“It’s what’s not going on.” He tapped the last coding algorithm on to the screen and explained the problem.
Marguerida nodded, her eyes thoughtful. She might not have advanced scientific training, Jeram reminded himself, but she was University-educated and literate, an intelligent woman who had been exposed to a variety of cultures and had successfully adapted to them. Sometimes he forgot she was not Darkovan.
“I am and I’m not,” she said absently, responding to his unvoiced thought. “I was born here and spent my first five years in Thendara, most of that time in the John Reade Orphanage. After Sharra was destroyed, Father took me away. I grew up on Thetis.”
“A very different world from this one.” Jeram had heard of the balmy climate and warm, shallow seas of that planet.
“Returning to Darkover in my twenties was a strange experience. I had almost no memories of this place, and yet it felt like home. I knew things I couldn’t possibly have learned. It wasn’t until I fully recovered my laran that everything began to make sense. It was like remembering who I truly was. I don’t know what I would have done without Istvana and my other teachers at Neskaya. Gone mad, I suppose.”
Jeram looked away, thinking how similar their stories were. Not where they were born, but the suppressed memories and newly awakened psychic abilities, the way their pasts had shadowed them. The teachers who had saved their sanity.
“I wonder…” she said. “How much do you know about laran monitoring?”
Jeram replied that it had been done to him at Nevarsin Tower. Puzzled, he asked, “Why?”
“I learned a little, first at Arilinn and then at Neskaya. It’s the most basic level of Tower training. I never had the desire to go further, but anyone who works as a monitor must be able to not only sense but also actively adjust the physiological processes of those in their care—breathing, for example, or heart rate. Even hormonal levels.”
Jeram shook his head, confused. He knew she had a point, but he was too tired to follow her logic.
“How different can this antibody be from the other natural substances of a human body?” she said. “If a trained circle, working under the direction of a Keeper, can separate out atoms of copper from crude ore, then it stands to reason they might also be able to complete your analysis.”
“I don’t know, it’s pretty tricky stuff. If the computers can’t handle it…”
Another part of Jeram’s mind insisted he was thinking like a head-blind Terran, trying the same thing over again in the insane hope of getting a different result. Maybe it was time to start thinking like a Darkovan.
Marguerida pressed on, her voice gaining in certainty. Her golden eyes glowed faintly, as if some inner fire had sprung to life. “Maybe your computers can’t replicate the Darkovan antibodies because there’s more to them than a simple chain of molecules. Maybe there’s another dimension, the laran that’s bred into us.”
“Certainly, your psychic abilities go beyond anything in the Federation,” Jeram admitted. “I have some laran myself…”
Enough to blow me out of the water when you blanked out my memories.
Marguerida flinched visibly at his thought.
“Laran is just a human trait, developed through natural selection and isolation,” Jeram said. “The computers should compensate for the genetic drift.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Marguerida said. “There’s no question that Darkover was colonized by a Lost Ship. Some time after Darkover’s beginning, if the stories are true, human women bore children fathered by chieri”—seeing Jeram’s look of confusion, she explained—“a nonhuman sapient race, strongly telepathic, hermaphroditic, and extremely long-lived. They may be extinct now, but at least one was still alive during the time of Regis Hastur. Linnea or Danilo may know more of what happened to him—her, I’m not sure. Legend says that our laran originated with them. You can see traces of their heritage in the Comyn—not only our laran, but the six fingers many of us have, as well as pale eyes and slender build.”
“That still doesn’t explain why I can’t replicate the immunoglobulins from Ulm’s blood,” Jeram said doggedly. “First of all, the donor is not Comyn, and second, as I told you, the computer protocols already include the necessary adjustments.”
“That is, if the changes are purely physical,” Marguerida said. She paused, rubbing her fingertips across her temples and muttering under her breath about this damned headache. “What if there’s a laran field around the protein molecule, a psychic vibration, something that can’t be measured by ordinary instruments? Something that could be perceived and manipulated by a trained telepathic mind? I know how fantastical it sounds, but in the twenty-odd years I’ve been on this planet, I have seen more things than are dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy.”
