Epilogue
KAELION
One year ago, I would have called this unprofessional.
Sitting in the third row of the University’s main symposium hall, in a seat I did not reserve through the faculty portal but rather through my twelve-year-old daughter, who got here forty minutes early and saved two spots with her jacket and her sketchbook and what I can only assume was a very effective glare at anyone who tried to sit down.
One year ago I would have said this was inappropriate. A conflict of interest. A situation requiring careful management and a great deal of documentation.
Now I'm just a man in the third row.
It's an improvement, honestly.
"She's going to be great," Solvi says, for the fourth time, without looking up from whatever she's drawing. Her tendrils are doing the thing they do when she's excited and trying not to show it—twitching in small, rapid increments, like they can't quite hold still.
"She's always great," I say.
Solvi looks up at that. She has the expression she reserves for moments when I've said something she approves of but won't admit to approving of—mouth flat, eyes bright, tendrils going suspiciously still.
"You're so embarrassing," she says.
"I know."
She goes back to drawing.
The hall fills steadily around us. I recognize a number of faces—colleagues, junior faculty, a few postdocs from the xenobiology wing who I know have been following the research.
There are people here from off-planet, which I did not expect.
A small contingent from the Galactic Medical Institute, identifiable by their lanyards.
Two researchers I know from Stanford's neural division, who have flown a very long way to be in this room.
Good.
They should be here.
The lights shift. The murmur of the crowd settles. And then Lyn walks out.
She looks—
I'm not going to be clinical about this.
There's no point. She looks extraordinary.
She has her curls pinned up today, a few of them escaping at her temples the way they always do, and she's wearing the deep green jacket she bought last month after Solvi told her it made her look like a scientist from a comic book, which Lyn took as the highest possible compliment.
She has her notes in one hand and her prototype in the other, and she sets both down on the podium, showing no nerves at all.
That's new.
A year ago she would have been vibrating. Not visibly—Lyn is good at the surface—but I would have seen it. I would have recognized the particular set of her jaw that meant she was translating anxiety into sharpness, readying herself to fight before anyone had said a word against her.
She's not doing that now.
She adjusts the microphone. Looks out at the room. When her eyes find us in the third row—when she clocks Solvi's frantic little wave and the completely undignified way I have apparently been staring at her—the corner of her mouth moves.
Just slightly.
Just enough.
Then she looks back at the room and begins.
The presentation is forty-five minutes.
I know every word of it. I have read every draft, heard every rehearsal at my kitchen table, and argued with her about the framing of the second section for approximately three weeks before conceding—graciously, I thought, though Lyn used the word finally—that she was right and I was wrong.
The work is extraordinary. It has always been extraordinary.
The research into neural translation as a mechanism for pain response interruption represents the most significant advance in the field in a generation, and I told her so the first time I understood what she was actually trying to do.
I told her that, and then I tore her prototype apart in front of the entire lab and called her interface amateurish.
I have thought about that a great deal this year.
Sitting in the third row, watching her field questions from the Stanford contingent with the kind of easy authority that comes from someone who simply knows more about the subject than everyone else in the room, I think about it again.
About what it cost her to keep coming back.
To keep building the thing even when I was being—
"Baba," Solvi murmurs.
"What."
"You have the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have the guilty face." She doesn't look up. "Stop it. She's not thinking about it."
I look at my daughter. She is twelve years old and she is absolutely correct and I resent both of those things equally.
"Pay attention," I tell her.
"I am paying attention," Solvi says serenely. "I'm also drawing. I can do both. Lyn said it’s okay.”
I return my attention to the podium.
Lyn is demonstrating the device now—the final prototype, the one that actually works, the one she finished three months ago and has been testing in clinical partnership with the Galactic Medical Institute ever since.
She has a volunteer from the audience, a Skoll researcher whose chronic nerve condition has been documented in the literature for years.
She fits the interface with efficient, practiced movements—the same hands that once set her workstation on fire twice in a single week—and when she asks the volunteer to describe the effect, what she says is that the pain is still there, distantly, but that it has stopped insisting.
That it has learned, somehow, to speak more quietly.
The room is very still.
I'm very still.
Solvi has stopped drawing.
There is something almost unbearable about watching someone you love be recognized for the thing you knew they were capable of long before they stopped doubting it themselves.
