Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [58]
All the while, Lando experienced a growing sense of unease, some vague pain or nagging that made his sleep less restful than it might have been. He’d had no idea, all day, where they were going. There wasn’t any choice in the matter for him: he had to find the Mindharp, and then figure out how to get out of the tunnel, away from the ruins, off the stinking planet, and, ultimately, clear of the Rafa once and for all.
They’d never catch him bringing mynocks into the Rafa System again!
Or anything else.
The sense of unease grew, gradually metamorphosing into something resembling real pain. Lando tossed and turned in his sleep, but kept on dreaming.
The ancestors of the Sharu had built roads and buildings that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to any civilized inhabitant of the galaxy. They had traveled in powered vehicles, eventually spread themselves to other planets of the system. At first they endured the harsh conditions on some of these globes, living in domes or underground. Finally, they had begun transforming them into replicas of their own home planet.
It hadn’t always been a desert. There had been oceans and trees and lakes and snow-covered mountains. There had been moisture in the air, and weather. How long ago all that had been, the part of Lando that did the dreaming wasn’t prepared to guess. How long does it take for the seas to go away?
Gradually, however, as their technology surpassed that which was currently available in Lando’s civilization, the shapes of buildings changed, the roads disappeared. The unseen entities who were becoming the Sharu fought no more wars, but struggled, instead, with the environment. No rock, whirling in its independent orbit around the Rafa sun, was too insignificant to be altered into a garden. To what precise purpose became increasingly unclear. Cities ceased to resemble anything that made sense. The first of the gigantic plastic structures appeared—on Rafa V. Then they appeared on the other planets, as well.
Taken altogether, they were nightmarish things. Lando squirmed in his sleep, flailed his arms and sweated. Every surface and angle was somehow wrong, things were added that seemed without function, passageways tapered out into tiny pipelines, hair-fine fractures became vast thoroughfares, in no logical order. The seas began to vanish, red sand replacing landscape everywhere. Had something gone wrong with the Sharu environment, or did they like it better the new way, plan it?
Lando sank deeper into a dreamless, pain-filled sleep. His last thought was a question: would this passage funnel down until the inexorably moving floor ground them into tiny pieces?
Lando woke up.
Somewhere, for a fraction of a second, he had the feeling that everything made sense after all. Then the feeling went away and left him with a terrible lingering headache.
“Vuffi Raa, are you awake? You’re going to have to find another perch for a while, my whole head hurts!” He rolled over on his back from the curled-up position he’d taken in the night.
“Masteryou’reawakeatlasthowdoyoufeel?”
He sat up—a sudden blast of pain hit him and he settled back again for a moment. “Take it a little slower, will you?” He lifted a hand to his ear. “Hop down a minute while I get rid of this headache.”
He felt a feather touch his palm. The pain subsided. Bringing his hand down, he looked at Vuffi Raa. Something was funny, but he couldn’t place it in his present groggy state.
The walls rolled by, this time showing discarded metal and plastic containers, parts of machinery and electronics frozen into the geological matrix. How long does a civilization have to last before its radios and televisions become fossils?
“Now, what was it you were saying, little fellow?”
“Merely … greeted … you … Asked … how