Aw, there goes the end of her ability to poke fun at the linguists. But on the other hand — a chance to learn a genuine alien language, one apparently unconstrained by phonology, would excite even the most reserved person.

"Yes!" she indicates.

He'll do that, then. Getting the full dictionary printed is going to take a few hours but it comes in parts, he can get started with them as soon as the first section is ready, in maybe half an hour.

And, once he's got the printer going: Do they want to try asking him any questions while they wait?

The woman snorts. She very much wants to — as does everyone being made aware of this remotely — but doesn't have many words to ask questions with.

Đorestat tries tugging at their robe, trying to indicate the color, and then gesturing at his patterned house and looking questioning.

Ah, yeah, he wasn't sure how obvious that difference would be from their end. The sparkly indigo and gold colorway is his personal pattern; it indicates that something belongs to him. Grey - sometimes with subtle patterns in it but a flat neutral grey is almost universally recognized - indicates that something is intended for public use, and mixed colorways indicate that something is owned by a particular person but they're allowing others to use it in specific ways, like when he turned part of his house grey he was indicating that they could have come into that part. Crafters have a territoriality instinct that makes it basically impossible for them to touch other peoples' things or go into other peoples' spaces without clear, direct invitation and even sometimes with it, and clearly marking things that are theirs helps them not get confused about what things they're welcome to interact with. (Yes, it is pretty weird to him that they're wearing the same colorway like that; it makes sense if they can't trivially recolor things, but it still looks like they're claiming to be the same person. It's fine, though, he's sure he'll get used to it eventually.)

They perk up, and grab the hem of their robe, which they hold up for him to see.

Along the hem are a tightly-packed sequence of subtly hand-embroidered characters. To someone unfamiliar with Largest City styles, it probably looks like gibberish. To someone who has read the city's social signalling guide, however, it's a dense code revealing several details of Đorestat's personality and history. And that this robe is machine washable.

Romafiŋ rolls her eyes. But she also shows her own robe hem for comparison — which is noticeably less detailed, since not everyone is so into precisely labeling aspects of their personality, but which does have her name on it, at least.

That's pretty clever and he appreciates knowing about it! He might still get them mixed up with each other since he's used to being able to tell who's who at a glance but it should definitely help.

Oh, and he thinks earlier they asked how to refer to him - Crafters don't generally have specific personal designations aside from their personal patterns, they just describe the person they're thinking of in enough detail to disambiguate. But if they want a standardized way to talk about him they can base it on his pattern - with the caveat that it's not impossible that he'll change it in the future - or use the pen name he writes books under, 'traveler'.

Oh, that will be a lot more friendly sounding than calling him 'the alien' all the time!

They're all sort of dying of having a friendly alien who is willing to explain things, but whom they cannot meaningfully question.

The woman thinks and then takes off her hair ornament, which is blue, and shows it to the Traveller. Then she says something to Đorestat. They nod, and then tap her on the arm. She switches to red and repeats herself. Đorestat makes a show of refusing to touch her, and turns away to stop looking at her. She switches back to blue, and Đorestat taps her arm again. Then she puts the hair ornament back in her hair.

Huh, also clever. Crafters generally just stay in their territory when they don't want to deal with other people. Also he needs them to be significantly less casual than that about touching him, it'll interact extremely badly with the territoriality instinct - touching something is a more visceral indication of ownership than anything else, if he were to toss them something with his pattern on it and they picked it up and threw it back without greying it first he wouldn't be able to touch it because it wouldn't feel like it was his anymore. Which isn't a huge deal when it's a random object, he can just make another unless something's gone really wrong, but if it's him himself...

They all indicate agreement.

Romafiŋ relays a message from dispatch: some physicists want to solicit more information on ansibles, if possible.

"Maybe we could try to explain about phones, and then Traveller could see that they don't work by the same principle," she suggests.

Đorestat takes the more pragmatic approach of pointing at the printer that is spitting out the first section of the dictionary and looking curious.

Do they want to know about ansibles (indicate red), the technology behind storing and retrieving books (yellow), the global library (blue), or something else (black)?

Đorestat points at the red circle, since it does sound like ansibles are pretty important, but then follows it up with a gesture at the blue circle, because who in their right mind would not want to hear about an alien Archive.

Ansibles are a special kind of Crafted object; there's a sense in which an ansible is actually one object existing in two places at once, and any change to one half of it changes the other as well.

He sinks his fingers into the railing as if it was clay, taking some of the material it's made of to make into an example; after greying it and focusing on it for a few moments he tosses one half down to them, a small egg-shaped lump of smooth, firm material; once he sees that they've picked it up he flattens his part out into a thick sheet, and the other part flattens in their hands.

There's all kinds of things you can do with an ansible - they're popular in complicated machinery for transmitting motion from one area to another without having to build transmission machinery through other parts of the build - but the thing they're best for is communicating over long distances. For example, if he writes on his part, the writing shows up on Đorestat's as well. Or if he makes it visibly temperature-sensitive, they can see each others' handprints along with their own, where they're holding it.

Man, they are going to have all kinds of questions for Traveler once they have enough vocabulary to talk about physics.

They play with the ansibles for a few moments, show them to the other þereminians, and then toss it back since he apparently has a limited amount of crafting material.

He appreciates getting the ansible back - they can have some crafted stuff to keep in the long run but he's on short rations with it right now, he had to leave most of his stuff behind when he went up in this airship.

