the main trunk corridor toward her lab. "I hope you're not sleepy yet. Jarmi is heavily out of it after our transfer, and—"

Shanlun beamed. "So you didn't kill again!" He muttered something in the odd language she'd heard him speaking with the gypsies. "I should have trusted Yuan for that. But who's Jarmi?"

She explained tersely, then opened a fire door that led off into a crisscrossed maze of tunnels. "My lab is this way—that is, if you're not hungry?"

"Breakfast is yet a couple of hours away."

In the lab, she made trin tea while he inspected the place. She explained what they had accomplished, how Jarmi had helped, and what she hoped yet to do.

"My heart told me you were still alive, Laneff, but my head wouldn't listen. Laneff—I have never been—bereaved—like that before. If Yuan hadn't forced me to stay, I think I'd have fought him for the privilege. And I don't think Mairis would fault me for that."

"No, he won't, because after I die, you'll be able somehow—maybe through your gypsy friends—to get my work back to him. I've been praying for someone I could trust—"

He wasn't listening. With one huge, cool Gen hand, he reached behind her neck and cradled her head, forcing her to face him. His eyes were pools that seemed to reflect the multicolored effect of his nager. As she watched, and zlinned, the effect faded. The intense pure gold inner core engulfed her. "Die, Laneff? No. Not again. No."

"Shanlun, nobody can prevent it." Least of all Jarmi. He drew her face close with a trembling intensity more profound than the restrained yearning in his nager. Then he kissed her thoroughly, his whole body responding. The totality of sensation cascaded through her until it was as if he were kissing every part of her. At last, she drew away panting. "Do you know what you're doing to me?"

"When did you have transfer?"

"About five hours ago."

"Then I know what I'm doing to you. Or—is there someone else?"

Such panic she had never felt in a man before. But she had to admit it. "When I ran into you—I was looking for Yuan." The memory of that unfulfilled night gnawed at her, and as eager as she was for Shanlun, he, too was suffering underdraw symptoms as well as the backlash of breaking his exclusive with Digen. Such stresses rendered the higher-order Tecton Donors both impotent and virtually sterile, until after their next good transfer.

"You love him?"

"No!" But that wasn't true. "Yes!" But that wasn't true, either. "I don't know! He's—he's so much like you!"

Shanlun denied that, and they talked for a while about Yuan's role in the whole affair until she related that Yuan had given her a finishing transfer after her kill.

Searching her face, as if trying to read her nager, Shanlun asked, "Could I win you away from him by doing the same sometime?" But there was no hint of nageric seduction in his nager.

"You're too Tecton straight!"

There was a tremor in his voice as he countered, "I'd do it, Laneff —if it would bring you back to me. If it was the only possibility, I'd do it. And more, a full transfer."

She was shocked. Of course, logically, the amount of selyn she might take would never be missed by any of his channel clients. But the Tecton doesn't condone junctedness! Yet Laneff found a greedy eagerness erupting within her which she could put down only by telling herself that Shanlun could be no more satisfying than Yuan.

Again, the puzzle that had tormented her rose again. "Shanlun ambrov Zeor, who are you, really? Why do you know these gypsies– their language, their customs, their channels? What kind of a name is Shanlun, anyway? And where did that Desha get off calling you Shan? You look like them, you know."

He looked down at his hands, folded quietly in his lap as he perched on a wicker lab stool. His nager stirred into a faint prismatic display, then washed out to pale gray.

"And where did you get that crazy nager?"

"I'm sorry, does it bother you?"

"No! And that's what's so intriguing about it!"

"The Tecton calls my type of Donor a Cardinal. And I'm at about ninety-three percent capacity right now. And that capacity is higher than most because I'm trained to serve the—" He broke off, glancing about suspiciously.

"This is private," said Laneff, having checked the place daily and found no spy devices.

"—to serve the endowed," he finished.

"Was any of that real?" asked Laneff. "It was another life, forever ago."

"It was all real. It's the training to handle that kind of emergency that gives my nager its peculiarities. The one time you accidentally zlinned me working, you discovered why I don't let it show most of the time."

Laneff remembered him bending over Digen, offering. "You never got that training in the Tecton," guessed Laneff.

He didn't answer her directly. "Laneff, I want to marry you—a permanent, sanctified union. I don't ever want to lose you again."

"Shanlun, you have to get it through your head. Jarmi was good—

the best the Distect has for me, anyway. And she wasn't good enough. That means I'm going to die soon in disjunction crisis."

He searched her face frantically, then lowered his eyes to his hands again. They lay still in his lap, just as his nager lay still. But she thought he'd have charged about the room restlessly had he permitted himself the luxury.

"Let's lay that aside for the moment. I'm going to tell you something nobody in the Tecton except Mairis knows. I don't know if Yuan suspects, but it doesn't matter as long as he never knows. You already possess the greatest secret; the rest has to go under the same seal."

"You'd respect the word of a junct?"

"Digen was junct. Don't profane his memory. Azevedo is junct– by Tecton standards. Can you find it in your heart not to respect him?"

"Azevedo is junct? I don't believe it!"

"He is a channel—and more. Swear."

"I can't swear Unto Sat'htine anymore," she said, her hand going to the signet nestled between her breasts.

He caught her hand, and her tentacles naturally twined about his fingers. "Was your disjunction valid?"

"Yes!" Blood rushed to her face in shame at how she'd repudiated it all.

"Did you kill that terrorist out of craving for what you had forsworn?"

"No, but I—I was beginning to want a Gen, not a channel." "And it was my nager that did that to you, wasn't it?" "How did you know?" It was out of her mouth before she could stop the words.

"Laneff, you are not truly junct now, for your disjunction was valid, and it did not fail you. If you do not kill again– Laneff, swear by the validity of your disjunction, marry me, and together we'll fight for your life."

He dropped her hand, his nager closing around him so as not to engage her field at all. "But you must choose freely. Yuan, too, is offering hope. Do not bind yourself to me for the sake of something that may not come to pass."

Yuan, too, had only offered, and then made her choose. They are so alike! Suddenly, it occurred to her to ask, "Shanlun, what do you hate?"

"Hate?" he asked, bewildered. "Why would you ask such a question? Have you ever seen me hate?"

"No. But you must hate something."

"Why?"

His confusion was genuine. Laneff had zlinned closely to detect the truth, and his nager seemed open to her in his confusion. "Well, then, what is your enemy?"

"I pray that I make no enemy in life. I've never found anyone who required me for an enemy."

"That's the oddest answer I could imagine. What do you fight against in the world?"

"A wise man does not fight against. If necessary to fight, the wise man fights for his goal, choosing to preserve life wherever possible."

"Well, how do you feel about the Diet, for example?"

"The Diet?" He considered her. "I'm sorry, I can't hate them. They are terrified, and they live in a fantasy world. Their violence is a form of insanity born of terror, like a Sime in attrition. And there's only one way to approach that kind of blind terror: with love, not hate."