The land that stretches out below them is not very forested.

Directly below them, there are scattered copses of trees. But by far the most noticeable feature of the landscape is the set of large, boxy buildings surrounded by long, black, flat roads visible on the horizon. It would be noticeable even if those were its only visible characteristics, because the land is otherwise fairly dull, but it is also marked by having several large, loud, fast flying machines of unfamiliar design taking off and landing.

Also, someone has pointed a bright light at them from the top of the tallest tower, and is flashing it in a repeating pattern.

...He didn't think there were any megaprojects like this around here? For that matter he didn't think there were any plains around here; where is he? And what's that flashing about?

Figuring that out is less important than getting out of dangerous airspace, he has no idea if those aircraft are agile enough to avoid him or guided in such a way that they'd even realize they ought to. He's not in the path of any right now, he doesn't think; he takes down most of his ship's flotation bag, rendering the remainder into a makeshift parachute that'll keep the ship oriented properly and stop it from going into complete freefall, and begins converting the freed up crafting material and the bottom of the ship's hull into a squishy buffer that'll hopefully offer enough protection when it hits the ground and straps to keep him from being flung around. The crows squawk in protest and abandon ship when it begins to fall; he's too distracted to explain what he's doing or warn them about the other aircraft, they'll have to figure it out for themselves.

The other aircraft are, in fact, flying nowhere near him. Departing aircraft are taking off almost directly opposite him, and arriving aircraft are coming in at a ninety-degree angle to him.

Nobody wants mid-air collisions, even though þereminia does its best to put airports in places that won't be seriously inconvenienced by crashes. So when the airport picked an unknown object up on radar, they routed flights well clear of it.

But you can't really stop air traffic into and out of the largest airport in the world every time there's an unidentified radar blip in dense cloud.

His landing is rough, but the ground here is fairly soft, and no permanent harm seems likely to result.

Yet a third style of aircraft takes of vertically from the set of buildings, and begins flying in his direction.

He gives himself a few moments to catch his breath after the crash, then goes to check on his dog - banged up and unhappy, but with no obvious broken bones or anything - and sets about reworking the ship into a walking configuration so that he can get out of this apparently-claimed patch of land. It'll take maybe half an hour; he could go faster if he could rework the whole thing at once but he can't do that while he's on board and can't leave the ship in someone else's territory.

Helicopters go somewhat faster than that; a team of people wearing black and purple robes land approximately forty meters away, and then quickly make their way over.

The one in the lead shouts something — but in a concerned tone of voice, not an angry one. Between them, the people are carrying a stretcher, and a set of pouches with a purple square on them.

He looks up when shouted at, and recoils in startled confusion when he sees them, but he recovers quickly and goes over to the railing nearest them.

They all get the impression, from no apparent source, that he's sorry for intruding on their(?? he's assuming based on their weird matching color schemes, but he's never seen anyone match like that before and is just guessing at what it means) airspace and territory and intends no claim by his presence, he got caught in a bad storm and blown here or something (he will figure out how he got from a mountainside to plains without noticing later); he's getting his house into a walking configuration now and will leave as soon as he can, and he'd appreciate it if they could point him to the nearest edge of their territory. Also ideally at the nearest public meeting area so he can get help getting back to his other things.

They were expecting a crashed balloonist who had blown far off course. They were not expecting telepathy.

The three figures stop and confer for a moment. One of them steps back, pulls a flat, rectangular device out of their robe, and starts speaking into it in a low voice. The other two stand and think hard at him, but when this doesn't generate a response, they begin pantomiming a scene:

One figure acts like they're floating, and then suddenly falls to the ground and clutches at his arm. The other figure mimes spotting him, and then comes over and pretends to splint his arm.

Then they both stand up and make questioning faces at the telepathic alien and his balloon crash.

When the one touches the other he looks very concerned.

He's fine, they get the impression, but he's concerned that they're not, if they can't communicate with outsiders (not surprising, exactly, but he thinks it's a bad sign for their mental state) and don't know how to Craft away a simple injury like a broken bone (much more concerning). His best guess is that they're stuck in some kind of bad situation that's causing both of those; he can make part of his house public if any of them want a lift out of here.

As they get the impression that he's offering to make his house public, the color drains out of the ship under his hands, leaving a grey patch that continues across the hull until it covers half the ship. Then a section of railing on the grey side flows and shifts into a ramp leading down to the ground a little ways away from them.

One of the figures scratches their head, and they give each other stumped looks.

The one who faked a broken arm holds a hand against his chest and says "Shavami". The other one holds a hand to their chest and says "Đorestat". Then they point at each other and say the opposite words. One of them points at the telepath and looks questioning.

In the background, a large wheeled vehicle leaves from the collection of buildings in their direction.

He doesn't know what that's about - or, he has a guess, are they doing sound symbolism like writing is visual symbolism? Can they craft at all? Uh-

Two patches of the ship's hull lighten and darken respectively, settling into a white circle and a black one spaced a couple feet apart.

He'll understand them to mean yes if they indicate white and no if they indicate black: can they craft at all?

They look relieved, and the one who might be called Đorestat points at the black circle.

Well shit. Where is he.

Crafting is more or less a species trait, he explains; babies learn it like they learn to walk, where he's from. It's not completely unheard of for someone to never pick it up but only if they're pretty badly cognitively disabled and that's clearly not what's happening here. He has no idea what to make of people who can't.

He's still going to need to get his house into walking shape, being stranded like this is making him anxious, but is this a territory he needs to get out of?

Ðorestat shakes their head and points at the black circle again.

They point at the buildings, and mime a plane taking off over their heads. They point up at the sky, nod, and point at the white circle. Then they point down at the ground, shake their head, and point at the black circle again.

Aircraft belong in the sky and not on the ground? Yes? - are they still thinking of his house as an airship - it was one but he took apart the airship parts with Crafting when he needed to get out of the sky and it's just as easy to turn it into a ground vehicle now as to put those back; he doesn't intend to try to share the sky with their aircraft.

That appears to satisfy both the purple people. They step back and sit down on the grass, speaking softly to each other and watching him make repairs.

"They don't even have the concept of spoken language; the linguists are going to be so worked up," Đorestat remarks to their partner.

"I'm more interested in the fact that they said the 'crafting' was learnable. I mean, maybe it's only their species that can learn it, but what if it's not? Once we've actually gotten some form of shared language, we should ask if they're willing to teach a baby," Shavami suggests.

"The airport is sending out some other folks for confirmation, and a big screen to help with language learning," the person who hung back to call this in interjects. "I'd normally want to try more introductions, but in this case it might be better to wait on a specialist."

The others nod.

He goes back to fixing his house, though the first thing he does is to turn it back to sparkly indigo and take the ramp back in. He turns various sections of the hull transparent so they can see what he's doing as he sets up the walking mechanics on the underside of the structure; they're a combination of straightforward gearwork and much less familiar tubes and blobs of material that reshape themselves - or sometimes recolor themselves or do other things - in response to various stimulii.

That is fascinating, although the þereminians are all a little unclear on why he wouldn't just use wheels.

A few minutes later, the truck that set out from the airport arrives, demonstrating that wheels work just fine over this sort of terrain. Another person in purple and black gets out, and then helps an older woman wearing a blue robe with pictures of birds get down. They unload a large screen, and set it up close enough that their visitor will be able to see it, while not getting too close.

The woman pokes around on the back of the panel, and then pulls up a map of the world on it, with a spot on the eastern coast of the largest landmass highlighted.

...okay that makes things dramatically more confusing; that's the same set of continents he knows from home. ...almost; there are a couple of areas they have marked as water that he knows as land or vice versa. And he's been to this region at home and knows people there can Craft, and also there's no way he got to this region from the other continent in the couple days he was stuck above the clouds.

The woman nods; yes, this situation is pretty confusing.

She toggles on the 'population' layer of the map, showing stick figures of people proportional to population spread out through the whole world. Then she shows a little video clip of him changing his house that Romafiŋ captured earlier, and says the word for "craft". Then she points to the people gathered around and says "no craft". She points to all the population centers on the map, including on the smaller landmass, and again says "no craft".

He belatedly realizes he ought to put back the yes and no dots, and does that, adding a set of primary colored ones underneath them for more complicated questions as well, and then asks for confirmation that they know nobody on the planet can craft.

Also, just to confirm, they have no idea how he can get home?

Yes to both of those.

Okay. Well, he has his most important ansibles in his emergency kit, he can get some people at home working on it, but he's presumably going to be here for a while. Are they the right people to talk to about what he's going to need in the short term? He can trade Crafting or something for the help; if they can make aircraft without Crafting they can probably do a lot of what he can but there's probably something useful he can do.

The woman smiles and indicates that yes, they're the right people.

She is privately amused at how little sense this conversation will make to to anyone who's not here in person; presumably the dispatchers have tasked someone else with taking notes, but the poor linguists are going to be so upset that they did not actually end up being useful for first contact.

Good, he appreciates that. He's going to need water soonest; his current supply is very low. Foodwise he'll be fine for a few days but he'll need meat for his dog when his current supply of jerky runs out; he has some food plants and can Craft food for himself from those. In the longer run he's going to want some chickens - about a dozen and ideally a rooster too - or other small food animals if chickens aren't available, and a wider variety of food plants than he's currently got, and a fairly large amount of whatever spare non-dangerous stuff they have around; he can convert that into crafting material to Craft into tools and fertilizer and housing for the chickens and whatever else. He'll also need a place to be - he's not picky, it's not like he's going to make a permanent claim there, he just needs to not be in anyone's way - and if the area they recommend has dangerous wildlife he'll want a few more reasonably-friendly dogs to help keep watch and some extra chickens to keep them fed with.

The woman briefly confers with the purple people. On the one hand, there's a reason that nothing important is put near the airport. On the other hand, it's going to be very convenient to fly in the people who are going to want to talk to the alien, and the airport does have a lot of existing infrastructure. On the gripping hand, they have no way to communicate a nuanced answer to the alien. 

She puts up pictures of water, meat, human food, seeds, and chickens, and makes affirmative gestures. Then she points up at the sun (just visible through thinning clouds), and then points about thirty degrees lower in the sky.

Two of the purple people head off to move the helicopter and truck back to the airport, although the others stay.

Sure, that's plenty soon enough.

The other thing they should do is get some better communication going; he's not optimistic that he's going to be able to learn their sound-based system, he's having trouble telling the sounds apart, but written communication should work fine if they do that. It'll probably be easier for them to learn his language first rather than the other way around, since he can tell them what the glyphs mean; he can download a dictionary from the global library at home and make copies for them all if they'd like to do it that way. Should he go ahead and do that?

Aw, there goes the end of her ability to poke fun at the linguists. But on the other hand — a chance to learn a genuine alien language, one apparently unconstrained by phonology, would excite even the most reserved person.

"Yes!" she indicates.

He'll do that, then. Getting the full dictionary printed is going to take a few hours but it comes in parts, he can get started with them as soon as the first section is ready, in maybe half an hour.

And, once he's got the printer going: Do they want to try asking him any questions while they wait?

The woman snorts. She very much wants to — as does everyone being made aware of this remotely — but doesn't have many words to ask questions with.

Đorestat tries tugging at their robe, trying to indicate the color, and then gesturing at his patterned house and looking questioning.

Ah, yeah, he wasn't sure how obvious that difference would be from their end. The sparkly indigo and gold colorway is his personal pattern; it indicates that something belongs to him. Grey - sometimes with subtle patterns in it but a flat neutral grey is almost universally recognized - indicates that something is intended for public use, and mixed colorways indicate that something is owned by a particular person but they're allowing others to use it in specific ways, like when he turned part of his house grey he was indicating that they could have come into that part. Crafters have a territoriality instinct that makes it basically impossible for them to touch other peoples' things or go into other peoples' spaces without clear, direct invitation and even sometimes with it, and clearly marking things that are theirs helps them not get confused about what things they're welcome to interact with. (Yes, it is pretty weird to him that they're wearing the same colorway like that; it makes sense if they can't trivially recolor things, but it still looks like they're claiming to be the same person. It's fine, though, he's sure he'll get used to it eventually.)

They perk up, and grab the hem of their robe, which they hold up for him to see.

Along the hem are a tightly-packed sequence of subtly hand-embroidered characters. To someone unfamiliar with Largest City styles, it probably looks like gibberish. To someone who has read the city's social signalling guide, however, it's a dense code revealing several details of Đorestat's personality and history. And that this robe is machine washable.

Romafiŋ rolls her eyes. But she also shows her own robe hem for comparison — which is noticeably less detailed, since not everyone is so into precisely labeling aspects of their personality, but which does have her name on it, at least.

That's pretty clever and he appreciates knowing about it! He might still get them mixed up with each other since he's used to being able to tell who's who at a glance but it should definitely help.

