RenSime s-6

by Jacqueline Lichtenberg

“No; tastes horrible.” He showed her how to concentrate the extract from the dried flowers, steam-distill off the fraction of active kerduvon, cook it, then vacuum-distill it. Instead of a molecular mechanism, though, he had her concentrate on a decorative old starred cross he wore around his neck. It was jeweled, flashing a dozen colors like Shanlun’s nager.

  “Visualize the symbols picked out by the jewels,” he commanded. “And the colors are extremely important.”

  “Is this your molecular symbolism?”

  “Goodness no! Wellll—actually, there is a relationship. But just try it; visualize it while you work. “

  She learned it under his supervision, then spent another whole night running ten simultaneous procedures, filling two whole benches with apparatus and doing everything the same except what she thought about while working on it.

  The one she did without any of the visualizing came out black– almost devoid of the product according to the qualitative test Azevedo had provided her. They graded through dark brown, brown, light brown, all the way to nearly transparent yellow, the one where she’d given her all to the visualization. Azevedo’s own product was a pale yellow, the color of Shanlun’s nager.

  She was staring at the row of vials when Jarmi came in, looking drawn and weary. “Jarmi, I don’t believe this. I just don’t believe it. It can’t be happening—not by any theory of science I’ve ever heard!”

  While looking over Laneff’s results, Jarmi said, “But isn’t this what you’ve been trying to get me to do?”

  “Yeah. I think I’ve been expecting you to fail—only then, what will become of K/A?” She sat down on a wicker stool, picking idly at a stray wisp of the tough fiber. “But if you succeed, how can we possibly report this in a respectable journal?”

  “I don’t think we’d be anywhere near that point, even if I succeed today! First you’re going to have to teach it to several really respectable experts. When it’s becomes something ‘everybody knows,’ then you can write it up.”

  Laneff slumped on her stool. “I probably won’t live that long.”

  “You know what’s wrong with you? Tomorrow is your turnover day —I’ll just bet!”

  “Three days early?”

  “You are pregnant. You haven’t been getting enough rest.”

  “It can’t be affecting me this soon,” pleaded Laneff, but she was thinking of the solicitous way Azevedo hovered over her when he visited the lab—which was often.

  “Well, we’ll talk about it tomorrow. Meanwhile, let’s get this mess cleaned up. I was supposed to try the K/A synthesis on my own while you do the conductivity studies.”

  They worked industriously all day long, and when it came time for Jarmi to quit, she said, “Let’s just set up the analysis for tomorrow.” Laneff had noticed how the Gen was putting in a couple of extra hours each night.

  They worked until Jarmi was weaving with fatigue and Azevedo came in and shooed her to bed. “And when was the last time you slept, young mother?” he asked Laneff.

  She admitted, “Just before Shanlun left.”

  “Then off to bed with Jarmi—or you’re going to have a very rough turnover!”

  “But—” There was no arguing with such a channel. Laneff said, “We won’t know whether we’ve succeeded until these analyses are run. I was going to start them tonight—”

  “No. That’s an order.”

  On the way up the stairs, Laneff had to admit that her knees and feet were glad for the respite. She caught up to Jarmi on the third floor and confessed that she’d been run out of her own lab by a ferocious channel.

  Jarmi commiserated. “Look, maybe we can get into one of the kitchens and fix us something decent to eat.”

  “I’ve got a kitchen all to myself, remember?” And she rattled off the list of ordinary ingredients she had in stock. “Think you could make a meal off of that?”

  “Sure! Let’s go.”

  Cooking together turned out to be even more fun than lab work. They discovered they had a lot of food prejudices in common, and apart from those of the gypsies around them. Laneff actually enjoyed the taste of the food Jarmi made while thinking that if Azevedo was right about turnover, it was probably the last meal that would taste good for a long while. Laneff even dutifully remembered to take her new vitamin tablets.

  Over the empty dishes, Jarmi looked around at the apartment: an open living room with breakfast nook, a tiny kitchen, a hall leading to three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Jarmi had never seen it before, and Laneff was suddenly ashamed that she hadn’t decorated the bare walls. Everything was done in the style she’d come to think of as “Old Gypsy Standard.”

