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It helped, of course, if his surgical procedure went well. Sometimes, however, even when the operation was technically correct, something went sour, and no matter how hard he tried, no matter how much he wished it otherwise, the patient expired.

So it was with the clone trooper on the table now. The surgery had been relatively easy as these things went: a bit of shrapnel had nicked the pericardium, and there had been bleeding into the pericardial sac with associ-ated cardiac tamponade. But the blood had been drained, the wounds repaired, and that should have been that. Instead, the trooper had ceased breathing, the repaired heart had stopped, and all efforts to jump-start things had failed. Had Jos been a religious man, he would have said the man’s essence had departed.

This was the last patient, though, and he had man-aged to keep five others alive, including one who had sustained massive injuries to three organ systems that needed replacement: a multipunctured and deflated lung, a ruptured spleen, and a severely lacerated kidney.

Why had that one survived and this one died? It was totally unexpected, totally inexplicable, and totally frustrating.

Medicine was not an exact science, he knew-the pa-tients often confounded things. You’d think that gene-tically identical clones would have pretty much the same reactions to physical stress, but that certainly didn’t seem to be the case with these two.

Back when Jos had been a fairly fresh student in med-ical school, he had frequented a Bamasian restaurant that had become all the rage among his peers. The food was cheap but good, and the servings large; the place was within walking distance of the student housing complex, and it was open all day and all night-perfect for students. Bamasian cuisine was varied, spicy, and something of an acquired taste, but Jos liked it. At the end of each meal, the traditional complimentary dessert was a small, sweet, baked bread ring, about the size of a bracelet. Cooked into the treat was a protein-circuit onetime holocaster.

When you broke the ring, the ’caster projected a bit of Bamasian wisdom that glim-mered and hung in the air for a few seconds before the organic circuitry decayed. The aphorisms were amusing to the medical students, who tended to eat as a pack for the family-style discounts. Often they would all break the bread rings at the same instant, then try to read the homilies before they faded away. Some of them were real howlers: "Avoid dark alleyways in bad neighbor-hoods." Or "Being rich and miserable is better than just being miserable." Or "Beware smiling politicians..."

One evening, when Jos was exhausted from a long se-ries of exams and tricky procedures he had mostly fum-bled, and feeling overwhelmed by things he had never thought to see, never even considered might be a part of his training, he had cracked his sweetened bread ring open and gotten a message that had seemed personally crafted for him alone:

"Minimize expectations to avoid being disap-pointed."

At the time, it had struck him as oddly useful, if somewhat obvious, wisdom. If he didn’t expect any-thing, he wouldn’t be distressed if it didn’t happen. He tried to plug it into his life, and found it helped. Some-times he forgot, of course. Sometimes he expected to be able to save them all. He was a good surgeon; maybe, given the circumstances, even a great surgeon, and he never expected to lose a patient who had even the small-est chance of survival. When it happened, it was always a shock. And always disappointing.

It was hard to admit, even to himself, but there were times when he even caught himself feeling resentful to-ward the never-ending parade of wounded and dying troops. There were times, when they wheeled in a Twi’lek with a nearly severed lekku, or a Devaronian with one of his livers perforated, that a small part of him relished the opportunity to do something different. Because at this point it really did feel like he could build a stratosphere-piercing tower just from the sheer tonnage of shrapnel he’d pulled out of the clone troopers. Not