Jos pushed I-Five into an empty booth. "Your gamer friend borrowed it."
"I-Five," Den said, "I think maybe it's time to sober up
I-Five shrugged. Jos wouldn't have thought the gesture possible for a
drunken droid with only one arm. "If you say so." His photoreceptors
flickered for a moment, then resumed what Jos thought of as their normal
glow.
The droid looked about him in mild surprise. "Interesting."
"Wish sobering up was that easy for me," Jos said.
A human female brought the arm over to them, handing it to Jos. "Here,"
she said. "You might want to program your droid to avoid games with Wookiees
in the future. They're, uh, very competitive."
I-Five looked at the arm. "So I have determined."
Jos examined the arm's exposed end. "I'm no cy-bertech," he said, "but
it looks like this can be reattached fairly easily." He looked at the droid.
"You're lucky he didn't pull your head off."
"True," I-Five agreed. "That would have been considerably harder to
fix."
"What were you thinking, challenging a Wookiee to a dejarik game?"
"I wasn't thinking. That was the point. I was drunk- or at least as
close to it as I could program."
Jos shook his head in amazement. "Come on," he said. "Let's head over
to the shop and see if anyone's still there who can fix you up. Reattaching
mechanical limbs is a bit beyond my expertise."
The three left the cantina and walked through the hot night air, I-Five
holding his dismembered arm. Den said,
"I'd feel terrible if I was responsible for you getting drunk and into
a bar fight-if it turned out not to be worth it."
"I think it was," I-Five said. "I think it was very worthwhile." He
looked at Jos. "Remember my mentioning that I seemed to be having an anxiety
attack?"
Jos nodded.
"I believe it was born out of conflicting impulses based on new data
garnered from regaining all of my memory files-including several regarding
my erstwhile friend and partner, Lorn Pavan.
"I remembered that I have an obligation to fulfill-one that involves my
returning to Coruscant as soon as possible. But to do so would be to abandon
my responsibilities here. This was a problem that could not be solved by an
application of logic. I needed intuition-the ability to sense what was right
by mechanisms far older than logic and application of data.
"I needed, somehow, to jar my synaptic grid cortex into another mode-a
totally nonlinear mode. Thus, the concept of altering my sensory input and
perception of data."
"Did it work?" Den asked.
"I believe so. I have decided on a course of action."
"You leaving us, I-Five?" Jos asked.
"Not immediately." The droid did not amplify his comment.
Jos couldn't resist. "But," he said, "you're a machine, remember?
Programmed to be an automaton, no more. So what does it matter how you reach
a decision?"
I-Five looked at him. "You're enjoying this, aren't you?"
"Oh, yeah."
"All of what I have said before is technically true," the droid said.
"But I've come to realize it's possible for things to be more than the sum
of their parts. And that a difference that makes no difference is, for all
practical purposes, moot. I think I was, for lack of a better term, afraid.
I believe that I was trying to convince myself, more than you, that I am not
what you, Barriss, and a few others here see me as. I was, however, lacking
necessary information to reach the right conclusion."
"And that would be . . . ?"
"That I am indeed sentient," I-Five said.
Jos grinned, and slapped the droid on his durasteel back. "Took you
long enough to figure it out."
They found an Ishi Tib tech, half asleep under a tool bench. At first
he was surly, but the bottle of Corellian wine that Den had grabbed as
they'd left proved an effective bribe.
As the tech was reattaching I-Five's arm, spot-welding snapped
junctions and splicing sensory cables and hydraulic circulatory piping, Jos
said, "By the way, it's none of my business, but I'm curious-just what is
the obligation you remembered?"
I-Five didn't answer right away, and the silence stretched long enough
for Jos to begin to wish he hadn't asked. Then the droid said, "It was a
request of Lorn's. He asked me to watch over his son."
29
Barriss could not sleep. Her experience with the Force continued to
echo in her, stronger by far than after the first time, bringing up powerful
flashes of the wondrous cosmic consciousness she had been a part of-along
with the feeling of important things going undone. She wanted to return to
that place-to stay there, if at all possible.
Maybe it was cumulative. Maybe it would come to pass that, eventually,
she could swim in that magical sea on her own, at will, and without the bota
to deliver and keep her there.
There hadn't been any new revelations. The danger to the camp was
approaching, but it was not yet at hand. On some level, she knew she had
enough time to decide upon a course of action. On another level, what that
course of action would be seemed utterly beyond her capabilities.
Beyond her unamplified capabilities. But nothing seemed too big for her
to handle while connected in the Force by the miracle of the bota. She knew,
right to the depths of her bones, that what she could do with the Force in
that state would be astounding, once she got used to it. Once she learned to
not control it, but to flow with it, to be it.