  But Jarmi let out a wobbly sigh. “It’s almost like home.” Her voice broke on the last word, and after a moment’s struggle, she broke into tears;. “I’m sorry!” she gasped.

  Laneff moved her chair over beside Jarmi, supplying tissues and then crying with her because the nageric power of the Gen was

  overwhelming. Afterward, they both felt wrung out, and Laneff took Jarmi into the sitting room, where they shoved books aside and sat on the cushion-strewn wicker couch.

  “That’s why you’ve been working so hard lately, isn’t it?” asked Laneff, feeling like an idiot for not knowing.

  “No,” she answered. “Well—that room got to be so empty with you gone. It was like home, only there was no Michen to come visiting, no Gilbert, no Tanya, no Sissa …”

  She’d have gone on listing her dead friends, but Laneff put a tentacle over her lips. “I wish I’d met them.”

  “They were a little afraid of you—oh, not that way. Afraid of what you meant to all of us. Afraid of the gossip about anyone who so much as spoke to you. And now they’re all”—she strangled on the word– “dead.”

  She held the Gen through another siege of tears, worried that perhaps Jarmi had chosen to come here to avoid the ghosts she’d have to face with Yuan’s group. Jarmi eventually quieted, then drifted slowly into sleep, clutching Laneff’s tentacles as if they were life itself.

  Laneff slept half propped against the Gen and woke just after dawn, confused by the presence of Azevedo’s nager. And then she realized he was at the door.

  Disentangling her hand from Jarmi, she went to let the channel in. She didn’t feel rested, and moving away from Jarmi, she felt the familiar sinking sensation of turnover.

  “Laneff? Here, let me.” Azevedo did something with the selyn fields as she opened the door, and she felt better. Jarmi sat up, grinding sleep and the crusts of tears out of her eyes. “Who? Are we late– did something happen?” She lurched to her feet, her beige pants wrinkled, her buff blouse twisted.

  “I just came to invite you to breakfast,” said Azevedo.

  He came to zlin my turnover!

  Seeing the disarray in the kitchen, he said, “I’ll assign someone to give this place a daily straightening for you. Now, come along. The trin tea will be getting cold!”

  He gave them only moments to wash up, and then they were climbing stairs to the roof where tables were set among huge potted; plants. All the way, Laneff argued that she wasn’t hungry, and’ Azevedo insisted that the growing fetus had to be properly nourished. As good as his word, he had a whole new regimen of vitamin and mineral supplements laid out for her along with a ration of yeast tablets.

  Laneff found the nut bread went down all right, and she could manage the fruits, but no way could she get near the gypsy idea < porridge. It reeked. By the end of that meal, Azevedo had guaranteed to search all of P’ris if necessary to find Laneff foods she was more accustomed to.

  The rest of that week, she and Jarmi spent running the analyses of the various products they’d accumulated. Laneff set up three new gas chromatographs, experimenting until she found a column packing that didn’t die after one run of kerduvon. Jarmi analyzed her own K/A product, doing two more runs and analyzing those before she reported to Laneff, “I think I can almost do it now. At least these are fifty percent higher yields than I got befor
e.”

  She was referring to the runs she’d done at the Distect labs, but avoided calling it home.

  “That’s—interesting,” said Laneff, looking over Jarmi’s shoulder at the notebook page displayed on the computer screen. “I don’t want to believe this. I’m not going to even try until I’ve looked at it after transfer. Print it out. I want to take it upstairs and study it later.”

  Jarmi punched up the printout and the photocopy machine lit up, flashing out the pages of notes. “Have you calculated the kerduvon results yet?”

  “I’ve been afraid to. Need makes me cowardly.”

  “Hardly!” laughed the Gen suggestively. “But it probably blunts your curiosity about anything not Gen.” Her fingers danced over the keys of the pad. “Mind if I run the calculations for you?” she asked as Laneff’s notes appeared on the screen. “Shidoni!”

  Anybody who’d been working this analysis regularly hardly had to calculate to see the similarity between the kerduvon components and those of the K/A Jarmi made before learning the visualization technique. Jarmi looked at Laneff.

  “Yeah, I saw it. It scares me still. Go ahead and run the calculations.”