Oh, and he thinks earlier they asked how to refer to him - Crafters don't generally have specific personal designations aside from their personal patterns, they just describe the person they're thinking of in enough detail to disambiguate. But if they want a standardized way to talk about him they can base it on his pattern - with the caveat that it's not impossible that he'll change it in the future - or use the pen name he writes books under, 'traveler'.

Oh, that will be a lot more friendly sounding than calling him 'the alien' all the time!

They're all sort of dying of having a friendly alien who is willing to explain things, but whom they cannot meaningfully question.

The woman thinks and then takes off her hair ornament, which is blue, and shows it to the Traveller. Then she says something to Đorestat. They nod, and then tap her on the arm. She switches to red and repeats herself. Đorestat makes a show of refusing to touch her, and turns away to stop looking at her. She switches back to blue, and Đorestat taps her arm again. Then she puts the hair ornament back in her hair.

Huh, also clever. Crafters generally just stay in their territory when they don't want to deal with other people. Also he needs them to be significantly less casual than that about touching him, it'll interact extremely badly with the territoriality instinct - touching something is a more visceral indication of ownership than anything else, if he were to toss them something with his pattern on it and they picked it up and threw it back without greying it first he wouldn't be able to touch it because it wouldn't feel like it was his anymore. Which isn't a huge deal when it's a random object, he can just make another unless something's gone really wrong, but if it's him himself...

They all indicate agreement.

Romafiŋ relays a message from dispatch: some physicists want to solicit more information on ansibles, if possible.

"Maybe we could try to explain about phones, and then Traveller could see that they don't work by the same principle," she suggests.

Đorestat takes the more pragmatic approach of pointing at the printer that is spitting out the first section of the dictionary and looking curious.

Do they want to know about ansibles (indicate red), the technology behind storing and retrieving books (yellow), the global library (blue), or something else (black)?

Đorestat points at the red circle, since it does sound like ansibles are pretty important, but then follows it up with a gesture at the blue circle, because who in their right mind would not want to hear about an alien Archive.

Ansibles are a special kind of Crafted object; there's a sense in which an ansible is actually one object existing in two places at once, and any change to one half of it changes the other as well.

He sinks his fingers into the railing as if it was clay, taking some of the material it's made of to make into an example; after greying it and focusing on it for a few moments he tosses one half down to them, a small egg-shaped lump of smooth, firm material; once he sees that they've picked it up he flattens his part out into a thick sheet, and the other part flattens in their hands.

There's all kinds of things you can do with an ansible - they're popular in complicated machinery for transmitting motion from one area to another without having to build transmission machinery through other parts of the build - but the thing they're best for is communicating over long distances. For example, if he writes on his part, the writing shows up on Đorestat's as well. Or if he makes it visibly temperature-sensitive, they can see each others' handprints along with their own, where they're holding it.

Man, they are going to have all kinds of questions for Traveler once they have enough vocabulary to talk about physics.

They play with the ansibles for a few moments, show them to the other þereminians, and then toss it back since he apparently has a limited amount of crafting material.

He appreciates getting the ansible back - they can have some crafted stuff to keep in the long run but he's on short rations with it right now, he had to leave most of his stuff behind when he went up in this airship.

Anyway: the global library. It started as someone's megaproject - some fraction of Crafters decide that they want to do something big rather than just leading relatively quiet lives, and megaprojects are one result of that, though the library is a joint project by dozens of people at this point rather than a one-person operation like most megaprojects; it's been around for a few generations. The library team takes all kinds of books - they don't have specific exclusion criteria but there's always a backlog to process them and they prioritize by quality and importance - and put them into what's probably the most complicated pebbleclinker machine on the planet. (He's vague on what pebbleclinker machines are, exactly, not having a good grasp of the topic himself, but they'll probably be able to piece together that they're marble-based mechanical computers.) They also give out ansibles connected to the pebbleclinker and book-writing machines that work with it, so that anyone who has one can put in a request for any book they have and make a copy for themselves, anywhere in the world.

Once they're comfortable with the language he's willing to loan them his book printer so they can see what the library has and read whatever of it they'd like. (There's a downloadable directory he'll show them how to use before leaving them to it, of course.)

They are definitely excited about the prospect of being loaned the book printer; they all look enthusiastically affirmative at the prospect.

The woman puts the map back on the projector screen and highlights a different location: a place in the desert near the northern coast of the southern bit of the largest landmass, near the inland seas. Then she shows a picture of a big marble building, alongside a picture of towering shelves packed with books. A man wearing a long brown and gold robe and black elbow gloves can be seen delicately removing a book from a shelf a good distance down the row and placing it on a cart of similar books.

Of course, in reality, the vast majority of the Archive's collection is digital now. But showing racks full of blinking servers is less likely to be understandable to someone who doesn't quite grasp mechanical computers. And the Archivists do keep a lot of physical books around for various reasons, not least of which is that paper and ink is still one of the most durable storage media known; hard drives need replacement every few hexades, whereas correctly treated paper can last centuries.

Then the woman finds a picture of a grey phone to display, and gestures back and forth between the phone and the Archive, and then the phone and the book printer. She mimes taking the phone out of the screen and tossing it to him, and looks questioning.

He'll be interested in getting a connection to their library, yeah. In the long run, not urgently, he prefers learning by observation and he's going to have plenty to see for the next while.

The printer finishes up its work, and he sets it going for the next part of the dictionary before cannibalizing a section of railing for material to make copies of the first part for them all. He accompanies those with a set of pencils, which he explains are hot at one end and cold at the other; the material the books are made of has been set to be temperature-sensitive, so they can write notes on it with the hot end of a pencil and erase with the cold end and not lose their work when it returns to ambient temperature. The hot ends of the pencils aren't burning-hot but they'll probably want to avoid touching them anyway, it won't be comfortable.

With that done, he settles in to read to them. The language is fairly simple, each word getting a glyph made of simple shapes, with a fairly predictable visual grammar and some modifying concepts being drawn around other glyphs as circles or ovals with different markings on or around them. The dictionary starts with a survey of grammatical building blocks - here's how you indicate 'and', here's how you indicate 'not', here's how you indicate that you're referring to a specific instance of a thing, and so on - before starting on useful vocabulary with a section about Crafters: words for their relationships, words related to their household structures (each household has a specific person in charge, and the word for other household members doesn't differentiate between Crafters and animals; he'll clarify if they seem confused or concerned that almost all adult Crafters have their own territories or mobile living arrangements like his), and words relating to the freezing instinct and personal territories and personal patterns. Then it gets into words for activities; it makes no distinction between useful work and hobbies, and there's no vocabulary offered for talking about employment or government in any form. There's also no mention of farming, though apparently some people breed or craft plants or animals to be more interesting or useful in various ways, including as food.

And across the world, a thousand linguists cry out with joy for having some actual vocabulary to work with!

... well, once Romafiŋ finishes translating, since nobody can hear Traveler's explanations remotely. She sets up her phone camera to be able to see her copy of the dictionary and her hands, and starts signing along with his reading.

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.

He lets the dog out - she'll run off, but she won't go out of sight of the house without good reason and she'll come back at nightfall if not sooner, it should be fine - and cannibalizes another section of railing to make a temporary enclosure for the chicken and moves her to it to let her get used to him while he works. (He was hoping for an established flock, but he can handle introducing chickens to each other, it's fine.) He turns one of the boxes of junk into crafting material, takes a break to have a look at the seeds and grow a couple he's curious about in pots at the base of his house, converts another box of junk, and finally feels settled enough to head to bed, bringing the chicken up onto the deck/roof of the ship/house while he retires inside.

He doesn't have a way to let the locals know he's up, a few hours later when he wakes, and they might not want to come back out this close to sundown anyway. He gets back to work on converting his house into a walking vehicle, and if they haven't shown back up in the fifteen minutes that takes he'll start building a second walker out of the new material to hold his new garden.

It is, on the one hand, probably rude to watch the alien with binoculars. On the other hand, he can vanish inside his house any time he wants to, and also he has unknown capabilities and is set up near the third-largest airport on the continent, which they can't afford to shut down. And also he probably can't figure out the phone from first principles and message them.

(The fact that Largest City does not have the largest airport is one of those little ironies of logistics that people make five minute audio essays about; to cruelly summarize, the trains are good enough and Inheritor of the Old City is more centrally located for connecting flights.)

So when he comes back out of his house, the guard who has been assigned to watch him with binoculars takes note, and a few minutes later the diplomatic team is assembled and ready to go talk to him again. 

Diplomat Tatenika is currently in Edge of the Forest City in southern Smaller Continent — but she's not the only professional diplomat available. Vesherti is, in many ways, her Larger Continent counterpart. And, luckily, he was overseeing trade talks in Largest City, and so was immediately available.

When it pulls up, he hops out of the truck and waves to Traveler, before setting up another portable screen to write with.

"Hello! Were (the things we gave you) the right things?"

They were! He's going to need more chickens and he's not familiar with all of the food plants but they've got the right idea. Also he'd like to take five minutes to finish getting his house in walking shape, and they should be aware that his dog is out and will probably come back soon to see what they're about - she's friendly to strangers, there's no danger, he just doesn't want them startled.

Vesherti has never met a dog, but he's vaguely aware that they're still used for animal herding in some areas. Presumably it's easier to handle living with an animal when you're telepathic.

"We won't be startled," he promises. The screen is linked to his tablet, so it's easy to scribble down almost as quickly as speaking. The þereminians wait patiently as he finishes up, although Vesherti does go through talking points in his head.

He gets back to work on the house, finishing up the connections that let its long spidery legs move, then backs it off a few paces and switches to the new smaller walking vehicle on the roof to come down and talk. He's added a blue band around the top of the base of this one, bordered in gold, to indicate that it's okay to talk to him, and the whole sitting area is enclosed in a bubble just large enough for him to stand in if he chooses to, with the transparent front half shading into opaque sparkly indigo at the back and the five communication dots replicated at the bottom of the transparent area.

"You communicated you would ask people about (you got here) — we are very interested in going there and here. Are there things that you think would help with (know how to go)?" he asks once it looks like Traveler has gotten settled. "There are other things to talk about, but sometimes it is helpful (when working to learn) to observe things quickly."

He has no idea what the phenomenon might be that brought him here; his best guess on how to proceed at this point is to ask one of his traveler friends to go to the area he disappeared from and look for records of crafting experiments that might be related or talk to the elders and record-keepers in the area to see if they know of anyone doing that sort of experimentation in the past, and if that doesn't work they'll have to ask around to see if they can find anyone else doing anything that might be similar. He doesn't know of anything that can be done from this side, unless they have some idea of how something on this side might have been the cause.

He shakes his head.

"No, we don't know of such a thing. But it's good to check, in case. We have sent (mechanical birds) through the sky where (you were), and they did not find a way to go," he explains. The programmers haven't gotten Crafter glyphs hooked up to the text-processing standard yet, so he has to draw glyphs by hand, but his handwriting isn't too bad.

"What do you (plan or want) to do next? We want to figure out (how to trade with Crafters)."

Next, he's not sure; the main constraint he sees on his plans in the next month or so is that he's presumably going to be integrating chickens into a new flock and that can fail if he's moving them around too much at the same time. In the longer run he's going to want to travel, he doesn't do well if he tries to stay in one place for too long. He doesn't think he'd do well in their cities at all but if they'd like him to move closer to one to be easier to trade with that shouldn't be a problem, at least if they can hold off on the rest of the chickens until he gets there and keep him supplied with eggs or meat directly in the meantime.

Vesherti thinks about how to explain the existence of a global transportation network, or at the very least of helicopters.

"We have many people who (they like to travel)," he settles on. "So we have many good machines for traveling fast. It is mostly easy to trade with you wherever you go. If you want to live in a boat in the ocean, it would be harder."

"We can supply eggs and meat until (you find a spot to settle the chickens), though. If (you don't want to see the cities), what do you want to see? Or do you want the movement of traveling, not the seeing of traveling?"

He does want to see the cities, just, like, as a day trip, not to try to live there. He likes seeing new things - or seeing things again to see how they've changed - but the part where he's always going to new places is the important part, he's very nomadic by nature. A few months hanging around outside a city and visiting it every few days should be perfectly comfortable, though.

Oh! Alright, that makes sense.

"Lots of people will be excited to (you see our interesting projects)," Vesherti agrees. "The closest city is 'Largest City'."

He points over the hills to the south.

"How fast is your walking house? By our (traveling machines that go on a traveling machine path), it is an hour away, but I think your house is not as fast as a traveling machine is."

He doesn't usually go that fast, no - the limitation is more to do with how fast he feels comfortable going than the machinery, though. At any rate he could make the trip tomorrow, if he's estimating their speed right it shouldn't take him more than a day to go as far as they can go in an hour.

Vesherti nods again. That sounds about right.

"If true, we would be happy to have you visit. We will make sure to tell people in the City to (be very careful not to touch you). There is lots of unclaimed territory in the city, but it is not colored grey. We can't recolor it all in a day, and that would be a lot of work. Will you be okay if (people can point out what is unclaimed), even if it is not colored grey? Or if we tell you how to guess well?"

