Star Wars: Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu by L. Neil Smith

Author:L. Neil Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub, pdf
Tags: Science Fiction, American
ISBN: 9780345311580
Publisher: Del Rey
Published: 1983-06-12T00:00:00+00:00

XI

DEATHLY SILENCE.

Beneath a looming, monstrous, crustacean form resting on stilted legs, the twin pale moons of Rafa V

picked out metallic reflections in the night-blackened sand. Shadows overlaid at different angles with slightly differing shades: the enormous double shadow of the Millennium Falcon, hundreds of tiny double shadows of stubby wooden projectiles buried in a fragile metal carapace and nearby soil. Deathly silence and deadly cold.

Everywhere within sight of the Falcon, small, ground-hugging plants had rolled themselves into compact olive-colored balls in order to survive the frigid darkness. The air was dry, even cheer than the daytime atmosphere. The subtlest sparkling of frost showed here and there, on half-frozen plant-life, on the crest of miniature dunes, on the rims of a thousand footprints that surrounded the ship, even on the tortured, tangled mess of chromium cables lying in a heap just outside the Falcon's shadow. Fluid still stained the sand for a short distance around the pitiable heap, slow and thick and gummy now, in the frozen quiet. Yet, a few inches beneath the grainy surface, there was movement. Pseudo-organisms, shiny and metallic, mote-like, hovering at the edge of human visibility, stirred within the thickened fluid, migrated a millimeter at a time back toward the larger pseudo-organism they had tumbled from before dark. Microscopic flagella beat languidly, laboriously. Yet, centimeter by centimeter, millions of the tiny objects swam what was to them enormous distances, back to where they belonged. In their wake, the fluid became thinner, more liquid, and withdrew after them, carrying minerals and trace metals into the soil with it.

The same two moons cast double shadows several kilometers away.

Beneath a spread of glassy boughs, a figure huddled, trying to stay alive in the cold. Lando Calrissian was dying. As Vuffi Raa's life had run out into the sand, so he could feel his own life running out through his exposed skin into the frigid air, into the hungry sinister plant he was bound to. Around him, if he'd cared to look, he might have seen the same small plants rolled up into the same small, heat-conserving spheres. He might have wished that he could do the same. But he was past all that, by now. From time to time he shivered, convulsions wracking his body, seeming to tighten the painful fibers around his waist, around his wrists, cutting off the circulation even further. It was getting hard to think, and Lando didn't know whether the cold was causing that or the tree. It seemed important to figure it out. What had he heard about trees like this? That there was nothing free in the universe - that what the crystals gave to those who wore them, they had first taken from someone else. Were they taking from him now?

Most of all, it hurt. His naked feet felt as if they were on fire. Even in the parched air, frost was forming on their tips, on the nails. How cold does tissue have to be before frost will form on it.

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