  Jarmi had re-created the calculation program she’d worked out in Yuan’s labs. With a few key strokes, she had the results flashing before them. Jarmi’s nager jumped with excitement, while Laneff felt morose. At that moment, Azevedo walked in. He’d taken to seeing them at breakfast and dinner, Desha joining them now that the channel, too, was in need. It was close to dinnertime, and he entered projecting appetite at Laneff, but as he read the ambient, he shifted to more neutral fields until he could see what they had on the screen.

  As he studied the figures, his fields crystallized around him into an opaque egg—an effect Laneff had never zlinned before. He reached over Jarmi and punched up her notebook, scanning to her recent analyses, split the screen, and compared the two analytical runs. He studied Laneff’s struggle to find a column packing that would work.

  He looked over her calibrating runs of his pure K/A, and compared that to the kerduvon samples she’d just finished running.

  “I don’t believe this,” he said at last.

  Jarmi burst out laughing. Laneff couldn’t supply more than a smile and an explanation to Azevedo.

  “Laneff, do you realize that the best minds of Rathor have been trying to do this”—he pointed to the results of her gas chromatography—“for centuries!”

  “The gas chromatograph hasn’t been around that long,” said Jarmi.

  “Well,” he amended, so facilely that Laneff was instantly certain that Rathor had the instrument long before the rest of the modern world, “I mean trying to analyze moondrop.”

  “There’s a lot of stuff in this mixture that I don’t know anything about,” answered Laneff. “But I’ve been analyzing the vile mixtures my synthesis produces for years, and I’ve invented a few kinds of column packs to handle it!”

  “You don’t seem to realize what this implies,” said Azevedo.

  “If it’s true,” said Laneff, depressed, “it means that I murdered Digen Farris. With an overdose of kerduvon!” She was wishing more frantically than ever that Shanlun was back. He and Mairis were the only ones who could say for sure if that was the case.

  Azevedo brought his fields back into the channeling mode by some dissolving sort of effect. Softly, he said, “It also means that you’ve synthesized moondrop—something long thought impossible. In fact, it was once a religious premise!”

  “It isn’t really moondrop,” argued Laneff, somewhat horrified. “I told you there’s a lot of odd organics in the natural stuff. I’ve got one of the active ingredients!”

  “Two,” returned Azevedo. “There’re two isomers.”

  “But nobody knows what the other does!” replied Laneff.

  “Your K/A has two known properties,” he said. “It stops selyn flow in placentas. And it mitigates the transfer abort reflex. Kerduvon has several other properties, some of which may be attributable to the other isomer.”

  “What properties?” asked Jarmi.

  Azevedo merely said, “Why don’t you synthesize some of the other isomer, and let’s run a few quick tests on it. Then we’llcompare it to the known properties of moondrop.”

  Shanlun had said she could disjunct using kerduvon, but not until after the baby was born. Kerduvon is an abortifacient and a disjunctant. Could it be that K/A is the abortifacient and K/Bis the disjunctive agent?

  Unbidden, a feeling she’d had while making love with Shanlun came back to her—the feeling that she was Gen. It had been a feeling of wholeness that went beyond Sime and Gen. Everything in the universe was a component of something larger.

  With a blinding insight that shook her to the core she knew beyond all reason that K/B had to be natural to the Gen metabolism, as K/A was to the Sime. If K/A fit into receptors on the selyn-transport nerves, then perhaps K/B tied into the central nervous system of the Gen—perhaps the brain surface receptors. The state of junctedness might cause irreparable imbalance in that complex biochemistry, causing the producers of the substances to atrophy. And that’s why people die in disjunction as adults?

  “Laneff,” said Jarmi, perhaps for the tenth time. “You can’t stand there slack-jawed all night. Tell us what you’re thinking.”

  Azevedo’s hand came to her arm, cradling the tentacles gently. “First, let’s get some dinner into her.”

  Laneff went without protest, lost in thought. Interrogated over the meal, she said, “I’m just feeling so stupid. This has been staring me in the face for years. I couldn’t see it!”

  “But you didn’t know anything about moondrop. You didn’t know that your compound actually occurs in nature!”

  “Well, it—or something awfully like it—occurs in the Sime body! You know we produce within ourselves all the pharmacopoeia we really require. Kerduvon isn’t so much a drug as it is a vitamin! Maybe there are even traces of it in trin tea!” She held up her glass to look at it.

