Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [57]
“The question, then, is why. What’s so flaming important about your seeing all these rocks and suchlike?”
The old man lifted his sightless head. “There must be a better word than ‘seeing,’ Captain.”
“Great Heavens, man, I’d almost—,” He had almost forgotten about Mohs’ eyes. At least the hideous wounds were healing.
Yet Mohs had not been moving like a newly blinded man, had not been stumbling and groping. He had peered at the walls, down the tunnel, listened to Vuffi Raa as if he could—
“What do you mean, ‘a better word,’ Mohs? Is there some sense better than seeing?”
The Toka Singer swiveled himself where he sat on the floor and faced Lando. He drew in a deep breath, then let it out.
“It would appear so, Captain. You are carrying the Emissary on your right ear. You have a container of water in your left hand, the remains of a food-stick in your right. Your coat is unfastened; the shirt beneath has a missing fastener, second from the top. You hold a burning weed-stick in the same hand which holds the canteen. It is approximately one-third consumed.”
Lando was as impressed as he ever was by anything. “What color are my eyes?”
“They are the color of deceit, the color of avarice, the color of—”
“Enough, enough! Don’t go getting poetic on us. Somehow you are ‘seeing’ all these things. Any idea how: clairvoyance, telepathy, psychometry …”
“I do not know the meaning of these words, Captain. I can hear the water gurgling, the weed-stick crackling, the tones within your voice and that of the Emissary. I smell things and feel vibrations in the floor. Here it is warm, there it is cold. Pictures form themselves in my mind. My remaining senses assemble information which tells me everything my eyes once did.”
“Pretty good trick. How many fingers am I—ow! Take it easy, Vuffi Raa, that’s my earlobe you’re destroying!”
“Apologies … Master.… Observe the walls.… There are the first large creatures to appear on this world.”
Vuffi Raa’s method of communication was far from perfect, but it didn’t fail to convey his excitement. Lando wondered what was so terrific about the fossils of old marine animals. Why, they looked like ordinary urchins, starfish, and the like. Perhaps that was what had moved the little robot. These things weren’t unlike him in their rough anatomy: five-sided, five-limbed.
That didn’t account for Mohs’ excitement: “Behold! Look upon the very ancestors of Those whose name it is not wise to speak in this place!”
“You mean the Sharu?” Lando said defiantly. He hated mumbo jumbo, even in a good cause, and this wasn’t.
“Yes, Captain,” the old man sighed resignedly, “I mean the Sharu.”
They were nothing more than a bunch of formerly slimy starfish, no matter whose ancestors they were.
The hours wore on, Vuffi Raa and Mohs alternating in rapture over what they observed embedded in the walls. Lando yawned, slid over onto the moving floor surface, arranged the hood of his parka comfortably, and did a little sliding of his own, in the direction of sleep.
The floor was solid, but resilient, and it was warm.
Even in his sleep, the science lectures wouldn’t leave him alone. He recapitulated the slow, steady progress—boring every step of the way—from the tiny, disgusting single-celled inhabitants of the planet’s soupy primeval waters, through the first colony organisms, up into multicelled animals, and from there to things with backbones and legs which eventually crawled out on the land.
Oddly, the further these imaginary entities got, climbing the tree of evolution, the vaguer and more nebulous they grew in Lando’s mind. Queer, shadowy shapes beat at one another with broken tree limbs. Even more intangible figures took those tree limbs, scratched the dirt with them, and planted the first seeds. By the time the ancestors of the Sharu were building tiny, crude cities, it was almost as if the cities built themselves and were inhabited by invisible citizens.
Continents were explored,