It was as outlandish an idea as Jeram had ever heard, and he had half a mind to tell Marguerida so. But what better idea did he have to offer?
It was time, he repeated to himself, to think like a Darkovan.
The decision of whether to perform the experiment in the Terran Base or in the newly refurbished Comyn Tower, as well as all the subsequent arrangements, took far longer than Jeram expected. He understood that ordinarily the Keeper simply decided things, and her word was law. This circle, however, consisted of Istvana Ridenow, Linnea Storn—the elegant beauty who, Jeram gathered, had once been consort to Regis Hastur—Moira DiAsturien, and Laurinda MacBard, with Illona acting as their monitor. Each one of them was accustomed to having her own way, and while they were exquisitely courteous to one another, their discussions amounted to exercises in diplomatic pig-headedness.
At last, the Keepers agreed that, despite the advantages of working in the Terran Medical Center, with supplies at hand and where their results could be easily verified by computer analysis, they preferred a setting that could be safely shielded. The Terran Base provided only flimsy protection against the fear and anger pervading the city. Comyn Tower, on the other hand, had been designed to insulate the minds of those who worked within.
Despite Jeram’s reluctance to relocate, Marguerida accepted the decision as an accomplished fact. She recruited Ethan and his friends to transport the blood samples, reagents, and various portable instruments that Jeram determined were the bare minimum.
Comyn Tower, as he understood it, had been abandoned for some time. Another Tower, referred to in strained whispers as Ashara’s, had functioned in one capacity or another until fairly recently. He asked Marguerida why it was not still in use, and she pretended not to hear.
Housekeepers had clearly been at work in Comyn Tower, for the entry hall and stairwells had been dusted, and intricately woven rugs laid on the stone floors. The room they were to use was three-quarters of the way up the physical tower itself, a space Marguerida called a matrix laboratory, although Jeram could not imagine doing experiments here.
The room had a surprisingly light, airy atmosphere. Panels of translucent blue stone alternated with the smooth, fine-grained granite of the walls. A sideboard bore an array of pastries, candies, honey-glazed nuts, and beverages. With a good deal of bustle, the equipment from the Medical Center was arranged on a round table, and benches and cushions were brought in for everyone.
After Ethan and his friends left, a hush fell over the room. Laurinda MacBard took the centripolar place. Ever since their first meeting, Jeram had found her intimidating, although she treated him with scrupulous politeness. The other Keepers assembled around the table, with Illona sitting on a bench set to one side. Marguerida led Jeram to a seat along the opposite wall.
“I’ll need to tell them—” he began.
“They will know. Illona says she has linked to you before. She will be monitoring, but she’ll also be facilitating the rapport with you.”
Marguerida left, and the work began. The women in the circle set their starstones on the table around the vial containing a sample of Ulm’s blood. The sparkling blue-white stones caught and intensified the light. Then, as Jeram
watched, they began to glow. Slowly, the light grew into a ring and then spread through the room. It bathed the faces of the Keepers in a pale, eerie radiance. Jeram closed his eyes against the brightness…
…and felt a faint touch, like silk brushing the inside of his skull. Although he could not have told how, he recognized the mental presence of Illona and, through her, Laurinda.
For a long moment, he hovered, suspended in a sea of misty blue-white, surrounded by cool, pulsating globes of the same light. Gradually, the colors shifted, so that he traveled between swirling disks of red, in a sea of golden liquid. The disks faded to mere ghosts, residual energy imprints of the red blood cells. Vision shifted, as if he were approaching a planetary system from space. He passed between spheres of color and energy, some as huge as gas giants, others tiny asteroid belts. These were not celestial objects but particles of infinitesimal size.
A sound like a vast ocean filled his hearing. He shrank further and now perceived that the golden sea was not entirely liquid. Shapes emerged from the faint currents, complex threads and globules, the tiny nodes of electrolytes, nutrients, and waste.
