He is not a chemist and knows very little chemistry, but luckily basic science classes you take when you're three cover all of the elements and a bunch of molecules and various details about why they exhibit the periodicity they in fact exhibit when you chart them. It's about electrons. He can probably advance the field a couple centuries but he can't actually think how to get anything practically useful out of it.

The chemists are delighted anyway.

That part's fun. 

They can afford a house now! With plumbing!

Aitim splits his time evenly between work, showering, and meeting people who do research things; he barely sleeps. 

Shasali works. She does two shifts, most days; she can bring Kalatha along and sleeps better when she's exhausted.

She acquires a local boyfriend.

He arranges for his shifts to overlap less with hers and observes quietly at some point that probably they're not interfertile with the locals but the locals would be horrified if they were wrong about that.

"I don't think he'd consider himself to have the slightest reason to be interested in the proceedings if I did get pregnant," she says.

"Danru specifically said he was glad to know we, ah, 'breed like animals' because he would otherwise have considered hooking up with you, so - just make sure he doesn't feel that way."

"I did."

Nod.

He talks to people about uses of electricity for cooling rather than heating. He has vague ideas about radio. He has less vague ideas about water purification.

They don't get anywhere fast on cooling or radio. They investigate water purification.

How expensive is metal, do they, in fact, seem to have a lot less of it or are they worse at something else? (This is complicated by his not knowing much about early Amentan metal production.) Do they have sundials and heliocentrism and things? (Presuming that this planet in fact orbits its sun?)

They have metal, they're just not as good at mining as Amentans are. Unclear if they're as good as Amentans were. They don't visibly use sundials but people have heard of them; they use shine clocks. They orbit the sun.

Well, if they didn't it wouldn't be weirder than appearing babies.

Nobody here thinks that's weird.

This has not escaped him. 

He should probably just learn servantmaking himself rather than try to find someone in the right intersection of trustworthy and capable for the assembly-line project but he does not want to learn servantmaking, he wants to find somebody. He keeps looking.

Wrebb is large enough to have multiple servantmakers. Some take apprentices; this one has a houseful.

He's reasonably confident he could sort little local kids for trustworthiness (not perfectly confident, kids change a lot, but reasonably so); he definitely can't sort them for aptitude. He publishes some more chemistry and biology notes - cells and molecules and circuits and so on - and wracks his brain for interesting algorithms problems that he probably overheard discussed at dinner years ago. 

When he comes up with some he distributes them in housefuls of servantmakers, with a note announcing that there's a substantial monetary prize. You have a golem that can pick up rocks, one at a time, and determine their weight. How would you instruct it to proceed in order to end up with the fourth largest rock as quickly as possible?

Prime numbers are numbers that cannot be divided evenly by any whole numbers; 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13... Come up with a set of instructions so following the instructions produces prime numbers. What is the 10,001st prime number?

And so on. They are more computing problems than servantmaking problems but he's skimmed enough books to be confident you could solve them with the servantmaking kind of program-writing if you were very motivated.

...might be hard for them to be that motivated. He picks up extra shifts, doubles the monetary prize.

He gets a letter. What's this for?

I have some hard problems. I'm not smart enough to solve them, but I know some people who would be and I vaguely remember what they talked about at the dinner table.

...math problems?

No. But in my homeland ability to write programs that solve math problems is a prerequisite for writing programs that solve other kinds of problems.

It's pretty niche here.

Well, it is supposed to filter.