Ah, okay. That really re-contextualizes their civilizations' relative levels of engineering knowledge.

They briefly debate whether to give him þereminia's corresponding population statistics; one of them worries that it will cause a diplomatic incident, but the others point out that he could easily infer as much once he gets a look at the city.

"There are about a billion of us," she writes to him. "A little less than a million people live in Largest City. I'm sorry, I was comparing your knowledge of things to ours and judging you, because you can do so much with Crafting, but it seems like your people know less. I shouldn't have judged, but it is hard not to, since knowing these things is so common on our world. But when we had only eight million people, we had not invented machines other than wheels and pumps, and we knew much less. That was many thousands of years ago. We only managed to put things up high enough to not come back down about a gross years ago. Probably in another gross years, Crafters will know a lot too, even if you didn't find us and give us the chance to help teach you things."

Wow, yeah, that's a lot of people. He thinks they have more incentive to mess around with things to see what they can discover, too; Crafting makes a lot of things easy, so there's rarely a need to invent things, and people just do it for fun or because their soul calls them to.

They all nod.

"That makes sense," she agrees. "And even if we didn't have a need, we'd still have twelve times more people who have souls for it."

"If people don't need as many things because of Crafting, what do you do with your time?" she asks, relaying a question from the third woman. "I know you have books; do you have lots of games? Amazing artworks?"

Lots of people do artwork, or challenges, or study things happening in their territories, or invent new machines, or breed or train animals, or things like that. Group things like games or singing are less popular but not uncommon, and so are megaprojects. Designing complicated pebbleclinkers has gotten popular within his lifetime; they're too difficult for most people to understand but the ones who can seem to really like them.

"What do you specifically do?"

He travels and writes about things in different places - how people live, or what the animals are like, or different megaprojects sometimes, or whatever he finds that's interesting. He'll be writing about them next obviously but he'd been working on one about how lake ecosystems differ from place to place. He also raised three kids up to toddlerhood, though he wound up passing them off to their sires when they were old enough to make the switch; he liked it, but he doesn't do well with staying in one place for that long.

That prompts another round of understanding nods; traveling with children is hard.

"I have kids too," one of the women relays. "Although they're grown, now. Do you still get letters from your kids and their sires, or travel back to see them? Or do you not see them once you move on?"

He visits, sometimes, yeah - the older two live in their birth communities, the third one inherited his traveler's soul. He has - or, had, he hasn't fully catalogued what he grabbed out of the fire yet - ansibles to all three of the kids and the latter two sires, the first one didn't take it too well when he figured out he couldn't stick around any longer and they aren't close any more. The kids are all doing well for themselves and he's expecting his first great-grandchild soon.

"That's wonderful; congratulations!"

The woman with the tablet's partner quickly looks up some statistics on her phone, and then adds her own question:

"Do many Crafters have children with different sires? Or is that because of your traveler's soul? We have plenty of people who have children with different sires — and our keeping-track-of-families people usually think this is good — but about half of people with multiple children have them all with the same person."

He thinks it's more like two thirds different sires than half, for Crafters; it's hard to tell, though, since enough people feel private about it that it's not a good idea to ask.

While he's thinking of it, do they have anything for letting people bear or sire children when by birth they'd only be able to do the other one? He imagines that's much more complicated without fleshcrafting.

One of the woman bluescreens at the mention of "fleshcrafting", flips to red, and turns her chair to stare out into the distance. Although she does stay and continue listening to the discussion.

"Not well," the others answer. "We found the tiny parts that tell a body 'have breasts' or 'have body hair' or 'don't do those things'. So people can change what they look like, to some extent. But we can't make someone who can bear children sire them or the other way around. We're working on it — it looks like it may be possible to let a bearer sire children using a special machine — but it doesn't work yet."

(He stops including her in his telepathy when she goes red, unfortunately.)

Well, letting people bear children is beyond his skill level, at least for now, but assuming they're mammals of the sort he's used to he can let people sire children no problem. And breastfeed, if they haven't worked that one out.

Huh!

