KHOMM

CHAPTER 17

As Dorsk 81 piloted them to the main spaceport on Khomm, Kyp Durron stared out at the amazingly perfect gridwork of cities.

Dorsk 81 fidgeted at the control panel, looking anxious as he brought their craft in. A few other vessels sat parked in marked-off rectangles, out-system traders coming to the clone planet to offer their wares. The inhabitants of Khomm rarely left their world, preferring to stay at home and do what they had always done.

Dorsk 81’s olive green skin flushed a deeper hue. “It feels good to be back,” he said. “I was untrained when I left, but now I can trace what my senses told me as I grew up. I feel the calming influence of this place, the comfortable familiarity. After all the difficult decisions I’ve faced at the praxeum, I want to sink back into the pool of my own people, absorbing their warmth and welcome. You’ll sense it too, Kyp.”

Kyp nodded, masking his skepticism. “I can already feel a low-level … muffled sensation.”

Dorsk 81 nodded his streamlined head and innocently blinked his bright eyes. “Yes, yes, that’s it.”

When they opened the access hatch, Kyp was amazed to see that a crowd had been shuttled in from the tall buildings. He looked at the hundreds of smooth-skinned clones gathered to welcome them. They applauded when Dorsk 81 stepped into the hazy sunlight and raised his right arm in greeting.

Kyp stood beside his friend and whispered, “Why so many? This is amazing.”

Beaming, Dorsk 81 answered, “I am famous here, now that I’m a Jedi Knight.” He cast a sheepish glance at Kyp. “I’m the only person in Khomm’s recent memory who has done anything … unpredictable.”

Kyp stifled a laugh, knowing that Dorsk 81 was not joking. He watched as one of the cloned aliens came forward on a levitating raft encircled by handrails. The placid-faced alien piloting it wore some sort of uniform with insignia on the shoulders.

Dorsk 81 was impressed. “That must be our city leader, Kaell 115. I’ve never seen him this close before. He’s been our leader for decades. It’s in his genetic line.” But when the standing platform drifted in front of them, Kyp saw that the uniformed alien had a childlike roundness to his face that did not speak of many years wearing the burdens of leadership.

He raised his right hand in greeting, as Dorsk 81 had done. “I am Kaell 116,” he said, “the new leader of this city. Welcome, Dorsk 81! We are proud to have such an impressive personage return to us.” He gestured toward the open platform. “Please allow me to escort you to your domicile.”

The city leader gave Kyp a stiff greeting. They climbed aboard, and the levitating platform drifted just over the heads of the crowd. The olive-skinned aliens waved in unison, giving Dorsk 81 a hero’s welcome.

Kaell 116 cruised away from the spaceport toward the identical blocks of city buildings. Trees lined every street, pruned to look exactly the same. Lawns of purple and blue grass were carefully manicured in front of each building. The air held a dusty, mineral undertone that spoke of life-lessness.

The structures were squarish monstrosities made of polished green-veined rock, bordered with a rough sandstone. The outer walls bore no decorations, no sculptures or window boxes, merely a number engraved in each cornerstone at street level.

“How do you find your way around?” Kyp said. “Everything looks the same.”

Kaell 116 seemed to take this as a criticism, and his face grew pinched. “We have molded our city to be the way we want it, and we’ve maintained it that way. Everything is numbered and cataloged, and Khomm is a stable, understandable place. Our citizens are happy and content here.”

“I see,” Kyp said, forcing a smile. His dark eyes flashed toward Dorsk 81, who looked so pleased to be back home.

As the standing platform drifted by, other aliens leaned out the windows to wave at them. Finally, Kaell 116 lowered them to the ground in front of one building that looked like all the others. The city leader dropped them off with a perfunctory farewell.

Dorsk 81 rushed to the building unabashedly, gazing up at the stone edifice as if he had never seen anything like it before. “This is my home!” he said. Kyp followed as the cloned alien fairly ran up three flights of stairs to his personal abode.

The well-lit corridor was lined with a dizzying succession of identical doors, like myriad images reflected from nested mirrors. One of the doors popped open as Dorsk 81 hurried toward it.

Two figures emerged, wearing grins on their smooth faces; for a moment Kyp felt as if he had seen a vortex of alternate timelines, images of an identical person at different stages of life. They both looked like Dorsk 81, one older and more weathered, one younger and slightly smaller.

All three embraced and talked quickly in low voices. Kyp stepped back, feeling as if he didn’t belong there—but he didn’t mind. He observed with a pang of homesickness, thinking fondly of when he and his parents and his brother, Zeth, had spent warm times together on his own world of Deyer: the floating fishing platforms, the quiet lake sunsets … but the Empire had crushed that place, and Kyp hadn’t seen it since his childhood.

After the brief and intense welcome, Dorsk 81 gestured for Kyp to follow him inside. “This is my friend Kyp Durron, another Jedi Knight. This”—he turned to the older image of himself—“is Dorsk 80, my predecessor, and here,” he clasped the shoulder of the younger clone, “is Dorsk 82, my successor.”

Kyp felt disoriented by the genetically identical copies, but he had seen many strange things in the galaxy. He glanced around where the Dorsk family lived, saw adequate furnishings and all the expected rooms. “Do any of you have wives?” he asked, seeing no one else.

All three clones blinked at him, and finally Dorsk 81 gave a short laugh. The skin on his forehead wrinkled. “Kyp, no one has wives. Everyone on Khomm is genderless. That’s why we use the cloning facilities. We haven’t had genders on this planet for thousands of years.”

