Editing Dale Arden (section)

===Term 3===
Databases have always sung to me, and I put the talent to good use in assignment to investigate some very high tech ruins on a primitive world.  We were making good progress in getting our machines talk to their ancients ones, but not enough for me.  I thought the low tech natives had answers they weren't sharing, secrets they must have possessed from living so close for so long.  I pushed hard.  Too hard.  Among us civilized folk, blackmail is a delicate game of move and countermove.  There are places in the galaxy, though, where all it gets you is a spear to the face.

I lost an eye, others lost their lives.  If I were the ice queen some have called me, no doubt I would have carefully covered up the evidence.  Found someone else to blame.  That's how these things are done.  Instead I confessed everything and left the Academy in disgrace.  It was a dark time for me, as I slunk back home to have my eye regrown.

It was at this juncture in my life that I met Zemmy Zarkov, at that time working as a doctor.  Zemmy is many things.  Smart, crazy, creative, a thief, a brilliant doctor, a cultural chameleon, and afraid of only one thing in this galaxy- did I mention crazy?  He's a hopeless addict, afraid to face his own mortality, and I think convinced that the lack of lines on his face means that his soul is still pure.  Over the years I've run into him more times than coincidence should allow, usually when he was desperate for help to score his next anagathic fix. [2]

Why is he my friend?  It's a hard question.  I suppose because no matter how little my troubles are compared to his, he treats them as though they mean something.  And because, though I've never needed a body buried, I'm confident that if I did he'd show up with a spade and no questions asked.  Zemmy's that kind of guy.