She now understood how it was that the greatest Jedi Masters could
sense things even parsecs away, information gained far faster than by
subspace packet; she had now the knowledge-the certainty-that the universe
was of an entire piece, each part connected to all the others, webbed
together by vibrating strands of the Force that stretched through
dimensions -utterly beyond the ken of her senses-and she knew her place in
it, and that all things, great and small, were precisely in position. As
they had always been, and as they always would be, worlds without end.
There was a temptation to rush out and harvest bota by the bale, render
it into fluid, and install a constant-feed pump on her arm to trickle it
into her system continuously. She wondered if that was the desire of a
seeker, or an addict.
She wondered if there was any difference.
In any event, she could take this new knowledge back to the Jedi
Council, and with it the Jedi could become more powerful than anyone could
possibly imagine. They could stop this war, as well as prevent others from
starting. They could abolish slavery, transform barren worlds into lush
paradises, chase evil to the ends of the galaxy and strike it down! Nothing
would be beyond their capabilities-the power was that immense!
It all swam in Barriss, overwhelming in its intensity. Even now, she
could barely contain the memory of it.
But first, before she went too far into the void, she had to deal with
the camp situation. That would be easily accomplished. Then, she could
address the larger issues . . .
Den hurried through the camp to the launch platform, hoping that he
wasnrt too late. Milking fool, he thought, of all the days to oversleep-/
He hardly ever bothered with alarm chronos-like most of his kind, Den
had an inner timekeeper that went along with his keen sense of direction.
Usually it adjusted to the day-and-night cycles of whatever world he was on
fairly quickly, taking no more than a standard week at most, and he'd been
on this planet a lot longer than that.
But on the one day he needed it the most, wouldn't you just know it
would kick out on him, and he'd sleep just long enough to maybe miss the
transport departure of the HNE folk, including Eyar?
After the proposal she had made and he had accepted, he couldn't let
her leave without saying good-bye. It was hard to know just when he would
see her again. And when he did, it would be as part of the extended family
that would include, by all accounts, a truly staggering number of
younglings.
He was to be a patriarch, a hoary old dispenser of wisdom. To sit
somewhere deep in the warren and dole out nuggets of sage advice to the
young and foolish.
The whole thing didn't seem quite as appealing now as it had when Eyar
had described it to him.
The entertainers were being ferried up to MedStar, where their own
transport was docked. Eyar had been scheduled for the first lift up.
Den came around the corner of the launch facility's main building in
time to see the few members of the troupe moving up the ramp. Eyar was one
of them,
He ran forward, pushing his way through the taller beings that
surrounded him, mostly techs and other workers. "Hey!" he shouted. "Eyar!
Wait!" Blast it, he couldn't see anything but legs-legs covered with
clothing, fur, or scales; digitigrade legs, plantigrade legs; a veritable
forest of supporting limbs. At last he reached the gate.
"Eyar!"
She was walking sadly up the ramp, the last to leave. At his cry she
whirled, and when she saw him, her eyes, her face, her whole body lit up.
"Den-la!"
He was so relieved she hadn't left yet that he didn't care that she'd
attached the familiar-suffix to his name in public. They embraced.
"I was afraid you wouldn't come! What happened?"
To tell her he'd overslept would be a bad idea-this he knew almost
instinctively. She'd be offended that he'd nearly missed her leave-taking
for so trivial a reason. "Had a comm from HNE," he said. "Some talk about
one of my articles from last year being made into a holo. Finally had to cut
'em off and run all the way to get here."
Amazing how easily the lie came out of him-amazing, and not a little
bit dismaying. But it worked. She looked at him with starry-eyed love. "Come
back to Sullust soon," she whispered. She nuzzled his dewflaps one more
time, and then turned and ran up the ramp.
Den moved back behind the field radius. The transport, silent save for
the thrum of the repulsorlifts, rose quickly and disappeared into the glare
of Drongar Prime.
Den walked slowly back to his kiosk. It had been so easy to lie to her.
One could argue that it was a small incident, trivial and unimportant. One
could argue that he'd lied out of beneficence, to save her from hurt
feelings, One could argue all kinds of things, but none of them had any more
validity or authenticity than a Neimoidian's handshake.
He was a scoundrel.
Eyar was sweet and sincere and trusting. He admired those qualities in
her. But how long would it be before those same attributes filled him with
impatience, or annoyance .. .
Or contempt?
He was hardly worthy of Eyar's admiration.
Den stopped in the middle of the compound. This was bad. He was having
cold feet all the way up to his armpits, and he had no idea what to do about
it.
He looked about. From where he was standing, he had two options, each
of which lay in practically opposite directions. To his left was the
cantina, with its amazing and highly therapeutic varieties of distillates.
