For an instant, the heady insight she’d had when they discovered K/A and K/B in kerduvon came back to her, the vision of Shanlun and Mairis blending and becoming a Unity, of Shanlun and Azevedo in eager harmony, all crowded into her awareness. The whole universe was made of one piece, infinitely reflected. Just find the axis of symmetry, and it would all make sense!
They stayed with her all that night, and she slept as well as possible at turnover. Refreshed, at dawn she asked Azevedo if she could go to the dawn salute with him, and he was delighted, though Yuan wasn’t allowed to go.
She ignored the nageric gymnastics and contemplated that cube of half-silvered mirrors. The candle wasn’t lit, but she could imagine it as she had once seen it.
Afterward, she told Azevedo, “I’ve got to get back to work. I was so close; I can’t give up now.”
“Your lab is as you left it,” he assured.
But the first thing Laneff saw when she flipped on the lab lights was that a cat had had kittens in the nest of a fallen lab coat. She hissed at
Laneff, hardly bothering to move from nursing the little ones. They seemed to be about two weeks old.
Prowling among the benches, Laneff swiped a tentacle through the patina of dust, broke a cobweb, automatically checked the thermostats-on the thermal baths, and found where a ventilation grate had fallen out, admitting the mother cat.
As she toured, she saw Jarmi’s desk littered with things just as she’d left them. Jarmi’s analyses in progress. The neat bottles of Jarmi’s own products. The screaming, haunting presence was overwhelming.
She made herself bring the mother cat a bowl of milk and egg, and then left the lab. The next day, and the next, she fed the cat, but could do little more than dust and make a few tentative attempts to clear away Jarmi’s things.
One morning, Azevedo found her there. “Somebody,” she said, “should have been carrying on while I was—ill.”
“Laneff, I could perhaps assist you, but I don’t understand this well enough to design and execute the bench work. What you’ve done here is beyond what Rathor has been able to accomplish in centuries! You may make it safe for the last of our secrets to be released!” “Secrets?”
“Kerduvon. Laneff, think. How would the out-Territory Gens of your grandfather’s day have used kerduvon? To abort every Sime fetus—even at risk of the mother’s life or sanity! How would it have been used in-Territory? On every junct who wanted it, regardless of how ill prepared. ‘Rejuncting is not a terrible thing; you can always disjunct again.’ Only it doesn’t work that way; it’s no miracle solution. But its constituents, used by properly qualified channels, may do great wonders to transform this world. And you will be the one to solve the problem!”
Together they cleaned the place up, and Laneff sat down at her desk. She found the disjointed mess she had left and decided it was born of the craziness of need, so she chucked it.
Hours whizzed by. Later, Azevedo came back, got hissed at by the cat, sidestepped, and came to her desk. The entire day had passed. For those few hours, Laneff had thought only of cadaver brains and K/B receptors and how to prove their existence and function. Not for weeks had a day passed so quickly.
She set Azevedo to work the next day, trying to find a way to remove all the K/A from a kerduvon mixture. She set to work on the cadaver brains that had finally arrived. Despite the tightening of need, she was able to work, and that made the need easier to bear. Over dinner, they talked of the experimental design, and she explained her hypothesis of the composition of kerduvon. “Nature put the two active isomers back to back, in the mahogany trinrose. The trin plants are a mutation that appeared about the same time as the Sime~Gen mutation, and I saw this in your candlebox. Optical isomers are reflections; Sime and Gen are reflections of each other; I’ve now proved K/A is present in detectable abundance in Sime nerve tissue; K/B has to be present somewhere in the Gen nervous system, and I’m betting on the brain. K/A is the transfer-abort fraction; K/B has to be the disjunctive. It has to be that way or nature isn’t symmetric; but nature is symmetric.”
She explained how K/B would have to be present in Simes in extremely minute quantities, and K/A would likewise be present in Gens in minute portions. “An adult can’t disjunct because the ability to create K/B has totally atrophied. Somehow, kerduvon restores that ability.”
