"Uh, hi?" calls Cam. "I'm not gonna hurt you."

He stops running halfway down the stairs. "Why are you in my ship, then?"

"You summoned me? I mean, it looks like you did it by accident, you should be more careful, but that's entirely on your end, dude."

"I've only heard of summoning in stories and myths. But you look like something out of old religions, I guess that's appropriate." He resumes backing down the stairs.

"So am I."

"Well, perhaps we can help each other. Where I am from summoning is common. Accidentally summoning a demon with no bindings on much less so but it would be really, really weird for somebody to appear a winged person and have no idea what was going on. Also, religions which ascribe significance to demons and angels are still extant, if less popular and increasingly schizophrenic about how the summonable versions interact with their theology. Now, where the heck am I, please?"

"...You're on Cloudbank. It's a gas planet. People came here to mine, what was it, Helium three? Helium some number. And Hydrogen. But the stargate collapsed hundreds of years ago, and now all the religions are about lost technology. Are you from Earth?"

"I am summoned to Earth more often than anywhere else, but I don't live there. What is a stargate?"

"Lost technology. Point A to point B in an instant. I won't pretend to understand how, it's a small wonder Cloudbank at large still knows about the speed of light."

"I begin to think this is the sort of place you will be very glad to have a summoned demon handy. Who put the stargate there, why haven't they shown up to see what happened to it, any clues?"

"Mining companies? Original records from back then mostly don't exist anymore so don't take my word as absolute, but most of the myths say Earth wasn't terribly peaceful. Mind if we move this conversation to my control room? I've left it unattended a bit long."

"Lead the way."

"Well, if I threw something overboard it wouldn't be very hard to get it back. And not just because I could fly after it and catch it. Is that made of bone?"

"Yes. Cow's bone, to be specific. It's not like we have enough bronze and steel left to make every little thing out of it."

"You are going to be so glad you accidentally summoned me," predicts Cam. "Demons: make stuff."

"Yep!"

"Your prediction is correct. Can I have a barometer? I found one on a monitoring station wreck half-embedded in an island near the storm belts once, but it broke a few months ago."

"What kind d'you want?"

"I don't. I live a life of perfect material luxury. Or to put it more exactly: I want something to do. Because where I'm from everyone lives a life of perfect material luxury and it means I'm a little low on fulfilling vocations."

"Then we're both rather happy with this accident. Though I wonder why nobody's managed to summon demons before."

"I do not know. Maybe I'm a fluke. We could check, but if I am a fluke it might be hard to get me back, or hard to put back another test summons. It sounds like you have about one really dedicated demon's worth of needs, so let's not mess with it yet."

"If it's not broken, don't fix it. Right. Well my wishlist starts with proper instruments, barometer being the first one I thought of, telescope, electric things for light and pumps and radio, proper fuel-cell engines instead of steam burners... I should probably take you to a town. They'll need more things than I ever will."

"I will be perfectly honest with you: all your technology looks to me like extremely ingenious stone-age crap. I can just fill out your wishlist and then move on to the town, but this seems a little like meeting a guy in a cave with a stone knife and getting him a new one instead of offering him a pair of decent shoes and the secrets of domesticating the tasty animals."

"Yes, all our technology is stone-age crap. Please enlighten me to the wonders of lost technology."

"I don't think it's the same tech tree. We don't have stargates, for instance. But, like," Cam makes his computer, "this is my computer, it stores and manipulates and presents data, it can hold a decent fraction of the sum total of media output from the last forever or connect to a somewhat larger device which could hold literally all of it, it can translate between any languages it 'knows' and connect to networks of similar devices, and only I can operate it because I have a gadget in my brain notifying it of my mental commands."

"I've heard of computers, seen them in rusted out mining stations even, but never had a clear picture of what they're for. Am I correct that entertainment is just one of many uses?"

"Yup. For example, if I'm doing any complicated engineering, I plan it out on the computer first because the computer is very good at math."

"Delightful." He's been manipulating the stone-age crap controls during the conversation. The ship is now turning left and descending. "I'm quite unsure how to be efficient with your ability. If you made an unusually huge floatstone island and encouraged immigration it would centralize things, at least."

