Yuan, too, spent hours talking to her. Gradually, time became structured into morning, noon, night. The rhythm of passing days became the tension of approaching turnover. The baby was developing. Morning sickness seized her, and she had to urinate more often. The brisk quickening of need prodded her thoughts into motion again. Azevedo was sitting with her—had been the entire day, lurking in wait for the renewed hysteria at the first touch of cold need. Instead, she turned to him and shocked herself by saying, without preamble, "She raked her own arms with her fingernails." Azevedo stopped in midsentence, bewildered. Yuan, who'd been preparing dinner, charged out of the kitchen. "She—what? That fool!" Setting aside the bowl he was carrying, he knelt before her, taking her hands in his cool, damp ones. "Then it wasn't your fault, not at all. That was a stupid thing to do with you!" Azevedo asked, "This is some sort of Distect practice?" "We've worked out a few such evocations to prod listless need. Jarmi hadn't learned any of them, but people talk."
"Then Jarmi, too, was responsible for what happened. She used a technique she didn't fully understand."
"But why?" asked Yuan. "Laneff, did she also resist your draw?"
She nodded mutely.
"And she felt pain?" prompted Yuan. Again Laneff nodded, and he added, "That's part of the technique, but it got away from her. Why would she be so desperate?"
Azevedo pulled back. "I told her this would be her last transfer with Laneff until after the baby was born!" And then he frowned. "She was so depressed. Working like that, not eating, having no one to share her grieving for all the lost ones. To have come here only for Laneff, and then to fail with her—I should have realized! I should have monitored them!"
Sitting on his heels in front of Laneff, Yuan put his face in his hands, driving his fingers into his reddish-blond hair. "They obviously weren't as well matched as I thought—"
Laneff saw the responsibilities like reflections. At Jarmi's funeral, she had seen a device Azevedo had told her symbolized Thiritees: a cube made of half-silvered mirrors. Inside the cube, a candle burned, Its flame reflected in all six reflecting surfaces, infinitely in all directions, and visible from outside the box through the half-transparent walls.
She hadn't been able to get that object out of her mind. Now she saw one thing it meant. If one person did something, another responded, and another responded to that, out to infinity, each acting in free will, each responsible for the results. But it's all one!
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.