He wouldn't call that trade fair but he doesn't mind it being unfair in his favor if they don't. (He chuckles a little at this.)

The problem he sees with putting his library ansible in their pebbleclinker is that if something goes wrong, he wants to be sure he'll get it back, and he doesn't know them that well yet. ...thinking about it, it should be possible to relay the relevant kinds of ansible changes to a second ansible, he can look into whether that works well enough for this. He can also copy off the rest of the printer aside from the ansible if they want to take a look at that; in general crafted objects can be copied trivially as long as he has enough material for the copy, it's just ansibles that are an exception.

"A copy of the book printer without the ansible would be wanted," Vesherti agrees. "And a chained ansible is okay. Or maybe we can make a small pebbleclinker that fits inside your book printer, and you can keep the ansible with your things. It depends on how the ansible communicates things."

Sure, an addon to his printer is fine. Or if they want to make an entire second half-printer that relays their books instead of printing them, he can leave the ansible in there when he's not using it, that might be easier.

Here's a copy of the printer - it really is just that easy, yeah - and if they don't mind waiting while he looks up the reference number he can get a book started for them that'll explain how the encoding and decoding works.

Vesherti nods.

"Thank you."

Some of his team pick up the printer and load it into the truck, which will take it to the airport's airplane component laser grid defect scanner — which is unfortunately not portable, but which should produce a high-quality 3d scan of the mechanism in short order.

The printer is designed to be manually serviced, albeit by someone who can easily double or even quadruple its scale if they need to get at any particularly fiddly bits, and uses the same hot-to-mark, cold-to-erase scheme that they've seen before with the pencils; they shouldn't have too hard of a time figuring most of it out.

He doesn't remember all of how the encoding scheme works but he can go over what he does remember while they're waiting for the book, if they'd like, or they can talk about something else.

Hmm. On the one hand, alien protocol specifications sound really interesting. On the other hand, Vesherti is very much not a computer science person, and probably it's better to have someone look at the book and then come up with questions to ask.

"A pebbleclinker-person will look at the book," he says. "We can talk about other things. Are there things that are important to you or important to ask that (we haven't asked them yet)?"

Important for them to ask, he's not sure - if they're going to want things from him it'd be useful to know about that before he gets too far into rebuilding, it might affect how he sets his household up, but presumably they know that and he likes to keep himself ready for surprises anyway. He should maybe give them a more comprehensive look at what crafting can do but he'll do a better job of it if he takes some time to think about what they'll want to know first. In terms of what he wants to know, he imagines that with them living so close together they have lots of habits relating to how to treat each other that he's not going to be familiar with; he should probably get at least an overview of that. And also it'd be useful to know more about how their machines work, it's very likely that he can do things with crafting that are useful for that in ways they might not be able to replicate without it.

He nods. Those are all good talking points. He briefly confers with the remote experts.

"Showing how people live closely is easier tomorrow," he writes. "I can point at examples. For our machines — they work in lots of ways; many work by little trapped lightning. What do you know yet about trapped lightning or stones that want to face one way?"

Luckily, they did think ahead about how to demonstrate this when the dictionary didn't contain vocabulary for electrical computing. One of Vesherti's team members fetches some (hastily spray-painted) magnets and bits of wire, setting them near Traveler in case he wants them.

Magnets are obscure, at home, but he knows how to make them, yeah. (Here's the glyph he prefers for that, it's obscure enough that there's a couple competing ones.) He's never heard of trapping lightning.

He extrudes a grabber from his vehicle and uses it to bring the wires and magnets up to the not-glass, where he opens a hole to bring them inside to look at; after a few moments he confirms that the magnets are the type of thing he was thinking of but communicates that he's not familiar with the material the wires are made of, or at least not recognizing it here; can they say more about its relevant properties?

"It is like insulation — Some things, heat goes through easily. Some things, heat goes through slowly. It's the same with trapped lightning," he explains. "This stuff is copper."

He uses the Larger Continent Trade Language word for copper in its own little bubble, since they don't know any words for metallurgy.

"It lets trapped lightning through easily. The best way to see that is to wrap it many times around a tube, and quickly spin a magnet inside the tube."

They're guessing Traveler can probably do that pretty easily by making a little crank shaft, but maybe they'll need to elaborate.

"The magnet drags the tiny bits of trapped lightning that are inside everything along behind it as it turns, and because the copper lets it through easy, the bits of trapped lightning add up to an amount that you can feel. If you touch a finger across the two ends of the coil of wire while spinning the magnet, your finger will feel a tiny lightning strike. The amount of lightning you can make with a small magnet and a little wire is not too much — but it is a bad idea to experiment with lots of trapped lightning until you understand it, because getting hit by a larger lightning strike is bad. It can stop your heart or do worse things."

Huh!

He sets up a little motor - he doesn't need to hand-crank it, it's driven by a rod that expands and contracts to spin the wheel it's hooked to - and gives it a try.

Oh, that! It's the same thing that happens in cold places with dry air. There's a way to set crafting material up to be more or less prone to stinging in those conditions; it doesn't get used for anything else so it doesn't get talked about much but he bets it's what they mean, or at least related.

He makes up his own little coil of stinging-prone wire (only moderately stinging-prone, he's not sure how something very stinging-prone would compare to the copper's degree of it and it might be dangerous) and tries it in place of the copper.

That doesn't seem to do much. Possibly it's just stinging a lot less, but possibly it doesn't work at all.

"It is related!" Vesherti agrees. "Things sting like that when there is more trapped lightning in the thing then in your hand, so the lightnings rush to even out, like water or sand reaching a level."

He doesn't have a great view of Traveler's follow-up experiment, but he can say some more general things about conductors and static electricity.

"Spinning the magnet is different, because you push the lightnings, not just let them flow. To build up more trapped lightning on one thing, you can either make a machine that pushes it a lot, or you can use a thing that does not let little lightnings go very well, so you can push them in gently and then they get stuck. By combining materials that let lightnings go fast and that don't, you can guide the lightnings to flow in precise patterns, which is how we can make very small lightning-based pebbleclinkers."

That's really clever! His little experiment with a stinging-prone bit of crafting material doesn't seem to be working; he can probably figure it out himself if he keeps experimenting but it might be safest to give them a set of wires with different levels of that trait and let them figure out how that relates to this by their own methods. Not that he expects to get into lightning machine design or anything but he'd like to write this up for the people back home to play with.

Not only is knowledge of electricity public domain everywhere in the world by now, but also there's no way Traveler wouldn't have seen lots of examples of electrical appliances with their various wires in the city; þereminia is more than happy to just teach the aliens about electricity. It will probably make it easier to trade with them, especially if they can put an internet connection through an ansible.

"We can test wires," Vesherti agrees. "There's a standard scale for how much they let the little lightnings flow, and it's easy to test."

"Since so many machines use little lightnings, we have books about (the study of little lightnings)," he offers. "We can write them in Crafter words and share."

That'll be much appreciated, definitely, though he might still be the best positioned person to write something about how it works with crafting in particular. In any case....

...here's a set of wires running the whole spectrum of the winter stinging trait, the proportion of white to black in the middle indicates where on the spectrum they lie with more white being more of the trait. Gradations finer than these 24 are definitely possible but this set seems like a decent starting point.

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.