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she d had in school. Now, she and Jarmi continued to gather equipment and set
up their experiments again. Meanwhile, Laneff was welcomed into the community
of not-really-quite gypsies from which Shanlun had come.
Thiritees was their word for library/school, and the entire top floor of
the building housed a collection of ancient volumes that must have dated back
to the Ancients. This is all that s left of the great library of
theSchoolofRathor , disbanded almost a century ago. Many of these books are
copies of ones published by the Ancients before mankind mutated into Sime and
Gen.
Whole sections of that library, open to her only under Azevedo s guidance,
described the science behind the Endowment. She didn t pretend to understand
any of it, but she was interested. Her own child, they explained, would likely
be endowed.
TheSchoolofRathor , some of whose members called themselves the Company and
traveled out disguised as gypsies, had been founded to preserve the mystical
and esoteric lore of the Ancients and to add to that lore by experiment. Their
central symbol was the starred cross an ordinary five-pointed star
superimposed on an equal-armed cross. It was the Company who had founded and
maintained the safe ways out ofSimeTerritory for the children of Simes who
established as Gens.
If she believed their claim, that certainly solved one of the oldest
mysteries of civilization. To know that the safe ways were the work of the
people around her made her happier. And Azevedo even began teaching her their
language.
Shortly after that, Laneff was asked to attend three brief meetings, from
which Jarmi was excluded, designed to familiarize residents of the building on
new local laws.
Thiritees was established in a four-story brick building on a sheltered
courtyard off a busy avenue in P ris, a regional and district capital
straddling a Sime /Gen border. The city was divided by a wide, oily river into
Sime andGenTerritory , and the new experimental Embankment Zone where
Thiritees was located. In the Embankment Zone, a mixture of Sime and Gen law
prevailed.
The establishment of the zone was not merely the result of Mairis Farris s
campaign, they were assured. The City Planners had been considering it for
years. But the advent of the Digen coin suddenly made it feasible.
Laneff reported all this to Jarmi, saying, This may make it easier to order
from Sime orGenTerritory suppliers. Deliveries won t be so conspicuous.
They had a much tighter budget here, and less actual space. But Laneff had
salvaged all the data from the expensive analytical machines, though her notes
were a little mud-stained. With Shanlun s help, she was able to locate or
borrow balances, desiccators, and distillation and filtration apparatus. And
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Shanlun found a renSime woman who was an expert glassblower.
We ll have to recalibrate everything! complained Laneff.
I can do that, replied Jarmi, and set to work.
In a matter of days, they were ready to pick up where they d left off. Jarmi
began running the syntheses they d planned to do as part of the K/A structural
analysis.
Simultaneously, Laneff began to teach Azevedo the K/A synthesis. They worked
late at night, when Jarmi was asleep and they had the lab to themselves. Often
they d still be there in the morning, when Jarmi came in munching a sweet roll
from the breakfast buffet.
Azevedo quickly demonstrated his mastery of the equipment, and within three
sessions, Laneff had identified a familiar air to his manner. You re a
teacher a professor!
He pivoted on the wicker stool as he sat at the balance and smiled at her.
I ve taught it, yes. But that was years ago.
Now she recognized the elegant battering all her equipment showed. This is a
school not a lab!
A graduate school, yes.
Laneff recalled the groups she d gone to those legal briefings with.Pregnant
women, children, young men, but only a few of middle years.A typical college
cross section.
But it was all housed in the one building that extended three damp stories
underground, and rambled into a nightmare of wings and additions aboveground.
She d often walked by the entrance to the living wing. The smells and noises
and wild music were just like any gypsy encampment where you might shop for
wickerwork. She hadn t seen anything that looked like a schoolroom, and she
said as much to Azevedo.
Our methods aren t suited to mass production of identical experts. And we
don t differentiate between students and teachers. We don t have courses or
curricula. But we do develop skills. Right now, I d like to acquire one of
yours.
Well, I guess you re as ready as you ll ever be. He d read up on her work
as it was published, and now he d read her previous month s notes.
So that night, she demonstrated her technique for him. Shanlun watched,
commenting on the number of times he d watched her do it for Mairis s experts.
She had it down to a precise series of motions, pointing out to Azevedo each
of the crucial conditions where glassware had to be ultraclean, where weights
had to be exact, where reagents had to be spectrometric grade and totally dry.
And she could detail exactly what happened when any condition wasn t met.
He listened with rapt enthusiasm. The next night, when he began to duplicate
her procedure with his own hands, she drew on a convenient chalkboard the
diagrams of the various molecules formed during reaction. If I hada
three-sixty plotter, I could run up a display to show you in three
dimensions.
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Don t worry. I ve a fair imagination. He asked cogent questions about the
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