She hadn't been able to tell them how it had happened. When she'd found Azevedo beside Yuan's bed, she'd only been able to strangle a wail and point in the direction of the apartment. But the channel had known from her nageric state. Running under full augmentation, gathering attendants with shouts, he'd pounded into the apartment and to Jarmi's side, halting only when the hopeless silence of her nager was clear.
How good it had been. Tell a Gen how good it was to kill? His hand stroked her back, pausing just where the selyn-transport nerves joined the spinal axis, sending a seductive relaxation through and through her.
She straightened away from that touch, unwilling to yield the tension that held down the realities. His hand hovered. "Tell me how good it was, Laneff." She turned, unable to believe his nager, searching for the condemnation she knew had to be in him somewhere, searching his face for a hint of it. But it wasn't there. He knew very well—how good it was. A sudden inward rending, and she threw her arms around his neck, burying her face in his good shoulder, blurting in total catharsis, "I killed Jarmi! I killed her and I didn't even know I was doing it! I thought I could live forever on such—such—such transfers! But it was killbliss. And she hurt, and died! I—ha-ha-ha-hate myself!" Dry sobs wrenched at her chest, burbling upward, unstoppable.
Hours later, when it abated, he helped her shower and dress and then to eat a little. There was a private funeral. Yuan officiated in Distect style, reciting formal words and then calling Jarmi his most dedicated follower. They took her body away in a rattletrap truck to the gypsy burial ground, far out in the wilds.
After that, they left Laneff pretty much to herself. Yuan stayed in the apartment, sleeping on a narrow cot in the sitting room. He cooked for her, made her get out of bed and dress, but let her sit for endless hours just staring at nothing. Azevedo came, often with Desha. She knew when they'd had transfer, and watched as Azevedo suffered from the inadequacy. But he came to make her feel better– to sit quietly or talk randomly of the life of Thiritees, the children, dogs, students, weddings, and graduations. Every once in a while he mentioned that her lab was standing empty.
Yuan, too, spent hours talking to her. Gradually, time became structured into morning, noon, night. The rhythm of passing days became the tension of approaching turnover. The baby was developing. Morning sickness seized her, and she had to urinate more often. The brisk quickening of need prodded her thoughts into motion again. Azevedo was sitting with her—had been the entire day, lurking in wait for the renewed hysteria at the first touch of cold need. Instead, she turned to him and shocked herself by saying, without preamble, "She raked her own arms with her fingernails." Azevedo stopped in midsentence, bewildered. Yuan, who'd been preparing dinner, charged out of the kitchen. "She—what? That fool!" Setting aside the bowl he was carrying, he knelt before her, taking her hands in his cool, damp ones. "Then it wasn't your fault, not at all. That was a stupid thing to do with you!" Azevedo asked, "This is some sort of Distect practice?" "We've worked out a few such evocations to prod listless need. Jarmi hadn't learned any of them, but people talk."
"Then Jarmi, too, was responsible for what happened. She used a technique she didn't fully understand."
"But why?" asked Yuan. "Laneff, did she also resist your draw?"
She nodded mutely.
"And she felt pain?" prompted Yuan. Again Laneff nodded, and he added, "That's part of the technique, but it got away from her. Why would she be so desperate?"
Azevedo pulled back. "I told her this would be her last transfer with Laneff until after the baby was born!" And then he frowned. "She was so depressed. Working like that, not eating, having no one to share her grieving for all the lost ones. To have come here only for Laneff, and then to fail with her—I should have realized! I should have monitored them!"
Sitting on his heels in front of Laneff, Yuan put his face in his hands, driving his fingers into his reddish-blond hair. "They obviously weren't as well matched as I thought—"
Laneff saw the responsibilities like reflections. At Jarmi's funeral, she had seen a device Azevedo had told her symbolized Thiritees: a cube made of half-silvered mirrors. Inside the cube, a candle burned, Its flame reflected in all six reflecting surfaces, infinitely in all directions, and visible from outside the box through the half-transparent walls.
She hadn't been able to get that object out of her mind. Now she saw one thing it meant. If one person did something, another responded, and another responded to that, out to infinity, each acting in free will, each responsible for the results. But it's all one!
For an instant, the heady insight she'd had when they discovered K/A and K/B in kerduvon came back to her, the vision of Shanlun and Mairis blending and becoming a Unity, of Shanlun and Azevedo in eager harmony, all crowded into her awareness. The whole universe was made of one piece, infinitely reflected. Just find the axis of symmetry, and it would all make sense!
They stayed with her all that night, and she slept as well as possible at turnover. Refreshed, at dawn she asked Azevedo if she could go to the dawn salute with him, and he was delighted, though Yuan wasn't allowed to go.
She ignored the nageric gymnastics and contemplated that cube of half-silvered mirrors. The candle wasn't lit, but she could imagine it as she had once seen it.
Afterward, she told Azevedo, "I've got to get back to work. I was so close; I can't give up now."
"Your lab is as you left it," he assured.
But the first thing Laneff saw when she flipped on the lab lights was that a cat had had kittens in the nest of a fallen lab coat. She hissed at
Laneff, hardly bothering to move from nursing the little ones. They seemed to be about two weeks old.
Prowling among the benches, Laneff swiped a tentacle through the patina of dust, broke a cobweb, automatically checked the thermostats-on the thermal baths, and found where a ventilation grate had fallen out, admitting the mother cat.
As she toured, she saw Jarmi's desk littered with things just as she'd left them. Jarmi's analyses in progress. The neat bottles of Jarmi's own products. The screaming, haunting presence was overwhelming.
She made herself bring the mother cat a bowl of milk and egg, and then left the lab. The next day, and the next, she fed the cat, but could do little more than dust and make a few tentative attempts to clear away Jarmi's things.
One morning, Azevedo found her there. "Somebody," she said, "should have been carrying on while I was—ill."
"Laneff, I could perhaps assist you, but I don't understand this well enough to design and execute the bench work. What you've done here is beyond what Rathor has been able to accomplish in centuries! You may make it safe for the last of our secrets to be released!" "Secrets?"
"Kerduvon. Laneff, think. How would the out-Territory Gens of your grandfather's day have used kerduvon? To abort every Sime fetus—even at risk of the mother's life or sanity! How would it have been used in-Territory? On every junct who wanted it, regardless of how ill prepared. 'Rejuncting is not a terrible thing; you can always disjunct again.' Only it doesn't work that way; it's no miracle solution. But its constituents, used by properly qualified channels, may do great wonders to transform this world. And you will be the one to solve the problem!"
Together they cleaned the place up, and Laneff sat down at her desk. She found the disjointed mess she had left and decided it was born of the craziness of need, so she chucked it.
Hours whizzed by. Later, Azevedo came back, got hissed at by the cat, sidestepped, and came to her desk. The entire day had passed. For those few hours, Laneff had thought only of cadaver brains and K/B receptors and how to prove their existence and function. Not for weeks had a day passed so quickly.