It should feel straightforward—uncomplicated pleasure.
It mostly does. But there's a splinter in it somewhere, something small and sharp, which is that I spent a year making it harder than it needed to be.
I have thought about this, and I have talked to Lyn about it, and she has said—in her particular way, half-exasperated and half-sincere, the way she says most important things—that the pushing was part of it.
That being taken seriously enough to be argued with was part of it.
That she used my rubrics as her benchmark because she knew I wasn't going to let her get away with anything, and that she needed that, even when she hated it.
I believe her.
I'm still working on believing her completely.
Lyn concludes the presentation to an applause that starts at the back of the room and builds forward.
She thanks her committee, her research partners, the institute.
She thanks Thalara, which makes me smile, because Thalara is in the seventh row and has been crying since the demonstration and makes absolutely no effort to hide it.
She thanks Riley, who is sitting next to Thalara and not crying—but is glaring at me because he’s still not sold on my presence in Lyn’s life.
Then she looks at the third row.
"And I want to thank," she says, her eyes finding mine, "the most infuriating supervisor I've ever had.
Who told me my interface was amateurish, and was right, and who also—" she pauses, briefly, "never once stopped believing the thing would work.
Even when he was being a complete pain in my ass about it. "
Laughter ripples through the room.
I'm aware that my ears have gone warm.
Solvi, beside me, cackles.
"And Solvi," Lyn adds, "who told me the green jacket was the right call. She was also right."
Solvi sits up very straight. "Obviously," she whispers.
Afterward, in the corridor outside the hall, there's the usual crowd—colleagues with questions, the Stanford pair who want to discuss collaboration, someone from a university on the other side of the galaxy with a card and an expression that suggests the card is important.
Lyn moves through all of it with the ease I've watched her develop over this last year, the ease that comes from finally being in a room on her own terms.
I stay back. I'm good at staying back. I've had practice.
Solvi tugs on my sleeve.
"I finished it," she says.
She holds out the sketchbook, open to a page she's been working on since we arrived.
It's the three of us—rendered in her particular style, precise and a little stylized.
We're at the noodle shop, the Nyeri'i hole-in-the-wall in Mythara Village that has become, over the course of this year, something like our place.
Solvi has drawn herself in the middle, grinning wide, her tendrils out and animated.
I'm on one side, looking—she's drawn me looking the way she always draws me these days, which is to say less like I'm filing an incident report about my own feelings.
And Lyn is on the other side, her curls loose, laughing at something.
It's a good drawing.
It's an excellent drawing.
I don't say anything for a moment.
"I'm going to give it to her," Solvi says. Then, with the air of someone delivering a verdict: "She should have it."
"Yes," I say. "She should."
Solvi closes the sketchbook, satisfied. Across the corridor, Lyn has extracted herself from the Stanford pair and is making her way toward us, jacket slightly rumpled now, notes tucked under her arm.
When she sees Solvi holding the sketchbook with obvious intent, her expression does something complicated that she doesn't quite manage to control.
Good.
She's still learning.
Solvi holds it out. "I drew us," she says, in the matter-of-fact tone she uses when she's done something kind and doesn't want to make a production of it. "At the noodle place. You can keep it."
Lyn takes it.
She opens it.
She looks at it for a long moment—the three of us in the noodle shop, Solvi's careful lines, the way Solvi has drawn Lyn as simply, entirely, one of us.
"Solvi," she says. Her voice has gone the quiet way. The real way.
"You don't have to say anything," Solvi says. "It's just a drawing."
"It's not just a drawing."
Solvi shrugs with the elaborate casualness of someone who is extremely pleased. "I have a good subject," she says. Then she looks over her shoulder, back toward the hall doors. "Can we get noodles? I've been waiting for noodles literally this entire time."
Lyn laughs—helpless, full, the laugh I've heard every day for a year and have not once gotten tired of. "Yes," she says. "We can absolutely get noodles."
She looks at me over Solvi's head. Her eyes are bright. She has the sketchbook pressed to her chest and she's smiling at me like I'm something she chose, and keeps choosing, and intends to keep choosing for a considerable time.
I reach out and straighten one of the escaping curls at her temple.
She leans into my hand.
"Come on, then," I say.
And we go get noodles.
THE END