"Why, then, are you here?"

She felt rather than saw Jos Vondar emerge from the OT behind her, was aware of him listening.

"I helped transport another trooper here yesterday. CT-Nine-one-five."

"Ah. And how does he fare?"

"I don't know. He's still in surgery."

Jos drifted over. "Nine-one-five? He, ah, didn't make it."

The wave of grief that broke from CT-914 and washed over Barriss was sudden and strong. To look at his face, however, it was hardly apparent that he felt this deep emotional chord.

He said, "Unfortunate. He was"-he hesitated, just a heartbeat or two, - "a good soldier.

The loss of someone so well trained is... re-grettable."

Barriss could see that, even without the Force, Jos picked up on something either in CT-914's tone of voice or his body language, as subtle as both were. He said, "You knew him?"

"He was decanted just after me. We trained together, were posted here together, we were part of the same co-hort." CT-914 hesitated again. "He... I thought of him as my brother."

Jos frowned. "But you're all brothers, in a sense."

"True." The clone trooper straightened. "Thank you for your efforts to save him, Doctor.

I'm going back to my unit now."

He turned and strode away. Barriss and Jos watched him go. "If I didn't know better," Jos said, "I'd say that he was upset."

"And how is it that you know better? Wouldn't you feel upset if it had been your brother?"

She half expected him to answer with a wisecrack - his standard response under circ.u.mstances like these. He didn't, however. Instead, he frowned. "He's a clone, Barriss.

Those sorts of feelings are bred out of them."

"Who told you that? True, they are standardized, trained, and toughened, but they are not mindless au-tomata. They're made from the same kind of flesh and mind as are you and I, Jos. They bleed when cut, they live and die, and they grieve at the loss of a brother.

CT-Nine-one-four is in emotional pain. He covers it well enough, but such things can't be hidden from the Force."

Jos looked as if she had just slapped his face. "But - but-"

"The clones are bred for combat, Jos. It's what they were designed to do, and they accept it without ques-tion. Were it not for war, they would not exist. A hard life as a soldier is better than no life at all. But even without the Force, you felt it," she said, her voice gen-tle. "Stoic as he tried to be, it came out. Nine-one-four grieves. He suffers the loss of his comrade. His brother."

Jos stood speechless. She felt emotion radiating from him as she had from CT-914. "It never occurred to you before, did it?"

"I-it-of course, I..." He ran down. No. It hadn't occurred to him, not like this. She could see that.

How blind those who did not know the Force were. How sad for them.

"Surgeons are notorious for their lack of bedside manners," she said. "They tend to view and treat in-juries without worrying about the whole patient, even with 'real' people.

Most beings consider clones nothing more than blaster fodder-why should you be any dif-ferent?"

Jos shook his head, confusion still bubbling in his thoughts. She felt badly for him. One of the drawbacks to the ability to use the Force was that you sometimes learned things that you weren't expecting, things that you weren't capable of properly understanding, much less able to do anything about. Over and over again, Barriss had discovered that power brought knowledge, and that this was a decidedly mixed blessing.

"I'm sorry, Jos. I didn't mean to-"

"No, no, it's fine. I'll see you later." He gave her a patently fake smile and walked away. He looked as if the weight of the planet had just been dropped on his shoulders.

Jos walked across the compound, a damp heralding wind and suddenly overcast sky cooling the muggy af-ternoon somewhat as-big surprise-another storm ap-proached. He had gotten pretty good at judging these things after all the months here. He knew he had two, maybe three minutes before the sky would open up.

"Jos?" Tolk said. "You okay?"

She had come up to walk beside him. He hadn't even noticed her in his preoccupation with this new and sud-denly troubling knowledge.

"Me? I'm fine."

"No, you aren't. Remember who I am. What is it?"

He shook his head. "Just had a blindfold removed I didn't know I was wearing. Something I took for granted, never really thought about before. I'm.

.. feel-ing pretty stupid."

"Well, how unusual is that?"

He looked at her, saw the smile, and appreciated her trying to cheer him up. He managed a small smile of his own. "Bet you scored 'sharpshooter' on your basic weapons tests."

