Solvi looks up at that. She has the expression she reserves for moments when I've said something she approves of but won'tadmit 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 wordfinally—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.
"Iampaying attention," Solvi says serenely. "I'm also drawing. I can do both. Lyn said it’s okay.”
