Jarmi smiled tentatively. “I’ll do my best… .”
And she did, exceeding all Laneff’s expectations because Jarmi really wanted to work on this project. Within three days, they had the bare lab furnished with wet benches, cabinetry, standard glassware, reagents, and computer terminals. Work crews labored around the clock until every drain, power outlet, fan, and water tap worked perfectly.
On the fourth morning, when Laneff came back from breakfast, she found Jarmi had set up two partitioned office areas. One was surrounded by light-orange fabric-covered partitions, not quite the Sat’htine hue. The other partitions were the sickly green color Jarmi seemed to prefer.
“This will be your desk,” said Jarmi in greeting. “I bribed a friend of mine to give up his new terminal so you can have it. We’re short this month, with all this expanding.”
“I wish I knew where you get the money for all this!”
“Legally,” assured Jarmi. “But by the time you’re cleared to learn all the details, you won’t have time. See,” she proffered a stack of shiny magazines, “your first mail.”
“But—” She’d never gotten a subscription started in under two months.
“You have to know who to ask,” explained Jarmi brightly.
The Gen’s happiness was too soothing to Laneff’s nerves for her to want to tarnish it with suspicious questions. She sat down at the desk; the chair wasn’t new and creaked in a friendly way. “May I clip these magazines for file?”
“Certainly. They’re yours.”
And Laneff dug in, catching up on all she’d missed since Digen had died. Specifically, she searched for articles on his death. The autopsy results would surely be published, and so would her treatment notes, and those of Shanlun and Digen’s other physicians.
Around noon, Jarmi came back with two Simes pushing a wheeled platform stacked with electrical equipment. While they unloaded, Jarmi came to the office. “Here! Top-priority requisition forms for the NMR machine and the big mass spectrometer!” She thumbed the stack onto the desk. “Key to the balance room.” The chip went on top of the stack. “We’re set. Now, what do I do next?”
Laneff had found the articles she wanted, but only part of the information was there. “Have you read any of my papers?”
“Sure, not that I understand much of it. It seems to me it’s a long, long way from identifying receptor sites on nerve sheaths to distinguishing Sime from Gen in utero!”
“Well, I haven’t been able to publish my synthesis because nobody else has ever been able to duplicate it. Without that, there’s no hope of making this commercial!”
Laneff took a sheet of paper and began to lecture. “I call this compound K/A because it’s the eleventh compound I tried when looking for a reaction distinctly different between Sime and Gen placental material. Now, please never forget that this has not been field-tested. My evidence is entirely statistical. I tested five hundred specimens taken from Sime women with Sime husbands—and I assumed that two thirds of those placentas had to be from Sime children, while about one third would be from Gen children.”
“Reasonable enough.”
“But not conclusive, even though K/A bonds to receptors on two thirds of those placentas, and not at all on the other third. Dissecting out the nerve fibers, I found that the bonding takes place on the selyn transport nerve sheath in the placenta that supplies the fetus with selyn from the mother. Further, a nerve saturated with K/A will not transport selyn. I tried it on selyn transport nerves from other parts of the body and got the same effect.
“My theory is that this substance I’ve synthesized is naturally present in all Simes, but especially abundant in channels, and is responsible for regulating selyn flow. I have no idea how its level in the blood would be regulated. And I’ve never done any experiments to isolate it from blood. I was about to try that when Digen was brought into the Center suffering from hypersensitivity to selyn flow causing transfer abort.”
Laneff told a highly censored version of that story to Jarmi, leaving out everything to do with the Endowment. But she now felt close enough to the Gen woman to tell all the rest of the story of Shanlun.
The first time she’d met Shanlun, she’d been wandering the corridors of the university hospital/Sime Center where her lab was. Frustration had driven her from the lab that evening, and despair had once more set in when she checked her mailbox and found yet another rejection by a major journal. It was close to midnight, the hallway lights dimmed. She wandered into her favorite waiting alcove, where huge windows overlooked the far-flung lights of the city. She was halfway through the door before she even noticed the muted nager.
