"It can't be affecting me this soon," pleaded Laneff, but she was thinking of the solicitous way Azevedo hovered over her when he visited the lab—which was often.

"Well, we'll talk about it tomorrow. Meanwhile, let's get this mess cleaned up. I was supposed to try the K/A synthesis on my own while you do the conductivity studies."

They worked industriously all day long, and when it came time for Jarmi to quit, she said, "Let's just set up the analysis for tomorrow." Laneff had noticed how the Gen was putting in a couple of extra hours each night.

They worked until Jarmi was weaving with fatigue and Azevedo came in and shooed her to bed. "And when was the last time you slept, young mother?" he asked Laneff.

She admitted, "Just before Shanlun left."

"Then off to bed with Jarmi—or you're going to have a very rough turnover!"

"But—" There was no arguing with such a channel. Laneff said, "We won't know whether we've succeeded until these analyses are run. I was going to start them tonight—"

"No. That's an order."

On the way up the stairs, Laneff had to admit that her knees and feet were glad for the respite. She caught up to Jarmi on the third floor and confessed that she'd been run out of her own lab by a ferocious channel.

Jarmi commiserated. "Look, maybe we can get into one of the kitchens and fix us something decent to eat."

"I've got a kitchen all to myself, remember?" And she rattled off the list of ordinary ingredients she had in stock. "Think you could make a meal off of that?"

"Sure! Let's go."

Cooking together turned out to be even more fun than lab work. They discovered they had a lot of food prejudices in common, and apart from those of the gypsies around them. Laneff actually enjoyed the taste of the food Jarmi made while thinking that if Azevedo was right about turnover, it was probably the last meal that would taste good for a long while. Laneff even dutifully remembered to take her new vitamin tablets.

Over the empty dishes, Jarmi looked around at the apartment: an open living room with breakfast nook, a tiny kitchen, a hall leading to three bedrooms and two bathrooms. Jarmi had never seen it before, and Laneff was suddenly ashamed that she hadn't decorated the bare walls. Everything was done in the style she'd come to think of as "Old Gypsy Standard."

But Jarmi let out a wobbly sigh. "It's almost like home." Her voice broke on the last word, and after a moment's struggle, she broke into tears;. "I'm sorry!" she gasped.

Laneff moved her chair over beside Jarmi, supplying tissues and then crying with her because the nageric power of the Gen was

overwhelming. Afterward, they both felt wrung out, and Laneff took Jarmi into the sitting room, where they shoved books aside and sat on the cushion-strewn wicker couch.

"That's why you've been working so hard lately, isn't it?" asked Laneff, feeling like an idiot for not knowing.

"No," she answered. "Well—that room got to be so empty with you gone. It was like home, only there was no Michen to come visiting, no Gilbert, no Tanya, no Sissa ..."

She'd have gone on listing her dead friends, but Laneff put a tentacle over her lips. "I wish I'd met them."

"They were a little afraid of you—oh, not that way. Afraid of what you meant to all of us. Afraid of the gossip about anyone who so much as spoke to you. And now they're all"—she strangled on the word– "dead."

She held the Gen through another siege of tears, worried that perhaps Jarmi had chosen to come here to avoid the ghosts she'd have to face with Yuan's group. Jarmi eventually quieted, then drifted slowly into sleep, clutching Laneff’s tentacles as if they were life itself.

Laneff slept half propped against the Gen and woke just after dawn, confused by the presence of Azevedo's nager. And then she realized he was at the door.

Disentangling her hand from Jarmi, she went to let the channel in. She didn't feel rested, and moving away from Jarmi, she felt the familiar sinking sensation of turnover.

"Laneff? Here, let me." Azevedo did something with the selyn fields as she opened the door, and she felt better. Jarmi sat up, grinding sleep and the crusts of tears out of her eyes. "Who? Are we late– did something happen?" She lurched to her feet, her beige pants wrinkled, her buff blouse twisted.

"I just came to invite you to breakfast," said Azevedo.

He came to zlin my turnover!

Seeing the disarray in the kitchen, he said, "I'll assign someone to give this place a daily straightening for you. Now, come along. The trin tea will be getting cold!"

He gave them only moments to wash up, and then they were climbing stairs to the roof where tables were set among huge potted; plants. All the way, Laneff argued that she wasn't hungry, and' Azevedo insisted that the growing fetus had to be properly nourished. As good as his word, he had a whole new regimen of vitamin and mineral supplements laid out for her along with a ration of yeast tablets.

Laneff found the nut bread went down all right, and she could manage the fruits, but no way could she get near the gypsy idea < porridge. It reeked. By the end of that meal, Azevedo had guaranteed to search all of P'ris if necessary to find Laneff foods she was more accustomed to.

The rest of that week, she and Jarmi spent running the analyses of the various products they'd accumulated. Laneff set up three new gas chromatographs, experimenting until she found a column packing that didn't die after one run of kerduvon. Jarmi analyzed her own K/A product, doing two more runs and analyzing those before she reported to Laneff, "I think I can almost do it now. At least these are fifty percent higher yields than I got before."

She was referring to the runs she'd done at the Distect labs, but avoided calling it home.

"That's—interesting," said Laneff, looking over Jarmi's shoulder at the notebook page displayed on the computer screen. "I don't want to believe this. I'm not going to even try until I've looked at it after transfer. Print it out. I want to take it upstairs and study it later."

Jarmi punched up the printout and the photocopy machine lit up, flashing out the pages of notes. "Have you calculated the kerduvon results yet?"

"I've been afraid to. Need makes me cowardly."

"Hardly!" laughed the Gen suggestively. "But it probably blunts your curiosity about anything not Gen." Her fingers danced over the keys of the pad. "Mind if I run the calculations for you?" she asked as Laneff’s notes appeared on the screen. "Shidoni!"

Anybody who'd been working this analysis regularly hardly had to calculate to see the similarity between the kerduvon components and those of the K/A Jarmi made before learning the visualization technique. Jarmi looked at Laneff.

"Yeah, I saw it. It scares me still. Go ahead and run the calculations."

Jarmi had re-created the calculation program she'd worked out in Yuan's labs. With a few key strokes, she had the results flashing before them. Jarmi's nager jumped with excitement, while Laneff felt morose. At that moment, Azevedo walked in. He'd taken to seeing them at breakfast and dinner, Desha joining them now that the channel, too, was in need. It was close to dinnertime, and he entered projecting appetite at Laneff, but as he read the ambient, he shifted to more neutral fields until he could see what they had on the screen.

As he studied the figures, his fields crystallized around him into an opaque egg—an effect Laneff had never zlinned before. He reached over Jarmi and punched up her notebook, scanning to her recent analyses, split the screen, and compared the two analytical runs. He studied Laneff’s struggle to find a column packing that would work.

He looked over her calibrating runs of his pure K/A, and compared that to the kerduvon samples she'd just finished running.