Meanwhile, a bidding war is happening. This isn't particularly unusual for þereminia, but this one is unusual for attracting so much interest from the average person.

Because the uplink inside Traveler's printer just came online.

The Archive is managing the whole thing, naturally, and they exercised their discretion to begin by downloading the library's index of available books, for obvious reasons. But the ansible link is painfully low-bandwidth — which is to say, it's actually on par with the speed of internet access available in many rural areas, but trying to run an entire planet's curious desire for alien books through a single connection makes it look pitifully under-powered.

The Archive will download and redistribute all of the books; that's not in question. The thing that has to be decided is the order.

So people pool their money to move books that interest them higher in the queue. The redundant servers inside the Archive's datacenters process an unusually high volume of financial transactions. And inside Traveler's printer, the uplink begins gently, politely requesting books.

The Archive isn't the only þereminian institution exercising some level of discretion over access to limited bandwidth, though. So the next visitor Traveler receives is Kharet, a plant biologist who is interested in talking about how it is that plants can grow in crafting material.

He is also a reasonably fit and handsome switch who is attracted to men and visits the pink district semi-regularly. Traveler might run into a mildly disproportionate number of those, going forward.

He wasn't told why the diplomatic team suggested that he meet with Traveler directly, instead of passing off his proposal for a crafting-material-fertilizer randomized trial indirectly, but he assumes it's for good diplomatic reasons. And it is, just not for good diplomatic reasons that he would guess if he were pressed to make a guess.

He's happy to discuss how crafted fertilizer works, and give samples and demonstrations. (He can grow plants in normal soil, too, it just gets depleted and that limits things.) And if Kharet gets the impression, midway through the visit, that the friendly alien is paying a little more attention to him than he might otherwise be, well, that could just be an impression he's getting through his own intuition, at least if he has a Crafter-typical inclination towards intuitions of that sort.