Emily stuck by Sophia like glue while she recovered from surgery on the ward. Sophia was paralysed below the waist, so a wheelchair was the best that could be done.
Elijah heard from a doctor on Earth who had an experimental treatment, and he broached the subject while he helped Sophia dress the morning after she came home.
"You can't fix this, Eli. I wish to the stars there was a cure, but we're on borrowed time. You know that, right? Angelo worked wonders to give me a few days, and we got lucky with a few extra weeks. Maybe." she told him. "I will not waste precious weeks fixing my legs, when I don't know that I'll make it to supper, let alone next year. I want to be here, on Mindoir, with you and Emily."
"Doc Ryder is cutting edge, Soph. You've known her for years, she wouldn't bother you if she didn't think she could help. We can go with you. It's worth the risk. Please. I just want whatever keeps you here for a while. I'm not done. l…"
Sophia sighed and said, "You don't think I see that? But nobody can can fix this, Eli, not even Ellen. I'm too far gone."
"You don't know that," Elijah said angrily.
Emily heard as she walked passed their bedroom door, which was ajar, and stopped to listen.
Sophia gave him a look and asked, "Oh really?"
"You don't."
"Ok. Ellen only has Angelo's report, which, bless him, is optimistic. He said toxin levels would drop, and rate of decline would slow. Ellen's implants force new pathways to replace damaged ones, so they could restart critical functions when they fail, but…"
"Exactly."
"I'm not finished, Eli. The implants increase synaptic activity, which accelerates this toxin. With Angelo's estimates, that's ok. The implants would work slowly, because decay would be slow. But toxin levels will go up before they come down. So the implants will work overtime masking symptoms while I die faster as a result. Angelo's filters and inhibitors are the only reason I'm not dead already, but it's not perfect. I'm dying. There's no cure, and no way to delay it. Every time I look at you from now on, it could be the last time. That's just the way it is.
Now please, stop trying to fix what can't be fixed and just let me leave you as many happy memories as I can before I go. That's all I want. So no more fighting – please?"
Outside the door, Emily knocked her head silently on the wall as a tear dropped out of her face.
Elijah slid down into a ball against the wardrobe and massaged his forehead, muttering, "How can you just say that s***?"
Sophia grabbed her knickers that he was going to have to help her into and threw them at him as she teased, "Hey, tough guy, I'm naked over here, and you're just gonna sit there?"
Emily cringed. The humour slowed the flow of tears, and she called out through her tight throat, "Ew. Yes mom. Way to live it up."
Sophia and Elijah laughed as Emily closed the door properly for them.
"How much do you think she heard?" Sophia asked.
Elijah picked the knickers off the floor and called out, "Everything. Em, icky warning. Run."
Emily chuckled and called back, "Oh, yuk. I'm gone."
"Why isn't she at school?" Sophia asked, while Elijah stood up to start helping her again.
"Because both of the women in my life are stubborn goats who won't take orders," he said loudly.
Emily wiped her eye and answered, "Ok, ok!"
When Elijah heard her walk away he said to Sophia, "She said she'd study from home with you."
"And you let her? Eli, she's got exams next week!"
"That's why I let her," Elijah replied with a grunt as he fumbled to get her foot through the knickers.
Sophia narrowed her eyes suspiciously at him, and then asked, "Ok, I'll bite. You want to let her off school to do better at school? What have you been smoking, and can I have some so I can deal with you waving both my legs in the air?"
"Well can you picture our Emily in a library right now? A caged mother varren would be calmer. On the other hand, I can picture her curled up on you for hours. And you'll make sure she keeps her books and a practice paper in easy reach. Plus, tough as you're acting, you need the quality time as much as she does."
Sophia's eyebrows slowly climbed her forehead as she listened. "Did that hurt?" she asked. "I think you actually said something sensible."
Emily did pass top of her class, although not by as far as Professor Hamilton hoped.
As the holidays went by, Sophia's health declined. Emily stayed by her side from dawn to dusk. Gina, Alice and Fiona hung out with her a lot, but she drove them crazy with how hard she studied and worked out.
Alice lay on the floor one evening with her chin on her fist. She watched Emily, who was next to her, finish the nineteenth page of a mathematical proof, frown, curse, and squint at a screen full of "alien doodles". After a few minutes Emily highlighted three details on the screen, frowned, and filed her last week of work under "False Rotation 17". Then she scanned her finger back through a few actual paper pages of a monster sized volume whose doodles were really, really small, and started to read again.
"I know you need maths for your decryption stuff, but why are you writing it out by hand when you have a computer right there? Seriously. That's crazy, with a capital C. What are you actually doing?" Alice asked.
