She shivered. For a moment it seemed that she could feel that chill breeze again—not on her skin this time, but in her heart.
7
The cantina was fairly busy, it being one of the rare times when the spore-ridden skies were not full of medlifters, themselves full of wounded clone troopers. At their usual table sat Den Dhur, Klo Merit, Tolk le Trene, Jos Vondar, I-Five, and Barriss Offee. These were the regulars for the twice-weekly sabacc game. Occasionally others, like Leemoth, would sit in, but for the most part it was the same six. The game was a way of relaxing, of rebuilding themselves for the next onslaught of blood and pain. They could never forget about the war, but for an hour or two it would not be uppermost in their minds.
The air coolers were working fairly well, which was also unusual—the filters in the refrigerating units were especially susceptible to spore-rot, and, because all the other Rimsoos on Drongar had the same problem, replacement parts were on constant back order. Even though spores couldn’t penetrate the force-dome when it was lit, there were pass-throughs for incoming and outgoing vessels, plus all the local flora and fauna that were already there when the dome was first triggered. Consequently, most of the time, rooms filled with cool, clean, and dry air were few and far between.
In addition to the heavenly coolness, the cantina had recently acquired a few other luxuries, either by accidental consignment or through the efforts of the new quartermaster, a Twi’lek named Nars Dojah. One was a dejarik game, complete with holocreature generator, which was being played at one table now between two human female nurses. Another was a new autochiller for drinks. But the most impressive was a perky TDL-501 unipod waitress droid, whom Den had promptly nicknamed Teedle, and who scooted adroitly around the crowded room on one wheel while balancing trays of drinks.
Teedle pulled to a quick stop in front of the sabacc table and placed drinks before Jos, Tolk, Klo, and Den. “One Coruscant Cooler, one Bantha Blaster, one Alderaanian ale, and a Johrian whiskey,” she said briskly. “Seventeen credits, folks.”
Den waved one hand in dismissal. “On the tab.”
“Whose tab, hon? Your bill’s higher’n a skyhook already.” A static pop accompanied every sentence, sounding almost like a wad of dreamgum cracking.
Den turned slowly and looked at Teedle. “I beg your pardon?”
Teedle jerked a durasteel thumb toward the bar. “Mohris says he can’t float you anymore. So you either pay up or bring a repulsor next time.”
Jos saw that the other patrons of the table, with the exception of I-Five, were having just as much trouble holding laughter back as he was. “Put his on my tab,” he told Teedle. “He’s covered for tonight.”
“You got it, Cap’n,” the waitress droid answered, and zipped away.
Den gave her a sour parting look, then said to Jos, “Thanks. It’s hard to program good help these days.”
Jos was about to respond when he noticed I-Five staring after Teedle. The others had noticed it as well. “Anything wrong, I-Five?” Klo Merit asked.
“She’s beautiful,” I-Five said reverently.
Everyone stared. Jos put his cooler down so hard it splashed onto his pile of chips. “I-Five…are you saying you’re attracted to Teedle?”
The droid continued to look at Teedle—then abruptly turned back to study his cards. “No,” he said lightly. He glanced up, and Jos would have sworn that those immobile features had somehow contrived to look sly. “Had you wondering for a second, though, did I not?”
The others burst into laughter. Jos grinned. “Why, you chrome-plated water heater—I oughtta—”
“You ought to shut up and play,” Tolk interrupted good-naturedly. She looked around. “Where’s that CardShark?”
The cantina’s other new droid—and as far as Jos was concerned, the jury was still out on how much of an actual improvement this constituted—was an automated sabacc dealer, an RH7-D CardShark. A smaller, mobile version of the big casino automata, the droid now floated down from the ceiling to hover over the table via repulsorlifts. It shuffled the deck in a blur of motion, then slapped the cards on the table. “Cut,” it said to Jos, its electronic voice raspy.
Repressing his annoyance at the droid’s tone, Jos cut the cards. The CardShark quickly dealt two rounds with its manipulator appendages. “Bespin Standard,” it announced. “First hand. Place your bets, gentlesirs.”
