Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [21]
Jos had nodded, not understanding what his father was getting at, but aware that the subject was making the man uncomfortable. “Uh-huh.”
“They aren’t… bad people,” his father had said then. “Just… different.”
“How, Da?”
His father had frowned. “You know how you like saltnut butter on bread?”
“Yeah!” The kind fresh from the farm, the nuts just cracked. Spread it on thick, it was the best!
“And how you also like bluefruit jam on bread?”
“Yeah…” It wasn’t as good as saltnut butter, but it was still a treat.
“But how if you mix saltnut butter and bluefruit jam on the same bread, you don’t like it?”
“Uh-huh.” It was true. The two tastes, individually wonderful, when eaten together would gag a sand cat. That had always seemed very unfair.
“Well,” his father had said, “that’s how ensters and eksters are. They just don’t mix together.”
“But, Da, people aren’t all the same, like saltnut butter and bluefruit jam, are they—”
His father cut him off: “You’ll understand this when you’re older, Jos. Don’t worry about it now.”
Now, sitting with his shunned great-uncle decades later, Jos now had a much better idea of what his father meant. At home, this attitude was normal. But to outsiders, it was called xenophobia, speciesism, or worse. For years he had shrugged that off. Outsiders didn’t understand the complexities of permes, so they spoke from ignorance. They were to be pitied more than feared or scorned. Even after his rotations on Coruscant and Alderaan, during which dozens of sentients had been laid open before him, even though he no longer spoke the High Tongue or observed the Purging Days—even then, though he fancied himself fairly galactopolitan, the interdiction, the barrier between his kind and all others, had worked for him on a deep level, so deep he hadn’t even realized its power.
But then he’d fallen in love with Tolk—a Lorrdian nurse who was not of his planet or even his system, a fact that was supposed to be the death knell for any possible long-term relationship. In the words of many older and infirm beings he’d treated, he’d fallen and he couldn’t get up.
And he wasn’t sure he wanted to.
“Go ahead,” his great-uncle and admiral said then. His voice was strong—a voice that knew how to give an order—but kind as well. “Go ahead. Ask.”
Jos looked straight at him. “Was it worth it?”
Silence for a long moment, the two of them looking straight at each other—and the older man gave him a small smile. “Yes. And no.” He sat down with a sigh in Vaetes’s chair. “For six glorious years, I was sure it was.”
Jos raised an eyebrow. His uncle gestured for him to sit as well, which he did.
“Feleema—my spouse—died in a mag-lev accident on Coruscant six years after we married. So did four hundred others. It was quick—a superconductor failed, the safeties malfunctioned, and the train left the rail at three hundred kilometers per hour and rammed into a row of deserted industrial buildings in the southern hemisphere. No survivors in any of the cars.”
“I’m sorry.”
His great-uncle nodded. “Thank you. It’s been more than thirty years. No one from the family has ever said that to me. Or anything else.”
Jos was quiet, touched by the man’s sense of loss.
“So, there I was,” Erel Kersos continued. “A fresh lieutenant in the service of the Republic, my wife gone, and my family and culture no longer available to me. We had no children. I couldn’t go home. So I applied myself to my work, I made a career for myself in the military.” He smiled, and Jos thought there was a slight bitterness in it. “Which is how I wound up here, nearly forty years later.”
“You could have recanted.”
“I would have had to deny my dead wife to do that. I could not do so. And could not abide a family that would have demanded