Emily didn't register her question for half a minute, when she turned her head but not her eyes away from the book to say, "Hmm?"
Gina came to sit on Emily's ass, and poke her back.
Emily started to put a bookmark in to close the book, and said, "Ok, I'm…" Then she suddenly dived at the book again.
Fiona giggled and remarked, "She's really into it isn't she? I bet she wouldn't notice if we stripped her naked and painted rude words on her bum."
Alice cringed. "Er, no. No thank you? The hell?"
"Oh I would," Emily belatedly answered.
Alice rolled her eyes, "Right – yeah. It'd probably turn your slutty ass on. Really though, what the f*** is this project? You're like, obsessed. Some kind of research thing for the prof?"
Emily finally managed to break her eyes away and told them, "Nah, my professors know about mom, so they said I need a holiday."
Gina leaned down to kiss her head and said, "They're right."
Fiona was more interested in the idea that Emily was working through the holidays even though she had no school work. "You better not be doing all this for fun, right Emily?" she asked.
"No."
Gina leaned down again, this time hooking her arms under Emily's shoulders and resting her body down on her for a "weird hug". She knew Emily well enough to know that the shorter her sentences became, the less she wanted to say. So she told the others, "Something to keep your mind busy. Right Em?"
Emily shrugged and settled her head on her forearms, enjoying the closeness of her girlfriend.
"Fair enough," Fiona commented. "So long as you have fun too. I was the same, after – well, you know. School and chores and s*** stopped me going bat s***, like, banana level insane, but I only got normal again when I started helping you guys with all those pranks."
"Lol," Alice said. "Remember Miss Fairfax's face when Gina sewed that musical whoopee cushion into her chair?"
"That wasn't me!" Gina exclaimed, sitting up again. Emily smirked, and hunkered her head in her arms. Gina declared Emily faked her signature on the whoopee cushion, and playfully riddled Emily's back with pokes. It was true, but since Emily always denied it when the others were around, and the tune she put in the cushion was one of Gina's favourites, nobody believed it.
"You nearly got us all expelled," Emily teased. Her hidden grin could be heard in her muffled voice.
"You!" More pokes became tickles. Emily cried out in laughter while she wriggled to ward Gina off with her elbows only for Gina to switch to the back of her neck.
Fiona threw a cushion at Gina and told her, "Wallop Crazy Lady from me."
"What?" Emily asked when the assault stopped, and twisted to see in time for the cushion to hit her square in the face. That set all of them laughing out loud.
Sophia watched them from the sofa. They thought she was asleep, but she was glad to have been awake to see Emily so happy. She stored the memory of that moment for a dark day.
The school term started again, and Emily stayed at home instead of taking her work to school like she did the year before. The more Sophia slept, the harder Emily worked.
On a usual morning, Emily woke at five A.M. and went outside to train with Elijah. It was wet season, so the warm rain soaked them to the bone by the time they came in at seven. Then Emily showered, changed into dry clothes and invited Gina. Gina arrived at about seven thirty, and they made breakfast. Elijah helped Sophia roll herself to the kitchen, and they ate together. Elijah went to work after that. He never cried, but his parting words to Sophia were always whispered in her ear and left a teary smile on her face. Gina left at the same time to go to school. Then Emily settled on the sofa or the bed next to Sophia.
Emily would then follow a pattern of fifty minutes of work and ten minutes of workout or target practice. If ever her work was verbal or audio, she put her earphones in and went back to working out. Sophia took to writing out coded jokes for Emily to decipher. One morning, Emily came back to the kitchen with a book and Sophia was gone. She looked everywhere and started to panic.
Fortunately Elijah was in on the plan, so when Emily called him and started talking about search parties, he stopped her. "Woah, slow down Em. She's ok."
"Yeah? She could be halfway to the jungle by now, or getting mugged at the mall. You know she gets confused sometimes. What if…"
"Em, read her pad, it'll be flashing bright red on the kitchen table. She's been planning this for weeks. It was supposed to be a surprise."
"Oh." Emily walked into the kitchen. When she saw the pad, she said. "S***." She unceremoniously plonked into a chair and fiddled with the edge of the pad. "I've ruined it haven't I?"
"When your mom met me I was a slobbering, near lobotomised wreck on a gurney. Seems to have worked out ok. Nothing's ever ruined if you just get on with enjoying it."
"A wee bit out of proportion there, Dad. Nobody's been lobotomised," Emily replied. She smirked and added, "I'm not marrying her, either."
He chuckled and replied, "You damn well better not. She's mine,"
Emily groaned, but she was grinning too until she remembered her screw up. "I was so fr***ing scared. Missed the big red flashing sign," she mused. "Good one, Emily."
