Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [54]
Not that that wasn’t the situation now.
With incredible slow steadiness, Lando had raised the robot up to his eye level, then across his mountainous chest, over to the other hand. Vuffi Raa tumbled down into the waiting palm, righted himself, and looked up into the giant eye that peered down at him.
“Master! What a mess! What are we going to do?”
“EEEVVVUUUFFFEEE EEEUUURRRAAAHHH,” responded Lando, taking at least twenty seconds to do it, his voice low and thunderous. A human being in Vuffi Raa’s position might not have been able to hear what Lando said—the little droid’s range of hearing was impressive—but he’d certainly have felt it.
Now the robot understood his master’s unnatural rock-steadiness. There seemed to be some difference in their perception of time, correlative to the difference in their sizes. Lando was living at a vastly slower rate than Vuffi Raa. He considered the problem for what would have seemed a millisecond to his master, then gave forth a series of loud chirps, spaced evenly over about a minute’s time, each burst carefully shaped and calculated to blur with the ones before and after into something the giant could follow:
“Can’t understand you, Master,” Lando heard a tiny voice say, “Can you hear me?”
Lando wasn’t stupid, either. He could see how quickly, jerkily, Vuffi Raa was moving about in his hand, and figured out that time—or at least metabolism—was flowing differently for each of them. He even had a good idea how Vuffi Raa was managing to communicate with him, although none whatsoever as to how he could communicate back.
He decided on short words: “Yes.”
Vuffi Raa received this as “EEEYYYEEEAAASSSSS,” but the part of him that was a high-powered computer quickly squashed it all together (as it had eventually learned to do when Lando called him by name) and formulated a brief reply—although it would take a much longer time to transmit:
“Ask Mohs about this.”
“OOOGGGAAAIIIEEE!”
Giant-to-giant: “I say, Mohs old fellow, what does your new-found cogitational capacity tell you about this distressing turn of events? I believe I’ve got the galaxy’s smallest droid here, but I don’t think he’s appreciating the distinction very much.”
Wrapping the loincloth back around his middle by feel, the old shaman shuffled up beside the gambler, cocked an ear over the tiny robot in lieu of peering down at him with ruined eyes, and thought his answer over for a moment.
“I do not know of any Song which speaks of such a thing as this. He can hear us, can he not?”
“Yes,” came the small, clear reply, almost as quickly as Mohs has asked the question, and long before Lando could respond. This method of communication seemed to work satisfactorily for the organic giants, Lando realized, but it must be agonizing unto tears for the tiny speeded-up droid, each word requiring many seconds to assemble, then the even more annoying molasses-like wait for the humans, with their slower reaction time, to answer.
“Captain,” the old man said, seemingly unwilling to address a spider-sized machine directly, “I can see—in a manner of speaking—no intelligent alternative but to go on with our search for the Harp. We can do nothing for your friend here. Perhaps some solution lies ahead of us.”
“Agreed,” Vuffi Raa said before Lando had a chance to think about it. Meanwhile, the miniature automaton had also had time to think to become thoroughly fascinated with the examination of his giant master’s hand. The epidermis was shingled like a shale field, and the fine ridges were like furrows made by a plow. Lando’s pulse was a quiet, steady earthquake every few minutes. Open pores lay scattered abut like gopher holes.
Finally, long after Vuffi Raa had tired of his explorations:
“AAAIII EEEGGGIIIEEESSS EEEIIIYYYOOOUUURRR EEERRRAAAIIITTT.”
Eventually, Vuffi Raa managed to convey a question about travel