“Hey,” Tolk said sharply, looking up at it. “Clean your photoreceptor and try again.”
“Your pardon, madam,” the CardShark said crisply. “Bets, please, gentlebeings.”
“Not much improvement,” Tolk grumbled as she checked her cards.
They had been talking about the newest addition to the surgical team. “One problem with the new guy that’s obvious from the start,” Den observed as he tossed a cred chip in the pot. “He’s too young to come into the cantina. So I guess he won’t be playing sabacc anytime soon.”
“He’s not that young,” Barriss said. “And he’s a long way from home.” She added her bet to the hand pot, then noticed Jos, Tolk, Den, and Klo grinning at her. “What?”
“For shame,” Den said with mock severity. “And you a Jedi.”
“I’m shocked,” Jos added. His grin grew wider at the blush that spread over her cheeks. It contrasted nicely with her facial tattoos.
“I didn’t mean—” she started, then glared at Den. “Mind in the gutter, Dhur,” she said. “Again.”
The reporter shrugged. “Hard not to be when the whole planet’s a gutter.”
“I just meant,” Barriss continued, “that we should do our best to include him in things like this. Make him feel welcome.”
“She’s right, of course,” the Equani said. “Adolescence—particularly human adolescence—is hard to endure without support.”
“Just how old is he?” I-Five asked. “I confess that estimating age differences isn’t something I’m extensively programmed for.”
“You’d make a terrible nanny droid,” Tolk told him.
“For which I thank the maker devoutly.”
“He’s nineteen standard years,” Klo Merit said. “Something of a prodigy, I’m told. Aced all his courses, graduated with the highest honors. Interned at—”
“Big Zoo,” Jos finished. “Hey, most of us have seen Wonder Boy work. He’s very good.”
“I can vouch for that,” Barriss said. “I fold.”
“Please shift hands, ladies,” the CardShark said.
Everyone stared at the hovering droid. “Sweet Sookie,” Jos said, shaking his head. “Whoever dumped this one on Nars saw him coming.”
Den looked around. “Maybe the new droids will earn their keep,” he said. “More people in here now than I’ve seen in a while. And some of ’em I don’t even know.” He indicated a corner table, where three beings were engaged in intense discussion.
Klo Merit looked, and frowned. “I recognize two of the species, though not the individuals. The Kubaz, of course, and the Umbaran. But the other I’m not familiar with.”
“She’s a Falleen,” Jos said. “They tend to be insular; outside of some high mucky-mucks on Coruscant, you don’t see a lot of them offworld. Wonder what she’s doing here.”
“Just don’t get too close to her,” Tolk warned him with a grin.
Den looked puzzled. “Falleen exude pheromones,” Jos explained. “Strong stuff, crosses most species boundaries. Usually signaled by cromatophoric changes in pigmentation. It’s said that they can mix precursors and influence endocrine levels.”
“Thanks. It’s all clear as swamp water now.”
“They can manipulate how you feel by what they sweat,” Tolk told him.
Den blinked. “They must be real charismatic in this weather.”
I-Five dropped a chip in the sabacc pot. “Raise.”
Jos looked at his cards, frowned. “I think you’re bluffing, tin man.”
“And I think you’re sweating, puny human.”
“Who isn’t? I call
.”
The players spread their cards. Jos grinned. He was holding a Commander of coins, a Mistress of sabers, and an Endurance of staves. He put the hand into the interference field broadcast by the CardShark, freezing it. “Anyone closer? No? That’s what I—”
“Unless my math module has suffered severe damage,” I-Five said, “I believe my hand beats yours.”
Jos looked down. His jaw dropped. The droid’s hand consisted of an Idiot, a three of staves, and a two of sabers. An idiot’s array. The one hand that beat all others, even pure sabacc.
“That’s not fair,” Jos said mournfully as I-Five gathered in his winnings. “What does a droid need with credits anyway?”
“Didn’t I tell you?” the droid replied. “I’m off to see the Sorcerer of Tund to buy a heart and brain.”
