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“I see,” said Threepio. “Master Lando, should I discontinue my efforts to contact the masters of this vessel?”

“Just hang on, Threepio,” said Lando. “I’m still not sold on this. Lobot, a ship of this size and complexity, successfully evading capture for more than a hundred years—there must be something or somebody in charge.”

“Something, yes. But not something sentient. I believe we were deceived by the apparent complexity into invoking a god hypothesis.”

“A god hypothesis?”

Lobot nodded. “When we spoke of the masters of this vessel, we assumed there was a consciousness observing us and controlling events in our environment,” he said. “We even turned to these masters to save us, respectfully offering entreaties and hoping for their intervention on our behalf.

“But there’s no indication the ship is aware of us, beyond its local awareness of our effects on it. Its responses have the character of autonomic functions. I now believe the vagabond is an automaton of great sophistication, employing rule-based responses incorporated into its fundamental structure.”

“What rule could it have been following when it tried to suck me out into space?”

“You were using a blaster, and caused a breach which did not heal,” said Lobot. “You could have triggered a rule specifying that fires be extinguished by exposure to vacuum.”

Lando’s cheeks wrinkled as he weighed Lobot’s argument. “So you want us to start pushing buttons at random, is that it?”

“We know it responds to touch. We were probably wrong to conclude that it responds negatively.”

Lando continued to vacillate. “Still quiet outside, Artoo?”

Artoo chirped a single beep, recognizable as “Yes.”

Looking back at Lobot, Lando shrugged and gestured with an open hand. “After you.”

Nodding, Lobot unlocked and removed his gauntlets one at a time, clipping them to tool stays on the contact suit. Then he jetted to the nearest part of the enclosing wall, reached out both hands, and pressed the palms lightly against the surface. When nothing happened, he started sliding to his left. The wall of the chamber began to rise under his hands, as though it were shaping itself to an invisible mold.

“My goodness gracious!” Threepio suddenly cried out. “Artoo, do you see?”

Lobot retreated hastily to the middle of the chamber, but the transformation continued. Broad disks appeared and grew into squat cylinders. Ridges defined long arcs across the display, shadowing the rippled patterns spilling down the curves of a hemisphere. Color appeared but did not overwhelm—there were swirls of a pale blue and spikes of a soft yellow, and none respected the boundaries of the geometries they overlaid.

Lando’s eyes twinkled with delight. “I never thought you were the artistic type, Lobot.”

Returning to the wall, Lobot touched the drumlike surface of one of the cylinders. The chamber was suddenly filled with music, a haunting duet of intertwined melodies that rose and fell like swells in a gentle sea.

“I’m not letting you have all the fun,” Lando said with a grin, peeling the makeshift glove off his right hand and jetting to the opposite wall.

It answered his touch with a great rectangle pierced by two long channels and filled with finer detail than the sculpture it faced. Lando did not know the meaning of the pattern, but he could see the scar his blaster had left in it—a circular bite out of the upper edge of the rectangle, obliterating twenty or more of the myriad smaller cells within it.

The damage did not dampen Lando’s enjoyment for long. The two men flew about the chamber like nimble, persistent insects until they had tested its entire surface. There was something marvelous about the way a simple touch of the hand brought the empty chamber to life.

But the most splendid discovery of all—in Lando’s eyes, at least—was the doorway that opened for him at one end of the chamber, and its twin, which Lobot manifested at the other.

Lando did not know where either might lead them, but he much preferred an uncertain choice to no choice at all.

In the