Anyway: the global library. It started as someone's megaproject - some fraction of Crafters decide that they want to do something big rather than just leading relatively quiet lives, and megaprojects are one result of that, though the library is a joint project by dozens of people at this point rather than a one-person operation like most megaprojects; it's been around for a few generations. The library team takes all kinds of books - they don't have specific exclusion criteria but there's always a backlog to process them and they prioritize by quality and importance - and put them into what's probably the most complicated pebbleclinker machine on the planet. (He's vague on what pebbleclinker machines are, exactly, not having a good grasp of the topic himself, but they'll probably be able to piece together that they're marble-based mechanical computers.) They also give out ansibles connected to the pebbleclinker and book-writing machines that work with it, so that anyone who has one can put in a request for any book they have and make a copy for themselves, anywhere in the world.

Once they're comfortable with the language he's willing to loan them his book printer so they can see what the library has and read whatever of it they'd like. (There's a downloadable directory he'll show them how to use before leaving them to it, of course.)

They are definitely excited about the prospect of being loaned the book printer; they all look enthusiastically affirmative at the prospect.

The woman puts the map back on the projector screen and highlights a different location: a place in the desert near the northern coast of the southern bit of the largest landmass, near the inland seas. Then she shows a picture of a big marble building, alongside a picture of towering shelves packed with books. A man wearing a long brown and gold robe and black elbow gloves can be seen delicately removing a book from a shelf a good distance down the row and placing it on a cart of similar books.

Of course, in reality, the vast majority of the Archive's collection is digital now. But showing racks full of blinking servers is less likely to be understandable to someone who doesn't quite grasp mechanical computers. And the Archivists do keep a lot of physical books around for various reasons, not least of which is that paper and ink is still one of the most durable storage media known; hard drives need replacement every few hexades, whereas correctly treated paper can last centuries.

Then the woman finds a picture of a grey phone to display, and gestures back and forth between the phone and the Archive, and then the phone and the book printer. She mimes taking the phone out of the screen and tossing it to him, and looks questioning.

He'll be interested in getting a connection to their library, yeah. In the long run, not urgently, he prefers learning by observation and he's going to have plenty to see for the next while.

The printer finishes up its work, and he sets it going for the next part of the dictionary before cannibalizing a section of railing for material to make copies of the first part for them all. He accompanies those with a set of pencils, which he explains are hot at one end and cold at the other; the material the books are made of has been set to be temperature-sensitive, so they can write notes on it with the hot end of a pencil and erase with the cold end and not lose their work when it returns to ambient temperature. The hot ends of the pencils aren't burning-hot but they'll probably want to avoid touching them anyway, it won't be comfortable.

With that done, he settles in to read to them. The language is fairly simple, each word getting a glyph made of simple shapes, with a fairly predictable visual grammar and some modifying concepts being drawn around other glyphs as circles or ovals with different markings on or around them. The dictionary starts with a survey of grammatical building blocks - here's how you indicate 'and', here's how you indicate 'not', here's how you indicate that you're referring to a specific instance of a thing, and so on - before starting on useful vocabulary with a section about Crafters: words for their relationships, words related to their household structures (each household has a specific person in charge, and the word for other household members doesn't differentiate between Crafters and animals; he'll clarify if they seem confused or concerned that almost all adult Crafters have their own territories or mobile living arrangements like his), and words relating to the freezing instinct and personal territories and personal patterns. Then it gets into words for activities; it makes no distinction between useful work and hobbies, and there's no vocabulary offered for talking about employment or government in any form. There's also no mention of farming, though apparently some people breed or craft plants or animals to be more interesting or useful in various ways, including as food.

And across the world, a thousand linguists cry out with joy for having some actual vocabulary to work with!

... well, once Romafiŋ finishes translating, since nobody can hear Traveler's explanations remotely. She sets up her phone camera to be able to see her copy of the dictionary and her hands, and starts signing along with his reading.

The hastily assembled xenocultural team going through all this remotely forwards a request for more words and information related to bees, wolves, ants, schooling fish, and other animals that display pack coordination.

When he gets to the end of this dictionary section, Romafiŋ flips to a blank part of the thermoreactive material and attempts to compose a question, which she holds up for him to read.

"(? (Households are like) ((group hunters) are like) ((six legs) are like) words)"

Households don't bear much resemblance to hunting packs of dogs and have nothing to do with bugs; a household is the Crafter who claims the territory or otherwise runs it and whoever they're in charge of. Usually the household members are various livestock - he has dogs and chickens, lots of people have rabbits or guinea pigs or whatever instead of or in addition to the chickens and some people have hawks or other hunting animals instead of or in addition to dogs - and any children the head-of-household is raising. Occasionally a talking animal will join a Crafter household too - he hasn't mentioned those yet; sufficiently smart animals like corvids or elephantiformes can communicate with crafting even though they can't craft with it and they might encounter some crows who can, there was a smallish flock on the ship with him when he came here. Anyway, the livestock usually have a purpose - it's not unheard of for someone to keep animals for fun but it's not common, usually it's for food or work - but most Crafters don't have anything that big they're doing with their lives and aren't shaping their household as a whole toward a specific purpose, and of course children are separate people with their own lives even when they aren't ready to set out on their own yet.

... yeah, none of that was what she was trying to ask. Romafiŋ really wishes that someone over at Emergency Services hadn't made the entirely reasonable decision to have the people physically present take point, since Traveler's telepathy means they probably have the best intuitive understanding of what's being discussed.

She turns to the others, and they briefly brainstorm.