"Thiritees" was their word for library/school, and the entire top floor of the building housed a collection of ancient volumes that must have dated back to the Ancients. "This is all that's left of the great library of the School of Rathor, disbanded almost a century ago. Many of these books are copies of ones published by the Ancients—before mankind mutated into Sime and Gen."

Whole sections of that library, open to her only under Azevedo's guidance, described the science behind the Endowment. She didn't pretend to understand any of it, but she was interested. Her own child, they explained, would likely be endowed.

The School of Rathor, some of whose members called themselves the Company and traveled out disguised as gypsies, had been founded to preserve the mystical and esoteric lore of the Ancients and to add to that lore by experiment. Their central symbol was the starred cross—an ordinary five-pointed star superimposed on an equal-armed cross. It was the Company who had founded and maintained the safe ways out of Sime Territory for the children of Simes who established as Gens.

If she believed their claim, that certainly solved one of the oldest mysteries of civilization. To know that the safe ways were the work of the people around her made her happier. And Azevedo even began teaching her their language.

Shortly after that, Laneff was asked to attend three brief meetings, from which Jarmi was excluded, designed to familiarize residents of the building on new local laws.

Thiritees was established in a four-story brick building on a sheltered courtyard off a busy avenue in P'ris, a regional and district capital straddling a Sime~Gen border. The city was divided by a wide, oily river into Sime and Gen Territory, and the new experimental Embankment Zone where Thiritees was located. In the Embankment Zone, a mixture of Sime and Gen law prevailed.

The establishment of the zone was not merely the result of Mairis Farris's campaign, they were assured. The City Planners had been considering it for years. But the advent of the Digen coin suddenly made it feasible.

Laneff reported all this to Jarmi, saying, "This may make it easier to order from Sime or Gen Territory suppliers. Deliveries won't be so conspicuous."

They had a much tighter budget here, and less actual space. But Laneff had salvaged all the data from the expensive analytical machines, though her notes were a little mud-stained. With Shanlun's help, she was able to locate or borrow balances, desiccators, and distillation and filtration apparatus. And Shanlun found a renSime woman who was an expert glassblower.

"We'll have to recalibrate everything!" complained Laneff.

"I can do that," replied Jarmi, and set to work.

In a matter of days, they were ready to pick up where they'd left off. Jarmi began running the syntheses they'd planned to do as part of the K/A structural analysis.

Simultaneously, Laneff began to teach Azevedo the K/A synthesis. They worked late at night, when Jarmi was asleep and they had the lab to themselves. Often they'd still be there in the morning, when Jarmi came in munching a sweet roll from the breakfast buffet.

Azevedo quickly demonstrated his mastery of the equipment, and within three sessions, Laneff had identified a familiar air to his manner. "You're a teacher—a professor!"

He pivoted on the wicker stool as he sat at the balance and smiled at her. "I've taught it, yes. But that was years ago."

Now she recognized the elegant battering all her equipment showed. "This is a school—not a lab!"

"A graduate school, yes."

Laneff recalled the groups she'd gone to those legal briefings with. Pregnant women, children, young men, but only a few of middle years. A typical college cross section.

But it was all housed in the one building that extended three damp stories underground, and rambled into a nightmare of wings and additions aboveground.

She'd often walked by the entrance to the living wing. The smells and noises and wild music were just like any gypsy encampment where you might shop for wickerwork. She hadn't seen anything that looked like a schoolroom, and she said as much to Azevedo.

"Our methods aren't suited to mass production of identical experts. And we don't differentiate between students and teachers. We don't have courses or curricula. But we do develop skills. Right now, I'd like to acquire one of yours."

"Well, I guess you're as ready as you'll ever be." He'd read up on her work as it was published, and now he'd read her previous month's notes.

So that night, she demonstrated her technique for him. Shanlun

watched, commenting on the number of times he'd watched her do it for Mairis's experts. She had it down to a precise series of motions, pointing out to Azevedo each of the crucial conditions—where glassware had to be ultraclean, where weights had to be exact, where reagents had to be spectrometric grade and totally dry. And she could detail exactly what happened when any condition wasn't met

He listened with rapt enthusiasm. The next night, when he began to duplicate her procedure with his own hands, she drew on a convenient chalkboard the diagrams of the various molecules formed during reaction. "If I had a three-sixty plotter, I could run up a display to show you in three dimensions."

"Don't worry. I've a fair imagination." He asked cogent questions about the activated states of the molecules and the bonding mechanisms. She sketched them, elaborating with hand and tentacle gestures, and sometimes full-body postures, creating for him something of the beautiful dance she saw in her mind as the reactions proceeded.

At one point, Shanlun remarked, "You seem to think of these molecules as personalities—friends, even."

Surprised at that notion, she could only nod. "And I sometimes feel you have to coax them to behave, like trained animals!" She laughed, a little embarrassed.

Azevedo smiled at Shanlun. "Isn't that what I've always taught you, Shanlun? Make friends with the universe!"

They worked until well past dawn, Shanlun leaving after then-routine midnight break, when Laneff went to the public kitchen for a snack. At that time, everyone else in the building congregated in the large briefing room where they'd had the legal meetings. For those few moments, an intense silence fell over the building that penetrated the ambient nager, as it did at dawn, noon, and sundown.

When she asked about this, Shanlun told her, "We mark the passage of time with a salute—you might say because time is a sacred part of the material universe. It's too easy to be caught up in personal affairs and forget one's relationship to the eternal."

Weird. Laneff reminded herself not to ask such questions, and that afternoon she got down to running the analysis on Azevedo's product, allowing for excess moisture since it hadn't dried for a full twenty-four hours. Her last sample was filtering down the chromatographic column when Shanlun came in beaming.

"What's the good news?" asked Laneff. She was a bit tart with him, more tired than she should be after such a light day's work. Don't think about it, she told herself silently. Miscarriages are very common among Farrises.

"We've got an apartment! You and me, and Jarmi. And room for the baby, too. You'll have your own kitchen!"

She zlinned him. For the first time, she believed he really would come back—and stay with her, always, or until she died. If he can.

"What's the matter? You complained about the spices in the food from the main kitchen, so I thought—"

"It's not that." She told him how she felt.

"Laneff, you've chosen me, and I you. By Zeor custom or here, we'll be married." He took her in his arms. "This is for real. This is forever."

Jarmi came around the workbench. "This apartment is on the family floor, right?"