Kyp chuckled in embarrassment. “Well, I just assumed … uh, obviously I was wrong.”

“We all make mistakes,” the elder Dorsk 80 said with a quick, meaningful frown in the direction of Dorsk 81. Kyp noticed, but his friend pretended not to.

Later, Dorsk 81 helped make up a bed in their small extra room, and Kyp used the moment of privacy to ask a question that had been bothering him.

“Dorsk 81,” he said. “Now that I’ve seen how …” he searched for the right word, “how stable and unchanging your world is, I don’t understand how you’re going to be a Jedi watchman. What are you going to do here?”

Dorsk 81’s yellow eyes suddenly filled with panic. “I don’t know!” he whispered, his voice hoarse. “I don’t know …” He repeated the words to himself, then he left Kyp alone, fleeing back into the outer rooms.

Kyp could not sleep for some time. He looked out the window into a night that glowed with a billion bright stars. Khomm was close to the galactic nucleus, near the dreaded Core Systems where the survivors of the Empire had gone into hiding. The stars made a blurry island in space, a lens that spilled across half the sky.

Kyp stared toward the Core Systems, fearing what they might hide, but also yearning to know.

Young Dorsk 82 spent the next morning showing off his work in the clone banks. The cloning facility was taller than the other buildings and of a different design: the only unusual structure Kyp had seen in the gridwork of the metropolis. Rather than the ubiquitous green-veined stone, the outer walls were immense rectangular sheets of transparent crystal, interlocked with chrome girders that reflected the hazy sunlight. The crystal windows were so clear that Kyp could look in from street level and see the carefully organized activity inside.

“We have maintained everything exactly as it was when you left it,” Dorsk 82 said, beaming up at his “father.” Inside, the air was damp and laden with a medley of chemical and organic smells that were not so much unpleasant as exotic and unusual. Dorsk 80 accompanied them like a stern schoolmaster, nodding in pride at his protégé Dorsk 82 and looking from side to side, touching controls and inspecting them as they passed.

“I didn’t know this was the work you did before,” Kyp said to Dorsk 81.

His friend nodded. “Yes, the computer database holds genetic blueprints of all the major family lines. When it is time to produce the next offspring, we call up the DNA strings and produce another copy of the preferred stock.”

“Each clone is usually the same,” Dorsk 80 interrupted. Kyp knew that Dorsk 81 was an anomaly, Force-sensitive against all odds, when he should have been identical to all previous incarnations of his clone pattern; but something inexplicable had changed.

Metal incubators lined row after row in banks carefully numbered and monitored where embryos were grown past the infant stage and accelerated to near adolescence, whereupon they were released and raised by their family units, trained in the duties of their genetic string.

The hissing of moving fluids, the whisper of mist generators, and the clicking of computer operators made the cloning facility a constant hive of activity, but tension grew around Dorsk 81 like a blanket of silence.

Dorsk 82 proudly led them to his own station. Flat terminal screens displayed the status of thousands of the embryo tanks. “Here is where you used to sit,” Dorsk 82 said. “Everything remains fully functional, and I have followed in our family’s footsteps—but now that you have returned, I gladly relinquish my position to you, so that I may continue my training and one day become your true successor.”

Dorsk 81 blanched. “But that isn’t why I came back. You don’t understand.” He looked to Kyp for support. “Continue in your duties at the cloning facility, Dorsk 82. I don’t intend to take them again.”

The younger clone blinked, uncomprehending. “But you must!”

Dorsk 80’s face darkened. “You are my successor, Dorsk 81. You have always known your place.”

Dorsk 81 whirled to look at his elder. “No. I am a Jedi Knight, and I must find my place—my new place.”

Kyp yearned to help his friend, to support him. But this was a personal debate, and he would only hurt things if he interfered.

Dorsk 80 looked at him sternly. “You have no choice in the matter.”

“Yes,” Dorsk 81 said, his face tilled with anguish. “Yes I do have a choice. That’s what you don’t understand.” Dorsk 81’s tear-filled eyes flicked back and forth to his younger and older versions. As Kyp watched, the expressions on all three faces were enough to break his heart.

Dorsk 81’s family brooded for the rest of the day, shunning him. Looking wretched, the cloned alien came to Kyp, who had retreated to the guest room. He felt so sorry for his friend; he could see from the stagnant life on Khomm that the others could not comprehend who Dorsk 81 was or what he had done.

Dorsk 81 sat beside Kyp. His yellow eyes were very expressive, but it took him a long moment to gather the courage to speak. “I don’t dare stay here,” he said. “Even if I try to be strong, I know that if I live on this world, in this city, with my family members … I will eventually give in. I’ll forget what it was to be a Jedi. I will fail in my vow to Master Skywalker. It’ll all wash away, and my life will vanish as a minor deviation in the history of Khomm.

“What am I to do now? It all seemed so clear to me when I became a Jedi. I was going to return to Khomm and be the guardian of this system. But this system does not need—or want—a Jedi Knight to guard them. Now what mission do I have?”

Kyp gripped Dorsk 81’s arm, feeling his heart pound. “You can come with me,” he said. “I want you to.”

Dorsk 81’s smooth face became an open window through which hope streamed like sunlight.

Kyp’s eyes narrowed, then he felt a glimmer of the old vendetta against the Empire. “We’ll take our ship and slip in to the uncharted Core Systems,” he said. “You and I together must discover what’s become of the Empire.”