"Well that's spooky."

"I guess setting conditions isn't the best way to go about it, probably. What if I have to wait in a very long line."

"We don't have the constituents of such a line but I've just decided I'll be open for business at sidereal dawn and the subsequent subjective fifteen minutes."

"- that's fine."

"...I'll put it in my calendar, then."

He drops the coin to the ground and - bounces up and down. "We did it! It works! There's a way out! We can price things that we think ought to have a price on them and don't - any of them - and we can get everyone to use currency -"

"And they get to internalize the benefits of having beneficial interactions instead of pointlessly horrible expedient ones!"

"Everyone'll be so - able to do good things and have them make things better -"

Cam enters into his calendar that he should be open for fifteen subjective minutes beginning at sidereal dawn. "Wonder how popular it can reasonably get overnight."

"We'd need to go to courts and explain how it works, and probably have enough compelling goods around that people are interested in trying it just so they can trade with you, and some courts'll have humans they can trade you in exchange, or will be willing to make an agreement to send you any future humans they get, but most of them won't so we'll probably have to arrange some inferior way for them to pay us back for the initial explanation and goodies. That'd be our bottleneck."

"Is the explanation itself going to be expensive? I guess if we can't explain it in a way that doesn't invite lots of clarifying questions - or, no, they probably start with asking 'why are you here', don't they?"

"Either way the explanation itself is expensive. It's slightly more expensive if it's all separate questions but not by that much. It's not disastrously expensive, if you're all right with people accepting favors on your behalf, but getting paid back for it will usually take the better part of a day, I'd expect."

"I thought volunteering information nobody asked for was free? What's the thing going on there? Subjective or sidereal?"

"Subjective. Uh, if we show up and they ask nothing at all and we explain everything we're okay but they'll almost certainly demand to know our business and the difference between 'demand to know our business, we explain everything' and 'demand to know our business, we explain a little bit and they ask clarifying questions' is pretty small."

"Damn. Do enough people know how to read that you could fling a pamphlet at them and flee?"

"It'd be stupid to read it, if someone did that."

"Riiight. I'll get a sense for this eventually. Uh, what kinds of things will tend to be on offer for the introduction?"

"Some places might have books, or stories, or musicians, or information about who else might have a human we can buy off them. I do not really understand what was communicated to me of your objections to sex but if I'm travelling with you I can accept sexual favors for payment if that's not objectionable. Courts'd want to negotiate this before they let us give the explanation, they're in a vulnerable position if they're in our debt and we haven't got a plan to fix that."

"I do not have an objection to sex in general and can try to explain it and then we can try to figure out whether this objection is tripped by the scenario you describe."

"We go to a court! We say that we have valuable information and goods to trade and sincerely expect that they'll be glad of arranging to trade with us. We ask what they have. They do not have books or stories we don't already have, they do not have humans, they ask if we'll pick out someone from a set of people, I talk with the people, I find someone, he or she pays us for the information and goods, we give them the information and goods."

"How is the set of people determined?"

"Mostly by expertise at getting the numbers to come out right, typically."

"How does one typically come by that expertise?"

"A lot of practice?"

"Which one has for what reason?"