"Thank you!" He gives orders that the plant's caretaker should be selected from outside the capital to further spread the news of the aliens and their beneficence, someone worthy of honor but perhaps not someone already busy with the duties of high office such as would leave them distracted, someone already skilled with plants, someone who will especially appreciate the beauty of alien flowers. - And then it occurs to him to ask what the alien custom is when the flowers are spent, whether they're deadheaded or just left to fall, whether this sort of plant is ever used for anything or always allowed to grow as it pleases...

"Oh, we can make the flowers into a tea, but you shouldn't do that, we still don't know if we're able to eat each other's food. The greens are working on figuring that out. In that size pot it will stay small on its own without any pruning, letting the flowers fall is fine."

"Thank you, we'll make sure that information is passed along. Out of curiosity, what sort of tea?"

"It can help us sleep? Even if it's safe for you it might do something totally different or nothing at all for humans, though. This is true among animals on our own planet."

"Of course! But the details of your world interest me in themselves." He sounds as sincerely enthusiastic as he can manage without compromising on dignity, which is very.

"Among Amentans who use that kind of flower in their tea they usually have it at bedtime with something sweet added."

"That makes sense. What sorts of sweets do you have?"

"I don't think we have words for them in your language yet! Would you like to see pictures?"

"I would."

So she will pull up pictures of Amentan sugars and syrups and the things they are made from.

He's looking for background evidence of their material culture and the secrets of their technology, that they might not have thought to redact from pictures of foods (or that they don't actually mind him finding out, either way), but not going to comment on that regardless.

"Those of your people who love sweets must be very happy."

"Yes! We have a lot of variety of food. Everyone is hoping that we will be able to share it with you. The greens think they will be ready to have a human taste something in a few days if all their investigations go well, though I don't know who will want to be first."

That is a very surprising thing for them to say and he needs to chase down all the implications of it later.

"I'm sure there will be people who are excited. How are they investigating?"

"They're figuring out what the food here is made of, and what animals here are made of. I think it might help them to have a sample from a human too, a vial of blood or something like that, but they can make very good guesses without."

Oh, dear, that sounds terribly ominous.

"I don't know if anyone will feel comfortable with that, but I'm very curious as to how you would be able to tell from a blood sample!"

The green in the party speaks up at this. "Blood does a lot of things in the body - it carries everything important from what you eat to where it needs to go to keep you alive. So if we look at some of it, we can tell what things in your food are important, and see if they're the same as the things that are in our food, and in our blood when we eat our food."

"I'm not disagreeing, only confused, but it doesn't seem as though it does that; for instance, animals that eat different things have very similar-tasting blood."

"Yes, that's true on our planet too," says the green. "Most of what makes blood taste a particular way is what makes it be blood in the first place, rather than blood from a drunk person or a hungry person or a cow or a bird. But we aren't tasting blood samples, we're using special equipment to tell more detail than that."

"Oh! How does that work?"

"The team on the ship told your people about some of it! One that is relatively easy to explain is a device that makes it possible to see things that are much too small to make out with the eye alone, so we can just look at things up close and tell the difference between them that way."

"Like a magnifying glass?"

"Yes, like a very very strong magnifying glass."

"Delightful! What a marvel."

"Eventually we will want ways to build all such tools here, because shipping them is so costly! And you can all see how they are made," says Mashu.

"'All'? All tools such as what, exactly?"