air currents. The temperature felt the same. He was free to wiggle his fingers, clench and unclench his fist. He snapped his fingers, felt the snap—but couldn’t hear it outside the wall.
Thrusting in a second hand, he felt the first. Both felt quite normal. He clapped them, feeling the sensation, missing the usually resultant noise. Odd. He placed his right hand around his left wrist, slid the hand slowly up the arm until it reappeared, much like a hand and arm emerging from water—except that this surface was vertical. He stooped, picked up a handful of sand, reinserted his arms, poured sand from one hand to the other.
He pulled his arms out, threw the sand away …
… and stepped through the wall.
Sometimes you have to take a gamble.
* * *
He hadn’t thought of that before.
Old man Mohs, ancient and revered High Singer of the Rafa Toka, had been leaning against the pyramid wall when the Key-Bearer inserted the Key. Suddenly, it had been as if the wall weren’t there, and, in the short fall into darkness that resulted, his garment had nearly been lost.
All his long, long life, Mohs had put up with the chilly draft that found its way beneath the simple wraparound. Now, even in the darkness, even in this terrifying, holy place, it had occurred to him that he could take a long free end of the cloth, tuck it up between his legs, and eliminate the draft.
Why hadn’t he thought of that before? Why hadn’t anybody else among his people? He found himself thinking cynically that this little