The easiest way for him would be if he had a guide; he might be able to infer which places are public from how people are acting in general, but it'd be effortful and there's a risk of him freezing up in the middle of everything if something goes wrong. Instructions would help with the inferential method but won't be enough on their own.

"I can be a guide," Vesherti offers. "Or we can make sure someone is available even if I am not. I am a (skilled at communicating with people) person. I do lots of (communicating with a group of people so they can live together without fighting) and (making sure groups of people understand each other), and right now our (group of groups) wants me to make sure we can live well with you, so I am happy to do things that help with that."

They weren't sure if Traveler would want to visit a city, but it was an obvious sort of thing to prepare for, so Vesherti flips through the checklist.

"When you were reading the dictionary, we didn't see any words about ... the very tiny animals that make people sick? The ones that are usually killed by heat. Do you not know of them, or are there more words we don't know yet?"

They know that heating things protects against illness but he hadn't known that it was because of tiny animals, that's neat. If they're worried about him carrying illness he doesn't think they need to worry too much, he heat-cleaned his house before he left the last settlement of Crafters he was at and it's been long enough that anything he might've picked up from them should be gone, he thinks.

"That's good! We did want to know that," Vesherti agrees. "But we also want to make sure you don't get an illness from us. People's bodies get to know the tiny animals over time, and get good at (fighting them without getting ill). So some tiny animals that will not hurt us, but maybe they will jump to you. We will keep the ill people away from you, but it's still probably a good idea to heat-clean yourself after getting back from the day-trip or before touching food."

He puts up the same picture of someone wearing all-concealing white clothing that was used to explain different clothing before.

"This is the clothing of our very tiny animal fighters. You probably won't need to talk to them, but if they ask you to not go somewhere, please don't go so that they can stop the spread of the tiny animals."

Sure, that's reasonable. Though also in general if anyone tells him not to go somewhere he's likely to have a hard time doing it - the main exception to the instinct against taking actions in other peoples' territory is that he can always leave by the most expedient route he knows about or can infer, and that could in theory lead to him being someplace they don't want him, but if that's a concern he can make sure he's prepared to fly out, that's presumably fine in all outdoor cases.

"Leaving is always okay, in public places," Vesherti reassures him. "By flying or not by flying."

He has directions, he's accepted a guide, he's going to comply with quarantine procedures, he is going to visit in a known timeframe ...

Vesherti mentally crosses off most of the list of things to clarify.

"Do you have questions (you want to ask them of us) about visiting the city? Or can I ask you about ansibles?"

He'll probably have questions about the city at some point but he hasn't thought about it much yet. What do they want to know about ansibles?

"We can do machines without Crafting, but we don't know how to do ansibles without Crafting. Our machines communicate with invisible light and inaudible sounds, not ansibles. We want some ansibles to look at and try and figure out how to ansible. Also, we want access to more Crafter books, and most of all the Crafter book ansible, but we know it is precious. What kinds of things would you want in trade for making some ansibles, for printing more books, or for giving us your book ansible to get books with?"

He only has the one library ansible and doesn't want to give it up, but he has no objection to letting them use it anytime he doesn't need it, or in theory to setting something up to get a full set of the library's books; it might be possible to rework the machinery to use local non-crafted materials to make the books, but if it's not and he has to make crafting material for the whole set that's another constraint and a pretty significant one, the library has a lot of books. Or if they have a way to copy books he can set up the material they're printing them on so it's reusable. In any case there are options there and the main thing he'd want to be compensated for is his time, not the use of the ansible and related machinery.

For ansibles, he can make them a batch of a few dozen and he'd consider that partial repayment for what they've done for him so far; if they want more than that he's less willing to do it, it gets boring after a while, but it'd still be a reasonable request if that's how they want him to discharge his debt. He'd ballpark the first, say, 24, as discharging a quarter to a third of it and an additional 36 as discharging the whole thing, including the additional requested chickens.

... huh. On the one hand, that's very convenient. On the other hand, he would become a pariah if he was not completely fair to the alien.

"We have a standardized system for tracking transferrable debts between people," he explains. "This makes it easier for lots of people to work together, instead of owing each other individually. By our measuring, you making a dozen ansibles is worth more than the things we have given you so far, because they are completely new and unique and lots of people will want one. Since you think they are worth less and we think they are worth more, would you call it fair to say that the things we have given you, and the extra chickens, is a fair trade for a dozen ansibles?"

He starts a separate thought on the other side of the screen from that one.

"If we made a pebbleclinker that (you have an ansible to it) and (we have an invisible light link to it) and (it keeps your book ansible and sends things back and forth), would that be okay? So you could print books like normal, and when you weren't printing books we could use the ansible without bothering you. We can probably make a pebbleclinker like that, but having a copy of the book printer would help to be sure."

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.

Vesherti digests this for a moment, before deciding that Traveler is receptive enough that he should try looking to the future.

"I can tell you more about doing things with lightnings," he says. "But maybe it is good to wait until we measure the wires, so you can learn the lightnings-permitting property better."

He shifts a bit.

"You said that (crows came here with you) — can thinking animals also Craft?"

They can't - or, they can use it to communicate but not to make things, communicating with crafting is much easier than crafting with it; there's occasional rumors of individual animals from talking species learning to craft a little but Crafters are the only ones who can do it reliably.

Hmm. That's unfortunate, because it does mean that Traveler is really their only source of Crafting.

Vesherti clears his screen, and starts writing a long message.

"We have a word that I didn't see it in the dictionary. It is like not pushing yourself too hard, but for groups — whether the group can keep doing things in the future, past the life of the people in the group," he explains. "I think that Crafters do a lot of things alone that we need to do in groups. So right now, individual people are looking at your Crafting, and saying 'It is so neat! There is stuff to learn, and things we can do that we couldn't do before'. But Largest City, the city to the south, it has lived longer than any person, and it will still live after you and I are gone. So the city as a whole group is saying 'It is neat — but we can't use it, because it will be gone in a few years.' So we're very interested in figuring out how to pass down Crafting to children."

"And maybe it is not possible — we are not Crafters, maybe there is no way to learn to Craft. But we look very similar to you; we are more alike than most animals are alike. So maybe it is possible, that we learn to Craft. We are thinking of ways to check, but you are the expert. If you can think of how to do it, we would trade almost anything in return."

Vesherti wants to wait to see how he reacts to the city before suggesting some of the options they've already thought of, though, like asking Traveler to raise an orphan or see whether he's cross-fertile with a human.

It's very weird to him that they can't, yeah, and obviously would be much better if they could. The first project he'd want to try, to see if they can pick it up at all, would be making some baby gear out of crafting material and seeing if local babies growing up with it works - it should only take a year or two to find out, the locals' babies might be slower to pick it up but Crafter babies can generally communicate simple needs within half a year. And of course he can give crafting material out for older locals to play with, too, and spend a lot of time communicating with specific people in case that's the relevant part; it's not impossible that they can pick it up later, it just seems less likely to him.

Oh, if exposure to crafting material might do it, that's a lot more scalable. And honestly supports the 'alien nanotech' theory.

"Thank you, that would be great," Vesherti responds. "Do you think people who are more Crafter-like are more likely to pick it up later? Because we have some people who are more or less solitary, more or less capable of recognizing people, and maybe other Crafter traits."

He doesn't think so - when he said it was more or less a species trait that's one of the ways it's less, it seems to be purely a matter of intelligence and Crafters are just the only species on their world smart enough. He wouldn't expect it to be genetic, either, or at least not mostly that.

It is also the case - crafted objects don't have to wear out; they do by default decay over time like natural objects but it's not especially hard to fix that. If they want him to make several thousand of whatever thing over the course of the next couple years that doesn't entirely fix their problem but it should help, even in the long run.

"That would be a good backup option," Vesherti agrees. "The thing we're most likely to want of that is —"

He stops and crosses out the partial sentence.

"We will need to think about what not-wearing-out things are most useful. Probably if you can make a crank-shaft that will turn itself against very high loads and never break that would be useful. But we will think about it, in case there are better choices."

He flips through his checklist again.

"Do you want me to show you how to use the phone —" He includes a picture of the object he means. "— to get books from our library? They are mostly not in Crafter words yet, but there are people who like (writing things from one way to another way) who will put more things in Crafter words for fun. The phone can also send letters to people, in case you want to send a message after we leave."

He can make arbitrarily strong and indestructible crankshafts like the one on his lightning experiment, sure; if they know what other traits - size, density, whatever - they want them to have he can get going on that while he's on the way to the city tomorrow. It'll be most efficient if they're all the same, or only a few different types with a simple ratio for how many of each he should make. They'll also want to keep him supplied with stuff to turn into crafting material, that's going to be the main bottleneck on that kind of thing if he's doing a lot of it.

He's not much for reading, ironically enough, but it'd be good to be able to send them messages, yeah.

Vesherti nods.

"We will bring more material to Craft with in the morning," he promises. "And some initial designs to experiment with."

He puts a copy of the phone interface up and shows Traveler how to send messages using it. Since they haven't got Crafter glyphs added to the encoding standard yet, this involves tapping on the name of the person he wants to contact (there are two existing entries, one for Vesherti specifically, and one for whoever is available in his group) and then drawing on the screen with a stylus or one's finger.

He also points out the battery symbol ("Place it on the charger to refill it; the charger eats sunlight") and the Network symbol ("It should be able to talk from anywhere you go except caves, but if there is a problem with it talking, it will show here"). There's also a way to indicate whether he wants the phone to make a dinging noise when he gets a letter, or not.

"Lots of people want to send you letters — probably too many. So right now we haven't given anyone else your mail code. But if you want, you can give it to people and then they can send letters too."

By way of demonstration, Vesherti sends him a letter with a map of the local area between here and Largest City, with their current location and where he proposes meeting up both marked.

That all seems pretty reasonable. Is there a way to set it up to only ding if the person sending the message says it should? Is there some specific aspect of sunlight that the charger needs, or will any bright light in the visible spectrum do?

Good questions!

"Yes, you can set up custom rules for when it should ding here —" he explains.

They didn't have time to wrangle up a completely new phone interface for Traveler, so it's a stock þereminian phone. That is to say: while the basic interface is simple and minimalist, you can make it do arbitrarily complicated things if you're willing to dig into the advanced settings.

Luckily "don't make noise unless it's really important" for some value of "important" based on whether the message is marked as such and who its from is a common preference, so there's a preset for it.

"The charger can eat many kinds of light, but more blue light is better. The very best light is the purpler-than-purple part of sunlight that makes people get tan, but bright blue light is fine. If you feed it only red light, it won't go," Vesherti explains. "If you want, we can bring you a charger that just wants a wheel to spin fast, instead. People who want to travel a lot usually like the light-eating chargers because they are small and have no moving parts that break."

Oh, he can make things light up, that's not a problem at all, and he can do ultraviolet in a box for it if that's what it works best with; that's easier than having to set it up in the sun.

(He appreciates the help with the settings; he's not really up for learning the complicated bits of a new technology right now.)

Vesherti nods.

"Lots of people don't like how complicated phones are," he agrees. "And it's normal to not do everything with it that it can do. But having a standard sending-letters and commanding-machines device is pretty useful."

He glances over at the sun. It's not dark yet, but they've also stored up a decent number of action items that will need to be taken care of overnight.

"I can talk more if you want, or we can leave you to sleep, and I'll see you in the morning to give more things, or at the city when you get there."

He's about ready to start winding down for the night, yeah. First, though, is there anything he should know about what to expect at the city?

Vesherti considers the question.

"The place I suggested we meet is a fast-machine endpoint. We can walk through the city, but it is a long walk, so we could take a fast-machine to see different parts instead. We have told the people in the city about you, so everyone will know you are coming to visit, and be ready for it. The city is separated into territories for different activities — I thought you might want to start with seeing our food and day-to-day routine areas, but there are also the making things area, or the learning things area, or lots of different megaprojects for different things."

"The (showing what happened in the past so we can learn from it) megaproject and the (demonstrating physical principles so we can learn from it) megaproject are both things I think you will like to see. But you can pick what to see. I will point out things that might be interesting, and answer your questions. I think there is more to see than just one day, so we can do separate trips for separate things."

"Does that help, or were you asking something else?"

Hm. He intends to use a walking vehicle like the one he's in in the city at least at first, it has several benefits including that he's not going to get physically tired out, or be touched by accident, or get sick as easily. He's not expecting that their fast vehicles are designed to take another vehicle inside, but if he builds his vehicle light he can compact it down to go in theirs as generic matter, if that's still warranted - he can get it down to one and a half times his weight without compromising too much on stability, and it can be whatever shape and size they need when it's compacted.

He's definitely interested in seeing their megaprojects but he doesn't expect he'll be ready to appreciate them properly right away, he's not going to have enough background knowledge; the food and general public areas are probably better for that. It might be good to get through some of the effects of everyone wanting to see the interesting new thing, too, to start, and he's not sure what exactly to expect from them there, even with Crafters that'd vary from place to place.

