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.

The woman in blue makes her own attempt, using the screen to pull up some pictures. She shows wolves hunting in a pack, geese flying in a V formation, and an ant colony.

"((Together animals) work) ­— (No crafting) — (No (Crafter of household)) — (Yes (are like household)) — (? words)"

...he's not sure what they're getting at but he's intrigued. Yes, animals form groups and work together to achieve their goals; the groups vary a lot in how household-like they are, from herbivore herds where they seem to just be sticking together for safety by instinct to elephantiforme herds where the matriarch takes a role similar to a Crafter head-of-household but with much more input from other members of the group rather than just telling everyone what to do. Crows also work together in a different way that might be useful for comparison; they do have stable families of two to five who stick together and look out for each other, but their flock dynamics are more fluid and when they need to work together on something they just ask whichever other crows are nearby to help.

Here's the glyphs for elephantiformes, crows, herbivores, groups, leading, and following.

This seems to be what the þereminians were after; they consult a bit more, and then the woman clears her screen and tries another utterance.

"(We are like crows) (We are like elephants) (We have groups)"

She puts up a picture of four people on the screen. If he's a face-recognizer, he may be able to tell that one of the people is her, but wearing different clothing. She gestures between herself and the picture of her to make this more obvious. Two other people are adults, and the remaining person is a child.

"(This is (my crow group))" she adds. She draws some lines between the child and two other adults and labels them "child" on one end and "parent" on the other. Then she draws lines between the three adults and labels them "romantic partner".

Then she shows a picture of herself with some coworkers, all wearing green and sitting in a group.

"(This is (and (my elephant group) (my book group)))"

She draws an arrow from one person in particular to a new bubble.

"(This is (leader (my elephant group) of))"

He completely fails to figure out that it's her in all the pictures, even with the gesturing, but that's fine, he gets the idea anyway.

Adult Crafters will visit each others' territories, and it wouldn't be that strange to see a group like that hanging out together in one of their homes; the territoriality instinct means it's much harder for Crafters to take care of themselves when they're in someone else's territory, though, and that's unpleasant enough that adults don't live together without some kind of pressing reason. Crafters also maintain public areas, where people can meet their neighbors and get together to do things and leave notes for the community; hobby groups are common there and her book group might be that sort of thing, though he's not sure he's got it right. (He's very curious what kinds of things they pick clothing colors about.) Some places also have local pebbleclinker networks - someone will build a pebbleclinker and share ansibles with their neighbors to let them get in on whatever the pebbleclinker does, most often passing messages back and forth between users. And then rarely there are schools - someone will get good enough at whatever thing that people will start showing up to ask to be taught, and if they don't turn people away it can take over a whole area if it gets enough traction - or other multi-person megaprojects, where people stay in mobile houses or claim territories near each other and work together on whatever thing. Most Crafters only have friends and romantic partners and a hobby group or two, though, for interaction with other Crafters.

That seems like ... a step in the direction of communicating the idea that þereminians have complex social structures, at least.

Luckily for his curiosity about clothing, þereminians love explicit signalling, and there are handy reference diagrams for the meaning of different styles.

The woman puts one up on the screen. At the top, there are three different figures wearing different cuts of robe. The robes are otherwise plain brown. Lacking any gender-related vocabulary, however, the woman leaves those three unexplained. Instead, she starts to write descriptions next to the lower section, which has robes in different colors and patterns:

Purple corresponds to "work". Purple with black accents in a specific shape corresponds to "(and (danger work) (heal work))". She pauses next to a few different blue patterns, tries to figure out how to word things, and eventually gives up and writes "(? more words)". Dark green gets "(and (book work) teacher student)", while light green gets "(and games (? work))". Lemon yellow gets another "?", but goldenrod gets "(group leader)". Orange gets "changing" and dark red gets "private". Pink gets "(? ? (is like romantic partner) (not (is like romantic partner)))", and all white with a face covering gets "(and (heal work) (? hunter))". Brown gets "(is like O)" with a big gray circle.

Then there are some more specific patterns: vertical thin purple and gold pinstripes gets "((leader group) (group of group))". A design with purple squares gets "heal work" without other qualifiers.

At the very bottom of the chart is a bunch of mixed patterns of multiple colors with lots of small writing that she doesn't bother to try and translate.