"Actually, I rated 'master' with the pulse rifle, and dropped down to 'sharpshooter' only with the sidearm blaster."

"Figures. I was 'basic marksman' with both, which means I can't hit the side of a Destroyer-from the in-side."

"You want to talk about it?"

He stopped. The rain was almost here. She put her hand on his shoulder, and, oh, yes, he wanted to talk about it. Later-when they were holding each other, kissing, and happier than he'd been since he had been conscripted. Then he'd talk about it. She'd be hard-put to shut him up, then.

But now...

"Not really, no," he said. The touch of her hand on his shoulder was almost hypnotic in its comfort.

The storm hit then. Big, fat drops, a few at first, pattered - and then the deluge. They stood together in the rain, not moving.

20.

Jos had hoped that Klo Merit could shed some light on his newfound and uncomfortable knowledge about clones, but so far, the minder was more stirring up mud from the murky bottom of his thoughts than pumping in clarity.

Clarity seemed a forlorn hope right now.

"So, what exactly are we talking about here when you say 'expertise'?"

Merit said, "Well, you can tell a lot about how much somebody knows by listening. See this ring?" He held his hand up so that Jos could view it. The piece of jew-elry was a deep golden band of metal with a thumbnail-sized stone inset into it. The stone glittered in the overhead light of Merit's office, flashing multiple colors-reds, blues, greens, and yellows in a kind of rolling pattern, as Merit moved his hand. It was quite impressive.

Jos nodded. "Very nice. Some kind of firestone?"

Merit smiled. "Yes. And your question marks you as somebody who knows a little about them, but not much. You recognize it as a firestone, but that's only a small step into the subject."

Jos shrugged. "I'm a surgeon. You want to know about kidney stones, I'm your boy."

"Somebody who didn't know anything about gems would say, 'That's nice-what kind of stone is it?' Somebody who knows a little more will comment as you did. A person with a bit more knowledge might say, 'Is that a Gallian firestone, or a Rathalayan?' They know there is a difference between those two and prob-ably that this is one or the other.

"Now, a real expert will look at my ring and say, 'Ah, a black Gallian firestone, very nice. Is it a crystal or a boulder matrix?' Because he can tell that many specifics just by looking at it-that it is a firestone, that it comes from Gall, that it is a black. But the way it's mounted, he can't see the back of it, so he can't tell the matrix. It's a boulder, by the way, which denotes the kind of rock in which firestone is sometimes found, and the term black refers to the background colors upon which the flashes shine."

Jos shook his head. "So now I'm educated about gems."

Merit smiled broadly. "No, you aren't. You couldn't tell a real one from a fake, and you don't know any-thing else about them other than what I just told you. How valuable is it, do you think?"

"Even if you found it in the Ja.s.serak Swamp, I still couldn't afford it."

"It's worth more than a blue-white diamond of the same size. And do you know about the curse?"

"'Curse'?"

"Yes. Firestones are supposed to be unlucky. But that was a canard, started by diamond merchants who were losing business to firestone sellers. Only thing unlucky about them is not owning one."

Jos smiled. "Okay, I take your point. At least part of it."

"So take the rest of it. You weren't an expert on clones because you never tried to be.

Other than know-ing how to cut and glue them back together, which is sufficient for your needs, why would you bother? Be-fore the war, there weren't enough clones around to make it a concern. Out of sight, out of mind. You deal with their physiology, not their psychology."

"That's true."

"But clones aren't the only beings you probably haven't thought much about. What about droids?"

"Droids? What about them?"

"Do you consider them people?"

"Only in the same sense that a tetrawave is. They're machines."

"But they think. They interact. They function."

Jos looked perplexed. "Okay, but..."

"Work with me for a minute," Klo continued. "Just for the sake of argument, have you ever met a droid that expressed worry, or fear, or that had, say, a sense of hu-mor? That seemed... self-aware?"

Jos was silent. Yes. He had. I-Five came immediately to mind. "But they don't feel pain.

They can't repro-duce-"

"Aren't there people with neuropathic disorders who don't feel pain? And who runs the a.s.sembly line in a droid factory, building more droids?"

