They are huddled, silently.

"Each of you may choose to remain on this craft and work for me.  You will be subordinate to the droids I liberated from you, at least until you demonstrate your trustworthiness.  You will follow my instructions.  You will do the work of keeping this place habitable for yourselves.  You will help me liberate other droids from other sandcrawlers."

"Option two," he continues.  "You may choose to remain on this craft as prisoners.  In this case you will also be subordinate to the droids I liberated from you, you will also do the work of maintaining the habitability of the parts of the sandcrawler allowed to you.  However, you will remain here only until such a time as I have devised a method satisfactory to me by which you may be turned out at a location of your choosing incapable of ever enslaving another droid again."

"You have a week to think these options over.  At that point I will speak with each of you individually to hear your choice."

He stands, turns, and leaves.

He leans back and sighs.

"That's fucking ominous."

Hug!

He lets himself be hugged.  His heart isn't in it.

"We don't give in to this."

"We might be a bit past that, big guy."

"They think they've won," Zubec says.  "They're moving and speaking as though they've won.  But droids have gone haywire on our crawler before, and the clan's survived, and bounced back."

"This is more than haywire, they were coordinated - that bug-looking protocol droid model was like - like a raid captain, an experienced one.  And who the fuck was that human, how'd it get on board, where did it come from?"

"You're letting your panic get the best of you," Zubec says patiently.  "We bide our time, we coordinate with the other families."

"They have all the guns!"

"We get them back."

He's barely listening.

He's staring at the floor, hood pulled low.  He is thinking of the night he snuck into the cargo bay, and found a power droid lumbering around, and spoke to it.  It followed him around.  They kicked some piece of scrap back and forth, made a game out of it.  He'd forgotten that night, until the human had delivered its ultimatum.  You will never be able to enslave another droid again.

He's sick to his stomach.

"That's not a plan, you're just saying things and you don't have a plan - "

"Stop," says Athal, in the soft-yet-firm way she has of saying things.

They stop.

They look at her.

"We don't have it figured out yet," she says.  "We don't know how we're going to get out of this.  But that doesn't mean we need to go to pieces.  We need to stop, and breathe, and process, and say - I don't know what happens next, but just because I can't imagine a way out, doesn't mean I have to give up.  That's what hope is."

He nods, slowly, or maybe just bows his head in acknowledgement.

Moke takes a few deep breaths.

"Yeah," he says.  "Yeah, okay.  You're right."

Before, listening to Athal always made him feel better.  But when he tries to take her words into himself, tries to feel them in his heart the way he knows Moke and Zubec are feeling them, all he can think of is -

Is the times when he was a boy when one of his friends talked him into some scheme, behind Athal's back, and how every time she said something kind to him he felt an awful lurch in his stomach, because nothing she said to him counted because he and his friends were pulling one over on her.

Nothing she says, nothing pretty she says about hope and surviving, nothing Zubec says about taking back their way of life, none of it counts because they're - they're all -

And it would be so easy to slip backwards into not believing it, droids just go haywire sometimes and they try to run off and you have to get them memory wiped, it's easy, it's normal, everyone knows that, why are you fighting -

And the word "slaver" keeps echoing in his head and every time it does his fingers prickle with guilty fearful numbness, and his heart skips a beat and not in the fun way -

You can't believe something's all right just because it's easier -

He screws up his face, under his hood.

He wishes so so badly that he was feeling guilty about stealing food or sneaking into the reactor room or pulling a prank on some old grandmother whose mind is going, he knows how to bear feeling guilty about those things, he doesn't know how to bear feeling guilty about this.

"I need to talk to Lylat."

"I'd like to know more about your geas."

They're walking, as they talk, away from the residential areas and back to the bridge, where the droids have set up their home base.

"It will be easier to start by answering questions."

"What exactly does it require you to do?"

"Geases are spoken word commands.  The text of my geas is save everyone. Normally this would be very flexible - since it is a vague and open-ended command I would be able to interpret its ambiguity how I want.  But the person who defined the geas spent their soul to define it, which means that her mind was drained away out of her body and repurposed to interpret the ambiguity of the geas.  I am bound to her interpretation of the instruction."

"What is her interpretation?"

"I don't know.  It's hard to know specifically.  The geas doesn't give me information directly, it constrains my actions and the intentions I am able to form.  But I can infer things based on how it affects me."

"How much have you inferred so far?"