"I might do that! Although an island which floats seems awkward in a number of ways. It's gas all the way through, nothing to anchor on?"

"There's solid land down there somewhere. I was imagining your making things on insufficient scale, it seems. Though come to think of it, everything else would still be moving and eventually run into your tower-or-whatever, wouldn't it?"

"Do they have ways to prevent that when everything involved is moving?"

"Yes. Mostly. Usually. But the relative speeds would be higher since we mostly flow with the winds. We're probably currently moving at probably at least two hundred kilometers an hour compared to the surface."

"Can they steer? I could make it with nice big holes in the structure."

"That could work, as long as it's sufficiently obvious that they'll be needing to. The clouds can get dense sometimes. But uninhabited islands and ships that are tied down to something solid for the night won't be steering."

"All right, maybe I won't anchor my island, but I'm going to make it stationary most of the time, anyway."

"You could go for an altitude that has little traffic, which would reduce the problem. And nimble ships with harpoons and a watch system can help cover it too. I'm sure you'd find volunteers."

"Harpoons? What am I harpooning?"

"Dangerous wildlife and/or floating islands to pull them out of the way."

"I can probably improve on harpoons, or at least manually operated harpoons. You can harpoon islands. What a planet."

"Well technically you'd be harpooning the thick layer of plantlife every island either eventually accumulates or is, in fact, entirely composed of."

"Even so. This will require serious design thought."

"I'll just pilot us to somewhere potentially convenient for island-making then? You probably want to study some floatstone. You can probably do meat, could I have some fish? I've heard of fish but never actually had any. No open water."

"I assume you don't care what kind of fish or know how you want it prepared."

"I don't like fried things. Otherwise, you are again correct."

Cam hands him a skewer of salmon chunks with lemon oil and butter and salt and pepper and roasted garlic.

He tastes it, tentatively at first. "Oh, that's excellent. Thank you. What's the fruit in this called?"

"...Lemon? Do you also not have lemons? My god, what do you eat?"

"Onions, maize, grilled onions, cornbread, strawberries, fried onions, carrots and potatoes, garlic, mushrooms, occasional jellywing or chicken, pickled onions... For some reason onions grow really well here. We have pepper, too."

"I will export food. I will export a lot of food."

"I'm sure people will appreciate it. I'd say at least two thirds of us farm in one way or another. You saw my greenhouse."

"What's a jellywing?"

"...Big, roundish, bloated lighter-than-air critter. Completely harmless unless one dies and falls on you. They eat floatgrass, bladesquid hunt them. They make a great fuel source if you can kill one without popping its gas sac, but they're not terribly domesticatable."

"I assume bladesquid are a bigger lighter-than-air critter which look like squid and have blades."

"Yes. They mostly leave people alone. And everything native to here is immensely afraid of fire, if you ever have to fend critters off make heatless smoke and they'll bolt."

"Good to know."

"What's the range of habitable altitudes?"

"Approximately 100 kilometers to approximately 300 kilometers? There's some flex, but below 120 or above 250 begins to be uncomfortable. The atmosphere is mostly the same at every point between those altitudes despite not having an immediately apparent reason to work that way."

"How peculiar. It doesn't thin noticeably as you ascend? Then how do you maintain a position within it?"

"It does thin, just not as dramatically. I meant the temperature and relative composition of gases is consistent in that range."

"Oh. I wonder why. I could probably figure out but I think it is less important than making sure everybody can have lemons."

"Lemons are a critical life experience, are they now? By the way, you will probably object to many towns' governments. They vary widely in several respects. Effectiveness, morality, structure. That's why I fly between them."

"Then I will just have to outcompete and/or harpoon them, won't I."

"And it's pretty hard to outcompete making stuff from nothing."

"I will exploit this unfair advantage."

"Can you turn my library, such as it is, into something less combustible? Possibly attached to a compiter?"

"Computers run on electricity. They're not, in advanced forms, particularly prone to catching fire, but you definitely should not open one up, get it wet, or subject it to mechanical stress. If that seems like an improvement, yes, I can render your library as a computer file with a computer to match."

"Stone-age here, remember. The computer will be competing with paper that's been recycled dozens of times and ink that eventually devolves into unrecognizable smudges. Thank you."

