Star Wars_ Darksaber - Kevin J. Anderson [52]
Dorsk 81 rushed to the building unabashedly, gazing up at the stone edifice as if he had never seen anything like it before. “This is my home!” he said. Kyp followed as the cloned alien fairly ran up three flights of stairs to his personal abode.
The well-lit corridor was lined with a dizzying succession of identical doors, like myriad images reflected from nested mirrors. One of the doors popped open as Dorsk 81 hurried toward it.
Two figures emerged, wearing grins on their smooth faces; for a moment Kyp felt as if he had seen a vortex of alternate timelines, images of an identical person at different stages of life. They both looked like Dorsk 81, one older and more weathered, one younger and slightly smaller.
All three embraced and talked quickly in low voices. Kyp stepped back, feeling as if he didn’t belong there—but he didn’t mind. He observed with a pang of homesickness, thinking fondly of when he and his parents and his brother, Zeth, had spent warm times together on his own world of Deyer: the floating fishing platforms, the quiet lake sunsets … but the Empire had crushed that place, and Kyp hadn’t seen it since his childhood.
After the brief and intense welcome, Dorsk 81 gestured for Kyp to follow him inside. “This is my friend Kyp Durron, another Jedi Knight. This”—he turned to the older image of himself—“is Dorsk 80, my predecessor, and here,” he clasped the shoulder of the younger clone, “is Dorsk 82, my successor.”
Kyp felt disoriented by the genetically identical copies, but he had seen many strange things in the galaxy. He glanced around where the Dorsk family lived, saw adequate furnishings and all the expected rooms. “Do any of you have wives?” he asked, seeing no one else.
All three clones blinked at him, and finally Dorsk 81 gave a short laugh. The skin on his forehead wrinkled. “Kyp, no one has wives. Everyone on Khomm is genderless. That’s why we use the cloning facilities. We haven’t had genders on this planet for thousands of years.”
Kyp chuckled in embarrassment. “Well, I just assumed … uh, obviously I was wrong.”
“We all make mistakes,” the elder Dorsk 80 said with a quick, meaningful frown in the direction of Dorsk 81. Kyp noticed, but his friend pretended not to.
Later, Dorsk 81 helped make up a bed in their small extra room, and Kyp used the moment of privacy to ask a question that had been bothering him.
“Dorsk 81,” he said. “Now that I’ve seen how …” he searched for the right word, “how stable and unchanging your world is, I don’t understand how you’re going to be a Jedi watchman. What are you going to do here?”
Dorsk 81’s yellow eyes suddenly filled with panic. “I don’t know!” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “I don’t know …” He repeated the words to himself, then he left Kyp alone, fleeing back into the outer rooms.
Kyp could not sleep for some time. He looked out the window into a night that glowed with a billion bright stars. Khomm was close to the galactic nucleus, near the dreaded Core Systems where the survivors of the Empire had gone into hiding. The stars made a blurry island in space, a lens that spilled across half the sky.
Kyp stared toward the Core Systems, fearing what they might hide, but also yearning to know.
Young Dorsk 82 spent the next morning showing off his work in the clone banks. The cloning facility was taller than the other buildings and of a different design: the only unusual structure Kyp had seen in the gridwork of the metropolis. Rather than the ubiquitous green-veined stone, the outer walls were immense rectangular sheets of transparent crystal, interlocked with chrome girders that reflected the hazy sunlight. The crystal windows were so clear that Kyp could look in from street level and see the carefully organized activity inside.
“We have maintained everything exactly as it was when you left it,”