"It's fine if I have to look and experiment and ask questions, I just want to know which things to ask and look at and try, and I want to do it fast so I can do it for all the things in the world before I run out of time."

"How much time is there? Does anybody know?"

"Ages. All the Ages of the earth. But that might not be enough, not to learn everything, not when so many things point at new things - maybe they just keep doing that forever, and then no matter how much I learn I won't know everything!"!

"But how long is an Age and how many of them does the earth get?"

"Ages are thousands of years, sometimes millions. I don't know how many the earth gets. We don't die when we're done, the Song just concludes and then we're happy forever. But if I don't know everything already at that point maybe I don't get to learn it, I'm not sure."

"It sounds like it'd be pretty hard to make you happy if you didn't know enough things," she points out. "Maybe you will personally prevent the Song from ending just by being impossible to satisfy. Because there's lots of other people and there will only be more and they'll come up with all kinds of things and maybe some of them want to do that very fast, too."

"It is a good thing I have a head start," he agrees.

"You do?"

"Imagine if we'd already lived in Valinor for a thousand years when I was born, I'd have to learn so much just to be as good as everyone else already was! Or ten thousand years!"

"Oh, so you have a head start on future people. But you are still younger than most of the people around and definitely the Valar." Pause. "What do you suppose you'll do about all the other planes?"

He nods seriously. "I'm going to have to be really smart and really fast."

"Some planes are dangerous to go to. My plane is actually especially dangerous to go to if you think very highly of yourself."

"Can you learn about it without going to it?"

"Maybe. I mean, you can learn what I remember about it, since I'm from there, but that's not actually very much. Maybe one day we'll figure out how to rescue other people who are stuck there or in the other planes I know about and then you can learn what they know too."

"I can't think of a better approach at the moment," he says seriously. "Do I know enough to read Pax now?"

"Maybe." She writes in her book I got a fruit to taste like chocolate earlier; chocolate is a kind of candy my plane has but I'm not sure if it's known here.

He sounds it out. "Chocolate isn't a word I know. I don't know if we have it here, we might just have a different word."

"Well, you pronounced it right," she says. "It tastes like -" And she shows him.

"Mmm. Is one of the vendors offering it? I can tell them to bring it to the palace."

"I haven't seen it here yet."

"Where? I can still have someone go get some."

"I mean it's a thing I ate on my plane," she says. "Even if you could send someone there to get some it's not worth it."

He reads the words she wrote again. "You got a fruit to taste like it? That's enough for me to get the idea, we can go get some of that."

"...I'm not sure if it'll actually keep the taste if I bring it away from where I got it, but I can bring some next time to find out if you like."

"Or you can tell me where you got it and then I can go there and get some," he says. "Can I try writing?"