Show us, whispered a distant voice, so subtle it did not disturb the slow, floating dance of the molecules. Which one?
How could he tell? The long, immensely complex chains loomed ever larger. There were dozens of them, all different. With an effort, he summoned an image, the pattern on the computer screen. Some parts of the molecule resembled any other immunoglobulin, but the specific sites here and here…He forced himself to concentrate, to bring the configuration into focus.
Ah, yes! responded the voice, and then trailed away.
Nausea rose up, and his throat stung with acid. He blinked, his eyes focusing reluctantly.
Illona leaned over him, one hand on his arm, and urged him to close his eyes. Sick and disoriented, Jeram obeyed. He felt a cool touch on his brow, and his unease vanished.
When he opened his eyes again, Illona was smiling at him. The women of the circle had risen, some stretching, others helping themselves to the food and drink that had been laid out on the sideboard. They had, Illona explained, been working for over an hour, and that was a long time for anyone who was not accustomed to it. At her advice, he ate some fruit, sweet and intense like sun-dried apricots. It helped to steady his nerves.
With a nod, as one acknowledging an equal, Laurinda handed him a small vial of serum.
As soon as Jeram felt steady enough, he took the sample back to the Medical Center laboratory. Excitement thrilled up his spine, sweeping away the last remnants of fatigue, as he watched the indicators change.
Positive…positive…
Marguerida joined him a short time later, just as the computer simulation confirmed the test tube results. “Well?”
He grinned. “Break out the champagne. We still need the final litmus test, a live subject, but yes, I think we’ve got a biologically active serum here.”
In the end, Jeram decided to test the serum on three people in the city clinic-shelters, each in a different stage of the fever. The most ill, a young woman, had been unconscious for the last day, her body radiating heat like an oven.
The next morning, the fevers of all three patients had broken. Over the following days, even the woman who had been critically ill was able to sit up and take some food.
Jeram sent word to Domenic and then returned to Comyn Tower to ask Laurinda to reconvene the circle. She received him in the kitchen, of all places. When he entered, she was kneading bread on a floury work table, rhythmically folding and pushing the elastic dough. With her hair tied back under a gaily striped kerchief, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and her forehead glistening with sweat, she looked like a peasant wife, not the Keeper of Dalereuth Tower.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Sit down, but don’t talk to me until I’ve got this settled.”
Laurinda smoothed the dough into a huge earthenware bowl, scraped the table surface clean, rinsed her hands, and sat down facing him. “There. I feel almost human again. I take it from your expression and the jubilation you’re practically shouting mentally, you have good news.”
“The serum worked better than we hoped!” he told her. “How soon can we have more?”
“That depends,” she said heavily, wiping her face with her kerchief, “on how much you need.”
An icy trickle shot down Jeram’s spine. “We need enough to treat everyone who’s sick. I thought that was understood.” He gave her Darius-Mikhail’s current figures. “We’ll also need to begin a prophylactic program, beginning with health care workers. Of course,” he went on, trying to sound encouraging, “distribution will take time. We won’t need it all at once.”
Laurinda shook her head. “Your heart is good, but you do not understand what you are asking. A circle of Keepers, the most powerful minds on Darkover, took an entire session to produce what we gave you.”
“Which was enough for a dozen patients,” Jeram said.
“That is all we can do at any one time. Laran work is exhausting on both physical and psychic levels. It will take us days to regain enough strength to do the work.” Her expression gentled. “We will make more serum for you, do not fear.”
“Just not at once, or any greater quantity?”
Laurinda’s gaze flickered, and in that brief instant, Jeram caught her own frustration. No wonder she’d been punching the bread dough.
We’ve come so close! There must be another way, something else we can do!
“You are all Keepers,” Jeram said desperately. “Could you not each head up a circle, so that we have four—or five, if Illona can do the work—groups working on it? What about asking the other Towers to help?”
