"I know you won't. But if teaching everyone to summon will make them immortal..."

"Yeah. Unfortunately if someone summons their grandma unbound there is not a ton you can do about it besides shoot the grandkid."

"...If killing people just makes them daeva I don't know if we need to execute people more or less but - hotel now and I'll think about that."

"Hotel!" agrees Cam. He flies to the beach and surveys it for suitable sites.

He could fit something with a smallish footprint in on top of a cliff if he clears some trees out of the way and is careful of the pipes underground. Or he could maybe do something with the area currently taken up by the ruins of what was a particularly nice section of the city and is currently a bunch of rubble leaching something caustic and brown into the water. Or he could move a little inland and try to figure out how to safely put something next to a pond of dark eco that absolutely nothing wants to grow near except for some thick black stalks with what look a bit like skull gems near the tips.

Wow, an entire pond of dark eco, he was not expecting them to just kinda leave that lying around.

What if he puts it on a platform out in the water, any major environmental hazards there?

A robot which does not yet know that Haven City is at peace with the metal heads or that leaving is allowed lurks near some of the more scenic coast trying to shoot anything in the water but it doesn't patrol the entire ocean and he can avoid it. Farther out there are some amazingly aggressive fish but while they can and will bite through solid wood there are plenty of materials they can't and won't. The caustic water near the ruins doesn't have any robots and its local monsters are soft and squishy and incapable of biting through solid wood.

Well, he doesn't know exactly what the caustic substance is and doesn't want to bet he can come up with something that it won't eat. He tests the bite strength of the monsterfish and makes a platform out of stone and steel and puts the hotel on that and arcs a swoopy bridge from the platform to the cliff.

That works. If he examines the fish while he's doing this testing he may notice its lower jaw looks characteristically lurkery.

He does notice that! He does not take particular actions about it. He releases the fish unharmed.

He installs tidecatchers all around the hotel's platform and runs wire along the underside of the bridge to continue on from there when the time comes; he caps it off neatly at the cliff. If he's done this right nobody will even particularly notice the wire's traces among the aesthetic flourishes.

The robot manages not to take issue with this. It patrols under the bridge.

Oh good.

He goes to report about where the hotel is and tries not to sound judgmental about the state of the build site.

Finding someone to reprogram the robot can go on Torn's to-do list somewhere below ending slavery.

Once everyone who needs to sign off on the plan does they'll be able to start moving people into the hotel and tearing their houses down; they'll let Cam know when they're ready for him to put in replacements. That should be in a few days.

"Do you have any design input?"

They have (obsolete due to electricity and Cam) blueprints and they're aiming for traditional yet modern - obviously strongly influenced by and respectful of the grandeur of Haven's past but doing its own thing. They want something a little bit boring. And they want some gardens. Just small ones, where there are convenient places for them.

He would like species lists for the gardens, please, or possibly historical gardens to copy sections of, the biosphere here is not familiar to Cam and it would be terrible if locals turned out to be allergic to lilacs en masse.

He could copy parts of the gardens in front of the stadium or pick out something nice from the forest. Minus the trees, there won't be enough room for their roots. Or just do dirt and Samos can lovingly place each individual flower at some point.

Can do!

He starts putting stuff up as they clear space for it, making occasional trips to check on lurkers, feed the metal heads and inquire if they still want a colony ship while the precursor egg question is up in the air, and build the ministry lady a house.

The lurkers have blueprints for him after a while, not drafted by professional architects but they're something, and lots of details on why they want things the way they do so if he has to improvise he can do it well.

The metal heads want a colony ship and some warships and help mining eco from nearby asteroids and the non-eco parts of an anti-spacecraft weapon installed on the next furthest planet from this sun, and of course an entire ecosystem when Cam has time to get to that. They can promise they primarily want to use the weapons against the dark makers. Either way it'll still take some time to wind down everything they have happening on this planet - they have people to call in from other continents, they have eggs that wouldn't survive being uprooted from their dark eco pools, and so on.

The minister is pleased with her house and reminds Cam he can ask her if he needs her expertise again later on.

The younger Samos accosts him after a while to complain that the plants in the new gardens are terrible conversationalists.

Cam can think amateur blueprints at CAD software until it has usable ones.

Cam would like the metal heads and the humans to have more of a treaty than "Cam went and talked to them so they're cool now" before he starts issuing anyone warships, and he does not want to make a trip to another planet just yet since that will take a while and he has many things to do, but he will do it when there is a spare week.

Cam has no idea what Samos was expecting. "I'm... sorry?"

The metal head leader will talk with Ashelin, then, and wants to know if that will be enough or if they need treaties with the other humans too.

"Hmph. It's like pulling weeds to try to talk to them," Samos says. "But maybe they'll be smarter when they have more experience."

With other humans too will be ideal.

"I'm - I'm sorry, are you being - literal -"

"What else would I be doing, composing an allegory for my frustration with the inadequacy of mankind?"

"Maybe you think flowers should be more asymmetrical or something, I don't know! What were you expecting?"

"Well, in Haven Forest, the plants have things to say about recent events and how they feel. Just like they do in the gardens everywhere else in the city. Even the grass on the beach has things to say, even if it's only repeating what wiser things have told it."