Fuming, Shanlun looked from Azevedo to Laneff and back. Gradually, his ire subsided. “My apologies, Azevedo. Permission to enter?”
He was already standing in the middle of the intricately patterned matting. Azevedo motioned with two tentacles, a gracious invitation to be seated. He was sitting cross-legged on a cushion set on a wicker platform surrounded by hanging plants and lit by a skylight. Tastefully upholstered wicker chairs and stools dotted the room. A fireplace filled one wall, the mantel strewn with huge fat candles and wax sculptures. Woven tapestries adorned the walls with abstract designs. There was no desk, no books, no files, yet Laneff had been told that Azevedo ruled the tribe from this room, as a Sectuib once would rule a Householding.
Shanlun took two strides toward the old man and crossed his legs at the ankles, easing himself gracefully to the floor. Laneff closed the door and hovered, unsure of the protocol. She was wearing gypsy costume—a floor-length skirt and hip-length tunic, hemp sandals, and wide hair band, all in pale beige. For disguise, in case she were seen by outsiders, they had dyed her black hair and eyebrows to a rusty blond and had given her a cream to use on face and hands that would bleach her complexion. She hardly looked Farris anymore.
Studying Shanlun’s downcast eyes, Azevedo motioned her to a chair beside him, and said, “Or you may sit beside Shanlun, if you like.”
She took the patch of floor matting beside Shanlun, feeling the ache of shame in his nager and wanting with unbearable intensity to soothe it away.
Azevedo closed his eyes, seeming to ignore them. At first, Laneff thought this the rudest possible rebuke to Shanlun. But the ambient settled into a calm she was loath to disturb, and presently she noticed Shanlun’s nager changing. The stark contrast in color and brightness between the randomized chips at his nageric surface seemed to fade. The flecks danced less energetically, finally stilling and merging into a hazy solidity behind which the bright gold of packed selyn pulsed. His intense shame turned to chagrin and faded to a self-forgiveness.
At last, Azevedo said in the distant voice of a working channel, “Your feelings are understandable, Shanlun ambrov Zeor. You’re personally involved here, a deep involvement.”
“Yes. But it seems years in the Tecton have addled my perspective.”
“But not your acuity. You’re correct that this does change the
situation.”
Eyes like burning coals, Shanlun looked up at Azevedo, his hand stealing aside to grip two of Laneff’s tentacles. “Is there anyone among the Company who has handled a Farris renSime’s pregnancy?”
“I have, of course, put out the call for experienced midwives.”
“I’m sorry,” said Shanlun. “I should have realized you’d already be working on it.” He added, “But even at best, she’s going to have to be told everything. She can’t survive this without hope.”
Laneff quelled a leap of curiosity and listened.
Azevedo gathered Laneff’s attention. “I do believe you can survive to be delivered. But we dare not fail to consider abortion.”
Laneff had not thought of that. Objections burst into her mind, but before she could speak, Shanlun said, “No!” And then, worried, “It’s a channel, isn’t it?”
Azevedo nodded. “A female, unless I’m mistaken. But a channel will demand so much selyn of Laneff’s system that she’ll need transfers very frequently, and will likely go into disjunction crisis much sooner.”
Scientific terminology in their outlandish accent, their gypsy costumes, seemed totally bizarre. Laneff laughed and then had to explain what was funny about disjunction.
“And that’s the other thing,” said Shanlun. “Azevedo, you’ve got to try to learn her synthesis—now, before she can’t work anymore.”
“Before that, I may have to go to see Mairis. If we don’t have a midwife for her, we must beg one of the Tecton. No, Laneff, don’t panic. We won’t send you to their Last Year House. Zeor has a long history of cooperation with—gypsies. As Sectuib, Mairis can provide someone to care for you.” He shifted his gaze to Shanlun. “Someone we can tolerate.”
Shanlun put his arm about her, and she felt his inner conflict as he summoned bravery. “I’ll go to Mairis. You must stay and work with Laneff while she can work.”
