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"This is unbelievable news, Den," Barriss said. "You must be horribly disappointed."

Den was quiet-he seemed to be editing his thoughts. "It is. I am," he said finally. "But I’m not all that surprised. I didn’t just fall off the purnix lorry yesterday, after all.

I’ve seen it happen to others. I’ve even had it done to me before-though never to this degree." He snorted. "Our warped Phow Ji will probably get a rich entproj contract out of it, if he doesn’t dice the agent who offers it to him. ’The Hero of Drongar,’ coming to your home three-dee soon."

"Sweet Sookie," Jos said.

"Heroes are transient," Den said, in a tone that sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than the other players at the sabacc table. "They come, they go, and they tend to die more often than everybody else in wartime. If one is real and another is a product of the media, it’s all the same, in the long run. None of it really matters."

"I’m going to go out on a spiral arm here and guess you have no use for heroes," I-Five said.

Den shrugged. "They make good copy sometimes. Other than that, no."

"So there’s nothing for which you would risk your life?"

"Good maker, no. I don’t believe in all that spiritual stuff. I don’t expect to be recycled as something higher up the food chain in another incarnation, or to see the Spectrum at the end of the galaxy, or discorporate and become one with the Force. For me, what you see is what you are, and when the lights go out, that’s it. So why should I court the Eternal Sleep any sooner than I absolutely must? No risk, no loss. Heroes are, save for those who wind up being in the category completely by accident, either fools or selling something."

Jos looked at the droid. "What about you, I-Five? Given your construction, you could last five hundred, a thousand years or more. Would you put your durasteel neck and all those centuries on the line if there was a good chance somebody would ax it?"

I-Five said, "It would depend on why. I’ve mentioned before that I still have some memory damage I’m en-deavoring to repair, and it seems from some of the re-cently recovered bits that I may have performed some ’heroic’ actions in my past." He fanned his cards. "I must say I’m interested in learning the circumstances."

Den shook his head, then looked at Barriss. "You, I expect it from-you’re a Jedi, that’s what you do. The medical folks-well, I’ve seen some of them who’d charge a particle cannon at the drop of a glove, so they’re as crazy as clones, too, in my ’cron." He glanced at Jos, Zan, and Tolk. "No offense," he added.

"None taken," Zan said.

Den shifted his gaze back to I-Five. "But I didn’t ex-pect to ever encounter a droid with delusions of valor. You, my metallic friend, are in need of some serious rewiring."

"And you," I-Five replied as he tossed a credit into the hand pot, "need a damper slapped on your cynicism chip."

Jos, Zan, and Tolk smiled. Zan took the deck of cards. "Maybe my luck will change," he said.

"It better not while you’re dealing," Jos said.

Zan shuffled, then put the customary blank card at the bottom of the deck, marking where the shuffled cards stopped. He put the deck down for Barriss to cut. As she did so, he said, "I guess I’m what they’d call a de-vout agnostic. I don’t know if there’s something bigger than us or not, but I think that we should attempt to live our lives as if there is."

"A philosophy more beings should espouse," Barriss said.

Den rolled his eyes but said nothing.

There flashed into Jos’s mind once again an image of CT-914’s quiet grief for his comrade.

He looked up from his cards and saw Barriss watching him, a look of sympathy on her face.

He glanced at I-Five. The droid was studying his cards, but he appeared to sense Jos’s attention, because he looked up. Jos had gotten quite good at reading the subtle shifts of luminosity in I-Five’s photoreceptors, but this time the droid’s expression was enigmatic.

The moment stretched.

"Jos," Zan said. "It’s your turn."

"What are you going