Azevedo liked the hypothesis and helped her brainstorm a series of experiments that might prove it. Laneff began to feel she understood what it was she had synthesized and how it worked. She even began toying with the idea for a test that could be administered in childhood to determine Sime from Gen before changeover establishment. But first she had to determine how K/B behaved on brain surfaces. The task was simply enormous and required a team of laboratories. She had to get enough proof in hand to publish something that would get people started on this line of research.
With the crude equipment of the school and Azevedo’s help, she designed a small exploratory experiment and began the work. In spare moments, she pored over the notes she and Jarmi had collected, assembling data and creating tables to show that her synthesis was indeed repeatable. And she pondered how to broach the subject of the importance of the operator’s visualization. She had no scientific reputation to lose and wouldn’t have to live with the rejection that would no doubt follow publication because she’d be long dead of disjunction crisis. If not here, then in a Last Year House. There’ll never be another Jarmi.
But as she worked on the paper, she had to admit it required more data. She ceased to struggle to oust Yuan from her apartment on the grounds that she could care for herself now and convinced him to come work in the lab and learn her synthesis. Seeing Yuan daily in Shanlun’s chair, at Shanlun’s place in the kitchen, and using Shanlun’s shelf in the bathroom, watching him daily doing Jarmi’s work, sitting at Jarmi’s desk, only increased the tension between them. And it was worse because Yuan turned out to have the worst technique of any lab assistant she could imagine. How did he ever pass basic pharmacology?
Azevedo had infinite patience, but Laneff often yelled at Yuan and then had to apologize. At one point, she accused him of playing mud pies in her lab, and he came back belligerently, “Perhaps I don’t really grasp the importance of what you’re doing, but I think you grasp it too tightly, Laneff!”
“What in creation do you mean by that?”
“You’re hiding from need by burying yourself in this work—like Jarmi did!”
“She wasn’t hiding,” Laneff retorted. “She was dedicated to banishing the kill! She knew what it means to be renSime, even if she was Gen. She not only worked in this lab until she dropped from exhaustion, she tried the craziest stunt in the Distect arsenal in hopes of keeping me on my feet long enough to finish this!”
Azevedo broke it up, then, before it could turn into a real fight, and sending Yuan off to eat, he fed Laneff trin tea and yeast tablets, saying, “I think you understood Jarmi’s motives better than the rest of us, but don’t discount her very real depression. She was fighting off coming to grips with her personal losses by her furious dedication to something vast and impersonal—your research, and, through it, you.”
“No. She wasn’t impersonal, she wasn’t Tecton. I was something deeply, intimately personal to her.” And she sketched for the channel what Me in the Distect warren had been like for Jarmi, excluded from the one-to-one Sime~Gen relationships which were the foundation of Distect philosophy. “And then I came, and gave her the first real taste of the pleasure she’d always fantasized transfer to be.” She related the course of their first transfer. “So, you see, there was nothing mercenary, nothing of the Tecton distancing in it for her. She wanted to give me what I’d given her; surely as a channel you can understand that! The great ironic pity is that she succeeded!”
He looked down at his hands, toying with his tentacles as if working out a difficult arithmetic problem. “And she took pride in being able to ‘handle’ you? It was a matter of personal pride for her to
be able to satisfy you?
“Pride? No—but well, you might say that …”
He looked up at her, head tilted to one side, duoconscious. “Did you know that Gens can experience a kind of egobliss?”
“Egobliss is just another word for killbliss, so they can’t—”
“No, no. They are two completely different things. Think, Laneff.” He zlinned her deeply, then returned to duoconsciousness. “You no I longer have the capacity for egobliss. You gave it up at your first I disjunction. But remember what that first kill was like? You were lord of the universe, and that Gen was so much cold meat for your use. Your ego, your sense of being totally separate from all creation, was fed in that kill, and engorged, inflamed, and torn from its moorings in the lives of others. The disjunction year was spent making that sick ego fast and repent and see itself in others. Didn’t they make you watch disjunctions?”
