Besides, I had business to attend to there. With the bright tone of one looking forward to a moment of perfect, undiluted triumph, I reminded Suhail, “I have something to report to the Philosophers’ Colloquium.”
AFTERWORD
I would say that the rest is history, but as the entirety of my memoirs have been concerned with matters historical, it seems a bit redundant.
I returned home to honours and accolades, a thousand requests for public lectures and nearly as many dinner invitations. At a time when I wanted nothing more than to ensconce myself in my study once more, the world demanded my presence, and I fear I ran myself ragged trying to satisfy their insatiable hunger.
But one invitation I would have accepted were I on my deathbed from overwork.
On a beautiful Athemer evening in early Graminis, at a ceremony in their premises off Heron Court, I was inducted as the first woman Fellow of the Philosophers’ Colloquium.
Compared with my elevation to the peerage, the ceremony was not particularly elaborate. The induction of new Fellows takes place in the Great Hall, around a little table with a book. This volume is the Charter Book of the Colloquium; its opening pages contain the royal charter that first created the institution, and the rest of it holds the signatures of the Fellows, inscribed in columns on each page beneath the Obligation that binds all members. That Obligation reads as follows:
We who have hereunto subscribed, do hereby vow, that we will endeavour to promote the good of the Colloquium of Philosophers, and to pursue the end for which the same was founded, which is the Increase of Knowledge; that we will carry out, so far as we are able, those actions requested of us in the name of the Council; and that we will observe the Statutes and Standing Orders of the said Colloquium. Provided that, whensoever any of us shall signify to the President under our hands, that we desire to withdraw from the Colloquium, we shall be free thereafter from this Obligation.
The room that day was filled to the walls with the current Fellows of the Colloquium; the street outside was filled with journalists, well-wishers, and hecklers. I did not like to keep all those people waiting, and so it was not until a later occasion that I had the opportunity to turn the thick vellum pages and peruse the signatures of the luminaries who had gone before me: Philippe Dénis, who proposed our taxonomic classification of organisms; Yevgeny Ivanov, the great astronomer and discoverer of planetary moons; Randolph Cremley, who created the periodic table we use to organize the elements; Albert Wedgwood, the theorist who gave us the concept of evolution; Sir Richard Edgeworth, whose book had been such a formative influence on my youth and my field.
Perhaps it is just as well that I did not have the time to survey the ranks of those I was joining. My hand might otherwise have shaken quite badly as I added my name to their company. But I did take a moment to look back a smaller distance, to the page that bore the name of Maxwell Oscott. He was not the Earl of Hilford when he signed; but he was, of course, the man whose patronage had launched me on my career, without whom I would not have been in the Great Hall that day.
I could not look for long. It would not have done my reputation any good for me to sniffle, or for a tear to fall upon the pages of that precious book. But I looked up and sought out Tom Wilker’s eye, for he had benefited as much as I had from that patronage. We shared a smile; then I bent and signed my name to the book. If you have a chance to see it there, know that the slight gap in the column is intentional, for I felt it was only proper to place my signature to the right of Tom’s.
After that there was a banquet, in which the President of the Colloquium stood up and said a great many flattering things about me, and many toasts were drunk in my honour. Much was made of the fact that the vote to award me a Fellowship was unanimous. Tom had told me in private that the President had taken a few recalcitrant gentlemen aside and informed them that if they did not vote in favour, they would not be welcome on the premises thereafter; for it would be to the eternal shame of the Colloquium if they failed to recognize the achievements of the woman who had found the last surviving population of the Draconean species. Those gentlemen had attended the signing, but absented themselves from the banquet, and I did not miss them. I did not need their dour faces marring that day. I said earlier in this volume that if the Colloquium had not admitted me to their company, I would have washed my hands of them without further ado; but it was much finer to achieve my girlhood dream at last.
For although the Colloquium is often a hidebound place, it is still a fine institution, and one that fosters scientific understanding in countless fields. My son Jacob is now a Fellow himself, having earned recognition through his work as an oceanographer—a field for which we did not even have a name when I was born. Natalie Oscott and her friends turned their attentions from the sky for a time in order to build him superior devices for exploring the world beneath the waves, and he has put these to excellent use. Suhail served as President of the Society of Linguists for a number of years, though he retired from that position a while ago; in his words, “If I never have to sit through another meeting again, it will be as good as attaining Paradise.” (A part of me is relieved that no one has yet been able to stomach the notion of a female Colloquium President. I have no doubt that it will happen someday, and I will applaud the lady who takes that laurel—but I had rather it not be me.)
At this point I find myself wanting to make some comparison between the world as I knew it when I preserved my first sparkling and the world I live in today. But the latter is so familiar to my readers that any extensive description of it would be tiresome, and as for the former, if I have not conveyed the general sense of it with the previous volumes of my memoirs, I could not hope to do so now. The changes are pervasive: everything from the pragmatic facts of daily life (travel by caeliger, and the widespread use of dragonbone machines for countless tasks), to the fabric of Scirling society (vastly increased educational opportunities for my sex, and the right of women to vote), to the state of all scientific fields, my own not excepted. Those with a far greater understanding of anatomy and chemistry have begun to establish the various mechanisms by which extraordinary breath is produced: a thing I could not have hoped to puzzle out for myself, as my own education was so informal. And, of course, we know far more about developmental lability, and how it produced the Draconean species in the ancient past.
I will not pretend this knowledge is an unmitigated good. As one might expect, it has unavoidably led to a great deal of unethical experimentation, with disreputable types who hardly deserve the name of “scientist” attempting to create their own breeds for a variety of purposes. Some of them have even tried to make new Draconeans—or rather, new hybrids of dragon and human. Their efforts have succeeded in establishing that the theory I formulated while living in the Sanctuary (dragon eggs anointed with human blood) is likely correct; but the rate of viability for the resulting organisms is low enough that it must have taken ages of primitive dragon worship among humans before a breeding population was established. I personally suspect that the Draconean species arose from a single pair, the happy accident of two successes in close enough temporal and geographic proximity that they were able to produce offspring. From there, developmental lability ensured enough variation to avoid inbreeding.