"They also need to be charged. I can make you a solar generator or a wind powered one?"

"Let's say solar. Sun is easier to come by than a wind differential sometimes."

"Sure. Where do you want that mounted?"

"Top bow of the ship?"

"Show me?"

"Right this way." He clicks a bone-lever into place and a few other mechanisms snap to a halt. He goes back out to the hall, opens a wooden door to open air (the ship is moving downright sedately by modern standards, the wind can't be more than twenty miles an hour), ties a knot to his belt in a well-practiced motion, and starts climbing up ridges that form a ladder built into the (stone?) hull.

Cam doesn't climb; he just leans out into the air and catches wind and flaps up.

"I can do wireless electricity. And you don't need to drill anything, I can stick it in a case that attaches like it grew there. Any requests before I make it?"

"Not green. Too much green makes the ship look like a Jellywing and could attract squid."

"Black all right?"

"Yeah, black's fine."

A nubbin appears on the described location.

"I suppose black works better than leaves because it doesn't reflect green light? With lots of science for why it can do what plants can't."

"So much science."

"I'd like to learn it sooner or later. Textbooks don't even require you to waste time teaching me when you could build up steam toward improving everyone's lives instead."

"Well, they're not written in a dialect you'll decipher easily or designed for your level of context, but you could get somewhere with them, I suppose."

"I have spare time in my day-to-day and I suspect everyone will soon have more time. And I like to think I'm cleverer than average, though who knows if I'm right."

"I might skip making a giant island and being a trading hub and just see about replacing the stargate."

"Your trade hub would have trouble reaching very far. Navigation is tricky around here. Feel free to copy my books on it."

"Maybe I'll just make a habitable layer down on the ground."

"Would it continue to be habitable without your intervention?"

"Probably? It depends on what's wrong with the ground and how seismically active it is."

"The largest part of what's wrong with the ground is that it's significantly warmer and more sulfurous than up here. I have zero idea what seismic means."

"Earthquakes, volcanoes, continental drift. I can maybe just confine all the sulfur in something; the heat it matters why it's hot. I assume no one will miss anything about the ground as-is?"

"As far as I know, yes. I think we would have rumors at least if the original settlers found aliens."

"So I'll go down and check that out and maybe just make a shell for the whole thing."

"I won't pretend to know whether that'll work, but you seem fairly confident."

"Well, I don't know either, if you have a ton of continent drift going on down there or some kind of weird pressure issue I might have to leave it alone, but I could make a whole new planet from scratch and don't see why I shouldn't at least consider patching this one."

"I'm mostly just skeptical about anything involving the surface. Before you try that, would you mind making me some more things? Just in case you can't find me again."

"I could also give you a tracking device. But I don't mind making you other things."

"Tracking devices are a thing, because why not, lost technology. That'll work, sure. Before you fly off could I have the non-electricity-making part of the computer with some introductory science books, and a half ton or so of ductile steel and a forge or more likely whatever fantastic machines a technologically advanced society uses to make miscellaneous objects without direct demon intervention? Or is that not a thing, because you don't need it?"

"Lemme curate you a quick list of books... I just make miscellaneous objects directly but not everyone's a demon. I could give you a 3D printer that would do steel and give you the raw for it but using them is not actually a skill I have."

"I cannot teach you to make a 3D printer and the operating manual will not be designed for you. And the stuff you use to get steel objects out of it is not the same as ductile regular steel. You sure you want it?"

"Yes. Let me dump some ballast at the same time you make the things - or refill my gas sacs, they're..." He checks a pocket notebook, "About 120 kilograms of hydrogen short of the safety pressure at this altitude."

"Distributed how between them?"

"Roughly evenly but a little more toward the bow. Ship's front-heavy now, to help descending."

"Sure." Cam - gradually - adds the requested quantity of hydrogen to the sacs.

"Cam."

"Nice to meet you, Cam. I suspect this day will be one of the most interesting of my life."

"Likewise, in fact."

He starts carefully descending the ladder. "Anything else you want to know before investigating the surface?"

"What else can you tell me about the stargate, if I go that route?"

"...It's in orbit somewhere, it's many times larger than this ship, it's said to have needed immense amounts of power to function. The mining company that built it might have been named 'Extrasolar Extraction'. That name was on the wrecked monitoring station I salvaged."