He's guessing purple and black is medical first responder? Crafters all know some first aid but that's not otherwise a specific role for them; it makes sense as a role to have, though. Dark green makes sense; light green makes less sense - he thinks a board game coordinator and a choir leader and a sports coach are very different sorts of things - but he thinks he gets the idea. Pink might be a confidant type role? Or sex related but that doesn't make sense to him as a role like the others at all. White he has to think about and offers a tentative guess that they're in charge of sanitation; brown he thinks is generic, probably unskilled work or manual labor. The purple and gold pinstripe concept is weird; he thinks he gets what they're getting at (some sort of overarching community coordinator) but they don't have that at home and he doesn't know how it'd work. Purple squares for healers is clear enough. (He takes notes of his own, on another section of converted railing; the bit near him is almost entirely gone now and he's sitting crosslegged on the deck of the ex-airship.)

She nods to each of those, although his thoughts on pink get a finger-through-hole gesture that should hopefully be pretty self explanatory.

Since he seems to have gotten the gist, she puts up a picture of a þereminian city, so he can see the colors in context:

Hundreds of people are visible in the picture, covering a wide cobbled area between two rows of four-story buildings. There are trees planted down the center of the area, and more buildings visible in the background where the area branches out. The buildings are different colors, but not all different — some buildings look pretty much the same. They all have signs with writing on them, although it doesn't look much like Crafter writing, because there are no glyphs that encircle other glyphs.

The main focus of the scene, however, is the people. People in blue are sitting around eating and socializing. People in purple are mostly visible inside the shops. People in green mix with some of the people in blue. People in light green are climbing one of the buildings, with ropes tied around them for safety. A couple in yellow is getting their picture painted by a man in brown and orange. People in red thread through the crowd, being ignored and having space left around them. The other colors are absent.

Goodness. That certainly explains why they need the red signal! Even without a territoriality instinct he doesn't know how they can tolerate that, it looks so overwhelming.

She puts up a picture of a single-person cabin in the woods, with only a single person sitting on their porch, and nobody else visible through the windows for comparison.

She wants the glyph for "varies", but she doesn't have it, so instead she captions the pictures "(different places) — (there is (and (<arrow pointing at city> us) (<arrow pointing at forest> us)))".

Then she draws two circles for "city us" and "forest us", although she has to use arrows since she doesn't have a word for city. She draws two arrows going back and forth between them, and labels the one from the forest to the city "(give (and (not Crafting) (is like Crafting)) food)", and the one from the city to the forest "((is like pebbleclinker) give (and (not Crafting) (is like Crafting)))"

'Not crafting but like it' is presumably whatever they're doing instead of it - here's the glyph for assembly, that's probably the closest his language has to it. The dictionary won't have a glyph for city but there's an obvious construction for 'densely populated territory' that should work fine, and here's the one for forest.

So the forest-dwelling locals produce food - which would have to be a whole thing, without crafting, wouldn't it - and trade it to the city-dwelling ones for... something? He's not sure what they might have that's similar to pebbleclinkers.

Oh, also, he's going to want a few hours to himself once the things get here, if they want to take that into account in their choices of whether to try to communicate things like this vs. letting him get through the rest of the dictionary.

That's very relatable; lots of people would want time to themselves after appearing in an alien world. The þereminians indicate understanding.

Romafiŋ glances over at the book printer, which has already printed the next section, and decides to hold her questions for later.

They settle down to learn more words.

And so he continues through the dictionary. They'll learn from the animals section that his world is in the late glacial interstadial period, with a wide variety of fauna from that time period being familiar to him. From the section on fleshcrafting and body parts, they'll learn that Crafters can make extensive modifications to themselves and to plants and animals, for medical, functional, and cosmetic purposes. (He's had unspecified medical and functional work done but no cosmetic work; he shares a memory of a friend who has fur in peach-themed colors and a pair of prehensile tentacles with tasting patches on them as an example of the sort of thing Crafters who want more extensive upgrades might go for.) There's also a shorter section on genecrafting; most of the vocabulary for that is specialist territory and not included in the basic dictionary, but the general gist of it is that crafting can reactivate dormant genes or the inverse (he offers a memory of a dinosuar-ish crow as an example of the results of that, though often it's more subtle) or add new ones (Crafters as a species have a couple reproductive quirks not usually seen in mammals that they believe were genecrafted in at some point, as an example of what can be done with that) to change a creature's traits in a way that can, optionally, be passed down to any offspring, unlike fleshcrafted changes.

