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.