RenSime s-6

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

  The channel grabbed a light beige smock from beside the door. “Let’s find out!”

  Laneff started to follow him out of the office into the lab, but he waved her away. “Shanlun will have to be leaving in the morning. You two deserve a night off together. Besides, I have to see if I can do this without your nager interfering.”

  Joyfully, Shanlun scooped her out the door of the lab, not giving her a chance to ask what in the world her nager had to do with a simple chemical reaction.

  She found that he’d spent some of the time while she was doing the analysis in setting dinner in their apartment. There was a soup she’d made, an artichoke, avocado, and mushroom dish from the main kitchen, sans the awful spices, and some nut bread with a tofu-and-tahina spread that he must have bought in some regular supermarket.

  As soon as he had made sure she’d eaten enough, he said, “We must do something to celebrate your victory.”

  “It’s not a victory yet, just a breakthrough. Let’s clean this up and go back to the lab to see how Azevedo’s doing.”

  “No. He asked us to leave. He’s probably sent Jarmi off, too. If this is going to work, he’s got to be alone.”

  She got up and started to clear the table. “That’s nonsense. He’s been watching me—”

  “When do you get your best yields?” he asked point-blank.

  She stared at him. She’d never correlated it, but—

  “Laneff, I watched you, lived through all that in the Hospital/Center with you when you were trying to get Mairis’s experts to duplicate your results. They still haven’t done it. And they won’t. I knew Azevedo could do it. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  She nibbled sauce off the end of one handling tentacle. “Why did you think Azevedo could do it?”

  “Because I guessed what you were doing differently from all the others who tried, and I recognized it as a technique Azevedo had taught me, although I’ve never been very good at it. And when I found out you zlin in color, I realized you visualize a lot. You dream in color, too, don’t you?” At her nod, he went on, “You can’t work a synthesis without visualizing the molecules! And that’s the essential technique necessary to get good, clean yields of kerduvon.”

  “Ker—what?”

  “Kerduvon. The mythical extract of the mahogany trinrose. We call it moondrop. It’s what I was giving Digen because it helps control tertiary entran, among other things—”

  “Wait a minute!” The other half of her puzzle, the exact cause of Digen’s death, had been put aside under the press of events. “Why are you telling me this now?”

  “Because Azevedo has given me the discretion to do so.” He took her hands, pressing them together between his huge, cool Gen palms. “Laneff, I had it in my mind, when I found you alive, that if I could get Azevedo to accept you, we could use kerduvon to disjunct you.”

  “A drug that disjuncts? Nobody could possibly have kept such a secret! I don’t believe it! Disjunction is—is—is a private and personal hell!” She had once thought this Gen of all Gens understood that. “No drug could-f”

  “No, kerduvon doesn’t disjunct. It’s very dangerous, Laneff. It acts on the central nervous system to wipe away certain types of neurophysiological programming. That’s all it does—blanks the Sime’s programming. What new programming takes its place is a matter of your choice—and that of the Gen working with you. One slipup and both Sime and Gen could end up permanently insane—or dead.”

  Assimilating that, Laneff said, “It’d be worth the risk.”

  “Kerduvon tends to cause abortion or miscarriage.”

  It was too much. Laneff’s hands flew to her face, muffling a gasp. She understood now the firmness of Shanlun’s nager, the tension in him.

  “Laneff, you can survive until the child is born. I’m going to bring an expert, and we have Azevedo and Jarmi. Staving off disjunction crisis for ten or eleven transfers is not an absurd goal. And after that, we can risk kerduvon. There is a way for all of us, Laneff, if we have the courage to take it. I can’t offer certainty—only hope. And that’s better than no hope, isn’t it?”

  Strangling a cry of anguish, she nodded. Her body relaxed. “Oh, I’ve been so exhausted lately,” she said, her shoulders slumping. “I know that’s no excuse when so much depends on this, and there’s so little time now. I keep telling myself I must do things today because I’ll only feel worse tomorrow, but—” He held her snugly. “Shanlun, what am I going to do without you here?”

