Previously:

"We don't actually have to immediately get back into job-related topics," Zarian clarifies, scraping up the last of her dessert soup.  "Most of the urgent progress possible at this time is in the hands of the other people building things, or on me going off and talking to experts on various subjects.  And I'd expect that you two do better when you have each other to bounce things off of."

"It doesn't hurt," he admits. "We have really different backgrounds."

"I'd - gotten that impression."

"We're from different planets and they're really different planets. My dad was the ambassador from mine to his, and I tagged along, that's how we originally met."

"You'd mentioned a bit of what his was like but didn't describe yours in very much detail except by contrast.  And in sharing the knowledge of your technology, I suppose.

"I'm pretty used to my planet, so contrast is one of the main ways I can describe it. I mean, I could contrast it with Outer Sohaibek, I guess, but the differences there were less stark. Different languages, different ethnicity..."

"I suppose that makes sense for planets and countries without - a gimmick, for lack of a better word.  Something immediately distinguishing about them."

"Yeah. There's cultural differences but they tend to be kind of - not superficial, necessarily, but more localized than 'planet'? Like, Xeren does genetic engineering for Olympics candidates - that's a sports competition - but if you don't happen to be one of those, then being in a Xeren city isn't necessarily stranger than being in an unfamiliar city on Kular, for a Kularan."

"That must be interesting.  I would describe Creta as reasonably distinct.  Some smaller countries might be more similar I suppose; I've never been."

"I feel like most of what I notice here is downstream of the copying magic but probably if I had more breadth of experience with this planet I would be able to detect differences."

"I'm going to go pay for this unless you want more of anything."

"I'm full, thanks!"

She does that and then they can begin the walk back to her office.

"'What was a normal day for you like?', might be the best way of pinning down the sort of thing about which I'm curious."

"I lived in a student flat near but not on campus of the University of Starport. I'd wake up, order breakfast - if I was running late I'd have cereal at home to save a few minutes, but given time I'd order an omelette or French toast or a fry-up or something and it'd land on my windowsill delivered by a little flying robot. I had class, not the same ones every day but usually like four of them on a given weekday when class was in session - I was taking gen ed literature and gen ed ceramics, gen ed means it's a requirement and you have to cover something in that department even if you're focusing somewhere else, and my non-gen-eds were differential calculus, history of the Sohaitok system, principles of debt, and intro econometrics."

"I've picked up a vague impression of how classes work, but not one remotely clear enough to really understand how people go about learning things the long way."

"Usually they give you a book about it - do you have, like, nonfiction books about things, here -"

"Certainly.  Generally as supplements or to provide framing."

"Well, ours are supplements to provide framing for the teacher talking, usually. The teacher's an expert in the field and knows the answers to all the likely questions from novices, ideally, and they try to give another perspective on what's in the books so you can sort of triangulate from there, and they also - a lot of the point of this is that in addition to learning stuff you get the ability to prove you learned stuff, since we can't just - check. So they give you assignments that are hard to do if you don't have a clue what's going on in calculus or whatever, and assess your progress."

"At some point people with philosophical or practical objections to picking up skills the fast way may want to interrogate you in great detail in search of improvements to their methods."

"I had no idea there were such people - or is it mostly people who are obliged to spend a period of time holding onto an inferior version of the copying thing -"

"In this country there are more incidentally- than categorically-opposed people.  Colley, for example, has steadfastly kept her own voice for her entire life, with enough margin to cut off some number of skills she could have otherwise acquired more easily.  Developers aren't generally deprived of adequate versions for long enough that they'd need to learn something during that time; it's usually only a year or two at most."

"Presumably some people have to keep and train their own voices or you can never have a new ideal voice for all the singers to converge on."

"It's generally more on the scale of tweaks and nudges to one's existing voice, or blending a few others even when aiming for a fairly drastic change.  Direct replicas are somewhat rare."

"I guess that makes sense but it's harder to picture since I don't have the entire sense people'd be using for picking out little bits of a voice."

"It's a bit gauche in the same way copying someone's entire appearance would be; you might do it for a holiday or a performance but not, typically, as a way of living.  I don't know if you have any equivalents.  Buying exactly the same wardrobe as someone and matching what they wore every day?  I suppose you might have less cultural focus on specialization and the like given that you have fewer avenues towards accidentally eliminating it."