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.