Laneff choked on half-formed protests, dizzied by the speed with which events whirled around these two. “Shan, if the Tecton ever lays hold of you, you could be sent anywhere in the world and never get back here!”
“No. I’ll go in gypsy garb, and no one but Mairis will know who I am. I’ll tell him you’re with Azevedo, and—” Bright hope and shyness warred with his apprehension. “Laneff, can I ask him to invite you to pledge Zeor?”
She’d thought about it often enough. Zeor doesn’t marry out of Zeor. But Sat’htine was so much a part of her. “Shan, I’m a healer”.
“But as a healer, as in all parts of your life, you do strive for excellence. Even facing your own death, you have not ceased to strive for the best you can envision. You have always been as much Zeor as Sat’htine. Let Mairis judge it.”
“I can’t guarantee my answer.”
Azevedo cut in, “There’s no reason to be anxious about it, Laneff. You’ve plenty of time to make that decision. Meanwhile, you’re safe here.”
That’s what I thought with the Distect! thought Laneff, aware that considering another life change, such as pledging a new House, did fill her with intolerable anxiety.
Azevedo turned to the Gen. “Shanlun, you’re willing to risk your life—everything–for this child?”
“Yes,” he answered without hesitation.
“Do you know why?” challenged Azevedo.
“Yes.” He turned to Laneff, as if in explanation. “The impossible doesn’t happen randomly. I haven’t been tested, but I’m sure I’m at the absolute nadir of my own fertility. Yet this happened despite your precautions, too. This child is yours—and mine—and wants very much to be born now. I’m willing to take as much risk as you do to see that happen.”
Laneff had spent three days growing into the idea, realizing that this baby was as important to her as her work, something to survive her. Yet Shanlun had arrived at acceptance within minutes of hearing the news. Her whole love went out to him, and she hugged him close, burying her nose in his chest and muttering, “Yes, I’m scared, too, Shan.”
He kissed her. The nageric warmth was incredible.
Azevedo cleared his throat. “Then this is the plan. We’ll begin immediately to determine why only Laneff can do this synthesis. Jarmi will continue the structure studies on the purified chemical you salvaged. If the Company can find no midwife, we’ll send Shanlun to Mairis with a letter I’ll write.”
The previous day, Laneff had been assigned a musty old lab, much like the one she’d had in school. Now, she and Jarmi continued to gather equipment and set up their experiments again. Meanwhile, Laneff was welcomed into the community of not-really-quite gypsies from which Shanlun had come.
“Thiritees” was their word for library/school, and the entire top floor of the building housed a collection of ancient volumes that must have dated back to the Ancients. “This is all that’s left of the great library of the School of Rathor, disbanded almost a century ago. Many of these books are copies of ones published by the Ancients—before mankind mutated into Sime and Gen.”
Whole sections of that library, open to her only under Azevedo’s guidance, described the science behind the Endowment. She didn’t pretend to understand any of it, but she was interested. Her own child, they explained, would likely be endowed.
The School of Rathor, some of whose members called themselves the Company and traveled out disguised as gypsies, had been founded to preserve the mystical and esoteric lore of the Ancients and to add to that lore by experiment. Their central symbol was the starred cross—an ordinary five-pointed star superimposed on an equal-armed cross. It was the Company who had founded and maintained the safe ways out of Sime Territory for the children of Sime
s who established as Gens.
If she believed their claim, that certainly solved one of the oldest mysteries of civilization. To know that the safe ways were the work of the people around her made her happier. And Azevedo even began teaching her their language.
Shortly after that, Laneff was asked to attend three brief meetings, from which Jarmi was excluded, designed to familiarize residents of the building on new local laws.
Thiritees was established in a four-story brick building on a sheltered courtyard off a busy avenue in P’ris, a regional and district capital straddling a Sime~Gen border. The city was divided by a wide, oily river into Sime and Gen Territory, and the new experimental Embankment Zone where Thiritees was located. In the Embankment Zone, a mixture of Sime and Gen law prevailed.
The establishment of the zone was not merely the result of Mairis Farris’s campaign, they were assured. The City Planners had been considering it for years. But the advent of the Digen coin suddenly made it feasible.
