He goes in to get the crafting material, rolling it out of the house in big heavy spheres.

Behold: Objects.

Vesherti smiles at him.

"Thank you. This will be very helpful."

A few members of the team collect the created objects and roll them up onto the platform to be sent out on the train (which was equipped with a cargo car this morning for the purpose).

"I am ready to accompany you to the city whenever you are ready to go," Vesherti tells him. "We can go wherever you'd like, but I was planning on a park near the edge of the city where you can see people interacting and have space to hang back or get close to them, as you please. After that, there is a building with lots of small territories in it that the people living there have said you can come see, to see what our houses are like. I remember you said you wanted to get some sense of how people interact with each other in the city before going anywhere more specific."

The park sounds good to him; the idea of going into strangers' indoor-spaces is strange to him and he's not sure he'll be comfortable with it even with clear permission, but he is curious, if they're comfortable with giving it a try. (For the reciprocal curiosity, he's planning on making them a small translucent copy of his house once he has enough crafting material and fewer urgent uses for it.) He's also interested in trying some of their food today; he was talking to some people from the train last night and they mentioned a preserved dill carrot thing that sounded interesting.

He nods.

"The park has some shops — centralized places for trading for a particular kind of thing — some of which have food and two of which have carrot pickles. You can both see how trading for them works and try them," Vesherti informs him.

"While we travel to the park, there's an idea that we use for living in groups that I want to prepare you for in advance, because it is invisible and Crafters don't seem to have an equivalent. Do you ever run into a situation where three Crafters each have something one of the other Crafters wants, in a triangle shape? Like, person a is a dancer who wants a new seed; person b has that seed and wants a library ansible; and person c has a library ansible and wants to learn to dance?"

He's seen cases like that, yeah. Crafters have a few different approaches to setting up that kind of group trade, though it also doesn't come up all that often.

"If you have more people, living closer together, and with more things that not everyone can just make, the situation comes up more," Vesherti tells him. "The average person living in the city runs into three to six situations like that every day, sometimes involving many more than three people. So we have a system for handling group trades smoothly called 'money'."

"The idea is to add something that everyone always wants — money. That way, any two people in a situation like that always have a trade they can make. So person a can trade money to person b for the seed. Then person b can trade money to person c for the ansible. Then person c can trade money to person a for dance lessons. They don't have to all meet up, or even all agree, in order for the group trade to work. And, once everybody is familiar with that idea, that actually gives them a reason to want money. People want money because it is easy to trade for things ­— if you have a little, you can trade it for what you need without lots of extra work, so it is convenient to have."

"We don't use the money system for everything, but it turns out to be pretty useful. For example, everybody on the planet wants the things you have to trade. But if they all tried to come talk to you individually, that would be inconvenient and overwhelming. So what happens is that they have traded some of us money in exchange for our time working with you and making things go smoothly, so that you will help us get Crafting, new seeds, and so on. That's why we're willing to get you a bunch of things and arrange the things you ask for — not just because you're interesting and because we want to be good hosts, but because the specific people who are having to do work for your visit are getting money for that work from everyone else, which we'll be able to use to trade for the things we want."

"So it's better for those of us who are working to make your visit nice, because we get the things we want by doing things we're good at and know how to do. And it's good for everybody else, because they each only need to trade a little bit of money for their share of whatever Crafted things we're able to get. And it's better for you because you can deal with only a few of us, instead of all of us, and you don't need to worry about being unfair, because we're making sure everything balances in the background. The idea doesn't work perfectly for everything, and there are more details, but that is the general idea. It works well enough to enable big, complicated group trades that would otherwise be hard to arrange."

Huh, clever. Crafters use crafting material that way sometimes, since it's at least a little bit useful to almost everyone, but not everyone will accept it - he usually won't, it's too much trouble to transport - and it's usually not a very good trade for the Crafter offering it. He sees how it'd be handy to have a version without those issues.

(Also the obvious glyph for that is 'value-object', like this.)