Jos didn’t reply. The remark had suddenly put him in mind of CT-914, the clone trooper whose life he had saved in the OT, only to learn later that the vat-grown soldier had been lost, along with his entire garrison, in a surprise Separatist attack. It had been Nine-one-four and, to a lesser degree, I-Five, who had raised Jos’s consciousness to a level including the awareness that clones, and even, under certain circumstances, droids and other artificial intelligences, should be considered self-aware sentients, and thus deserving of the same rights.
This was something he had known all along, but he’d unconsciously kept it at a lower level, not really considering all its moral implications. Clones were created to fight wars; the desire for little else was encoded in their genetic programming. They had no fear of death, a sense of fulfillment and contentment when engaged in battle, and just enough pain receptors to warn them away from actions that could result in injury or death.
Until Jos had gotten to know Nine-one-four, he’d also assumed clones were incapable of forming close bonds, either with each other or with beings of other species. But CT-914 had felt a sense of brotherly affection for his vatmate CT-915, and when the latter had been killed, Jos had watched the clone grieve.
Similarly, I-Five, with his enhanced cognitive module functions and deactivated creativity dampers, had impressed them all repeatedly with his “humanity.” Though initially his world had been turned upside down by all this, Jos now was grateful, because this wider definition of what was human had led directly to his being able to embrace—literally and figuratively—Tolk as a potential life mate, even though she was a non-permes esker.
He loved Tolk, he now knew. No matter the consequences of espousing an outworlder, he was determined to follow his heart in this matter. But he could not help but wonder what the new commander, Great-Uncle Erel, would think of this.
It wasn’t long before he found out. As the casino droid set up for another game, a Bothan corporal approached the table. “Admiral Kersos requests your presence, Captain Vondar. Please come with me.”
8
Ohleyz Sumteh Kersos Vingdah,” the admiral said. “Than donya sinyin.”
“Sumteh Vondar Ohleyz… dohn donya,” Jos responded, hesitating just a bit. It had been well over a standard decade since he had spoken in the High Tongue. Everyone spoke Basic nowadays. As a boy, he’d only spoken the older, ceremonial language during Purging Days.
His great-uncle looked tired. His face was about half a day shy of depilation, and his uniform had one of the front tunic flaps unbuttoned. Without the man’s surgical mask, Jos could see a distinct family resemblance. Somewhere during his boyhood, he and a cousin had discovered in the family archives fragments of broken holograms—shattered images of, among others, the young man who had thrown away his heritage and been disowned by the family he chose to abandon. They’d peered through the fragments as if they were windows open on the past, providing glimpses of that young man, who was also apparent in this older man’s features.
By all that was strict and proper, Jos knew he ought not to be speaking to Erel Kersos at all, save as a military subordinate replying to a superior officer. Great-Uncle Erel was still non-permes—the social and personal invisibility did not diminish with time, or even with death. But then again, given Jos’s current status with an esker female and his determination to keep it that way, the prohibition against speaking to a shunned relative didn’t seem quite such a major infraction.
Plus, there was nobody from the homeworld around to see it. And the reason Erel Kersos had been expunged from the clans was of compelling interest to Jos: the man had married an esker.
They were in Vaetes’s office, just the two of them. Jos had a hundred questions he wanted to ask his great-uncle, and at the top of his list was one in particular. Standing there uncomfortably, wondering if he should be the first to speak, he suddenly remembered the first time his father had talked to him about outsiders…
At six years of age, Jos had never been offworld, and the only sightings of aliens he’d had were at a distance. So when the subject of outlanders came up in the school rec-dome, it had been puzzling to him. He had asked his father about it, on one of the rare evenings when his father had been home and not working at the clinic.
It had taken him some time to work up the courage to approach him. His father was never violent, and Jos had no doubt that the man loved him. But he was big; when he stood, he towered over Jos. And he could be loud, very loud, though never when he was talking to his son.