"Is there a way to tell whether we're the kind of mammal you're used to? Some kind of feedback from Crafting? My partner and I don't need help having children, but I'm curious."

The woman who got overwhelmed fishes around in her robe for a stim toy, and starts spinning it between her fingers.

The dog gets up from where she was laying at traveler's feet and goes to sniff at the redded woman; he gives her a sharp look (which she can't see, facing away from him as she is) and she comes back and inserts her head under his hand to be petted instead.

He'd be able to tell with fleshcrafting without changing anything, yeah, unless there's some kind of really subtle difference. It's the kind of thing he can test on an animal, too.

Probably they can just pass on that fact to the guard on the platform, and they can arrange for Traveler to get some local mammals for testing. For now, she has some additional questions to ask him.

"What's the difference between crafting and fleshcrafting? How do you change bodies if they aren't crafting material?"

Living bodies are like crafting material in the way that matters, though crafting them so the changes stick around properly is a little more complicated, and genecrafting is tricky enough that it's considered its own discipline. (He doesn't know any of it.) It's the same basic type of action, though, for the most part - the main functional difference is that with normal crafting you can make direct copies of an object and with fleshcrafting that doesn't work for most things, for a few different reasons - you can't exactly keep a box of miniaturized organs sitting on a shelf, and even copying your own over you have to account for anatomical and biochemical differences between people - so fleshcrafters need to actually know what they're doing. The simple kinds are pretty simple, though, he gets most of his food from fleshcrafting food plants to grow the part he wants to eat when he wants to eat it.

That raises a lot of questions, really. Not least of all whether whatever property makes crafting work on both flesh and crafting material also means crafting material has medical advantages. Well, beyond the obvious.

... but luckily it's not either of their jobs to figure that sort of thing out.

"I'm curious about what you will think about our food," the woman with the tablet writes. "It is less fresh, but we also have plants from all over the world, and recipes that were invented to deal with the freshness problem but which turned out to be tasty."

He looks forward to finding out.

Actually, do they mind if he pops in to get some crafting material real quick? He wanted to send them back with an ansible that he could write on to let the crowd know what they're talking about over here, but it just occurred to him that it'd make more sense for them to write it up in the local style than for him to do it in between groups, if they're up for it.

"Sure, we can do that," she agrees.

"I think we're done talking about fleshcrafting," her partner remarks in a general sort of way, staring about four feet over from the tushot woman's shoulder.

He'll head in, then, with the dog following close beside him, and return in a few seconds with a lump of grey crafting material. They can keep talking while he forms part of it into a writing board with an indigo border on top and duplicates it into a pair of ansibles, and makes a pencil to go with it.

The women stare at the ansible-creation process thoughtfully.

"You can copy things made of crafting material easily; can you copied paired ansibles to make a new pair of ansibles that are connected to each other but not the original pair?"

If he has both of a pair of ansibles he can copy them like that, yeah; if he only has one he can only copy off a singleton. It also looks like it might be possible to make a double set of ansibles, four rather than two, the way you make the pair in the first place, but all the obvious ways of trying it just disconnect the pair and as far as he knows nobody has figured out how to make it work.

... huh.

There have been so many interesting avenues of exploration and research opened up to her that she feels a bit like an explorer, standing on the edge of a tiny plateau and seeing the rest of the world for the first time.

"Darling, I think I want to switch careers; I think it's time to go back to doing original research, instead of just maintenance stuff," she remarks.

Her partner purses her lips.

"They're going to need someone to safely disassemble existing reactors when we all switch to miraculous magitech power systems," she observes. "But yeah, I see where you're coming from. We have savings; we can probably get a place in the physics department at the university if we beat the rush ..."

Because there's obviously going to be a rush into crafting research. There's just too much to learn.

"Do pebbleclinkers use a lot of ansibles?" she asks Traveler, because that's the obvious application for being able to copy ansibles — make tiny physical relays, arrange them into reusable logic gates, copy and paste the gates without caring about physical layout at all. Probably it doesn't end up being more convenient than automated manufacturing, but ... who cares if your computer needs to be the size of a refrigerator again if you can still carry around the terminal in your pocket?