"Betcha Curufin will figure it out before you teach any of them."

"Wasn't he going to spend the next ten years obsessively studying biological decay?"

"Yes, but he has a son he can parallelize on things with, and if I tell them that you're teaching the cousins eleketaricity, one of the two of them will make it a project."

"A race! What fun."

He starts to climb down. "Thank you, Miles. Please do feel free to stop by whenever."

"I certainly will."

He helps get the grav stretcher out of the shuttle, waits until all of the Elves are also out of the shuttle, closes it, and hops into the lake to wade to shore again.

Maitimo's still not moving. He tells himself this is all right. Then he starts swimming.

Miles emerges near where he left the crate. Is it still there? Any Elves nearby?

"I'm arranging to give one to everyone in the camp. We did this sort of supply movement all the time on the road, so I expect they'll be done quickly. You sure you won't starve?"

"That's not the end of my supply. I will have to look for other food sources sooner than I otherwise might, but that's fine, I was planning to anyway, and as you may have noticed, I do things quickly when I do things. How would you like to learn my language and read all my books? Or if not you, then someone else?"

"My sister-in-law would be enraptured, but they murdered her. I can give it a try."

"Excellent. And who here might like to help me figure out how to make more of the resource I need to make my shuttle maneuverable in directions other than 'forward' again? It's useful stuff, most of my devices need it, and I imagine I might run into trouble if I crossed the lake, made it over there, and then had to negotiate its transport back to my shuttle."

"You saved Russandol from Angband. They should be falling at their feet, and the reason they aren't is because they know that if you act entitled to the world, most people will give it to you. But yes, I'm sure we can try."

"Good. Then that's what I'll be doing for the rest of today, I guess. Language, books, and electricity."

"You really don't rest, do you? Are you sure we shouldn't spend today riding out to Angband and taking advantage of its destruction?"

"We could. But I need electricity before my shuttle will fly properly again. I leave the decision of whether or not to assault Angband without me up to the people who'd be doing it; without my shuttle I'd just slow you all down on the way. Better for me to stay here and, for example, teach you English out of my book on how to find food in strange places."

"Well, I won't get to go anyway, so we can get started in English while my father decides whether to do it."

"Sounds good to me."

Out comes the reader, with its copy of the Survey Handbook. Miles commences translating.

She listens, gnawing on a ration bar.

It seems most efficient to give a practical demonstration of the 'how to find food in strange places' aspect, and he still has some, though not all, of the appropriate tools with him. Here's a scanner. There's a plant. Here are many characteristics of the plant, revealed.

She nods. "I rode with Oromë, I know how to do that. How does it arrive at the safe to eat determination?"

"Well, it says it's safe to eat for Men, I wouldn't know how to ask it what's safe to eat for Elves, but here's all the information that went into that and how it arrived at its conclusions from the data available..."

So many kinds of analysis. She's going to learn a lot of English biochemical vocabulary. The software also has guesses about the plant's optimal growing conditions, and it can compare soil samples to plant samples and guess how well the latter would thrive in the former.

"We've been doing that by smell. Is your system not going to be thrown off by the fact the Sun just rose in the sky a month ago and killed basically everything that grew here before then?"

"Well, not very. And it probably would've been thrown off worse if I'd landed before there was a Sun."

"I wish you had. We were still crossing the Ice, then, and you could have slapped Macalaurë into giving us food when we arrived."