"What?"

"He is seventeen, Avera."

"He knows about the effects of Heartsongs, doesn't he?"

"He deserves to know you're seventy-one beneath all that makeup."

"And now you have informed him. Enough?"

Cocoa looks at Teddy.

"It's pretty great people here can live a long time without going infirm or insane. Everyone should live happy and healthy as long as they want. That said, it's not not weird. And I'm from a prudish society, okay? Just..." Huff. "Actually, if I'm going to be your student in some way, maybe it's better to not? And maybe that's an excuse I'm making to cover my shyness but whatever."

"Oh, if it's a no it's a no. I was mostly teasing. Alva is more your type."

Blush. "... at least let me get to know him first before you start selling me off..."

Hand: meet face.

"...Subject change. Alva, how much is known about the sun, the stars, and other objects in space here? I probably shouldn't assume things work the same as they do at home, but I don't see any big reasons it wouldn't yet."

"We orbit the sun and not the other way around. The moon orbits us and it's a place, you can see mountains and craters on it if you have a decent telescope. Some of the stars wander around, and under magnification they're discs, not point sources like the other stars, so they seem like a fundamentally different class of object. I'm working on specifying a better lens for Rosalie to manufacture for me so I can investigate some anomalies there." 

He grins. "The disks are likely planets, places, in orbit around the sun like the moon orbits this one. Stars are other suns, immensely distant. Light has a speed, it's about three hundred thousand kilometers per second. Light took eight minutes to go from our sun to our Earth. One second to go to the moon. We landed on it, with enormous machines called rockets to lift tiny capsules into space and carefully navigate there - it was very dangerous since there's no air. I bet I could find some really good telescope designs, or... Pictures of Saturn and Jupiter and Mars, I bet you'd love those, maybe I can post them to the local rel'he'ar? It's very cool."

"My, that's a lot to take in all at once. Now, I've heard your world doesn't have a Hymn, so we can't be certain what's true for this world, but - you've been to your moon. That must be astonishing." 

She pauses. "I heard you're a data admin. I would love it if you could take images. Rosalie says she can't image from any higher than a few thousand feet, and I believe her, but it might be different for you."

"I can access images from my world. Kaldea-anske Earthrise." He spins the display around.

"Whoa."

Cocoa cranes his neck to see.

Avera frowns. "That's not just - art, is it?"

"It is not. The astronauts who landed on the moon had cameras - which capture light with lenses. Modern ones encode it as data, older ones did so as chemicals. There are lots of these but I'm not sure how much core draw it's taking. Actually..."

He brings up the local rel'he'ar, starts a new thread "Pictures from another world", and puts it there. "So I don't have to retrieve it again."

"I want images like that but for our universe."

Avera taps her fingers against her lips and says nothing.

"I'd like to see more of your world, actually."

"I think I can image from higher? But planets are really far away. Feels like the kind of thing that'd take a lot of core draw. I can try in a bit though. Like, Earthrise is... Well known and widely distributed at home, not something I imaged just now? What kind of things, Cocoa?"

"I'd like to see one of your cities. They must be really something compared to here."

"In general getting information from long distances doesn't cost much, but that might be different when you start talking about orbital distances... It's worth trying the experiment."

"I'd like to see more of your inventions."