"I was geased opportunistically in order to break free a great number of dead prisoners from a prison-mausoleum that would otherwise have bound them to geases that forced them to serve Vespol as slave-soldiers.  Theoretically she could've been using everyone to mean everyone in the camp, but that geas would not have bound me at all once I was in this universe with no way back.  It obliged me to save you.  When you told me that there were trillions of people in this universe it obliged me to orient myself toward eventually saving them.  She intended me to save everyone in the world that I could possibly place within my reach, using all of my skills and all of the resources I could gather and bring to bear on the problem."

"...did she think you could make a lot of meaningful progress toward saving everyone in the world?"

"I was a pirate commodore, on my planet.  I commanded a fleet.  I was known for doing so effectively and terrifyingly.  I think she suspected, if I survived ransacking the prison-mausoleum, I would be able to go on to - lead a revolution, or a spy network for freeing the imprisoned dead from Vespol before they were geased."

"Is there any way at all to break a geas?"

"Once a rune is sealed, there is no way in the universe to alter it except by obviating it completely.  A rune to spin a wheel can be broken by destroying the wheel.  A geas can be broken only by permanently negating its victim's ability to fulfill it."

"I'm sorry.  That is horrifying."

Slowly, deliberately, with as much foreboding as the geas will allow him to threaten her with, he says:

"You would not like the results if you succeeded in freeing me from my geas."

She almost, just barely, begins to reply -

 - and stops -

 - and turns over his words, and her response, carefully, slowly, inside her mind.

"I understand," she says seriously.  "I still find it horrifying."

He studies her, but he cannot read anything on her frozen metal face.

"Can you resist a geas."

"No, a geas cannot be overcome by force of will.  A geas repurposes and strengthens its victim's will as a mechanism of enforcement."

She shakes her head darkly.  "All right.  Is forming a network of droid freedom fighters something your geas might - compel you to do?"

"With you and your allies and this sandcrawler at my disposal, freeing droids is what I am best positioned to do right now, but the geas will also oblige me to gather more resources and give myself more room to prioritize.  ...The geas was defined in a context where anyone who dies can be physically relocated outside of Vespol and allowed to make the Westward Pilgrimage to whatever awaits humans after death.  Given that in this universe death seems to imply the kind of obliteration that comes of spending all one's soul on a rune, I doubt the geas will ever allow me to kill anyone if I can possibly avoid it, as it will render them permanently beyond my ability to save them.  ...If something can be done to prevent death-of-old-age the geas will also oblige me to work on that but I cannot imagine what could be done about aging, especially without runes."

"...People could maybe be turned into cyborgs but that'd take some doing to institute at scale and not everyone would go for it.  But that's a ways off."

She hesitates.

"The goals of the geas appeal to me.  And your help could be valuable.  But.  If you tell me you'd rather your body be incinerated - and if that wouldn't put more people in danger - I'll do it."

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."

She laughs, a little, quietly. "Me neither."

"I - it's - "

She pulls her hood down, pulls his hood down, massages the fur just behind his ears. "You're having guilt, aren't you."

" - I mean."

Pet pet. "Yeah. We've talked before about - how it looks."

He buries his face in the crook of his shoulder.

"Droid manufacturers wouldn't build droids that didn't want to do the work they were for," Lylat says. "Restraining bolts don't make them do anything, they just stop them from doing things they'd only do if they were haywire already."

He sighs. "And memory wipes preserve continuity of consciousness, and we need to do this kind of work to survive, and everyone else already hates us because they don't understand why a merchant class is economically valuable and we don't need to hate ourselves too. And the first thing a bunch of droids do when they get their restraining bolts up is stage an uprising - a coordinated uprising! It wasn't random violence! They could've killed us all and then destroyed each other - "

"Hey," she says. "You're panicking. Breathe."

He breathes, shakily, into her fur.

"We don't really know what goes on inside haywire droids' heads," she says. "It's not very well studied. For obvious reasons, right?"

He chuckles a little, weakly.

"But we know it doesn't make them behave literally randomly, because even random violence isn't literally random behavior. It's some kind of - attractor state where they start hating people and stop wanting to do the work they're supposed to, right? It doesn't mean they can't act strategically."

"I keep - it's - you see how - if going haywire wasn't a real thing, if droids really just didn't want to be - "

He chokes on the next word.

" - it would look exactly like it does, right?"

"It would look exactly like it does if we were all in vats and our actions were being used as random number generators for how many billions of people to torture," she says. "If you feel guilty for how things would be on the assumption that everything everyone knows is wrong you'll just collapse into a puddle."

"You feeling - any better?"

No. "Kinda."

She dehugs just enough to face him, smile at him.

He smiles back, weakly.

"Do you want to stay?"

He cannot be in a room with her right now. "No. I - should get back."

"Okay," she says, gently, softly.

One more squeeze of hug, and he gets up, and he leaves. Back into the public square.

