Star Wars_ The Adventures of Lando Calrissia - L. Neil Smith [73]
Freeble-reeep!
From the heavily planted median on the Esplanade, an entity that might have been a songbird warbled noisily in what may have been a bush, momentarily distracting the little robot. You could never tell. In the plush, cosmopolitan resort, the creature doing the singing might well be a photosynthetic vegetable attempting to attract pollen carriers, and the foliage it perched in, a soil-rooted animal. The entire Oseon System was like that, a rich-man’s playground, cleverly intended by those who had ordained its construction to be full of surprises.
But then, so was life itself. Their very presence in this overstuffed watering hole, his and his master’s, was ample testimony to that.
Vuffi Raa forced his jumbled thoughts back into relevant channels. He was a Class Two droid, with intellectual and emotional capacities roughly equaling those of organic sapients. And an uncorrected tendency in his programming to let his mind wander and to mix his metaphors on occasion. It was a price he paid for being one of the rare machines abroad with an imagination.
At the moment, it was a luxury he couldn’t afford. He held the blackened evidence before his eye again as a reminder. It was a fist-sized chunk of scorched metal and fused silicon. A few hours ago, it had been a neutrino hybridizer, a delicate and critical component in the sub-lightspeed drive of a certain class and vintage of starship.
Now it looked like a microcredit’s worth of asteroid mine-tailings.
Unconscious of a gesture he had acquired from long association with human beings, Vuffi Raa raised his free tentacle to scratch at the upper portion of his five-sided torso—the closest thing he had to a head. The little droid was pentadextrous, having no preference as to which of his five sinuous limbs he used for getting around on, which he used for holding, carrying, or manipulating objects. Such as treacherous lumps of recently molten quartz and platinum.
A well-rounded, versatile, and radially symmetrical fellow was Vuffi Raa.
And a very worried one.
His brisk but absentminded pace carried him past a leaf-shaded decorative pond where something between a green mammal and a small many-jointed insect dabbled a line—actually an extension of its right front leg—into half a meter of water. There was a modest ripple, a splash, then a snap! The creature reeled in a tiny, colorful fish, devouring it on the spot and spitting the bones back into the water.
Vuffi Raa never even noticed.
At long last he reached the expensively decorated surface entrance of the exclusive Hotel Drofo. With a brotherly salute, Vuffi Raa strode past the door-being, a robot painted in the garish gold and purple livery of the establishment, and went directly to one of the eight down-shafts leading into the hotel proper.
On an asteroid, even one like Oseon 6845, and even where a first-rate hotel is concerned, surface area comes dear. Volume is cheap.
Selecting LOBBY on the miniature display beside the entrance to the down-shaft, he waited for the elevator to take his measure, then fell—“drifted” might be a better word—at a fraction of the augmented surface acceleration of the asteroid gently downward several dozen meters, coming at last to a cushioned rest at the bottom of the shaft. He stepped out into the whispery bustle of the underground hotel.
Plenty of other droids were in evidence, mingling freely with the humans, humanoids, and nonhumans present. Most of the automata here were in service of one sort or another; they were unusually conspicuous in their number and visibility.
The galaxy over, robots were the object of harsh and persistent prejudice. The Oseon was different, however. Cynics pointed out that neither its current inhabitants nor their ancestors were ever likely to have worried much about losing a job. The place was filled with exiled and vacationing nobility. Captains of industry, active and retired, gravitated