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"No being should have to make that choice," I-Five replied. "Yet this is the galaxy in which we exist, and until the powers-that-be come to the realization that war is inefficient and costly in terms of life and prop-erty, such choices will always be with us."

Den shook his head. "I still haven’t gotten used to a droid as a philosopher. You are something quite special, I-Five."

"Get used to it. I don’t expect I will be the last such droid ever created. I can say this: if droids ran things, war would not be an approved activity."

Den nodded. "Wouldn’t that be nice."

"You would be out of a job as a war correspondent."

"I could find other work. Believe me, it would be worth it."

I-Five went back to his patient coordination, and Den drifted off. Walking across the compound, he passed several troopers who were obviously newly arrived - though they did all look the same, there was a sort of naivete to the ones newly arriving that set them apart from the more experienced troops. They were chatter-ing to each other, no doubt finding all this tremen-dously exciting. Had he ever been that innocent? If so, it had been flensed from him a long time and many worlds ago.

He’d miss Zan Yant-the man’s music, his wit, his card playing. But I-Five was right: this was how things were. Not likely to change anytime soon.

In the meantime, he had work to do.

"Excuse me, friend tech, can you tell me how you felt about the recent attack on this Rimsoo...?"

EPILOGUE

Eighty kilometers southeast of the old encampment, Rimsoo Seven was now set up. Outside, it looked much the same. The trees were in different places, the small hillocks had slightly different shades and shapes of fungi, and there was even another bota patch close by. They were still a Rimsoo on a forsaken planet, only now Zan was gone and the war was still out there, crouched to spring like a monster from some dark and dank cave.

Jos sat on his new bunk, in the same quarters he had shared with Zan, staring through the solid wall into in-finity.

Everything was the same, but everything had changed.

Droids had the capability to be more than he had thought, and clones were not as simple as he had com-fortably believed. The world had turned upside down, but somehow things were still dropping out of the sky onto his head.

He still couldn’t get his mind around Zan’s death. Just couldn’t get a grip on it.

Intellectually he knew that his friend was gone, gone to that place from which none return. But emotionally Jos still expected the door to open any minute, expected to see Zan enter, lugging his quetarra case, griping about the rain, or laughing at some bit of business in the OT, before unpacking the in-strument and wandering off into some classical fugue.

That was never going to happen again.

People died almost every day in the OT, some of them under his hands as he frantically tried to save them, but this-this was not the same.

Zan had been his friend.

"Jos?"

He looked up.

Tolk stood in the doorway. She was in her surgical whites, and his heart leapt to see her-then fell and shattered. His tradition, the centuries-old customs of his clan, denied her to him-his family and history and social constructs all told him that he and Tolk could never be together. And he had believed, up until this moment, all this to be true, had accepted that it was anathema to even think of defying canon.

But Zan was dead. And that simple, searing fact now brought home to Jos, in a way that nothing ever had be-fore, the truth of the old saying that he had heard bandied about all of his life, had even said himself on occasion, but had never really understood: Life is too short.

Too short to waste on things that aren’t important. Too short to waste on anything that doesn’t, in some way, enrich you or your loved ones. Too short by far to let mindless rules and traditions tell you what you could do, where you could live-And whom you could love.

Here stood Tolk, before him. Jos looked at her, felt tears start to gather. He stood and opened his arms. "Tolk-" he began.

That was