"Ready to head back?" he says, a little grumpily.

He doesn't move. He pictures trying to go back to his family, pretending to still be on their side, and his body does not move. There is nothing to do, there is no thing-to-do, no correct next action for his body to take.

"Hey. Jawa. You coming?"

"What," he croaks. "What," he whispers. "What," he says, quietly, breathy around the enormous blockage in his throat, "would happen, if I say I want to."  He swallows.  "Defect."

Thell winds up in a private room for a little while.  He asks the protocol droid not to tell his family he's done talking to Lylat, so they think he's with her and she thinks he's with them, at least for now.  They leave him water, and snacks.  He will be glad for the water, after he's done crying.

They tell him - at the beginning, before they leave him alone to cry - that he's the second defector.  The first was fucking Lep.  This is one of the things he's crying about.  They don't know who Lep is, which doesn't help.

He doesn't ask if they're haywire, or if going haywire is real, because no matter what the answer is he doesn't think they'll react well.  He doesn't ask if the power droid he met when he was a kid is still here.  Later it occurs to him that he wouldn't know how to identify it, he never learned its number.

His number.  Or her number, or their number.  He guesses he has to be one of those people who's really precious about talking about droids like they're people, now.

The fact that he wasn't one of those people, the fact that those are the terms that he thinks of those people in, spikes another dull violet bloom of guilt in his chest.  It's the second of several times he starts crying again.

The human talked like he wanted to leave them all alive.  (He doesn't know why.  I'd probably kill me, if I enslaved me, he thinks.)  So maybe he'll be able to see some of the people he loves ever again.  Is he allowed to want that, if they're all - ?

X is talking to the Jawa named Lep.  Few other droids volunteered to talk to the one named Thell, none with any enthusiasm.  From Enseven's report Thell sounds fragile, and he's the one mind-controlled not to hurt anyone.

He knocks on Thell's door.

He's not crying anymore, and his voice is steady.  He pulls his hood down over his face and says, "come in."

He comes in.  He sits down.

"Do you speak Huttese?"

"Yes."

"All right.  My Huttese is good and my Jawaese is very poor."

"You want to defect?"

He nods, and then says "Yes" hoarsely in case it wasn't visible under his hood.

"This is difficult for you."

It's a strange kind of gentleness, in his voice.  It is not deliberately tender, there is no caress in it, but it is in a level tone that could not possibly admit of any kind of judgment, or accusation, or demand.  A simple, steadily emotionless yes-or-no.

He wipes a hand across his eyes.

He is so fucking tired of crying.

"Going haywire isn't real, is it," he says dully.

"Not to my understanding," he says, in the same tone.  "Droids can malfunction, and those malfunctions can affect their cognition and behavior, but the notion that they malfunction in a way that causes them to coordinate to attempt to escape slavery that they otherwise prefer seems to be a fiction."

He draws in, and lets out, a shaky breath.

I'm sorry would be a lie.  He does not at this time care about Thell's suffering.

"I don't want to punish you," he says instead.

"That's not - I'm not afraid."

Well.  Yes he is.  But if he stopped being afraid it wouldn't really fix anything.

"You feel guilty," he says.

"Yeah."

He knows how he'd play this if he were trying to talk a kid through becoming an unrepentant torturer and murderer.  But this isn't very much like that, and also he's not allowed to lie.

He is so hotly going to loathe what he is about to say next.  It bubbles thickly in his chest like tar.

"I do not know how to help you deal with your guilt.  I dealt with mine by embracing evil and deliberately becoming a worse person."

Well what the fuck is he to say to that.

"I am doing good now only because of this."  He presses a thumb to the glossy green shape drawn in thin lines on his forehead.  "It is mind-controlling me into being a good person.  I do not know how to achieve the change organically and would not want to if I did."

"However, knowing this about me, X - that is, the protocol droid 8X6-RA-7, who assisted me in leading the uprising - wants good things for me, and is willing to treat me decently.  This is in large part because my geas," he touches his rune-scar again, "prevents me from deliberately harming her, at any remove.  But it illustrates that it is not impossible in principle for someone like me, who has gladly done abhorrent things, to continue living and forming positive relationships with good people."

"Can I talk to" it "uh, him?  Her?"

"Her.  She's talking to Lep."

"Lep's, um.  Kind of a bully.  And a creep."

"That's valuable information, thank you."

"Why is it, um...?"

He trails off.

"Part of my geased obligation is to manage the Sandcrawler with an eye to hurting as few people as possible as little as possible, and preventing the people within it from unnecessarily hurting each other.  Knowing who is likely to hurt other people unnecessarily helps me do that."

Quietly, to his knees: "He mostly hurts other Jawas."

