Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [56]
“I don’t think so.… It never fully leveled out.… Starting a gradual downward spiral.”
“So? At what rate?” Lando repeated. The old Toka Singer listened to this exchange as it went on, a strange look on his blinded face. “What’s the apparent diameter of the spiral?”
“Whose scale?”
Lando chuckled. “A good question. Make it mine, if you don’t mind. I’ve got to figure it out, haven’t I?”
Vuffi Raa refrained from saying that Lando hadn’t been much good so far at figuring out anything—and only partly because communications were such a chore. Instead, he simply divided everything his sensors told him by approximately sixty.
“Ten klicks at current rate. Drops a hundred meters every thirty kilometers.”
“Can you tell how fast this thing is carrying us?”
“About twenty kph. One full spiral every one-twenty-third of a planetary revolution.
The journey went on and on. Hours passed.
It was Vuffi Raa who first noticed the changes in the walls.
“Master. Please observe that something is visible.”
“I see it.” Lando peered through the transparency. Where before there had been inky blackness, now some form and structure could be seen, like a highway cut through a mountain pass. “We’re out of the pyramid! Below it!”
• XVI •
THEY TRAVELED THROUGH the heart of the planet.
This was not precisely true, as Vuffi Raa was already pointing out, but it was a metaphor that suited Lando.
The geological strata they were seeing dated, according to the little droid, from the beginnings of life on Rafa V. Beds of stone formed by tiny microscopic creatures living in seas that no longer existed on the ancient, dried-up sphere alternated with slabs of solidified lava from volcanic eruptions. Vuffi Raa’s fine vision—and perhaps the fact that he was so small—enabled him to see and describe the smallest details through the transparent glass.
“And here we see … Master … the evidence of the first cellular colonies … the precursors of multicelled animals.”
“Don’t call me Master, especially when you’re lecturing me. Do you want a bite of this, Mohs?”
Lando had delved into the pockets of his survival parka for water and condensed rations. Vuffi Raa hadn’t any need of them, but the old man surprised Lando by accepting only a small portion from the plastic canteen.
Otherwise, the ancient High Singer had been strangely quiet for hours, watching the walls, peering ahead into a gloom that was something other than darkness, listening to Vuffi Raa. How much the old man understood of the droid’s paleontological dissertations, he had no way of guessing.
“But if we’re seeing the slow, steady progress of microscopic life,” Lando asked Vuffi Raa, “doesn’t that mean we must be gaining altitude again?”
“On the contrary … Master … the corridor leveled out some time ago … and straightened.… We’re traveling in a diagonal upthrust formation.”
For some reason, this bothered Lando. He wished the robot had kept him informed on the shape and direction of their travel. More, this was almost as if … as if …
“They chose this route deliberately, didn’t they? So we’d see what we’re seeing!”
“They, Captain?” Mohs spoke up, surprising Lando. The old man had long since discovered that he could travel on a moving sidewalk just as easily by sitting down as standing. Lando had joined him, and they were sitting a few feet apart now. Lando had been thinking about taking a nap before the walls grew transparent and the geology lectures began. He was still thinking about it.
“You know perfectly well who I mean. There’s some purpose to all this, isn’t there?”
“If so, Captain, the Songs do not—”
“I’ll bet they don’t! Mohs, the primary purpose of those Songs of yours was to make sure somebody, someday, wound up sitting precisely where you are.”
“So I, too, had surmised.”
Lando searched through his pockets, found a cigarette. He didn’t smoke much at all, and when he did, he preferred cigars. Whoever had packed this parka—an Imperial