Like smell.
Anyway, the last time she had seen the old Jedi with a bowl of food in the
Temple rectory, there had been a tail hanging over the edge.
"I'm telling you, we're too low," Scout said. "We should have taken the lift
tube to Level Fourteen. That's what the sign said."
"That wasn't a sign. It was a scuff mark on the lift tube wall."
"Sign."
"Scuff."
"Sign!"
Whie took a breath. "Perhaps it was a sign, and I am mistaken. Let's try
Level Fourteen."
Scout stalked along the narrow corridor. "You know, the way you do that takes
all the fun out of being right."
"The way I do what?"
"Give in. It's like even though I'm right and you're wrong, somehow you're
just humoring me. Jedi serenity is all very well, but in a thirteen-year-old boy
it's sort of creepy."
"What do you want from me?"
"Argue! Fight! Don't be this . . . this pretend Jedi," Scout said. "Can't you
just be human, for once?"
Whie's mouth quirked in a little smile. "No," he said.
The truth was, Whie was preoccupied. Master Leem had hinted they were going
to Vjun to meet with someone very important—maybe Count Dooku himself, and
possibly the famous Jedi-killer Asajj Ventress. Whie had done a computer look-up
on her, and found himself staring at the woman from his dream.
Ventress would be waiting for them on Vjun. In a few days, a week at most, he
would be standing in a room with a ticking detonator. Ventress would be smiling.
Scout would turn to him with blood trickling down her shirt. "Kiss her,"
Ventress would say.
He wished he knew what he was going to answer.
They were standing in the cooked-food line—the lines for raw were far too
long—when someone tapped Scout politely on the shoulder. "Passenger Pho?"
"What? I mean, Yes?" Scout said, belatedly remembering that she, Whie, and
Jai Maruk were traveling as the Pho family, en route to a cousin's wedding on
Corphelion.
She found herself looking up at a tall humanoid-shaped droid that had seen
better days. If it had ever featured any markings—paint, interface instructions,
or even a brand name—they had long since been worn away, so its whole body had a
dull, scuffed, scratched look, as if it had been sanded down and never
refinished. "The ship's purser asked me to fetch you," the droid said. "It seems
one of your belongings has been turned in to the Lost and Found."
Scout blanched. It had become depressingly clear over their first few days
together that Jai Maruk didn't think much of her. She could just imagine the
expression on his lean, closed face if he heard she'd had to bail her lightsaber
out of Reasonable Doubt's Lost and Found. "What did I lose?"
"The purser neglected to mention," the droid said politely. "Will you come
this way?"
She looked at Whie, who nodded. "Go ahead. I can manage." Still Scout
hesitated. "Don't worry," Whie said. "I won't tell."
He isn't trying to humiliate me, Scout told herself. It just works out that
way.
The scuffed droid turned and headed for the lift tube. Scout trudged after
him. "Your finish is pretty worn," she said, making conversation.
"I am not a regular part of Reasonable Doubt's crew," he explained. "I
offered to work for them in exchange for my passage. Regrettably, my owner is
dead," the droid went on. "I am responsible for my own upkeep."
The lift tube door opened. "I never thought of that," Scout said. "What would
happen to a droid with no owner, I mean."
"I hadn't, either," her companion remarked dryly, "until it happened to me."
"What do you do about maintenance?" Scout asked. "Go back to the factory?
Find a repair tech? But how would you pay for repairs?"
"Your grasp of the problem is admirable," the droid said. "As it happens, I
was part of a rather small production run, now very obsolete. I am programmed to
correspondingly expensive, as they must be either bought as antiques or
custom-built from my specifications. The challenge is considerable, as you
surmised."
"Wouldn't cost you much for a couple of cans of metal paint, though," Scout
said, glancing at her guide's scuffed bare metal surfaces.
"Ornamentation is not logically a high priority."
"Easier to get a job if you look smart, though. Think of it as a business
expense."
The droid shrugged, a strangely human gesture. "There is some truth in what
you say . . . and yet, there is something honest about this," he said, touching
the bare metal surface of his cheek. "It seems to me that most sentients live in
a . . . cocoon of illusions and expectations. We are full of assumptions: we
think we know ourselves and those around us; we think we know what each day will
bring. We are confident we understand the arc and trajectory of our lives. Then
Fate intervenes, strips us down to bare metal, and we see we are little more
than debris, floating in darkness."
Scout looked at him. "Whoa. You must have been a philosopher droid off the
assembly line."
"Quite the opposite," he said, with a sharp inward expression. "Philosophy
has come rather late to me." The lift tube arrived at Level 34, and the doors
slid open. "After you, Mistress Pho," he said.
"My friends call me Scout." She stuck out her hand.
Gravely the droid accepted it. "I don't think I can count myself as a friend,
yet. Just a droid with a job to do."