She recognized Shanlun as the Companion-Therapist to the world-famous elder statesman housed in the security wing. She’d heard the Gen’s nager was distinctive, but she’d never imagined anything like this.
“Jarmi, it seemed as if he’d wrapped his nager about him like a cloak, defining his personal space so that he literally didn’t exist beyond it. I could zlin the compressed intensity of his selyn field, but you know how when a Gen is paying attention to something, it’s as if a shaft of nageric light beams out of them and sets the object of attention glowing? Awake, any Gen is aware of something, and things around them—glow. The First Order Gens, when they’re high-field, set the whole room on fire. Shanlun does that, but he can also not do it. He can pay attention to nothing. It’s as if he just becomes invisible or unzlinnable, rather. I’ve never heard of anyone who can do such a thing, but he was doing it that night when I first saw him.”
He seemed to be staring out the window, unaware of her. His nager was composed of tiny flakes of particolored light that blended to an iridescent silver. Knowing it was impolite to zlin a Gen so fixedly, she blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Beautiful view, isn’t it?”
After a long silence in which his nager didn’t react, he said in the deep voice of a working Companion, “Yes, it is beautiful. It’s a beauty which is easy to perceive. There are others which are much harder.” “Beauty comes in grades of difficulty?”
His nager relaxed, spreading to suffuse the room with an even glow of his attention. This, too, was an effect Laneff had never zlinned before, even in other First Order Donors. “Is there anything,” he asked in a rhetorical tone, “that is not beautiful when viewed from the center of its own moment?” “What?” Yet the words made an odd echo of sense. He turned, his eyes raking her as if astonished to find someone there. “I’m sorry, that must sound like nonsense.” He shrugged ingenuously, like a gypsy. “I’m just feeling terribly frustrated, and I don’t want to splatter that on every Sime around me. Excuse me, Hajene.”
He left before she could deny the title “hajene,” given only to channels. She brooded, aware that she should have realized the First Companion in Zeor would not be feeling talkative while his Sectuib was so ill. She couldn’t get image, nager and flesh, out of her mind, and so the next night, she pinned her Householding signet to her lab coat conspicuously, and sought the same waiting-room alcove just before midnight. He was there, gazing at the last quarter moon rising over the city.
Silently, she joined him. They shared the alcove without a word for nearly half an hour and parted with only a nod. Five nights she joined him in that silent midnight vigil, aware for the first time in her life of the way the moon shifted phase and time day by day. Finally, on the sixth night they gazed on a moonless sky over a multicolored city of jewels, a visual effect parallel to his nageric effect.
As he turned to leave the alcove, she dared to speak again. “I think I see now how beauty comes in grades of difficulty. Sometimes, a model of a molecule can seem ugly on first sight. But understand how its bonds imbue it with special character—how they strike a chord and sing together—and the sight of the model can make you cry. But people think you’re crazy if you sit over a reaction pot and cry for joy. Especially if the reaction won’t go!”
His nageric astonishment melted into an avid hunger that even her
sensitivity might have missed, it was folded away so quickly. His eye lit on her Householding signet. “You’re not Perrin Farris, are you?”
“Laneff Farris ambrov Sat’htine. Hajene Perrin’s my cousin. I’m just a renSime.”
“Shanlun ambrov Zeor.” He added, “Just a Gen.”
They had talked for another hour. She found that Shanlun had pledged Zeor, to Digen, expecting to be his last Companion, but accepting that in order to be part of Zeor. “I hadn’t expected, though, to come to admire him so much, Laneff. I don’t want him to die so soon. He’s come to be the definition of Sectuib to me. I suppose that sounds odd from someone who was never even a Householder before.”
“No,” Laneff replied. “I’ve never met Digen; he’s not even a relative of mine; not all Farrises are related, you know. But I’ve heard Digen can make people understand what creates and sustains a Householding. It’s the ideals of Zeor that have touched your heart. You’re as much Zeor as I am Sat’htine.”