Laneff reported all this to Jarmi, saying, “This may make it easier to order from Sime or Gen Territory suppliers. Deliveries won’t be so conspicuous.”
They had a much tighter budget here, and less actual space. But Laneff had salvaged all the data from the expensive analytical machines, though her notes were a little mud-stained. With Shanlun’s help, she was able to locate or borrow balances, desiccators, and distillation and filtration apparatus. And Shanlun found a renSime woman who was an expert glassblower.
“We’ll have to recalibrate everything!” complained Laneff.
“I can do that,” replied Jarmi, and set to work.
In a matter of days, they were ready to pick up where they’d left off. Jarmi began running the syntheses they’d planned to do as part of the K/A structural analysis.
Simultaneously, Laneff began to teach Azevedo the K/A synthesis. They worked late at night, when Jarmi was asleep and they had the lab to themselves. Often they’d still be there in the morning, when Jarmi came in munching a sweet roll from the breakfast buffet.
Azevedo quickly demonstrated his mastery of the equipment, and within three sessions, Laneff had identified a familiar air to his manner. “You’re a teacher—a professor!”
He pivoted on the wicker stool as he sat at the balance and smiled at her. “I’ve taught it, yes. But that was years ago.”
Now she recognized the elegant battering all her equipment showed. “This is a school—not a lab!”
“A graduate school, yes.”
Laneff recalled the groups she’d gone to those legal briefings with. Pregnant women, children, young men, but only a few of middle years. A typical college cross section.
But it was all housed in the one building that extended three damp stories underground, and rambled into a nightmare of wings and additions aboveground.
She’d often walked by the entrance to the living wing. The smells and noises and wild music were just like any gypsy encampment where you might shop for wickerwork. She hadn’t seen anything that looked like a schoolroom, and she said as much to Azevedo.
“Our methods aren’t suited to mass production of identical experts. And we don’t differentiate between students and teachers. We don’t have courses or curricula. But we do develop skills. Right now, I’d like to acquire one of yours.”
“Well, I guess you’re as ready as you’ll ever be.” He’d read up on her work as it was published, and now he’d read her previous month’s notes.
So that night, she demonstrated her technique for him. Shanlun
watched, commenting on the number of times he’d watched her do it for Mairis’s experts. She had it down to a precise series of motions, pointing out to Azevedo each of the crucial conditions—where glassware had to be ultraclean, where weights had to be exact, where reagents had to be spectrometric grade and totally dry. And she could detail exactly what happened when any condition wasn’t met
He listened with rapt enthusiasm. The next night, when he began to duplicate her procedure with his own hands, she drew on a convenient chalkboard the diagrams of the various molecules formed during reaction. “If I had a three-sixty plotter, I could run up a display to show you in three dimensions.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve a fair imagination.” He asked cogent questions about the activated states of the molecules and the bonding mechanisms. She sketched them, elaborating with hand and tentacle gestures, and sometimes full-body postures, creating for him something of the beautiful dance she saw in her mind as the reactions proceeded.
At one point, Shanlun remarked, “You seem to think of these molecules as personalities—friends, even.”
Surprised at that notion, she could only nod. “And I sometimes feel you have to coax them to behave, like trained animals!” She laughed, a little embarrassed.
Azevedo smiled at Shanlun. “Isn’t that what I’ve always taught you, Shanlun? Make friends with the universe!”
They worked until well past dawn, Shanlun leaving after then-routine midnight break, when Laneff went to the public kitchen for a snack. At that time, everyone else in the building congregated in the large briefing room where they’d had the legal meetings. For those few moments, an intense silence fell over the building that penetrated the ambient nager, as it did at dawn, noon, and sundown.
When she asked about this, Shanlun told her, “We mark the passage of time with a salute—you might say because time is a sacred part of the material universe. It’s too easy to be caught up in personal affairs and forget one’s relationship to the eternal.”
