"Try to teach Jarmi the synthesis. I don't know if she has the well-developed ability to visualize, but she knows the theory best. If you can teach it to her, you have something to publish. And I'll be back in time to give Azevedo transfer."

"What if Mairis taps you for his transfer? Or the Tecton—"

"I'll find a way. Azevedo needs me now. And so do you."

He began kissing her seriously, but she leaned away to ask, "Shan, you've got to get me a sample of this kerduvon."

"Azevedo will get it for you whenever you ask, though I don't know what good it will do—"

"Neither do I, but it's the only hole left to plug. I've got to know what's in that stuff, and how it interacts with K/A in order to exonerate K/A of causing Digen's death."

"Our best chemists have tried to analyze moondrop for generations. It's a very complex mixture, and we've never—"

"Can you get me any publications on it?"

"Certainly, but not in any language you know."

"Get me a translator then. Surely there's a graduate student around here who'd like to get their name on my project."

"We don't work that way."

Suddenly frustrated beyond endurance, she cried, "How do you work then! Nothing around here makes any sense! Shidoni-crazed motives and ass-backward customs, inedible food, and imagination controlling chemical reactions—"

She scrubbed at a tear, and he handed her a tissue.

"I'm not going to cry! I'm not post anymore."

"I remember how I felt, those first few years in the Tecton. For a time, I was sick with it—like being constantly shenned. Nothing works the way you expect it to, not the plumbing or the people. And it isn't the big things but the little things that finally get to you. For you it's worse because you're weakened by the pregnancy, and you've been snatched into a second, totally foreign, culture. Oh, Laneff, I wish I didn't have to go."

"Then send somebody," she said, knowing it was silly.

"I can't." He broke away from her and paced, then looked back at her as if measuring her strength. It made her stand taller. He said, "There's more news. Our messenger to Yuan returned. The bolthole where he said he'd be—it was a bombed-out ruin. Unidentifiable bodies everywhere. The Tecton picked up those Diet Gens we left in the crater. News blackout on what they've gotten out of them, if anything. Mairis is making a round-the-world tour, campaigning. The Digen coin is a big success most places. Mairis's experts still haven't duplicated your synthesis. And even so there have been six attempts on Mairis's life."

"He—"

"No, he's not hurt. Some of the Distect supporters are still with him; one died protecting him. That attack on Yuan's labs was just the opening shot in an all-out war between Diet and Distect. In every major city there's been violence, bloodshed and pain enough to provoke Simes into the kill. But not one Sime has killed because of it. The vast majority of the world is coming to see where the Diet is wrong about Simes in general. Support for the Diet is cooling off.

"But with all this, security around Mairis is very tight. Paranoia is a survival trait for him now. If I were him, I wouldn't believe a note delivered by just any gypsy–not if it asked me to send one of my best out into the mists. Remember, he thinks I'm dead—and you, too. He's not going to send anyone else into that kind of danger. So I've got to go and choose one person to come take care of you. And I want to be back before you hit turnover—or, failing that, at least before hard need. You and Azevedo are in phase . . ."

"That doesn't give us much time," said Laneff. Her cycle was already perceptibly shortening, as always with a channel fetus.

"I'm going to leave no later than noon tomorrow." He said, coming to enfold her in his arms. "And you're right, that doesn't give us much time." ,

It was the first time she could recall him failing to read her thoughts, and she suspected it was deliberate. He bent and kissed her with a single-minded dedication that she couldn't resist. They had their own bedroom now, and they used it.

Sometime past midnight, he lay back exhausted and fell into a typically heavy Gen sleep. She reveled in it for a while, and then got up, took a snack plate from the refrigerator, and went to the lab.

As she'd suspected, Jarmi was there, having slept the late afternoon away and found herself too wakeful to laze in bed all night. "Hungry?" asked Laneff.

"You know me by now, don't you?" asked Jarmi investigating the plate. "Oh, yum, real food!" she said, tasting the nut bread. "Here, I've got some hot trin tea. Let's eat!"

They took the tea and nut bread to Jarmi's desk, set across the end of one workbench, and Laneff said, "Tomorrow, I'm finally going to get a sample of that other drug Shanlun had Digen on when I gave him K/A! They call it kerduvon around here. We're going to have to figure out how to analyze the stuff, but if we can, maybe we can figure out what caused Digen's death. Did the cadaver tentacles arrive?"

"Yes, they're in the refrigerator. I'm afraid there isn't much I can help with on those selyn conductivity tests!"

"Don't worry. I'll be back to start them as soon as Shanlun leaves in the morning. Meanwhile, you're going to have to do an analysis on this kerduvon sample, at least find out what kind of trouble it'll give in the chromatograph."

"It'll muck up the column for sure."

"I'll figure on repacking the column and make some extras."

Licking honey off her fingers and tentacles, Laneff got to work analyzing Azevedo's yield of the afternoon. Jarmi puttered around awhile and finally fell asleep on a cot they'd had brought into the lab. Just before dawn, Laneff had some preliminary results: Azevedo's yield had been immeasurably close to the theoretical yield for the equations. And it was nearly pure.

When she told Shanlun as he was dressing, she let her dismay show clearly. He threw back his head and laughed. "I know what you mean. It's enough to make anyone wish to be an endowed channel!" Then he sobered. "Well, at least now we know the secret. And all that's left is to teach it to Jarmi!"

CHAPTER 10

NEED

The noon sun beat down on the courtyard. Laundry hung on sagging lines in sunny corners. Bedding lolled out of windows like heat-struck tongues. The cacophony of colors dazzled the eye, and the riotous play of swarms of children numbed the ear. A buff-clad man leaned out a window, beating a dusty rug, sending clouds of dog hair into the light breeze. A woman who was fixing a bicycle in one shady spot yelled as a group of children waded through her tools playing Sime~Gen wars and laughing in high shrieks.

Laneff stood in the cool of the main doorway with Shanlun. They were waiting for his car to be driven up from wherever it was stored. The gypsies in the surrounding buildings, Laneff had discovered, were "real." And they accepted the Rathorites with a respect bordering on awe. No outsider ever penetrated this deep into the courtyard. Looking at the spectacle, smelling the heavy odor of their cooking, Laneff could understand why nobody would want to.

"You said Mairis is on this side of the ocean now. How will you find him?"

"Read the newspapers. I can read languages I can't even speak, and we have friends all over. All I have to do is find a certain tribe, and they'll get me in to see Mairis."

"I don't understand! You're going to wander around the countryside until you find this gypsy tribe you've never met before and just tell them to sneak you past the tightest security cordon this continent has seen since the time of Kishrin the Eighth?"

"Before I went to Digen, I was trained by the Company. Gypsies do not wander around at random. And they leave clear sign for their own to follow. Finding them will be easy. Getting to Mairis may be harder. I don't want to announce myself to the whole Tecton, so only Mairis is to know I'm alive."