"You forgot to breathe, that's why you missed the sign. But it's done, in the past. Use it or lose it. Go make a new memory with mom, and chill. Okay, kiddo?"
"Yeah. Thanks, Dad."
"No drama, killer. You gonna hang up now, or next year?"
"Oh, go to hell. See you later," Emily said, and hung up.
She followed the trail of simple coded clues Sophia had arranged somehow without her knowing. Once she broke each code, the screen showed a photo from a family moment and a sweet message from Sophia. The last one at the front door said, "Boo," right as it opened and Sophia arrived back.
A friend dropped them off at the falls in his shuttle with a packed lunch and a picnic rug. Since it was way outside the perimeter, Emily's trunk of gear was already on the shuttle just in case. The only person who could have snuck it out of her room without her seeing was her dad, she thought. He'd even put letters in there addressed to both of his "gems". He said it was because there were some feelings he never had words for face to face. It was a perfect, if emotional, day.
As she leaned out of the shuttle door on the way home, Emily remembered her resolution to enjoy breathing and what that meant. Perhaps she could accept it after all, when her mum died, even if it would hurt. Now, or in a hundred years, the memories would all be good enough to make her smile through the tears – at least, it would get that way eventually. While she mused, and the pilot took a slow, scenic route following the river, Emily looked back at her sleeping mum and suddenly realised what was missing from her project.
That December, Emily sat exams for the end of her third year of Xenolinguistics six months ahead of her classmates, who were all at least twenty years old. Emily was fifteen.
As Professor Hamilton marked the essays, the decryptions, and the algorithms, her excitement waned. Emily increasingly asked questions far beyond the lecture material and brought out thoughts in her essays that danced ever more perceptively on the limits of cutting edge ideas. Yet, for every page of faultless work she marked, Professor Hamilton grew more resigned to patience. The new spark of brilliant insight she knew was coming from her distant protégé had not yet come. She closed the copybook with a sigh for what might have been and put it in her out tray.
Then she noticed the back cover was covered in an unusual arrangement of asari script. It was in high thessian, the most common asari tongue. Except that it was written in a circle, and in such a way that the meaning, and even the words, would change depending on what one chose as the "beginning". In fact, each ring of text restructured itself when you read it with its own grammatical context, which had to be done to read it at all. Professor Hamilton shook her head in disappointment. Circular poetry was a classic form in asari, but the skill was to lock down the grammar so that the meaning didn't destroy itself as you read it.
Just before she moved onto the next paper, Professor Hamilton blinked. Something was odd on that poem. She blinked at it again, and the character for "mother" stood out in the negative space between some of the script. She looked for more. Each of the eleven segments were marked by two characters, not in the text but in the negative spaces. One was always the same; mother. The second changed. They were; kindness, humility, integrity, equanimity, forgiveness, joyfulness, courage, serenity, focus, wisdom, and trust. Intrigued, as she always was by ciphers, she began to read.
Three days later Emily's omni rang, and the caller ID said it was from Earth.
The professor's camera gave a view of the whole room. Professor Hamilton herself was in the middle of the space, with closely written sheets of paper radiating around her on the floor. There were bags under her excited eyes and her unwashed hair stuck out in odd places. An asari sat at the desk, tapping out a rhythm on her temples with her slender fingers, staring at the blackboard. A circle poem was chalked on the board, with five hidden characters in each segment shaded in with red; Emily's poem.
Sophia was cradling Emily's head in her lap, so she saw too. She asked, "Hello? Is everything ok, Professor Hamilton? We thought the results would only come back next week."
"Oh," Professor Hamilton said, as though she'd almost forgotten she made the call. "Well – it might be the week after. We've been rather distracted here. It's incredible. Did you realise how many variations there are, Emily?"
Emily frowned. She thought the back cover of the answer book would not be scanned or submitted. "One hundred and twenty-one per cipher," she said crisply. "I was messing with it in my spare time and couldn't make it work until the essay gave me an idea. I had a full crypto suite right on the exam computer, so I ran the numbers and doodled it out. What's the fuss?"
"What's the fuss? Emily, I've got Grenvi here…"
"From the asari embassy," Emily whispered to Sophia.
Hamilton frowned and abruptly demanded, "Wait. Per Cipher?"
"Well, yeah. It rotates every time you complete it," Emily replied. She was bored, embarrassed and cross. They were stealing her time from a precious afternoon.
"What did she say?" asked the asari, Grenvi. "The key rotates with the text?"
Both of the women in the office at Harvard stared the blackboard with interested faces, and Sophia looked at Emily with raised eyebrows.