Cam fiddles with his computer. "Why were there enough people and supplies on this planet when it broke to form a stable population?"

"I'm not sure. There was a lot of mining, and tourism and research and farming in addition to the mining, I think. You can still find old ships and buildings in the parts of the world with more dangerous weather, it's just the equator band that's been picked clean."

"In addition to a tracker I can leave you a phone and then I could ask you other questions as they occur to me."

"A communication device, I assume. I make no promises to answer it at all hours, but I'll certainly take it. I imagine 'phones' for all is part of your desired end state for this planet so it won't be a single-purpose tool forever."

"Yup!"

"You are an excellent person and I will gladly answer your questions in order to help you be excellent more effectively. I do hope it's relatively simple to use, though."

"Well, it is when there's only one person to call and I'm not loading it up with a lot of other features. If you want easy-to-use are you sure about the 3D printer?"

"Easy-to-use for things there is high value in immediately knowing how to use. Not knowing how to use the printer won't hinder me or you the way not knowing how to use the phone would."

All of this is very interesting! Cam takes photos.

A different kind of palm-sized critters, these covered in spines in an almost pufferfishy way. A little village, probably too far away for anyone to notice his nonbird shape and coloring. More clouds of seeds. (Seriously, that stuff seems to be everywhere.) A very irregularly shaped island that seems to be just a tangle of plants. Perhaps it broke off from something larger. More jellywings... That's probably a bladesquid. It looks mean.

It does look mean! Cam is not afraid of it, nor is he green. Candid shot of the bladesquid.

The bladesquid seems to be stalking a herd of jellywings. It has a tough-looking shell covering most of the lower part of its main body, and easily two dozen tentacles. It does not choose this moment to strike, dramatic timing though this would be.

Maybe he'll stalk it for a while. Surface of the planet isn't going anywhere.

The bladesquid seems to notice him after a while. Something facelike is pointing at him, at least. It starts ascending, though it doesn't move to go direcly above him, just at a slightly higher altitude.

The air's definitely getting thicker. Islands are more common and more commonly inhabited. It's also getting darker.

Cam flies west as he continues to descend. Once he's on the ground he can light his way.

Hello town! Cam doesn't think towns will be any harder to find on his way up than down, so he ignores it for now. Down down down.

Cam takes some air samples for doing chemistry to, but then sees no reason to tolerate the smell. He can make a little air, just around his face, as he flies.

The dark, thick layer of clouds is trying to burn his skin with both temperature and chemistry. When he passes through, the air below would still be killing a human, just not quite as aggressively. The surface is visible in spots between more dark, thick clouds if he has a sufficiently powerful light source, now.

Cam has a floodlight! And doesn't like burning, so air around all of him when he's in the clouds.

Well, he measures that, and samples the rock, and samples the air, and samples the clouds, and drinks some coffee, and energetically chemistries the heck out of everything!

Not super promising. He makes a little ship and flies to a bunch more locations on the planet, taking samples and confirming that it's all like so.

He encounters more volcanic rock, and ash spouts, and more volcanic rock, and a magma flow, and a moderate earthquake.

"The phone or the plan to put a shell around the planet?"

"The phone, and the answer is now obvious."

"Ah-huh. The plan is off, alas, there's a lot of magma and earthquakes that might wreck a shell and thereby let toxic air out, no fun at all."

"I told you the surface was a probably no-go. Worth checking, but you checked and now we know. Are you going for the stargate now?"

"I thought I might find a town and meet some more people but I might just go straight for the gate if I don't run across one soonish."

"What's your altitude? Towns tend to congregate at one fifty to two hundred. They're heavy."

"Approaching that. I may be too far away from the equator, I hopped around a lot to get a variety of samples." Cam turns.

"Not precisely, my latitude figuring stuff isn't calibrated for the planet. I can find the equator again though."

"You'll find towns soon enough. You were right about your books being tricky to understand, by the way. Who would have guessed that electricity and magnetism are the same thing?"

"I can answer questions as long as you've got me on the phone."

Anywhere he can land?

Not really. There are towers for anchoring lighter-than-air ships and open space for gliders, but not something as large as his shuttle.

