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 before."
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."