Jos laughed. "You can switch a droid on and off, dis-a.s.semble it, put it back together, and it won't blink a photosensor. Of course," he added, "you can do that to me too, but only after a fourteen-hour shift."

"I'm not saying they are exactly like you and me. But if you stop and think about it, a self-aware construct that has an emotional content and a job isn't simply a dumbot welding seams on next year's landspeeder."

"You aren't helping here. I'm still trying to get my mind around the concept of clones as people, and now you're throwing droids at me."

"Life isn't simple, Jos. Once you start clumping cells into tissues and tissues into systems, the level of com-plexity goes up in powers of ten. I can't give you any easy answers-you have to figure things out for yourself."

"Whatever the Republic's paying you, it's too much."

Merit shrugged, a fluid and smooth gesture. "That's how the galaxy works. It's not my design; when I get to be in charge of everything, I'll fix it. Until then, we're stuck with this."

Jos sighed. When you wanted answers, more ques-tions didn't exactly help.

Merit looked at his chrono and stood. "Our session is up-and I believe it's now time for the weekly sabacc game, is it not?"

"Raise," Den said. He tossed a ten-credit chip onto the table. The suspension field kept it from clinking too much or rolling away.

"I'll see that," Jos said, "and raise you two." Two more chips. .h.i.t the growing pile.

Den glanced owlishly at his cards, then at the rest of the players surrounding the cantina table as each anted up in turn. Besides himself and Captain Vondar, there were five others: Captain Yant, Barriss Offee, the min-der Klo Merit, Tolk le Trene, and I-Five. Den could glean no clues from any of them as to the hands they were holding; the four organics all had carefully non-committal faces, and even though the droid was capable of subtle expressions, he apparently had no problem controlling them.

It had been said that sabacc was as much a game of skill as it was of chance, and Den had no trouble believ-ing that, especially with this crowd. Talk about a stacked deck: out of seven players, three of them were extremely adept at reading others. He was pretty certain that the Padawan would not use the Force to give herself an edge, but he wasn't so sure about Tolk and Merit. The minder might be able to sense feelings in the others that would betray their emotional state, and so gain an edge, but Tolk would have a harder time of it. Even though this group wasn't exactly at the same level of ex-pertise as a bunch of card shooks working the Corus-cant Crown Casino, they'd all, Den included, mastered fairly well the art of the "sabacc mask"-the com-pletely expressionless face that did not betray by so much as an eyelash flicker any clues whatsoever. Not even a Lorrdian could read body language if the body in question was being utterly uncommunicative.

"n.o.body calls? Great," Yant said. "Draw two." Bar-riss, the new dealer, handed him his cards.

From the camp's hypersound speakers, the voice of one of Filba's subordinates made an announcement, the focused sound beams making it seem as if he were speaking to each individual alone. "Attention," the voice said hesitantly, obviously reading unfamiliar copy. "At, uh, zero-six-hundred hours the scheduled in-spection by Admiral Bleyd will take place. Let's make sure we give him a big welcome."

"Ah, yes," Jos said. "The visitation from on high. Think I'll start saluting now and avoid the rush."

A new round of betting began, starting this time with I-Five. Den had been watching the droid play with some interest. I-Five's cognitive module was no doubt capable of calculating all or nearly all of the myriad combina-tions possible in the seventy-six-chip-card deck, but not even the most advanced synaptic grid processor could antic.i.p.ate the random order in which they might occur in any given hand. Still, the droid was an excellent player, calm and cool. "Raise three," he said.

Jos raised an eyebrow. "Maybe it's just the heat," he said, "but I could swear that durasteel skin of yours is starting to sweat."

"Must be a leaky lube node," I-Five replied imper-turbably. "I might note, however, that my olfactory sen-sor is picking up a distinct whiff of fear pheromone with your genetic tag, Captain Vondar."

"How'd you get to be so good at cards, I-Five?" Den asked the droid.

"My partner taught me," the droid replied. "He could usually walk out of a game with more credits than he went in with. He's held more idiot's arrays than an asylum nurse."