“Yes,” whispered Laneff, hoarsely. “Oh, yes.”,
“And when it came your turn, you chose the channel because the channel had something within that bespoke kinship with your inner self, understanding of what life meant to you.”
“How did you know?”
“It’s often that way in a true first disjunction. The affinity for a fellow Sime becomes stronger than the attraction to a reflection, the Gen. The channel gives you access to the Gen without danger of egobliss.” “Danger?”
“But after a first disjunction, the craving for killbliss is still there. The Tecton treats that craving as pathological, denying its existence in every Sime, nonjunct, disjunct or junct. Killbliss, Laneff, is simply another word for the physical satisfaction of need, the repeating of the experience of First Kill, or First Transfer. It is only at second disjunction that a new “first experience” can be imprinted on your nervous system. What you will crave and what you will experience will feel like killbliss, but it should not be necessary to burn a Gen to get it.”
“You’re talking about the kind of junctedness of the endowed, aren’t you?”
“No, not really. We share a third experience, textually different from killbliss, and indescribable. We call it slilbliss.”
There was a sadness in his nager that told Laneff it was this experience Desha was unable to give him. Oh, where is Shanlun?
“Slilbliss,” repeated Laneff. “Slil is the experience of the four-plus Donors who can read selyn fields and sense selyn motion directly during transfer. What could slilbliss be like?”
He shook his head and gave a gypsy shrug. “Maybe a mutual sort of egobliss/killbliss, a moment of perfected ecstasy shared.” He brushed that aside. “My point, Laneff, is that you had long since given up egobliss—but Jarmi had not! She was not your perfect reflection, not the right transfer partner for you. When you satisfied her, you were left wanting. When she satisfied you, she was destroyed. Think of the candlebox, Laneff. The people we see surrounding us are reflections of ourselves. Each of us lives inside a candlebox, unable to see the real selves of those around us, able to see only reflections of ourselves. To even glimpse others, one must extinguish the egoself, if only for a moment’s meditation.”
“And I’m imputing motives to her that are really my own?”
“That might have indeed been within her, however buried. You can see them where we can’t, but we can see what you can’t.”
It was like the infinite tangle of responsibilities she had seen before when contemplating Jarmi’s death. Digen’s death, too, had been the result of decisions and responsibilities made by Shanlun, Mairis, herself, and even Digen, reflecting infinitely in all directions, ultimately becoming a single Unity. In both cases, she had made decisions that had led to disaster by long, involved chain reactions. Things she started to do just didn’t come out right.
“Can you see what’s wrong with me?” whispered Laneff.
“No,” he answered quietly. “You are inside your own candlebox, you alone determine the distortions in the reflections you see. Look out around you, and see yourself.”
She looked.
She looked at every crucial decision in her whole life. She had begged and pleaded, and prayed to God to be allowed to go and visit Fay Ravitch. And that had led to her killing in First Need. From that day, she had regarded herself as handicapped because of being renSime and disjunct, vulnerable to the temptation to kill. She had compensated for that handicap by always playing it safe around Gens, always opting for the safest transfer.
She’d played it safe when she accepted Mairis’s suggestion of going into the visitors’ box, rather than onstage beside Shanlun. She’d played it safe when she’d let Yuan take her to his headquarters, promising her a Gen whom she couldn’t kill, but who could satisfy her and keep her alive. She’d played it safe coming to Thiritees, where there was a channel good enough to handle her, and Shanlun whom she certainly couldn’t kill and who claimed he could satisfy her —and Jarmi, too. She’d played it safe choosing Jarmi the first time, but that had led to her getting pregnant so that Shanlun had to go out into danger which had probably taken his life. And she’d played it safe choosing Jarmi over Azevedo, and that had led to her killing Jarmi.
By failing to risk herself, she was murdering those around her.
A plan was forming, a daring plan, a harebrained scheme that any real scientist would be ashamed of hatching. But it would cut ten years of throat-clearing out of the process of airing her results in the proper journals. If she was right, she and the baby would live, and never kill. If she was wrong, they’d both die, but nobody else would have to.