  “Try to teach Jarmi the synthesis. I don’t know if she has the well-developed ability to visualize, but she knows the theory best. If you can teach it to her, you have something to publish. And I’ll be back in time to give Azevedo transfer.”

  “What if Mairis taps you for his transfer? Or the Tecton—”

  “I’ll find a way. Azevedo needs me now. And so do you.”

  He began kissing her seriously, but she leaned away to ask, “Shan, you’ve got to get me a sample of this kerduvon.”

  “Azevedo will get it for you whenever you ask, though I don’t know what good it will do—”

  “Neither do I, but it’s the only hole left to plug. I’ve got to know what’s in that stuff, and how it interacts with K/A in order to exonerate K/A of causing Digen’s death.”

  “Our best chemists have tried to analyze moondrop for generations. It’s a very complex mixture, and we’ve never—”

  “Can you get me any publications on it?”

  “Certainly, but not in any language you know.”

  “Get me a translator then. Surely there’s a graduate student around here who’d like to get their name on my project.”

  “We don’t work that way.”

  Suddenly frustrated beyond endurance, she cried, “How do you work then! Nothing around here makes any sense! Shidoni-crazed motives and ass-backward customs, inedible food, and imagination controlling chemical reactions—”

  She scrubbed at a tear, and he handed her a tissue.

  “I’m not going to cry! I’m not post anymore.”

  “I remember how I felt, those first few years in the Tecton. For a time, I was sick with it—like being constantly shenned. Nothing works the way you expect it to, not the plumbing or the people. And it isn’t the big things but the little things that finally get to you. For you it’s worse because you’re weakened by the pregnancy, and you’ve been snatched into a second, totally foreign, culture. Oh, Laneff, I wish I didn’t have to go.”

  “Then send somebody,” she said, knowing it was silly.

  “I can’t.” He broke away from her and paced, then looked back at her as if measuring her strength. It made her stand taller. He said, “There’s more news. Our messenger to Yuan returned. The bolthole where he said he’d be—it was a bombed-out ruin. Unidentifiable bodies everywhere. The Tecton picked up those Diet Gens we left in the crater. News blackout on what they’ve gotten out of them, if anything. Mairis is making a round-the-world tour, campaigning. The Digen coin is a big success most places. Mairis’s experts still haven’t duplicated your synthesis. And even so there have been six attempts on Mairis’s life.”

  “He—”

  “No, he’s not hurt. Some of the Distect supporters are still with him; one died protecting him. That attack on Yuan’s labs was just the opening shot in an all-out war between Diet and Distect. In every major city there’s been violence, bloodshed and pain enough to provoke Simes into the kill. But not one Sime has killed because of it. The vast majority of the world is coming to see where the Diet is wrong about Simes in general. Support for the Diet is cooling off.

  “But with all this, security around Mairis is very tight. Paranoia is a survival trait for him now. If I were him, I wouldn’t believe a note delivered by just any gypsy–not if it asked me to send one of my best out into the mists. Remember, he thinks I’m dead—and you, too. He’s not going to send anyone else into that kind of danger. So I’ve got to go and choose one person to come take care of you. And I want to
be back before you hit turnover—or, failing that, at least before hard need. You and Azevedo are in phase …”

  “That doesn’t give us much time,” said Laneff. Her cycle was already perceptibly shortening, as always with a channel fetus.

  “I’m going to leave no later than noon tomorrow.” He said, coming to enfold her in his arms. “And you’re right, that doesn’t give us much time.” ,

  It was the first time she could recall him failing to read her thoughts, and she suspected it was deliberate. He bent and kissed her with a single-minded dedication that she couldn’t resist. They had their own bedroom now, and they used it.

  Sometime past midnight, he lay back exhausted and fell into a typically heavy Gen sleep. She reveled in it for a while, and then got up, took a snack plate from the refrigerator, and went to the lab.

  As she’d suspected, Jarmi was there, having slept the late afternoon away and found herself too wakeful to laze in bed all night. “Hungry?” asked Laneff.

