Star Wars_ MedStar 02_ Jedi Healer - Michael Reaves [62]
Jos grafted burned skin, resected pulverized tissue, removed perforated organs and replaced them with fresh transplants. Time crawled by.
Tolk was working with another surgeon this day. Whenever he could, Jos tried to catch her gaze, but to no avail; she simply looked at him from over her mask, her eyes betraying nothing—then turned her attention back to her work.
By the time his shift was up, nine troopers had passed beneath his gloved hands, and he was about to fall asleep on his feet—something he hadn’t done since his residency.
He went to the ’fresher and laved his face and hands, sieved tepid water through his hair. It helped push back the exhaustion a little. Was a time when he had been just like Uli—well, a little older—and pulling a shift like the one he just had would have slid off him like water off an Aqualish’s back. But now, every time he looked in the mirror, it seemed he could find new lines in his face, more gray hairs in his stubble. He was beginning to look—
Creators help him, he was beginning to look like his uncle.
He hadn’t had a chance to talk to Tolk—she’d gone off shift before him, and he hadn’t seen her since.
When he left the ’fresher, he saw I-Five just emerging from the OT disinfection passage. The combination of UV light and ultrasound was complete enough to zap any pathogen that might have somehow made it through the sterile patient field, but the droid always complained that the sonics left him with the robotic equivalent of tinnitus for a few minutes afterward.
“So your memory’s fully restored?” Jos said as the droid joined him.
“What?”
“Turn up your auditory sensors. You said you remembered everything,” Jos said. “So tell me—are you really a lap-droid for some wealthy princess, or a groomer for a Shistavanen, or what?”
“I’m exactly what I was before, thank you very much for asking. I said there were gaps in my memory that needed to be filled. Now they have been. My internal cognitive function repairs are complete.”
“I wish mine were. Anything in particular you recall? C’mon, I-Five. Share.”
The droid cocked his head in a puzzled pose. “Why are you so anxious to know?”
“Well, because—” Jos thought about it. Just why was he so curious?
“Because,” he said slowly, “because from what you do remember, you’ve had an adventurous time of it, first on Coruscant and then careening around the space lanes. As for me…the only worlds I’ve been to, other than here, are Coruscant and Alderaan. I look in the mirror, and I hardly recognize the aging hunk of protoplasm I see. I suppose that, when you said you remembered everything, that…” He shrugged.
“That you would seize the opportunity to do a little vicarious sightseeing?”
“Something like that. Also,” Jos paused, looking again for words. “I suppose I should be telling all this to Klo—”
“He does rate far higher than I do on the intuition scale.”
“Most doctors—especially the ones here and others like them—will tell you they don’t fear death, because they’ve seen so much of it. That may be true, for them. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s for just that reason that I do fear death. Or at least the boat that makes the crossing.”
“Padawan Offee might also be more able to help you than—”
“It’s usually painful and protracted, death. Seems odd, with all the painkillers and stim treatments available nowadays, but there’s still about a billion quadrillion or so beings just getting by for every one with his own private skyhook. In that respect, the galaxy probably won’t ever change.”
“There are other options.”
“True. If you’re rich, there are options—a personality dump, being frozen in carbonite—all kinds of options. But I’m not within a parsec of being that rich, and probably never will be. So I—”