Yeah, yeah, she'll get out of the way.

This is so exhausting.  She needs to do literally anything that's not bash her head against a bureaucratic monolith.

...Eh, she'll go eat something.

Pork chops? Porridge? Different porridge? Bean stew? Vegetables and tofu?

...she'll go for the vegetables.

It's baby corn and mustard greens and carrots and potatoes and silky triangle-shaped tofu.

That's definitely food.

She eats it mechanically, and doesn't forget to feed her mice.

Or drowse one, for that matter.

...She may as well check her mail again, she supposes.  Not that she's actually expecting anything, but...she's basically stuck.

She has a note from Wheat saying that if she doesn't want this pinch of clay anymore he would like to know so he can stop devoting desk space to keeping it moist enough to be pliable.

She'll stop by, then, to pick that up.

...She looks indelibly worn, as she heads for Wheat's office.

"...I'm not sure the kind of cohabitation you have going on is working adequately," he says, handing over the clay.

"It's the bureaucracy.  And the way it's not capable of handling me.  It's depression, not fatigue.  ...Or it's kind of both, I suppose, but not in the way that sleeping resets except as and if drowsing might.  Except it didn't, so.  Yeah.  Just been having a rough day, because - I don't really know how to even begin acquiring legal existence, at the moment?  Since...well...y'all hardly take Earth records.  And I need to get something like that somehow, or my dreams will mostly be stillborn, because going from zero to industrial powerhouse on my lonesome...that's just impossible.  I need to be able to do business to run a business.  ...As much as I mislike the inevitable concentration of wealth that both feudalism and capitalism provoke if left unattended."

"Maybe you need a business partner? I realize that might also be hard but it's at least not dependent on having records."

"Are you volunteering?", she deadpans.  "Honestly, yes I do need someone with local business experience, but I'm not sure where I'd even begin looking, yet."

"I'm not, I like the job I have, but if you'd met anyone else you got along with..."

"I still haven't actually gotten past the culture shock, unfortunately, as far as I know.  I think everyone I've met is...acculturated in a particular way I don't gel with?  It's eerie."

"Is... everyone in your culture more like you?"

"I'm an outlier both here and there, but...maybe?  I - am having the damnedest time trying to frame it appropriately, but it's...

"No-one seems to expect the unexpected, around here, whereas the first thing I do with the slightest bit of ambiguity is find and poke at the edge cases."

"I don't think anything like you has ever happened before."

"Yeah; there's a concept in disaster planning back home, called a black swan event.  It goes something like this: You have never seen a black swan.  All the swans you've seen are white.  So, by logical induction, you predict that all the swans you'll ever see are white.

"Then a black swan shows up anyway because the universe doesn't care about that; the rules allow for black swans, so here one is, and now you have to deal with it.

"That's basically this entire thing."

"- I assume that example makes more sense when you can't change what color a swan is whenever you want but even accounting for that I'm not sure why an unexpectedly colored swan would be such a big deal."

"It's - you have built your worldview on a false assumption that only certain kinds of events are possible.  Also, yeah, it makes less sense when troportation exists.  Hmm.  Think of it like...well actually for all I know this happens - stars are presumed to last forever, but one day one goes out."

"- what is a star?"

"Generally, the flaming balls of whatever-your-suns-are-made-of in the sky.  Ours are a lot bigger and further away because we don't live on an infinite plane."

"Those are suns. Why don't you just call them suns?"

"Because suns have planets, and not all stars do.  I suppose that's meaningless over here.  You, well, don't have planets."

"I don't know what a planet is," he agrees. "The suns are suns. I'd be more optimistic about you finding a business partner if I thought you were going to reliably talk sensible Nlaaki to people you met."