One of the team goes and packs the wires into the truck. They thought of a lot, but nobody actually seems to have packed a multi-meter, which is sort of an obvious oversight.

"How does giving a material a trait?" Vesherti asks. "Can you craft something to be like the copper in all ways, or do you need to know the way to craft it?"

With a sample of copper to turn into crafting material he can make more crafting material that's just like it, but without a sample he'd have to know all the relevant traits of it and that's not really practical. Adding traits without a sample is hard to describe - it's a bit like dancing or throwing a spear or something, it's mostly done by feel and it's not generally possible to say exactly which muscles you're using for it and how, except that it's a mental action rather than a physical one so figuring out the muscle movement equivalents is even harder. He can show them - it's like this, or this, or this - but even between Crafters that kind of sharing doesn't get all the details across.

Suddenly having a sense-memory for a sense you don't have is incredibly weird. Vesherti needs a minute to process that, and he's not the only one.

"How do you —"

He pauses, trying to figure out how to phrase it.

"How do you get the feel for a property? Looking at materials that have it different amounts?"

In the remote situation room, a physicist falls over.

"Do you think he can do superconductors? You know, make this thing be 'the most conductive'?"

Looking at it and fiddling with it, yeah. It's sort of like how if you find an object in an awkward shape that you've never seen before it'll take you a minute to figure out how to carry it competently, and the best way to do it is to just pick it up and move it around a little.

Vesherti digests this for a moment, before deciding that Traveler is receptive enough that he should try looking to the future.

"I can tell you more about doing things with lightnings," he says. "But maybe it is good to wait until we measure the wires, so you can learn the lightnings-permitting property better."

He shifts a bit.

"You said that (crows came here with you) — can thinking animals also Craft?"

They can't - or, they can use it to communicate but not to make things, communicating with crafting is much easier than crafting with it; there's occasional rumors of individual animals from talking species learning to craft a little but Crafters are the only ones who can do it reliably.

Hmm. That's unfortunate, because it does mean that Traveler is really their only source of Crafting.

Vesherti clears his screen, and starts writing a long message.

"We have a word that I didn't see it in the dictionary. It is like not pushing yourself too hard, but for groups — whether the group can keep doing things in the future, past the life of the people in the group," he explains. "I think that Crafters do a lot of things alone that we need to do in groups. So right now, individual people are looking at your Crafting, and saying 'It is so neat! There is stuff to learn, and things we can do that we couldn't do before'. But Largest City, the city to the south, it has lived longer than any person, and it will still live after you and I are gone. So the city as a whole group is saying 'It is neat — but we can't use it, because it will be gone in a few years.' So we're very interested in figuring out how to pass down Crafting to children."

"And maybe it is not possible — we are not Crafters, maybe there is no way to learn to Craft. But we look very similar to you; we are more alike than most animals are alike. So maybe it is possible, that we learn to Craft. We are thinking of ways to check, but you are the expert. If you can think of how to do it, we would trade almost anything in return."

Vesherti wants to wait to see how he reacts to the city before suggesting some of the options they've already thought of, though, like asking Traveler to raise an orphan or see whether he's cross-fertile with a human.

It's very weird to him that they can't, yeah, and obviously would be much better if they could. The first project he'd want to try, to see if they can pick it up at all, would be making some baby gear out of crafting material and seeing if local babies growing up with it works - it should only take a year or two to find out, the locals' babies might be slower to pick it up but Crafter babies can generally communicate simple needs within half a year. And of course he can give crafting material out for older locals to play with, too, and spend a lot of time communicating with specific people in case that's the relevant part; it's not impossible that they can pick it up later, it just seems less likely to him.

Oh, if exposure to crafting material might do it, that's a lot more scalable. And honestly supports the 'alien nanotech' theory.

"Thank you, that would be great," Vesherti responds. "Do you think people who are more Crafter-like are more likely to pick it up later? Because we have some people who are more or less solitary, more or less capable of recognizing people, and maybe other Crafter traits."

