Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia by L. Neil Smith

more terrible than they, something they feared greatly, although whether another species, some disease, or some unimaginable something else, we cannot so much as conjecture. They left their massive buildings, they left, apparently, the life-orchards whose original function is as obscure as everything else regarding the Sharu, and they left the Toka, crushed and enfeebled by some aspect of their experience with the Sharu.”
    Lando reflected on Gepta’s words while he let himself be offered another cigar.
    It seemed to him that the question of what broke the Broken People was of considerably less pragmatic interest than whatever put such a scare into their superhuman masters. He hated to think of something like that still hanging around the galaxy.A starship captain’s life (he knew better from vicarious experience than from any of his own) carried him through many a long, lonely parsec in the darkness. And many a ship has disappeared without so much as a trail of neutrinos to mark its passing.
    The Toka servant, skirting Gepta, lit Lando’s cigar.
    The latter said, finally, “What’s all this got to do with me?”
    From within the voluminous folds of his ash-colored robes, Gepta extracted an object about the size of a human hand, constructed of some lightweight, bright untarnished golden metal.
    It was Lando’s turn to blink.
    Viewed from one perspective, the device seemed to be a large, three-tined fork—until the gambler looked again. Two tines or four? Or maybe three again? The thing just wouldn’t settle down in his field of vision, giving him, instead, the beginnings of a headache when he stared at it too closely or for more than a few seconds.
    Gepta placed the object carefully on Duttes Mer’s crystalline desk, where it seemed to writhe and pulse without actually moving. The governor gazed dowr at it with an uninterpretable expression on his face—somewhere between dismay and greed.
    “We have reason to believe,” Rokur Gepta hissed, “that this object is a Key—perhaps it is a miniature of the Mindharp itself, although that is only surmise. It was … shall we say,
obtained
in an altogether different system, from a small, shabby museum. But it came originally from the Rafa System and is a Sharu artifact. Of that there is not the slightest doubt.”
    Somehow, without being told, Lando knew that there were volumes of adventure, betrayal, and deceit behind the sketchy explanation Gepta had just given. He had no doubt it was a story best left untold.
    “A key,” he repeated. “What the blazes does it unlock, if one may ask?”
    “One may ask,” the sorcerer replied in a threatening whisper, “but with a great deal more deference and respect in the future than is your customary practice!”
    “A thousand pardons!” Lando tried to keep the sarcasm he felt out of his voice, with only partial success. “Pray what does it unlock, noble magician?”
    Gepta paused as if trying to gauge Lando’s sincerity, then shrugged it off as of no practical consequence. “There is evidence to indicate it provides access to the Mindharp of Sharu.The Mindharp is the focus of a thousand Toka rituals. The fools believe it produced music so sweetly compelling—isn’t that just precious!—that it was capable of swaying the most unfeeling of hearts, even across vast distances of space.”
    The Rafa
was
a multiplanet system, but, given the millions of miles of hard vacuum between planets, Lando reserved judgment. He’d seen legends come to nothing before.
    Gepta mentioned that some versions of the legends had the Mindharp as the principal means of communication between the mighty Sharu and their human “pets.” What the Mindharp looked like and precisely where it might be found, these questions remained unanswered.
    It was up to Lando to answer them.
    Or else.
    For his part, Lando wondered what the value of such an instrument might be to a system governor or a Sorcerer of Tund. And he wondered again about the terrible