If she won this gamble, the whole world would see that the kill wasn’t the essence of the renSime. It had been Digen’s dream, and Shanlun’s, and Jarmi’s. It was Mairis’s life’s work, and he had a chance to succeed if she could show concrete results: one adult junct dis– juncted. And with that success on record, her project to identify Simes before birth was as good as completed. Those were stakes big enough to be worth a couple of more lives. So many had died in senseless violence already.
“Yuan was right. I was hiding my work. I hadn’t given a single thought to my next transfer, because the whole idea scared me. I knew what I had to do—and I knew I wouldn’t do it.”
Azevedo waited, one hand spread over her lab notes, the other resting on his knee. When she didn’t go on, he prompted, “And what do you have to do?”
She couldn’t read a thing in his nager. So she took her courage in hand and said, “No matter what, you would be giving me my next transfer. But I’ve decided you’re going to take moondrop with me, and be Gen to me. Not after the baby is born. Now. This transfer is going to be it for me. I’m not hiding anymore.”
“You’d sacrifice your child—”
“No! I will take K/B! Azevedo, the preliminary tests show that it is absorbed onto Gen brain surface, molecules fixing themselves in a – definite array. My work has shown that K/A fixes onto Sime fetus placenta, inhibiting or even cutting off selyn flow to the fetus. That means K/A is the abortifacient fraction of kerduvon. There might be other chemicals in it that contribute to that effect, so I’m opting for pure K/B, which my theory says must be the disjunctive agent.”
“And what if the impurities contribute to or control the disjunctive effect?”
“You said yourself it works better, safer, when it’s purest.”
“That has been our experience,” he conceded, but argued, “But there’s no reason to do it now. We can save this as a last resort, continuing the research to improve our understanding. I’ve sent another messenger to Mairis—while you were so ill. The security cordon was so tight she couldn’t get through at all. Rumor is that a big Diet attempt on Mairis’s life is cooking. So I sent a messenger to your father. Sat’htine can surely find us a Farris expert who can handle your case. We’ve been lucky so far you haven’t suffered complications. Why try to precipitate them? I’d have a hard time facing your father’s expert if I’d participated in a drug experiment with you– and made matters worse.”
They argued for hours, but Laneff was adamant, the fire of her new vision of herself driving her. She’d never felt so sure about anything before. But Azevedo, too, was intransigent. She’d never thought to meet up with such entrenched scientific orthodoxy in the midst of a gypsy camp.
At last, she stood, gesturing with hands and tentacles as she paced. “You’re not the only channel in this outfit trained to handle that stuff, and there are Gens who know how, too! I’m not going to be stopped this time!” She started toward the lab door.
He called after her, “Whatever you do, don’t try to involve Yuan in this. He has the nageric power, but a total lack of the control necessary. He’d leave you both insane.”
If, she thought, K/B itself is responsible for the hallucinations– which hasn’t been established.
Frustrated, disconsolate, she stalked out into the halls to walk off the spurt of fury that had built when Azevedo had denied her. I feel betrayed. It’s nonsense. He’ll do my transfer–even if only his way. And he thinks he’s not Tecton! Ha!
She realized she knew not a soul she could go talk to. She regretted not paying more attention to the language lessons, trying to develop contacts among the other students. And her feet knew only one path through the sprawling building: the one to her apartment.
She found the newspaper outside the door. She usually had no time for it, but she took it inside and threw herself onto the floor cushions in the sitting room to read. All the news seemed strange, continuations of events she’d never heard of. But when she got to the back page of the world political news, she stared.
Mairis’s face leaped out of the page, paired with the photo of a woman she’d never seen before. The caption identified her as Hajene Malry Remuns, a newly declared candidate for World Controller. She was calling people to come back to traditional basics in Sime government, not to take risks with the world balances achieved at such great cost to our ancestors.
She wasn’t opposing Mairis directly. He never mentioned her in the interview published with the pictures. But they stood for opposite paths. With a shock, Laneff realized the election was barely a week away now. And the published polls suddenly indicated Mairis was trailing Remuns by nearly 20 percent.
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