The young chauffeur opened the door for Lord Kristal, who got out easily despite his eighty-one years.
The Durslan estate at Lake Loreen was one of Kristal's favorite places, although he got there infrequently. And this was one of its pleasantest aspects—mellowed by late afternoon sunlight slanting soft through trees and autumn haze. The changes since he'd arrived there as a pupil, seventy-five years earlier, had been modest and graceful.
The greatest change was an addition. Despite some architectural innovations, the new building, the Research Building, might almost have stood there as long as the others, for generations, fitted as it was among great peioks that shaded the lawns and had begun to spill bronze leaves across them.
It was the Research Building where his interest lay today, but the limousine had delivered him to the Main Building. He took this for granted. Even among the alumni, even—especially—for a representative of the Crown, there was protocol to observe. But it was simple, common courtesy really, and with friends a pleasure. He went up the steps to the veranda, where Laira Gouer Lormagen waited, with Kusu, to greet him.
When she'd embraced her guest, she took his hand and stepped back. "Emry," she said, "I'm the only Gouer family representative here today, the only one who hasn't flown off to Durslan Hall to help prepare for Harvest Festival. But it's my husband's research you've come to see"—she half turned and put her hand on Kusu's sleeve—"so I'll wait till dinner to claim you for a talk, if your schedule permits dinner with us."
She left them then—she'd seen the test already; it wasn't pleasant—and the two men walked the winding, eighty-yard sidewalk to the research building, exchanging pleasantries. Kristal knew in general terms what the test had shown, but he wanted to see for himself. In the actual presence of an event, a useful cognition might be triggered, if not then, perhaps later. Especially in someone of his training and experience. And a relevant cognition was needed here. Although he was at Service instead of Wisdom/Knowledge, over the years he'd shown occasional flashes of exceptional perceptivity.
Kusu did not defer to Kristal's elderly legs; he knew His Lordship better than that. Instead of the elevator, they climbed the curving main stairs to the second floor and walked to Kusu's lab. The equipment there was meaningless to Kristal. In his school days there'd been no science, no such thing as research, and hadn't been for a very long time. The Sacrament had seen to that, as it had seen to other things, and they'd lived off the genius of ages long past.9
To Kristal, the most nearly familiar thing in the lab was a cage containing five pale olive sorlex, the Iryalan mouse. They looked up at him with eyes like tiny black beads, their noses twitching.
"How are the others?" Kristal asked. "Did any survive?"
"The last two died while I was talking with you on the comm," Kusu answered. "This morning I tried it with three meadow soneys I live-trapped; something with substantially more body mass. They only lived about an hour. And a feral cat I caught last night. It was worse than the rodents; by that time I'd attached this microwave emitter"—he touched a black apparatus on the side of the box—"so I could put it out of its frenzy. That's what I'll do with these, too, assuming they respond like the earlier sets."
"And sedation doesn't help, you said."
"Depending on its strength, it eliminates or reduces the intensity of the frenzy, but so does exhaustion, and they die just as quickly. Even when I put them to sleep before teleporting them."
"Are you having post mortems done?"
"On the sorlex and the soneys; they weren't microwaved. I've gotten the results, and they're not very informative."
Kristal nodded. "Well, let's see it operate."
Kusu raised the cage lid and reached in. The sorlex investigated his hands. He took two of them out on one palm and stroked them reflectively for a moment with a finger. Then, kneeling, he put them in a glass box that sat on a waist-high platform, part of a much larger apparatus, set a timer, closed a switch, and took Kristal to a vacant table at the other end of the room. There was nothing on the table except an electrical cord plugged into a receptacle.
"It'll be a few seconds yet," Kusu said. Suddenly, after a moment, the glass box was there, and inside it a virtual blur of movement, the two sorlex racing frenziedly about. They caromed off the sides, off each other, launched themselves upward with remarkable leaps to bounce off the top. After ten seconds, Kusu plugged the electric cord into the microwave emitter on the side of the glass box, flicked a switch, and the sorlex stopped at once, to lie unmoving.
For a moment the two men stood looking silently at them, then Kusu spoke again. "The cultures I teleported—bacteria and yeast—are still growing normally, as if nothing had happened." He gestured at several potted plants on a window sill. "So did the saragol. And the horn worms. And finally the sand lizards. The lizards acted a little strangely afterwards, for a few minutes—scurried around enough more than usual to notice—but they gave us no reason to expect anything like this.
"If teleportation had killed the other life forms, too, I'd set this work aside and go back to theoretical studies. Maybe I will anyway. But . . ." He gestured. "Only the mammals."
"Hmh!" Nothing stirred in Kristal's mind, and obviously not in Kusu's either. "I suppose the box couldn't have anything to do with it?"
"It didn't harm the lizards. Besides, I didn't use the box when I teleported a set of heavily sedated sorlex. They were asleep when I sent them across, and they died anyway.
"And I can't teleport things into a box, because the nexus won't form on the other side of a solid wall. I couldn't teleport them into the next room, for example, except through line of sight, say through the open door."
Kristal's brows raised a millimeter. "I hadn't realized there was that limitation."
"I hadn't either, till I tried it. The teleport didn't grow out of well worked out physical theory. The possibility occurred to me in an intuitive leap while I was studying some topological ideas the ancients apparently had played with but not done much with. So the research has been heavy on intuition and trial. And without adequate theory, a result like this can be a major block."
"Hmm. So what's your next step?"
"I don't know yet. I had Wellem up here for this morning's tests. He's much more at Wisdom and much less at Knowledge than I am, which can be useful when you hit a barrier like this. But he had no cognitions either; not yet anyway."
Kristal looked again at the sorlex, then back at Kusu. "Well," he said, "this feels like a good time to look in on him. It's been some two years. And his work is invariably interesting. Even when there isn't language to describe it."