  “You’re exaggerating,” said Jarmi. “This is going to be decades in the researching stage.” She shoved her chair closer to Laneff. “She’s in need, can’t you zlin? Laneff, you’ll have the strength to deal with this in a few days, when we’ve had our transfer.”

  “A week, you mean,” said Laneff, realizing that she’d never discussed the problem of transfer with Jarmi. Time goes so fast!

  Azevedo leaned across the table. “Not quite a week. Laneff, you’re deeper into need than mere passage of time would indicate. Your transfer should be moved up a few days. Don’t let depression swallow you whole. It’s just part of life. Take it in stride.”

  Laneff zlinned the old channel next to Desha, who was for him a not-quite-adequate-but-best-there-was Donor. Azevedo knew whereof he spoke. But are Jarmi and I even that closely matched?

  Without being asked, Azevedo zlinned Laneff and Jarmi, comparing, and pronounced, “Jarmi’s selyn production is increasing slightly. She’ll be ready for you when you are for her. But”—he probed them seriously—“Jarmi, you do realize that this may in fact be the last transfer you’ll have with Laneff until after the baby is born? Your capacity is just not going to match hers when that channel fetus starts to draw selyn in earnest.”

  “I understand,” replied Jarmi gravely.

  “Azevedo,” said Laneff, hesitant. He brought his attention to her, and she had to just blurt it out. “Maybe it’d be better if you give me transfer this time, too?”

  “Laneff!” cried Jarmi, and the bereft tone sliced through Laneff’s heart.

  Azevedo, studying her, zlinned Desha. “Are you still Tecton enough to accept a channel’s judgment?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you’ll do better on Gen transfer this time. And of all our bens, Jarmi really is your best match here. Her willingness is also a big factor in that. Now, it is up to you, Laneff. I know Tecton renSimes aren’t trained to make these decisions for themselves, so I will advise; but here, it is
ultimately up to you. At least it is until Shanlun gets back with your physician.”

  She studied Azevedo and Desha, seeing channel and Companion, but not the eager harmony Shanlun’s nager made with Azevedo’s. And even she could see his need now, the graven lines carved deeper around his eyes, the weary shuffle to his stride, the pallor that occasionally underlay his leathery tan. He just doesn’t feel up to me, she concluded.

  Later, when they were alone, Jarmi said, “I thought you were completely post after our transfer; I thought you were satisfied.”

  The tremulous fear of rejection in the Gen made Laneff reach out to her. “Oh, Jarmi, you were marvelous. I was as post as ever I’ve been!”

  “But?”

  “But,” admitted Laneff. “But. It wasn’t—exactly—what I’m going to be craving in a transfer.”

  “You mean—I didn’t get the right tone of killbliss?”

  How can I discuss this with a Gen! “Well—yes.”

  “Don’t worry! I told you it takes practice. I’ll learn. But you’ve got to be honest with me. I thought I had it right; you didn’t let me know—”

  “I’m sorry… ‘

  Jarmi took Laneff’s hands, letting her fingertips rest near the wrist orifices. “This time we’ll get it right!”

  With Shanlun gone and Azevedo declining, it was Laneff’s best course. At least I know this time that I won’t kill her!

  For the next few days, they labored to clean up the lab and set up the new work. Laneff ran several large batches of K/B, having to purify it several times of the K/A that came with it. She couldn’t seem to twist her mind around into the reversal of the formulas. But

  she was determined to have enough of it on hand after her transfer to launch right into the new work.

  This could be the big breakthrough! In the back of her mind was the nascent idea that she might separate the selyn-flow inhibitor, which was probably responsible for the abortifacient effect, from the disjunctive agent. It was the abortifacient, she was sure, that was what she was using to detect Sime fetuses. The Rathor statistics showed that kerduvon caused abortion in just the right proportions for it to be aborting Sime fetuses, the ones dependent on selyn from the mother. Her test would take a tissue specimen from the placenta and check its selyn conductivity with and without K/A. In Sime fetuses, the conductivity would drop markedly under K/A—and thus, K/A introduced into the womb would have killed the fetus!