Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [81]
But, as the assistant manager of that pink plush-lined cavern had phrased it, “You sound like a festerin’ jizz-box. I got a festerin’ jizz-box right over there in that corner.”
And Threepio, even had his programming permitted him to argue with a human, would have been hard put to find grounds for disagreement. Before seeking another resort of public entertainment, therefore, he gave the matter some thought.
It was, as usual for Nim Drovis, pouring rain, and those citizens for whom consumption of liquid befuddlement took precedence over defending their homes and families, if any, from the street fighting in sporadic progress all over the city were scarcely a promising lot. The denizens of the Chug ’n’ Chuck seemed to consist mostly of Drovian soldiers on three-hour furlough, professional mold-and-fungus removers—a hard-bitten lot with their flame and acid throwers slung over their backs, Drovian molds and fungi being what they were—a scattering of the small-time providers of goods and services prohibited at the more polite levels of society; and the joy-boys and lolly-girls associated with every species represented on the planet, together with their forbidding-looking business managers. Given their wholesale absorption of alcohol, sundry chemicals, and spice, Threepio did not hold high hopes for his and Artoo’s success in this venue, either, but he was surprised.
Entertainment, he had long ago deduced, seemed (as far as he could judge) to be based on random mixtures of incongruous elements. Therefore, taking into account the words of the assistant manager of the Wookiee’s Codpiece, he had acquired a concertinium, a set of violion twitch bells capable of activation through one of his chest jacks, and a drum for Artoo. Randomly digitalizing patterns of notes for every one of those thirty thousand songs popular in the Core Worlds over the past seventy-five years for reproduction on these three instruments and recalibrating his voice circuits to reproduce the tones of such luminaries as Framjan Spathen and Razzledy Croom, he was able to produce quite passable music, although Artoo, as a result of the switch boxes and Pure Sabacc’s computer circuits still taped and jacked and wired into him, was a little eccentric as far as the rhythm line was concerned. Threepio was quite proud of the result; and had his audience been sober, he was sure they would have appreciated just how good the entertainment was.
And indeed, the one individual in the Chug ’n’ Chuck not engaged either in boozing himself into insensibility or behaving toward the opposite sex in a manner usually reserved for one’s honeymoon did applaud Threepio’s rendition of Gayman Neeloid’s “The Sound of Her Wings” and tossed a credit piece into the basket perched, hatlike, on Artoo’s domed cap.
“Can you play Mondegrene’s Fuge in K?” he asked, naming a classical piece of great antiquity and grandeur, which Threepio had only heard performed by full orchestra with thunder cannons and a dual-spectrum light organ.
It was one of Threepio’s favorites, the mathematical complexity of it a source of endless delight to his logic circuits. He leaned a little over Artoo’s bass percussion. “In its entirety?” he inquired hopefully.
His audience, a sturdy little Chadra-Fan whose silky golden fur could have been much improved by a session in one of the spaceport’s grooming parlors had any been open, nodded enthusiastically. He signaled the bartender for a refill on his megavegiton ale. “Do you have it all in your programming?”
“Hey,” grunted