"I've never actually been called an angel before!" remarks Cam.

"Person with wings is an angel! Did you get 'em just now or something?"

"Nope, I've had them for a while, but where I'm from angel means feathers in particular."

Cam waits politely, tail swishing.

"It's the first one I saw. I want to learn more about the place."

"I'll gladly tell you about this place, but we're... Concerned about where you came from. Your wings should be impossible."

"They aren't! I'd offer you a set but they're a little hard to get used to."

"I probably wouldn't accept. Whatever lost technology you're using I'm too old for it." (He's barely middle age.) "What would you like to know about us?"

"I'm curious about local culture and the stargate, and as long as I'm here I can," he makes the upper left quarter of a muffin and bites it, "I can distribute presents."

He restrains the surprised look on his face at the sudden muffin piece. Mostly. "I, uh, don't think we're the most qualified place to tell you about the stargate. Most things about that time are rumor and hearsay now. If you find a larger town they may have a more substantial library. As to local culture, do you mean things like the floater festival?"

"No. Well, maybe, but probably not, I mean things like how you call all winged people 'angels' and there is a mayor and stuff."

"As far as I know 'angels' are part of an old religion where God lives high in the sky and sends winged people down when he needs something done on the surface. I'm the mayor of Oli, yes. We're small enough that a regular democratic election and town council still works reasonably well. There are plans to divide the place into three districts if the population crosses two thousand. We mostly work as a brewery town. Where are you from?"

"Another world."

That... Is not nearly as implausible as the mayor was expecting. "I see. Do you want to come into the great hall? It's probably more comfortable to talk there than standing here, if you want to learn all about us."

"Sure, why not."

"No thanks, I never developed a taste for it. Would you like an arbitrary conjured beverage of your choice?"

He laughs for a bit. "I'm supposed to be feeding you. I'll just have to feed you information instead. I'll accept, how about some fruit juice?"

Cam hands him a glass of orange juice.

He starts drinking it. "Ah, this is a strong taste. What is it? And shall I fetch a couple of chairs?"

"It is, creatively, called 'orange juice', and you can if you don't want a proliferation of extra chairs but I can just make those too."

"Hm. Unless you make hundreds they won't be 'extra' chairs. You don't seem much bothered by making things. That's why you want information and not goods, I suppose."

"I have no need for goods and plenty of need for information!" Cam makes a coupla chairs. They have metal bits, incidentally.

Once he notices the metal he becomes intent and focused. "...Metal. At least two pounds of it. If you're not cheating for some reason, pulling these pre-assembled out of the nowhere, you're going to change all of Cloudbank. I've already said we don't know much about the stargate, shall I summarize what we do know about it? What else do you want to know?"

"Well, I'm considering replacing it. Would that be welcome? Will I have some kind of war on my hands over it?"

"Nobody can even get to it. You will definitely attract pirates, but there aren't any large standing armies here."

"I can travel through space on my own, but if 'gating' is customary and no one has been by this planet since it broke, I assume that through conventional space you're very far away from all your neighbors."

"That seems logical, but I wouldn't know. I'm not sure nobody's visited us since, though."

"No? Who may or may not have visited?"

"I just don't know how to make sure that nobody has visited. If such a thing happened it would be dismissed as baseless rumor."

"Will I too be dismissed as baseless rumor?"

"If we don't have obvious Lost Technology or piles of steel and silver to show off and give away, yes."

Cam makes a little pile of steel ingots. "Souvenirs. Enjoy."

"Thank you. We'll have trouble finding enough fuel to work all this metal in the forge, but it'll make excellent trade material. I'll have to issue a tax break, fair is fair. I don't suppose I could get more things before you go?"

"Sure, whaddaya want?"

Cam provides.

The mayor runs out of things he wants for town property. Then he tries to collect and order requests for things so Cam isn't just listening to people shouting what they want. He's also balancing the town's weight budget, and eventually asks him to expand the islands' floatstone a few feet. He could be here a while if he doesn't decide to be done at some point.

Cam stops at the point where he would have to literally grow the island bigger in order to make them any more things. "It's been fun," he says, "but I think it's about time I checked out the stargate."