He doesn't think so - when he said it was more or less a species trait that's one of the ways it's less, it seems to be purely a matter of intelligence and Crafters are just the only species on their world smart enough. He wouldn't expect it to be genetic, either, or at least not mostly that.

It is also the case - crafted objects don't have to wear out; they do by default decay over time like natural objects but it's not especially hard to fix that. If they want him to make several thousand of whatever thing over the course of the next couple years that doesn't entirely fix their problem but it should help, even in the long run.

"That would be a good backup option," Vesherti agrees. "The thing we're most likely to want of that is —"

He stops and crosses out the partial sentence.

"We will need to think about what not-wearing-out things are most useful. Probably if you can make a crank-shaft that will turn itself against very high loads and never break that would be useful. But we will think about it, in case there are better choices."

He flips through his checklist again.

"Do you want me to show you how to use the phone —" He includes a picture of the object he means. "— to get books from our library? They are mostly not in Crafter words yet, but there are people who like (writing things from one way to another way) who will put more things in Crafter words for fun. The phone can also send letters to people, in case you want to send a message after we leave."

He can make arbitrarily strong and indestructible crankshafts like the one on his lightning experiment, sure; if they know what other traits - size, density, whatever - they want them to have he can get going on that while he's on the way to the city tomorrow. It'll be most efficient if they're all the same, or only a few different types with a simple ratio for how many of each he should make. They'll also want to keep him supplied with stuff to turn into crafting material, that's going to be the main bottleneck on that kind of thing if he's doing a lot of it.

He's not much for reading, ironically enough, but it'd be good to be able to send them messages, yeah.

Vesherti nods.

"We will bring more material to Craft with in the morning," he promises. "And some initial designs to experiment with."

He puts a copy of the phone interface up and shows Traveler how to send messages using it. Since they haven't got Crafter glyphs added to the encoding standard yet, this involves tapping on the name of the person he wants to contact (there are two existing entries, one for Vesherti specifically, and one for whoever is available in his group) and then drawing on the screen with a stylus or one's finger.

He also points out the battery symbol ("Place it on the charger to refill it; the charger eats sunlight") and the Network symbol ("It should be able to talk from anywhere you go except caves, but if there is a problem with it talking, it will show here"). There's also a way to indicate whether he wants the phone to make a dinging noise when he gets a letter, or not.

"Lots of people want to send you letters — probably too many. So right now we haven't given anyone else your mail code. But if you want, you can give it to people and then they can send letters too."

By way of demonstration, Vesherti sends him a letter with a map of the local area between here and Largest City, with their current location and where he proposes meeting up both marked.

That all seems pretty reasonable. Is there a way to set it up to only ding if the person sending the message says it should? Is there some specific aspect of sunlight that the charger needs, or will any bright light in the visible spectrum do?

Good questions!

"Yes, you can set up custom rules for when it should ding here —" he explains.

They didn't have time to wrangle up a completely new phone interface for Traveler, so it's a stock þereminian phone. That is to say: while the basic interface is simple and minimalist, you can make it do arbitrarily complicated things if you're willing to dig into the advanced settings.

Luckily "don't make noise unless it's really important" for some value of "important" based on whether the message is marked as such and who its from is a common preference, so there's a preset for it.

"The charger can eat many kinds of light, but more blue light is better. The very best light is the purpler-than-purple part of sunlight that makes people get tan, but bright blue light is fine. If you feed it only red light, it won't go," Vesherti explains. "If you want, we can bring you a charger that just wants a wheel to spin fast, instead. People who want to travel a lot usually like the light-eating chargers because they are small and have no moving parts that break."

Oh, he can make things light up, that's not a problem at all, and he can do ultraviolet in a box for it if that's what it works best with; that's easier than having to set it up in the sun.

(He appreciates the help with the settings; he's not really up for learning the complicated bits of a new technology right now.)

Vesherti nods.

"Lots of people don't like how complicated phones are," he agrees. "And it's normal to not do everything with it that it can do. But having a standard sending-letters and commanding-machines device is pretty useful."

