"- I think we'd build a new ship instead! We haven't got seeds of all the crops we'd want, for one thing, this isn't a colony ship!"

"Okay but imagine those plants are available on the round to harvest and reseed over time, and that the gravity of the round is too far out for you to easily get the sail high enough to launch for a while. Maybe someone has to figure out a way to get a sail that far up first, maybe it takes a centiwake or two. Do you suppose there would be anything important missing, from all the skills everyone has?"

"....you're saying there's rounds where you need a taller tower? I guess we'd settle if it was really impractically high or there was no... wood on the round to build a ship with...? I guess something's probably rusty enough we'd need a new person but I don't think we'd need a lot."

You're saying there are no rounds where you'd need a taller tower?!

He probably shouldn't be too quick to judge that as a huge sign pointing to technology rather than magic for the creation of this world, but it... sure feels less obviously weird if there's some mini-planet factory out there somewhere making assembly-line "rounds" that all have the exact same surface-to-gravitational-field distance.

"Okay," he says after forcing his mind back on topic. "I am extra glad that I learn things quickly, now, because I started with... basically no skills and had to pick them all up the hard way. I guess it's good to know I can ask practically anyone to teach me practically anything, even if they're rusty at it."

He wonders what skills he has that, upon learning about it, someone here could make someone with, like they did with English. If they could make someone better than him at the unique skill, that would be useful to know... maybe he should set up a basketball hoop somewhere for testing, rusty as he'd be at that. Also it might be hard to make a properly pressurized ball...

All of which is assuming he can find someone willing to make test subjects, of course. Man, science must be so weird in this world.

(What little of it people are allowed or made interested enough to do, anyway.)

"How do you guys pick captains, if everyone has the same leadership and sailing skills when they're made?"

"Usually the captain makes a successor when they're ready to retire. Not everyone has the same skills, some of them pull against each other and you have to pick! Leadership especially."

Oh, wait, that's interesting!  He assumed the contradictions mentioned earlier only meant like, trying to make someone tall and short at once.

"What skills pull against each other?"

"Well, like, if you're a good leader you're going to be - decisive and diplomatic and making tradeoffs all the time, say. But the weather forecaster shouldn't be going 'there's a storm that way but if we do make it we'll get to port three wakes faster than if we go around and turn a profit', the weather forecaster should be saying, that's a storm, it's yea bad, and letting the captain decide whether to go through."

Huh. Danny can sort of see what he means, but he's not sure how much of that is skill vs... being aware of one's role on a team? Personality?

Ugh. Test #27 he'd want to perform or hear about: if people are made with the same skills but different personality, how much does that affect their ability to use those skills well?

Danny will keep sanding for a while, lost in thought. Eventually he'll remember to ask, "I'm Danny, by the way. Thanks for answering so many strange questions."

"I'm Petkalkanos."

Damn, he is probably not going to remember that.

Petkalkanos. Pet the kalk, a nose. Pet kalka nose. He imagines a kalka to be something like a quokka, and himself petting its nose.

Okay, maybe fine now.

"I might bother you with more questions sometime," he says as he continues sanding, starting to notice his tiredness but wanting to go as long as Petkalkanos does. "Feel free to tell me you're not in the mood if I do."

"Oh, no problem, you've got more novelty for chatting about than people who're on this ship with me all the time."

"Fair." He'll keep sanding until they're done, or until Petquo-Petkalkanos says they've done enough, thinking over all the experiments he'd want to run to figure out how the making-people-thing works.

He should get some paper when he gets to Rabbitround, assuming he can afford it.

They run out of sanding after not too much longer and can exchange tools for scrubbers.

Hoo boy. Okay he'll try to stick it out through the scrubbing as well. Novelty or not, he feels really grateful for all the questions answered.

And he gets to practice more tricks around the hull to stay awake.

Weeeee...

The ship makes it safely to Rabbitround.

And not a wake too soon! After all his time in the Hedge he doesn't think he's likely to get cabin fever from just a few "days," but Danny's had a pretty full journey, all things considered, and he's more than ready for something new. He managed to rotate through all the various jobs on the ship (except for working the sails, no one would let him do that even with supervision). He heard a lot more songs to pick up a few more words here and there, including some bits from new ones. He also had a few more interesting talks with crew members, including some older ones who have been around for over a hundred centiwakes, meaning they've lived for close to 30 years at least; according to them, there have been a few minor tech improvements over the course of their lives, like better crafted ships and hinges and kitchenware.

But nothing major, which weighs against his guess that this world might actually just be really new, and is going through rapid technological growth due to all the supergeniuses that can be constantly made with tons of knowledge and skills, and weighs toward his bet that there's some kind of ongoing conspiracy to keep the tech level where it is, either through lack of resources on the artificial worlds (no millions of years of compressed biomass = no fossil fuels, but surely someone would have figured out steam power?) or select removal of anyone who gets too... scientific.

Which means he'll have to be kind of careful as he goes around as an obviously weird person asking questions about the world from the closest things to scientists he can find.

Despite all that, Danny is excited to get off the ship and explore the new round. He thanks the captain again for letting him journey with them, says goodbye to the acquaintances he made along the way, and prepares to follow Blenn's general directions to find the nearest research institute.

But along the way, he'll be interested in looking around to see what a Rabbitround port is like.

Rabbitround's port is big! It has a dozen docking towers, eight currently occupied, and lots of warehouses and mail relay stations and folks coming by with carts and wagons to haul things in and out. He can get a ride on a cart that's going past a research institute if he asks around. Farther out from the towers (themselves pretty widely spaced) there's townier town stuff, inns and shops and houses and a hot springs bathhouse and a big park where various people are playing some kind of sport and picnicking and dancing.

He enjoys watching the dances from the back of the wagon, and tries to figure out the sport as best he can in the brief time it's visible while they ride past, mildly excited to try playing it at some point.

It's hard to remember when he sees the relatively idyllic way a lot of this world seems to live that it's all probably hiding some horrible secrets. He hopes he'll have time to explore this round, between the conversations he hopes to have with the various researchers.

The sport seems to involve four different colored balls being thrown person to person with no stationary goal, and possibly there are also shifting team affiliations; lots of yelling opaque code phrases occurs and tends to be followed by swearing and frantic bursts of activity.

Huh! This world invented multi-ball sports! He always wondered why basically every game on Earth always just has one ball (or puck) in play at a time, and that just seems like such a waste of potential...

What else (or who else) is riding on the wagon with him?

The wagon is full of underripe bananas, pulled by an ox and directed by an old lady.