Weird. Laneff reminded herself not to ask such questions, and that afternoon she got down to running the analysis on Azevedo’s product, allowing for excess moisture since it hadn’t dried for a full twenty-four hours. Her last sample was filtering down the chromatographic column when Shanlun came in beaming.
“What’s the good news?” asked Laneff. She was a bit tart with him, more tired than she should be after such a light day’s work. Don’t think about it, she told herself silently. Miscarriages are very common among Farrises.
“We’ve got an apartment! You and me, and Jarmi. And room for the baby, too. You’ll have your own kitchen!”
She zlinned him. For the first time, she believed he really would come back—and stay with her, always, or until she died. If he can.
“What’s the matter? You complained about the spices in the food from the main kitchen, so I thought—”
“It’s not that.” She told him how she felt.
“Laneff, you’ve chosen me, and I you. By Zeor custom or here, we’ll be married.” He took her in his arms. “This is for real. This is forever.”
Jarmi came around the workbench. “This apartment is on the family floor, right?”
“Yes,” admitted Shanlun, letting Laneff go.
“Do you think it’d be all right if I keep the room I’ve got?” She turned to Laneff. “I’ll come stay with you when you’re in need, but– I just wouldn’t feel welcome up there.”
She’d been warned, and she wasn’t complaining, but Laneff’s heart went out to her. “I don’t mind, but—”
Shanlun said, “It’s all right for a while, but there’ll be a group of transients coming through in a few weeks, and there’ll be as little privacy where you are as on the family floor.”
“But can we keep it that way—for a while?”
“Sure, Jarmi. But you’ll have a home with us, when you’re ready.” Then he inquired about what Laneff was doing, adding, “Azevedo will be along in a few minutes.”
The channel arrived nearly an hour later, announcing, “Well, that’s it. I just heard from the last group. Nowhere in the Company, nowhere in all of Rathor, is there a midwife with experience of Farris renSimes.”
Laneff turned on her stool to change the collector under the dripping column, mentally timing it. Her hand was shaking. To Shanlun, she said, “When are you leaving?”
She was trying to be brave, but she thought it would be easier if she were going to sn
eak in and talk to Mairis while Shanlun stayed behind and worried. If Mairis goes all Tecton, and decides I have to go to a Last Year House before he’ll help me …
His arms came around her, and he turned her on the stool, his nager enfolding her until his overwhelming optimism suffused her whole system. Then he kissed her with real passion. Even though she was far past being post, she enjoyed every second, but she had to break away to change the collector again. “Don’t distract me right now. The fractions come out at close intervals. Jarmi, take number one over and dry it.”
Laneff worked mechanically, her mind whirling as she assimilated the news. If she’d gone with Yuan, pregnant with Shanlun’s child, she’d have been hysterical to get back to him. She had the best possible chance here, but the sinking feeling at the idea that Shanlun had to leave her now, if only for a few days, verged on panic. Only by total concentration on the work under her hands was she able to still the shaking in her fingers. Her work was the one haven of peace in her life.
Shanlun and Azevedo watched her quietly for a while and then left for their sundown salutation. When they returned, Jarmi had gone to dinner, and Laneff was just calculating the results of the analysis, holding her breath as the numbers flashed on the screen before her.
The door had no sooner closed behind Azevedo than she blurted out, “It’s perfect! You did it! I can’t believe it!”
“We must send word to Yuan,” said Shanlun. “And Mains has a
right to know.”
“Don’t tell anyone until we double-check these results. And Azevedo has to do it at least twice more with the same or better results. We can’t report out on—”
“Absolutely correct,” agreed Azevedo, as if giving her a lab grade. He bent over the results on her screen, then ran the graph strips from her new gas chromatograph through his fingers. She’d packed the column herself but still didn’t rate it as reliable.
Azevedo said, “I wish we had some of your original data to compare this with. There’s a lot of water in it, too.”
“I have a second group running right now,” said Laneff. “And Jarmi’s doing a third—which should be perfectly dry—right on the heels of this one. But this is definitely the very best anyone but me has ever gotten. You can do it! Now, can you do it again?”
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