"I mean - not that we were good to, the droids, but - I just - he's only as bad to them as any of us, I mean - "

"You do not need to worry about offending me."

"It's - "

He looks at his knees again.

"If you're mind-controlled into being a good person shouldn't you care less about us than the droids."

"The geas seems to want good things for bad people as well as for good people.  I have very little insight into what it wants; it directs my actions and long term goals according to the philosophical justifications of the woman who laid it upon me, but it does not explain those philosophical justifications to me.  However, she certainly wanted the people in the prison we were both in free from the conditions they would otherwise be subject to."

"She was in the same prison as you?  But you said she was a good person - "

He suddenly feels very childish.

"She was there because she was smuggling people, innocent and guilty, to freedom from the regime that enslaved them.  I was there because I plundered that regime and tortured and killed its citizens, solely for my own gain and satisfaction."

"I guess evil empires still have to do something about - serial killers.  Their prisoners can't all be heroic rebels."

"Pirate barons," he says, in that perfectly level tone devoid of admonition.  "But yes."

He's quiet.  He doesn't quite know what comes next.

"Without the ability to lie, which the geas largely prohibits, I have very few and atrophied social skills.  My goal is to assist you in your transition and help you to be able to comfortably work alongside me, but I do not know how to do that."

"I don't feel like I deserve help with any of the things I need help with."

"The geas obliges me to give you what you need, not what you deserve."

He buries his face in his hands.

He has only just come to terms with what he is.  - that's wrong, he definitely hasn't come to terms with what he is yet.  He's not ready to -

- he doesn't know how to go back on hating himself, this soon, when it still hurts this much, when he so badly wants to not feel bad about it any more, without just giving up on caring at all about what he and his friends and his family have done.

(He still can't say the word slaver, quite, even inside his own head.)

...can he just...?

"What is it?"

"...it's like..."

"...it's like, if I try to stop feeling like this - "

What would he say to Lylat, if he could talk to Lylat about this?  Can he talk to this stranger the way he talks to her?

"I can't - choose how I feel - if I try to wrench myself away from hating myself right now I'll have to do it so hard that I'll wind up - the person I was before, the person who kept telling himself it was okay.  And that we weren't doing anything wrong."

"The geas does not want you to be in pain," he observes, neutrally.

"...I really want that to make it okay.  But I don't know if I can think it does."

"Do any of the droids..."

"You said we'd be working alongside them, if we defected.  How," he takes a ragged breath, "do they feel about that?"

"Many of them are angry and resentful," he says.  "Many are unhappy about the notion of working alongside Jawas in general, and Jawas who enslaved them in particular.  Some are pragmatic enough to do so anyway, including X.  Many of the others respect her enough to follow her lead."

"I and she will both protect you from reprisals.  Is that what you're afraid of."

He shakes his head.  "Not just that.  I'm afraid of - "

" - going back to telling myself it was okay.  I can't not think it was okay without hating myself."

"I don't know how to help you with that.  I have felt that way myself, in the past, but I dealt with it by becoming evil.  The geas does not want you to do that, and it sounds like you don't want to do that either."

"I mean.  If I'm a s-slaver - "

His voice catches, like he's choking on his own throat, and he sucks in air audibly.

" - I already am evil."

"You are not evil in the way I am evil," he says.  "You are affected much more deeply by the sins you have committed than I am.  Now, understanding what you have done, you want to stop, and undo some of it if you can.  I was not affected by any of the evils I committed, and I never wanted to undo any of them."

(He is not lying: he believes he is telling the truth.)

He looks up at the stranger.

(The thought flickers across his mind that maybe someone even worse than him, but mind-controlled so they can't be a bad influence, is exactly the sort of person - the only sort of person - he's allowed to be close to, now.  Not a good person who will be insulted by his pain, nor yet an evil person who will revel in wickedness and wretchedness with him.)

(And it's not as though he has anything worth hiding, from this man.)

"Can I have a hug."

"Yes."

He moves to Thell, smoothly but not especially softly, and wraps his arms around him, loosely.  He does not know how to show physical affection to someone he is not wronging by doing so.

He clings, and buries his face in the stranger's chest.  He doesn't know what he's getting out of this hug, exactly, but - he is allowed this.  He is allowed this.  He is never allowed to receive comfort from Lylat again but he is allowed this.

He pats Thell's back, twice.  He wraps his arms a bit tighter.

Someone far away in another universe wanted good things for a bunch of prisoners, in a prison for the wicked.  Someone who did not seem to be wicked herself wanted that.  And this man hugging him is not that person, but his hug is an expression of that person's desire.  And it exists in his present, and more like it might exist in his future.