"A walking vehicle should be fine," Vesherti agrees. "Not all of us can use our legs, so we have personal-moving machines, and the fast-machines are able to fit them up to a standard size."

He draws a box on the ground the size of a large personal scooter or wheelchair.

"But using a walking vehicle to cross the city without a fast machine is fine too," he continues. "Most people use the fast machines, but there are also machines for moving bulky things that people use."

"People are excited to see you, but there is a —"

He searches for the vocabulary. What he wants to say is that there's a ... civilizational honor, in handling this well, and that if they broadcast a message asking 0.55 of people to pretend that it is a normal day with nothing unusual happening, most people will actually listen and the remaining crowds will be manageable.

"People are excited to see you, so wherever we go some people will follow just to see. If you want to, you can give a lecture to the people who show up, about Crafters or about you or about anything you want to say to us, and people will listen and write letters about it. People would be happy if you did, but you aren't expected to."

Huh, that's quite a small footprint, he's going to have to experiment to find a design that'll be that narrow and still be stable enough to be comfortable. He'll plan on not having access to their vehicles until he does.

He's much more comfortable conversing with people than doing solo presentations, but if they want to figure out the best half dozen or dozen people for him to have a group conversation with - or sequential ones or whatever, he's not picky - and let everyone else listen in, that's fine. With the caveat that his communication range is only moderately above average, forty feet or so, so he can't project to a whole crowd at once.

"One good thing about talking with sounds or hands, and not with Crafting, is that we have machines that can write down the talking and play it back for people," Vesherti ventures. "There are people who like to find interesting people, and having a conversation that gets written down, and then other people read it. For example, there is someone who finds people who study different areas, and talks with them about what they're studying, and people like to listen to learn about areas of study they don't know about."

"If you wanted, I could ask someone like that to meet us to talk with you. Also, if you do need to talk to a crowd, you can just talk to me and I'll say what you say with my hands, and everyone who can see us will understand."

Both of those sound like they'd work; he's fine with whichever one would be better for satisfying peoples' curiosity. He does expect that he can pick up a gestured language, too, just not quickly enough to be very useful in this situation.

"If you keep traveling, you should learn eventually. But there is plenty of time. I will send a dictionary in Crafter glyphs when it is written," Vesherti writes. "Do you have more questions about what I expect in the city?"

Well, he's expecting to get there tomorrow evening and pick a place to leave his house, and then in the morning he'll make a walker and wait for Vesherti or someone else in blue to come get him. He'll have as much crafting material with him as he can reasonably build into the walker, for tools for himself or things to give out, and he'll have enough water for himself for the day and seeds and dirt with him for food for himself, as a backup, or to give out. He might bring his dog with him in the walker depending on how she's feeling about everything, and there's a chance he'll judge it best for the new chicken to bring her, though he doubts it. He's not going to be able to aim for a walker design that can fit into their vehicles but he's going to go for a slim and agile design that will hopefully be okay in their buildings, and he'll have parts of it greyed to allow for being touched - is their red signal discrete enough that he can mark a greyed part with red for 'please don't touch this' without designating himself entirely not to be interacted with? He does want to get a feel for how big of a risk that's going to be for him.

In the city, they're going to see the food area - he'll have a light breakfast before they go, so it's fine if this doesn't go entirely smoothly - and hang out in public watching people and probably having some conversations with them or joining in on other activities if the option presents itself. He's going to want to see inside some of their buildings if that's on offer and doesn't have much of an opinion on which ones besides what he already said about their collection-places; he'll ask his guide what's available to go see when he's ready for that if they don't volunteer options as they come up. They'll probably have it set up for someone to talk to him and publish the conversation; he's assuming that's not going to be first thing in the morning, and even if they're ready for him then he'd rather have more time to see how they live before he tries to answer questions about the differences between their species. He's assuming he can let them know he wants to head home at any time and he's going to want to be back a few hours before dark even if the day goes well.

He's assuming that the guide will know where he's allowed and not allowed to be, and be generally authorized to take him places he's allowed to be, and that they'll understand not to touch him or to let people touch him or his walker in non-greyed spots, and that they expect to be fine spending the day with him or that they're prepared to find him another guide if they need to leave or go red for more than a few minutes. It won't be a complete disaster if he's left alone and has to find his way out of the city, probably, but it will be very stressful for him and he's depending on them to not let that happen.

"Yes, that all is correct," Vesherti agrees. "Since you're using a walker, I'll bring a personal transport vehicle too, so I don't get tired walking. I expect to be able to accompany you all day, and if I need to go I'll call for one of my colleagues first. We can be done whenever you want, but I'll plan on being done a few hours before dark. I don't know which buildings we will go in yet, but we'll ask overnight, and I'll know in the morning."

"I'm not quite sure what you mean by marking a grey part with red — do you mean leaving it grey so that it can be touched, but outlining it in red so that people don't touch it? Our red signal doesn't work like that, but you can make small parts of your walker red without people stop interacting with you. We're already telling people it's very bad to touch you; we can also tell them some more complex rules for color-coding if it is needed."

Hm. So the issue he has here, with the red, is - so for Crafters, if part of his vehicle is indigo-and-gold and part of it is grey, that means it's perfectly fine to touch or use the grey parts and the indigo-and-gold parts aren't available for other people to interact with, and if someone touches an indigo part he's liable to lose the whole vehicle. He wants some parts grey here so that he's at less risk of losing the vehicle, but he also wants to see how good the locals are at not touching his things without the instinct for it, so he doesn't want the 'it's just entirely fine to touch this' part of the greying, and he doesn't have a pre-established marker for that, he's trying to invent one on the fly. If adding red to the grey doesn't do it he's inclined to go with something in the Crafter model but he's not sure if he should be trying to teach the locals how Crafters do things or just going all in on going native, and if he's doing the latter he's not sure how they'd signal it - if he's going with the Crafter model he'd probably tint the grey with indigo and sparkles to a degree where it doesn't register to him as his but it's not properly public-grey either, or maybe go with grey spots or something if his instincts turn out to play badly with that.

Vesherti gets a look of understanding.

"I understand now. Since we don't have a strong touching instinct, we are going to need to tell people how to interact with you anyway. So any signal is okay, as long as once you tell us it stays the same and people can learn it. I think grey-with-red-spots would be easy to remember. I think tinting the grey would be less good because not everyone has good vision, and they might not see subtle changes."

Grey with red spots will be fine; that's unambiguous for him, too. Is there anything else?

He shakes his head.

"I think that is everything we wanted to say. Thank you for talking to us. We covered a lot."

He'll see them the day after tomorrow, then.

He spends the rest of the evening getting the rest of the supplies stowed in the house; if they're still watching from a distance they'll see him construct a screw pump to move the water they brought into a collection tank with its intake on the roof. He has to go looking for his dog, walking his house along behind him, but she shows up when he's just a little ways away from where he'd been settled before, and they head in for the night after a little bit of gentle roughhousing.

The contact team piles back into the truck and returns to the airport.

And everyone else has a very busy next day.

Someone at the airport has a multi-meter to quickly test the wires with. But it's not sensitive enough to accurately measure the resistance of some of the samples, so they get shipped off to Largest City University, which has an electronics lab.

Close to midnight, a physicist stands in the lab, looking at a curl of wire suspended in place over a magnet.

"... it's very clearly diamagnetic," they note. "And the measured resistance is within measurement error. I know we're still waiting on the high-voltage electromagnet, but I will switch to social science if that's not a superconductor."

    "Well."

Elsewhere, someone is bent over a scribe table, carefully cleaning up a vectorization of a set of glyphs from the dictionary. The linguists are still arguing about text layout, but by the time the sun rises on Largest City again, there will at least be a font for Crafter glyphs.

And in Largest City, there are more specific preparations: picking out a good neighborhood to start with, making sure people everywhere know not to touch the alien or his walker, making sure that the streets will handle the walker, making sure the train station has a spot for him to leave his house, arranging for guards to help with crowd control if necessary, trying to make sure it's not necessary by making announcements, figuring out which apartment buildings are willing to be opened and which aren't ...

There's a lot to do, but that's how these things go. By the time he arrives, they'll be ready.

He's up at dawn the next day and on the roof not long after, quick-growing an ear of corn and some berries and tea leaves for his breakfast. An hour later he's out again, setting up a giant 'go this way' glyph on the ground in his intended direction of travel and doing a final check of the area to make sure he's not accidentally leaving anything behind. With that done, he brings his dog out and gets her set up to guide the house to its destination; the handhold he was using to bring it with him to find her last night does double duty as a pushbar for her to lead it as well.

He arranges himself and the new chicken on the roof once they're underway, adding a transparent inward-sloping guardrail to stop her from flying out, and settles in to spend the trip crafting whatever they've requested of him and taking notes on what he's seen so far for the book he's going to write about this experience.

When he checks, there's a letter from Vesherti:

Good morning,

We checked the wire samples — the one that was pure black was the most permissive of little lightnings. The others varied like this:

<diagram showing a nonlinear relationship between "conductivity" and "potential for static build up">

The pure black one was very useful; if you have time, we would like some larger samples of more material like that to examine. Ideally in shapes like this, and as strong and not wear out as you can:

<diagram showing a set of simple shapes, including a coil of wire, a torus, and so on>

Or if you could make crafting material that is like that but that can be moved like clay that does not dry out, that would be good too.

We're also interested in figuring out if a crafting material spinning wheel can help with our need for making little lightnings for our machines; do you think you could make a crank shaft with a large attachment plate, where all the parts are never wear out, and how fast it turns can be changed with a dial?

<diagram of a three-shaft crank with a large attachment plate clearly designed to hook into other machinery>

If you can, we should talk more about how big to make it; I do not think the ideal size would fit well in your house.

We have some more raw materials and the other chickens ready for you at the place that we will meet. I hope your journey goes smoothly.

We usually end our letters with our sound-based personal identifiers to show who they are from, but I can't write mine in Crafter glyphs, so:

- (Vesherti)
- Your greeter

The latter two diagrams are embedded 3D CAD models, and Traveler can spin them with his finger or a stylus. It's also possible to zoom in, although the gesture for that is probably less obvious.

And, in the air a mile or two behind him, there's a quiet ultralight drone gliding along, just to make sure he doesn't run into any trouble on his journey.

As his house walks, the first further signs of þereminian architecture that he will see are two enormous hyperbolic towers, just visible on the horizon as he comes over the first hill. They are releasing large amounts of steam into the cool morning air. If he looks closely, he can see that they're surrounded by more low-lying buildings and also fences. They're also out of his path of travel.

More parallel to his path is the train tracks — every few minutes, a train goes by from the airport (or returning from the city) at high speed.

The area he actually travels through is mostly empty, although as the day wears on he will come across the first roads: first little more than dirt tracks winding through fields of grain, and then switching to smooth black asphalt. The roads see a steady stream of trucks and busses headed to various outlying locations, but they do stop for him whenever his path takes him across a road, or slow down significantly if his dog pilots the house along a road with them.

The dog leads the house alongside the road rather than on it; traveler doesn't want to try sharing space with vehicles that fast. She doesn't mind the towers, but the trains bother her; after the first couple she stops startling away from them but he still opts to come down and move the house to the opposite side of the road. He has to come down to bring it across the cross streets' asphalt, too, when she balks at it, which slows them down considerably the first couple times; after that, he pauses for a few minutes to relocate himself inside and make a window on the front of his house, and then when he needs to come out it's at least somewhat faster.

Well, they can't do much about the asphalt. But it continues to not bite her. Or do much of anything other than lay there on the ground, really.

The area slowly gets denser, with occasional one and two story buildings, although there's still plenty of room to walk. Cross streets get more common, unfortunately. There are occasional people who stop to look at his house as it goes by, before going on with their business.

Eventually, following the same general direction as the train tracks brings them to a large, open building. It has no walls, but it does have a roof held up by supports. There's a large expanse of asphalt filled with dormant traveling machines, and beside it a large grassy field in which someone has put up a sign:

"Space for Traveler's House"

As they arrive, a much slower train departs from the building and heads into the city proper, which is through a thin band of trees from here. The tallest buildings are visible over the trees.

He eventually takes over for the dog, and guides the house through the densest final bit himself; it's late afternoon by the time he gets there, humming cheerfully to himself and looking around at everything. He gawks at the pavilion only a little before settling the house into the field a little ways from the sign.

He extrudes a sunshade from the side of the house and brings out a chair and side table to sit and watch the comings and goings.

Since they're pretty sure Crafters are more solitary, and he has plans to meet up the next day, Vesherti is not waiting at the train station.

... but a group of thoroughly briefed people in blue robes are hanging out at a table talking near one end of the station, just in case Traveler does feel like having some conversation.

