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What indeed?

Jos dropped his hand and stood. "I’m out," he said. "I’ll see you all later."

Zan blinked. "Where are you going?"

"To pay a sympathy call," Jos said as he left.

35

Jos walked across the compound, slipping an osmotic mask over his nose and mouth as he did so, because the concentration of spores in the air was unusually heavy. He was so preoccupied with his thoughts, however, that he barely noticed them, or the syrupy heat of midday.

He was thinking about space travel.

His training was in medicine, not applied and theoret-ical physics-he smiled slightly, remembering the iras-cible Dr. S’hrah, one of his teachers, who had zero tolerance for any discipline outside medicine-"You’re a doctor, not a physicist!" would be his take on Jos’s woolgathering-but he knew the basics and the history, as did anyone with anything more than a dirt clod for a brain. Travel between star systems was made possible by moving through hyperspace, an alternate dimension not all that different from realspace, in which superlu-minal velocities were easily reached. In ancient times, this had been thought impossible, since the legendary Drall scientist Tiran had proven conclusively, more than thirty-five thousand years ago, that time and space were inseparable, and that the speed of light was an absolute boundary that could not be crossed.

But Tiran’s Theory of Universal Reference did not prohibit anything traveling faster than light-it only disallowed traveling at the speed of light. If the "light-speed barrier"

could somehow be bypassed, one could theoretically shift easily from realspace to hyperspace and back.

Galactic colonization had initially been accomplished by generation ships, and this made it impossible to knit the separate worlds together in a viable galactic civiliza-tion.

Finally, after centuries of experimentation and frustration, the best scientists of the Republic found a way to create and contain negative pressure fields strong enough to power a portable hyperdrive unit. At long last, affordable and ubiquitous superluminal travel had been achieved.

This accomplishment, of course, had quickly led to the Great Hyperspace War and various other forms of unpleasantness, but that wasn’t where Jos’s thoughts had taken him today.

The problems of achieving FTL speed made a nice metaphor for breaking through to new concepts. If you could somehow make it past the initial barrier of perception, then the galaxy you found yourself in wasn’t really all that different from the one you’d left behind. In his case, it was a galaxy in which artificial intelligences and cloned personalities had to be judged on an equal emotional footing with organics, but, once that concept was grasped, it proved to be not that hard to assimilate.

It did, however, require some adjustment-and some apologies.

Barracks CT-Tertium was the largest of the three gar-risons at Ground Base Seven, which was located at the edge of the Rotfurze Wastes, a region of severe ecologi-cal blight two kilometers from the Rimsoo. Jos requisitioned a landspeeder and was there in less than ten min-utes. He was far enough behind the lines to feel rela-tively unconcerned, although he could hear, on several occasions, the distant crackle of particle beams and the muffled whump! of C- 22 frag mortars. Apparently the Separatists weren’t all that worried about bota damage anymore.

At GB7 he was directed to a tiny 4.5-square-meter billet, barely large enough for the bunk-and-locker combination that constituted CT-914’s home away from-actually, Jos realized, it was just his home. Un-less one counted the vat from which the clone had been decanted in Tipoca City on the waterworld Kamino, CT-914 had no place else he could call his own.

The bed had been made to military precision, the blankets as smooth as the surface of a neutron star. The locker was ajar, and closer inspection proved it to be empty.

What was puzzling, however, was the spot over the head of the bed, where the trooper’s designation should have been. Instead of reading ct-914, the frame