WHY IS EVERYTHING THIS PERSON SAYS MADE OF MATH.

...that's a very stupid question, isn't it. Korva is beginning to suspect that when you get to Hell, they scoop all of the words out of you and replace them with math, and then every time you talk you have to translate it out of your native language, which is now math, and that the core reason Keltham is valuable is that no one realized that you could do that to someone without magic. But someone did it to Keltham, at some point, and now he's trying to do it to them.

...which means she should try her best to let him do that, but out of concern for her ability to make it through this conversation, Korva is going to try to redirect him away from math anyway. 

"That would be cool, but no surprise that it's beyond us for now. As far as share language for lectures goes, I kind of expect there are pros and cons? I'm sure I picked up some things I wouldn't have picked up from a lecture in Taldane, but I think it also got me tripped up in places. I'd try to work through the connotations of some word I only had a vague sense of, and I'd end up unfolding it out into some long Taldane phrase before I felt like I maybe had a handle on it, and by the time I was done I'd have missed a sentence or two and be struggling to jump back in."

"Oof.  Yeah, it's plausible that literally slowing down and pausing between sentences is a sort of thing I should do in that situation.  Hopefully Security can get you a copy of the transcript, I should be reading all of mine and checking them but I do not, in fact, seem to be doing that."

Oh NO oh NO there's no way Korva could have seen that coming but 'Don't nudge Keltham into reviewing all his transcripts' is on the wall in PURPLE and now they need a subject change a SMOOTH subject change that doesn't make Keltham notice anything strange is going on, or some other person coming by to interrupt, or failing that even an outright DISTRACTION quick somebody think of SOMETHING -

Meanwhile in a totally different continuum, Thellim is having something of an argument with a man of the planet Earth, whose job title translates as 'scientist'.

(Continued in to earth with science.)

(This space intentionally left blank.)