Other than that group, most of the people passing through here are commuters. The areas north of the city are largely used for industry, so at the end of the day this mostly means people coming back from jobs, either being dropped off by company busses or (for smaller companies) driving cars. Then they wait on the platform, file into a train, and are whisked off to the city.

There are a few people going the other way, however: a few people who live outside the city and are returning home, and, when the right hour approaches, the evening shift.

People are generally not very talkative, although a few friends do run into each other and make conversation while waiting for the train. People do stop to stare at Traveler's house a little bit, but a person in purple robes quietly keeps anyone from coming over to him unsolicited. Several people do hold up their phones in his direction for a moment, before moving on.

Even with such a limited number of people (by city standards) passing through, he'll see a lot of variety. No tails or other genemods that might be expected from a Crafter population, but he'll see people holding hands, eating food, sitting alone, talking, signing, bobbing their heads to unheard music, and more.

Well, you know, he's watching them, it's only fair that some of them watch him back.

After a while he brings the dog out to sit at his feet and crafts up some grey chairs and puts up a sign: People can come and talk if they want; no more than three people or one group of up to five at once, please, and remember that Crafters are not to be touched.

This is obviously exciting. A large group of people forms up on the side of the station facing him, and the person in purple says something to them. Then everyone does something mysterious with their phones, and three people start making their way over. Two of the people (one in plain blue and one in blue decorated with clouds and birds) are holding hands; the other person is wearing a partially open powder-blue outer robe over a tight purple garment.

The woman in plain blue pulls a tablet out of her bag and slots her phone into it. A moment of fiddling later, she flips it around to show Traveler.

"Hello!" it reads.

They settle down in the chairs, being careful not to approach him too closely.

Look at all those people. He has perhaps made some sort of calculative error. Oh well, it's fine.

He replies with a sense of warm welcome, and that he thinks this new situation is quite exciting. Do they have questions for him?

They say a few words to each other. The woman with the tablet has apparently been selected as their spokeswoman, because she flips it back around and taps on it to respond.

"Yes!" she flashes at him. And then, composed with more hesitation and less grammar than Vesherti displayed:

"Do you find it bad to live with an animal? Or is it better because it is a thinking animal?"

The dog is pretty clever but dogs aren't talking animals, if that's what they mean. He likes having animals around, though; they're good company in addition to being useful. His dog guided his house here mostly by herself today, for example, after he explained that he wanted her to follow alongside the road with it.

This causes some surprised expressions.

"Your dog depends on you — and she isn't smart — how—"

They break off into a brief whispered argument about grammar, before dragging the symbols around into a more coherent order.

"If (your dog isn't smart and she depends on you), how do you cope with her doing things near you when you're feeling bad? Or does not everybody can tolerate a dog?"

Most Crafters like having dogs around! They'll leave you alone if you ask them, unless they're really desperate for something, and if that's too much you can make tools to give them the things they need automatically, he does that for his chickens since they can't come get him if they need something. Some people do like to house their dogs in a different building so they can have time away from them but that's not common, it's not like having another Crafter around where it's always a little stressful.

... huh. They confer again.

"That is strange. I think we have the opposite thing because if my partner—"

She gestures from the glyph for partner to their joined hands.

"— were mad at me, she could tell me. So if she's not telling me, I know she's not mad at me. But if I had a dog and it wasn't telling me, I wouldn't know, because it can't tell me. That's why babies are so stressful until they learn to signal somehow."

Oh! Dogs are expressive, they just aren't smart enough to communicate with Crafting. If she were mad at him she'd avoid him or refuse to do things he asked, and he'd be able to tell from her body language. She's happy right now, he can tell from how relaxed she is. And also from knowing her, she likes long runs like she had today and she likes getting to hang around with new people.

They look a bit dubious, but none of them has actually had a dog, so they have no real reason to doubt that you can learn how to read them with practice. One woman points out that if the dogs are smart enough to learn how to read sheep, they can probably also learn how to be read themselves.

"It's good she's happy," the woman with the tablet writes, while her partner and the other woman discuss. "We have more questions, but maybe you want to ask us things in between our questions."

He is curious about what kinds of things they're hoping to get out of him being here, in whatever sense is interesting to them.

The woman taps at her lip. Her partner says something, and she writes it down.

"The (all the people on the planet) want to get having new neighbors to trade with, and new books to read, and new learning about what is true. And crafting. Probably the purple people have talked to you about that plenty."

"The three of us want to learn interesting things about you and share them with friends, and also to have a story to tell."

Huh. Crafters don't do much trade, really? They do some, it's not an unfamiliar concept or anything, but it's not in the first four or six things he'd wonder about when he was meeting someone new. He does intend to do crafting for them but that's more to do with an impulse toward neighborliness than an expectation that he's going to get something specific in return.

Maybe they have questions about what he can do with crafting? If they'd like a little souvenir he can make them something small.

"Yes, please!"

The un-partnered woman digs in a pocket, and comes out with a metallic blue cube with a cylindrical rod through it so you can hold the rod and spin the cube around it. She spins it demonstratively.

"Can you make a very dense thing that spins silently, but it is hard? Can you really make things that will not wear out?"

He can! And soundless things aren't hard either, though very dense things take enough material to not really count as small at that size.

This gets an alarmed exclamation from one of them.

"How dense can you make things?" the woman with the tablet writes, and then on being prompted adds:

"If you don't know, don't find out now. I don't think a most-dense thing so small is dangerous, but there are most-dense things so big they eat light out between the stars, and those are dangerous."

It's not really practical to make things too dense, anyway. But he doesn't know there to be an upper bound, exactly, just that you can't make mass from nothing. If he wanted to collapse his house down to the size of an acorn he could do it.

"If you collapse the whole planet down to the size of a pin head, it becomes a most-dense thing," the woman explains. "The limit is very high, but there is a limit. What is the smallest thing you can craft?"

"Also — if you can make a thing that glows purple enough and does not get lighter, and magnets, you can make mass. Don't try it, though, because things that glow purple enough are killing you."

Yeah, every Crafter kid gets warned not to mess around with giving things random traits, there's definitely some deadly ones out there. People do it anyway, that's how things like ansibles got discovered, but it's got a mortality rate and he's not interested in taking that kind of risk at all.

He's not sure the precise limit for the smallest thing he can make, but it gets harder as it gets harder to see what he's doing. And crafting the whole planet down like that would be wildly impractical even if it wasn't an obviously bad idea for lots of reasons.

"Do you have to see a thing to Craft it? What if you make crafting material that is see-through and just like the air?"

He can't make liquids or gasses, but he can make a solid that's invisible in air, yeah. He'd have to touch it to craft it out of that state again, and he might be able to craft something smaller by touch than by sight but there's still a perceptual limitation, he's pretty sure he couldn't craft something down to the size of a grain of sand no matter how he did it. With enough practice, maybe.

They think about this for a minute.

"Can you make a box that looks like air, and if you put a thing inside you can't see the thing?" the woman questions.

No, making something invisible in air is just making it transparent to visible light - he can do infrared and ultraviolet and things too, but they don't usually matter for this - and then adjusting how it bends light to match how air does. He can do water, too, but that's a different degree of light bending.

He takes a little bit of crafting material off of his chair, expands it into a cube a few inches tall, adjusts all but a grey sliver on the bottom and top to be invisible in air so that it looks like the top is floating, and gives it to them to look at while he makes another one like water. (He'd want to adjust it in a bowl of water to make it perfect, he'll mention, but it's pretty close as is.)

The three of them pass the cube around, holding it up to different light sources and feeling out its contours.

The woman with the tablet bites her lip, and spends a moment conferring with her partner about different glyphs.

"Light bends in clear things because it has a speed," she settles on. "And when it hits at an angle, one side of the light gets slowed down first, so it bends. Light goes slower in water than in air; light goes faster in a box with no air in it. Can you make a box that makes light go through it faster than that? It would look like light bends the other way from how water bends it, by a lot."

After all — ansibles are already possibly faster-than-light-in-a-vacuum. Although they haven't gotten the chance to actually measure that yet, and more likely they just rely on some form of signalling the Crafters haven't detected.

She's sort of getting a lower and lower opinion of their science the longer she talks to Traveler, but that's not really fair. Science is a communal endeavor, and even though crafting should make it a lot easier to do basic experiments, they don't have the advantages of being able to work together on large projects. Also, if she's continuously updating in a direction, she should just jump to her final conclusion and skip the wait.

He's never heard of that; it could be that it just hasn't been discovered, though, or wasn't recognized as interesting when it was.

She considers telling him that this one should be safe to test — but she doesn't actually know that. Maybe the universe would enclose the object in an event horizon, to prevent detectable FTL signalling. Maybe it just can't be done with crafting. Either way, he's said that he doesn't want to experiment, and any tests should really be done in a lab.

"I will have more questions about crafting, but I want to think about what you've told us," she tells him, and then relays a different question:

"What are you looking forward to seeing in the city?"

He's really curious about how cities work! Crafters don't get together in nearly that big of groups; having six dozen people at a public meeting place at once only happens when there's a big event on. He's wondering what the locals are doing differently to be able to handle groups so big.

They flip through the dictionary in search of relevant vocabulary, and come up bereft.

"There are inventions that are (ways to act in a group and knowledge of how that works) instead of physical objects," they eventually settle on. "We think the first people had to work together to avoid dying, which forced them to invent the first ways of being in a group. But there are lots of advantages to being in a group, so once the first people were in groups, they continued to invent and learn and grow, until the world was full of people who were suited to being in groups and all the children learned how to be in a group when they were little."

Their grammar gets a little shaky as they try to collectively compose a complex sentence.

"None of us are (learning about how to be in groups) people — we are tiny-lightning-machine workers and a healthy-teeth worker — but the simple version of the best (learning about how to be in groups) knowledge that everybody knows is: design your groups and cities so that when everybody does what is individually best for them, this is mostly what is best for the whole group and stable over time. That isn't always possible, but for lots of important things it is. Not everybody can live in a city designed like that, so people who can't go and live outside the city."

"Would an example be nice?"

It would, if they have one in mind, but he's going to go see the city tomorrow, too.

Well, they're still not social science people, but there's an obvious example to use. It requires a long explanation to do it justice, though, so they spend a while composing a long sequence of sentences.

"Well, when people first started living in cities, one thing that became a problem was fires. Anybody's house can catch fire, but when houses are close together, fires can spread. Any fire in the city risks a lot of people's houses. Trying to make your own house not burn down is hard — you can make it out of things that don't burn as well, and design it so if it does burn people don't get trapped. But there is a limit. Things still burn."

"But fires are easy to put out if you get to them when they're small. So eventually we made a special group that always has at least a few people watching the whole city. When a fire starts, they put it out. Since people know they can rely on them, we worry less about fires. And in order to make sure there are people willing to do fire-putting-out, everyone in the city gives them a tiny amount of stuff each year. Giving a tiny amount of stuff is much better than your house burning down, so the system is better for people living in the city. Getting a tiny amount of stuff from everyone adds up to a lot, so it's better for the people who put out fires, since they can have nice things."

"But there is more: when everyone worried about fires, houses couldn't be too big or too close together. It was better for each person if their house was away from the others. So the city was more spread out, and harder to walk. It was a little harder to trade for things, and less convenient to go places. Once there was a system for dealing with fires, the city got denser, and living there got a little nicer."

"There are lots of things like that. If you can figure out how to make it so that a system is better for each person to have than not have, it is stable. And frequently those systems have other effects that are good. Add enough of them together, and living in a city becomes very convenient."

"There are systems that are stable but make things worse, too. Our living-in-groups people learn about this and try to make sure that we end up with good systems and not bad systems."

That makes sense, yeah, for people who can't craft and need to be around other people to get what they need. It's very different when everyone can craft, of course, and the territoriality instinct is a big factor too, so it's not intuitive to him. He was actually just in a big forest fire - that's part of how he got here - and it was kind of awful but not because his house might have burned, and having other Crafters around wouldn't've made a difference to how bad it was.

The woman with the tablet gets a thoughtful look.

"Why was a fire a problem for you at all?" she asks. "Couldn't you just make your house stay cold, and stay inside until it burned out?"

He can do that, yep. The actual problem was the smoke and bad air; he can filter some of it out, but it's dangerous to rely on that for a really bad fire, if the bad air builds up too badly it can kill you before you realize what the problem is. He converted his house to an airship and tried to hover over it instead, but when he came back down he was here.

Oh, and he can't craft gasses or liquids, so he couldn't just make more air. That makes sense.

"We have machines that filter out bad air. If you want that, you should ask," she advises.

"Can you make a very strong box and put lots of good air in it with a pump?"

It'd be nice to have a machine like that, yeah. He's not aware of a pump design that'd let him store enough air to wait out a forest fire in a reasonable volume of space, but it's been a while since he checked in with the space travel people, maybe they've figured something out.

All three of them perk up at the mention of space travel.

"What space travel have Crafters done?" she asks. "We have put some machines up, and sent some people, but establishing a territory in space is really hard."