  “You know me by now, don’t you?” asked Jarmi investigating the plate. “Oh, yum, real food!” she said, tasting the nut bread. “Here, I’ve got some hot trin tea. Let’s eat!”

  They took the tea and nut bread to Jarmi’s desk, set across the end of one workbench, and Laneff said, “Tomorrow, I’m finally going to get a sample of that other drug Shanlun had Digen on when I gave him K/A! They call it kerduvon around here. We’re going to have to figure out how to analyze the stuff, but if we can, maybe we can figure out what caused Digen’s death. Did the cadaver tentacles arrive?”

  “Yes, they’re in the refrigerator. I’m afraid there isn’t much I can help with on those selyn conductivity tests!”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be back to start them as soon as Shanlun leaves in the morning. Meanwhile, you’re going to have to do an analysis on this kerduvon sample, at least find out what kind of trouble it’ll give in the chromatograph.”

  “It’ll muck up the column for sure.”

  “I’ll figure on repacking the column and make some extras.”

  Licking honey off her fingers and tentacles, Laneff got to work analyzing Azevedo’s yield of the afternoon. Jarmi puttered around awhile and finally fell asleep on a cot they’d had brought into the lab. Just before dawn, Laneff had some preliminary results: Azevedo’s yield had been immeasurably close to the theoretical yield for the equations. And it was nearly pure.

  When she told Shanlun as he was dressing, she let her dismay show clearly. He threw back his head and laughed. “I know what you mean. It’s enough to make anyone wish to be an endowed channel!” Then he sobered. “Well, at least now we know the secret. And all that’s left is to teach it to Jarmi!”

  CHAPTER 10

  NEED

  The noon sun beat down on the courtyard. Laundry hung on sagging lines in sunny corners. Bedding lolled out of windows like heat-struck tongues. The cacophony of colors dazzled the eye, and the riotous play of swarms of children numbed the ear. A buff-clad man leaned out a window, beating a dusty rug, sending clouds of dog hair into the light breeze. A woman who was fixing a bicycle in one shady spot yelled as a group of children waded through her tools playing Sime~Gen wars and laughing in high shrieks.

  Laneff stood in the cool of the main doorway with Shanlun. They were waiting for his car to be driven up from wherever it was stored. The gypsies in the surrounding buildings, Laneff had discovered, were “real.” And they accepted the Rathorites with a respect bordering on awe. No outsider ever penetrated this deep into the courtyard. Looking at the spectacle, smelling the heavy odor of their cooking, Laneff could understand why nobody would want to.

  “You said Mairis is on this side of the ocean now. How will you find him?”

  “Read the newspapers. I can read languages I can’t even speak, and we have friends all over. All I have to do is find a certain tribe, and they’ll get me in to see Mairis.”

  “I don’t understand! You’re going to wander around the countryside until you find this gypsy tribe you’ve never met before and just tell them to sneak you past the tightest security cordon this continent has seen since the time of Kishrin the Eighth?”

  “Before I went to Digen, I was trained by the Company. Gypsies do not wander around at random. And they leave clear sign for their own to follow. Finding them will be easy. Getting to Mairis may be harder. I don’t want to announce myself to the whole Tecton, so only Mairis is to know I’m alive.”

  Privately, she doubted Mairis would go along with that. “The other thing that worries me is that message from Yuan that Azevedo got this morning.” The development had delayed Shanlun’s departure by a few hours. Yuan’s first refuge had been destroyed before he got there, so he’d gone on to his second choice, sending a message by a stray gypsy. Now, Shanlun was to be the first of Azevedo’s regular messengers to call on Yuan.

  “Look, Yuan’s place is right on my way, and I can carry a message from Yuan to Mairis. Azevedo insists Yuan has a right to know of the baby—and your success.”

  Laneff didn’t quarrel with that. And Azevedo was right that Yuan really could use the encouragement. “The Distect hideouts are all targets right now. It’s dangerous to stay overnight with Yuan!”

  “True. But Mairis is also a target.”

