"Sure, yes please."

"Bar's recommendations are pretty much never wrong. Emily gets a different fruit thing pretty much every time she's here."

Bar supplies an Escobar pear nectar. Linyabel puts away the last couple bites of her meal and the dishes vanish. "I've enjoyed her expertise myself."

"If I didn't know better I'd suspect she was a telepath too, but even I can't do drink orders like that when someone gives me permission to read them."

"Well, like I said, I do know better."

"Mm-hm. So what exciting reverse-engineerable technology have you been bringing home to the nineteen hundreds?"

"Medical stuff, mostly."

"That's a good choice. I'm importing some of the same. Bar says that when Ivan was here she could not find Miles useful anaesthetic without knowing more about his medical properties, but I always carry," she pats a small object, "a medical scanner which has a recent scan of him, and I have his complete genome on my pen, so between the two it's only a little worse than if she had him here to look at, and I think he'll be delighted. He has the oddest allergies."

"My father can walk again."

"I'm so glad."

"We all are."

"In the case of many technologies Bar knows to exist the problem isn't that there's anything wrong with the technology but that the information that counts to her as 'published' isn't sufficient to reconstruct it from scratch. I wonder if you could use holo-pens where you're from, as long as I'm here to consult on them anyway?"

"I'd ask how they work but my brand-new degree is in education, not engineering."

"They're - computer technology has not advanced in the way that was promised in the nineteen hundreds and the two thousands," says Linyabel. "It's a cryptography and security problem, principally - I can't remember off the top of my head if you already have computers that are more portable than the average comconsole in my world, but you soon will, assuming a similar tech track. Our software is smarter, though, and I condensed the necessary cryptography and other equipment into this," she displays her pen, "which also does gesture recognition and three-dimensional holoprojection into the air. The simple model - low-security crypto that will still more than suffice against anything you're dealing with unless you have data mutants, cabochon-style nib, etcetera - you might be able to make yourself with a small handful of technological jumps I could help you get. But while the idea of using a turn-of-the-twenty-first-century portable computer fills me with dread I imagine it doesn't look like such a large jump coming from the other direction. So you might not consider it worth the trouble."

"...That sounds like the kind of thing it would be useful to have the plans for socked away in a database somewhere for when cryptography gets to the point it was when you invented them."

"Keeping up with the cryptanalysis is actually not the problem. The crytography keeps up. It just gets bigger. The real breakthrough was how I shrank it, and you'll have - Bar, an example of a relevant portable computer, late nineteen hundreds?" Bar shows them a laptop, presented open, and then vanishes it again. "You'll have those, which aren't as snazzy as my pens, but you also won't have the kinds of hacks that necessitated the arms race."

"Well, your pens are at least aesthetically interesting..."

"Thank you. I wanted mine to look like jewelry to a casual observer. They come in different colors, and Miles wanted one with a pointed tip - purest vanity and the hardest optics project I've ever pulled off, but they come with pointed tips now as an option."

"Vanity as cause for scientific breakthroughs. Well, I've heard of worse reasons."

"Well, he's very cute when he offers me engineering challenges."

"Aw, does he do that very often?"

"Not too frequently. I'm in a non-consumer-grade field at the moment - pens are down to occasional software upgrades and some delegated design, marketing, and fabrication work, not an ongoing concern in most of my working time."

"What field?"

"Neuroscience. I'm not the neuroscience expert in my operation, I hired someone, but I know enough to provide him software support and evaluate additions to the lab, and I'm picking up more."