Chapter 85

"Got there at last."

The final step done, Li Lan looked at the data and let herself relax. It was the twenty-seventh of August; three months from beginning to end, and under Zhao Qi and Xie Nan's supervision she'd successfully extracted the glycosyltransferase from Trollius chinensis. She hadn't reached the last step — making it into a drug — and since making it into a drug is a different research category, her work counted as a success. Conditions being what they were, this was as far as it could go for now.

She printed the data, and coming out of the laboratory found the campus dark and silent — though with term approaching there were more lights on than last month.

"Back, are you?" Passing the dormitory door, the warden was about to lock up, and greeted her. She knew this one: in and out on the exact minute the doors opened and shut, and few students stay over the summer, so after a while she'd come to know the student who was always carrying a bag.

"Yes. Good evening."

"It must be hard work, all this postgraduate preparation. Up early and back late all through the holiday." Most of the students who stay are preparing for postgraduate entrance, and seeing Li Lan there and working like that, the warden had assumed the same.

"I'm going into second year. It isn't time for that yet." Li Lan stopped at the door and talked a while; the woman had a good reputation among the students, and had let her in more than once early in the summer when she'd missed the lock-up.

The warden was surprised. "Second year? Then what are you doing here? That's a long way off." Students of any year can apply to stay, and half the applicants are second and third-years preparing for entrance exams or internships. First-years do occasionally, and rarely — there's no pressure on you in the first two years and everybody would rather be out enjoying themselves.

Li Lan chatted a moment longer and went up, leaving the warden reflecting that Peking students really are different. None of the children she knew stayed at university over the summer in their first two years.

Back in the room, washed, she sat down and opened the paper. She'd been running it alongside the experiments — experiments by day and writing at night since the topic opened, and once the holiday started and she had the room to herself she went to bed whenever she liked, all-nighters included. Knowing where she was going, and with a memory that retained everything, she wrote faster than most people; the references alone saved an enormous amount of looking things up. Months on, the paper was only slightly behind the experiments — and today's being finished, the experiments and results sections could be finished too, and in a couple of days she could try closing it out.

Once the feeling arrives there's no holding it back. She wanted the material in her head turned into text, and being her own design and her own data, she recalled the procedure and typed the figures straight in; needing no thought, her fingers barely stopped.

Gradually the room held nothing but the keyboard, and the corridor outside went quiet, and under the sound of typing the night thinned and the sky began to lighten, and a pale strip appeared beyond the window while the dormitories stayed silent.

She glanced out, got up and stretched out a body stiff from sitting, looked at the rising sun and yawned. Another all-nighter, not intended — the result was gratifying, though. Three months of work and only the polishing left.

She yawned again. Typing, she'd been fully awake; the paper finished, the moment she relaxed the tiredness came up in a wave, and she tidied briefly and went to catch up on sleep.

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She woke at three in the afternoon to several unread messages, the new teaching assistant reminding the group about tomorrow's family meeting — which reminded her that between the experiments and the paper she hadn't made her slides. With the paper written, slides were only a question of time, and the meeting was at ten.

The canteen having long since closed, she ate something, took her computer to the library and made them. She couldn't be bothered with anything ornamental: white background, text, some of it bold and some not. Beyond being clear it had no beauty whatever — and there was a great deal in it, which is why even something that plain took an hour.

Nine forty on the twenty-eighth, the School's large multimedia lecture room.

With that many people and a computer needed, these meetings are always held there, and with term about to start nearly all of Wang Xin's students were present, scattered about the room.

It began at ten. Wang Xin said a few words for the new term, and then came the new intake's first step into the laboratory: introductions. Being short-handed, he'd taken three doctoral and four masters students this year — the largest intake yet.

Then the presentations. The first of a term generally go to doctoral and masters students about to graduate, Meng Wei among them, now going into his third year. Li Lan being a special case, the assistant had put her last.

She listened carefully, and though the directions differed she got a good deal from it, Wang Xin's comments especially; several times during a presentation something opened up for her. Meng Wei presented third, and to her eye a summer had produced no great progress — whether he'd hit a wall or simply been away, she couldn't say.

By the time she went up the room had been listening for over an hour and attention had begun to wander, though people politely rallied. The boy who'd come in as a research assistant alongside her still couldn't believe it; receiving the email he'd assumed he'd misread it or the assistant had made a mistake, and only with her actually at the lectern did he accept that the girl who'd started as an assistant with him had a research topic of her own. How? He couldn't work it out, and put his ears up to hear what the research actually was.

Her experiments being complete, and although she'd worked to cut the inessential, a whole study took considerably longer to present than anybody else's — and the steps she'd omitted drew the most questions afterwards. Answering, she wondered at it: nobody had looked remotely alert during the presentation, so where had all these questioners come from?

With the session about to overrun and no sign of the questions stopping, the new assistant conferred with Wang Xin and called a halt, saying that anyone interested could talk to her privately, and only then did the wave subside. Summing up, Wang Xin endorsed her work again, and hearing the paper was already written, nodded with visible satisfaction.

Meng Wei, in the middle of the room, was staggered by how far along she was — and when Wang Xin asked about the paper and she said the first draft was done, his eyes widened and he doubted his ears. Zhao Qi and Xie Nan's faces said the same. Other people didn't know the position; his own group did. Before the holiday the two of them had been at much the same stage. She'd spent two months conducting research on a rocket.

Which stung a little. On a normal timeline his own progress was what most students do: settle the direction and the rough framework in the second half of the second year, spend the summer and the first half of the third on experimental verification, then write up from the results in the last semester, or write as you go, which is a great deal tighter. Last term had gone smoothly and he'd spent little of the summer at the university, and even so the first half of third year was ample time for experiments.

So how had a perfectly normal schedule been made to look like the terminal stage of procrastination?

Looking at the experimental framework he'd copied from her slides, though, he thought about it. Their directions were similar; if she could extract and synthesise a glycosyltransferase from Trollius chinensis, might his own work be possible too? He'd have to find time to talk to her. Discussing it with an undergraduate sounded like a loss of face — and set against a thesis, what is face? And she wasn't an ordinary undergraduate. Can an ordinary undergraduate open a research project while working as an assistant? Or open one and actually produce a result, inside six months?

So he didn't in fact think of her as an ordinary graduate student. Getting into Peking for his masters had made him the top student of his own circle; arriving, he'd learned what it means for there to be always somebody better.