"Do yours have the same size wheels? How do you avoid having to pedal inhumanly fast to go the same speed? That would just be undignified. Those poor twenty-third century knights."

"I have not extensively studied bicycles but suspect gears are involved. Remind me when we've got a spare minute and I'll make one for you to take apart. Also, knights, not such a thing in the twenty-third century."

"Oh, good. They do exist where I'm from, but you mostly get the title by earning it, which is much more palatable."

"You have a lot of very strong political opinions, don't you."

"I wouldn't say political. Just that everyone ought to be judged by what he can do and not by how he was born. This is rather a vexing century to be in, and I'm glad the future is better."

"Mm-hm. Bet with enough poking and prodding and demon magic we can get it better on relevant axes by the time the year eight hundred rolls around."

"If it takes us that long I'll be sorely disappointed!"

"There's a lot of world in the world."

"Yes, but once we have the first place upgraded, it should spread easily enough. Every nation wanting to keep up with its neighbor ought to make our job easier."

"Unless that just starts wars."

"I'm sort of worried about it, because it sounds like some of those twenty-five thousand knights would've died."

"Well, yes, it's a battle. Still, thousands of attackers dying because they're superstitious and not because they're evil is a good thing to avoid."

"What I was getting at is that part of what I'm construing as my job - it's up to you if it's yours - is to prevent any wars from breaking out in the first place. Which job may not be simplified by international competition."

"I, on the other hand, am likely to distribute books. Although I suppose I could just skip straight to computers and load everything up with fancy crypto."

"I think you've lost me there. Is that something that people would be able to use if you distributed it? Literacy is extremely low, even in Britain."

"That'd be another reason to skip to computers, I s'pose, avoiding having to teach everyone to read first - although it'd break my heart to actually bypass universal literacy in favor of speech recognition..."

"I'll continue working on literacy unless you're very sure it's unnecessary. Because it is necessary for the sort of society I can build, and I don't know yet how reliably your computers can replace it."

"Reliability's up to scratch when I'm from, but text's still faster and more searchable. Are you keeping an eye on the ground so we know when to land?"

"Yes, the entrance to the cave is in the Torpenn Howe—that's a hill; it'll be just past a ruined tower along the road below us."

"Mmkay. Oh man, I bet you will love computers. I am pretty sure you are not familiar even with basic computers unless I have some dates mixed up and you were personally acquainted with Babbage or something."

"I've only heard of computers meaning individuals skilled at arithmetic. I take it your computers are something more than a machine that does the same?"

"Well... they're sort of machines that are very skilled at arithmetic. It turns out if you put a ludicrous amount of arithmetic in a glowy box it can do amazing things."

"I can imagine arithmetic telling you how to do existing things better, figuring the precise proportions of alloys for the strongest steel or things of that sort, but I can't think how a box of arithmetic could do anything you couldn't do without it. How does it work?"