"Yes," admitted Shanlun, letting Laneff go.

"Do you think it'd be all right if I keep the room I've got?" She turned to Laneff. "I'll come stay with you when you're in need, but– I just wouldn't feel welcome up there."

She'd been warned, and she wasn't complaining, but Laneff’s heart went out to her. "I don't mind, but—"

Shanlun said, "It's all right for a while, but there'll be a group of transients coming through in a few weeks, and there'll be as little privacy where you are as on the family floor."

"But can we keep it that way—for a while?"

"Sure, Jarmi. But you'll have a home with us, when you're ready." Then he inquired about what Laneff was doing, adding, "Azevedo will be along in a few minutes."

The channel arrived nearly an hour later, announcing, "Well, that's it. I just heard from the last group. Nowhere in the Company, nowhere in all of Rathor, is there a midwife with experience of Farris renSimes."

Laneff turned on her stool to change the collector under the dripping column, mentally timing it. Her hand was shaking. To Shanlun, she said, "When are you leaving?"

She was trying to be brave, but she thought it would be easier if she were going to sneak in and talk to Mairis while Shanlun stayed behind and worried. If Mairis goes all Tecton, and decides I have to go to a Last Year House before he'll help me . . .

His arms came around her, and he turned her on the stool, his nager enfolding her until his overwhelming optimism suffused her whole system. Then he kissed her with real passion. Even though she was far past being post, she enjoyed every second, but she had to break away to change the collector again. "Don't distract me right now. The fractions come out at close intervals. Jarmi, take number one over and dry it."

Laneff worked mechanically, her mind whirling as she assimilated the news. If she'd gone with Yuan, pregnant with Shanlun's child, she'd have been hysterical to get back to him. She had the best possible chance here, but the sinking feeling at the idea that Shanlun had to leave her now, if only for a few days, verged on panic. Only by total concentration on the work under her hands was she able to still the shaking in her fingers. Her work was the one haven of peace in her life.

Shanlun and Azevedo watched her quietly for a while and then left for their sundown salutation. When they returned, Jarmi had gone to dinner, and Laneff was just calculating the results of the analysis, holding her breath as the numbers flashed on the screen before her.

The door had no sooner closed behind Azevedo than she blurted out, "It's perfect! You did it! I can't believe it!"

"We must send word to Yuan," said Shanlun. "And Mains has a

right to know."

"Don't tell anyone until we double-check these results. And Azevedo has to do it at least twice more with the same or better results. We can't report out on—"

"Absolutely correct," agreed Azevedo, as if giving her a lab grade. He bent over the results on her screen, then ran the graph strips from her new gas chromatograph through his fingers. She'd packed the column herself but still didn't rate it as reliable.

Azevedo said, "I wish we had some of your original data to compare this with. There's a lot of water in it, too."

"I have a second group running right now," said Laneff. "And Jarmi's doing a third—which should be perfectly dry—right on the heels of this one. But this is definitely the very best anyone but me has ever gotten. You can do it! Now, can you do it again?"

The channel grabbed a light beige smock from beside the door. "Let's find out!"

Laneff started to follow him out of the office into the lab, but he waved her away. "Shanlun will have to be leaving in the morning. You two deserve a night off together. Besides, I have to see if I can do this without your nager interfering."

Joyfully, Shanlun scooped her out the door of the lab, not giving her a chance to ask what in the world her nager had to do with a simple chemical reaction.

She found that he'd spent some of the time while she was doing the analysis in setting dinner in their apartment. There was a soup she'd made, an artichoke, avocado, and mushroom dish from the main kitchen, sans the awful spices, and some nut bread with a tofu-and-tahina spread that he must have bought in some regular supermarket.

As soon as he had made sure she'd eaten enough, he said, "We must do something to celebrate your victory."

"It's not a victory yet, just a breakthrough. Let's clean this up and go back to the lab to see how Azevedo's doing."

"No. He asked us to leave. He's probably sent Jarmi off, too. If this is going to work, he's got to be alone."

She got up and started to clear the table. "That's nonsense. He's been watching me—"

"When do you get your best yields?" he asked point-blank.

She stared at him. She'd never correlated it, but—

"Laneff, I watched you, lived through all that in the Hospital/Center with you when you were trying to get Mairis's experts to duplicate your results. They still haven't done it. And they won't. I knew Azevedo could do it. Doesn't that tell you something?"

She nibbled sauce off the end of one handling tentacle. "Why did you think Azevedo could do it?"

"Because I guessed what you were doing differently from all the others who tried, and I recognized it as a technique Azevedo had taught me, although I've never been very good at it. And when I found out you zlin in color, I realized you visualize a lot. You dream in color, too, don't you?" At her nod, he went on, "You can't work a synthesis without visualizing the molecules! And that's the essential technique necessary to get good, clean yields of kerduvon."

"Ker—what?"

"Kerduvon. The mythical extract of the mahogany trinrose. We call it moondrop. It's what I was giving Digen because it helps control tertiary entran, among other things—"

"Wait a minute!" The other half of her puzzle, the exact cause of Digen's death, had been put aside under the press of events. "Why are you telling me this now?"

"Because Azevedo has given me the discretion to do so." He took her hands, pressing them together between his huge, cool Gen palms. "Laneff, I had it in my mind, when I found you alive, that if I could get Azevedo to accept you, we could use kerduvon to disjunct you."

"A drug that disjuncts? Nobody could possibly have kept such a secret! I don't believe it! Disjunction is—is—is a private and personal hell!" She had once thought this Gen of all Gens understood that. "No drug could-f"

"No, kerduvon doesn't disjunct. It's very dangerous, Laneff. It acts on the central nervous system to wipe away certain types of neurophysiological programming. That's all it does—blanks the Sime's programming. What new programming takes its place is a matter of your choice—and that of the Gen working with you. One slipup and both Sime and Gen could end up permanently insane—or dead."

Assimilating that, Laneff said, "It'd be worth the risk."

"Kerduvon tends to cause abortion or miscarriage."

It was too much. Laneff’s hands flew to her face, muffling a gasp. She understood now the firmness of Shanlun's nager, the tension in him.

"Laneff, you can survive until the child is born. I'm going to bring an expert, and we have Azevedo and Jarmi. Staving off disjunction crisis for ten or eleven transfers is not an absurd goal. And after that, we can risk kerduvon. There is a way for all of us, Laneff, if we have the courage to take it. I can't offer certainty—only hope. And that's better than no hope, isn't it?"

Strangling a cry of anguish, she nodded. Her body relaxed. "Oh, I've been so exhausted lately," she said, her shoulders slumping. "I know that's no excuse when so much depends on this, and there's so little time now. I keep telling myself I must do things today because I'll only feel worse tomorrow, but—" He held her snugly. "Shanlun, what am I going to do without you here?"