“I hope so,” he sighed. On subsequent nights, he began to talk of the intricate medical problems Digen was enduring. She was a researcher, not a clinician, so all she could offer at first was Sat’htine philosophy: “Shanlun, a physician can never win the battle against death, for death is a part of nature. A physician’s job is to enhance the quality—and length—of life, or perhaps to ease death.”
Astonishment whirled through his nager in dizzying sparks that left her as breathless as his smile did. “Thank you!” As he hurried away, she thought that never had anyone learned one of Sat’htine’s hardest lessons so quickly. Or maybe I just reminded him.
She wished that her own spirits could be lifted so easily. Her grant money was running out, she couldn’t figure why nobody else was able to reproduce her synthesis of K/A, and she couldn’t find a cheap enough way to extract and purify it from Sime blood—if it was even there. Every time she heard the news or read a newspaper and encountered a report of a berserker, she ground her teeth in frustration, for she knew from intimate personal experience what they were suffering. She couldn’t give up, yet she couldn’t go on, and as hard as she prayed, there was no answer in sight.
The moments around midnight she spent with Shanlun became the focus of her days, the rest a dull endurance trial. One night, he turned from the rain-sheeted windows and sat heavily in one of the padded green chairs. He admitted, “It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the abort seizures. He’s dying, Laneff, and I can’t even make him comfortable.”
Earlier that day, she’d dutifully plowed through an article on the mechanism of transfer-abort seizures in elderly channels. It had been a hopeless, heartless article, and she had pondered how her synthetic compound reduced selyn flow and thus nervous sensitivity to selyn flow. She began explaining this to Shanlun before she had it all thought out herself. “But, no! You don’t use the Sectuib in Zeor as a human experiment! Especially not on a wild theory.”
But he wouldn’t listen to that. He made her repeat her explanation three times until he understood.
“I call it olquenolone, though I’m not at all sure of the stereochemistry; my synthesis produces a messy mixture. The fraction I purify out of it I call K/A because it’s the first fraction of the eleventh compound I’ve tried. But I’ll bet olquenolone will be a good name for it.”
“And this molecule could be the key to transport nerve irritability.”
“Maybe, but it’s never been tried on living tissue!”
Pacing, Shanlun decided, “I have to tell Mairis—and Digen—about this. Remember, Digen once submitted to Rindaleo ambrov Zeor’s experiments, and that led to the end of the Donor shortage. He might go for this, too.”
She had learned about the great Rindaleo ambrov Zeor in school, but she was hardly his equal.
The next day Shanlun brought Mairis to her lab. She spent the entire day with them, between their trips to check on Digen. They grilled her on her every experiment more closely than any doctoral committee ever had.
Every time she successfully fielded a challenge, she noticed Shanlun’s attention on her, and there was more than just hope in his nager. It was admiration that was gradually becoming intensely personal.
The following day, Mairis brought in two top experts, one a member of Zeor and another a nonHouseholder. She was halfway through the entire reprise of her experiments before the nickname introductions finally sank in, and she realized these men were behind two of the most exalted names in her profession.
The Householder, a Sime, stayed in her lab all night checking her benchwork. She sweated that out torn by a mixture of hope that he’d find her mistake, and a perverse conviction that there was no mistake to find.
At dawn, when Mairis and Shanlun rejoined them, the Householder zlinned her sharply, and said, “Her theory could even be right. The compound does work as described, but I’d like a few weeks to check—”
“We don’t have a few weeks,” interrupted Shanlun, seeming haggard. “We’ve got to get a transfer into the Sectuib—or he’ll be dead in hours.”
Mairis elaborated gravely, “My top four channels have been working with him around the clock, and we can’t do anything. This, at least, is worth a try—and he’s for it. So tell us what you want set up to capture all the data possible out of this test. And let’s get started.”