"Yeah. We used to track value-objects as little pieces of paper with unique designs, but now the value-objects aren't really objects, just a count of how many value-objects you would have, and the phones keep track of them," Vesherti mentions. "There are complicated pebbleclinker techniques to keep everything fair.  So when we get to the park, you'll see some people walking into a shop, tapping their phone on a machine, and then walking out with something. I wanted to explain our value-object system so that you would understand what was going on there, since otherwise it looks like they're just taking things."

That would have been confusing, yes. He appreciates the warning. Do they have his phone set up to interact with the system?

"We do, in case you wanted to see how it works. But mostly people don't trade things that so many people want part of as you helping us figure out crafting. So your phone has a count of value-objects on it, but that doesn't quite represent the final, fair number because the pebbleclinkers are still working through things. You should have more than enough for anything you want to trade for in the city, just know that the number is not exact and will probably go up as things settle, we put crafted items to use, and so on. It won't go down unless you trade for something, though. The number your phone says is the lower bound," he explains.

"Normally, nobody can manipulate other people's value-objects. But in this case, I am also set up to make trades with your value-objects, just so that I can arrange things for you. I won't unless you ask me to, but since you might not know the best way to get things that's how it's set up right now. We can change that if you want," he adds.

He points out the icon on the phone to make it tell him his current balance.

That sounds reasonable to him, including the guide having access to his value-object stockpile for now, though he'd like to prioritize learning how to manage it himself so he's not in trouble when his territoriality instinct starts kicking in about it.

Vesherti nods.

"We weren't sure how your instinct would interact with an abstract count of objects instead of literal physical objects. But managing it is pretty easy, so it shouldn't be difficult to learn — the whole system is supposed to make things easier and more convenient, not difficult. If you do end up losing value-objects for territoriality reasons — we don't have an existing system for that, but we can trade you the tainted value-objects for fresh ones. Just let me know."

"The main thing is how to do trades with your phone; if you see that same symbol on a machine, it represents a place where you can tap the phone to trade with value-objects. The way it works is you will show the person with the machine the things you want to trade for, they tell the machine, you tap the phone to the symbol, and the phone tells you how many value-objects they're willing to trade for. If you hit the blue 'yes' symbol, the phone does the trade and the things are yours. If you hit the red 'no' symbol, the trade doesn't happen," he explains.

"Usually, shops will have little labels near the things that they are for trading that say how many value-objects they want for each thing, so you can also add up how big a trade will be before you go to the machine to do the trade. There's also a way to trade value-objects directly to another person's phone, but we can leave that for later since you don't have to learn everything at once."

He's not sure how his territoriality instinct is going to interact with the value-objects either, but in the worst case trading out the objects for similarly-conceptual construed-as-different ones might not be enough. It seems like it's unlikely to be a problem, though; he bets he can have the basic trading procedure down within a couple tries.

"That seems likely to me as well."

While they've been speaking, Traveler has gotten his walking machine and dog ready for travel, along with a few other things.

Since Traveler can't fit his walking machine on the train, the way into the city is a bit more winding, but it does roughly follow the train tracks. Vesherti has a little electric cart that keeps pace with the walker just fine.

There's a band of lightly wooded area separating their current location from the city proper — mostly as a sound baffle between areas with and without cars — but then it quickly gives way to two or three story buildings.

There are a number of people walking around in the street, either on their way to work, or just enjoying a walk on their day off. The street is wide, and a number of people in purple uniforms are moving ahead of them, dealing with any problems before they come up. Residents of the buildings on either side cluster by the windows to watch them go, although the ground floors are dedicated to shops and venues of various kinds.

The street zigzags back and forth, making 120 degree corners every few hundred feet, but is otherwise straight — so Traveler's line of retreat should be pretty clear, should he need one.

He stays fairly close to the middle of the street, mostly, after demonstrating that his territoriality instinct starts to kick in when he gets within fifteen feet or so of the buildings and makes it hard for him to move other than to move away. He can look as much as he wants to, though, and does quite a bit of gawking at the stores' front-window displays and waving at the watchers overhead.

Hmm. 15 feet is plenty on the main roads, but is probably pretty tight for some of the other parts of the city. Possibly Traveler just won't be able to go inside any of their buildings.