They haven't done that much yet, they haven't figured out how to solve the thing where you run out of air if you go too high. They have figured out that if you set an unmanned ship up to blow stored air out behind it you can get it up past the point where there's enough air to push a ship with a propeller, and sometimes if you do that it doesn't come back down at all which is pretty interesting but hard to do much with yet. Last he heard they were working on better sensors to figure out what's going on past the top of the air, plus the air pump thing and better steering for their ships.

... right. Well.

"You should send the space explorers a book on orbital ballistics," the woman with the tablet recommends. "It is the (kind of learning) about putting things up high so that they don't come back down. It also includes knowing where they're going to end up, and also how to fall back down safely. We have figured that part out; the part that is hard for us is that it is hard to lift things that high, and people need so much stuff to live. Maybe with crafting we could send people with less stuff, and it would be easier to lift."

Also, she's pretty sure that self-contained perpetual motion machines and a modern understanding of materials science should let you make a carbon scrubber with an indefinite lifetime. She doesn't know how exactly — she's a nuclear engineer, not a chemist — but it seems pretty likely. She's going to have to see whether the future-infrastructure-prediction people have figured that out yet, or whether she can make a bit of extra money off of the prediction markets for the first lunar colony.

Her partner relays a question to her, and it's one that somebody probably ought to have asked before this. Maybe the Emergency Services people did, and they just didn't publicize it.

"Do you know how many Crafters there are on your planet?"

Not offhand but he can estimate it, hold on while he does some math...

Seven or eight million, he thinks.

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?

It depends on the kind; most of the pebbleclinkers he knows about are like the world library's one, letting people get things from them without needing to be right there. Internally he's not sure, the simple designs he's seen instructions for don't need them but that might just be because they were introductory and most Crafters don't know how to make ansibles.

They nod. That makes sense.

When the ansible pair is finished, the tushot woman blinks back over to orange, and offers to carry the remote end back over.

"It was good to meet you, Traveler," she relays. "But I'm going to go. I hope* your visit goes well."

* Translator's Note: The word she uses is a compound word for a specific kind of hope — the pessimist's hope. The fervent desire that things will really turn out like that, despite the overwhelming fear that they won't.

The woman with the tablet isn't quite sure how to render that in glyphs, so she goes for a more generic word. It was a bit rude of her to say, anyway.

He hopes so too, and appreciates her visit.

With the ansibles done he starts working on a little toy to duplicate a bunch of and send over - a little spheroid blob of material marbled in nearly invisible and translucent cloudy grey, light enough to float but connected by a short thread to a handle heavy enough to weight it down and small enough to be tucked into the base of someone's fingers. He adds a bit of a glow to the floating portion and sets it up so that the hue can be changed by pinching the ends of the handle and running your finger up or down the thread; when he's satisfied with that he makes the floating portion chime when struck with moderate force, producing a pleasant sound that seems out of place from such a small object.

As before, they can keep talking while he works: he's curious about what sorts of things were going on before he got here, actually.

Oh! Of course.

The woman with the tablet composes a reply while her partner summarizes the conversation so far onto the ansible.

"This close to the city, a lot of people live in the city and then travel out to —"

She lacks the vocabulary to say 'work'.

"— do daily things. This place —"

She points at the train station.

"— is the middle of that trip. It's a place to switch between the car fast machines and the train fast machines. The car machines are useful because you can pilot them to go anywhere on the path. But the train machines are useful because they carry more people, and they can go by themselves, they don't need to be piloted. The car machines are mostly not allowed in the city. Some are okay — they say you're going to be visiting in a personal machine, and that's fine — but if everyone used a car in the city, it would be too crowded and there would be no room for them all."

She feels like she's gotten enough of a feel for crafter glyphs to try minting new ones for cars and trains; hopefully they're clear from context. 

"So the people here are mostly not doing things together. Mostly, they just happen to be passing through here on their way between their houses in the city and the places where they do things during the day. My partner and I both do things at the (moving small lightnings with dangerous rocks and steam machinery place). We arrange our trips to be at the same time so we can travel together."

"Once we got on the train machine, we were going to talk a bit and then go get dinner from a place that prepares food. But then you were here, and talking to you was more interesting, so we changed plans."

She's not sure whether that was quite what he meant, though.

"Did that answer your question, or did you mean something else?"

That's interesting! Most Crafters don't leave their territories most days, he's surprised that they do enough of that to have a whole system of machines for it. It isn't quite what he meant, though - back at home the answer to the question he's trying to ask might be something like 'the local singing group is about to put on their annual concert' or 'the crows just had a weird-colored baby' or 'there's been a lot of rain recently and everyone's figuring out what to do about all the mud'.

"I see — sorry, I thought you meant going on here specifically, not going on generally."

She thinks for a moment about how to summarize the current news cycle.

"There was a long race a few days ago. People were excited to see it and see who would get there first — it was a person from a distant city. There was a big snowstorm up north, but it didn't reach us. There are always music performances in the city, but I am looking forward to one in eight days by a music person I like."

She taps her lip, trying to think of more. Her partner says something.

"A group of math people figured out a hard problem related to the theory of pebbleclinkers. Also the special day for quiet rituals is coming up."

"There's a lot of things. I could keep saying more. But I think those are the big ones right now."

With so many people it does make sense that there'd be more going on. What's the quiet ritual day about?

"There are ritual days dedicated to different things. This one is about planning for the new year and the growth of spring and reflecting on what you want to do and who you want to be. Of course, people think about those things on other days too, but the ritual is a reminder to think," she explains.

"In the area near this city, many people don't tell people things with sounds all day, and eat a kind of little cookie. Different cities have different rituals, though. And since some people travel and move here, on the day people do lots of different things. People from the city where my partner was born make little fires and watch them."

Aww, that's cute. And good timing for him, it sounds like.

Is it common, in this world, to make fires?

What a weird question. She's not quite sure how to answer this one.

"There are a lot of things fires are useful for," she settles on. "Setting things on fire used to be one of the only ways to stay warm in the winter. Now we have tiny lightning machines for staying warm. But not everywhere has the latest machines, or can have a wire to carry tiny lightnings to them. So lots of remote territories still use fires. Even places that don't always use fires sometimes have places for fires as a backup. Also, fires are useful for cooking. Some recipes require a fire, and some places that do lots of cooking use fires instead of tiny lightning machines. Some places for making things with machines also need to use fires to change properties of materials without crafting."

"The looking at tiny fires for the ritual is because for a long time fire was very important, especially during the winter, and also it's pretty. So little fires became part of the tradition. I don't know whether we make more fires than Crafters do or not — we make fewer fires per person than we once did, but we still make plenty of fires."

Huh. Crafters almost never make fires; they can craft something to be hot just as easily as crafting it to stay cool, so they use that for heating and cooking and things and it's much safer. The robe he's wearing is crafted to stay warm, actually, so he doesn't have to worry about it if he wants to fly or travels to a hot or cold climate or whatever.

"That sounds convenient," she observes. "We have to do a lot of work to keep things the right temperature."

That really brings her thoughts back around to physics questions, though.

"How cold can you make things? Because if you make air cold enough, its parts become liquids and get much smaller. So you could make a box to store lots of good air in as long as it kept it cold."

Huh. He doesn't see why he wouldn't be able to do that, though getting it back to a safe temperature when he wanted to breathe it might be tricky.

"Yes. You'd want something that could warm it up slowly and away from you," she agrees. She looks pensive.

"Your house must be able to do a lot. If you can have things warm up and move and so on without needing space to make it happen. What kinds of things can your house do?"

It can do a fair amount of stuff, yeah. They presumably saw the walking when he came in, and how he was able to guide it without needing to pull it. The structure is fireproof and indestructible and keeps its temperature, and he has temperature-controlled filters in the air intake vents so that it stays at a nice temperature in all sorts of climates. He's got a rainwater intake and filtering system - he's not sure how they'd do it, but he has physical filtering for particulates and then boiling for diseases - and then storage for the filtered water with ultraviolet to keep it safe and pipes to get it to the kitchen and bedroom and dog's room, and he's got a little system set up to make sure his plants stay watered properly - he'll set up something bigger and more permanent when he has a proper plant house again. He's got lights everywhere, of course - some Crafters prefer to light their whole ceiling but he likes smaller ones scattered around. For cooking utensils he just keeps a countertop oven and a frying press, if he wants to use something else he'll make it when he needs it, and he's got an ice chest for meat storage. In the bedroom he's got a more complicated light setup so he can control everything from the bed rather than needing to get up to adjust it, and fans, and the water spigot he mentioned, and different weighted blankets, and he can adjust his mattress's firmness by hand control if he wants to, and he's got a system to monitor things while he sleeps and wake him up - like if he's flying overnight and he starts losing altitude or there's a mountain ahead or things like that. In the bathroom he's got a heat-treatment system for waste and a full-spectrum light to keep his scrubbing plant happy. The dog has her own water dispenser in her room that she knows how to use, and that's set up so it won't overflow the bowl, and an automated system for feeding her on a timer, and her own waste disposal system, and an alert pad she can use to signal if something's wrong, and he can lock and unlock the door from the bed if he wants her to be able to leave without him. And then in the main area it's pretty sparse, actually - of course he can adjust all the properties of the furniture if he wants to but he doesn't have that specifically set up - but he's got some sensor outputs there and like the emergency help drum - he doesn't think he's explained the emergency help drum yet, he should do that - and a closet with cleaning tools and things. And he's probably forgetting some stuff.

Wow! That sounds really cool.

"If you've told anyone about the emergency drum, I haven't heard it. It sounds important. Is it something we should know?"

They personally probably don't need to but in general the locals ought to, yeah. If there's some kind of emergency that he can't handle on his own or leave to get help for, like if he has a heart attack or something, he'd signal that with an emergency drum, which is extremely loud - if they aren't sure if it's loud enough to count, it's not the emergency drum. It means they have permission to come rescue him but they'll want hearing protection to do it; he can make their emergency people some fully soundproof earmuffs if they don't have their own way of doing that.

... and the aliens have healing powers. Crap. Uh.

"We don't have perfect soundproof things. We have things that are pretty soundproof, but not all the way. So the emergency people would probably like earmuffs. How far away can the emergency drum be heard? How far away do people need to be for it to not permanently damage their ears?"

It can be heard for miles, but that's as much because of how it makes a sound that carries well as because of how loud it is. He's not sure how far away you have to be to not get temporary hearing damage but it'll do permanent-until-healed damage up close, like a little farther than the train platform from here? He can also use a different system if they have something better, the emergency drum is mostly good because you don't have to set anything up with your neighbors beforehand to use it.

The woman with the tablet takes a moment to compose her thoughts.

"Because we don't have healing like yours, we are a lot more cautious with things that could permanently injure someone. If your emergency drum went off by accident, and hurt people at the platform, that would be bad. I can show you how to send an emergency signal with your phone, which will work anywhere on the planet without deafening anyone."

She takes out her phone, which is a similar design, and shows him how to hold it pressing two buttons for a few seconds to call emergency services. The gesture is a little awkward to do with one hand, but it was chosen as a tradeoff between being difficult to do by accident and being easy to do with blood loss.

"And if you want something easier, we have simple buttons that do the same thing. I'm sure we can get you one."

She pulls up a picture of someone wearing a medical alert necklace, the large square button obviously being designed to be easy to press.

He's never heard of an emergency drum going off by accident, they're pretty well safetied since nobody wants to deal with the side effects of using one for anything less than a deadly emergency. He'd be comfortable switching to something like the necklace; he's not confident he'd remember the phone gesture if he was panicking. 

She nods.

"I will ask someone to get one for you," she promises. "Are there any other things in your house that could injure people outside of it?"

He takes a moment to think about it.

In theory his cooking utensils could start a fire that could spread outside his house but it'd take a lot of coincidences in a row, he's not perfect about making sure everything he has is fireproof but certainly the structure of the house is, and most of the rest of his things. His water tank can drain to the outside and in theory that could hurt someone if they were right under it and really unlucky but he checks before he opens it. - and if someone got under his house while it was moving he can't guarantee that's safe, the person he got the design from said it was good for having around little kids and undersocialized dogs and so on but he hasn't personally checked it over and wouldn't expect to catch every possible problem if he did.

"I think that sounds safe enough," the woman agrees. "People should know not to stand in front of a large machine when it moves. I was more worried about things that we might not know to expect — I wouldn't have guessed about the emergency drum if you hadn't said anything."

At this point the woman who departed has dropped off the other end of the ansible. There's another spot-auction among train-station-occupants and she's replaced by a tanned person wearing long green pants, muddy boots, and a blue vest that they don't bother to keep closed.

They exchange a few words with the two woman, and then sit on the third chair to listen.

Yeah, he generally tries to be a good neighbor, and there's not that much reason to keep dangerous things around anyway. And he wouldn't use the drum if something happened with people right there in any case; even if he didn't care about them at all it'd be better for him to go out and call for help instead of losing the house when they came in to help him on top of everything else that'd be going wrong in that situation.