There's no mention anywhere of money or formalized jobs or any economic activity beyond small-scale individual-to-individual trade, and very little vocabulary related to organized groups at all; the compound word he uses for 'library' in an example sentence doesn't distinguish the global library from someone's personal collection. There's also only a brief mention of pebbleclinkers, in the section about complex machinery; again more detailed vocabulary is specialist territory and they'll need a separate book (or more likely a few books) if they want to know more about them. Gender does come up, just briefly in the section on body parts; discussions of both gender and anatomical sex make use of the outer marking for talking about binaries and spectrums in general, where left and right indicate the two extremes and above and below indicate both and neither, with one mark used on the relevant position on the outer circle to indicate a relatively normal example of that position relative to the extremes and a different one to indicate an unusual example.

That is such a neat way to indicate gender in writing! You could get really detailed with exploring how a character's relationship to their gender changes over time. Đorestat is tempted to draw an alien gender-marker for themself, or maybe to show off þereminia's standard-trinary-model tetrahedron, but they're not really sure how to map gender onto a bi-polar model.

Plus, it occurs to them after a moment that Crafter gender norms are probably different, as well. Maybe they don't have a third gender because they're less social, so there's less need for people who (yes, it's a stereotype, and they've never been very good with numbers, but as a vague gender norm) specialize in accounting?

Romafiŋ finishes signing out the last of the entries, and then sort of collapses for a moment to catch up with the long stream of alien words that she really hopes all the linguists got, because she totally did not memorize all of them in one go.

... plus, with more examples of the grammar, she totally overused grouping markings in her earlier attempts. They can actually be omitted in a bunch of places without the syntax being ambiguous.

Luckily, they're all saved from being asked to relay messages from the remote team by the arrival of the truck with the things their guest requested. They didn't send too many people out, to avoid spooking Traveler, so Romafiŋ and Đorestat are both roped into helping to unload the contents.

Inside are large crates, hastily spray-painted grey. Some of them contain junk, some of them contain books or art objects that they think he might like, some contain food and seeds, and one contains a chicken. On top of the chicken crate is a grey phone with a solar charger.

The woman with the display scrawls a much more grammatical message on it, under coaching from the linguists.

"Here are the things you wanted. Thank you for teaching us your words. Do you want to ask questions about the things we got you, talk more, or have your privacy now?"

He appreciates the things and especially the crates being greyed; he'd been thinking about how to bootstrap something for that from his house but this way is much more convenient. He should get the animals settled (his dog will be pretty desperate for a walk by now) and then he really needs some time making crafting material - it's soothing - and a nap before he tries to do anything else.

The various þereminians nod, and pile back into the truck, which slowly makes its way back to the airport.

Meanwhile, and just over 130 miles away, a group of speculative xenopsychologists — a field which, prior to today, only avoided underfunding because þereminians get passionate about these things — have gotten into a fistfight, again because þereminians get passionate about these things.

"They've got to have some kind of larger organization! They've got communicative telepathy! You don't develop communicative telepathy unless there's a reason to talk to your neighbors!"

     "The helpful alien has not just censored all of the words pertaining to community organization in his dictionary. That's absurd! Clearly, socialization is not as necessary for the development of intelligence as we previously thought."

Luckily, their colleagues have mostly gotten them restrained at this point, so they're more shouting than anything.

"It's less absurd than suggesting that all of our evolutionary biology knowledge is wrong! Maybe they've got a cultural taboo about representing non-constituent groups strong enough to make the vocabulary taboo."

    "Oh, you think everything is a taboo! It's not like evolutionary psychology makes any sense, anyway — we know that there must be complex tradeoffs in the evolution of intelligence that aren't obvious from historical evidence based on modern demographic sampling."

"Doesn't make sense! Doesn't make sense! Are you a scientist or aren't you?"

"Gentlemen! I asked you whether you had any suggestions for the diplomatic team in putting together and presenting our trade proposals," the director of Larger Continent Emergency Services, a stern older woman, barks.

They exchange sheepish glances.

"Yes, well. I think that things are ... probably too preliminary to say. We really need more data."

    "That's the first thing you've said that I've agreed with."

The director does not sigh, although only because she has spent years doing the managerial equivalent of herding cats.

"I'm not asking you for a firm commitment, just any predictions that we[in] should keep in mind."

Ultimately, it's probably a good thing that it takes the Traveler a while to get his things settled, because she doesn't manage to drag a useful amendment to their existing first-contact plan out of that room for nearly another hour.