Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [53]
Up until now, the rounded sides of the features he chose to call tanks were just as solid and impassable as any of the other walls. This one was different. He could stick a tentacle through it. For lack of any better course, he followed the tentacle into the circular area, where, on one spot along the curved inner side, there was a deep purplish glow. As he expected, the “tank” wouldn’t let him back out, so he felt the glowing section carefully. Yes, it, too was permeable.
He stepped through into a rectilinear room, exactly like the tankless blue ones he’d spent the last day wandering through.
Only these were a brilliant scarlet color.
One, two, three, four. He should be between two of the blue tankrooms, now, but there wasn’t any tank in here. Five, six, seven—something odd. The far wall seemed to tug at him, and the red glow was a little fainter here. He backed up and thought.
Thirty-two hours, fifteen minutes, forty-two seconds had passed since he’d gotten into this mess. He didn’t much care, now, how he got out of it.
He let the wall pull him toward itself and stepped through …
Lando sat by the transparent pyramid wall, his head in his hands. The last half hour had had its shocks, but this was the worst of all. Where the old Singer’s eyes had been, there were now a pair of deep ugly wounds—healing rapidly, it was true, and showing no signs of infection, just as the old man showed no signs of pain. But he was blind, horribly, hideously blind.
And happy about it.
“Captain,” said Mohs, “please do not be distressed. There is nothing free in this life. I seem to have exchanged my eyes for a certain understanding. I now know what I was: a retarded savage who could see, but did not know what it was he saw. Now I am an intelligent, civilized man, who happens to be blind. Do you not think it a fair trade?”
Lando grunted, poked a fìnger idly at a tiny line of dust gathered in the corner between wall and floor. Something tiny sparkled there, like a speck of metal, a fleck of mirror silvering. Curious, Lando brushed the dust away from it. It was better than answering Mohs, either truthfully or insincerely. Nothing could make up for blindness.
“Further, Captain. My new-found reasoning capacities seem to serve me in the stead of eyes to some extent. I can tell that you are sitting to my left, turned mostly to the wall, poking with a finger in the corner. I believe I know this by deducing from the sounds you make, what I know of your personality and habits—it’s quite as if I could see you.”
“I’m happy for you, Mohs,” Lando mumbled irritably. Suddenly, the minute sparkly bit grew larger, and Lando drew his hand back abruptly. “Son of a—look at this!”
Not noticing what he’d said to a blind man, Lando watched the corner. There was a spider there, a tiny one, very shiny, very fast. It skittered about frantically, trying to escape Lando. It couldn’t have been much more than three millimeters in diameter.
Lando reached down, unafraid, let the spider race up his thumb, turned the thumb down into the palm of his other hand …
And watched a nearly microscopic Vuffi Raa, accelerated to sixty times normal speed, trip over his lifeline and go sprawling.
• XV •
NO ONE HAD ever accused Vuffi Raa of being stupid.
Of course he’d recognized the hundred-meter giant looming over him, the instant he’d popped out of the final red-lit chamber and through the inside wall of the pyramid. It was his master, and what surprised him was the feeling that, whatever their current predicament, he was home.
Apparently, Lando grasped the weird situation, too. He’d held his thumb down on the floor in front of Vuffi Raa, keeping it amazingly still for the full minute the little—very little—droid required to climb its length.
For his part, Vuffi Raa was very careful: the thumbnail at this scale was rough and full of convenient handholds, but the flesh seemed