“Even if that were possible, the work would take far longer, so there would be no advantage in dividing our forces,” Laurinda said. “As it is, there are not enough circle workers in Thendara, perhaps in all the Domains, to do what you ask. Once, perhaps, but now we are few and scattered.”
Jeram gulped, remembering how appalled Lew and then Silvana had been by his desire to rid himself of his own laran.
“What are we to do then?” he cried. “Let people die, when we know how to save them?”
“I am more sorry than I can say,” Laurinda said, “but we can help no one if we burn ourselves out.”
Jeram had once caught the edge of a blaster beam. Sick and shaken, he had been confined to a rejuvenation tank while skin and nerve and muscle healed. Now he felt as if he had been shot full in the belly. Numbly, he walked from Comyn Tower, across the courtyard, through the Castle gates and toward the city beyond. Someone called out to him, but he had not the will or voice to respond.
Until now, he had thought the worst thing would be to accomplish nothing, to watch the people he loved and the planet he called home die, helpless to save them. But this was far, far worse.
Some will live, and some will die. Who will decide?
The Council? Would the Comyn seize the tiny supply of serum for themselves? No, he could not believe that. He knew Lew and Domenic and Danilo—yes, and Marguerida—too well to believe they would act in such a selfish way.
Me? Will I be the one to deal out life or death?
He walked along the streets, through swirls of activity. Even the fear of the plague could not keep everyone inside. Life must be lived, and Darkover’s summer was all too brief. In a market square, half the stalls stood empty, but others were laden with food and leather goods, finely worked knives, harnesses, beaded scarves, and ribbons. A musician sang while another strummed a guitar and a little girl danced. Down an alley, two ragged boys played with hoops and sticks. Through it all, Jeram moved like a ghost.
His feet carried him to the entrance of the Terran Base. I’m the one with the training. It’s up to me to find another way. There must be something else…
In the laboratory, his crew rushed to meet him. They looked edgy and exhausted, worn thin with worry and relentless work. Their faces fell when they saw his expre
ssion.
“What’s the matter?” Ethan asked.
“What more can go wrong?” said someone else.
“At the maximum rate the Keepers’ circle can produce the serum, it will be only a trickle,” Jeram said. “We’ll make more, of course, but it will be too little, too late.”
Ethan looked away, chewing on his lower lip. “My cousin, Geremy, is sick. We won’t have the serum in time for him, will we?”
“I don’t know—” Jeram bit off the words. There were a few more doses left from the batch the circle had made. They’d used three from the dozen the Keepers had made. That left nine doses. He could eke the serum out to ten if he dared to dilute it. If he took one dose for Ethan’s cousin, would it be stealing? Who would die then, who might have lived?
How will we decide?
“Jeram, I’d like to speak with you.”
Lost in his own tortured thoughts, Jeram had not seen Marguerida enter the laboratory. A quality like steel energized her. Ethan and the others stepped back to let her pass. She moved briskly between the tables of equipment.
“I have an idea, a way around the production problem,” she said, “but we’ll have to clear the lab. I can’t take any chances.”
Her plan sounded mysterious and somewhat sinister to Jeram, but that could be his own bone-deep weariness speaking. Marguerida’s last idea, he reminded himself, had been a good one. Within short order, she tactfully but firmly ejected everyone but the two of them. She managed to give the rest of the team important tasks elsewhere, so there were no grumbles.
“I’ll need a work space with absolute privacy,” she said briskly, “a sample—either the original serum or the one the circle made—and the protein substrate solution. As much of it as you’ve got.”
Surely she’d gone mad, Jeram thought. The team had indeed prepared quantities of the amino acid building blocks ready to be turned into serum. The circle of Keepers had worked with a soupy mixture, the ingredients dissolved in a sterile solution. Jeram loaded the storage vat on a cart, wheeled it into the laboratory, and assembled the rest of the supplies Marguerida asked for, including a small sample of Ulm’s immune serum. At her direction, he placed a chair between the vat and the work table.