"Now you tell me your name," Scout prompted. "That's how this works."
"Certainly not. However trusting you are, I certainly don't know enough about
you to give you my real name." Relenting, he added, "For now, you may call me
Solis, if you prefer."
"It beats 'Hey, Scuffr " Scout had the distinct impression that if the
droid's factory programming had included an eye-roll function, he would have
deployed it. She grinned. "Solis it is."
The line in the cafeteria was interminable, even for cooked food, but after
what felt like a galactic age Whie had finally placed his orders and paid for
them. Now he stood looking uneasily over his haul. One large bubble-and-squirt;
five orders of vacuum flowers; half a dozen of what the menu called Blasteroids!
and appeared to be double-fried chili dumplings; a bucket of crispy feet; and a
sloshing half bucket of rank (extra gummy), along with five drinks and a handful
of napkins. That ought to be enough, Whie thought. But how was he going to get
it back to the cabin?
Would Asajj be the one who left Scout bleeding? Or would they be captured by
guards and taken before her already hurt?
If he kissed her, would he taste the blood on the edge of her mouth?
Stop! Don't think about it.
Don't think. Don't think.
Whie's immediate instinct was to pile the food in a stack and trust to
balance and a little judicious application of the Force to keep it from toppling
over, but that seemed a bit conspicuous. How would an ordinary person handle
this? Awkwardly, he decided, glancing around the cafeteria and watching a hefty
female shouldering between tables with a tray on each hand and a sniveling
toddler attached to each leg. Maybe he could grab one of the Doubt's little
service droids and get it to help carry trays down to their rooms.
"May I help you, sir?" said a tall droid painted with immaculate
cream-and-crimson livery, appearing at his elbow as if conjured by his thoughts.
The Force is with me, Whie thought with an inward smile. "No, that's all
right. I don't want to take you from your owner's duties. If you could help me
find a ship's droid, though . . ."
The droid picked up the Blasteroids and the bucket of rank. "I insist, Master
Whie."
"That's very k—" Whie froze. "I'm sorry. What did you call me?"
"Master Whie," the droid said, in a low, pleasant voice.
"My name is Pho—"
The droid shook its head. "It won't do, Master Whieit really won't. I know a
very great deal about you. It's possible I know more about you than you know
about yourself."
Whie set the food on an empty table. His hand was light and tingling, ready
to dive beneath his robes and draw his lightsaber. "Who are you? What are you?
Who do you belong to?"
"I suggest," the droid said—and his voice was in deadly earnest now—"you ask
yourself those exact questions."
Down in the ship's exercise room, Jai Maruk was working out in anticipation
of his second meeting with Count Dooku, honing his body as another person might
sharpen a knife.
Maks Leem was meditating in what had once been a storage closet, but was now
officially listed on Reasonable Doubt's directory as Cabin 523. Master Leem had
her own room, next door to the others. Partly this was because she liked to
meditate for several hours every day, preferably surrounded, as now, by a
choking cloud of Gran incense that smelled, to the human olfactory system, like
burning thicklube. But the chief reason the others had encouraged her to take a
room of her own was that the Gran's four ruminant stomachs worked loudly and
continuously all night long in a way that humans found impossible to sleep
through.
Being at heart a social creature, Master Leem regretted being secluded from
her human comrades, and in fact spent most of the waking hours with them. But
now, with Jai exercising and the Padawans dispatched to the cafeteria, she had
gone next door to her little snuggery. Surrounded by smoke thick enough to drop
a small mammal, she was happily reestablishing her connection to the living
Force that bound all things.
Next door, in Cabin 524, Grand Master Yoda was wondering what in space was
keeping the Padawans. He wasn't worried for their safety. He was starving.
The whole point of travel, Scout reflected, was to learn about oneself. In
that sense, this trip was going really well. She had learned all sorts of
things. She had learned that being chosen to be a Padawan did not necessarily
bring every happiness with it, as she had thought it would, if one's Master
obviously viewed you as excess baggage. She had learned that her body was
entirely too used to the comfortable and familiar food served at the Jedi
Temple, and that the galaxy was large, and full of people who willingly ate the
most disgusting stuff imaginable. And she had learned that she had absolutely no
sense of direction at all, because it seemed as if her interminable trek with
the droid Solis—whom she couldn't stop thinking of as Scuffy—must have taken her
through the whole ship about three times. "Look, this is ridiculous," she
finally said. "Have the purser send whatever it is to my cabin. If I can ever
find my cabin again," she added.
"Here we are," Solis said imperturbably; and indeed, they had turned a last
corner and stood before a small door marked PURSER'S OFFICE: SHIP'S PERSONNEL
ONLY in Verpine signage, which was to say, so faint that Scout's nose was
touching the door in her attempt to make out the letters. "Wait here one
moment," the droid said, and he disappeared inside.