To his right was Klo Merit's office, where he could talk to the minder, or
at the very least make an appointment to do so later. He needed to work this
out.
How?
It took Den nearly two minutes of standing in the broiling sun before
he turned and trotted off, a direction finally chosen.
30
The throbbing of the medlifters, the shouts and cross talk of personnel
running to the triage area, the screams and groans of the troopers-it was a
litany of sounds and cries that Jos had responded to so many times that it
seemed he could do it in his sleep by now.
Sleep. There was a laugh. The truncated periods of naps and dozing that
the medics of Rimsoo Seven managed to snag on good days wasn't anything even
close to good sleep hygiene. Of course, they had delta wave inducers, but
cramming six to eight hours of uninterrupted cycling through the four stages
and REM periods into a ten-minute nap just didn't replenish the brain the
same way that real-time sleep did. The only solution was a proper night's
rest, and that was a luxury seldom afforded.
Most of the time, the patients were clone troopers. For Jos, the
hardest cases were not the completely alien species. They were the nonclone
individual humans, because their anatomies were familiar to him, and yet
subtly different from one another. When operating on such a human patient,
he had to be very careful not to let his hands and brain fall back into
familiar patterns that might work on a clone, but be just off enough to kill
another human being. It had already happened once.
Truly alien individuals didn't come through the OT very often. The few
who did were usually on Drongarin some kind of observation or clerical
capacity. And they often provided most of the moments of both humor and
horror.
The last time they'd had an unexpected incident like that had been when
Jos had been drenched in the Nikto's life fluids. This time, it had been Uli
who experienced the shock of the new.
The young surgeon had been working on a female Oni. The Oni were a
fairly bellicose species, by all accounts, that hailed from the Outer Rim
world of Uru. What this one was doing on Drongar no one seemed to know for
sure-probably a mercenary. In any event, she had caught a projectile from a
slugthrower, and Uli was probing for it when there was a blue-white flash, a
sound like someone whacking a nest of angry wingstingers, and the young
surgeon bounced backward and hit the wall.
He wasn't hurt that much, as was evidenced by a stream of curses. The
usual buzz of instrument requests and readout quotes came to a stop.
Threndy, the nurse who had been assisting, helped Uli to his feet.
"You okay, Uli? Need any help?" Jos called.
"I'm good, thanks. But what in the seven skies of Sumarin was that? I
never-"
He was interrupted by a tripedal medical droid that came in, moved to
Uli's side, and spoke briefly to him. Jos couldn't hear the conversation,
but after a mo
ment Uli and Threndy both broke into laughter.
"What's up?" Jos asked.
"Apparently, Oni females are electrophoretic, 1 must've brushed against
a lobe of her capacitor organ during my probe." Uli shrugged. "Kinda wish
I'd known about it sooner ..."
Jos chuckled. "Maybe we should keep her around in case our droids need
a jump start."
His shift and Uli's were over at the same time, and, on impulse, Jos
asked the younger man if he wanted to join them at sabacc. They'd been short
several players the last couple of times. Tolk didn't show up anymore, and
Bar-riss seemed lately to be too absorbed in "Jedi-ing," as Den put it, to
sit in on every game. Even Klo had been too busy to put in more than an
occasional appearance.
Uli grinned, a smile that spread over his entire face. "Sure!" he said
enthusiastically. "I've been hoping one of you'd ask."
Jos grinned back. "Glad to have you." It would be nice to have
something approaching a full set of players again. On one level, though, he
did feel bad about it. Uli was so open and guileless, he was sure to be
eaten alive by the others. Sabacc could be a tough game.
Jos, Den, Barriss, and I-Five walked out of the cantina.
"Wow," Jos said. "Who knew?"
"Not you, I'm assuming," Den replied. "Unless you're in cahoots with
the little-"
"Hey, I had no idea he could play like that. I mean, look at him. He
looks like a holorep for some nice wholesome farmworld somewhere." Jos
shrugged. "Besides, we've been losing players. And I felt sorry for him."
"Yeah? Well, feel sorry for me. I lost three hundred creds in there."
Den shook his head.
"Just a suggestion," I-Five said to Jos, "but the next time you're
tempted to be altruistic in matters like these-don't."
"Aw, clamp your vocabulator," Den told him sourly.
"You're the only one who didn't lose his shirt. Not that you have one
to lose."
"This is true. However, for the first time in some weeks I have not won
anything, either."
Jos swatted futilely at a buzzing cloud of fire gnats. "Again I ask:
what do you need money for? You're a droid."
"A fact that seldom escapes my notice, thank you. My need for money is
quite simple-it costs large amounts of credits to travel. Especially as far
as Coruscant."
"You're really going, then?" Barriss asked.
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