He's not actually sure whether being permanently rendered a disembodied immaterial spirit that can only observe the world without acting on it would be better or worse than this.  ...In principle he could still act on the world by defining and investing into runes if he drew any in advance of his incineration, though, until he ran out of soul.

...And the geas isn't even going to let him answer this question honestly, is it, it's going to oblige him to answer in whatever way will allow him to continue living and continue to fulfill the terms of the geas.  Which will at least allow him to perpetrate a flawless interpersonal deception against an innocent bystander.  He's missed that, since he was geased.  He was so good at it.

If he was sure the awfulness of being disembodied would be worse than this, he'd just say

"No."

And not elaborate, at least until asked.

"Getting everybody out was one thing, but - I don't want to enslave you."

"I am not much less constrained without a body.  I would rather be something I hate than be almost nothing."

He has no idea whether this is true.

"All right."

Then, the bridge of the sandcrawler.  The astromech droid R2-C3 is projecting a live hologram of the protocol droid TN-17, who's been appointed acting commander of the guard in the residential areas.

"Updates?"

"Someone named Lep crawled out of his hole and defected about thirty seconds after the human made his pitch," Enseven says.  "No other takers so far.  One of the holdouts wants to talk to his girlfriend, she's being held in a different house."

Everyone looks at her.

"It's probably not practical to keep them all under house arrest indefinitely."

"They could be trying to collude," Epsilon puts in, with the help of the brass-colored 3PO unit translating for it.

He rolls his neck.  "Is it necessary that we stop them from colluding."

"The bolters and the ionizers are all locked up behind passcodes they don't know and aren't likely to get," X says.  "The only guns in circulation are the ones that only work on them."

"But why take the chance?"

How to sell this.  "Further restrictions on their behavior decrease the chance of successful collusion but also make Jawas on the fence less likely to defect, and defectors can be valuable in the long term."

"...how exactly is having slavers on our side valuable in the long term?"

"Blasters and stunners drop organics, ionizers drop droids; having both in our force means our opponents not only need to have and be able to use both, but need to parse which to use from moment to moment in a fast-paced battlefield environment. This is also why I am tactically valuable to you, as I cannot be dropped by stunners or ionizers and almost certainly not by blasters either."

"More than that - showing that we're willing to accept defectors means that we might have more allies on future crawlers than just droids, and it'll make it harder for people to say we're a bunch of haywires who took over a crawler. We have reasonable demands and we can be reasoned with."

"It's a lot more than they deserve."

"We're a long way off from giving anyone as much or as little as they deserve."

It looks away and bloops something.

"Ah," its translator says when everyone looks at him, "it's not quite linguistic - think a sigh of resigned acknowledgment."

X nods.  "We've gotten a bit afield.  The upshot I think is that we lose very little from allowing the Jawas to ask to move around the residential areas and talk to each other."

Noises of agreement, or acknowledgment, or concession, from the crowd.

To TN-17: "I would say ask which house she's in, escort him there, to make sure he doesn't sneak off."

"Of course," he says, and gives a salute.

He asks Thell where Lylat lives, and he seems nervous but not necessarily in a way suggesting his plans to sneak off somewhere else have been foiled; he takes Thell there, lets him in.

"...hi."

She doesn't ask, doesn't say anything, just pulls him into a hug.

It feels - less false than the hug from Athal, but -

"Are you okay?" she whispers.

"Yeah. ...No."