They all love him by now. The teenager he first talked to yells, "Good luck!" and watches him leave through her shiny new telescope.

Cam flaps up to his spaceship. He starts looking for anything stargatey.

It'll take a telescope, but there is a large man-made object in a fairly high orbit. It's essentially a giant ring, on scale with residential stations, but it's not spinning the way most stations do to fake gravity.

Cam goes and checks it out. Can he go inside?

Cam departs his ship and hops in, making himself air. He inspects the station with fascination.

He is currently in ALIGNMENT COIL 17. There are large machines along the wall closest to the inside of the gate. Across the hall is ROBOTICS REPAIR. Down the hall a ways is a POWER RELAY and a short distance in the other direction is a HEAT EXCHANGER.

Cam goes and checks out the entanglement systems.

How odd. Does it have a user manual?

There's a lot to sift through, in a mix of slightly off his Earth's standard English and similarly off-standard German. Personal journals. Lots of correspondence and forum posting. Credited as partial author on eleven scientific papers about obscure particle physics and primary author of one. The piles of bureaucracy reveal what he's looking for: Daily reports on the status of the entanglement systems. Efficiency and calibration and diagnostic. Personal notes on the project. Presentations attempting to explain the engineering concepts to upper management. Blueprints.

Lovely. What the fuck is an entanglement system.

According to these documents this world's physics are not quite the same as the ones he's used to once you go below the atomic level. The math is complex, but the entanglement system uses this to convince one unit of space to be in two places at the same time. This allows faster than light communication and, with enough convoluted supporting systems, FTL travel.

Okay. What's the backup looking like?

Neither of the central spheres are visibly damaged. Their entanglements are probably still be intact unless their other ends were damaged somehow. He'll need to figure out how to power everything up again, here or in a new Gate structure, of course.

Are there station logs he can get at which suggest anything about why there's a hole in the place and wrecked objects?

Eight hours and a few minutes before the control system reported fatal power failure, the station was placed under lockdown due to a bomb threat.

She left a note and opened her helmet. Apparently there was no hope of rescue.

Anybody else around?

There's some blood near the shuttle bay. One spacesuit is still here: Pedro Sanchez. There's no sign of Pedro himself, though.

Nope, nothing here.

Nothing visible happens. The place probably needs power.

Yep. Does the generator have an operator's manual?

Cam pokes his way through it. No point blowing up the whole station and having to gamble on being able to make entangled spaces after all. All he really needs to know is the features of its output, though; he can make his own generator when he knows how much juice goes where.

That's fairly easy to find. The tolerances aren't even particularly strict- Most of the power relays' job is to catch and modulate the reactor's output.

Cool. Cam makes a li'l thorium reactor and hooks it up.

Can he outgo a message?

Yep.

Cool. I have repaired this end of the entanglement. Is anyone still there?

This is an automated response. This entanglement is no longer actively monitored, but your incoming communication has been reported.

The portion of the planet where Nick was happens to be visible from here, but unless Cam's phone is powerful enough to reach from a high orbit all the way down to the planet below he'll probably have to install a satellite relay. Or figure out backward compatibility with the one that's already here.

Cam's phone is fancy 2157 technology. It careth not for such distances.

"Hello, Cam. I think I've figured out the printer. Printed and assembled a brand new screw wrench. How's your quest going?"

"Well, I fixed the stargate, but nobody on the other end is checking their mail so I have a wait ahead."

"Of course you did, I'm starting to think you can do anything. Lucky."

"I can't do anything! I can't make anitmatter. Or dance."

"What's antimatter?"

"It's... the opposite of matter. If antimatter encounters matter they annihilate each other."

"Sounds dangerous. I'm still curious but you're not a textbook, so. What was wrong with the stargate?"

"Somebody bombed the facility. Some things were disconnected in what may have been a separate incident, but the bombing is why no one was around to fix it after."

"Nasty. I hope someone answers, it'd be amazing to see Earth. D'you know how long it's been since the gate went down?"

"I could dig up a date but I'd be surprised if you're still using this calendar -" Cam hunts for datelike things in the records he's been conjuring.

"The bombing was in the year 2563, if that sounds about right to you, but your years and days are a different length on this planet."

"No, it seems we don't use the same calendar. By our reckoning it's year 384."