Vesherti is in no particular rush, so Traveler can spend as much time as he likes looking.

The shops they pass sell: books, food, furniture, dentistry, legal services, cameras, clothing, and many other things. Generally, þereminian cities try to fill the ground floors of their buildings with all kinds of useful, generally public spaces, and reserve higher floors for residences. The exception is the industrial part of the city, which has no residences — but that's about a quarter-turn around the city from where they are now, toward the train yards.

The park is about a quarter mile inside the city, and is fairly large. Trees provide shade to benches, there are some open areas set up for various games, and there's a small pond in the center. The exterior of the park is ringed with the same kinds of buildings they've been walking past, but more tilted toward food, games, and other things that people might want easy access to from a park.

He's impressed with the park; Crafter public areas are similar but usually not so intentionally designed, it's nice.

Once he's had a look around the interior, he does a lap of the shops around the edge, and picks a breakfast stand with a short line of customers to watch - he thinks maybe if he sees enough people going up to it he can convince himself it's not a private structure, despite the coloration, he explains.

Vesherti thinks about this.

"Would it help if I pointed out how to tell which parts of some of these buildings are private, so you can see the shop is not that?" he asks.

A few of the customers wave at them — and, indeed, go inside and then exit again carrying various breakfast foods. Wraps with egg and beans in them are popular.

That might help, yeah. (He waves back.)

Vesherti points at a staircase sandwiched between two shop fronts that leads up to an upper level.

"Private residences are usually up above the public areas," he says. "See the separate stairs headed up? They're separated from the shops so that the people who live there can come and go without interacting with anyone in the shops. Although often the same people run the shops and live above them. See how the door has a personal symbol written on it? That's how you know who lives there."

"Shops also have things written on them, so you can tell what they trade, but they're written in an obviously different style — shop labels are big and over the door, personal labels are smaller and written on the door. Sometimes a personal door will just have a number instead, if they don't want to let people know who lives there."

"Also, notice how all the shop doors have a lot of glass so you can see what they're trading inside, but the residences don't, because people mostly don't want to let others see inside. None of those are always the case, but if somewhere is on the ground floor, has a glass door, and has a big label above the door, it is definitely public. If somewhere is off the ground floor, has an opaque door, and has a small label on the door or no label, it is usually private."

That seems obvious enough, yeah! He's still not sure he'll be able to go in, Crafters don't really have indoor public spaces like that. Or, teenage Crafters do, but he wouldn't be welcome in those, either, he doesn't think that's a useful frame.

He tries it, anyway, and he can get the walker up to the main window now, but when he goes to get out of it to go inside he freezes up again.

Vesherti taps his lip in thought.

"When people are sick, sometimes they want things brought to them instead of going to get them," he remarks. "Of course you could just ask me to go get things for you. But for the sake of learning to do it on your own, I could show you how to use your phone to ask a shop person to bring you things, instead of going in? They usually want a few more value-objects for doing that, but that way you could stand outside and they would bring you things."

That seems like it'd work, yeah. Being very clearly invited in works, too, but it's more stressful and he'd rather not push himself like that today.

Then he will show Traveler yet another function of the phone. If he goes to this page and taps this icon, the phone will show shops that are nearby. Then he can match the shop's symbol here with what's over their door, and see a list of what they are trading and for how many value-objects. He can select the things he wants, and then select this option here to ask them to bring it out to wherever his phone is.

"Not every shop has this set up," Vesherti warns him. "So this won't always work. But most shops are set up to work like this, since they want to make it easy for people to trade with them."

In the case of this particular breakfast place, things they are selling include: bean-and-egg breakfast wraps with your choice of vegetables and sauces added, three different kinds of tea, two different kinds of lemonade, bowls of oats and cream with berries, bowls of yogurt, and two different kinds of muffin.

"Oh — the bowls and cups are usually returned to the shop so they can be cleaned and reused," he adds, when he realizes this is probably not what Traveler would expect. "But you can keep them if you want to; you just won't get a few value-objects back when you return them."

He takes notes as Vesherti explains the process, and asks what the cream and yogurt are when he gets to that part.