Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [8]
It wasn’t quite as bad as he’d expected.
Lando shipped the droid back slow-freight, balancing the extra rental time against the transportation costs. Evening had begun to fall before he’d taken care of that, plus all of the complicated official paperwork attendant upon grounding an interstellar spacecraft anywhere the word “civilized” is considered complimentary.
Tonight, he’d relax.
He needed it, after traveling with that confounded robot. Get a feel for the territory—by which he meant identifying potential marks, locating those social gatherings that others foolishly regarded as games of chance.
Tomorrow, he’d take care of business.
The Rafa System was famous for three things: its “life-crystals”; the peculiar orchards from which they were harvested; and what might have been called “ruins” if the colossal monuments left by the Sharu hadn’t remained in such excellent repair.
The crystals were nothing special—as long as you regarded quadrupling human life expectancy “nothing special.” Varying from pinhead to fist-sized, their mere presence near the body was said to enhance intelligence (or stave off senility) and to have some odd effect on dreaming.
They could be cultivated only on the eleven planets, assorted moons, and any other rocks that offered sufficient atmosphere and warmth, of the Rafa System.
The life-orchards themselves were nearly as famous—after the manner of guillotines, disintegration chambers, nerve racks, and electric chairs. It was not the sort of agriculture amenable to automation—the crystals were harvestable only under the most debilitating and menial of conditions. However, the operation was attractive financially because it came with its own built-in sources of cheap labor, two, to be exact: the subhuman natives of the Rafa, plus the criminal and political refuse of a million other systems.
The Rafa was, among its other distinctive features, a penal colony where a life sentence meant certain death.
That much was known by every schoolchild in civilized space—at least that minority with an unhealthily precocious bent for unwholesome trivia, Lando reflected as he secured the Falcon for the night. He strolled across the still-warm asphalt to the fence-field surrounding the spaceport, intending to catch public transport into Teguta Lusat, capital settlement of the system-wide colony.
An old, old man dressed only in what appeared to be a tattered loin-cloth, hunched over a pushbroom at the margin of the tarmac. He looked up dully for a moment as Lando strode by, then back at the ground, and resumed pushing dead leaves and bits of gravel around to no apparent purpose.
Slanting sunset caught odd angles of the multicolored alien architecture that constituted foreground, background, and horizon everywhere one cared to look on this planet. Pyramids, cubes, cylinders, spheres, ovoids, each surface was a different brilliant hue. The least of the monumental structures was vastly larger than the greatest built by living beings anywhere in the known galaxy. What passed for a town lay wedged uncomfortably into the narrow spaces between them.
Under a scattering of stars, Lando stepped lightly aboard the open-sided hoverbus, arrayed in his second-best blue satyn uniform trousers, bloused over bantha-hide knee boots. He wore a soft white broad-sleeved tunic, dark velvoid vest. Tucked into his stylish cummerbund was enough universal credit to get him into a semihealthy table game—and the tiny five-charge stingbeam that was all the weapon he ordinarily allowed himself. Those who carried bigger guns tended, in Lando’s brief but highly observant experience, to think with them instead of their brains.
Alone aboard the transport, he leaned back on the outward-facing bench, unsure whether he enjoyed the unique scenery or not. Traffic was a modest trickle of wheels, hovercraft, repulsor-lifted speeders. Not a few pedestrians clumped along the quaint and