Hello new person!

He's just finishing up with the trinkets now, with roughly half of the crafting material turned into trays of them; he takes three off the last tray and offers them around.

They take the trinkets and play with them, turning them over and feeling the weight of them.

"I'm glad to meet you," the new person relays via tablet-woman. "I saw on the summary that you get most of your food by crafting plants — I grow food for people, and I'm curious about whether your plants are more or less suited for people than ours. On the one hand, you can change them, but on the other hand, we need to change them more."

The trinkets are very lightweight, only a little heavier than they need to be to avoid floating off into the sky. The thread attaching the handle to the cube is a little stiffer than normal thread and has very little friction - best practice for avoiding tangles - which might make it interesting to fiddle with in its own right as they move the trinkets around.

That's an interesting question! He's not sure what to expect their food plants to be like at all. He could go get some seeds if they'd like to try some samples of his?

The newcomer indicates that they would like that, and the others agree.

The woman with the tablet wants to ask questions about right- vs left-handed proteins, but can't figure out how to put the questions into glyphs, and decides to leave that to the actual experts. Presumably they've already checked somehow that the alien isn't going to poison them or vice versa, given that he's going to try their food tomorrow.

He goes in to get the seeds, and comes back a few minutes later with a collection of packets in a tray. He has some local seeds they brought him, too, that he hasn't tried yet since he hasn't had the time to figure out the new cultivars, he can do that now if they want to make a direct comparison.

For grains he's got Crafter cultivars of corn, einkorn, and popping sorghum. (He hopes they have potatoes or at least jicama; he doesn't have either with him and he likes them.) For fruit he's just got a sweet micrantha, it wasn't a priority in his emergency kit. For vegetables he's got a kind of spicy lettuce, two experimental tomato cultivars he picked up a while back and never tried, and a broadbean cultivar that makes a decent meat substitute. For nuts, he has butternuts for oil and sugar and saba nuts for snacking. His spice collection is the bulk of it, though - he happened to have it out to thin down when the fire hit - and he's got a dozen and a half or so of those, ranging from fairly recognizable green onions and dill to a dwarf cinnamon cultivar and a kumquat variety genecrafted to have a fragrant reddish peel reminiscent of caramel.

Would they like him to start with anything in particular?

Oooh!

"Kumquats are delicious," the woman with the tablet informs him, and the others make agreeing gestures. "We would like to start with those, please."

It turns out that the local seeds he's been provided with include wheat, rice, rye, two kinds of bean (black and soy), a brassica cultivar somewhere between elongated broccoli and thick lettuce, almonds, peanuts, and lentils — the kind of basic staples that (by a þereminian reckoning) one should always have available, but specifically restricted to seeds that store and travel well.

"We do have potatoes," she continues. "Or at least the thing you're communicating seems like a thing we have."

They look over the local seeds and identify them for him.

"I think they didn't give you potatoes or fruits because the seeds don't store as well, but you can definitely get them in the city if you want."

He's glad they have potatoes! That's why he doesn't have any either; aside from the spice collection most of his seeds are from his emergency kit and potatoes wouldn't've worked there at all. The rest of the local seeds look good, too.

This variety of kumquat isn't intended for eating, to be clear, though he does like the juice in porridge as well as the intended use of grating the peel onto things. He grows it anyway, first crafting the remaining material into a sort of sand that he spreads on the ground next to his chair and then putting the seed in and keeping his hand over it to grow it into a low bush with four fruit that ripen in a matter of seconds as the sandy material disappears. He passes three of the fruits around and sets the fourth aside to get seeds from later: they're a little longer and thinner than the local sort of kumquat, with a disappointing amount of flesh, but the peel smells lovely.

The three of them take tentative bites.

The peel is thick and has a strong flavor. The woman with the tablet stops after a single bite, but her partner eats the whole thing.

"That is different from our local kumquats," she agrees. "Ours have thin skins and more juice. But I see why it would be tasty in porridge."

Then she relays a question from the new person.

"How do you get these seeds? Traded with people you meet on your travels?"

More often given or picked up from public areas than traded, but all three of those, yeah. He occasionally picks up something from the wild, too, if he sees something that looks like a familiar species. But it's easy to get lots of seeds, people don't usually mind giving them to whoever asks.

"Is there a megaproject like the library but for seeds?" they question. "So that important kinds of seed aren't lost, if something happens to the area they all grow in, or so that you can compare and see how plants change over time?"

The woman with the tablet, after transcribing the questions, shows a map of the planet with two dots labeled "our seed libraries" — one in the far north of the larger landmass, and one in the far south of the other.

Not on that kind of scale, no. Lots of people collect things, though, including seeds, and it's easy to put some seeds away in a disinfected airtight container if you hear that there's a plant disease going around and not too much harder to grow a plant in quarantine, that's mostly a matter of getting clean dirt and making it its own building that you're careful with.

He begins transforming the kumquat bush back into crafting material; this part will take a couple minutes, he explains.

They watch with interest as he does, but since there's not much to see, the woman with the tablet scribbles another question.

"Do you want some hints about how people cook with the local plants you have, or would you prefer to discover for yourself?"

He thinks he's got enough adventures lined up for the next while, he'll appreciate the hints more.

She nods. That's perfectly understandable — not a lot of people really like to cook, anyway, let alone run endless experiments.

Since not all of the local variants have glyphs, she just uses little pictures of them.

"The wheat, rice, and rye are all kinds of grain. The rice likes to grow in standing water. All three of them, you prepare by taking the seeds off the end and removing the exterior with mechanical force. We usually use coarse grinders and then a sieve to separate the soft inner parts from the harder outer part. The outer part of the wheat is nutritious, but doesn't taste as good. You can either carefully remove it all for light, sweet foods, or grind it fine for heavier, but more filling foods. All three can either be ground into flour that is used in baking, or soaked in water and boiled until they become tender, and then eaten alone. Use about twice as much water as grain. How long to boil them depends on how much of the shell you removed. It's more common to prepare rice that way than the others. Rice is often used as a bed for other foods, since it soaks up flavor well. Rye has a stronger flavor of its own that makes a popular bread," she explains.

"The beans aren't hard to prepare; remove the beans from their pods, and eat them raw, steam them, or grind them into paste to mix with things. The soybean can also be used to make a firm, flavor-absorbent, nutritious solid food. But that has a lot of steps. If you don't like meat, eating beans is good."

"The kalhornaðor is good to eat raw, steamed, or baked. No preparation needed, which makes it a popular snack. Almonds can also just be picked and eaten raw, but you can also squeeze them and mix them with water to make a drink that replaces milk for some people. Peanuts can be picked and eaten, but you have to remove the hard shell. They produce oil that is good for cooking but has a strong flavor. If you grind them to paste and store it in jars, it is a popular topping or component in other recipes. Peanuts have lots of energy in them for how much they weigh, and store well, so lots of people keep some for emergencies. Some people, their bodies get into fights with the peanuts and they can't have them — it's not common, but if you start getting puffy when you try one, don't eat them."

"Lentils also store well, but you can't eat them raw because they're too hard. Grinding them to flour doesn't really help either. But they go very well in soup — if you add them to soup, they will soften and thicken it a little."

"These are all practical foods — things that if you eat them, you'll be fine, but they aren't very fancy. So it's good that you have spices to add to things. All of these except the nuts usually get eaten with meat or spices for flavor."

That all sounds pretty straightforward. He assumes they also toast the nuts? Is storing the nut paste necessary for some reason? Also before she answers can he have the board back for a moment, he wants to make a copy of all that.

She hands it to him. When she has it back, she replies.

"Yes, you can toast the nuts. I think toasted almonds are tastier than toasted peanuts, but I think some people like them. Storing the nut paste is not necessary, but shelling peanuts and grinding them down is lots of work. It's less work now that they have machines for it, but people still prefer doing it in big batches and then saving it for later. For example, I like toasting slices of bread, spreading peanut paste on them, and then putting slices of fruit on top. It's a quick meal, but tasty and reasonably filling for when I don't want to go out of my territory to get food. But if I had to shell a bunch of peanuts and get out a grinder, it would be much more work. Instead I trade for jars of peanut paste with a group of people who have big machines that make it constantly."

"Also, if you put peanuts in an emergency kit, only storing the paste saves space and weight, since you can't eat the shells. We can't grow plants as quickly as you do, so we need to have enough food to eat while waiting for the plant to grow."

Yeah, Crafters prefer foods that don't take that much work, and being able to grow things when they need them makes that limitation much more practical. Maybe he'll try some of their jarred nut paste while he's in the city tomorrow and see if he likes it.

With the kumquat plant converted back into crafting material, he dissolves it back into fertilizer again and picks out three more plants to grow. These are different varieties of pepper, he explains; the fruit is edible - birds like it, in particular - but the seed is the part he uses.

They try the seeds — first individually, to gauge spiciness, and then a bit more. They all have reasonable spice tolerance, but eating straight pepper is a bit much.

"We have pepper that is like this; I think this one is most like the peppers we have, and the other two are more different," the farmer conveys.

"We also usually store pepper dried and ground," one of the women remarks. "How much do you like in your food? People from the south traditionally use more spicy ingredients, and people from the north traditionally use less, so the city has a mixture of different kinds of food."

He grinds it to use it, yeah, and most dishes don't need more than a little sprinkle of the powder. He'd expect it to lose flavor pretty quickly if it was stored ground, though, he grinds a seed or two at once and if he keeps the powder for a couple days he can already notice a difference; maybe they've bred for varieties that don't lose flavor as much?

The farmer checks some things on their phone.

"It looks like the flavor loss is because of evaporation and exposure to light," they relay. "We store pepper in air-tight, opaque containers, which helps. Also, there are steps to dry the pepper and treat it with purpler-than-purple light before it's ground which help too. But you're right that the best foods are made with fresh-ground pepper. I suspect this is another difference down to how much in groups we are — most people in the city don't cook for themselves, because it is less work for a few people to make big batches of food that everyone can have some of. But cooking in big batches is pretty different from cooking in small batches. Ingredients get used up faster, and people want to find ways to do it that have fewer steps."

"People who live outside the city often cook for themselves," one of the women adds. "I don't know if they are more likely to grind their pepper instead of trading for it already ground."

That's interesting. He's assuming they're going to want copies of all his nonpersonal stuff sooner or later - he's sort of expecting to end up giving someone a miniaturized copy of his whole house, when he figures out who the right person is for that - and it'll be interesting to hear what various people think of the different spices.

"That would be great! People will definitely want to try the spices," they agree.

One of the women has been thinking as they discuss spices. Finally, she makes an exclamation, and then scribbles "salt!" on the tablet. After a moment she expands that into a proper thought.

"You can make plant-based spices easily, but I bet you can't make salt with crafting material. You can probably get it from seawater, but you're not always near the sea. And you don't have trains to make moving it from the sea to where people are easy. I bet we use more salt in our food than you do; salt helps enhance the flavor of other things in the food."

Huh! Yeah, he doesn't use salt much even when he has access to it; if they're using it regularly they're using more than he does.

He's thinking he might grow the leafy herbs next, or he can do more seeds - he has a couple of anisses and fennels they could try, things like that.

"I think I know the plants you mean, but neither of those is a common herb here."

The þereminians check among themselves.

"We would be happy to try those next. Really, any order is fine."

All right.

For leafy herbs he's got varieties of sage, thyme, chives, tarragon, and two kinds of dill, one with particularly flavorful seeds and another with big dense sprays of edible flowers in addition to the tasty leaves of both; he passes around cuttings of each as he finishes growing them.

They nibble at the herbs.

They're generally of the opinion that the sage, thyme, and chives would probably all go well in rice, and say as much.

When they get to the dill, the woman with the tablet gets a thoughtful look.

"I think this the same plant as gets used to flavor pickles," she writes, using the LCTL word for pickles in a little circle, since she can't really draw a pickle as distinct from a cucumber. "They're vegetables — usually cucumbers, but you can also use carrots, peppers, kalhornaðor, etc. — that have been soaked in salt water and vineager to preserve them," she explains. "And flavored with different spices. The recipe started as a way to preserve food for winter, before we had good ways to store food for that long. But they're flavorful and salty, so we still eat them. You might like them if you like dill."

He'll definitely have to try that, dill is one of his favorites. Cucumbers aren't, but dill is good on carrots, maybe he can find some of those.

"Pickle carrots shouldn't be too hard to find. Although I prefer pickle cucumbers to plain cucumbers, because the process changes their texture. I bet you should look for foods that are based on preservation techniques generally, because it will probably be newest to you. Do you have dried and preserved meats?" the farmer asks.

He's not sure what specifically they mean by 'preserved', there; he dries meat so he can keep it with him if he's going to be away from the house all day and to put in the feeder for the dogs, but for regular use he mostly keeps it frozen.

The three of them briefly search for the right words.

"Maybe just drying it is the same as the thing we're thinking? But how you dry it changes the flavor. And there are some ways to preserve it that aren't drying or freezing," the woman tells him.

