That's pretty clever, if they don't have crafting for it! She thinks she could probably learn to understand that, but maybe not to make the sounds - some people like making sounds, for aesthetic reasons or to communicate more naturally with their animals or whatever, but she's never been inclined.

"If you want to understand it, I am happy to show you more," Weeping Cherry agrees. "I am happy to talk in Crafter writing, though. Crystal people's dogs can understand our noises, but not make our noises. Parrots can make our noises, and understand them."

She pauses for a moment, and then says "Some Crystal people sing making pretty noises that are also talking."

She sings the opening verse of "The Dreadful Wind and Rain", by way of demonstration. Her translation is a bit rough, but renders it:

There are two siblings from 'Claire' territory

Very bad storm

One is brightly colored and one is darkly colored

Bad bad very bad storm

Oh, the Crafters who sing will love that. (She likes it too, but there's a thread of stress in the enjoyment.)

Singing isn't for everyone. Weeping Cherry switches back to just writing in Crafter.

"I like to sing. I'm happy to share Crystal people songs. How do you write down singing? Crystal people write down long and short and 'high' and 'low' and word noises and more like this," she says, showing a snatch of sheet music.

She's not sure how Crafters do it - the library does have written music but she's never learned to read the notation, there's a special formatting team (possibly more than one? she's not sure of that either) for it.

That makes sense. Written music is really a different thing from normal writing.

Weeping Cherry scans through the library index she has so far to see if she's gotten any music yet, before a thought interrupts her. These people definitely have the tech level to produce a gramophone.

"Do Crafters have a machine that makes sound?" she asks. She shows a diagram of a gramophone. "The disk has bumps, and it goes around, and wiggles the needle that wiggles the paper and makes a noise," she explains.

They have sound machines but not like that - the disc part actually looks quite a bit like how books are formatted to work in the machine. For sound machines they can just set a piece of crafting material to vibrate the way they want directly, and most of them only make one or two different sounds - they're mostly used for emergencies, if a Crafter is alone in their territory and breaks a leg or something they'll set off an emergency noisemaker loud enough for their neighbors to hear, and it works as permission to come in and help them - or, it mostly works, but it works as well as anything that's not the Crafter physically escorting them over the threshold.

Oh, cool! You can probably make some really neat instruments if you can directly manipulate how a material vibrates.

"Books use disks with bumps?" she asks. She hadn't really thought about their storage technology. She had somewhat assumed that it used ansible-like materials that react to being poked in different ways.

Yep! She doesn't understand all the details, but the main type of mechanism the machine uses is marbles that roll down tracks and make different tones when they're struck, and the disc determines which marbles the machinery releases onto the tracks and then another piece of machinery on the ansible end strikes the marbles and listens to them and moves the ansible depending on what it hears.

That's amazing! The only other mechanical computers she's seen are gear-based. Although, come to think of it, she's not actually sure what they used for storage.

If they've got actual mechanical computers, rather than just a dumb storage system, she wonders if they have an internet analog.

"How many disk-machines are there? Different Crafters have their own disk machines that talk together by ansible?" she asks.

In the world, or as part of the library? The library has around fifteen, maybe closer to twenty sub-locations that all work together as parts of the one machine; this is the main one, but they don't have enough room here for everything, so some of the teams set up parts of it elsewhere in the world and connected them by ansible. In the world - Weeping Cherry would get a much better estimate from a traveler but she'd guess something like one in ten communities has someone with a computing machine? Those probably don't all use disc storage, not even all the library sub-locations do, but she knows some people do take inspiration from the library's setup for their own inventions.

"All machines with ansibles count as one machine?" she clarifies. That does make a certain amount of sense. "Crystal people make machines that can be put together and put apart again. Each machine works by itself, but if they are put together they talk."

She wonders what the network architecture of the library machine looks like. It was serving her requests in parallel, so it can't possibly have only a single part handling every request.

The different library locations work together as one big machine, yeah. She's not sure it makes sense to think of every machine that uses ansibles that way; it might, that's how it works for a lot of them, but she doesn't know everything that's out there. Crafter machines do use interchangeable parts within a given machine, where that makes sense - it'd be kind of silly not to, crating makes it so easy. She doesn't expect most machines to use parts that are interchangeable with each other, though; probably someone somewhere has copied an entire computing machine, but it's the kind of thing where just copying one without knowing how it works doesn't work very well, and if you need to know how it works the best way to do that is to build it yourself.

Huh! That's fascinating. She would have expected there to be standardized models that you could just copy sight-unseen, since you can copy things made of crafting material. Maybe crafting doesn't work like that, and the copies will be degraded unless you understand how they work.

Weeping Cherry has finished her breakfast -- does it look as though her interlocutor has as well?

She's still working on it, but it looks like she'll be done soon.

"After you're done with breakfast," she writes. "I like to see the book machines."

She was just going to absorb more library books and talk to the project staff, but the discussion of their computing technology has gotten her interested, and she really would like to get a closer look.

Sure, she'll just be another minute and then she can take her over to the maintenance crew's section.

This involves a walk through more tunnels inside the mountain; the formatting team's section continues a ways further, past turnoffs for the private territories of its members, and then the walls revert from brightly colored crafting material to smooth natural stone with darker grey handrails. This path meanders downwards, taking a couple of switchbacks and at one point using a bridge to cross a small natural cavern. A little ways past that they come to a pair of dull red territory markers with an unlabeled button and hematite rectangle next to them; her guide makes a stylus out of a bit of crafting material from the tip of the walking stick she made before setting out and writes 'the crystal-person alien wants a tour of the library machine' on the rectangle and then presses the button.

It'll probably be a few minutes before they answer, she thinks.

"Is the rectangle an ansible?" she asks. That seems like a very convenient intercom system.

Yep! If they keep an eye on it they'll be able to tell when someone's gotten their message, since they'll clear it off.

It does take a few minutes for the message to clear, but only another minute after that for another Crafter to appear in the hallway past the monoliths, this one in a blue outfit hung with teardrop-shaped bits of crafting material in a range of green tones.

Hi! Weeping Cherry must be the alien?

"Hello! I am the crystal-person. I want to see your machines. They seem interesting!" she replies.

They are! He can show her his section but she might prefer the kids' tour? It doesn't involve the actual library machinery, but it'll let her interact with the machines and see more directly how it all works.

She vaguely wonders if this is because she currently comes up to about his ankle, before responding "I want to see your section. If I see a machine, I can remember it and make it in my head in my crystal and touch it there."

(He knows that size doesn't have much to do with adulthood status, he's met crows. Though to be fair he wouldn't invite a crow into the guts of the library any more than he'd invite a little kid - it breaks if you mess with it!)

Sure, he sends. He doesn't have examples of all the different parts of the library machinery in his section, but he can show her most of it and ask someone else to show her the rest.

Is her companion going to join them?

She figures that's up to Weeping Cherry.