"...wow."

"It's handy being family friends with the King! Anyway, I think we've got this hooked up right - time to sing something?"

"Mmhm!"

She sets Katin down and sings.

Well, she has at least one appreciative audience member!

And was she successfully recorded?

She totally was! Really well!

"Okay so now all we have to do is solve the distribution problem that's been stumping the rest of the kingdom for a year. Easy."

"In Tapa there's television but also indie internet distribution..."

"No television in Aluvanna, just the commnet, and most people have no idea how to use the commnet. But we're surrounded by all these examples of how great it's going to be when we've figured it out."

"Is it very different from our internet?"

"Same basic idea, different implementation, I think. It's all ruikni technology, and the thing about ruikni technology is that it's all really efficient and standardized but kind of built on the assumption that everyone who uses it is going to mostly follow the rules. I hear the Tech Commission is reviewing all their standards based on analysis of your internet because there are all kinds of ways people harass, inconvenience, annoy, and endanger one another on it that the ruikni plain hadn't thought of."

"What, like all the mass mailings that go out every winter?"

"Yes! Ruikni wouldn't dream of doing that! Their crime statistics are amazing. Population of three hundred billion, average six cases of fraud a year - their years, that is, which are a little longer than your seasons - ours are a little shorter."

"I hear near the equator there are just mass mailings all the time."

"I admit it's not obvious to me why the mass mailings are seasonal."

"- oh, uh, we conceive kids in the spring, so anything that feels sort of like meeting new people is something people are mostly in the mood for in wintertime."

"Ah. Logical. In that case humans will probably end up with non-seasonal mass mailings if anyone manages to send some before the ruikni figure out how to make them prohibitively difficult."

"How equatorial of you."

"Equators are an interesting concept! Has anyone explained to you how this planet works?"

"No, but I bet it's wild, based on the sky."

"Okay, so the silver line is the moon-circle and the gold line is the sun-circle. The sun and moon each take exactly twenty-four hours to make a full circuit around their respective circles, and they start out at the first dawn of the year with the sun in the east and the moon in the west and both circles perfectly aligned. But both circles are constantly rotating; the moon-circle's axis of rotation is vertical through the middle of the planet, which is why the moon-circle's lines are always vertical, and the sun-circle's axis of rotation is horizontal between east and west, which is why the sun-circle's lines are always changing their angle. The sun-circle takes a year to finish one rotation, and the moon-circle takes a month. So on the outside of the planet, it more or less sort of works out like days and months and years on Tseiza-3, but on the inside we see the sun once every twelve hours for varying lengths of time depending on the angle of the sun-circle, ranging from barely half an hour when it's vertical to a full twenty-four when it's completely horizontal."

Pause.

"Also, the reason why the sky has geography is because that's the other half of the planet. We're on the inside, so gravity points outward, consternating physicists everywhere."

"That is in fact pretty wild! How do the halves hold together?"

"They just kind of float in place! Same with the sun-circle and moon-circle! We've had people go and measure everything and it's all extremely tidy and mathematical, the celestial circles are perfectly centered and there's an even amount of mass on both sides of the planet despite the chasms and jagged edges and so on, but as for what makes it all work this way the best anyone can come up with is 'uh, magic?'. Apparently this is just the kind of thing that happens if somebody's Sphere gets big enough to fit a planet in. Ridiculous little magic solar system."

"How even? Like, people can go to the other side or import stuff unevenly- right - "

"Yeah, it's, like, the underlying landscape that's even, not whatever we put on top of it. I think the dawn side is a few tons heavier than the dusk side - dawn side is the one the sun rises over on the first dawn of the year - but that's crumbs compared to the mass of the planetary shell as a whole."

"How's the atmosphere work?"