Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [30]
Interested now despite himself, Han asked, “How’d Jessa pick you for this ride?”
“She didn’t sir; I requested it. There was word that a ’droid would be selected from the general labor pool for some unstated modification. I was there, having been purchased at open auction. I went to her and asked if I might be of use.”
Han chortled. “And for that they yanked out part of you, rearranged the rest, and stuck that coin bank inside you. You call that a deal?”
“It has its disadvantages, sir. But it’s kept me functioning at a relatively high level of activity. There would probably have been some lesser vacancy for me elsewhere, Captain, even if it were only shoveling biological byproducts on a nontechnological world, but at least I have avoided obsolescence for the time being.”
Han gaped at the ’droid, wondering if he were circuitcrazy. “So what, Bollux? What’s the point? You’re not your own master. You don’t even have a say in your own name; you have to reprogram to whatever your new owner decides to call you, and ‘Bollux’ is a joke. Eventually you’ll be of no further use, and then it’s Scrap City.”
Chewbacca was listening intently now. He was far older than any human, and his perspectives were different from a man’s … or a ’droid’s. Bollux’s leisurely speech made him sound serene as he replied, “Obsolescence for a ’droid, sirs, is much like death for a human, or a Wookiee. It is the end of function, which means the end of significance. So it is to be avoided at all costs, in my opinion, Captain. After all, what value is there to existence without purpose?”
Han jumped to his feet, mad without knowing exactly why, except that he felt dumb for arguing with a junk-heap ’droid. He decided to tell Bollux just what a deluded, misfit chump the old labor ’droid really was.
“Bollux, do you know what you are?”
“Yessir, a smuggler, sir,” Bollux responded promptly.
Han, confused, looked at the ’droid for a moment, his mouth hanging open, taken off balance by the reply. Even a labor ’droid ought to recognize a rhetorical question, he thought. “What did you say?”
“I said, ‘Yessir, a smuggler, sir,’ ” Bollux drawled, “like yourself. One who engages in the illegal import or export of “—his metal forefinger pointed down at Blue Max, nestled in his thorax—“concealed goods.”
Chewbacca, paws clasped to his stomach, was rolling around on the acceleration couch, laughing in hysterical grunts, kicking his feet in the air.
Han’s temper blew. “Shut up!” he shouted at the ’droid. Bollux, again with that strange literalness, obediently swung his chest panels closed. Chewbacca’s laughter had him close to suffocation, as tears appeared around his tight-shut eyes. Han began looking around for a wrench or a hammer, or another instrument of technological mayhem, not intending to have any ’droid one-up him and survive to tell the tale. But at that moment the navicomputer bleeped an alert. Han and Chewbacca instantly charged for the cockpit, the Wookiee still clasping his midsection, to prepare for reversion to normal space.
The tedious trip to Orron III had gnawed at their nerves; both pilot and copilot were grateful for the reappearance of stars that marked emergence from hyperspace, though it was accompanied by a wallowing of the gigantic barge shell. The barge’s ovoid hull bulged beneath them, a metal can of a ship with a minimum of engine power. Jessa’s techs had executed their hull mock-up so that the Falcon’s cockpit retained most of its field of vision.
Han and Chewbacca kept their hands off the ship’s controls,