The Constantly Spring starts eating at Aitim but he has no idea how to find locals for something with the parameters implied by 'springtime hookups'. He continues to write up industrialization concepts as he remembers or is able to reconstruct them. He bothers more people about babies. He tries to calculate things about early Amentan metal mining. He does all their shopping just so he can talk to the vendors. 

"Is he always like this?" Kib asks Shasali once.

"I didn't know him before we arrived here," she says.

"I'm exhausted by proxy."

"You can ignore him."

"I can try, I guess."

He tries to spend an hour a day talking to Kalatha in each of Anitami, Tapap, Voan, Oahkar and Celen, which occupies much of his time with her. He writes history books as best as he can remember them (he remembers them a lot better than the science). He finds people who don't speak the common and tries to coax them to teach him what they do speak. He endeavors to diagram a bicycle.

He can learn various languages. The bicycle is neat, although it would be complicated enough to produce on this manufacturing base that it's not much of an advantage over servants.

Mopey green-haired springing Amentan will continue to socialize with everything in sight and occasionally write up notes, in that case.

"I may not be able to keep up," he says to Kib, "but I'd love to hear about progress on versatile servants."

"Sure. Where do you want me to start, do you have any background?"

"Read some books while I was trying to figure out what it changed and whether assembly lines were as straightforward as they sound, but I can't say it all made sense to me. Maybe assume I know ...more than the kids who are this high, less than the kids who are this high?" Gesturing.

"Sure, but servantmaker apprentice kids yea high or farm kids or what?"

"Servantmaker apprentice kids."

"Okay. So here's my project outline." He lays out a few sheets of paper with a cross between a chart and a mindmap. "I'm working on this part because it's not so experimental that it's likely to benefit from a book published in the next five years but it's also not so pedestrian that I can guess very exactly how long it'll take and consider it a given when working on other sections -"

He has an attentive audience who only occasionally tugs irritably at his own hair. "Am I right that assembly lines are reasonably tractable given lots of money for startup costs?"

"Oh, yeah, you'd just need to make a bunch of sturdy complicated automata. They can do the etching and even simple construction."

"Oh good. This hasn't been done because it wouldn't be profitable?"

"It'd be profitable, it'd just take a lot of startup capital. It's also not especially interesting? Like, it's not 'pet five million birds', but it's not theoretically complex or creative or anything."

"I guess you are a lot less motivated than us by making tons of money. Is there something that could be accomplished by petting five million birds?"

"You sell the birds. People like having them."

"...and can't pet them themselves?"

"You do have to learn how to do that. Or to puppet articulated chassis or shines."

"I seem unable to learn. I think perhaps you have to be a local magically-appearing person. Or just local, no real way to tell the difference."

"That might be. It'd explain why you don't have any servantmaking where you're from."

"Yeah. I'm curious whether servants made here would work in my world or whether servantmakers that travelled there would be magic, but I can't imagine there are a lot of those snakes about to experiment with."

"The snakes thing is really bizarre. Like, I'd be less weirded out by 'magic pond, swim to bottom and come out in a different pond' or something. A snake?"

"A pond would be great, there'd be prospects of going back! I assumed initially that the snakes were the native form of some aliens who had kidnapped Shasali and I to watch us fight to the death or have kids."

"...are you going to do either of those things?"

"I like Shasali but wouldn't have blamed her from trying to murder me. ...we'd probably have kids if we couldn't adopt as many babies as we wanted but we can, so."