Huh,  maybe it's the same thing? By drying he means he slices the meat thin and has a machine blow slightly-hot air on it for several hours, sometimes with spices on it for flavor, to make jerky. He doesn't know about ways to preserve meat besides those two.

"You can preserve meat by packing it in salt," the woman elaborates. "That makes it pretty salty, but it can taste good. Also, if you dry meat over a fire instead of using a machine, you get flavor from the wood. But maybe it's not very different; not everything can be different."

One of the others makes a comment.

"You can also preserve meat by taking all the air away around it and keeping it cold. That makes it very light, but also kind of crunchy and flavorless," she adds.

Well, that explains why he's never heard of those - most Crafters don't have access to that much salt, and they don't like messing with fire, it's too unpredictable. And he's not sure what the advantage of vacuum-drying is, if you still have to keep the meat cold.

"Oh, no. You just need to keep it cold while it's drying. After that, you can store it in warm places," they clarify. "Preserved like that, and in a sealed box, it stays good for many years. It's good for emergencies because sometimes the machines that keep things cold break. But if you can just make them stay cold without little lightnings, it probably isn't important. Preserving meat without air is not very popular, because it doesn't taste as good as freezing or drying it."

That is an advantage of crafted things, yeah, that they just keep working forever if you make them that way.

Speaking of meat, he'll grow the sumac and juniper trees next - again, as bushes - since those are for flavoring meat. The bright red sumac berries have a lemony flavor usually paired with a little bit of pepper, and the deep purple juniper berries have a herbal piney flavor with a bit of citrus tartness.

Those are both a bit more reasonable to taste-test on an individual basis than some of the other spices. The sumac berries get a better reception than the juniper berries, but they like both. 

They can have some seeds to take with them, if they want, by the way; he's not sure how useful that will be without them being Crafters, though.

Next he's got nutmeg, cinnamon, and a couple of varieties of green cardamom; these are all good in sweet dishes or tea. He's all out of butternut sugar, though; that he does make a few days' worth of at a time, since it takes a few hours to boil down the butternut sap, but he ran out while he was in the sky and hasn't gotten around to making more yet.

"We'll just have to grow the seeds the slow way," the farmer answers. "But that still means that in a few years we'll have plenty of seeds to share with everyone who wants some."

"Do you know what the natural season for these is? What kind of soil and water they like?"

Nutmeg and cinnamon are both familiar; cardamom is less common, but it's something they have as well. The women are a bit sad about not getting to try butternut sugar, since they don't really think it's used for that here.

"We usually use sugarcane or maple for sugar," the woman with the tablet mentions. "But you can get more sugar in the city if you want to."

He knows what kind of conditions the established plants like, but not their usual growing seasons or anything about starting them naturally, since he's never bothered to do that - the usual setup, for a Crafter, is having a building specifically for plants and growing them up to a nice established size when you first put them in there so you can harvest from them right away.

He's had maple and cane sugars, they're also popular back home; it's good that he'll be able to get them here. Butternut sugar is very similar to maple sugar, too, just with a little bit of a deeper nuttier flavor.

"That makes sense. I do want to try it at some point. I think maple sugar is popular because you can set it up to harvest itself, and lots of people like the wood flavor," the woman explains.

The farmer jots down the growing condition information to pass along with the seeds.

He definitely thinks maple sugar is tastier than cane sugar, yeah. He'll include some butternut seeds in with the rest, of course; he expects to be too busy to do enough food-growing for everyone to get to try it that way.

He finishes out the spices with three varieties of anise and two of fennel, which he was intending to get rid of all but one or two of - all five have a similar licorice flavor, but the anises have slightly more complex taste profiles - one is almost creamy, which he hasn't decided if he likes or not - whereas the fennels have tasty bulbs, leaves, and flowers in addition to the seeds.

Oh, that is creamy. They're not really sure whether they like it either, but it's definitely novel. They tell him as much.

"I don't think I've had anise before, actually. We don't use it much," one of the women comments. "But I bet it would make a good candy."

Crafters do use it for that, yeah.

It's getting late, he notices; he can stay up a little while longer if they'd like to try a few more things from the rest of his collection, though.

The þereminians glance up at the sky to check the time. Yeah, it is getting a bit late. On the one hard, it's hard to imagine anything they could be doing that would be more interesting than continuing to talk to Traveler. On the other hand, they were all on the way home from work and have not actually had dinner.

"Yeah, it is getting late," the woman with the tablet agrees. "It was good to meet you! I'm really glad you're visiting."

The others also relay their well wishes, and then make sure they have the little crafted items that he gave them.

He walks back with them with the rest of the trinkets; when he gets close enough he lets the people on the edge of the crowd know that he's about done for the night but they can have the trinkets and he'll come back over for the trays (which he's modifying into little tables) in the morning.

A few people scramble for their phones, and then wave the "thanks" glyph at him.

Once it's clear that he's probably going to bed, people mostly pick up a trinket and then disperse; there's one very full train headed back to the city, and then things are mostly quiet.

He takes in the chairs and things before turning in for the night, leaving the dog outside to watch the house.

She won't go far, but she will go to check on anybody coming through the train station.

Well, unfortunately þereminia does run night shifts in a lot of places. So while there are fewer people passing through at night, there are still small waves of people headed to go tend to various outlying jobs.

They have varying reactions to Traveler's dog; most of them are not quite sure how to treat her, and end up just nodding to her or greeting her with a few words of LCTL before continuing on. A few have seen dogs before, and crouch down to let her sniff at their hands for a moment.

That's fine, especially the people who let her sniff their hands. She'll beg for petting from them, and give extra attention to anyone who seems sad or stressed.

People will definitely give her some petting, sure. Although not for too long since people are mostly on the way to work, or back to bed.

Mostly, people who choose to work the night shift are people with less sun-dependence than average. And the night is pretty quiet. So most everybody passing through is neither sad nor stressed, just going about their business.

There is one man who comes through a little after midnight who smells acutely distressed, even though this isn't particularly apparent in his manner. He's one of the people who just nods to her and wishes her a good morning before going to wait for the train.

How does he feel about her following him and laying on his feet when he sits down?

This was not in the plan. He doesn't know what to do in this situation. And normally that would be fine, but ...

There is a maybe-person alien on his feet. For some reason.

He keeps his feet still, retrieves a fidget from his robe pocket, and plays with it while he sits.

"You don't speak language, do you?" he remarks after a few moments. "You probably didn't—" His voice hitches. "— didn't even grow up in an environment where it made sense to associate auditory stimuli with someone's thoughts or desires."

Crafters don't speak, but she knows what hitching breath means. She sits back up, leans against his shins, and puts her chin on his knee.

Oh no now he's more immobilized by alien.

He's starting to feel a little unreal, as though this is not quite happening to him, but to somebody else. It's some other man sitting on this bench, under the dim red light of the train station at night, feeling the dog's bony chin on his leg.

"You know they're reconsidering protections for elephants and crows?" the other man tells her, and he can't quite tell why he's saying it. "People have always wondered about whether they were sapient, right? But 'theoretically capable of telepathy' sure seems like a situation where you want them firmly on the 'people' side of the line. There's a referendum in five days."

The train pulls up, and he doesn't move to stand.

She nudges his hand with her nose, trying to get under it.

Uh. What does she want with his hand?

"I don't understand what you want," he tells her, because this is what he would normally tell someone who was being unclear. "I want you to go away, but I don't understand how to communicate that to you because I am not telepathic." His breath has evened out, not because he feels better, but just because the tenuous link between what he's feeling and what his body is doing has frayed to the point of nonexistence.

What would he do if she were a pre-verbal child? Is that the right analogy here?

Well ... she's not wearing a diaper, she doesn't appear hurt ... she probably wants attention. Why does she want attention from him?

He puts a hand on top of her nose, but cannot quite bring himself to do anything with it. He doesn't have a pattern for this; the situation is completely unprecedented.

She waits a second to see if he'll start petting her on his own, then wiggles her head forward under his hand to move it between her ears.

Okay, you know what? The dog seems to be perfectly capable of getting whatever it is she wants here without his involvement. He's just going to focus on his breathing, on the feeling of the seat under him, on the feeling of the cool night air.

The train doors swish closed, and the train pulls out of the station.

A moment later, his phone whistles to him in their private code: "Location monitoring — Unexpected observation — Intent: seek confirmation — Intent: call Kaðer"

He starts crying. He needs to update the coding for his contingencies not to point to her ...

"Deny — Sleep one hour," he whistles back, although it takes a few attempts for him to get a clear tone.

"Acknowledged — Intent: sleep one hour," the phone replies.

The crying doesn't surprise her. She's already right where she's supposed to be and doing what she's supposed to do about it, though. She'll stay put.

Not for an hour, though; she's patient but she's not that patient. Twenty minutes, maybe, if nothing else happens in the meantime.

It only takes perhaps ten minutes for his crying to turn to sniffles, and then to silence again.

"Some fucking days," he tells her. "I need to go to bed, and honestly I don't particularly care about making a bad impression on you or Traveler at this point. I'm going to move my feet."

He sort of falls sideways onto the bench and tries to wiggle out from under her.

She backs off and lets him up as soon as he starts moving, though she stays close to him.

"... oh, you respond to movement. Of course you do. I wish I knew what I was saying to you."

He's kind of worried that if he holds still she'll try to touch him again. But he has the advantage of having thumbs.

He stands on the bench, grabs the handholds on the pillar of the station, and hauls himself up to the little spot where the beams join the pillar.

"Query: time to train," he whistles.

"Heard: query — Response: 10 minutes," his phone replies.

She looks up at him for a few seconds, cocking her head as she assesses the situation, then moves off a little ways and sits with her back to him, facing the train tracks.

Okay, cool. He will wait and take deep breaths, then. Things are ­— well, no, they are not fine. But he has a plan, at this point, even if it is basically just "avoid the dog, get onto the train, get home, collapse in bed".

He can do that.

The train is on time. Six minutes later, it returns and opens its doors again, releasing a few early morning workers. They nod to Traveler's dog and head out toward their cars.

The man drops down from the beam and hurries into the train car.

She looks at him when she spots him moving, but doesn't get up or anything. When the platform is clear again, she trots back over to her person's house.

There's another relatively large group of people that make their way through a bit before dawn, around the shift change. But otherwise the night is quiet, disturbed only by the sound of steel rolling on steel as the train makes its unceasing journey back and forth.

A bit after dawn, Vesherti and some helpers come and wait in the field outside Traveler's house. They have brought breakfast, more items to be turned into crafting material, meat, and various other items.

They have chairs, though, and are perfectly content to wait, share breakfast, and drink some ginger tea for as long as it takes Traveler to be ready to face the day.

The dog is sleeping by the door when they arrive, but comes over while they're getting set up to see what they're doing and beg for bits of their breakfast.

And the Crafter heads up to his roof to gather his breakfast ingredients not long after that; he waves when he spots them waiting and brings his and the dog's breakfasts out shortly after.

Vesherti isn't sure whether to feed Traveler's dog; on the one hand, feeding your guests is polite. On the other hand, he's spoken to some people who raise herding dogs, and they said that generally the dog's owner has behaviors they want to reward and discourage, and interfering with that is rude. And he's not totally clear on how much the dog is like a tool, a pet, a child, or an adult with a communication disorder.

He ends up just setting a bowl of water down for her. And then, after checking the ingredients for things that are known to be harmful to dogs, a mug of lukewarm tea.

The diplomatic team did bring enough breakfast to share with Traveler, but if he prefers to make his own that's fine too.

"Hello," Vesherti greets him by way of a screen on a little rolling stand when he comes out. "I hope you slept well."

She seems enthusiastic about the tea, though still interested in their food - at least until her own comes out, at which point she goes and gets that instead.

He did sleep well, and he hopes they all did too. He also got a lot of material converted to crafting material during the trip yesterday if they want him to make the ansibles or crankshafts or anything else before they head into the city.

"If you don't mind, it would be helpful to have the ansible and crankshaft designs we sent you made for testing," he agrees. "We also brought more spare things for you to make crafting material with."

He points at the grey crates they've set in the field.

"There's no rush, we just don't want you to run out and I know the crankshaft our learning people asked for is fairly large."

Yeah, they should definitely keep him supplied with material to convert, the total mass of crafting material on the planet is going to be the limiting factor for a lot of things. Fortunately he prefers the kind of conversion where he can do it all day, not the kind where it gets boring after a few hours, and the stuff they've been bringing has mostly been good for that.

Anyway. He wasn't sure what density they wanted for the crankshaft or what size or density they wanted for the other things, but if they can clear those questions up he can make everything now, to the limits of how much mass he's got available.

Vesherti has had a whole day to prepare. So he happens to have some samples with him that are exactly the density the scientists wanted for their various tests, to side-step the whole unit translation problem.

He sets the samples on the table for Traveler, and points out which one is which.

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."