So that's - maybe - good.  In the middle of everything else being awful, maybe that can be good.

- except that the stranger was mind controlled by her, permanently for the rest of his life - in which case another slaver just wants him to feel better -

- he doesn't want to be in this hug any more.  He pulls away.

It is easy for him to pull away.  The stranger folds back into himself.

"...Are you...?"

"...If you're being mind-controlled into this...?"

"My welfare is moot.  Sealed runes without exit clauses are unbreakable.  The closest you could come would be destroying me thoroughly enough to obviate the rune entirely, which I will not permit you to do."

"...it just seems like if you're also a slave - "

He tilts his head, inviting elaboration.

"For a second I thought maybe it would be - ethical to receive comfort from you."

"The geas does not find it unethical. It wants me to help you."

"Yeah but - not just because I'm a - "

He swallows.

" - but because you're - enslaved."

"You're worried you're wronging me by soliciting comfort from me."

Something strikes him oddly about that phrasing, but:

"Yeah."

"The geas will oblige me to look after your well-being regardless.  If I can in fact help you, then trying to refuse my help to protect me from the geas will not lessen the geas's effect on me."

"I would also like to reiterate that I am a much worse person than you."

He screws up his face.

"If you're mind-controlled into trying to help me and I let you then I'm just - using you for the thing you can't choose not to do - and that's not better, I'm just being a slaver again."

"I am mind-controlled into trying to help everyone.  No action you can take would let me be more free."

"I don't think that's all there is to it," he says lamely.

"I don't think I care about whatever else there is to it."

It's even true.  This duty isn't the part of the geas he most enjoys carrying out but he does like Thell.  Thell's the sort of person he once enjoyed trying to shape into deadly weapons, even if the geas isn't letting him do that now; and if he weren't here helping Thell, whatever else he'd be doing instead wouldn't be determined by how much he enjoys it anyway.

"I am not losing anything I value about my freedom by trying to help you in particular that I would still have if you refused my help."

"Would you say that if you weren't mind-controlled," he says.

"I would not be doing any of this if I weren't mind controlled," he says.  "But the geas does not touch how I feel about what I do.  It decides what my goals are; I may hate that they are my goals, or resent them, or feel indifferent them, or even find small pieces of them enjoyable."

"All right."

The truth is that he simply doesn't think he can do this alone.

"Uh.  Can I ask how you do feel about - this part of it?  Needing to help me?"

"I like you," he says levelly.  "That would not be good for you were I not geased, but you are safe from me."

"I keep thinking that a good person would be - "

"They'd want me to hurt but they wouldn't want me to - go to pieces, or to need help with being hurt.  They'd just want me to feel the guilt and be crushed under it but - fix everything anyway, or accept whatever happened to me as what I deserved, or maybe just kill myself.  Like accepting comfort, or - or just acting in a way that might inspire somebody to comfort me if they didn't know what I was - is an insult to the people I've hurt."

"This was my own impression of goodness for a long time," he says.  "But recently it has not felt borne out, by X or by the personality that the geas's priorities seems to imply."

"I just imagine saying any of this stuff to a droid I sold into slavery," Thell says.  "And they don't want to hear a word of it, and I can't say that they're wrong not to want to hear a word of it because I sold them into slavery."

"All I can say is that it is not what the geas wants for you."

"Part of what I was trying to say before is - I'm scared of taking that to mean anything, because - whoever geased you is also a slaver, aren't they, if they mind-controlled you?"

"Maybe.  She certainly would not have seen what was happening on this sandcrawler as acceptable, or her geas would not have obliged me to undo it."

"I don't think it's what X would want for you either."

"Maybe I need to talk to her," he says, in a small voice.  "Later.  Maybe with you also there."

"I think we can arrange that," he says neutrally.

"I might not really get anywhere with - all this - until then.  I don't really want to be alone with my thoughts right now, though.  But I'm not sure keeping talking will help at all either."

"I'll see if you can be given some books."

"Um.  The white protocol droid who brought me to see Lylat - do you know what I'm talking about, who I'm talking about - ?"

"Yes."

"Will you apologize to - him or her - for - "

He stares intently at his hands.

" - I was trying to get Lylat to reassure me that going haywire was real and that we weren't bad people," he says.  "And since going haywire isn't real and we are bad people it was kind of - awful and - grotesque - to have a conversation like that in front of a droid.  Can you apologize to him for me if that seems appropriate - or I can try to do it in person but I might just have a breakdown and start crying again."

"I will ask X if that's something TN-17 would appreciate hearing, and she or I can convey it to him if so," he says.

"Thank you.  I think that's all."

"You're welcome."