In retrospect, it was clear that his father had not been ready for this conversation. What Jos recalled of the time was that, once he had approached and told him about his schoolmates’ talk, his father had stopped whatever he was doing—reading the evening newsdisc was what Jos remembered—and looked at his son in mild surprise. “Well, son, aside from being of different stock—that’s like the difference between a blethyline and a tarkaline; they look similar, but they’re different colors and sizes— aside from that, they don’t have the same beliefs that we do. They are—” He searched for an appropriate term, and finally came up with one. “—less pure. They mix things together that we don’t mix together, and that includes who they, um, marry.”
Jos had nodded, not understanding what his father was getting at, but aware that the subject was making the man uncomfortable. “Uh-huh.”
“They aren’t… bad people,” his father had said then. “Just… different.”
“How, Da?”
His father had frowned. “You know how you like saltnut butter on bread?”
“Yeah!” The kind fresh from the farm, the nuts just cracked. Spread it on thick, it was the best!
“And how you also like bluefruit jam on bread?”
“Yeah…” It wasn’t as good as saltnut butter, but it was still a treat.
“But how if you mix saltnut butter and bluefruit jam on the same bread, you don’t like it?”
“Uh-huh.” It was true. The two tastes, individually wonderful, when eaten together would gag a sand cat. That had always seemed very unfair.
“Well,” his father had said, “that’s how ensters and eksters are. They just don’t mix together.”
“But, Da, people aren’t all the same, like saltnut butter and bluefruit jam, are they—”
His father cut him off: “You’ll understand this when you’re older, Jos. Don’t worry about it now.”
Now, sitting with his shunned great-uncle decades later, Jos now had a much better idea of what his father meant. At home, this attitude was normal. But to outsiders, it was called xenophobia, speciesism, or worse. For years he had shrugged that off. Outsiders didn’t understand the complexities of permes, so they spoke from ignorance. They were to be pitied more than feared or scorned. Even after his rotations on Coruscant and Alderaan, during which dozens of sentients had been laid open before him, even though he no longer spoke the High Tongue or observed the Purging Days—even then, though he fancied himself fairly galactopolitan, the interdiction, the barrier between his kind and all others, had worked for him on a deep level, so deep he hadn’t even realized its power.
But then he’d fallen in love with Tolk—a Lorrdian nur
se who was not of his planet or even his system, a fact that was supposed to be the death knell for any possible long-term relationship. In the words of many older and infirm beings he’d treated, he’d fallen and he couldn’t get up.
And he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“Go ahead,” his great-uncle and admiral said then. His voice was strong—a voice that knew how to give an order—but kind as well. “Go ahead. Ask.”
Jos looked straight at him. “Was it worth it?”
Silence for a long moment, the two of them looking straight at each other—and the older man gave him a small smile. “Yes. And no.” He sat down with a sigh in Vaetes’s chair. “For six glorious years, I was sure it was.”
Jos raised an eyebrow. His uncle gestured for him to sit as well, which he did.
“Feleema—my spouse—died in a mag-lev accident on Coruscant six years after we married. So did four hundred others. It was quick—a superconductor failed, the safeties malfunctioned, and the train left the rail at three hundred kilometers per hour and rammed into a row of deserted industrial buildings in the southern hemisphere. No survivors in any of the cars.”
“I’m sorry.”
His great-uncle nodded. “Thank you. It’s been more than thirty years. No one from the family has ever said that to me. Or anything else.”
Jos was quiet, touched by the man’s sense of loss.
“So, there I was,” Erel Kersos continued. “A fresh lieutenant in the service of the Republic, my wife gone, and my family and culture no longer available to me. We had no children. I couldn’t go home. So I applied myself to my work, I made a career for myself in the military.” He smiled, and Jos thought there was a slight bitterness in it. “Which is how I wound up here, nearly forty years later.”
“You could have recanted.”
“I would have had to deny my dead wife to do that. I could not do so. And could not abide a family that would have demanded it.”
There was another silence—not one that was particularly comfortable to Jos. Then Erel Kersos looked him square in the eyes and made it worse. He said, “Jos, you need to think about all this, very seriously.”
Star Wars: Medstar II: Jedi Healer Page 5