"But not conclusive, even though K/A bonds to receptors on two thirds of those placentas, and not at all on the other third. Dissecting out the nerve fibers, I found that the bonding takes place on the selyn transport nerve sheath in the placenta that supplies the fetus with selyn from the mother. Further, a nerve saturated with K/A will not transport selyn. I tried it on selyn transport nerves from other parts of the body and got the same effect.

"My theory is that this substance I've synthesized is naturally present in all Simes, but especially abundant in channels, and is responsible for regulating selyn flow. I have no idea how its level in the blood would be regulated. And I've never done any experiments to isolate it from blood. I was about to try that when Digen was brought into the Center suffering from hypersensitivity to selyn flow causing transfer abort."

Laneff told a highly censored version of that story to Jarmi, leaving out everything to do with the Endowment. But she now felt close enough to the Gen woman to tell all the rest of the story of Shanlun.

The first time she'd met Shanlun, she'd been wandering the corridors of the university hospital/Sime Center where her lab was. Frustration had driven her from the lab that evening, and despair had once more set in when she checked her mailbox and found yet another rejection by a major journal. It was close to midnight, the hallway lights dimmed. She wandered into her favorite waiting alcove, where huge windows overlooked the far-flung lights of the city. She was halfway through the door before she even noticed the muted nager.

She recognized Shanlun as the Companion-Therapist to the world-famous elder statesman housed in the security wing. She'd heard the Gen's nager was distinctive, but she'd never imagined anything like this.

"Jarmi, it seemed as if he'd wrapped his nager about him like a cloak, defining his personal space so that he literally didn't exist beyond it. I could zlin the compressed intensity of his selyn field, but you know how when a Gen is paying attention to something, it's as if a shaft of nageric light beams out of them and sets the object of attention glowing? Awake, any Gen is aware of something, and things around them—glow. The First Order Gens, when they're high-field, set the whole room on fire. Shanlun does that, but he can also not do it. He can pay attention to nothing. It's as if he just becomes invisible or unzlinnable, rather. I've never heard of anyone who can do such a thing, but he was doing it that night when I first saw him."

He seemed to be staring out the window, unaware of her. His nager was composed of tiny flakes of particolored light that blended to an iridescent silver. Knowing it was impolite to zlin a Gen so fixedly, she blurted the first thing that came to mind. "Beautiful view, isn't it?"

After a long silence in which his nager didn't react, he said in the deep voice of a working Companion, "Yes, it is beautiful. It's a beauty which is easy to perceive. There are others which are much harder." "Beauty comes in grades of difficulty?"

His nager relaxed, spreading to suffuse the room with an even glow of his attention. This, too, was an effect Laneff had never zlinned before, even in other First Order Donors. "Is there anything," he asked in a rhetorical tone, "that is not beautiful when viewed from the center of its own moment?" "What?" Yet the words made an odd echo of sense. He turned, his eyes raking her as if astonished to find someone there. "I'm sorry, that must sound like nonsense." He shrugged ingenuously, like a gypsy. "I'm just feeling terribly frustrated, and I don't want to splatter that on every Sime around me. Excuse me, Hajene."

He left before she could deny the title "hajene," given only to channels. She brooded, aware that she should have realized the First Companion in Zeor would not be feeling talkative while his Sectuib was so ill. She couldn't get image, nager and flesh, out of her mind, and so the next night, she pinned her Householding signet to her lab coat conspicuously, and sought the same waiting-room alcove just before midnight. He was there, gazing at the last quarter moon rising over the city.

Silently, she joined him. They shared the alcove without a word for nearly half an hour and parted with only a nod. Five nights she joined him in that silent midnight vigil, aware for the first time in her life of the way the moon shifted phase and time day by day. Finally, on the sixth night they gazed on a moonless sky over a multicolored city of jewels, a visual effect parallel to his nageric effect.

As he turned to leave the alcove, she dared to speak again. "I think I see now how beauty comes in grades of difficulty. Sometimes, a model of a molecule can seem ugly on first sight. But understand how its bonds imbue it with special character—how they strike a chord and sing together—and the sight of the model can make you cry. But people think you're crazy if you sit over a reaction pot and cry for joy. Especially if the reaction won't go!"

His nageric astonishment melted into an avid hunger that even her sensitivity might have missed, it was folded away so quickly. His eye lit on her Householding signet. "You're not Perrin Farris, are you?"

"Laneff Farris ambrov Sat'htine. Hajene Perrin's my cousin. I'm just a renSime."

"Shanlun ambrov Zeor." He added, "Just a Gen."

They had talked for another hour. She found that Shanlun had pledged Zeor, to Digen, expecting to be his last Companion, but accepting that in order to be part of Zeor. "I hadn't expected, though, to come to admire him so much, Laneff. I don't want him to die so soon. He's come to be the definition of Sectuib to me. I suppose that sounds odd from someone who was never even a Householder before."

"No," Laneff replied. "I've never met Digen; he's not even a relative of mine; not all Farrises are related, you know. But I've heard Digen can make people understand what creates and sustains a Householding. It's the ideals of Zeor that have touched your heart. You're as much Zeor as I am Sat'htine."

"I hope so," he sighed. On subsequent nights, he began to talk of the intricate medical problems Digen was enduring. She was a researcher, not a clinician, so all she could offer at first was Sat'htine philosophy: "Shanlun, a physician can never win the battle against death, for death is a part of nature. A physician's job is to enhance the quality—and length—of life, or perhaps to ease death."

Astonishment whirled through his nager in dizzying sparks that left her as breathless as his smile did. "Thank you!" As he hurried away, she thought that never had anyone learned one of Sat'htine's hardest lessons so quickly. Or maybe I just reminded him.

She wished that her own spirits could be lifted so easily. Her grant money was running out, she couldn't figure why nobody else was able to reproduce her synthesis of K/A, and she couldn't find a cheap enough way to extract and purify it from Sime blood—if it was even there. Every time she heard the news or read a newspaper and encountered a report of a berserker, she ground her teeth in frustration, for she knew from intimate personal experience what they were suffering. She couldn't give up, yet she couldn't go on, and as hard as she prayed, there was no answer in sight.

The moments around midnight she spent with Shanlun became the focus of her days, the rest a dull endurance trial. One night, he turned from the rain-sheeted windows and sat heavily in one of the padded green chairs. He admitted, "It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the abort seizures. He's dying, Laneff, and I can't even make him comfortable."

Earlier that day, she'd dutifully plowed through an article on the mechanism of transfer-abort seizures in elderly channels. It had been a hopeless, heartless article, and she had pondered how her synthetic compound reduced selyn flow and thus nervous sensitivity to selyn flow. She began explaining this to Shanlun before she had it all thought out herself. "But, no! You don't use the Sectuib in Zeor as a human experiment! Especially not on a wild theory."