  Laneff had no idea why the Rathorites were so supportive of Yuan and Mairis both. When she asked Jarmi, the Gen had answered that Azevedo had been around ever since she’d met Yuan. It’d never occurred to her to question it. To Laneff, the Rathorites were gypsies that were nuttier than most gypsies, and there was no way to> fathom their motives. Yet it Was obvious that something deep in their way of life was congruent with Digen’s dream of Unity—and Yuan’s: Sime and Gen living together without fear or distrust. And to that end, they unquestioningly took all sorts of risks.

  With a shudder, she turned into Shanlun’s arms. “There are so many dangers!” But she held back the plea Don’t go!

  At that moment, the car nosed through the archway from the street and crept down the narrow alley between gypsy-occupied buildings into the courtyard, scattering children and weaving politely through laundry lines. It drew up before the door, a pale-beige jalopy lacking one fender and with a rack of empty chicken cages on the top. The front cargo compartment was tied down with hemp rope that dragged under the car. One shattered side window was taped, but the tires were new.

  The Sime woman driving it got out. Laneff knew her as a Rathor instructor. “Shan!” said Laneff shocked. “You’re not going Ito drive that halfway across this continent, are you? You’ll never make it!”

  He laughed,” as did the driver. Shanlun said a few placating words to the driver in their dialect and told Laneff, “Selitta wouldn’t give me a run-down car, Laneff!”

  Laneff closed her mouth over her outrage and just looked at him. He laughed again and tugged her toward the rear of the car. “Start it up, Selitta!”

  She got in while Laneff was treated to a view of the engine compartment. The engine housing was clean, and much smaller than the fittings had originally been designed for. Obviously new. The selyn battery was likewise of the latest design, and a spare battery also shimmered brightly with packed selyn. As Selitta started the Laneff zlinned the smooth clean running of the engine.

  “Good!” called Shanlun. “Now run the jiggler.”

  Another, smaller selyn-powered motor coughed to life, producing noise and vibration such as the car had displayed on entering the court. Now the selyn fields wavered like those of a truly decrepit car.

  “See? It’s a disguise. The brakes and bearings are all new, but disguised. It’s Selitta’s specialty.”

  As the woman stopped the motor and got out, Laneff apologized. “It’s a great disguise!”

  Shanlun picked up a patched and stained canvas bag filled with his things and tossed it into the dirty-looking back seat of the car. His costume, like the bag, was worn and tattered-looking, fringes missing here and there. Nothing was left of the crisply formal First Companion in Zeor
who had stood beside Mairis throughout the funeral ordeal. With his white-blond hair combed down over his forehead and the oddly gypsy mannerisms he could adopt in a moment, not one reporter would recognize him even if he were standing beside Mairis.

  He turned to Laneff, letting his nager pale to a chalky white flecked with only an occasional blip of color and his stance degenerate into pure gypsy. “I’m just another wandering gypsy. I’ve even got legal border-crossing tags that say so! I won’t be recognized, so stop worrying!” He kissed her quickly, then got in and started the motor, adding the vibrator to it.

  As he moved the car out of the court, expertly maneuvering around children, dogs, chickens, and laundry, he waved goodbye.

  To blot out the thought What if he doesn’t come back? Laneff plunged back into the lab work, setting all their projects in motion at once, and then starting Jarmi on learning the visualization trick for synthesizing K/A. This required giving Jarmi an entire refresher course in organic reaction mechanisms.

  Going through it all a step at a time brought back to Laneff how she’d played with the other isomer that could result—the one that ruined the synthesis when it occurred. Must research that thoroughly sometime,, thought Laneff. It was possible that this technique could make the other isomer pure just as it could this one. Maybe there’s some use for it?

  But she could only make note of it and dismiss it now. When Jarmi was sleeping, Azevedo joined her, showing her how to synthesize kerduvon from the raw extract of mahogany trinroses. The rich red-brown flowers were now grown in botanical gardens all over the world,) but Azevedo said, “Up in the mountains, we have ancient fields of them. Conditions are perfect there—and we get much richer yields of moondrop from those harvests.”

  “Does it make any better trin tea?” she asked, recalling the fact that the professionally grown ones didn’t.