Star Wars_ MedStar 01_ Battle Surgeons - Michael Reaves [57]
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 Jasserak 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 assembly line in a droid factory, building more droids?"
Jos laughed. "You can switch a droid on and off, dis-assemble 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 hit 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