Does the station computer know what year it thinks it is now?

"Station computer thinks it's now 2984. Which is not that far off from a 384 year difference in local years."

"I guess we were mostly right, then. Who would have thought."

"Mostly right about?"

"Time. I would have thought that Cloudbank is too decentralized to even be near correct when it comes to timekeeping."

"Well, I don't know how religious you are about syncing with each other but if you all started at the same time that makes some sense."

"I suppose if it's only been a few hundred years and not tens of thousands there's not that much time for little errors to add up."

"Nor much opportunity for someone with ego management problems to invent a new calendar and impose it on a subset of the population."

"Some towns have their own calendar but they never seem to catch on in the wider world. I guess there's both benefits and drawbacks to the isolation. No conquering hordes, just the occasional pirate band."

"Hey, does everyone speak the same language more or less?"

"There's lots of varying slang, and past the storm bands to the north and south have their own dialects but are mostly still intelligible. I think everyone here spoke the same language, more or less, when the gate blew up."

"I wonder how much longer it would have taken it to dialectize past mutual intelligibility."

Cam writes One.

"Yeah, I'll probably do that once I'm talking to a person and not an automated system on the far end and I know what to have the computers say."

"I don't suppose I can help some more?"

"Not really, just thought I'd update you. I stopped at a town but they couldn't really add anything to what you knew, so you should feel well-informed, at least."

"I'm so glad."

"Apparently this connection's been dead so long that they don't have a way for it to reach a person anymore. I had to prove I was a person, so it could be forwarded up, by answering a question of a sort some machines have a hard time with."

"I think they probably could have designed things better but didn't see a reason to bother."

"No point feeding a dead chicken. Eh, the metaphor breaks. But if there's almost no chance the gate would be fixed and we're keeping it just in case why put much effort into it?"

"They wouldn't have to, they'd just need some sensible push notification arrangement."

My name is Cam and I'm acting alone but in loose consultation with a Cloudbank inhabitant. The planet has a healthy but low-tech population mostly clustered around the equator. Surface uninhabitable.

That is outside of my capabilities, but I'm sure a human will be able to assist you.

Any idea when there will be a human on the line?

Please be patient. Recovery of a dead link is not a common occurrence. The person designated to handle these events should be online within a few minutes.

That's okay, I'm not in a particularly desperate hurry.

Archived reports indicate a bomb threat shortly before the link went offline. Do you believe that the threat was legitimate and the cause of the disruption?

That's what it looks like, yes.

Hi, Lyl. Yeah, I'm perfectly comfortable.

Excellent! I think it's very surprising that you managed to repair a dead link, especially on a low-infrastructure world. The whole web had written G seven-two-one off as a dead end. Not nearly as habitable or resource-rich as it looked from a distance and probably everyone was going to die out, so no re-establishing mission was sent. The answering machine says you want plans and specs to repair the gate itself. Can I ask where you'll be getting the parts and material? Some of these things are very tricky to make.

Would you believe me if I said I have magic powers?

Not without a significant body of proof. Getting this far is a point in your favor on that count, though.

Well, I have magic powers. I can make whatever you can specify for me.

I'll proceed as if you're telling the truth until proven otherwise. I'm getting gate engineers on the line now. Do you know how to have the station computer send files through the link?

Not as such. This isn't like the computers I'm accustomed to.

Incoming: Step by step instructions on how to bring up a station map in an image editing tool, and stream the main display to the other side.

Cam follows these instructions.

Can you use the pointer to mark sections of the station that are damaged?

Cam marks an outline of the hole blown in the side. These bits are just gone, he sends.

Alright, we'll get blueprints for that. My engineer has arrived. He says the only important parts are that you have the equipment in the entanglement room set up right, which diagnostics say they are, that the station has as little angular momentum as possible, and all 30 alignment coils in pristine condition and zipped up, powered and cooled. The exact details of the engineering behind it don't matter. Is a part number and installation guide for the coils good enough?

Yes, that should do the trick!

I've been corrected: No angular momentum except around the center axis, like a wheel. It can be spinning for artificial gravity just fine. And then a part number and full text of the owner's manual equivalent come through.

Cam replaces the generators and clears the junk.