"For the non-cryptologists here," Sophia asked, "Could someone explain what's going on?"
Emily went bright red, and Professor Hamilton gestured at the blackboard. "Emily wrote this – masterpiece – on the back of her answer book for the dialect paper."
"Is that your project? What is it? Some kind of code?"
Emily shrugged and said, "It's an asari poem."
Grenvi looked over at the camera and said, "More precisely, it's eleven poems about different facets of a central theme, all intertwined so they cannot be read separately, and whose meanings change when reread in the light of the grammar changes in the previous reading. Any of the component poems can be chosen as a start point, and then each time the loop is completed, one of the component poems alters the grammar until the reader is brought to begin again at the next poem's start point. So an eleven segment script can be read in one hundred and twenty-one subtly distinct ways before it begins to repeat itself. Hence the name, "eternal script".
Miss Court's script may differ though. In a normal script The initial grammatical rules are set by a cipher, usually a string of characters. If the cipher morphs upon each completed read… this script would have one thousand three hundred and thirty-one expressions, am I right Miss Court?"
"Yes, but honestly, it's just for me. I wrote it on the back of the answer paper, so I didn't think Professor Hamilton would even see it. It's not important."
"Oh yes it is, young lady," said Professor Hamilton.
Sophia asked, "It does sound impressive, but it seems to be more than just a good mark to you Professor."
Grenvi nodded, "Professor Hamilton is excited because, while we don't hide them, eternal scripts cannot really be translated, so we don't share them either. To her, this is a new concept.
I am more interested in what this script reveals about human thought. Eternal scripts require the writer to have passionately and personally embraced the central idea; to have fully, deeply known it. Without conscious understanding of an idea's every face and how they relate, one cannot express the idea so perfectly as in an eternal script.
The ancient temple matriarchs believed anything written this way was an expression of eternal truth, and that the more nuanced the harmony…"
"I.e. the more component poems," Emily explained for Sophia's benefit.
Grenvi nodded and continued, "…the more accurate the truth. Some of them spent five hundred years composing eternal scripts with fifty or more segments. One matriarch tried with seventy-one segments, but she died before it was complete.
This is the first successful eternal script not composed by an asari, and the rotating cipher is fittingly unique. It is – ingenious. It should allow much greater depth of meaning without the need for near impossible high order harmonies. It may not be as beautiful or refined as the greater scripts, but still…"
"Oh my bad," Emily returned. "I kinda don't have five hundred years to waste."
"Speaking of which; how long did this take you, Emily?" Professor Hamilton asked. "Why didn't you tell me?"
Emily snorted. "You can't collaborate on an eternal script," she informed the professor. "Words are subtly different to any two people, and when the whole point is to unpick every strand of meaning in order to express them all by weaving them back together… Yeah, no. Also, do not share or discuss my script with anyone from now on. That's final. Now, can I go back to lazing in the sun with my mom?"
Sophia asked, "Just how significant is this for Emily?"
"That will depend, Mrs. Court," Professor Hamilton said. "Emily is wasted in the colonies. She's losing her best years hunting and fighting, of all things. If this is what she scribbles on the back of an exam paper now, imagine where she could be in a few years' time if she were here, with daily one to one tutoring."
Emily scowled and retorted, "I'd be dead to reality, like you. You spent three days reading a hundred ways I love the most precious person in my life, and your response is to suggest I leave her behind? F*** you."
"Hey," Sophia said softly. "What do I always say about choosing to be angry? Did you tell Gina you felt this way? Or even that you were writing about her all this time?"
Emily shrugged awkwardly and looked away.
"Mrs. Court?" Grenvi said after the silence. "Whoever Gina is, she isn't mentioned once. You are the subject of every line, and you should know what that means. Remember how fully the author must know her subject to compose an eternal script. Emily wrote this to express what you mean to her. When you are alone, ask her for the primary definition of "siame", because if you spoke asari that's the word I think she would use for you."
She paused, and then added, "I disagree with my colleague. For now, it is clear Emily has plenty of inspiration at home."
A compromise was reached between Sophia and the two academics against Emily's protest. Emily would stay on Mindoir, for a couple of years at least. The asari embassy agreed to fund daily extranet calls, no small thing, and to connect Emily with a literary scholar in one of Thessia's universities. Emily would have to co-write a paper on her eternal script, double up her work rate even further to finish her degree early, while also recording lectures or speeches if asked.
When they finally hung up, Sophia asked about "siame".
Emily sighed, and replied that its colloquial meaning was "dearest one", but that it more accurately translated as, "one who is all", or a loved one cherished above all others. Sophia pulled her daughter into herself and didn't let go for a long time.