"I would happily have done so. But here we are." He pauses consideringly. "Well, maybe not literally slapped. The fact that I'd have to stand on a crate to reach his face would be likely to lessen the dramatic impact."

"Draw your Balrog-killer on him, then. We tried, you know, appeals to decency, but none of them have any."

"They seem to have more food than you do but I'm not sure they actually have enough even for themselves. Not optimal conditions for decency. Is more precise access to the biochemistry of your surroundings going to help you, or should I be teaching from a different part of the book? In theory the Survey Handbook contains all the knowledge required to arrive in an unexplored land, find out whether it is possible to survive there and if so how, and learn everything else about it that an interested settler might conceivably want to know."

"No, this is plausibly useful. We seem more resilent than you Men - if we eat a small amount of something poisonous, for example, we'll notice and easily protect ourselves, and we've been eating everything and getting a sense of its nutrient content from whether we're any less exhausted afterwards. But the time saved is precious. What other parts of the book are there?"

"Basic biochemistry, flora and fauna, microbes, geology, cartography, equipment maintenance and repair, some other things I'm forgetting - this is the Complete Survey Handbook; in print, the table of contents takes up its own entire volume."

"We'll need iron, though food's probably more of an immediate concern. Let's stick with this, walk around and test a bunch of different things. Your people routinely land on new planets and have to figure out how to live there?"

"Some of us. My mother's people are famous for their explorers. I've mentioned that exploring new wormhole routes is dangerous? To work with Betan Astronomical Survey, you have to be willing to take that risk on an ongoing basis, often without anything to show for it afterward, and smart and educated and competent enough to successfully do all the right surveys when you do find a planet. And the planets themselves have dangers, too, of course."

"That sounds amazing. By the end we felt very confined in Valinor. I'd be willing to take some chances on planet-hopping."

"I doubt it will ever be possible to introduce you to my mother, but if I somehow did, I think you might get along. She used to be in Survey. Which is why I carry around a copy of the Complete Survey Handbook for its sentimental value."

"The Ages of the world are long, I'm sure we'll meet eventually. And this is more than sentimentally valuable." 

"I didn't expect to be suddenly transported to a strange planet and need my copy of the Handbook for practical reasons."

And, well - Curufin might solve biological decay in time to make Miles effectively immortal, but he doesn't really expect anyone to solve interplanetary and possibly interdimensional travel before his mother has lived out her Betan hundred and twenty. He's trying not to dwell on it. There are plenty of more pressing issues to deal with, like elven politics and the continued existence of Moringotto.

"These grow everywhere, what does your scanner say?"

Miles investigates the plant.

"Promising things!" he concludes, showing her the display and paging through the highlights.

"It'll take me a while to have a chance at deciphering your script. Could we carve, maybe, a guide with some key phrases, for people to compare against?"

"Yes, good idea, that's one of the things I've been meaning to get around to for a while."

She pulls out a small knife. "We'll have to head farther afield to find the right kind of wood."

"...Is carving wood the most efficient writing method you can currently access?"

"We know how to do clay, but we don't have clay here. In Valinor parchment is lovely, but here it'll rot. So will wood, but not quite as fast. They stole all the ink."

"Parchment rots? I'm used to parchment lasting. Most of the early history of the Time of Isolation that stuck around the entire subsequent six hundred years was on parchment. I suppose some of the rest was also on parchment, but maybe the lasting stuff was better preserved."

"Where I'm from, nothing rots. Here, everything does, and we're rather scrambling. Does the scanner explain how to make parchment that lasts?"

"Let's see."

He investigates the contents of the reader.

"Yes it does. What's... oh, right, of course. The person whose job it actually is to fly my shuttle has a sister who's doing a treatise on document preservation, so she brought a copy of the latest draft on board."

He misses his army all of a sudden. Are they doing all right without him? Who knows... he may never find out.

"Shuttle flying is a job? We have got to get back to your planet, Miles. I think I'd like it."

"Yes. Pilot, is the term in English for one who flies shuttles and other flying vehicles. You might very well make a good one. Anyway, I can apparently teach you how to preserve parchment but carving wood is probably faster for the immediate purpose if you don't have any ink right now."

She gestures at the other side of the lake. 

"It doesn't matter. I can carve wood quickly."

"If you want me to go ask your cousins for ink, I can do that too, but it may take longer than finding a tree."