He doesn't have a reason to do that. To the control room!

"Months? Really?"

"We can't just take one off the assembly line if we want it to be compatible with the dinosaur on your side."

A different voice takes over. "No, no, it does work that way it's just the- yes, it was ceramic spheres. Just the spheres that have to start colocated. They contain each end of the entanglement, and the rest of the station extends it into a sort of film. But this link is a three-centuries-old design and can't use modern gate systems seamlessly. New style entanglements are smaller and thus lighter and thus much much cheaper to send on fast interstellar trips."

"I could dig out the spheres and make a new gate around them?"

"...Probably. You'd want to be very very careful. Don't spin them, don't subject them to any sharp acceleration. But that wouldn't solve the problem. We don't have the right systems on our end."

"Well, if it wouldn't solve the problem I won't bother."

"Does overtime look more appealing if I offer to bribe you with my magic powers?"

"Yes," Lyl says, "Proof, though. It seems like you can make things without knowing exactly what they are, correct?"

"Yes. Would you like me to conjure up your birth certificate and tell you when you were born or something?"

"Yes, yes, I'm an enormous security risk, tell me something I don't know. Give me a model number and I'll put an autodoc in front of a security camera."

"Rolebi Medico type three autodoc, public service version."

Cam makes one of those in view of a camera.

"Right. I'm not the final decision maker here but if you agree to make some reasonable quantity of things especially in low infrastructure worlds - more along the lines of medicine and computers than weapons, of course - I think we'll be able to push a rush-through to reconnect this gate as quickly as possible."

"I like everything about this plan!"

"I'll give you an update some time tomorrow. Bye." She might be a bit testy, what with the fact that she's not going to get to go back to sleep. Security wants to have words.

Cam hangs out in the station. He patches the hole until the place is airtight, in case someone wants to walk through once the gate's established and feels uncomfortable with the presence of a hole. He has dinner. He works on design for little drones to deliver the good news to the Cloudbank people.

After a couple of hours Nick calls him, apparently having figured out the 'sending' part of a phone.

"Hi! What's up?"

"I was wondering if the printer will safely accept different materials, mostly. Also wondering if you got a real person on the stargate's phone."

"I did get a real person! They have to do some engineering on their end for anything other than data to come through. Your printer can do other materials but not just anything you have lying around, the steel raw I gave you is not-quite-exactly-steel and it would similarly need not-quite-exactly whatever else."

"So I shouldn't just give it wood or floatstone. Good to know before I got curious enough to try it. Might have set my ship on fire."

"Nah, you'd just jam the printer, worst case."

"Horray for safety standards. D'you think I could see outer space at some point?"

"I don't see why not. Lemme see how far away you are right now..." Cam checks the location of the tracking device.

"Well, I'm not doing anything right now, it'd just be a couple hours to fetch you up and a couple more to put you back. Although your ship'd be unattended during."

"May as well wait. I'm not in a good spot to tie down. Tomorrow I'll probably find a good town to dock at, it can happen then. Thanks, by the way."

"You're welcome."

Time passes. Lyl Jupiter sends a message that they got crash funding approved but her career is dead if he reneges on his offer of stuff so she'd appreciate him not doing that.

"My offer's good, as long as the computers and medicine not weapons assurance was real."

"Some people are gonna want weapons, but if they ask and you refuse all it'll do to the rest of the council is cost them political capital."

"Then you needn't worry about your career on my account."

"Shen's preliminary evaluation says fifty-six days. They did actually take a gate ring off the assembly line, they're just modifying it heavily."

"Well, that's still a bit of a wait but I'll deal."

"Gates take time. I'll keep you posted."

"Thanks. I may be in and out of the station sometimes, not necessarily by the phone all hours."

"Thanks for warning me. Bye for now, then."

This town is a lot larger. There are hundreds of islands tied together in a carefully laid out sort of inverse pyramid, with more hidden inside. The resulting shape is like a conical section of a sphere. Buildings are part of the islands themselves as opposed to mostly built on top of them like in the first town. It looks like there could be quite a maze of tunnels inside. Mirrors and skylights here and there seem designed to bring light into the structure. At the very top is a grandiose shiny glass tower surrounded by spear-armed and white-uniformed guards.