They took all the K/A she had left and set her to synthesizing more under the watchful eyes of their experts. She had to shut her mind to the experiment going on in the security wing in order to stop her hands from shaking. To focus her concentration, she always visualized the reacting molecules tumbling through their gyrations, stage by stage, turning themselves inside out like contortionists or adagio dancers around a gypsy campfire. When she failed to concentrate like this, on each step of the reaction precisely executed, some un-traceable error crept in and she often got no yield of her desired product.
She knew she’d put on a proud display of her bench technique when, nine hours later, she weighed out her yield of K/A, pure. She was beaming radiantly when Shanlun and Mairis returned.
“He’s alive! We did it!” announced Mairis, and the Householder observing her beamed radiantly.
Shanlun was weary, but still fluorescent. “Here’s the record and a printout from the vital signs display. I think it shows the effect of the drug; I know I felt it when it hit Digen. It was—a miracle.”
His hand brushed hers as she took the strip of paper, and he caught at one of her handling tentacles with a finger. “I would have given up if it hadn’t been for you. Thank you, Laneff.” The tremor of sensuality in his touch kindled a like response in her. His nager was depleted of selyn though its usual pyrotechnic whirling still dizzied her. He’s post, she thought, and knew she could have him in bed if she chose. As delightful as the thought was, she found she didn’t want to take advantage of him that way. Not this man.
She put on her best clinical facade and examined the recordings. She could see how blood pressure, heartbeat, respiration, and ronaplin secretion had varied as the drug was introduced. The graphs jittered at the transfer point, trembling at the brink of abort for several moments, but then steadied through the transfer. “There’s no way,” said Laneff regretfully, “to rule out the placebo effect.”
“I know,” answered Shanlun, but she could tell his agreement was only intellectual. “The important thing is that it did work. And now Digen wants to meet you!”
Her first view of the living legend was in the ruddy light of a stormy dawn. He was propped up slightly in the white-sheeted bed, watching the sunrise while his withered old hands plucked aimlessly at the covers. He turned when she approached, and his eyes were fully alive in a way that belied the bruised throb of his nager.
“So you’re the one responsible for letting me see yet another dawn.” He paused to slide laboriously hyperconscious and zlin her. Then he said, “You remind me of Ercy—my daughter. I loved her, you know.”
“With good reason,” Laneff replied, recalling the story of
how Ercy had returned from a self-imposed exile and died giving birth to an heir to Zeor, Mairis’s mother. “But I’m not a channel like Ercy was.”
“So I noticed. I’m not that old and feeble yet, young lady. And with your help, I may be out of this bed again soon.”
Laneff glanced about the bare room. For a Sectuib’s hospital room, it was singularly bare and depressing. Even the curtains had been removed leaving only shutters. On a rolling tray at the bedside stood a lone cup of water. The absence of flowers she could understand. Farrises tended to be allergic. But usually the rooms in this hospital had some cheerful pictures on the walls, a television, brightly colored curtains, lamps, dresser scarves. This room had been stripped bare except for the yellow fire extinguisher on the wall near the door. The whole place echoed sharply.
“Sectuib Farris, is there anything I might bring you to make your stay more enjoyable?”
“Oh, no. They’ll be bringing me in some food in a few minutes. Not much that I’m allowed to eat lately, but they insist. A Sat’htine knows about such things . – .”
She nodded, and he asked that she stay and eat with him. Over the bland diet, which she tried to pretend wasn’t so dismal, they discussed everything from how the weather had changed from his youth to the modernization of the Householdings.
Weeks passed during which she became increasingly intimate with Shanlun. He nursed her patiently through pretransfer depression as if it were a malady he himself suffered from. And after her transfer, he quietly let her seduce him into a physical culmination of the growing emotional closeness between them. She had made love to many First Order Donors, but never had there been anything like this.
Shortly after that, she dared to offer the old Sectuib a present. “I made this for your wall,” she said, showing him a knotted yarn hanging in shades of deep orange, brown and yellow. “I thought it would cheer this place up. And you can take it home with you later.”
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