"Oh, I can make us a little spaceship. Trouble is, then there's a little spaceship, and I'm not confident I want to leave one lying around."

"I mean, I could also slag it. Just trying to be thoughtful. Elevators, water pumps, and all manner of exciting agricultural devices are also available once I know how best to distribute them."

"Hmm. I want to warn you, the balance of power needs upsetting, but if we do it hastily people will be hurt more than they need to. The Telra Senate likes to send in the army when any one city grows too powerful. They call themselves a republic, but... Each city gets one vote. Guess who casts the city's vote? Whoever's been appointed by the Senate to oversee the city. The current system is better than lawless anarchy, but by appearing things you have a good chance to undo it without the tremendously nasty 'civil war' parts in the middle. You'll want proof, of course."

"I do tend to like to know what's going on before I disrupt governments, however dodgy their systems of representation."

"You'll notice I'm not asking you for weapons or anything else government-disrupty. Do you want to try making a few more alive things now, see if I can find a difference, or start hiking back to town since you don't seem to want to make a ship?"

"If somebody sees a ship going up or down what will they think it is?"

"As long as they see it from a fair distance they'll probably think it's someone's magic experiment. It's fairly well-known that abandoned wilderness is the place to do magic experiments. Small chance you'll set off rumors of disaster, unexplained flying objects are signs of calamity to the superstitious."

"That's not so bad. All right. Wanna go to space today?"

"You're immortal, or claim to be. I'm not. It's safe and reliable?"

"Yeah, humans in the mortal world I'm accustomed to do space travel routinely. Some of them live on the moon and others have colonized a second planet."

"In that case, yes. I'd like to try to learn one of your languages at some point, even if there's no translation-dictionary. Seems like it'd be convenient."

"Sure. How do you best learn second languages?" asks Cam, picking a flattish spot to make a little two-seat shuttle.

"I learned Henta by listening to a description of the grammar, learning the alphabet, memorizing a few basic nouns and verbs, then total immersion because I was in the Crownlands."

"And that seemed pretty straightforward to you? All right. So, I speak lots of languages, and my computer can translate serviceably between all of them. You want something similar in structure to one of yours? Something you'll find easy to pronounce? Language with the best vocabulary and most native work?"

"It could have gone better, but I managed." In Henta, "Hard work may not make an adult, but avoiding it makes a child. That's an old proverb, and one I took to heart. A compromise between grammar and most available work, would be nice."

"Okay... do you mind viciously terrible writing systems? Because Chinese is very popular, especially in writing where the dialects don't compete, and it's got deliciously simple grammar, and its characters look like this and there's thousands of them." He shows her a sample on his computer. And opens up his spaceship and motions her in.

Steel pauses to investigate the spaceship. "Does it use the Reaction Law to fly? Tlane is symbolic like that, but honestly Chinese doesn't really appeal if there's thousands of different characters to re-learn. I can tolerate grammar in exchange for a phonetic alphabet like Henta has."

"I don't know of a Reaction Law under that name. I can give you a physics lesson but it'd take a long time. How regular do you need your phonetics?"

"The reaction law states that anything exerting a force has an equal force exerted on it in the opposite direction. Moving things with the stream is thought to push against the entire planet, but this has not been proven. Two or three different pronunciations per letter would be fine, especially if grammar can help tell which to use. A dozen, no."

"The reaction law is involved but not the only thing going on here." He takes off, thinking about languages. "Maybe Italian. How pronounceable does this sound?" He speaks a couple sentences of Italian.

She repeats them and only drops one vowel. "Close enough. What did that mean?"

"This is sentence in Italian. It has a lot of interesting cadence but not that many vowels," translates Cam.