He glances over at the sun. It's not dark yet, but they've also stored up a decent number of action items that will need to be taken care of overnight.

"I can talk more if you want, or we can leave you to sleep, and I'll see you in the morning to give more things, or at the city when you get there."

He's about ready to start winding down for the night, yeah. First, though, is there anything he should know about what to expect at the city?

Vesherti considers the question.

"The place I suggested we meet is a fast-machine endpoint. We can walk through the city, but it is a long walk, so we could take a fast-machine to see different parts instead. We have told the people in the city about you, so everyone will know you are coming to visit, and be ready for it. The city is separated into territories for different activities — I thought you might want to start with seeing our food and day-to-day routine areas, but there are also the making things area, or the learning things area, or lots of different megaprojects for different things."

"The (showing what happened in the past so we can learn from it) megaproject and the (demonstrating physical principles so we can learn from it) megaproject are both things I think you will like to see. But you can pick what to see. I will point out things that might be interesting, and answer your questions. I think there is more to see than just one day, so we can do separate trips for separate things."

"Does that help, or were you asking something else?"

Hm. He intends to use a walking vehicle like the one he's in in the city at least at first, it has several benefits including that he's not going to get physically tired out, or be touched by accident, or get sick as easily. He's not expecting that their fast vehicles are designed to take another vehicle inside, but if he builds his vehicle light he can compact it down to go in theirs as generic matter, if that's still warranted - he can get it down to one and a half times his weight without compromising too much on stability, and it can be whatever shape and size they need when it's compacted.

He's definitely interested in seeing their megaprojects but he doesn't expect he'll be ready to appreciate them properly right away, he's not going to have enough background knowledge; the food and general public areas are probably better for that. It might be good to get through some of the effects of everyone wanting to see the interesting new thing, too, to start, and he's not sure what exactly to expect from them there, even with Crafters that'd vary from place to place.

"A walking vehicle should be fine," Vesherti agrees. "Not all of us can use our legs, so we have personal-moving machines, and the fast-machines are able to fit them up to a standard size."

He draws a box on the ground the size of a large personal scooter or wheelchair.

"But using a walking vehicle to cross the city without a fast machine is fine too," he continues. "Most people use the fast machines, but there are also machines for moving bulky things that people use."

"People are excited to see you, but there is a —"

He searches for the vocabulary. What he wants to say is that there's a ... civilizational honor, in handling this well, and that if they broadcast a message asking 0.55 of people to pretend that it is a normal day with nothing unusual happening, most people will actually listen and the remaining crowds will be manageable.

"People are excited to see you, so wherever we go some people will follow just to see. If you want to, you can give a lecture to the people who show up, about Crafters or about you or about anything you want to say to us, and people will listen and write letters about it. People would be happy if you did, but you aren't expected to."

Huh, that's quite a small footprint, he's going to have to experiment to find a design that'll be that narrow and still be stable enough to be comfortable. He'll plan on not having access to their vehicles until he does.

He's much more comfortable conversing with people than doing solo presentations, but if they want to figure out the best half dozen or dozen people for him to have a group conversation with - or sequential ones or whatever, he's not picky - and let everyone else listen in, that's fine. With the caveat that his communication range is only moderately above average, forty feet or so, so he can't project to a whole crowd at once.

"One good thing about talking with sounds or hands, and not with Crafting, is that we have machines that can write down the talking and play it back for people," Vesherti ventures. "There are people who like to find interesting people, and having a conversation that gets written down, and then other people read it. For example, there is someone who finds people who study different areas, and talks with them about what they're studying, and people like to listen to learn about areas of study they don't know about."

"If you wanted, I could ask someone like that to meet us to talk with you. Also, if you do need to talk to a crowd, you can just talk to me and I'll say what you say with my hands, and everyone who can see us will understand."

Both of those sound like they'd work; he's fine with whichever one would be better for satisfying peoples' curiosity. He does expect that he can pick up a gestured language, too, just not quickly enough to be very useful in this situation.