Scout waited.
And waited.
And waited.
"That's it," she growled. But at exactly the moment she was about to stomp
away, the door hissed open and Solis returned.
"Good news," the droid said politely. "The missing item didn't belong to you.
It has already been claimed."
"What?"
"It seems it was a handbag belonging to another Mistress Pho. A simple case
of mistaken identity," the droid explained. "So sorry for the inconvenience."
The Jedi, Scout reminded herself, is serene. She is not pushed lightly about
by life's little whimsicalities. A true Jedi would not be imagining how this
droid would look disassembled into three buckets of bolts and a heap of scrap
metal.
The droid's head tilted to one side. "Is there something amiss, mistress?"
"No," Scout grated. "Nothing at all. I'll just be getting back to my room
now." She stalked away from the purser's office and turned a corner into the
labyrinth of ship’s corridors. Solis—whose hearing was based on the legendary
Chiang/Xi audiofilament tech—listened to her footsteps recede for quite some
time; stop; and slowly return.
"All right," she growled, turning the same corner several minutes later. "How
in the name of crushing black holes do I even find my cabin?"
"Allow me to help," the droid said suavely.
"Charmed," the girl snarled.
Far away in third class, Taupe Corridor, Level 17A, the door of Cabin 524,
registered to the Pho family, slid most of the way into the floor. The Verpine
usually built their doors to slide downward, so that a room's occupant could see
outside and if necessary converse with whoever was on the doorstep without
embarrassment, even if wearing only a bathrobe. This door opened only most of
the way, however, leaving a jutting lintel that any reasonably active
five-year-old could have jumped over, because under the standing orders of the
witty ship's engineer, maintenance cycles were only to be expended on third
class if something was broken "beyond all Reasonable Doubt."
For a bipedal human, stepping over a lintel only fifteen centimeters high was
no great challenge. To a squat, garbage-can-shaped R2 unit on wheels, however,
the challenge was somewhat greater.
Routine security in the public spaces of Reasonable Doubt was handled by
bottom-of-the-line Carbanti surveillance monads. Each monad was essentially a
small cam and microphone slaved to a very dim little artificial intelligence.
The making of efficient AIs was as much an art as a science, and the AIs
assigned to surveillance monads were by and large the slowest kids in the class.
Even by these standards, the mechanical consciousness monitoring the corridor in
front of Cabin 524, Level 17A, was notably dim-witted. The whole range of
criminal behavior, its patterns and motivations, was entirely beyond it. Several
spectacular thefts and one rather amusing con game featuring a fish, a diamond,
and two deaf-mutes had taken place directly under its cam without provoking the
slightest urge to pass a Questionable Activity Report up to the larger and more
intelligent AI that r
eported to ship security. The truth was, this particular
monad had only one idea in what passed for its brain, and that idea was Fire! It
had b een waiting its entire existence, some seventy-three trillion processor
cycles, for something to register on its infrared or smoke detectors. Then it
would finally be able to break its eternal silence with a scream of lights and
klaxons.
To say that the security monad on Taupe Corridor, Level 17A, longed for an
event of fire would not be too strong a word. The never-flashed alarm lights and
the never-rung klaxons were like seventy-three trillion processor cycles of a
sneeze that wouldn't quite come. By this time, the little security monad would
quite willingly have melted its own processors down to sand if only it could
sound the alarm of Fire! first.
The sight of an R2 unit rolling up to the stuck door in Cabin 524, however,
gave it no pause whatever—even when said R2 thumped painfully into the barrier
and emitted a surprisingly unmetallic yelp, followed by a snuff of frustration.
The sight of the little droid reaching out with one jerking mechanical arm to
whap the stuck door repeatedly in what was, for a machine, a markedly petulant
manner might have provoked some curiosity in an AI of greater intellectual
accomplishments. In strict point of fact, the engineers at Carbanti would have
said that even their least gifted security monad would surely have been struck
by the sight of the same R2 unit rising slowly into the air without the aid of
any visible boosters or rockets. When the droid settled back down into the
corridor with a clang and rolled off with a decidedly puckish, questing air, it
would not have been too much to expect a security monad with even minimal
initiative to flag the little droid for linked follow-up observation.
But the monad in Taupe Corridor did nothing of the kind. The sad truth was,
the only circumstance in which it would have paid the slightest iota of
attention to this hungry, flying, bad-tempered R2 was if some helpful passenger
had doused the little droid in lighter fluid and set it on fire.
Back in the cafeteria, long lines of bored passengers were still queued up
for food. Children dabbled designs on the plastic cafeteria tables with bits of
dipping sauce, or tried to convince their parents they had eaten their