"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 sneak 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?"
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.